between Salisbury and Bridport, a distance of twenty-two miles, I think
the sketch facing page 238 will convey the information much better than
words alone. It is just a repetition of those bleak seventeen miles
between Andover and Salisbury--only ‘more so.’ More barren and hillier
than the Andover to Salisbury section, and less romantically wild than
the rugged stretches between Blandford, Dorchester, and Bridport, it is
a weariness to man and beast. Buffeted by the winds which shriek across
the rolling downs, or nipped by the keen airs of these altitudes,
old-time travellers up to London or down to Exeter dreaded the passage,
and prepared themselves, accordingly, at Bridport or at Salisbury, while
exhausted nature was recruited at the several inns which found their
existence abundantly justified in those old times.
[Illustration: WHERE THE ROBBER FELL DEAD.]
Passing through West Harnham, a suburb of Salisbury, the road
immediately begins to climb the downs, descending, however, in three
miles to the charming little village of Coombe Bissett, in the
water-meadows of the Wiltshire Avon, which runs prettily beside the
road. An ancient church, old thatched barns standing on stone staddles
whose feet are in the stream, bridges across the water, and the
inevitable downs closing in the view, make one of the rare picturesque
compositions to be found along this dreary stretch of country.
Make much, wayfarer, of Coombe Bissett. Linger there, soothe your soul
with its rural graces before proceeding; for the road immediately leaves
this valley of the Avon, and the next bend discloses the unfenced
rolling downs, going in a mile-long rise, and so continuing, with a
balance in the matter of gradients against the traveller going
westwards, all the way to Blandford.
At eight miles from Salisbury is situated the old ‘Woodyates Inn,’
placed in this lonely situation, far removed from any village, in the
days when the coaching traffic made the custom of travellers worth
obtaining. It was in those days thought that after travelling eight
miles the passengers by coach or post-chaise would want refreshments. It
was a happy and well-founded thought; and if all tales be true, the
prowess of our great-grandfathers as trenchermen left nothing to be
desired--nor anything remaining in the larder when they had done.
The curious, on the lookout for this old coaching inn, will scarcely
recognise it when seen, for it has
[Sidenote: _WOODYATES_]
[Illustration: COOMBE BISSETT.]
been garnished and painted, and rechristened of late years by the title
of the ‘Shaftesbury Arms.’ But there it is, and portions of it may be
found to date back to the old times.
It was given the name of ‘Woodyates’ from its position standing at the
entrance to the wooded district of Cranborne Chase; the name meaning
‘Wood-gates.’ It also stands on the border-line dividing the counties of
Wilts and Dorset.
Bokerley Dyke, a prehistoric boundary consisting of a bank and ditch,
intersects the road as you approach the inn, and goes meandering over
the downs among the gorse and bracken. Built, no doubt, more than
fifteen hundred years ago by savages, solely with the aid of their hands
and pointed sticks, it has outlasted many monuments of costly stones and
marbles, and when civilisation comes to an end some day, like the
blown-out flame of a candle, it will still be there, with the existing,
but more recent, Roman road still beside it. That road goes across the
open country like a causeway, or a slightly raised railway embankment.
The Dyke may have sheltered the fugitive Duke of Monmouth on his flight
in 1685. The reading of that melancholy story of how the handsome and
gay Duke of Monmouth, a haggard fugitive from Sedgemoor Fight,
accompanied by his friend, Lord Grey, and another, left their wearied
horses near this spot, and, disguising themselves as peasants, set out
for the safe hiding-places of the New Forest, only to fall prisoners to
James’s scouts, paints the road and the downs with an impasto of
tragedy. All the countryside was being searched for him, and watchers
were stationed on the hills, looking down upon this open country where
the movement of a rabbit almost might be noted from afar. So he
doubtless skulked along in the shadow of the Dyke from the shelter of
Cranborne Chase down to Woodlands, where he was caught, under the shadow
of a tree still standing, called Monmouth Ash.
Scattered all around are the inevitable barrows. The industry of a
byegone generation of antiquaries has explored them all. Pick and shovel
have scattered the ashes and the cinerary urns of the Britons or Saxons
who were buried here, and the only relics likely to be found by any
other ghouls are the discs of lead deposited by Sir Richard Colt Hoare,
or W. Cunnington, with the initials ‘R. C. H. 1815,’ or some such date;
or, ‘Opened by W. Cunnington 1804’ on them.
