‘by the sight of the steeple, to Salisbury by night; but before I came
to the town, I saw a great fortification, and there alighted, and to it,
and in it; and find it prodigious, so as to fright me to be in it all
alone at that time of night, it being dark. I understand since it to lie
that that is called Old Sarum.’
To climb the steep grassy ramparts, one after the other, and to descend
into and climb out of the successive yawning ditches is a tiring
exercise, but perhaps in no other way is it possible to gain anything
like a proper idea of the strength of the place. Nor in there any more
sure way of arriving at the relative scale of it than by observing the
stray cyclist standing on the topmost ramparts and gazing toward the
distant spire of Salisbury.
There are other things than ancient history that make Old Sarum
memorable. It was the head and front of the electoral scandals that
brought about the great Reform Act of 1832. Although it contained
neither a single house nor an inhabitant, Old Sarum survived as a
Parliamentary borough until that date, and regularly returned two
members. Lord John Russell, introducing the Reform Bill to the House of
Commons, remarked that Old Sarum was a green mound without a single
habitation upon it, and like Gatton, also an uninhabited borough,
returned two members, while great towns like Birmingham and Manchester
were entirely without Parliamentary representation. The two members sent
to Parliament were merely the nominees of the Lord of the Manor, elected
by two dummy electors who, shortly after each dissolution of Parliament,
were granted leases in the borough of Old Sarum--leases known as
‘burgage tenures.’ Their voting done, they quietly surrendered their
leases, which were not granted again until a like occasion arose. The
elections took place at the ‘Parliament Tree,’ which, until 1896 (when
it was blown down in a snowstorm), stood in a meadow between the mound
and the village of ‘Stratford-under-the-Castle.’ It was supposed to have
marked the site of the Town Hall of the vanished town. Cobbett, riding
horseback past the spot, anathematised this ‘rotten borough’ and the
system that allowed such things. He calls it ‘The Accursed Hill.’ The
only house standing near is the ‘Old Castle Inn.’
Beyond it the road dips steeply to the downs, and so continues, with
regular undulations, unsheltered from storms or frosts, or the fierce
heat of the summer sun, to Amesbury.
[Illustration: OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).]
[Sidenote: _AMESBURY_]
Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley between these downs.
It was on the alternative coach route taken by the ‘Telegraph,’
‘Celerity,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Subscription’ coaches, which, leaving
Andover, came by Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, and ‘Park House Inn.’ This way
came the ‘Telegraph’ coach on its journey to London, 27th December 1836,
through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of which we find copious
mention on every one of the classic roads. It began when they reached
Wincanton, and from that place they struggled on up to the Plain, where
it was a white world of scurrying snowflakes, howling winds, and deep
drifts. Down into Amesbury, and to the hospitable ‘George’ there, was
but a momentary respite, for the determined coachman, although
immediately snowed up in the open country beyond the village, sent for
help and, assisted by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to
every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of Andover, with that
fortune which is said to favour the brave. That is to say, he and His
Majesty’s mails got through to London, where the story was duly
chronicled in the papers of the period.
Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came
into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th
July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the
roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to
others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according
to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless
driving, and for endeavouring to take too much of the road; but the
lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving
three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this
description was correct, the matter dropped.
XXX
And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from
Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an
awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come
upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness
of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a
literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the
mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by
the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an
immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably
vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of
the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round
it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the
brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on
the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like,
offers an insoluble riddle to archæologists of all the ages.
No one, despite the affected archaisms and the
[Sidenote: _STONEHENGE_]
[Illustration: THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’
ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY
(AFTER JAMES POLLARD).]
sham archæology, has described Stonehenge so impressively as that
‘wondrous boy’ Chatterton:--
A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,
Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,
It ne could be the worke of human handes,
It ne was reared up by menne of claie.
Here did the Britons adoration paye
To the false god whom they did Tauran name,
Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,
Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;
Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,
As they were met in council for to bee.
Stonehenge was probably standing when the Romans came to Britain, and
doubtless astonished them when they first saw it as much as any one
else. Its surroundings were not very different then from now. A
farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has appeared on the ridge
of the down of late years, and possibly a road which did not exist in
days of old: these alone have changed the aspect of the vast solitude in
which the hoary monument stands. No hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon
the meagre grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in general:--
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;
No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,
Much less a house or a cottage for miles.
