taking awful revenge for the massacre wrought by Ethelred the
“Unredy”—that is to say, the “Counsel-less”—marched from Devon to Wilts
by Dorset, and left Dorchester a desolation. It is said that he tore
down the walls, but this, almost for certain, was not so; they were
too massive to be wrecked without long labour, which the rovers would
not care to spend; and there is large evidence for their existence
far into the seventeenth century. However, Danish fire and sword must
have left the town black and blood-stained within its ramparts. Half a
century later, under the Confessor, Dorchester counted 172 houses; the
number is recorded in _Domesday Book_ (1085-6) as large, in contrast to
the eighty-eight at the date of the survey. Very likely the building
of the Norman Castle (where now stands the Prison) had to do with the
shrinkage; the castle was sure to be a centre of spoliation.
The restless John was in the town in 1201, and often later—hunting, no
doubt, and taking his “one night’s firm,” the statutable sustenance due
to the King and his men. Under Edward I., in 1295, we sent burgesses to
the first English Parliament. Our last burgess sat from 1874 till 1885.
Dorchester is now only the centre of an electoral division.
In that same reign appears the first mention of our town churches:
Holy Trinity, St. Peter’s, and All Saints’. Not that the parishes are
no older than that date; indeed, the porch of St. Peter’s contains a
twelfth century fragment.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, DORCHESTER.]
The reign of Edward III. experienced the terror of the Great Plague,
carried from China over Asia to Europe, where literally millions of
people perished. It burst into England, alas! from a ship which put
in at the Dorset shore, and no doubt our town owed to that awful
scourge the low state of industry recorded a little later. Things had
mended by the time of Henry VI., and from then, upon the whole, the
place has been prosperous. In the seventeenth century it was busy with
cloth-making and, as now, with the brewing of beer. In the old times of
farming it was a great centre of grain commerce. Stories are told of
Dorchester fair-days, when wheat-laden wagons stood ranged in long file
from Cornhill, along South Street, and far out upon the Weymouth road.
The town had its troubles in “the great century.” In August, 1613, a
fierce fire swept it almost clean away. The old churches of Trinity and
All Saints vanished, with nearly every other building within the walls
(and some outside their circuit, in Fordington), save only St. Peter’s
and the houses near it—among which would be that now almost solitary
relic of picturesque Old Dorchester, “Jeffreys’ lodgings.”
But the rebuilding must have been energetic, for in the Civil Wars we
find Dorchester populous and active enough to be a troublesome focus of
“malignity.” “A place more entirely disaffected to the King, England
had not,” says Clarendon. One probable cause of this attitude lay in
the commanding influence of John White, Rector of Holy Trinity from
1606 to 1648. White was an Oxonian, a man of culture and piety, and
evidently of strong personal influence. Preachers to-day may envy, if
they please, the pulpit privileges given him by the town. The borough
records show, for example, that in 1630 one Nycholls was brought
to justice for having “offered speeche concerning Mr. John White’s
preaching.” White helped to plan the colony of Massachusetts, but
he did not join the emigration. His power was felt at home, in the
Westminster Assembly, and in the politics of Dorchester.
In 1642 the walls were solidly repaired, and outside works thrown
up at, among other points, Maumbury Ring. Watch was kept day and
night at the gates and on St. Peter’s Tower. But the spirit of the
town strangely failed when, on the approach of the enemy, one Master
Strode predicted that the walls would hold off the King’s men for
just half-an-hour. The Governor, Sir Walter Erle, hearing that Lord
Carnarvon was coming with two thousand men, and Prince Maurice’s
artillery besides, promptly left the place, and the citizens opened the
gates on a promise that they should be spared violence. Carnarvon would
have kept the promise with chivalrous fidelity, but Maurice let his men
loose, and Dorchester was so badly handled that Carnarvon threw up his
command and went to serve the King in person. A little later the town
behaved much more bravely, and baffled a small Irish force under Lord
Inchiquin till help from Weymouth completed the rout of the Royalists.
Later again Essex occupied the town in force; and then Sir Lewis Dives,
for the King, surprised it with brilliant success, but was badly beaten
on a second attempt. Yet later there was a skirmish at Dorchester, when
the royalist _Mercurius_ says that no less a captain than Cromwell
himself was put to flight by Lord Goring; but the account lacks full
confirmation. A story of that skirmish clings to a corner of lower
Fordington, a curve in the road near Grey’s Bridge, known as Tupp’s, or
Tubb’s, Corner; it is said that a Cromwellian hero of that name fled
thereby at a speed memorable for all time.