George the Third always used to change horses at ‘Woodyates Inn’ when
journeying to or from Weymouth, and the room built for his use on those
occasions is still to be seen, with its outside flight of steps. When
the coaches were taken off the road, the inn became for a time the
training establishment of William Day.
The road near this old inn is the real scene of the Ingoldsby legend of
the _Dead Drummer_, and not Salisbury Plain, on ‘one of the rises’ where
An old way-post shewed
Where the Lavington road
Branched off to the left from the one to Devizes.
[Illustration: THE EXETER ROAD, NEAR ‘WOODYATES INN.’]
[Sidenote: _A HIGHWAY MURDER_]
It was on Thursday, 15th June 1786, that two sailors, paid off from
H.M.S. _Sampson_, at Plymouth, and walking up to London, came to this
spot. Their names were Gervase (or Jarvis) Matcham, and John Shepherd.
Near the ‘Woodyates Inn’ they were overtaken by a thunderstorm, in which
Matcham startled his companion by showing extraordinary marks of horror
and distraction, running about, falling on his knees, and imploring
mercy of some invisible enemy. To his companion’s questions he answered
that he saw several strange and dismal spectres, particularly one in the
shape of a female, towards which he advanced, when it instantly sank
into the earth, and a large stone rose up in its place. Other large
stones also rolled upon the ground before him, and came dashing against
his feet. He confessed to Shepherd that, about seven years previously,
he had enlisted as a soldier at Huntingdon, and shortly afterwards was
sent out from that town in company with a drummer-boy, seventeen years
of age, named Jones, son of a sergeant in the regiment, who was in
charge of some money to be paid away. They quarrelled because the lad
refused to return and drink at a public-house on the Great North Road
which they had just passed, four miles from Huntingdon. Matcham knocked
him down, cut his throat, and taking the money (six guineas) made off to
London, leaving the body by the roadside. He now declared that, with
this exception, he had never in his life broken the law, and that,
before the moment of committing this crime, he had not the least design
of injuring the deceased, who had given him no other provocation than
ill-language. But from that hour he had been a stranger to peace of
mind; his crime was always present to his imagination, and existence
seemed at times an insupportable burden. He begged his companion to
deliver him into the hands of Justice in the next town they should
reach. That was Salisbury. He was imprisoned there, brought to trial,
found guilty, and hanged.
Barham in his legend of the _Dead Drummer_ has taken many liberties with
the facts of the case, both as regards place and names, and makes the
scene of the murderer’s terror identical with the site of the crime,
which he (for purely literary purposes) places on Salisbury Plain,
instead of the Great North Road, between Buckden and Alconbury.
XXXIV
Three more inns were situated beside the road between this point and
Blandford in the old days. Of them, two, the ‘Thorney Down Inn,’ and the
‘Thickthorn Inn’ (romantic and shuddery names!), have disappeared, while
the remaining one,--the ‘Cashmoor Inn’--formerly situated between the
other two, ekes out a much less important existence than of old, as a
wayside ‘public.’
Then comes a village--the first one since Coombe Bissett was passed,
fifteen miles behind, and so more than usually welcome. A pretty
village, too, Tarrant Hinton by name, lying in a hollow, with its
little
[Sidenote: _CRANBORNE CHASE_]
[Illustration: TARRANT HINTON.]
street of cottages, along a road running at right angles to the Exeter
highway, with its church tower peeping above the orchards and thick
coppices, and a sparkling stream flowing down from the hillside. In this
and other respects, it bears a striking similarity to Middle and Over
Wallop.
The quiet, not to say sleepy, Dorsetshire villager who, lounging at the
bend of the road, replies to your query by saying that this is ‘Tarnt
Hinton,’ is the peaceable descendant of very desperate and bloody-minded
men, and the like circumstances that, a mere hundred years ago, rendered
them savages, would do the same by him, were they revived. The peasantry
are what the law and social conditions make them. Oppress the sturdy
rustic and you render him a brutal and resentful rebel, who, having an
unbroken spirit, will give trouble. Treat him fairly, and he will live a
life of quiet industry, tempered by gossipy evenings in the village
‘pub.’; and although he will never rise to be the mincing Strephon
imagined by the eighteenth-century poets of rurality, he will raise
gigantic potatoes, and cultivate flowers for the local Horticultural
Society, and do nothing more tragical in all his life than the sticking
of the domestic porker, or the twisting of a fowl’s neck.
