On the death of a young unmarried person of the parish, his or her
friends and relatives make a funeral garland, or chaplet, similar to the
one sketched overleaf, in paper, and hang it from the ceiling of the
church. The interior of the building now holds quite a number of these
singular mementoes, the oldest dating back to the last century. They are
fashioned of cardboard and white paper, something in the shape of a
crown, with elaborately cut rosettes and with five paper gloves
suspended, on two of which are recorded the name, the age, and the date
of death of the deceased whose memory is thus kept alive, while the
other three are inscribed with texts or verses from favourite hymns. The
particulars of age and death are repeated on a little wooden shield
above.
[Illustration: FUNERAL GARLAND, ABBOT’S ANN.]
During the last eight years three of these memorials have been added.
They are placed here after having been carried in front of the coffin on
the day of the funeral. On such occasions the garland is carried by two
girls, dressed in white, with curiously folded handkerchiefs on their
heads. There is now only one other place in England, at Matlock, in
Derbyshire, where this curious custom survives.
[Sidenote: _THE WALLOPS_]
These villages, together with Amport, Thruxton, Monxton, and East
Cholderton, lie in the triangular district between the branching of the
two great routes of the road to Exeter. Just out of Andover, on the
rising road, stands the old toll-house that commanded either route, with
the mileage to various towns still displayed prominently on its walls.
The right-hand road leads to the Weyhill and Amesbury branch of the
Exeter Road, while the left-hand fork is the main road to Salisbury.
Passing this toll-house, the old road runs through an inhospitable
succession of uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike to
mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or drive a horse, or urge
forth your wild career on a motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is
chiefly a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover behind,
and it is not until ‘the Wallops’ are reached, at Little (or Middle)
Wallop, lying in a hollow where a little stream trickles across the
road, that any relief is experienced.
It must be Little Wallop to which Mr. Thomas Hardy refers in the _Mayor
of Casterbridge_, where the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after
taking up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes employed at a
‘pastoral farm near the old western highway.... He had chosen the
neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at
a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare
was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.’
The Wallops are interesting places, despite their silly name. There are
Over, and Nether, and Middle, or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper,
Lower, and Little Wallop. According to one school of antiquaries (who
must by no means be suspected of joking), the Wallop district is to be
identified with the ‘Gualoppum’ described by an old chronicler, a
district, appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in which
Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There are, of course, local
derivations of the meaning of this place-name, together with a belief
that to Sir John Wallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth, who
‘walloped the French’ in one or other of our many mediæval battles with
that nation, we owe that very active, not to say slangy verb, ‘to
wallop.’ But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a little
stream, called the Wallop, flowing through these villages, to which they
owe their generic name; the name of the stream itself deriving from the
Anglo-Saxon ‘Weallan,’ to boil or bubble; the root of our English word
‘well.’
Of these villages, Little Wallop alone is on the road, and is merely an
offshoot of the others, called into existence by the traffic which
followed this course in the old coaching days. Since railways have left
the roads lonely it has simply slumbered, ‘far from the madding crowd’s
ignoble strife,’ and its inhabitants are presumably happy in their
retirement; although, when days are short and nights are long, and the
stormy winds do blow, it is quite conceivable that there are more
cheerful and warmer situations.
Three miles from here the road leaves Hampshire and enters Wilts, and
two miles onwards from that point, after passing ‘Lobcombe Corner,’ the
junction of the Stockbridge road, is seen that famous old coaching inn,
the ‘Pheasant,’ known much better under its other name, ‘Winterslow
Hut.’
XXIII
[Sidenote: _HAZLITT_]
There are few more desolate and cheerless places in England than the
spot where this old coaching inn stands beside the open road, with the
unenclosed downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold after fold.
Somewhere amid these hills and hollows, but quite hidden, is the village
of West Winterslow, from which the ‘Hut’ obtains its name. The place,
save for the periodical passing of the coaches, was as solitary in old
times as it is now, and its quiet as profound. The very name is
chilling, and as excellently descriptive as it is possible for a name to
be.
When, coming within sight of its isolated roof-tree from the summit of
the hills on either side, the coach-guards used to blow fanfares on
their bugles as a reminder for the ostler to have his fresh teams ready,
the inn and its surrounding stables woke into life, and when they were
gone their several ways, it dozed again. Save that it doubtless looked
more prosperous then, the present appearance of ‘Winterslow Hut’ is
identical with its aspect of sixty years ago. The same horse-pond by the
roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same
prehistoric dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been
capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting
its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in
the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either
direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no
traveller, the emptiness is appalling.
