beyond the common run, as the following affair proves. Eastbury marches
with Cranborne Chase, and one day the Ranger found one of Dodington’s
keepers with his dogs in a part of the Chase called Burseystool Walk.
The keeper was warned that if he was found there again, his dogs would
be shot and himself prosecuted; but despite this warning he was found
near the same spot a few days later, when the Ranger, having a gun in
his hand, put his threat into execution and shot the three dogs as they
were drinking in a pool, with their heads close together, in one of the
Ridings. Dodington, in a first outburst of fury, sent a challenge to the
Ranger over this affair, and the Ranger bought a sword and sent a friend
to call on the challenger to fix time and place for the encounter; but
by that time Dodington had thought better of it, and instead of making
arrangements to shed the enemy’s gore, invited both him and his friend
to dinner. They met and had a jovial time together, and the sword
remained unspotted.
On Dodington’s death his estates passed to Earl Temple, who could not
afford to keep up the vast place. He accordingly offered an income of
£200 a year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep it in repair.
No one came forward to accept these terms; and so, after the pictures,
objects of art, and the furniture had been sold, the great house was
pulled down, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception of this solitary
fragment.
There is room for much reflection in Eastbury Park to-day, by the
crumbling archway with the two large fir-trees growing between the
joints of its masonry; by the remaining wing, or the foundations of the
rest of the vanished house, which can still be distinctly traced in the
grass during dry summers. The stories of ‘Haunted Eastbury’ and of the
headless coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but the panelled
room in which Doggett, Earl Temple’s fraudulent steward, shot himself is
still to be seen. Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered
found this the only way out of his trouble.
When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside the Park gates, was
rebuilt in 1845 the workmen found his body, the legs tied together with
a yellow silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the day it was
tied.
XXXVI
Returning to the road at Tarrant Hinton, a steep hill leads up to the
wild downs again, with a corresponding descent in three miles into the
village of Pimperne whose chief part is situated in the same manner,
along a byeway at a right angle to the coachroad. There is a battered
cross on an open space near the church, and the church itself has been
severely restored. Christopher Pitt was Rector of Pimperne, and it
requires no great stretch of imagination to conjure up a vision of him
pacing the road to Eastbury, and composing laudatory verses on Dodington
and his ‘flowing wit’; rendered, perhaps, the more eloquent by
anticipations of the flow of Burgundy already quoted. He died in 1748,
fourteen long years, alas! before the wine had ceased to flow at that
Pierian spot.
[Sidenote: _BLANDFORD_]
From this haunt of the Muses it is two miles to the town of Blandford
Forum, whose name it is sad to be obliged to record is nowadays
shamefully docked to ‘Blandford,’ although the market, whence the
distinctive appellation of ‘Forum’ derived, is still in existence.
One comes downhill into Blandford, all the way from Pimperne, and it
remains a standing wonder how the old coachmen managed to drive their
top-heavy conveyances through the steep and narrow streets by which the
town is entered from London, without upsetting and throwing the
‘outsides’ through the first-floor windows.
If the outskirts of Blandford town are of so mediæval a straitness, the
chief streets of it are spacious indeed and lined with houses of a
classic breadth and dignity, as classicism was understood in the days of
George the Second, when the greater part of the town was burnt down and
rebuilt. One needs not to be in love with classic, or debased classic,
architecture to love Blandford. The town is stately, and with a
thoroughly urban air, although its streets are so quiet, clean, and
well-ordered. Civilisation without its usual accompaniments of rush and
crowded pavements would seem to be the rule of Blandford. You can
actually stand in the street and admire the architectural details of its
houses without being run over or hustled off the pavement. In short,
Blandford can be _seen_, and not, like crowded towns, glimpsed with
intermittent and alternate glances at the place and at the traffic, for
fear of jostling or being jostled.
Who, for instance, really _sees_ London. You can stand in Hyde Park and
see that, or in St. Paul’s and observe all the details of it; but does
anyone ever really _see_ Cheapside, Fleet Street, or the Strand, when
walking? The only way to make acquaintance with these thoroughfares is
to ride on the outside of an omnibus, where it is possible to give an
undivided attention to anything else than the crowds that throng the
pavements.