A still darker experience than that of war awaited Dorchester not
long after. When Monmouth fought at Sedgemoor (1685) our Dorset
peasants were among the bravest of his rude but heroic army. And when
the abortive rising was over, the Bloody Assizes began, and Jeffreys
sat at Dorchester. His lodgings are still shown, the most striking
house-front in the town, with its black timbers and long, low windows;
and still, in the Town Hall, is kept the chair from which the terrible
Chief Justice, in a court hung with red, dealt out death with grim
smiles and ghastly jests. Nearly three hundred men, told that it was
their only hope, pleaded guilty, but for most of them the only result
was a few days’ respite. Seventy-four were executed at Dorchester,
with all the horrible circumstances of death for treason. For years
afterwards grim human relics of that evil time still clung to the
railings round St. Peter’s, greeting the entering worshippers.
[Illustration: JUDGE JEFFREYS’ LODGINGS]
This was not quite the last scene of horror at Dorchester, though
it was alone in its dreadful kind. As late as within the eighteenth
century an unhappy woman, convicted of the murder of her husband, was
hanged and then burned within Maumbury, amidst a vast gazing multitude.
It is a relief to think that about the same time the town put on a
beauty of a sort unique, I think, in England. The walls had somehow
largely disappeared within the last half of the seventeenth century;
and now it was proposed to plant double rows of trees all along the
line of their foundations. By 1712 the planting was complete, and for
nearly two complete centuries Dorchester has been surrounded by the
noble range of avenues which we call The Walks, renewed from time to
time, and kept with increasing care. From close to Glide Path Hill
(“Glippath”) the visitor can walk under long successive aisles of
sycamores or chestnuts on a well-laid gravel road, now facing east,
now south, now west, now north, till he finds himself close to the
foot of High Street, within ten minutes of his point of departure. I
have seen the noble avenues at King’s Lynn, and those of the Backs at
Cambridge are only less dear to me than our Walks. But I do not think
that anything even there can quite equal these bowery ramparts of our
ancient town—certainly not when we put together the natural charm and
the historical interest.
The Walks were still young about the year 1730, when a poet, in the
course of a tour from London to Exeter with a group of friends, rode
through Dorchester. It was Pope’s intimate, John Gay. The travellers
first saw the town, of course, from Stinsford Hill, over a foreground
which then, no doubt, was less full of trees. The reaches of the Frome
and the broad water-meadows pleased Gay, as well they might, and in his
delightful verse-journal we read his impression:
Now the steep hill fair Dorchester o’erlooks,
Border’d by meads and wash’d by silver brooks.
In 1762 we find recorded as noteworthy the paving and fencing of a
side-walk in the lower High Street; and in 1774 came the first public
lighting of the streets. A decade later Miss Burney (Mme. D’Arblay)
gives a lively picture of Dorchester as she saw it when travelling in
the suite of George III. to Weymouth: “The city had so antique an air,
I longed to investigate its old buildings. The houses have the most
ancient appearance of any that are inhabited that I have happened to
see; and inhabited they were indeed! There was an amazing quantity of
indigenous residers—old women and young children,” who, as she shrewdly
remarks, could not have come in from a distance, and so formed an index
of population. Yet the town could not have counted then more than 3,000
inhabitants. It contains now just 10,500.
We reach at last the nineteenth century. The town, like the county,
and like all rural England, was in grave alarm in 1830 at the time
of the “rick-burnings.” Mrs. Mary Frampton’s _Journal_ speaks much
of the scenes of riot and of wild alarms. I possess letters written
by my mother, then the young mistress of Fordington Vicarage,[50] in
which she speaks of the nightly watch and ward kept all around, and of
her husband’s active share in it, and the relief, under the terrible
strain, which was given by the friendly attitude of Fordington towards
him. Just later the Frampton _Journal_ describes the battle royal of
an election scene on Poundbury (Pummery, as I must be allowed still to
call it), when the greatest of all Dorset’s sons, the seventh Earl of
Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, stood for the county.