The civilising of the rustic in these parts dates from the
disfranchising of Cranborne Chase in 1830. The Chase, which took its
name from the town of Cranborne, eight miles distant from this spot, was
originally a vast deer-forest, extending far into Hants, Wilts, and
Dorset. The great western highway entered it at Salisbury and did not
pass out of its bounds until Blandford was reached; while Shaftesbury
to the north, and Wimborne to the south, marked its extent in another
direction. Belonging anciently to great feudal lords or to the
Sovereign, it was Crown property from the time of Edward the Fourth to
the reign of James the First. James delighted in killing the buck here,
but that Royal prig granted the Chase to the Earl of Pembroke, from
whom, shorn of its oppressive laws, it has descended to Lord Rivers;
while the Earl of Shaftesbury also owns great tracts of woodlands here.
But, singularly enough, that part of the Chase which still retains the
wildest and densest aspect lies quite away from Cranborne, and in the
county of Wilts, around Tollard Royal. The nature of the country and the
character of the soil must needs always keep this vast tract wild, and,
in an agricultural sense, unproductive. Game will always abound here in
the thickets, and indeed the weird-looking hill-top plantations, called
by the rustics ‘hats of trees,’ are especially planted as cover,
wherever the country is open and unsheltered.
[Sidenote: _DEER-STEALERS_]
The severity of the laws which governed a Chase and punished
deer-stealers was simply barbarous. Cranborne had its courts and Chase
Prison where offenders and deer-stealers were punished by mutilation,
imprisonment, or fine, according to the crime, the status of the
offender, or the comparative state of civilisation of the period in
which the offence was committed. But whether the punishment for stealing
deer was the striking off of a hand, or imprisonment in a noisome
dungeon, or merely being mulcted in a larger or smaller sum, there were
always those who unlawfully killed the buck in these romantic glades.
Sometimes, for the devilment of it, the dashing young blades of the
countryside--sons of the squires and others--would hunt the deer.
‘From four to twenty assembled in the evening, dressed in cap and jack
and quarter-staff, with dogs and nets. Having set the watchword for the
night and agreed whether they should stand or run if they should meet
the keepers, they proceeded to the Chase, set their nets, and let slip
their dogs to drive the deer into the nets; a man standing at each net,
to strangle the deer as soon as they were entangled. Frequent desperate
and bloody battles took place; the keepers, and sometimes the hunters,
were killed.’
Other law-breakers were of a humbler stamp, and ferocious enough to
murder keepers at sight. Thus, in 1738, a keeper named Tollerfield was
murdered on his way home from Fontmell Church; and another at Fernditch,
near ‘Woodyates Inn.’ For the latter crime a man named Wheeler was
convicted, and suffered the extreme penalty of the law; his body being
hanged in chains at the scene of the murder. His friends, however, in
the course of a few nights cut the body down, and threw it into a very
deep well, some distance away. The weight of the irons caused it to
sink, and it was not discovered until long afterwards.
One of the most exciting of these encounters between the deer-stealers
and the keepers took place on the night of 16th December 1781. Chettle
Common, away at the back of the ‘Cashmoor Inn,’ was the scene of this
battle. The stealers, assembling in disguise at Pimperne, marched up
the road through the night, and headed by a Sergeant of Dragoons, then
quartered at Blandford, poured through the Thickthorn Toll-gate, armed
with weapons called ‘swindgels,’ which appear to have been hinged
cudgels, like flails. It would seem that the object of this expedition
was the bludgeoning of a few keepers, rather than the stealing of deer.
At any rate, the keepers expected them, and armed with sticks and
hangers, awaited the attack. The fight was by no means a contemptible
one, for in the result one keeper was killed and several disabled, while
the stealers were so badly knocked about that the whole expedition
surrendered, together with the Sergeant of Dragoons, who had a hand
sliced off at the wrist by a hanger. The hand was subsequently buried,
with military honours, in Pimperne churchyard.
