times that prevailed during Jack Cade’s rebellion. Bishop Ayscough was
that unfortunate prelate. He had cautiously retired to Edington, but a
furious body of Salisbury malcontents marched out across the Plain, and
dragging him from the altar of the church, where he was saying Mass,
took him to an adjacent hill-top, and slew him with the utmost
barbarity. It was for the benefit of these unruly citizens that one of
Jack Cade’s quarters was consigned from London to Salisbury and elevated
there on a pole, as a preliminary warning. Full punishment followed a
little later.
XXVI
It is really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through
the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the
cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the
Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story,
which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an
exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in
Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution
still stain the records of the Church; nor, although the very reading of
them turn brain and body sick, and make even the architectural
enthusiast almost turn away in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may
God grant that they ever be forgotten, as in the England of to-day they
would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity, damnable frauds, how they
smirch those sculptured stones and cry insistently for remembrance!
Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry the Eighth, was alive to
it all, and cleared away the false relics; the ‘stinking boots, mucky
combs, ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great bullocks’
horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets of wood,’ which he found
here; but, with less courage than others, he recanted in Mary’s reign.
Sherfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he lived in
less dangerous times for such men. It was in 1629 that he smashed the
stained-glass window, representing the Creation, in St. Edmund’s Church.
In other times he would assuredly have been burnt for this act; as it
was, he was summoned before the Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window
did not contain a true history of the Creation, and objected that God
was represented as ‘a little old man in a long blue coat,’ which he held
was ‘an indignity offered to Almighty God.’ He was committed to the
Fleet Prison for this, fined £500, and required to apologise to the
Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate Mr. Sherfield!
[Sidenote: _MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS_]
This fair city has been almost as much of a Golgotha as the settlements
of savage African kinglets are wont to be. Shakespeare has made mention
of the execution of the Duke of Buckingham here in 1484 by Richard the
Third, but many an one has suffered and left no such trace. That such
executions were generally unjust and almost always too severe is their
sufficient condemnation; but the hanging of Charles, Lord Stourton, in
1556, is an exception. The affair for which he was put to death was the
murder of the two Hartgills, father and son, at Kilmington, Somerset,
and it affords an unusually instructive glimpse into the manners of the
period. It seems that William Hartgill had long been steward to the
previous Lord Stourton, the father of Charles. Like most stewards, he
had profited by his stewardship, over and above his salary, to a
considerable extent. There was no friendship wasted between him and the
new lord, but the quarrels which had taken place between William
Hartgill and his son on the one side, and Charles, Lord Stourton, and
his servants on the other, finally came to a head when my lord demanded
a written undertaking from his mother that she would never marry again,
and that Hartgill should be bond for the undertaking being kept. The
widowed Lady Stourton was residing at the Hartgills’ house when this
demand was made. She refused to have anything to do with such a paper,
and Hartgill bluntly declined as well. Lord Stourton would then appear
to have determined on revenge for this defeat, and eventually, after the
Hartgills had been on several occasions waylaid, threatened, and
attacked by his servants, he conceived the devilish plan of a pretended
reconciliation over this and other disputes in the village churchyard of
Kilmington, the occasion to be used as a means of taking them off their
guard, and finally disposing of them. The two victims were suspicious of
this apparent friendliness; but, unhappily for them, eventually agreed
to meet in that God’s Acre, on 12th January 1556, there to settle all
accounts and differences. They met, and, at a previously arranged
signal, Lord Stourton’s servants rushed upon the Hartgills and stabbed
and battered them to death in a revoltingly cruel manner, while their
master looked on with approval. The details of this cold-blooded
atrocity are fully set forth in the trials of that period, for the
satisfaction of any one greedy of horrors.
[Sidenote: _THE DEVIL’S HEALTH_]
This was in the reign of Queen Mary, when Protestants were burned at the
stake with the approval of Roman Catholics; but not even in those brutal
times could this affair be hushed up. Lord Stourton was arrested,
brought to trial in London, and, together with four of his servants,
found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. Justice was commendably
swift. The two Hartgills had been done to death on the 12th of January,
and on the second day of March in the same year my lord set out under
escort from the Tower of London for Salisbury, the place of execution.
The melancholy cavalcade came down the Exeter Road, the chief figure in
it set astride a horse, with legs and arms pinioned. The first night
they lay at Hounslow, the second at Staines, the third at Basingstoke,
and thence to Salisbury, where, in the Market Place, on the morning of
the 6th of March, they hanged him with a silken cord. His servants were
turned off at the end of quite common hempen ropes, which doubtless did
their business quite as neatly. The body of this prime malefactor, the
organiser of the crime, was buried with much ceremony in the cathedral,
but those of the lesser criminals were treated (we may suppose) with
less reverence, because you may search the building in vain for tomb or
epitaph to their memory. But--quaintest touch of all--the silken rope by
which Lord Stourton swung was suspended here, over his tomb, where it
remained for many a long year afterwards.