To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic
and essayist, during several years, for quietude. For four years, from
1808 to 1812, he and his wife lived in a cottage at West Winterslow, on
the small income derived from her other cottage property there,
supplemented by the sums the wayward Hazlitt earned fitfully by the
practice of literature. Then they removed to London, where they
disagreed, Hazlitt retiring to the ‘Hut’ in 1819, and leaving his wife
in town. Nervous and irritable, he wanted quiet, nor can it be doubted
that in this spot he found what he sought. He was cursed, according to
the widely different beliefs of his friends, with ‘an ingrained
selfishness,’ or ‘a morbid self-consciousness,’ and oil the downs he
would walk, for the pleasure of having the neighbourhood all to himself,
from forty to fifty miles a day. He wrote his _Winterslow_ essays here,
and his _Napoleon_, for whom he had an almost insane reverence. The
‘diabolical scowl’ of Hazlitt when Napoleon or any other of his pet
susceptibilities were abused must have been worth seeing.
‘Now,’ says a literary hero-hunter, who has visited ‘Winterslow Hut,’ as
a place of pilgrimage,--‘now it is a desolate place, fallen into decay,
and tenanted by a labouring man and his family, cultivating a small farm
of some thirty acres, and barely able to make a living out of it. In
winter two or three weeks will sometimes elapse without even a beggar or
tramp or cart passing the door. On the ground floor, looking out upon a
horse-pond, flanked by two old lime-trees, is a little parlour, which
was the one probably used by Hazlitt as his sitting-room. At the other
end of the house is a large empty room, formerly devoted to
cock-fighting matches and singlestick combats. It was with a strange and
eerie feeling that I contemplated this little parlour, and pictured to
myself the many solitary evenings during which Hazlitt sat in it
enjoying copious libations of his favourite tea (for during the last
fifteen years of his life he never tasted alcoholic drinks of any kind)
perhaps reading _Tom Jones_ for the tenth time, or enjoying
[Sidenote: _A LITERARY RECLUSE_]
[Illustration: ‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’]
one of Congreve’s comedies, or Rousseau’s _Confessions_, or writing, in
his large flowing hand, a dozen pages of the essay on _Persons one would
Wish to have Seen_, or _On Living to One’s Self_. One cannot imagine any
retreat more consonant with the feelings of this lonely thinker, during
one of his periods of seclusion, than the out-of-the-world place in
which I stood. In winter time it must have been desolate beyond
description--on wild nights especially--“heaven’s chancel-vault” blind
with sleet--the fierce wind sweeping down from the bare wolds around,
and beating furiously against the doors and windows of the unsheltered
hostelry.’
It is not to be supposed that Hazlitt was insensible to the dreariness
of the spot. ‘Here, _even_ here,’ he says, as though the dolour of the
place had come home to him, ‘with a few old authors I can manage to get
through the summer or winter months without ever knowing what it is to
feel _ennui_. They sit with me at breakfast; they walk out with me
before dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented tracts, after
starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven
rustling above my head, or being greeted by the woodman’s “stern
good-night,” as he strikes into his narrow homeward path, I can “take
mine ease at mine inn,” beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with
Signor Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I have.’
His _Farewell to Essay Writing_ was written here 20th February 1828. He
had long given up the intemperance of former years, and cultivated
literature on copious tea-drinking. ‘As I quaff my libations of tea in
a morning,’ he says, ‘I love to watch the clouds sailing from the west,
and fancy that “the spring comes slowly up this way.” In this hope,
while “fields are dank, and ways are mire,” I follow the same direction
to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the dry, level greensward,
I can see my way for a mile before me, closed in on each side by
copse-wood, and ending in a point of light more or less brilliant, as
the day is bright or cloudy.’ And so this harbinger of our own literary
neurotics continues, dropping into a morbid introspective strain,
pulling up his soul, like a plant, by the roots, to see how it is
growing, and babbling to the world, between the jewel-work of his
literature, of his follies and his unrest. Strange, that this wiry
pedestrian, this apostle of fresh air, should be of the same dough of
which the degenerates of our time are compounded.
XXIV
It was here, however, that one of the most thrilling episodes of the
road was enacted in the old days. The Mail from Exeter to London had
left Salisbury on the night of 20th October 1816, and proceeded in the
usual way for several miles, when what was thought to be a large calf
was seen trotting beside the horses in the darkness. The team soon
became extremely nervous and fidgety, and as the inn was approached they
could scarcely be kept under control.
[Sidenote: _AN ESCAPED LIONESS_]
At the moment when the coachman pulled up to deliver his bags, one of
the leading horses was suddenly seized by the supposed calf. The horses
kicked and plunged violently, and it was with difficulty the driver
could prevent the coach from being overturned. The guard drew his
blunderbuss and was about to shoot the mysterious assailant when several
men, accompanied by a large mastiff, appeared in sight. The foremost,
seeing that the guard was about to fire, pointed a pistol at his head,
swearing that he would be shot if the beast was killed.
