place-names are no less illuminative, and his quaint or sonorous
substitutes might be transferred to the map of Dorset with little loss.
In some cases an older name is revived, such as Shaston, Middleton
Abbey, and Kingsbere. Sometimes he has made a slight modification of
the real name, or received a suggestion from it, as in Sherton Abbas,
Emminster, Port Bredy, Chaseborough, Casterbridge. Other names are
downright inventions, often a _précis_ of the natural features of the
town, such as Aldbrickham for Reading; or made with a fine ear for
local probability.[79]
[Illustration: MR. THOMAS HARDY.]
The county town of Dorset, with its core of old houses, and too many
that are new, is the centre of the Hardy district, as it is the “pole,
focus, or nerve-knot,” of the surrounding country. Its memories of
Rome are preserved in Mr. Hardy’s name for it, “Casterbridge”; and
its outward appearance in the days when Dorchester had no suburbs,
and was “compact as a box of dominoes” behind its stockade of limes
and chestnuts. A description of the old-fashioned place, in the mouth
of one of Mr. Hardy’s characters, always quoted in the guide-books to
Dorchester, is that “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”; and
the unusual way the country came up to the town and met in one line
is best described in his words:—
The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley mow and pitch a stone into
the office 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; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in
a meadow immediately before the drop, out of which the cows had been
temporarily driven to give the spectators room.
It has been said that the Dorchester in the Wessex novels had no
suburbs; the North Street ended abruptly in a mill by the river; the
South Street came to an end in a cornfield—but these bounds have been
leaped over in several places, and to-day the east, or Fordington side
of the town (Mr. Hardy’s Durnover) alone remains unchanged; and here
the flat water-meadows stretch up to the garden-hedges and the actual
walls of the houses. In spite of changes without the escarpments, the
curfew still sounds at the stroke of eight from St. Peter’s with its
“peremptory clang,” the signal for shop-shutting throughout the town.
The brick bridge over the Frome, and the stone bridge over a branch of
the same stream in the meads, have their well-defined peculiarities
in Dorchester as in “Casterbridge.” The neighbourhood of “Mixen”
Lane (Mill Lane), the “mildewed leaf” in the sturdy and flourishing
Casterbridge plant, is recognisable at the east end of the town, near
the town bridges.
Lucetta’s house, “High Place Hall,” at the corner of Durngate Street,
has a modern shop-front inserted; while the most significant feature
of her house is to be found at Colyton House, where, in the centre
of the wall flanking the garden, is an archway, now bricked up,
surmounted by a battered mask in which the open-mouthed, comic leer can
hardly be discerned to-day. Without the town, on the Weymouth Road,
is the immense Roman “Ring”—“Maumbury Ring, melancholy, lonely, yet
accessible from every part of the town”—which was to Dorchester what
the ruined Colosseum is to modern Rome.
“Some old people said that at certain moments in the summer time, in
broad daylight, persons sitting with a book, or dozing in the arena,
had, on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing
legion of Hadrian’s soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial combat,
and had heard the roar of their excited voices; that the scene would
remain but a moment, like a lightning flash, and then disappear.” The
ancient square earthwork where Henchard planned his entertainment is
Poundbury Camp, where the annual sheep-fair is held—“Square Pommerie”
of the poems.
Dorchester is interesting from the fact that it is the only full-length
portrait of a town drawn in the Wessex novels, and is the almost
unshifting scene of one, the _Mayor of Casterbridge_, where the
dramatic unity of place is preserved. In other novels the characters
are wanderers and the scenes shifted; or the towns and villages are
sketched in half-lengths or in small thumbnail sketches. Of these,
certainly the most important historically is Shaftesbury, the Shaston
of the novels, which seems to be set upon “a dominant cape or a
far-venturing headland.” It is a town of shrunken importance, “familiar
with forgotten years,” the ancient British Palladour, “which was, and
is, in itself, the city of a dream.”
The houses now composing Shaftesbury are held high up above the Vale
of Blackmore by the height, or cliff, upon which it is built; and
Barnes, no less than Mr. Hardy, was alive to the vision of the old city
on watch, straining her eyes to Blackmore’s “blue-hilled plain,” or
shining “so bright” to those down miles below in the Vale.
Another ancient, shrunken town is Wareham, which reminds one to a
certain extent of Dorchester, for it is square, ramparted, and defended
by water on one side; but these are the only points of resemblance. The
little diminished town “where only the presence of the river and the
shallow barges on its bosom suggest the ocean,” goes by the name of
“Anglebury”[80] in the Wessex novels, for it was a noted town in the
Saxon age, when it was a place of strength. Sherborne, the “Sherton
Abbas” of the novels, takes its fictitious name, like many other Wessex
towns, from its most prominent feature, the Abbey. Cerne Abbas—called
“Abbot’s Cernel” in the novels, one of its old names being Cernel—is a
village “still loitering in a mediæval atmosphere”; while Bere Regis,
which appears in the novels under the older form, “Kingsbere,” is
another of the diminished places that Mr. Hardy delights to honour, a
“blinking little one-eyed place” of thatched cottages, the measure of
whose earlier magnificence is the fine church of St. John the Baptist
that holds the dust of the Turbervilles. “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,” to
give it its full Wessex title, owes the last limb of that compound name
to Woodbury Hill (Greenhill)—a green hill partly covered with trees
that overlooks Bere. Its ancient fair, now much decayed, is described
rather as it was than as it is, as the “Nijni-Novgorod of South
Wessex.” The fair is, however, still held in September, beginning on
the eighteenth of the month. “Marlott,” really Marnhull, also connected
with _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, lies embedded in Blackmore Vale,
“where the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” between
Sturminster and Shaftesbury.
