death, certainly his "Decline and Fall" had an extraordinary run when it
first appeared. The entire impression was exhausted in a few days; a
second and third edition were scarce adequate to the demand, and it was
said at the time that "the book was on every table and on almost every
toilet." From that day to this there have been well-nigh twenty editions,
some of them consisting of as many as fourteen volumes, and, as a sign of
Gibbon's sometime popularity, it may be mentioned that the entries under
his name in the British Museum catalogue number about a hundred and
twenty.
Not many pilgrims make their way to Buriton for Gibbon's sake, yet were
you to turn aside from the high-road, you would find the place interesting
beyond expectation. Lying _perdu_ among the hills, although so near the
traffic of the outer world, it is, and has ever been, but rarely visited
by the stranger, and has thus come to retain a distinct and individual
character.
Push open the old wrought-iron gates of the churchyard and look around.
The church itself is just a typical building, with some few special
features. It has, of course, been restored, but the fury of the restorer
has been wreaked with greater effect elsewhere, and he has come to Buriton
in a manner comparatively mild and harmless. He has left even the fine
Decorated window of the south chapel, and has not cast out all the
memorials of the dead and used their shattered fragments for mending the
village street--as he has been known to do elsewhere. You can, in fact,
discover the names of some of Gibbon's ancestors upon the walls, and not
all the original encaustic tiles have been thrown away. Prodigious!
[Sidenote: _RESTORERS' INIQUITIES_]
But others have (truth to tell) been less fortunate. Poor cadavers! laid
to rest within the church, with storied ledger-stones above, decently
recounting both virtues they had and had not, they have been ruthlessly
removed, and as the stranger paces round the exterior of the church, he
walks upon their memorials, laid end to end, to form a solid footpath for
the good folks o' Sundays. The frosts of winter crack them; the nailed
boots of the rustics wear down the well-cut inscriptions that date from
the seventeenth century to within a few generations of ourselves; and they
will presently be worn quite away.
Here--stop and look--is the epitaph of one, a considerable fellow in his
day, a barrister of the Middle Temple. Here is his coat-of-arms, and here
his panegyric, writ, doubtless, by loving hands, and cut, most certainly,
by an artist in his mortuary craft. Ha! barrister, where are your fees,
your brief-bag, your writs of escheat and _fi fa_? Would you could arise
and with all your former eloquence denounce the paltry fellows who have
filched your gravestone for the paving of a churchyard path, whereon the
casual clodhopper thumps his ponderous way and the meditative tourist
pauses to moralize, and with the ferrule of his walking-stick scrapes away
the dirt that hides your identity.
Where this solemn paving was used to be, are spread now, over the nave of
the church, coloured tiles that wear a neat and cleanly, but distressingly
secular, look. You might be pacing the tiled hall of a suburban villa,
rather than the House of God. "But one must live," the restoring architect
will tell you. The greater the cost of his commission the larger will be
the amount from his five-percentage; so, out go the old stones and in come
the patent tiles, while that gentleman pockets his money and sets off to
fresh fields and pastures new.
XXX
[Sidenote: _BUTSER HILL_]
Another country lane affords the opportunity of regaining the Portsmouth
Road from Buriton, without undergoing what always is the penance of
retracing one's steps. It brings the traveller out into the highway just
below where the railway crosses, underneath a bridge; while away in front
lies the long slope that climbs steadily and straight towards the crest
of Butser Hill, that tall knob of the South Downs rising to a height of
nine hundred and twenty-seven feet above the Meonware country, and
commanding views stretching to Salisbury in one direction, and in others
extending to Andover, to the Isle of Wight, and to the rich lands of the
Sussex Weald.
Butser Hill is the highest ground in Hampshire. Here the traveller enters
upon the chalk country extending to the southern slopes of Portsdown Hill,
and here the character of the scenery changes suddenly with the geological
strata. Beech woods, oak and fir, give place to barren downs, clothed only
with a short and scanty covering of grass, or with meagre patches of
gorse. In favoured nooks, sheltered from the winds and brought by the
painful unremitting labour of years to a condition not altogether
prohibitive of cultivation, farmsteads stand, with their surrounding barns
and cow-sheds, the whole comprised within walls constructed of flints
picked plentifully from the land.