The next outstanding landmark in the way of executions is the hanging of
a prisoner who had just been awarded a sentence when he threw a brickbat
at the Chief Justice. His lordship was considerably damaged and for this
assault pronounced sentence of death upon him. The execution took place
at once, outside the Council House, the unfortunate man’s right hand
being first struck off.
The Civil War did not result in anything very tragical for Salisbury,
the operations in and around the city being quite unimportant. The
‘Catherine Wheel Inn,’ however, was the scene of much alarm among the
superstitious, when, according to a gruesome story, the Cavaliers
assembled there, having toasted the King and the Royal family, proceeded
to drink the health of the Devil,--and the Devil appeared, the room
becoming filled with ‘noisome fumes of sulphur, and a hideous monster,
which was the Devil, no doubt,’ entering, and grabbing the giver of the
toast, flying away with him out of the window.
Salisbury was the scene of Penruddocke’s rising for the King in 1655. He
was a county gentleman, of Compton Chamberlayne, and with some others
and a band of a hundred and fifty horsemen, rode into the city at four
o’clock in the morning of 14th March. They seized the Judges of Assize
in their beds, opened the doors of the prison, and imprisoned the judges
in the place of the released convicts. Then, finding the citizens too
timid to join them in their revolt against Cromwell, they sped across
country, into Devon, where they were captured.
Charles the Second was welcomed by Salisbury’s citizens, just as they
welcomed every one else; practising with much success St. Paul’s
admirable precept, to be ‘all things to all men.’ When James the Second
came here, on his way to meet, and fight, the Prince of Orange, he was
escorted, with every show of deference and respect, to his lodgings at
the Bishop’s Palace by the Mayor, and when he had slunk away, and the
Prince came, less than four weeks later, and was lodged in the same
house, the same Mayor did precisely the same thing.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century onward the citizens began
to dearly love kings and great personages, or, if they did not love
them, effectually pretended to do so. When plague ravaged the city of
London, no one coming from that direction was allowed to enter
Salisbury, and even Salisbury’s own citizens returning home from that
infected centre were obliged to remain outside for three months, while
goods were not permitted to be brought nearer than Three Mile Hill. But
Charles the Second and his Court, flying from London from the disease,
were welcomed all the same!
XXVII
[Sidenote: _BRUTAL SCENES_]
Coach passengers entering Salisbury even so late as 1835 were sometimes
witnesses of shocking scenes that, however picturesque they might have
rendered mediæval times, were brutalising and degrading in a civilised
era. Almost every year of the nineteenth century up to that date was
fruitful in executions. In 1801 there were ten: seven for the crime of
sheep-stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf, and one
for highway robbery. The practice of hanging criminals on the scenes of
their crimes afforded spectacles of the most extraordinary character, as
instanced in the procession that accompanied two murderers, George
Carpenter and George Ruddock, from Fisherton Gaol, on the north-west of
the city, to the place of their execution on Warminster Down, 15th March
1813. Such parades were senseless, since no one ever dreamed of a rescue
being attempted; but, all the same, the condemned men, placed in a cart
and accompanied by a clergyman preaching of Kingdom Come, preceded by
the hangman and followed by eight men carrying two coffins, were
escorted all the way by a troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry, followed by some
two hundred constables and local gentlemen, all walking and carrying
white staves; with bailiffs, sheriffs, under-sheriffs, magistrates, a
hundred mounted squires, a posse of ‘javelin men,’ more clergymen, the
gaoler and his assistants, more javelin men and sheriff’s officers, more
yeomanry, and, at last, bringing up the rear, a howling mob, numbering
many thousands. As for the central objects in this show, ‘they died
penitent,’ we are told; and indeed they could do nothing less, seeing to
what trouble they had thus put a goodly proportion of the county.
Executions for all manner of crimes were so many that it would be idle
to detail them; but some stand out prominently by reason of their
circumstances. For example, the hanging of Robert Turner Watkins in
1819, for a murder near Purton, presents a lurid scene. His wife had
died of a broken heart shortly after his arrest, and his mother was
among the spectators of his end. The same kind of procession accompanied
him across Salisbury Plain to the place of execution, and a similar mob
made the occasion a holiday. Mother and son were able to bid one another
farewell, owing to an unexpected halt on the road; and when they made a
halt for the refreshments which the long journey demanded, the condemned
man’s children were brought to him.
‘Mammy is dead,’ said one. ‘Ah!’ replied the man, ‘and so will your
daddy be, shortly.’ At the fatal spot he prayed with the chaplain, and
was allowed to read to the people a psalm which he had chosen. It was
Psalm 108, which, on reference, will not prove to be particularly
appropriate to the occasion. Then he blessed the fifteen thousand or so
present, felt the rope, and remarked that it could only kill the body,
and was turned off, amid the sudden and unexpected breaking of one of
the most terrific thunderstorms ever experienced on the Plain.