The progress of Blandford seems to have been quietly arrested soon after
its rebuilding in 1731, and so it remains typical of that age, without
being actually decayed. So far, indeed, is it from decay that it is a
cheerful and prosperous, though not an increasing, town. Red moulded and
carved brick frontages to the houses prevail here, and dignity is
secured by the tall classic tower of the church, which, although not in
itself entirely admirable, and although the stone of it is of an
unhealthy green tinge, is not unpleasing, placed to advantage closing
the view at one end of the broad market-place, instead of being aligned
with the street.
Most things in Blandford date back to ‘the fire,’ which forms a
red-letter day in the story of the town. This may well be understood
when it is said that only forty houses were left when the flames had
done their worst, and that fourteen persons were burnt, while others
died from grief, or shock, or injuries received. Blandford has been
several times destroyed by fire. In Camden’s time it was burned down by
accident, but was rebuilt soon after in a handsome and substantial form.
Again in 1677 and in 1713 the place was devastated in the same manner.
The memorable fire of 1731 began at a soap-boiler’s shop in the centre
of the town.
A pump, placed in a kind of shrine under the
[Sidenote: _GIBBON_]
[Illustration: BLANDFORD.]
churchyard wall, bears an inscription recounting this terrible
happening:--
In remembrance
Of God’s dreadful visitation by Fire,
Which broke out the 4th of June, 1731,
and in a few Hours not only reduced the
Church, but almost the whole Town, to Ashes,
Wherein 14 Inhabitants perished,
But also two adjacent Villages;
And
In grateful Acknowledgement of the
Divine Mercy,
That has since raised this Town,
Like the Phœnix from its Ashes,
To its present flourishing and beautiful State;
and to prevent,
By a timely Supply of Water,
(With God’s Blessing) the fatal
Consequences of Fire hereafter:
This Monument
Of that dire Disaster, and Provision
Against the like, is humbly erected
By
John Bastard
A considerable Sharer
In the great Calamity,
1760.
Between 1760 and 1762 Gibbon, the historian of the _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_, was constantly in the neighbourhood of Blandford,
camping on the downs which surround the town, and enjoying all the pomp
and circumstance which may have belonged to his position as a Captain of
Hants Militia.
Of these amateur soldierings he speaks as a ‘wandering life of military
service,’ a very amusing view of what everybody else but that pompous
historian regarded as mere picnics.
But Gibbon, although his person was not precisely that of an ideal
military commander, and although the awkward squads he accompanied were
not easily comparable with the legions of old Rome, affected to believe
that the military knowledge he thus acquired among the hills and
woodlands of Hants and Dorset was of the greatest use in helping him to
understand the strategic feats of Cæsar and Hannibal in Britain or
across the Alps. Let us smile!
In after years, when living at Lausanne, amid the eternal hills and
mountains of Switzerland, he looked back upon those days with regret,
alike for the good company of his brother officers, the jovial nights at
the ‘Crown’ in ‘pleasant, hospitable Blandford,’ and for the
interference those happy times caused to his studies; when,
instead of burning the midnight oil, he drank deeply of the
two-o’clock-in-the-morning punch-bowl.
Many of Blandford’s natives have risen to more than local eminence.
Latest among her distinguished sons is Alfred Stevens, that fine artist
who designed the Wellington Monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as yet,
unhappily, incomplete. He came into contact with governments and
red-tape, and broken in spirit and in health by disappointments, died in
1875. A tablet on the wall of his birthplace in Salisbury Street records
the fact that he was born in 1817.
[Illustration: TOWN BRIDGE, BLANDFORD.]
XXXVII
[Sidenote: _WINTERBORNE WHITCHURCH_]
Sixteen and a quarter miles of very varied road brought the old coachmen
with steaming horses clattering from Blandford into Dorchester, past the
villages of Winterborne Whitchurch, Milborne St. Andrew, and the village
of Piddletown, which is by no means a town, and never was.
It is a long, long rise out of Blandford, past tree-shaded Bryanstone
and over the Town Bridge, to the crest of Charlton Downs, a mile out;
where, looking back, the town is seen lying in a wooded hollow almost
surrounded by park-like trees in dense clumps--the woods of Bryanstone.
From this point of vantage it is clearly seen how Blandford is entered
downhill from east or west.