Here, on the incline leading across Butser Hill, may be noticed the
beginning of these things. At one point, to the left hand, turns off what
was once the old road, leading across the Hill, now a secluded track-way,
bringing the explorer upon excavations in the chalk, and suddenly upon
lime-kilns and lime-burners, working away in a solitude where every sound
re-echoes from the enclosing chalk in gruff and hollow murmurs. The old
road was in course of time abandoned for the new, which marches straight
ahead and is carried in a deep and precipitous cutting through the
hill-top. The winds whistle shrilly through this chalky gorge, and the
frosts and thaws loosen great pieces of chalk which come down into the
road with tremendous leaps, and break into a thousand fragments at the
bottom. It is a lonely place. A single cottage stands some distance away;
the lime-burners are hidden in their resounding dell, and the only company
the wayfarer has on ordinary days through the cutting are the two
notice-boards that, with a fine disregard of punctuation, caution folks
"against Chalk falling from the Sides by Order." These, together with a
board warning cyclists that "This Hill is Dangerous," are not cheering to
the spirits on a winter's day.
It was on Butser Hill that a post-boy from the "Anchor," at Liphook, was
stopped by an unmounted highwayman, who took the horse he was riding and
cantered off upon its back, in the direction of London. The post-boy
returned, sorrowful, to Petersfield, where he procured another horse and
rode back to Liphook.
On his way, riding up to the turnpike-gate at Rake, he received
information of the robber's passing through, and, upon reaching the
"Anchor," told the landlord of what had happened. Immediately "mine host"
organized pursuit, and so quickly did the party take to the road that they
overtook man and horse at Hindhead. When the highwayman observed his
pursuers gaining upon him, he lost his nerve, and did the very worst thing
possible under the circumstances. He dismounted and attempted to conceal
himself amid the gorse of that wild spot. But he was soon discovered,
captured, and hauled off in custody; afterwards receiving sentence of
transportation at Winchester Assizes.
[Sidenote: _NICHOLAS NICKLEBY_]
Passing through the precipitous cutting of Butser Hill, the road now comes
upon the bare and windy expanse of Oxenbourne Downs, where, at a distance
of fifty-eight miles from London, stands beside the road the "Coach and
Horses" Inn, marked on the Ordnance maps "Bottom" Inn, and known in
coaching days as "Gravel Hill" Inn, from the hill in the Downs rising at
some distance to the rear, covered in patches with scrub and gorse. This
is the roadside inn referred to by Dickens in "Nicholas Nickleby."
We left Nicholas and Smike looking down into the Devil's Punch Bowl, and
now take up their journey over Rake Hill and the heights of Butser to this
lonely roadside inn, which Dickens, using the latitude allowed to
novelists, describes as twelve miles from Portsmouth. It is, in fact,
thirteen miles, but its identity is unassailable, because there is no
other house beside the road for miles on either hand.
"Onward they kept with steady purpose, and entered at length upon a wide
and spacious tract of downs, with every variety of little hill and plain
to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up almost
perpendicularly into the sky a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible
to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there stood a
huge mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging
so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits.
Hills swelling above each other, and undulations shapely and uncouth,
smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by
side, bounded the view in each direction; while frequently, with
unexpected noise, there uprose from the ground a flight of crows, who,
cawing and wheeling round the nearest hills as if uncertain of their
course, suddenly poised themselves upon the wing and skimmed down the long
vista of some opening valley with the speed of very light itself.
"By degrees the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as they
had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged once
again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing near
their place of destination gave them fresh courage to proceed; but the way
had been difficult, and they had loitered on the road, and Smike was
tired.
"Thus twilight had already closed in, when they turned off the path to the
door of a roadside inn, yet twelve miles short of Portsmouth.
"'Twelve miles,' said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and
looking doubtfully at Smike.
"'Twelve long miles,' repeated the landlord.
"'Is it a good road?' inquired Nicholas.