That date brings me to times only a little previous to my own memory,
and well within the memory of my brothers and friends, and familiar of
course to my father, who from 1829 to 1880, as Vicar of Fordington,
laboured alike for the spiritual and social good of his parishioners.
I may be allowed to close my narrative with a small sheaf of
reminiscences from his and other memories. Then, after a brief glance
of the mind’s eye over my native town, my task of love is done.
My father knew very old people who “remembered when rooms were first
carpeted at Dorchester.” One aged parishioner could recall the change
of style in the calendar in 1752; the children were taken to _a stile_
in the Great Field as a memento. He and my mother saw, from Maumbury,
about 1832, the Princess Victoria with her mother, passing in their
carriage on the way to Weymouth. My brother, since 1880 Bishop in
Mid-China, recalls the bringing into the town, in carts, about 1834, of
loads of saplings sent to be planted along the London Road; and a noble
avenue they made, which now, alas! is no more than a relic of itself.
I just remember the days of the stage coaches in Dorchester. I see
the old _Emerald_ still, and hear the bugle of the guard. In 1852 I
travelled by coach to Dorchester from Bath. And how vividly I can see
the excitement of the crowd on the arrival of the first South-Western
train, in 1847! An old woman still runs across my field of view,
crying out: “There, I did never zee a coach avore goo wi’out ’osses!”
I remember, two years later, Prince Albert’s arrival at the station,
where he took carriage for Weymouth, there to lay the first stone of
the Breakwater. Very vividly I recall the thousands of lamps festooned
along the Walks to illuminate an entertainment for old people after
the Crimean peace. Two years earlier, a few weeks before the Alma,
I remember the awful outburst of the cholera in Fordington; it was
brought from London in tainted clothing which was sent to the wash in a
Fordington cottage. My father “stood between the dead and the living”
at that dark time, and, with admirable assistance, was able, under God,
to bar the pestilence from entering the town.
[Illustration: CORNHILL]
But I must not ramble further into narrative. Dorchester, with its
integral neighbour, Fordington (incorporated into the borough in 1835),
is very dear to my heart, and it is not easy to put narrow limits upon
reminiscence. Yet scarcely a word has been said here about our chief
architectural features of the place. I have but named Trinity Church,
the third structure in succession to that which perished in 1613, as
All Saints’ Church is the second in like sequence—All Saints’, whose
fine spire, raised in 1852, gave a wholly new feature to the town. St.
Peter’s is the ecclesiastical crown of Dorchester—a noble Perpendicular
church, with a dignified tower, vocal with eight fine bells; in its
churchyard stands a bronze statue of our Dorset poet, William Barnes.
At the head of High Street, where the tree-vaulted Bridport road
runs out westward, stands the modern St. Mary’s, the church of West
Fordington; the pretty original church, Christ Church, now the chapel
of the Artillery Barracks, was built by my father’s efforts in 1847,
when the parish was divided from old Fordington. The County Hall
and Town Hall are leading features of the High Street. The present
Town Hall, in 1849, took the place of a building visible still to my
memory, under which opened an archway leading into North Square, and
which itself succeeded, in 1791, “The Cupola,” near the Town Pump. The
Museum, where my brother, Henry Moule, long superintended and developed
the excellent geological and antiquarian collections, is a handsome
modern feature of the middle High Street; it stands at a point where,
almost within the oldest living memory, projecting houses so narrowed
the roadway that the stage-coach could pass up and down only with great
caution. The County Hospital, founded in 1841, has grown into abundant
usefulness, and makes, with its beautiful little chapel, a dignified
feature of the place. In South Street the quaint front of the “Napper’s
Mite” almshouses, and the Grammar School, are conspicuous.
[Illustration: “NAPPER’S MITE”]
With Fordington Church, St. George’s, let me close. As I write[51] it
is about to be largely rebuilt, for Fordington has grown fast; and the
north aisle of 1833 is, indeed, very far from beautiful. But, whilst
I rejoice that space and form should be added to the church, my mind
must still and always see it as it was, with its simple chancel of
1750; its rude, partly Norman, north aisle; its pulpit of 1592, now
approached by a rood-stair re-opened in 1863; its remarkable eleventh
century _tympanum_ at the south door, which shows (probably) St. George
routing the Saracens at Antioch, in armour of the Bayeux type; and
its very noble fifteenth century tower, a model of proportion. Let us
climb that tower, by the stairs familiar to me all my days, and from it
bid farewell to Dorchester. Beautiful is the prospect, near and far.