Very hilly, very open, very white and hot and dusty in summer, and
covered with loose stones and flints after any spell of dry weather, the
road goes hence steeply down into Winterborne Whitchurch, where the
‘bourne,’ from which the place takes the first half of its name, goes
across the road in a hollow, and the church stands, with its
neighbouring parsonage and cottages, in a lane running at right angles
to the high-road, for all the world like Tarrant Hinton and Little
Wallop. John Wesley, the grandfather of the founder of the
‘Wesleyans’--or the ‘Methodys,’ as the country people call
Methodists--was Vicar of Winterborne Whitchurch for a time during the
Commonwealth; but as he seems never to have been regularly ordained, he
was thrown out at the Restoration by ‘malignants’ and began a kind of
John the Baptist life amid the hills and valleys of Dorsetshire, an
exemplar for the imitation of his grandsons in later days. Itineracy and
a sturdy independence thus became a tradition and a duty with the
Wesleys. Thus are sects increased and multiplied, and no more sure way
exists of producing prophets than by the persecution and oppression of
those who, left judiciously alone, would live and die unknown to and
unhonoured by the world.
Milborne St. Andrew, close upon three miles onward, is placed in another
of these many deep hollows which, with streams running through them, are
so recurrent a feature of the Exeter Road; only the hollow here is a
broader one and better dignified with the title of valley. The stream of
the ‘mill-bourne,’ from which the original mill has long since vanished
(if, indeed, the name of the place is not, more correctly, ‘Melbourne,’
‘mell’ in Dorsetshire meaning, like the prefix of ‘lew’ in Devon, a warm
and sheltered spot), is a tributary of the river Piddle, which, a few
miles down the road gives name to Piddletown, and along its course to
Aff-Piddle, Piddletrenthide, Piddlehinton, Tolpiddle, and Turner’s
Piddle.
[Sidenote: _MILBORNE ST. ANDREW_]
Milborne St. Andrew is a pretty place, and those who know Normandy may
well think it, with its surrounding meads and feathery poplars, like a
village in that old-world French province. Almost midway along the
sixteen and a quarter miles between Blandford and Dorchester, it still
keeps the look of an old coaching and posting village, although the last
coach and the days of road-travel are beyond the recollection of the
oldest inhabitant. Here, in the midst of the village, the street widens
out, where the old ‘White Hart,’ now the Post Office, with a great
effigy of a White Hart, and a number of miniature cannons on the porch
roof, waits for the coaches that come no more, and for the dashing
carriages and post-chaises that were driven away with their drivers and
their gouty red-faced occupants to Hades, long, long ago. Is the ‘White
Hart,’ standing like so many of these old hostelries beside the highway,
waiting successfully for the revival of the roads, and will it live over
the brave old days again with the coming of the Motor Car?
Meanwhile, given fine weather, there are few pleasanter places to spend
a reminiscent afternoon in than Milborne St. Andrew.
The old church is up along the hillside, reached with the aid of a
bye-road. Its tower, like that of Winterborne Whitchurch, shows the
curious and rather pleasing local fashion of building followed four
hundred years or so back, consisting of four to six courses of nobbled
flints alternating with a course of ashlar. A stone in the east wall of
the chancel to the memory of William Rice, servant to two of the local
squires here for more than sixty years, ending in 1826, has the curious
particulars:--
He superintended the Harriers, and was the first Man who hunted a
Pack of Roebuck Hounds.
At a point a mile and a half farther used to stand Dewlish turnpike
gate, where the tolls were taken before coming down into Piddletown.
This large village is the ‘Weatherbury’ of some of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s
Wessex stories, and the Jacobean musicians’ gallery of the fine
unrestored church is vividly reminiscent of many humorous passages
between the village choir in _Under the Greenwood Tree_. An organ stands
there now, but the ‘serpent,’ the ‘clar’net,’ and the fiddles of Mr.
Hardy’s rustic choir would still seem more at home in that place.
Between this and Dorchester, past that end of Piddletown called ‘Troy
Town,’ is Yellowham--one had almost written ‘Yalbury’--Hill, crowned
with the lovely woodlands described so beautifully under the name of
‘Yalbury Woods’ in that story, and drawn again in the opening scene of
_Far from the Madding Crowd_, where Gabriel Oak, invisible in his leafy
eyrie above the road, perceives Bathsheba’s feminine vanities with the
looking-glass.
