the casual stranger, seem to sleep for six days of the week, and for one
day of every seven wake up to quite a sprightly and business-like mood.
But Petersfield is even quieter than that. Its market is but fortnightly,
and for thirteen days out of every fourteen the town dozes tranquilly. The
imagination pictures the inhabitants of this old municipal and
parliamentary borough rubbing their eyes and yawning every alternate
Wednesday, when the corn and cattle market is held; and when the last
drover has gone, at the close of day, sinking again into slumber with a
sigh of relief. Parliamentary, alas! the borough is no longer, since the
latest Reform and Redistribution of Seats Act has snatched away the one
member that remained of the two who represented these free and enlightened
burgesses before the Era of Reform broke out so destructively in 1832,
and has now left the representation of Petersfield merged into that of a
county division. The town lives in these days solely upon agriculture, and
the needs of neighbouring fox-hunters. Once upon a time it possessed a
number of woollen manufactories, but industries of this kind have long
since died out, or have been transferred to more likely seats of commerce;
and cattle, sheep, pigs, corn, and similar products now most do exercise
the minds and muscles of local folk. It is a substantial, well-built town,
looking, for all its age, like some late seventeenth-century growth, and
the stranger standing in the market-place finds it difficult, if not
impossible, to realize an antiquity that goes back certainly as far as the
twelfth century, and dimly to an age when primitive savages, naked and
dyed a brilliant blue, lived here in some clearing of the dense forest
that spread over the face of the country, and hunted with ill success, and
the inadequate aid of flint weapons, the wild boars and other fearsome
fauna of that remote time.
[Sidenote: _EARLY DAYS_]
We know, chiefly from geological evidence, that when the Romans came and
sailed up what is now Portsmouth Harbour, and cast anchor off the shore at
Porchester, they found the southern face of Portsdown Hill as bare of
trees as we see it to-day. Mounting to the crest of that imposing range,
the legionaries looked down upon a forest that stretched, with few breaks,
black and sullen, as far as eye could reach. This interior contained a
settlement of the Belgae at what is now Winchester, and, for the rest,
unknown men and beasts; and was only to be penetrated by slow and
laborious felling of trees, and clearing of tangled brushwood; while,
every now and again, these determined pioneers would be startled by an
irruption of ferocious Belgae (those primitive Frenchmen), who with
flint-tipped arrows sent many an invader to his long account. Those
stubborn Romans, however, cleared a way, and, indeed, several ways. For,
from this Portus Magnus, modern Porchester,--where their original fortress
still stands, added to by mediaeval builders,--Roman roads were made to
Venta Belgarum (Winchester), Regnum (Chichester), and Clausentum, now
known as Bitterne. On either side of these roadways to and from their
armed camps still stretched the woodlands, and they remained, in greater
part, when the Roman power declined and the legions were withdrawn, to
give room, in due time, to the invading Saxons. All these hundreds of
years the dark recesses of the forest remained practically unknown; but at
some safe and convenient distance from the towns of Venta or Regnum--handy
for support, and yet sufficiently rural--Roman generals, prefects, and
rich merchants erected elaborate villas, whose ruins are even now
occasionally discovered by the ploughman as he laboriously turns over the
grudging soil of Hants. Hypocausts and elaborate mosaic pavements testify
to the comfort and luxury with which they surrounded themselves in those
truly spacious days, while abundant traces of their roads remain. It
cannot have been until late Saxon times that the site of Petersfield
became at all settled, and we first hear of it as a town when William,
Earl of Gloucester, conferred a charter upon it, in the dawn of the
twelfth century.
That ancient document is still in existence, as also is its confirmation
by the Countess Hawyse, the Earl's widow in after years; and both these
important parchments, together with any number of later documents, were
produced in the locally-celebrated Petersfield petition in 1820 against
the pretensions of the lord of the manor, who claimed rights over the
municipal elections which the worthy burgesses and freeholders of the town
successfully resisted.
The result of that contention is evident to-day only in a supremely dull
book in which all the conflicting evidence is printed in page after page
of portentous, though hazy, rhetoric. It is all very uninteresting, and
the quantity of evidence so obscures the issues of the fight that he who,
like the present historian, comes to a consideration of these things from
the point of view of interesting the "general reader," may be very well
excused for coming away from a survey of the fray with as little knowledge
of it as old Kaspar, in the poem. You cannot know "all about the war and
what they fought each other for" without delving very deep indeed into the
mustiest by-ways of municipal history.