This, saving that intrusive farmstead, still holds good here; and
although every one is inevitably disappointed with Stonehenge, as first
seen at a distance, looking _so small_ and insignificant in the vastness
of the bare downs in which it is set, the place, and not the great
stones merely, impresses by its sadness and utter detachment from the
living world, its loves and hates and interests. The birds forget to
sing in this loneliness, which is awful in winter and not less awful in
the emptiness visible under the blue sky and blazing sun of summer. Just
the situation in which Stonehenge is placed, you understand, not
Stonehenge itself, gives these feelings. ‘Do not we gaze with awe upon
these massive stones?’ asks the high-falutin guide-book compiler. No,
indeed we don’t. It is a pity, but it can’t be done, and the average
description of Stonehenge which sets forth the grandeur and stupendous
size of these stones, is pumped-up fudge and flapdoodle of the
damnablest kind, which takes in no one. It is not merely the Philistine
who thinks thus, but even the would-be marvellers, and those of light
and leading are disquieted by secret thoughts that, had we a mind to it,
and if there was money in it, we could build a better and a bigger
Stonehenge by a long way.
The earliest account of this mystic monument is found in the writings of
Nennius, who lived in the ninth century. The first-comer is entitled to
respect, and when Nennius tells us that Stonehenge was erected by the
surviving Britons, in memory of four hundred and sixty British nobles,
murdered here at a conference to which the Saxon chieftain, Hengist, had
invited King Vortigern and his Court, we are bound to pay some attention
to the statement, although to place implicit reliance upon it would be
rash, considering the fact that Nennius wrote four hundred years after
the event.
[Illustration: STONEHENGE (AFTER TURNER, R.A.).]
[Sidenote: _WHO BUILT STONEHENGE?_]
But there are, and have been, many theories which profess to give the
only true origin of these stone circles. An antiquary formerly living at
Amesbury went to the beginnings of creation and held that they were
erected by Adam. If so, it is to be hoped for Adam’s sake that he
finished the job in the summer, or that if it occupied him in winter
time, he had clothed himself with something warmer than the traditional
fig-leaf, in view of the rigours of these Wiltshire Downs. It would be
interesting also to have Adam’s opinion as to the comparative merits of
Salisbury Plain and the Garden of Eden.
Then a tradition existed that Merlin, the sorcerer, arranged the
circles. Those who do not think much of this view may take more kindly
to the legend of our old friends the Druids, who, according to Dr.
Stukeley and others, made this their chief temple; while, according to
other views, the Britons before and after the Roman occupation, and the
Romans themselves, were the builders. Then there are others who conceive
this to have been the crowning-place of the Danish kings. The Saxons,
indeed, appear to be the only people who have not been credited with the
work; although, curiously enough, its very name is of Saxon derivation,
and the earliest writers refer to it as ‘Stanenges,’ from Anglo-Saxon
words meaning ‘the hanging-stones.’ That the Saxons discovered
Stonehenge, and were puzzled by it as greatly as it must have excited
the wonder of the Romans, hundreds of years before, seems obvious from
this name they gave the lonely place. Ignorant as to its use, they
either saw in the upright stones and the imposts they carried a
resemblance to a gallows, or else, not being themselves expert builders,
marvelled that the great imposts should remain suspended in the air.
Much of the legitimate wonderment in respect of Stonehenge lies in the
mystery of how the forgotten builders could have quarried and shaped
these stones, and could have cut the tenons and mortice-holes that held
the tall columns, and the flat stones above them, together. Camden, the
old chronicler, has a ready way out of this puzzling question. Beginning
with a description of this ‘huge and monstrous piece of work,’ he goes
on to say that ‘some there are that think them to be no natural stones,
hewn out of the rock, but artificially made out of pure sand, and, by
some glue or unctuous matter, knit and incorporate together.’
[Sidenote: _THE ‘FRIAR’S HEEL’_]
Stonehenge is considered to have consisted, when perfect, of an outer
circle of thirty tall stones, three and a half feet apart, and connected
together by a line of imposts, in whose extremities mortice-holes were
cut, fitting into corresponding tenons projecting from the upright
stones. The height of this circular screen was sixteen feet. A second
and inner circle consisted of smaller and rougher stones, some forty in
number, and six feet in height. Within this circle, again, rose five
tall groups of stone placed in an ellipse, each group consisting of two
uprights, with an impost above. These stones were the largest of all,
the tallest reaching to a height of twenty-five feet. They were named by
Dr. Stukeley, impressively enough, the Great Trilithons. Each of these
five groups would appear to have been accompanied on the inner side by a
cluster of three small standing stones, while a black flat monolith,
called the ‘Altar Stone,’ occupied the innermost position. A smaller
trilithon seems to have once stood near its big brethren, but it and
three of the great five are in ruins. Only six imposts of the outer
circle are left in their place overhead, and but sixteen of its thirty
upright stones are now standing. The smaller circles and groups are
equally imperfect. Some of this ruin has befallen within the historical
period; one of the Great Trilithons having been wrecked in 1620, in the
absurd treasure-seeking expedition of the Duke of Buckingham, while
another fell on the 3rd of January 1797, during a thaw.