Descending the western side of the hill and passing the broad park-lands
of Kingston, we enter the town of Dorchester along the straight and
level road running through the water-meadows of the river Frome. Until a
few years ago this approach was shaded and rendered beautiful by an
avenue of stately old elms that enclosed the distant picture of the town
as in a frame; but they were cut down by the Duchy of Cornwall
officials, in whose hands much of the surrounding property is placed,
and only the pitiful stumps of them, shorn off close to the ground,
remain to tell of their existence. As Dorchester is approached the road
is seen in the distance becoming a street, and going, as straight as
ever, and with a continuous rise,
[Sidenote: ‘_CASTERBRIDGE_’]
[Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ DORCHESTER.]
through the town, with the square tower of St. Peter’s and the spiky
clock-tower of the Town Hall cresting the view in High West Street, and
in High East Street the modern Early English spire of All Saints nearer
at hand. The particular one among the many bridges and culverts that
carry the rivulets under the road here, mentioned by the novelist in his
_Mayor of Casterbridge_ as the spot where Henchard, the ruined mayor,
lounged in his aimless idleness, amid the wastrels and ne’er-do-weels of
Casterbridge, is the bridge that finally brings the road into the town,
by the old ‘White Hart Inn.’ It is the inevitable lounging-stock for
Dorchester’s failures, who mostly live near by at Fordington, the east
end of the town, where the ‘Mixen Lane’ of the story, ‘the mildewed leaf
in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant’ was situated.
It is a transfigured Dorchester that is painted by the novelist in that
story; or, perhaps more exactly, the Dorchester of fifty years ago. ‘It
is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees,
like a plot of garden-ground by a box-edging,’ is the not very apt
comparison with the tall chestnuts and sycamores of the surviving
avenues. ‘It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining,
clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth. The
farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the
window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to
acquaintances standing on the pavement corner; the red-robed judge, when
he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa,
that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing
hard by.’
This peculiarity of Dorchester, a four-square clearly-defined _appliqué_
of town upon a pastoral country, has been gradually disappearing during
many years past, owing to an increase of population that has burst the
ancient bounds imposed by the town being almost completely surrounded by
the Duchy of Cornwall lands. This property, known by the name of
Fordington Field (and not the existence at any time of a ford on the
Frome), gives the eastern end of Dorchester its title. The land, let by
the Duchy in olden times, in quarters or ‘fourthings’ of a carucate,
gave the original name of ‘Fourthington.’ A great deal of this property
has now been sold or leased for building purposes, and so the avenues
that once clearly defined with their ramparts of greenery the bounds of
Dorchester are now of a more urban character.
[Sidenote: _THE BLOODY ASSIZE_]
Dorchester shares with Blandford and with Marlborough a solid
architectural character of a sober and responsible kind. As in those
towns, imaginative Gothic gables and quaint mediæval fancies are
somewhat to seek amid the overwhelming proportion of Renaissance, or
neo-classic, or merely Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick or stone
houses. The cause of this may be sought in the recurrent disastrous
fires that on four occasions practically swept the town out of
existence, as in the case of Marlborough and Blandford. The earliest of
these happened in 1613. Over three hundred houses were burnt on that
occasion, and property amounting to nearly a quarter of a million
sterling lost. This insistent scourge of the West of England thatched
houses visited the town again, nine years later, and also in 1725 and
1775. Little wonder, then, that mediæval Dorchester has to be sought for
in nooks and corners. But if like those other unfortunate towns in these
circumstances, it is very different in appearance, the streets being
comparatively narrow and the houses of a more stolid and heavy
character; so that only in sunny weather does Dorchester strike the
stranger as being at all a cheerful place.
XXXVIII
[Illustration: JUDGE JEFFREYS’ CHAIR.]
All the incidents in Dorchester’s history seem insignificant beside the
tremendous melodrama of the ‘Bloody Assize.’ The stranger has eyes and
ears for little else than the story of that terrible time, and longs to
see the Court where Jeffreys sat, mad with drink and disease, and
sentenced the unhappy prisoners to floggings, slavery, or death.
Unhappily, that historic room has disappeared, but ‘Judge Jeffreys’
chair’ is still to be seen in the modern Town Hall, and one can approach
in imagination nearer to that awful year of 1685 by gazing at ‘Judge
Jeffreys’ Lodgings,’ still standing in High West Street, over Dawes’
china shop.