[Sidenote: _HUMANE JURIES_]
They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801, for stealing a horse,
and afterwards discovered that he was innocent, according to a monument
still to be seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett suffered
death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed in 1820 by William Lee,
who died for the same offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for
arson; but public opinion had already been aroused against such
severity, judges and juries taking every advantage offered by faults in
the drawing up of indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty
of murder whose crimes were then met by capital punishment. The statutes
left no choice but death for the convicted incendiary, the horse-or
sheep-stealer, and many another; and so many a guilty person was
acquitted by judges and juries horrified by the thought of incurring
blood-guiltiness by sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed
loopholes for escape, and so when the _straw_-rick, to which a prisoner
was charged with setting fire, was proved to have been _hay_, he was
found ‘Not guilty.’ Blackstone called this action taken by juries ‘pious
perjury,’ and so it certainly was when, to avoid shedding blood, they
used to find £5 and £10 notes which prisoners sometimes were charged
with stealing, to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few
shillings, according as the case required.
The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were enacted at the close of
1830, when the so-called ‘Machinery Riots,’ which had spread all over
the country, culminated here in fights between the Wiltshire Yeomanry
and the discontented agricultural labourers, who, fearing that steam
machinery, then
[Illustration: ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.]
[Sidenote: _ALDERBURY_]
beginning to be adopted, was about to take away their livelihood,
scoured the country in bands, wrecking and burning farmsteads and barns.
The ‘Battle of Bishop Down,’ on the Exeter Road between ‘Winterslow Hut’
and Salisbury, was fought on 23rd November, and was caused by the
collision of a large body of rioters who were marching to the city with
the avowed object of pillaging it, and a mixed force of yeomanry and
special constables. All the coaches, together with every other kind of
traffic, were brought to a standstill. Stone-throwing on the part of the
rioters, and bludgeoning by the special constables were succeeded by
charges of the yeomanry, and the contest resulted in the capture of
twenty-two rioters, who were locked up in Fisherton Gaol. The next day a
number of rioters were surprised in the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ Alderbury,
and marched off to prison; and the day after, twenty-five were taken in
a fight near Tisbury, after one of their number had been killed. There
were no fewer than three hundred and thirty prisoners awaiting trial
when the Special Commissioners arrived for that purpose on 27th
December. Many of the prisoners were transported, and others had short
terms of imprisonment; but a leader, called ‘Commander’ Coote, who was
captured by two constables at the Compasses, Rockbourn, was hanged at
Winchester.
XXVIII
And now for some little-known literary landmarks. Salisbury, of course,
is the scene of some passages in _Martin Chuzzlewit_; but it is outside
the city that we must go, on the road to Southampton, to find the
residence of that eminent architect, Mr. Pecksniff; or the ‘Blue
Dragon,’ where Tom Pinch’s friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary’s
Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name of Mr. Pecksniff’s
home, but the house is only vaguely indicated in the novel. It is
different with the ‘Blue Dragon,’ which is an undoubted portrait of the
‘Green Dragon Inn,’ at Alderbury, despite the fact that the sign-board
has since disappeared. ‘A faded, and an ancient dragon he was; and many
a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour
from a gaudy blue to a faint, lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he
hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind legs;
waxing, with every month that passed, so much more dim and shapeless,
that as you gazed on him at one side of the sign-board, it seemed as if
he must be gradually melting through it, and coming out upon the other.’
The ‘Green Dragon’ is a quaint gabled village inn, standing back from
the road. It is even more ancient than any one, judging only from its
exterior, would suppose, for a fine fifteenth-century mantelpiece,
adorned with carved crockets and heraldic roses, yet remains in the
parlour, a relic of bygone importance.
As for Mrs. Lupin, the landlady, it is supposed that Dickens drew the
character from a real person. If so, how one would like to have known
that cheery woman. Do you remember how Tom Pinch left Salisbury to seek
his fortune in London? and how Mrs. Lupin met the coach on the London
road with his box in the trap, and a great basket of provisions, with a
bottle of sherry sticking out of it? and how the open-handed fellow
shared the cold roast fowl, the packet of ham in slices, the crusty
loaf, and the other half-dozen items--not forgetting the contents of the
bottle--with the coachman and guard as they drove along the old road to
London through the night?
[Sidenote: _A WORD-PICTURE_]
‘Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and
people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into
the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound
upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the
five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the
road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with
rustic burial-grounds about them, where graves are green, and daisies
sleep--for it is evening--on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams
in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past
paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut slice
by slice away, and showing in the waning light like ruined gables, old
and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry
water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!’