Every one then perceived that this ferocious ‘calf’ was nothing less
than a lioness. The dog was set on to attack her, and she thereupon left
the horse and turned on him. He turned and ran, but the lioness caught
him and tore him to pieces, carrying the remains in her mouth under a
granary. The spot was then barricaded to prevent her escape, and a noose
being thrown over her neck, she was secured and marched off to captivity
again.
It is said that the horse when attacked fought with great spirit, and
would probably have beaten off his assailant with his fore-feet had he
been at liberty; but in his frantic plunges he became entangled in the
harness. The lioness, it seems, attacked him in front, springing at his
throat and fastening the claws of her fore-feet on either side of the
neck, while her hind-feet tore at his chest. The horse, although
fearfully mangled, survived. The showmen of the time were evidently
quite as enterprising as those of these latter days, for the menagerie
proprietor purchased the horse and exhibited him the next day at
Salisbury Fair, with excellent results in the shape of increased
gate-money.
The passengers on this extraordinary occasion were absolutely
terror-stricken. Bounding off the coach, they made a wild rush for the
inn, and, reaching the door, slammed it to and bolted it, to the
exclusion of one poor fellow who, not active enough, found himself shut
out in the road. The lioness, pursuing the dog, actually brushed against
him. When she was secured, the poltroons inside the house opened the
door and let the half-fainting traveller in. They gave him refreshments,
and he recovered sufficiently to be able to write an account of the
event for the local papers; but in a few days he became a raving maniac,
and was sent to an asylum at Laverstock. For over twenty-seven years he
lived there, incurable, and died in 1843.
The leader attacked by the lioness was a famous horse, even before that
affair. There were many such in the coaching age. Animals unmanageable
on the racecourse were frequently sold to coach-proprietors, and soon
learnt discipline on the roads. ‘Pomegranate’ was his name. A ‘thief’ on
the course, and a bad-tempered brute in the stable, he had worked on the
Exeter Mail for some time before this dramatic episode in his career
found him, for a time, a home in a menagerie.
[Sidenote: _SALISBURY_]
The fame of the affair was great and lasting. That coaching specialist,
James Pollard, drew, and R. Havell engraved, a plate showing the
dramatic scene, which was dedicated to Thomas Hasker, Superintendent of
His Majesty’s Mails. In it you see Joseph Pike, the guard, rising to
shoot the very heraldic-looking lioness, and the passengers encouraging
him in the background, from the safe retreat of the first-floor windows.
It will be observed that this is apparently the lioness’s first spring,
and yet those passengers are already upstairs: at once a striking
testimony to their agility and a warranty of the exquisite truth of the
saying that fear lends wings to the feet.
XXV
Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a
Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the
unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile
Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted
road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling
around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is
coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently
in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary
height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of
travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be
believed.
Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of
modernity that quite belies its age. Few places in England have so
well-ascertained an origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and
eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet, although there is the
cathedral to prove its age, with the Poultry Cross, and very many
ancient houses happily still standing, it has a general air of anything
but mediævalism. This curious feeling that strikes every visitor is
really owing to the generous and well-ordered plan on which the city was
originally laid out; broad streets being planned in geometrical
precision, and the blocks of houses built in regular squares.
That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, thought Salisbury ‘a
very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated
city’--a view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish I could
tell you to which inn it was that he resorted to have dinner, and to
await the arrival of Martin. A coaching inn, of course, for Martin came
by coach from London. But whether it was the ‘White Hart,’ or the ‘Three
Swans’ (which, alas! is no longer an inn), or the ‘King’s Arms,’ or the
‘George,’ is more than I or any one else can determine.
[Sidenote: _NEW SARUM_]
Salisbury is by no means desperate or dissipated, even though it be
market-day, and although itinerant cutlery vendors may still sell
seven-bladed knives, with never a cut among them, to the unwary. It is
true that Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us, in _On the Western Circuit_, a
picture of blazing orgies at Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better
than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
should have been; and it is true that by ‘Melchester’ this fair city of
Salisbury is meant; but you can conjure up no very accurate picture of
this ancient place from those pages. The real Salisbury is extremely
urbane and polished, decorous and well-ordered. It is graceful and
sunny, and has, in fact, all the sweetness of mediævalism without its
sternness, and affords a thorough contrast with Winchester, which frowns
upon you where Salisbury smiles. One need not waver from one’s
allegiance to Winchester to admit so much.