Below us lies the spacious churchyard, a burial-place, in parts, ever
since the Roman period. Westward you see Dorchester, tower, spire, and
bowery Walks, with Poundbury beyond them. South-westward lies expanded
the vast field of Fordington, which till 1870 was unbroken by fence,
and was tilled by the farmers on a system of annual exchange, older,
probably, than the Christian era. Beyond it stretches the green,
massive rampart of Maiden Castle, and, more distant still, the aerial
dome of Blackdown, crowned by the monumental tower which commemorates
Nelson’s Hardy. North-westward we can almost see beautiful Wolfeton
House, cradle of the greatness of the Bedfords. Northward, we look down
on the roofs and lanes of dear old Fordington; and eastward lie the
long, fair levels of the Swingbridge meadows, where Frome is sluiced
into hundreds of channels, bright with living water. The bowery slopes
of Stinsford and Kingston flank the meadows; and then, eastward, the
broad valley leads the eye away to the vanishing yet abiding line of
the Purbecks, a cloud of tenderest blue. South-eastward, over the
village and its bartons, the woods of Came appear, and the sea-ridge
runs above them with its long line of Danish burial-mounds. Almost in
sight are Max Gate, the home of Mr. Hardy, our renowned novelist, and
the thatched roof of Came Rectory, once the home of our poet, William
Barnes—deep student, true pastor, clear and tender seer of nature and
of man.
O fields and streams, another race
Already comes to take our place,
To claim their right in you,
Our homes to hold, our walks to rove—
But who shall love you with our love,
Shall know you as we knew?
WEYMOUTH
BY SIDNEY HEATH
It has become customary in recent years for topographical and other
writers to depict Weymouth, if not exactly as a town of mushroom
growth, at least as one whose history and antiquity date no further
back than from the time when George III. found its salubrious air so
suited to his health. True, the aspect of the modern town has little
left of its pre-Georgian days to tempt the archæologist or allure the
casual literary worker; but a few hours spent among the old records
of the town would speedily remove this first impression of modernity,
and convince even the most sceptical antiquary that the old town of
Weymouth is one of the most ancient in the county of Dorset. The casual
visitor may, therefore, be forgiven his impression that Weymouth was
founded by George III.; for so nearly were the older buildings swept
away at the time of this royal invasion that even loyal Weymouth
citizens now find it difficult to realise how living a thing was the
ancient past of their town, since whatever was left untouched by the
Georgian builders has been well-nigh destroyed in more recent times to
make way for what is called modern convenience and improvement.
The word Weymouth is derived directly from the Saxon “Waegemuth,”
_waeg_ meaning a wave, that is the sea; and _mutha_, an opening. The
Celtic name for the river Wey, allied to the Welsh word _gwy_, meaning
water, seems to have caused some confusion in the Saxon mind, and have
led them to regard the mouth of the estuary (the Backwater) as the
inlet of the sea rather than the outlet of a small stream.
[Illustration: The Quay Weymouth]
The earliest beginnings of the town are lost in obscurity; yet, even
if we are not prepared to accept the assertion of certain historians
that the Tyrian and Phœnician merchants traded here in their numerous
visits to these shores, we have evidence of a more than respectable
antiquity in some traces and memorials of the Roman occupation, in the
way of roads, coins, and pottery; while at Preston, an almost adjoining
village, remains of a Roman villa may still be seen, and considerable
Roman remains have been found at Radipole.
There are very few records or official documents antecedent to the
reign of William I., and naturally many chasms occur in the continuity
of the recorded history of Weymouth. The earliest mention of the
place is in Saxon annals, which state that King Athelstan, A.D. 938,
granted to the Abbey of Middleton (Milton), in Dorset, in order that
masses might be said for his soul and the souls of his ancestors and
successors, Kings of England:
All that water within the shore of Waymuth, and half the stream of
that Waymuth out at sea: twelve acres for the support of the wear and
its officer, three thaynes and a saltern by the wear, and sixty-seven
hides of land in its neighbourhood.