"'Very bad,' said the landlord. As, of course, being a landlord, he would
say.
"'I want to get on,' observed Nicholas, hesitating. 'I scarcely know what
to do.'
"'Don't let me influence you,' rejoined the landlord. '_I_ wouldn't go on
if it was me.'"
And so here they stayed the night, much to their advantage, in a manner
familiar to the readers of Dickens. Of their progress to Portsmouth the
next day, with Mr. Vincent Crummles and his troupe, we will say nothing,
for no other outstanding features of the road are described between this
and Hilsea Lines.
[Illustration: THE "COACH AND HORSES" INN.]
[Sidenote: _CHALTON DOWNS_]
Oxenbourne Downs are succeeded, on the map, by Chalton (originally
"Chalkton") Downs; but they are all one to the eye that ranges over their
almost trackless hills and hollows.
XXXI
It was in the neighbourhood of Chalton Downs that a terrific, if, in some
of its details, a somewhat farcical, encounter took place between two
highwaymen and a mail-coach in the winter of 1791. The coach had set out
from the "Blue Posts" at Portsmouth in the afternoon, and the coachman
drove up through Purbrook and on, past Horndean, with the greatest
difficulty, in face of a blinding snowstorm. But when he had come, as
daylight faded away, to these bleak and open downs, he found it utterly
impossible to lash his tired horses a step farther. The situation probably
reads a great deal more interesting than those who experienced it had any
idea of. To be snowed up on an open down, miles away from anywhere, reads
prettily enough in Christmas numbers, but, as an experience, it does not
bear repetition. There were, on this occasion, four "insides" and two
"outsides"; and the lot of these last two, together with that of the
coachman and guard, must have been simply Dantesque in its chilly horrors.
The coachman was a humane creature, and determined, at any rate, not to
expose his shivering horses to the storm; so he unharnessed them and was
proposing to lead them into Petersfield, when two fellows, well mounted,
and apparently furnished with a perfect armoury of pistols, rode up
through the falling snow and the gathering gloom, and demanded the
passengers' money, or the usual alternative.
[Sidenote: _A HOMERIC FIGHT_]
But the guard was a fellow of courage and resolution, and so was one of
the "insides," a midshipman journeying to London for his Christmas. Quick
as thought, the guard whipped out his blunderbuss from its case, and, at
the same time, the midshipman bounded out of the coach, and laid one
fellow head downwards in the snow by leaping on his horse and delivering a
scientific blow on the side of his face. The other highwayman was,
meanwhile, in single combat with the guard, who having, so to speak,
entrenched himself behind the half-buried coach, opened fire in answer to
a pistol-shot from the enemy.
The blunderbuss of last century was an appalling weapon, with a bore like
that of a small cannon, and a bell muzzle which poured forth slugs and
small shot in a stream that spread, fan-like, until at the distance of a
yard or so it could be confidently relied upon, not only to hit the object
aimed at, but anything else within a space of six feet on either side. The
guard fired, and when the smoke and roar of the discharge, like that of a
piece of ordnance, had finally died away, the second highwayman's horse
was discovered plunging in the snow, peppered with shot from shoulders to
hind-quarters. The man himself was wounded in the leg, but was seen to be
advancing through the snow upon the guard, with another pistol aimed at
his head. He pulled the trigger, but the snow had damped his powder, and
it snapped harmlessly. The guard was now in a somewhat similar position
with the wasp who has delivered his sting, and is afterwards rendered
comparatively harmless: for the loading of a blunderbuss was an operation
that required time and care and a large quantity of powder and shot, and
not a moment's grace was he granted. Meanwhile, he was required to act.
The blunderbusses of that time were furnished with a hinged bayonet,
rather under a foot in length, and doubled back upon the barrel. To
release the bayonet and bring it into an offensive position, one had but
to touch a catch, and it sprang out with terrific force and remained
fixed.