The Jolliffe, the lord of the manor whose claims were thus resisted by the
good folk of Petersfield, was, singularly enough, a descendant of that
lover of liberty and paragon of latinity, William Jolliffe, Esq., M.P. for
the borough, and a knight in 1734, who presented the leaden equestrian
statue of William III., that now stands in the market square, in
admiration of that "Vindicator of Liberty."
[Sidenote: _HALF A HERO_]
This statue, bowed and bent and painted white, was originally set up in
that part of the town known as "the New Way." In those days it was richly
gilt, and doubtless excited the awe and admiration of the travellers who
passed through Petersfield; but to-day, the attitude of the King is
undignified, and the airy garb of old Rome in which he is represented, not
only adds nothing to our reverence, but outrages our sense of the fitness
of things under these cloudy skies.
The circumstances under which this statue was erected are recounted (in a
manner dear to the heart of Dr. Johnson) in a Latin inscription of equal
length and magniloquence, carved upon its stone pedestal. It veils with an
impenetrable obscurity the identity of this classic horseman from nine of
every ten people who behold him, and it runs thus:--
Illustrissimo Celsissimo Principi
GULIELMO TERTIO
Qui ob plurima quam maxuma Officia
De his Gentibus optime meritus est
Qui Rempublicam pene labefactam
Fortiter sustentavit
Qui purum et sincerum Dei cultum
Tempestive conservavit
Qui legibus vim suam Senatiq: auctoritatem
Restituit et stabilavit
Gulielmus Jolliffe Eques
Ne aliquid qualecumque deesset Testimonium
Quanto cum amore Studioq: tam ipsam Libertatem
Quam egregium hunc Libertatis Vindicem
Proseartus est
Hanc Statuam Testamento suo dicavit
* * * * *
Et in hoc Municipio poni curavit
{ Samuele Tufnel
Exts { Edvardo Northey
{ Johanne Jolliffe
It was in 1815 that this leaden presentment of Dutch William was removed
to its present site, over against the "Castle" Inn, where a scion of the
House he supplanted--Charles II.--had, years before, slept a night on his
way to France through Portsmouth.
Gibbon's father was the fellow-member with Sir William Jolliffe in the
Parliamentary representation of Petersfield from 1734 to 1741, when he
finally resigned all ambition to take part in the councils of the nation.
The historian, although for many years he had a seat in the House of
Commons, never represented Petersfield, but only the remote Cornish
borough of Liskeard. In this connection, the return for the three
candidates who offered themselves for election in 1774 may be of interest.
Between them they polled only a hundred and twenty-five votes, in the
following order:--
For Jolliffe 55
" Hume 53
" Sutton 17
And this is the number of the free and independent electors who at that
time cared to exercise the glorious privilege of the franchise!
As showing the relative importance of towns and villages in olden times,
it may be noted that Petersfield was an appanage of the manor of Buriton,
and that the ecclesiastical parish was a part of the rectory of the same
village until 1886. Yet the ancient parish church of St. Peter the Apostle
at Petersfield is a fine building, parts of which go back to Norman times.
Indeed, the chancel arch and some elaborate arcading in the church are
very fine examples of that period, and tend to show the importance with
which the early Norman builders invested this spot. But even to-day the
living of the quiet village of Buriton is very much more valuable than
that of the borough town of Petersfield.
[Illustration: PETERSFIELD MARKET-PLACE.]
[Sidenote: _PETERSFIELD HOSTELRIES_]
So much for the history of Petersfield. Busy days it had in coaching
times, and its inns were of the best, as befitted a place where the
coaches stopped to change teams. They are still here: the chiefest of
them, the "Castle," is now a school, and a very fine building it is,
whether as school or hostelry. It stands boldly fronting the market-place,
and is to be seen in the accompanying illustration, behind the statue of
William III. It is the place where Charles II. stayed, on his way to
Portsmouth, and is referred to by Pepys:--
"_May 1st._ Up early and bated at Petersfield in the room which the King
lay in lately at his being there. Here very merry and played with our
wives at bowles. Then we set forth again, and so to Portsmouth, seeming to
me to be a very pleasant, strong place."