It must have been with a ferocious satisfaction that Jeffreys arrived
here to open that Assize, for Dorchester had been a ‘malignant’ town and
a thorn in the side of the Royalists forty years before. A kind of wild
retribution was to fall upon it now, not only for the share that this
district of the West had in Monmouth’s Rebellion in this unhappy year,
but for the Puritanism of a bygone generation.
Jeffreys reached here on 2nd September and the Assize was opened on the
following day, lasting until the 8th. Macaulay has given a most
convincing picture of it:--
‘The Court was hung, by order of the Chief Justice, with scarlet; and
this innovation seemed to the multitude to indicate a bloody purpose. It
was also rumoured that when the clergyman, who preached the assize
sermon, enforced the duty of mercy, the ferocious mouth of the Judge was
distorted by an ominous grin. These things made men augur ill of what
was to follow.
[Sidenote: _GEORGE THE THIRD_]
‘More than three hundred prisoners were to be tried. The work seemed
heavy; but Jeffreys had a contrivance for making it light. He let it be
understood that the only chance of obtaining pardon or respite was to
plead guilty. Twenty-nine persons who put themselves on their country,
and were convicted, were ordered to be tied up without delay. The
remaining prisoners pleaded guilty by scores. Two hundred and ninety-two
received sentence of death. The whole number hanged in Dorsetshire
amounted to seventy-four.’
It is a relief to turn from such things to the less tragical coaching
era. The ‘King’s Arms,’ which was formerly the great coaching hostelry
of Dorchester, still keeps pride of place here, and its capacious
bay-windows of old-fashioned design yet look down upon the chief street.
Instead, however, of the kings and princes and the great ones of the
earth who used to be driven up in fine style in their ‘chariots’ a
hundred years ago, and in place of the weary coach-travellers who used
to alight at the hospitable doors of the ‘King’s Arms,’ the commercial
travellers of to-day are deposited here by the hotel omnibus from the
railway station with little or no remains of that pomp and circumstance
which accompanied arrivals in the olden time. King George the Third was
well acquainted with this capacious house, for his horses were changed
here on his numerous journeys through Dorchester between London,
Windsor, and Weymouth. He kept a commonplace Court in the summer at
Weymouth for many years, and thus made the fortune of that town, while
his son, the Prince of Wales, was similarly making Brighthelmstone
popular. If we are to believe the story of the Duchesse d’Abrantes,
Napoleon had conceived the very theatrical idea of kidnapping the King
on one of these journeys. The exploit was planned for execution in the
wild and lonely country between Dorchester and Weymouth: possibly
beneath the grim shadow of sullen Maumsbury, or of prehistoric Maiden
Castle. The King and his escort were to have been surprised by a party
of secretly-landed French sailors, and his Majesty forthwith hustled on
board an open boat which was then to be rowed across the Channel to
Cherbourg. According to this remarkable statement, the English
coastguards had been heavily bribed to assist in this affair. It was
magnificent, but it was not war--nor even business. As an elaborate
joke, the project has its distinctly humorous aspects, as one vividly
conjures up a picture of ‘Farmer George,’ helplessly sea-sick, leaning
on the gunwale of the row-boat, with the equally unhappy sailors toiling
away at rowing those seventy miles of salt water. Then, too, the thought
of that essentially unromantic King compelled to cut a ridiculous figure
as a kind of modern travesty of the imprisoned Richard Lionheart, raises
a smile. But, although Napoleon, who was not a gentleman, may very
possibly have entertained this rather characteristic notion, he
certainly never attempted to put it into execution, and the road to
Weymouth is by so much the poorer in incident.
But to return to the ‘King’s Arms,’ which figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s
story. Here it was, looking in with the crowd on the street, that Susan
saw her long-lost husband presiding as Mayor at the banquet, the
beginning of all his troubles.
Although the stranger who has no ties with Dorchester to help paint it
in such glowing colours as those used by that writer, who finds it ‘one
of the cleanest and prettiest towns in the West of England,’ cannot
subscribe to that description, the town is of a supreme interest to the
literary pilgrim, who can identify many spots hallowed by Mr. Hardy’s
genius.
[Sidenote: _THE ROMAN ROAD_]
[Illustration: DORCHESTER.]