Leader and followers alike were committed to Dorchester Gaol, and were
eventually sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, reduced to a
nominal term, in consideration of the severe wounds from which they were
suffering. One wonders how far mercy, and to what extent the wish not to
be at the expense of medically attending the prisoners, influenced this
decision. As for the Dr. Jameson of this raid, he retired from the
Dragoons on half-pay, and, coming to London, set up shop as a dealer in
game and poultry!
[Sidenote: _WILTSHIRE MOONRAKERS_]
Ten years later, a keeper killed a stealer, and another murderous
encounter took place on 7th December 1816 near Tarrant Gunville, at a
gate in the woods which the melodramatic instincts of the peasantry
have named ‘Bloody Shard,’ while the wood itself is known as ‘Blood-way
Coppice.’
Cranborne Chase was also at this time a haunt of smugglers, who found
its tangled recesses highly convenient for storing their ‘Free Trade’
merchandise on its way up from the sea-coast. Whether or not the
original ‘Wiltshire moonrakers’ belonged to the Wilts portion of the
Chase or to some other part of the county, tradition does not say.
That Wiltshire folk are called ‘moonrakers’ is generally known, and it
is usually supposed that they obtained this name for stupidity,
according to the story which tells how a party of travellers crossing a
bridge in this county observed a number of rustics raking in the stream
in which the great yellow harvest-moon was shining. Asked what they were
doing, the reply was that they were trying to rake ‘that cheese’ out of
the water. The travellers went on their way, laughing at the idiotcy of
the yokels. One tale, however, only holds good until the other is told.
The facts seem to be that the rustics were smugglers who were raking in
the river for the brandy-kegs they had deposited there in the gray of
the morning, and that the ‘travellers’ were really revenue-officers;
those ‘gaugers,’ or ‘preventive men’ who were employed to check the
smuggling which was rife a hundred years ago. It may be thought that the
seaside was the only place where smuggling could be carried on, but a
moment’s reflection will show that the goods had to be conveyed inshore
for inland customers. Smuggling, in fact, was so extensive, and brought
to such a perfection of system that forwarding agents were established
everywhere. Kegs of spirits, being bulky, were hidden for the day in
ponds and watercourses, wherever possible, and removed at night for
another stage towards their destination, being deposited in a similar
hiding-place at the break of day, and so forth until they reached their
consignees. Thus the ‘moonrakers’ by this explanation are acquitted of
being monumental simpletons, at the expense of losing their reputation
in another way. But everyone smuggled, or received or purchased smuggled
goods, in those times, and no one was thought the worse for it.
XXXV
At the distance of a mile up the bye-road from Tarrant Hinton, in
Eastbury Park, still stands in a lonely position the sole remaining wing
of the once-famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces which the
flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past era loved to build. Comparable
for size and style with Blenheim and Stowe, and built like them by the
ponderous Vanbrugh, the rise and fall of Eastbury were as dramatic as
the building and destruction of Canons, the seat of the ‘princely
Chandos’ at Edgware. Of Canons, however, no stone remains, while at
Eastbury a wing and colonnade are left, standing sinister, sundered and
riven, the melancholy relics of a once proud but hospitable mansion.
[Sidenote: _DODINGTON_]
Eastbury was begun on a scale of princely magnificence by George
Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, having presumably made
some fine pickings in that capacity, determined to spend them on
becoming a patron of the Arts and an entertainer of literary men, after
the fashion of an age in which painters were made to fawn upon the
powerful, and poets to sing their praises in the blankest of blank
verse. Every rich person had his henchmen among the followers of the
Muses, and they were petted or scolded, indulged or kept on the chain,
just as the humour of the patron at the moment decreed. Unfortunately,
however, for this eminently eighteenth-century ambition of George
Dodington, he died before he could finish his building. All his worldly
goods went to his grand-nephew, George Bubb, son of his brother’s
daughter, who had married a Weymouth apothecary named Jeremias Bubb.