The other inns where the jaded traveller of fifty years ago was certain of
being well and adequately received, were the "Dolphin," the "White Hart,"
and the "Red Lion," all of them flourishing still. Of these the "Dolphin"
is the largest, standing at the corner of Dragon Street, where the
high-road passes by. The courtyards and coach-houses of the "Dolphin" are
a sight to see and to wonder at. You gaze at them, and presently the old
times seem to come crowding back. The eight-and-twenty coaches (more or
less, as you choose your period) that fared either way upon the Portsmouth
Road seem more real to you who look upon these capacious stables; and the
passengers, the coachmen and guards, the ostlers, and the horsey
hangers-on of such places come upon the imagination with a great deal more
of reality than is gained from the reading of books, howsoever eloquent.
Cobbett on one of his rides stayed at Petersfield, and put up at this old
house. "We got," says he, "good stabling at the 'Dolphin' for our horses.
The waiters and people at inns _look so hard at us_ to see us so liberal
as to horse-feed, fire, candle, beds, and room, while we are so very very
sparing in the article of drink! They seem to pity our taste!"
The memory of old times dies hard, and they still tell you here of the
wonderful goat that was used to take his pleasure in following the
up-coaches from here to Godalming, returning day by day to sleep in the
straw of the "Dolphin" stables. For years this singular animal escorted
the coaches, until one day, after running some distance with the mail, he
turned round three times, trotted off home, and during the rest of his
life eschewed the delights of the road altogether. That was in 1825, and
the tale has lost nothing in the telling these seventy years.
For the rest, the "Dolphin" is a singularly dull and unromantic-looking
house, painted a leaden hue. Within, it is all long dark corridors and
unexpected corners. Commercials frequent it; although inquiries have not
yet discovered what commercial gentlemen sell at Petersfield. Sportsmen
come here too, and tourists of the pedestrian variety. In the old days,
of the period between the coaching era and the present time, the "Dolphin"
was very much neglected; the flooring precipitous and mostly worn out, so
that the unsophisticated guest who jumped incautiously from his bed in the
morning would, very likely, thrust his foot through some unexpected hole,
to the imminent danger of the ceiling of the room beneath; or else would
find himself rushing, with the steep gradient of the floor, into obscure
corners of his apartment. The mirrors, also, in those days, left much to
be desired of the guest who shaved himself, for they were either cracked
or wavy, or both; and the traveller who, greatly daring, reaped a stubbly
chin with trouble and cold water before one of those uncertain
looking-glasses, in which his features flickered dizzily, required both
stout nerves and a steady hand.
[Illustration: "SHAVED WITH TROUBLE AND COLD WATER."]
[Sidenote: _ELBOW ROOM_]
The dullness of that time has gone, and the roads are tolerably travelled
to-day. The "Dolphin" rejoices in level flooring and decent repair, but
the town, although so neat and cleanly, and, withal, prosperous, is a town
of few wayfarers. You stand in the chief street and look with some
surprise at twin evidences of considerable commerce--a large and modern
Bank building, and a larger and still more modern Post-office. At the
farther end of this street is the market-place, a spacious square, in
which the fortnightly market, already referred to, is held; and the high
jinks of the July fair are performed. On market Wednesdays you can scarce
move for drovers and farmers, for graziers, and for a peculiarly
knowing-looking class of men who might be horse-dealers or jockeys, or
'bus-drivers, or even cabmen: all wear the unmistakable look that they
acquire who have much acquaintance with the noble animal, the Friend of
Man. A very specialist crowd, this; and what they are ignorant of in the
way of swedes and turnips, oil-cake, corn, or top-dressing, is scarce
worth the acquiring. The market-place is partly filled on these occasions
with pens in which sheep are closely huddled together, while cattle occupy
the remainder of the space. The lowing of the cattle in a resonant
diapason, the barking of the drovers' dogs, the querulous bleating of the
sheep, and the hum of the people, amount altogether to an agricultural
_charivari_ as typical of a rural market-day as may be found in England.