Salisbury is still known in official documents as ‘New Sarum.’ It is,
nevertheless, of a quite respectable antiquity, its newness dating from
that day, 28th April 1220, when Bishop Poore laid the foundation-stone
of the still existing cathedral. There are romantic incidents in the
exodus from Old Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile and a
half away, to these ‘rich champaign fields and fertile valleys,
abounding with the fruits of the earth, and watered by living streams,’
in this ‘sink of Salisbury Plain,’ where the Bourne, the Wylye, the
Avon, and the Nadder flow in innumerable runlets through the meads.
Old Sarum was old indeed. Its history strikes rootlets deep down into
the Unknown. A natural hillock upon the wild downs, its defensible
position rendered it a camp for the earliest aboriginal tribes, who,
always at war with one another, lived for safety’s sake in such bleak
and inhospitable places when they would much rather be hunting and
enjoying life generally in the sheltered wooded vales and fertile
plains. These tribes heaped up the first artificial earthworks that ever
strengthened this historic hill, and they were succeeded during the long
march of those dim centuries by Romans, Saxons, and Danes. The Romans,
with their unerring military instinct, saw the importance of the hill,
and added to the simple defences they found there. They called the place
_Sorbiodunum_, and made it a great strategic station. The Saxons
strengthened the fortifications in their turn, and at the time of the
Norman Conquest a city had grown up under the shelter of the citadel.
In its deserted state to-day, the site of Old Sarum vividly recalls the
appearance presented by an extinct volcano, the conical hill rising from
the downs with the suddenness of an upheaval, and the area enclosed
within the concentric rings of banks and ditches forming a hollow space
similar to a crater. The total area enclosed within these fortifications
is about 28 acres. Within this space was comprised that ancient city,
and in its very centre, overlooking everything else, and encompassed by
a circular fosse and bank, 100 feet in height, stood the citadel. The
site of this castle is now overgrown with dense thickets of shrubs and
brambles; the fragments of its flint and rubble walls, 12 feet thick,
and some remaining portions of its gateways affording evidence of its
old-time strength.
[Sidenote: _OLD SARUM_]
Within this city, enclosed for centuries by the ring-fence of these
fortifications, stood the cathedral, in a position just below the Castle
ward. Its exact site and size (although not a fragment of it is
standing) were discovered in the summer of 1834. That portion of the
vanished city had been laid down as pasture, and the drought of that
year revealed the plan of the cathedral, in a distinct brown outline
upon the grass. This building, completed in 1092 by Bishop Osmund,
furnished the stone in later years for the spire of Salisbury Cathedral
and for the walls of the Close, in which, by St. Anne’s Gate, many
sculptured fragments of these relics from Old Sarum may yet be seen.
A variety of circumstances brought about the removal of the cathedral
from Old Sarum. Water was lacking on that height, and winds raged so
furiously around it that the monks could not hear the priests say Mass;
and, worse than all, during the Papal Interdict, the King, in revenge
for many ecclesiastical annoyances, transferred the custody of the
Castle of Old Sarum from the bishops to his own creatures, who locked
the monks out of their monastery and church on one occasion when they
had gone on some religious procession. When the monks returned, they
found entrance denied them, and were forced to remain in the open air
during the whole of a frosty winter night. There was no end to the
hardships which those Men of Wrath brought upon the Church. No wonder
that Peter of Blois cried out, ‘What has the House of the Lord to do
with castles? It is the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple of Baalim. Let
us in God’s name descend into the plain.’
The removal decided upon, it remained to choose a site. Tradition tells
us that the Virgin Mary appeared to Bishop Poore in a vision, and told
him to build the church on a spot called Merryfield; and has it that the
site was chosen by the fall of an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old
Sarum. If that was the case, there must have been something miraculous
in that shot, for the place where Salisbury Cathedral is built is a mile
and a half away from those ramparts. But perhaps the bishop or the
legends used the long bow in a very special sense.
The cathedral was completed in sixty years, receiving its final
consecration in 1260; but the great spire was not finished until a
hundred years later. The city was an affair of rapid growth, receiving a
charter of incorporation seven years after being founded. Seventeen
years later, Bishop Bingham dealt a final blow at the now utterly ruined
city of Old Sarum by diverting the old Roman road to the West from its
course through Old Sarum, Bemerton, and Wilton, and making a highway
running directly to New Sarum, and crossing the Avon by the new bridge
which he had built at Harnham. Old Sarum could by this time make little
or no resistance, for it was deserted, save for a few who could not
bring themselves to leave the home of their forefathers. Wilton,
however, which was a thriving town, bitterly resented this diversion of
the roads, and petitioned against it, but without avail. From that date
Wilton’s decline set in, and the rise of New Sarum progressed at an even
greater speed. A clothing trade sprang up and prospered, and many Royal
visits gave the citizens an air of importance. They waxed rich and
arrogant, and were eternally
[Sidenote: _THE MARTYRS_]
[Illustration: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).]