Quite so. And an excellent picture of the coaching age, although ‘Yoho!’
smacks too much of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that word
when he surely meant ‘Tallyho!’ Nor is this a correct portrait of the
Exeter Road by any manner of means. Dickens, usually so precise in
topographical details, has generalised here. A true and stirring picture
of country roads in general, there are farms, and villages, and churches
all too many for this highway. It should have been ‘Yoho! across the
bleak and barren down. Yoho! by the blasted oak on the lonely common,’
and so forth, so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was that
water-splash doing on a main road in the flower of the coaching age,
when all the runnels and streams across the mail routes were duly
bridged? But it is not very odd that Dickens should have been so inexact
here, for he began _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in 1843, and it was not until
long after the book was published, in 1848, that he really explored the
Exeter Road. Forster tells us that Dickens, in company with himself,
Leech, and Lemon, stayed at Salisbury in the March of that year, and
‘passed a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting
Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s “Hut” at Winterslow.’
It must be obvious how exquisitely fitted, both by reason of its
situation and circumstances, ‘Winterslow Hut’ is for the novelist’s use,
and that, had he explored it before, that wild spot would have found a
place in the pages of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, together with detailed
references to some of Salisbury’s old coaching inns, of which there were
many, this being a meeting-place of several roads, besides being on the
great highway to the West.
[Sidenote: _VANISHED INNS_]
So far back as 1786 there were three coaches passing through Salisbury
on their way from London to Exeter, daily. Firstly, the ‘Post Coach’
every morning at eight o’clock, with the up coach to London every
afternoon at four o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Secondly, a mail coach,
specially advertised as carrying a guard all the way, every morning at
ten o’clock, Sundays excepted, and the up mail every night at ten
o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Thirdly, a ‘Diligence,’ which passed
through every night about eight o’clock, the up coach at twelve,
midnight. All these coaches stopped, and were horsed, at the ‘White
Hart.’ In 1797 there were five coaches to and from London, daily, and
three on alternate days; and three waggons, two every day, the other on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
In those times, when highwaymen were numerous and daring and travellers
appropriately anxious, stage-coach proprietors in Salisbury advertised
the fact of their conveyances being provided with an armed guard, and
that any one making an attempt at robbery would be handed over to
justice. But, notwithstanding such bold announcements, all the friends
and relatives of citizens daring the journey to London used to assemble
on the London road and tearfully watch the coaches as they toiled up
Bishop Down and over the crest of Three Mile Hill, into the Unknown. The
spot is still called ‘Weeping Cross.’
Of the old Salisbury coaching inns, a goodly number have been either
pulled down or converted to other purposes. The ‘King’s Head,’ the
‘Maidenhead,’ the ‘Sun,’ the ‘Vine,’ the ‘Three Tuns,’ and others have
entirely disappeared; and the ‘Spread Eagle,’ the ‘Lamb,’ ‘Three Cups,’
‘Antelope,’ and the ‘George’--where Pepys stayed and was
overcharged--have become shops or private residences; while the
beautiful old ‘Three Swans’ was converted into a Temperance Hotel five
years ago.
There is a passage in Sir William Knighton’s Diary under date of 1832,
which, although written without any special emphasis, is highly
picturesque and informative on the subject of travelling at that time.
It gives in one phrase a glimpse of the waiting-room which was a feature
of all-coaching inns, and in another shows that it was possible to
bargain for fares. Only in this instance the bargain was not struck.
He had come at half-past one in the morning into Salisbury by a
cross-country coach, and waiting for the arrival of the mail to Exeter,
‘sat quietly by the fire in the common dirty room appropriated to coach
passengers.’
For twenty minutes, he says, he had for companion a man who had just
disengaged himself from an irritable rencontre with the coachman of the
mail. He had waited from two o’clock in the afternoon to go on to
Bristol, but when the time arrived he quarrelled with the coachman about
whether he should pay nine shillings or twelve, the passenger insisting
upon nine, the whip three shillings more; upon which the traveller
decided not to go, returned to the coachroom, and ordered his bed. Sir
William asked him if it really was worth while to lose the time and to
pay for a bed at the inn over this unsuccessful negotiation, and to this
the man replied that it was not. ‘In fact,’ said he, ‘we have both been
taken in. The coachman thought I would pay, and I thought he would take
my offer.’
XXIX
It is a nine-miles journey, due north from Salisbury to Stonehenge, but
although it would, under
[Sidenote: _PEPYS AT OLD SARUM_]
[Illustration: VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD
SARUM.]
other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope of this work to
travel so far from the highway, we need have no compunction in making
this trip, for it brings us to one of the most interesting places on the
Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter--to Stonehenge, in fact, and
passes by the wonderful terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old
Sarum looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying houses of
Salisbury, and if you come upon it when a storm is impending, as in
Constable’s picture, the impression of size and strength created is one
not soon to be forgotten. As to coming upon it in the dark, as Pepys
did, the sight is awe-inspiring.