Already, under the patronage of his uncle, a member of Parliament, and
an influential person, George on coming into this property assumed the
name of Dodington; perhaps also because the obvious nickname of ‘Silly
Bubb’ by which he was known might thereby become obsolete.
George Bubb Dodington, as he was now known, immediately stopped the
works on his uncle’s palace, and thus the unfinished building remained
gaunt and untenanted from 1720 to 1738. Then, as suddenly as the
building was stopped, work was resumed again. The vast sum of £140,000
was spent on the completion. Tapestries, gilding, marbles, everything of
the most costly and ornate character was employed, and the grounds which
had been newly laid out eighteen years before, and in the interval
allowed to subside into a wilderness, were set in order again. The
reason of this sudden activity was that Dodington had become infected
with that same ‘Patron’ mania which had caused his uncle to lay the
foundation stones of these marble halls. He was at this period
forty-seven years of age, and in those years had filled many posts in
the Government, and about the rival Whig and Tory Courts of the King and
the Prince of Wales. Scheming and intriguing from one party to the
other, he had always been ambitious of influence, and now that even
greater accumulations of wealth had come to him, he set up as the host
of birth, beauty, and intellect in these Dorsetshire wilds.
The gossips of the time have left us a picture of the man. Fat,
ostentatious, extravagant, with the love of glitter and colour of a
barbarian, he was yet a wit of repute, and had undoubtedly some
learning. He possessed, besides, a considerable share of shrewdness. If
he lent £5000 to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and never got it back, we
are not to suppose that he ever expected to be repaid. That was, no
doubt, regarded as practically an entrance-fee to the exalted
companionship of a prince of whom it was written, when he came to an
untimely end:--
But since it’s Fred who is dead, there’s no more to be said.
[Sidenote: _A WHIMSICAL FIGURE_]
That same Fred thought _himself_ the clever man when he remarked
‘Dodington is reckoned clever, but I have borrowed £5000 of him which he
will never see again’; but Dodington doubtless imagined the sum to have
been well laid out; which, indeed, would have been the case had not the
prince died early. Mæcenas was, in fact, working for a title, and this
was then regarded as the ready way to such a goal. They say the same
idea prevails in our own happy times; but that £5000 would not go far
towards the realisation of the object. But, be that as it may, Dodington
did not win to the Peerage as Lord Melcombe until 1761, and as he died
in the succeeding year, his enjoyment of the ermine was short. As,
however, the working towards an object and its anticipation are always
more enjoyable than the attainment of the end, he is perhaps not to be
regarded with pity, or thought a failure.
One who partook of his hospitality at Eastbury, and did not think the
kindness experienced there a sufficient reason for silence as to his
host’s eccentricities and failings, has given us some entertaining
stories. The State bed of the gross but witty Dodington at Eastbury was
covered with gold and silver embroidery; a gorgeous sight, but closer
inspection revealed the fact that this splendour had been contrived at
the expense of his old coats and breeches, whose finery had been so
clumsily converted that the remains of the pocket-holes were clearly
visible. ‘His vast figure,’ continues this reminiscencing friend, ‘was
always arrayed in gorgeous brocades, and when he paid his court at St.
James’s, he approached to kiss the Queen’s hand, decked in an
embroidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches; the latter
in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty and broke loose from
their moorings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner.’ That must
have been a sore blow to the dignity of one who possessed, as we are
told, ‘the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard towards women,
with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman to men.’
Rolling down the Exeter Road, from his London mansion, or from his
suburban retreat of ‘La Trappe,’ at Hammersmith, in his gilded,
old-fashioned chariot, he gathered a variety of literary men at what
Young calls ‘Pierian Eastbury.’ Johnson, sick of the Chesterfields and
the whole gang of literary patrons, scornfully refused Dodington’s
proffered friendship; but Fielding, Thomson, Bentley, Cumberland, Young,
Voltaire, and others were not slow to revel in these more or less
Arcadian delights. Christopher Pitt wrote to Young, congratulating him
on his stay here:--
Where with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit;
Where a new Eden in the wild is found,
And all the seasons in a spot of ground.
While Thomson, moved to it by the Burgundy or the more potent punch, has
celebrated palace and park in his _Autumn_.
[Sidenote: _RUINED EASTBURY_]