The guard, touching the spring, remained upon the defensive, with bayonet
fixed, while the highwayman, dismounted, came trampling down the snow and
leaving behind him a trail of blood, trickling from the slug-wounds in his
leg. Arrived at the back of the coach, from which peered the guard's red
nose and the gaping bore of his blunderbuss, he fired, and the guard would
in all likelihood have been killed, had not the midshipman, by creating a
diversion in the rear with the butt of the coachman's heavy whip, not only
destroyed his aim, but stretched him senseless in the snow. The enemy were
now utterly defeated. The first highwayman, on recovering from the blow
he had received, found his hands securely tied behind him, in a thoroughly
efficient and workmanlike manner characteristic of a sailor, and the
second was treated in the same way, with the help of the guard and the
entirely unnecessary aid of the remaining passengers, who now crawled from
under the seats, where they had taken refuge on the first alarm.
[Illustration: WINDY WEATHER.]
Waiting until the second assailant had recovered consciousness, the
coachman and guard, with the coach-horses; the midshipman and the rest of
the passengers, in charge of the two prisoners and their steeds, trudged
through the gloom and the fallen snow to Petersfield, leaving the coach
abandoned on the highway.
This party of ten reached the town late at night, almost exhausted, and
handed over their prisoners to the civil power, which no doubt dealt with
them in the time-honoured fashion of sending such gentry out of the world
"stabbed to death with a Bridport dagger," as the humorists of the time
termed execution by hanging, "hempen cravats" being usually of Bridport
make.
XXXII
[Sidenote: _SMUGGLING_]
But they were not only highway robberies that gained the Portsmouth Road
so unenviable a notoriety a hundred and fifty years ago. Smuggling was
rife along the highway from Hindhead to Portsmouth in those days, and the
whole sea-board, together with the forest villages that were then so
untravelled, swarmed with the "free-traders," as they euphemistically
called themselves. And this district was not alone, or even pre-eminent,
in smuggling annals, either for the number or for the ferocity of those
engaged in the illicit trade of importing wines, spirits, tea, or lace,
without the formalities of entering their goods at his Majesty's
Custom-houses, or of paying duty upon them. The whole extent of the south
coast, from the North Foreland and Dungeness, in Kent, to the Dodman and
the Land's End, in Cornwall, was one long line of resistance to the
Excise. The people, groaning under a heavy taxation, whose proceeds went
towards the cost of Continental wars and the perpetration of shameless and
atrocious jobs at home, saw no crime in evading the heavy duties that took
so much out of the pockets of a generation notoriously addicted to
continuous drinking; and the wealthy middle-classes, the squires, even
members of the Peerage, and not a few of the country clergymen (semi-pagan
as they were in those days), purchased and consumed immense quantities of
excisable goods that had never rendered unto Caesar--if, indeed, that
imperial term may be used of either the Second or the Third George.
The possession of a cellar well stocked with liquor that had never paid
duty was, in fact, a source of genuine pride to the jolly squires who
winked at each other as they caroused round the mahogany, and, holding
their glasses up to the light, pronounced the tipple to be "the right
sort," and as good stuff as ever came across the Channel on a moonless
night; and madam or my lady wore her silks, her satins, or her lace with
the greater satisfaction when she knew them to have been brought over from
France secretly, wrapped around some bold fellow's body who would surely
never have hesitated to put a bullet through the head of the first Excise
officer that barred his path.
[Sidenote: _UNHOLY TITHES_]
The risk of smuggling was great, the profits large, and the men who,
having counted the cost of their contraband trade, still persisted in it,
were not infrequently well able to afford presents to those easy folks who
might know a great deal of their midnight runs, and who, knowing much and
suspecting more, were folks to be rewarded for past silence, or to be
bribed into a passive acquiescence for the future. Thus the Parson
Trullibers of that time who discovered the belfries of their churches
crowded with strange kegs and unwonted packages and smelling to Heaven
with the scent of other spirits than those usually associated with
churches and churchyards, were not at all surprised at finding a keg in
their pulpits, together with a package of silk or such similar feminine
gauds, if their parsonages held any womenkind. The sexton was simply told
to take the keg and the package up to the house, and if, some blusterous
night, those easy-going clerics looked forth of their casements and saw
strange processions of men passing along the road, hunched with tubs on
their backs, and bound, strange to say, for the House of God, why, they
said nothing, but thought with great complacency upon the certain prospect
of some right Hollands or some generous brandy from over sea.