XXIX
[Sidenote: _BURITON_]
A short mile off the road, two miles below Petersfield, is the
charmingly-situated village of Buriton. It is reached by a winding lane
turning off the high-road, beside a finger-post and two ugly modern
cottages. Hop-fields and maltings border the lane, which suddenly, at one
of its turns, discloses the village, tucked away in the sheltered lower
slopes of the rolling South Downs, clothed in places with short grass, and
in others bald and showing the white chalk; while just above the village
are woodlands of tall elm and branching oak, vociferous with rooks. These
"hangers," as hillside woods are locally termed, are a special feature of
this part of Hampshire, and are not to be found in anything like this
profusion in any other part of the county. They form the loveliest setting
imaginable to an old-world village of this character, and it is difficult
to say at what season of the year such a place as Buriton, backed with its
woods, is most beautiful. Spring finds the forest trees bare and black,
with waving branches scraping, like wizard fingers, gnarled and crooked,
the leaden skies of moist February and windy March; and with April comes
the stirring of the sap that sets off every little twig with the
fairy-like pale green buds of future leaves, until a distant view of the
hanger seems clothed in a tender emerald mist. Spring passes and leaves
the hillside trees clothed with a thick coat of summer foliage that forms
the best of backgrounds to the red roofs of the village; and when leafy
summer mellows into russet autumn the hanger is one mass of brilliant
colour; gorgeous reds and yellows and tints of dull gold. When November
fades away in mists and midnight frosts into Christmastide and the bleak
days of January, when days draw out and "the cold begins to strengthen,"
as the country folk say, then the hanger is etched black and solemn
against the snow-powdered downs, and you can discern every high-perched
homestead of the rooks, swinging in the topmost branches of the tallest
trees, and looking twice their actual size by this adventitious
juxtaposition of black and white.
And, indeed, Buriton is as cheerful in winter's frosts as in summer's
heat. The village itself is commendably old-fashioned and typically
English of the eighteenth century. True, a post and telegraph office
stands in the village street, but that is the only anachronism: for the
rest, it is a picture by Caldecott come to life. Caldecott saw in his
mind's eye a characteristically English village of the time of the
Georges, and he crystallized his vision in many tinted drawings. Here,
then, is such a village in very truth, with its ancient church fronting an
open space in the village street, where a broad horse-pond, fed by a
trickling rill, reflects the ivied church tower in summer, and in
winter-time bears the shouting, red-faced urchins who come sliding upon
its surface as merrily as English boys have done from time immemorial.
Fronting the other side of the pond is the old farm-house of Mapledurham,
stuccoed, 'tis true, and plebeian enough to a casual observer, but bearing
traces of antiquity in its gables, whence Tudor windows peep from out the
handiwork of the modern plasterer, and thereby indict him for an artless
fellow, with never a soul above contracts and cheap utility.
[Sidenote: _AN IDEAL MANOR HOUSE_]
Behind the church, in midst of rick-yards and their pleasing litter of
fragrant straw, stands Buriton Manor House, a solid, staid, and
comfortable four-square building of mellowed red brick, frankly
unornamental, and therefore pleasing. Built in the days of Queen Anne, you
can yet scarce imagine (being a Londoner, and used to the grime of the
eighteenth-century houses of the capital), as you stand in front of it,
these cleanly walls to be so old. Yet there are brilliant lichens upon the
bricks that are not the growth of yesterday, and the cumbrous sashes of
the tall plain windows are not of the fashion of to-day. Some windows,
too, are blank and bricked up; reminiscences, these, of the days of the
window-tax, days when the light of heaven was appraised by the Inland
Revenue authorities, and to be bought at a price in coin of the realm. So
here, in very truth, is the Manor House of Caldecott's fancy, and of
Washington Irving's picture-like prose.
[Illustration: E Gibbon]
[Sidenote: _GIBBON ACCORDING TO BOSWELL_]
And here lived, for a time, Edward Gibbon, the historian, whose birthplace
we passed at Putney; and it is for this personal interest, for this
hero-worshipping object, that I have turned aside from the high-road to
visit Buriton. Gibbon, you will say, is a quaint figure for the
hero-worshipper to admire outside his stately pages of Roman History, and
I have no mind to deny your contention. He was, indeed, a humorous figure
of a man, the more so, doubtless, because he was so supremely unconscious
of the whimsical figure he cut before his contemporaries. The difference
between the majestic swing and rounded periods of his literary style, and
his personal appearance and his private habits of thought, is scarce less
than ludicrous. Gibbon was, in fine, exceedingly human, and his person was
almost grotesque. Do you, I wonder, conceive in that luminous optic, the
"mind's eye," when thinking of the man who wrote the stately prose of the
"Decline and Fall," the figure of a little snub-nosed gentleman, with a
square head, a prodigious development of chins, and a wagging paunch?