These circles seem to have been surrounded by an earthen bank, with an
avenue leading off towards the east. Very few traces of these enclosures
now remain. In midst of the avenue lies the flat so-called ‘Stone of
Sacrifice,’ with the rough obelisk of the ‘Friar’s Heel,’ as the most
easterly outpost of all, beyond. To the Friar’s Heel belongs a legend
which gives, by the way, an even more distinguished person than Adam as
the builder of Stonehenge. The Devil, according to this story, was the
architect, and when he had nearly finished his work, he chuckled to
himself that no one would be able to tell how it was done. A wandering
friar, however, who had been a witness of it all, remarked, ‘That’s more
than thee can tell,’ and thereupon ran away, the Devil flinging one of
the stones left over after him. It only just struck the friar on the
heel, and stuck there in the turf, where it stands to this day.
The various stones of which Stonehenge is constructed derive from
widely-sundered districts. The outer circle and the five Great
Trilithons are said to have been fashioned from stones that came from
Marlborough Downs, and the second circle and innermost ellipse belong to
a rock formation not known to exist nearer than South Wales. The ‘Altar
Stone’ is different from any of the others, and the circumstance lends
some colour to the theory that it, coming from some unknown region, was
the original stone fetish brought from a distance by the prehistoric
tribe that settled here, around which grew by degrees the subsequent
great temple. There are those who will have it that this was a temple of
serpent-worshippers; and an argument not altogether unsupported by facts
would have us believe that Stonehenge is really a Temple of the Sun. It
is a singular accident (if it _is_ an accident) that the ‘Friar’s Heel,’
as seen from the centre of the circle, is in exact orientation with the
rising sun on the morning of the Longest Day of the year, 21st June.
Every year, on this occasion, great crowds of people set out from
Salisbury to see sunrise at Stonehenge. There have frequently been as
many as three thousand persons present on this occasion. As the spot is
nine miles from that cathedral city, and as the sun rises on this date
at the early hour of 3.44 A.M., it requires some enthusiasm to rise
one’s self for the occasion, if indeed the more excellent way is not to
sit up all night. Great, therefore, is the disappointment when
[Sidenote: _SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE_]
[Illustration: SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE.]
the morning is misty. If this sunrise phenomenon is not an accident,
then Stonehenge, as the Temple of the Sun, is the earliest cathedral in
Britain. But, as we have already seen, in these multitudes of guesses at
the truth, no one can arrive at the facts, and all we can do is to say
frankly, with old Pepys, who was here in 1668, ‘God knows what its use
was.’
The present historian has waited for the sun to rise here. Arriving at
Amesbury village at half-past two in the morning, the street looked and
sounded lively with the clustered lights of bicycles and conveyances
gathered there; with the ringing of bicycle bells, the sounding of
coach-horns, and the talk of those who had come to pay their devoirs to
the rising luminary. The village inn was open all night for the needs of
travellers journeying to this shrine, and ten minutes was allowed for
each person, a policeman standing outside to see that they were duly
turned out at the end of that time.
To one who arrived early on the scene, while the Plain remained shrouded
in the grayness of the midsummer night, and the rugged stones of
Stonehenge yet loomed vague and formless, the scene looking down towards
Amesbury was an impressive one. Dimly the ascending white road up to the
stones could be discerned by much straining of tired eyes, and along it
twinkled brightly the lights of approaching vehicles, now dipping down
into a hollow of this miscalled ‘Plain,’ now toiling slowly and
painfully up a corresponding ascent. It is not to be supposed that it
was a reverent crowd assembled here. Reverence is not a characteristic
of the age, nor are cyclists as a rule, or agricultural folks, or
provincials generally, inclined greatly to worship the immeasurably old.
And of such this crowd was chiefly composed. It may very pertinently be
asked, ‘Why, if they don’t reverence the place, do they come here at
all?’ It is a question rather difficult to answer; but probably most
people visit it on this occasion as an excuse for being up all night.
There would seem to be an idea that there is something dashing and
eccentric about such a proceeding which must have its charm for those to
whom archæology, or those eternal and unsolvable questions, ‘Why was
Stonehenge built, and by whom?’ have no interest. There were, for
instance, two boys on the spot who had come over on their bicycles from
Marlborough School, over twenty miles away. Without leave, of course!
They hoped to get back as quietly as they had slipped away out of their
bedroom windows. Had they any archæological enthusiasm? Not a bit of it,
the more especially since it was evident they would have to hurry back
before the sun was due to rise.