The next mention of the place occurs in a Saxon charter of King
Ethelred II., wherein the King gives land to his minister, Atsere,
during his life, and licence to leave the inheritance of it as he
wills. The charter is signed by the King with the sign of the cross;
by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Oswald, Archbishop of York;
and the Bishops Athelwold, Living, and Hirwold. The date of this
interesting document is either obliterated or was never inserted; but
in 980 Dunstan was Grand-Master of the fraternity of free and accepted
Masons in England, and both he and Oswald died about 988.
We find no further record of Weymouth until 1042, when Edward the
Confessor caused a charge to be brought by Robert, Bishop of London,
accusing his mother, Queen Emma, of consenting to the death of her son
Alfred, of endeavouring to poison Edward, another of her sons, and of
maintaining an infamous connection with her kinsman, Alwin, Bishop of
Winton, to the King’s and her own dishonour. The Queen was ordered to
purge herself by “fiery ordeal,” which she did at Winchester Cathedral
in the presence of the King and his nobles; and, having passed
barefooted and blindfold over nine red-hot ploughshares without harm,
she was adjudged to have cleared herself of the accusations and to have
furnished her accusers with an example of what female chastity is able
to accomplish. The King publicly solicited his mother’s pardon; but
the Church of Winton was not so easily appeased at the charge brought
against its Bishop, and forced the repentant King to submit to severe
penance, and to give nine manors to Holy Mother Church, accordingly—“Ex
libello donatorium Wintoniæ Ecclesiæ, S. Edwardus rex, dedit Portelond,
Wikes, Hellwell, et Waimuth maneriis, cum ceteris aliis, ad Wintoniæ
ecclesiæ”; and this grant was confirmed by a bull of Pope Innocent II.
In _Domesday_ there are several parcels of land separately surveyed
under the name of _wai_ and _waia_, with no additional name to
distinguish them, and they are held by different individuals.
Henry I. granted by a charter (without date) to the Prior and Monks of
St. Swithun, Winton, the ports of “Waimuth and Melecumb, with all their
appurtenances, together with the manors of Wike and Portelond,” which
King Edward gave them, and that they might enjoy all the liberties,
wrecks, and all free customs, by sea and by land, as they had ever
enjoyed them. This charter was confirmed by Henry II.
In the reign of Henry III. the manor appears to have been considered
as a dependency of Wyke, and again as appertaining to Portland, but
it is certain that in the early part of this reign it was granted to
Henry Blois, Bishop of Winchester, and his successors, as appears by
the entry on the Charter Rolls. The Bishops did not keep the manor
long, for it soon became the property of the opulent family of Clare,
from whom was descended Edward IV. It would be tedious to trace the
varying fortunes of the Clare family, who were for centuries among the
most powerful in the kingdom; and although much could be written of
the subsequent holders of the manor, the following brief records must
suffice for several decades:—
* * * * *
40 Edward III.—Lionel, Duke of Clarence, held the boroughs of Weymouth
and Wareham, the manors of Portland and Wyke, with many others.
22 Richard II.—Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, held the borough of
Weymouth, the manors of Portland and Wyke, with many others.
11 Henry V.—Anna, wife of Edward, Earl of March, held the borough of
Weymouth, etc.
* * * * *
By the marriage of Ann Mortimer, sister of the Earl of March, with
Richard de Conysburgh, Earl of Cambridge, the manor fell to the house
of York, for their son, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, succeeded
them; and in 11 Henry VI., the King granted to Richard, Duke of
York, livery of Weymouth, and all the castles, manors, lands, etc.,
which Ann, late wife of Edmund, _Comes Marchiæ_, held in dower of the
inheritance of the Duke.
The town is mentioned by Leland (1538), Coker (1630 _circa_), and
Camden. The first-named writes:
The Tounlet of Waymouth lyith strait agayn Milton (Melcombe) on the
other side of the haven, and at this place, the Trajectus is by a bote
and a rope, bent over the haven, so that yn the fery-bote they use no
ores.
In another part of the Itinerary we read:
Waiymouth Town rite agen Milton, on the other side of the Haven yt is
bigger than Miltoun ys now. The Est South Est point of the Haven of
Waymouth ys caulid St. Aldelm’s point, being a litl foreland. Ther ys
a Chapelle by on the Hille. The Paroch Chirch ys a mile of—a Kay for
shippes in the town—the Haven Mouth almost at hand. Half a mile and
more to the New Castelle—an open Barbecane to the Castelle. Weimouth
is counted 20 miles from Pole.