Surely never. Yet this was the appearance of the man, and portraits and
caricatures of him all agree in showing this great literary figure of last
century's close as a very whimsical-looking human figure indeed.
It cannot with certainty be said whence Gibbon derived his singular
appearance. Not (one would say) from either his father or his mother, who
were both, to judge from their portraits, very comely persons. But if
neither his face nor his figure would have served to make Gibbon's
fortune, certainly his agreeable manners stood him in good stead; and
although Boswell describes him, in ferociously unfriendly terms, as "an
ugly, affected, disgusting fellow," of the race of "infidel wasps and
venomous insects," he seems to have been in good favour with polite
society. But then Bozzy's mind had room for only one hero.
He was not (curiously enough) at all eager in the early part of his career
to be recognized for his literary abilities, for, when a young man, he was
solicitous to be known as a good figure in polite society. Thus when, in
1762, we find the French Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, giving him
introductions to the foremost French writers of the time, we hear him
complaining that the Duke treated him "more as a man of letters than as a
man of fashion." He was, indeed, _very_ human! This quality (or defect?)
is seen again in a letter, still extant, in which he says, years later,
upon his determination not to stand again for Parliament:--"A seat in
Parliament I can only value as it is connected with some official
situation of emolument." Does that not endear him to you at once, who live
in these Pharisaical times, when men seek election to the House on the
score of philanthropy, of patriotism, of service to mankind; on any
ground, in fact, but the fundamental consideration of self-interest?
Gibbon lived and wrote in the days when the literary patron still existed,
and although the historian was a man of some pretensions in his own
county, and on his ancestral acres at Buriton, yet he found the powerful
friendship of Holroyd, afterwards first Earl of Sheffield, most useful,
not only in literature, but in his career as a Member of Parliament. The
almost lifelong friendship between the two was manifested even in death,
for Gibbon sleeps, not in the Abbey, nor among his fathers at Buriton, but
in the Sheffield vault at Fletching, in Sussex.
[Sidenote: _AN AMATEUR SOLDIER_]
The mind of this singular man was, indeed, not apt to run in the direction
of ancestor-worship, and old acres represented only so much money to him
when, a year after the publication of his History, he sold the estate.
Years before, in his father's time, he held the captaincy of a battalion
of Hampshire Militia (a sort of bachelor Sir Dilberry Diddle), and thus
he says of himself in the "Memoirs," in a manner unconsciously
humorous:--"I for two and a half years endured a wandering life of
military servitude." Thus seriously did he look upon the perfunctory
drilling of yeomen; the pleasant field-days between Portsmouth and
Petersfield, and the Sunday church-parades, in which the militia, gorgeous
in sky-blue coats with red facings; in white breeches with black gaiters;
with astonishing hats and careful perukes finished off daintily with
pigtails and black silk ribbons, bore a gallant part, exciting the
admiration of the ladies, and the scornful animosity of those sober
bachelors who belonged neither to the Militia, the Fencibles, nor to that
doughty body of men, the Petersfield Cavalry; all good men and true, ready
to shed their last drop of blood for their country, in the unlikely event
of an invasion; but, meanwhile, none the less averse from a little parade
of pomp and circumstance and the showing off of fine feathers. They were
gaudy and most remarkable figures, these old militia-men, and the modern
"Saturday afternoon soldier" is to them as a London sparrow is to a
peacock for comparison. Neither is there any adequate compare between the
work done by these old fellows and the modern amateur soldier. Gibbon and
his contemporaries may have boasted of their "military servitude," and the
historian may have profoundly believed the statement, that hints more than
it really expresses--"The captain of Hampshire grenadiers was not useless
to the historian of the Roman Empire;" but their services were more to the
eye than to practical efficiency, and they would have resented, even to
the laying down of their firelocks, the hard work which a battalion of
Cockney rifle volunteers endures with cheerfulness.
But Gibbon grew tired of his military exploits; and presently, when the
militia were disbanded, his father sent him travelling on the Continent.
It was at Rome, amid the ruins of the Capitol, that, in 1764, he conceived
the first idea of his great work, but it was not until 1788 that the final
volume was issued, after years of incredible toil and research.