[Sidenote: _TRIPPERS AT STONEHENGE_]
There were no fewer than fifteen police at Stonehenge, sent on account
of the disorderly scenes said to have taken place in previous years. But
this crowd was sufficiently quiet. Patiently the throng waited the
rising of the sun upon the horizon, and the coming of the shadow of the
gnomon-stone across the Stone of Sacrifice. The sky lightened, showing
up the tired faces, and transferring the Great Trilithons from the
realms of romance to those of commonplace reality. The larks began to
trill; puce-and purple-coloured clouds floated overhead; the brutal
staccato notes of a banjo strummed to the air of a music-hall song stale
by some three or four seasons; a cyclist struck a match on a sarsen
stone; watches were consulted--and the sun refused to rise to the
occasion. That is to say, for the twelfth time or so consecutively,
according to local accounts, the morning was too cloudy for the sunrise
to be seen. So, tired and disappointed, all trooped back to Amesbury,
the snapshotters disgusted beyond measure, and breakfasted, or refreshed
in various ways, according to individual tastes, at the unholy hour of
half-past four o’clock in the morning.
Those who say that Stonehenge will remain a monument to all time speak
without a knowledge of the facts. In reality the larger stones are
disintegrating; slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely. They are
weather-worn, and some of them very decrepit. Frosts have chipped and
cracked them, and other extremes of climate have found out the soft
places in the sandstone. Also, modern facilities for reaching such
out-of-the-way spots as this used to be have brought so many visitors of
all kinds here that, in one way and another Stonehenge is bound to
suffer. It is now the proper thing for every one who visits Stonehenge
to be photographed by the photographer who sits there for that purpose
all day long and every day; and although there is no occasion for such
insane fury, the picnic parties generally contrive to smash beer and
lemonade bottles against the stones until the turf is thickly strewn
with broken glass. Modernity also likes to range itself beside the
unfathomably ancient, and so when the Automobile Club visited
Stonehenge, on Easter Saturday 1899, all the cars and their occupants
were photographed beside the stones, to mark so historic an occasion.
XXXI
Away beyond Stonehenge stretches Salisbury Plain, in future to be
vulgarised by military camps and manœuvres, and to become an
Aldershot on a larger scale, but hitherto a solitude as sublime in its
own way as Dartmoor and Exmoor. Dickens gives us his meed of
appreciation of this wild country, and finds the boundless prairies of
America tame by comparison.
‘Now,’ he says, writing when on his visit to America, ‘a prairie is
undoubtedly worth seeing, but more that one may say one _has_ seen it,
than for any sublimity it possesses in itself.... You stand upon the
prairie and see the unbroken horizon all round you. You are on a great
plain, which is like a sea without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild
and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much
impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short
of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing
Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary,
but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its characteristic ... to say that
the sight is a
[Sidenote: _SALISBURY PLAIN_]
[Illustration: ANCIENT AND MODERN: MOTOR CARS AT STONEHENGE, EASTER
1899.]
landmark in one’s existence, and awakens a new set of sensations, is
sheer gammon. I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie--go to
Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open
lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive; and Salisbury
Plain is _decidedly_ more so.’
Salisbury Plain is the very core and concentrated essence of the wild
bleak scenery so characteristic of Wiltshire. An elevated tract of
country measuring roughly twenty-four miles from east to west, and
sixteen from north to south, and comprising the district between
Ludgershall and Westbury, and Devizes and Old Sarum, it is by no means
the Plain pictured by strangers, who, misled by that geographical
expression, have a mind’s-eye picture of it as being quite flat. As a
matter of fact, Salisbury Plain is not a bit like that. It is a long
series of undulating chalky downs, ‘as flat as your hand’ if you like,
because the hand is anything but flat, and the simile is excellently
descriptive of a rolling country that resembles the swelling contours of
an outstretched palm. Unproductive, exposed, and lonely, Salisbury Plain
opposes even to this day a very effectual barrier against intercourse
between north and south or east and west Wiltshire, and was the
lurking-place, until even so late as 1839, of highwaymen and footpads,
who shared the solitudes with the bustards, and attacked and robbed
those travellers whose business called them across the dreary wastes.
Many a malefactor has tried his prentice hand and learned his business
in these wilds, and has, after robbing elsewhere, retired here from
pursuit. Salisbury Plain, in short, bred a race of highwaymen who
preyed upon the neighbourhood and levied contributions from all the rich
farmers and graziers who travelled between the Cathedral City and other
parts, and sometimes graduated with such honours that they became
Knights of the Road at whose name travellers along the whole length of
the Exeter Road would tremble.
Among them was William Davis, the ‘Golden Farmer,’ whom we have already
met at Bagshot. His career was a long one, and was continued, here and
in other parts of the country, for forty years. They hanged him, at the
age of sixty-nine, in 1689. His most famous exploit was on the borders
of the Plain, near Clarendon Park, when he attacked the Duchess of
Albemarle, single-handed, and, in the presence of her numerous
attendants, tore her diamond rings off her fingers, and would probably
have had her watch and money as well, despite her cursing and torrents
of full-flavoured abuse, had not the sound of approaching travellers
warned him to fly.