Smuggling, in fact, was not regarded as a crime by any considerable
section of the public, and public opinion in the counties that gave upon
the sea was altogether in favour of the "free-traders" up to a certain
point. And if the squires, the clergy, and the tradesfolk largely
sympathized with them and connived at the wholesale cheating of the
Revenue that went on for a long period almost unchecked, certainly the
licensed victuallers--the country innkeepers and the struggling pot-house
landlords of the hamlets--were eager to buy goods that had never seen the
inside of a custom-house. Even the officers and men of the Customs and the
Excise were often found to be in league with notorious smugglers, and the
early inadequacy of the Revenue sloops and cutters to prevent the
clandestine landing of excisable goods is to be traced, in part, to bribes
judiciously expended.
The loss to the Revenue during a long series of years must have been
simply enormous, for the bulk of the hardy 'longshore men were engaged all
the year round in running cargoes across from France; in landing them at
unfrequented coigns and inlets of the sea; and in secreting them in the
most unlooked-for recesses of the country, until such time as they could
be safely disposed of. The fisheries, too, were neglected for this much
more remunerative trade, and few men cared to earn an honest and meagre
livelihood by day when anything from five shillings to a guinea might be
the reward of a night's work, climbing up cliffs with kegs slung on back
and chest.
The foremost smugglers were no men of straw, for, like all other trades,
the free-traders' business had its capitalists and its middlemen, who
financed the buying of cargoes and received their share of the plunder,
taking their ease at home while their less wealthy fellow-sinners worked
in fear of capture and condemnation. Others, anticipating the joint-stock
companies of later years, formed themselves into bands or confederacies
who shared both risks and gains, and kept up an armed organization that,
particularly in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire,[5] kept the
law-abiding country-side in terror, and not infrequently offered battle to
the officers of the Preventive Service. These organized gangs of
desperadoes alienated from themselves much of the sympathy that was felt
for the individual smuggler; for, as their power grew, they committed
crimes, not only upon that impersonal thing, the Revenue, but robbed and
despitefully entreated the lieges, and even overawed considerable towns.
[Sidenote: _A SMUGGLERS' RAID_]
One of the most daring exploits of these armed bands of smugglers was the
famous attack upon the custom-house at Poole. This resistance in arms to
the King's authority arose out of the capture by a Revenue cutter of a
heavy cargo of tea shipped, in September 1747, by a number of smugglers
from Guernsey. Captain Johnson, the commander of the Government vessel,
brought the tea to the port of Poole, in Dorsetshire, and lodged it in the
custom-house there. The loss of their entire venture was a very serious
matter to the men who had paid for their tea over in the Channel Islands,
and looked to selling it over here for a profit, and they resolved not to
let their cargo go without an effort. Accordingly, a consultation was held
among them, and they agreed to go and take away the tea from the warehouse
where it was lodged. A body of no less than sixty armed and mounted
smugglers assembled in Charlton Forest, and proceeded thence to Poole,
posting half their number on the roads, in true military fashion, to
scout, and to report the movements of Revenue officers or soldiers who
might hear of their expedition. Thirty of these bold spirits reached Poole
on the night of October 6, and, meeting with no resistance, broke open the
custom-house and removed all their tea, except one bag, weighing about
five pounds.
The next morning they returned through Hampshire, by way of Fordingbridge,
where the expedition was a matter of such common notoriety that hundreds
of persons were assembled in the streets of that little town, to witness
the passing of their cavalcade. Among the leaders of this body of
smugglers was a man named John Diamond, and it so happened that this
fellow was recognized by a shoemaker of the place, one Daniel Chater, who
had turned out from his cobbling to witness the unusual spectacle of sixty
"free-traders" riding away with their booty in broad daylight. Diamond and
he had worked together at haymaking some years previously. Now, to be
identified thus was an altogether unlooked-for and unlucky chance, and
Diamond threw his old acquaintance a bag of tea, by way of hushing him, as
he passed by.