Some six miles distant from Mr. Hardy’s home is the village of
Piddletown, known by the name of Weatherbury in _Far from the Madding
Crowd_. The church described there remains, but, as the novelist
expressly warns us, “Warren’s Malthouse” disappeared years ago, with
some of the village’s characteristic peculiarities.
Stinsford, a parish of which the Bockhamptons are hamlets, the original
of “Mellstock,” is so carefully described by Mr. Hardy that each
cottage might well be a literary landmark, while Sutton Poyntz, the
“Overcombe” of _The Trumpet-Major_, like Piddletown, has lost one of
Mr. Hardy’s landmarks, for the mill is demolished, but the colossal
figure of George III. upon the chalk downs, which in the novel was
being cut, is still to be seen.
Mr. Hardy’s special quality of precision that comes of knowledge is
nowhere more closely shown than in his pictures of great houses, or,
indeed, of buildings of any kind. They are all drawn from the real,
from their cellars and foundations to their leads and chimney-pots.
The only liberty he takes with the originals is to remove them, in
one or two cases, to another position. For instance, Lower Waterstone
Farm, the original of Bathsheba Everdene’s house in _Far from the
Madding Crowd_—“a hoary building of the Jacobean stage of classic
Renaissance”—is nearly two miles from “Weatherbury” (Piddletown).
Again, Poxwell Hall, the “Oxwell Hall” of _The Trumpet-Major_, is
really three miles from “Overcombe” (Sutton Poyntz), and, therefore,
not the close neighbour of the Lovedays it is made to be. The original
of “Welland House” is Charborough; but the “Tower,” as Mr. Hardy
writes, “had two or three originals—Horton, Charborough, etc.”
Wool Manor-house, or “Well Bridge,” as Mr. Hardy, reverting to the
older name, calls it, once a possession of the Turbervilles, is set on
the bank of the rush-grown Frome, near the great Elizabethan bridge
that gives the place half its name. The paintings of two women are
actually, as in the novel, on the walls of the staircase, but they
are now rapidly fading away, and can only with difficulty be made out
to-day by the light of a candle.
“Enkworth Court” (Encombe), deep in the Glen of Encombe, approached by
a long road gradually dropping into the cup-like crater by the only
expedient of winding round it, is a “house in which Pugin would have
torn his hair.” “Great Hintock House,” however, another house in a
hole, has no original, though it has somewhat hastily been identified
with Turnworth House, near Blandford. The situation is similar, but
Turnworth House is largely a modern building, while the “Great Hintock
House” of _The Woodlanders_ had a front which was an “ordinary manorial
presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in
rich snuff-coloured free-stone from local quarries.”
The sea-coast towns of Dorset, southern outposts of Wessex, make
an occasional appearance in the novels and tales. The original of
“Knollsea” is Swanage, which would scarcely now be described as the
sea-side village “lying snug within its two headlands as between a
finger and thumb.” With Bridport (“Port Bredy”) and its neighbour,
West Bay, Mr. Hardy takes one of his rare liberties in altering
the configuration of the country; for one story opens with the
statement that “the shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing
intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill,” over the intervening
chimneys. The cleft, however, in which the town is sunk is not so
exiguous.
Georgian Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of _The Trumpet-Major_; while
Portland, “the Isle of Slingers”—
The Isle of the Race
Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face,
—is especially the district of _The Well Beloved_. It is a “wild,
herbless, weather-worn promontory,” sour and treeless, with its
beak-like point stretching out like the head of a bird into the English
Channel. On the east side is an unexpected wooded dell, narrow and full
of shade, on the summit of which rises Pennsylvania Castle—“Sylvania
Castle” of the novel—a modern castellated house, built in 1800 for John
Penn, Governor of the Island, who planted the trees around it.
Perhaps Mr. Hardy’s most inalienable possession is not the town but
the wild, the “obscure, obsolete, superseded country,” a “tract in
pain,” which, with one form but many names, stretches from Poole in
the east to almost within sight of Dorchester on the west, from near
Bere Regis in the north to Winfrith in the south, where it joins the
heathland of the Isle of Purbeck. Though “Egdon” Heath is broken up
into many tracts, into Morden and Bere, and Wool and Duddle and other
heaths, it has an essential unity, and the attempts at cultivation have
met with desperate and, as it were, voluntary resistance, so that the
breaks into green strips of cornfield slip the memory on a back-look
at that lonely land. It is a place inviolate and “unaltered as the
stars,” a sweep of moorland, a tract of land covered with heather and
bracken and furze, practically unbroken, where, “with the exception
of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow, themselves almost
crystallized to natural products by long continuance, even the trifling
irregularities were not caused by pick-axe, plough, or spade, but
remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.” In
appearance its colours are by distance blended into the purple brown
called, in _The Return of the Native_, “swart”—its “antique brown
dress.” The swart, abrupt slopes appear to be “now rising into natural
hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral tumuli, now dipping into
hollows, where the rain-water collects in marshy pools and keeps green
the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken much longer than
the parched growths at the crests of these rises, and again spreading
out into little scrubby plains.”[81]
Its quality is “prodigious, and so as to frighten one to be in it all
alone at night,” as Pepys said of another solitary place—the great
earthwork of Old Sarum. In Mr. Hardy’s words, “the face of the heath
by its mere complexion adds half an hour to evening: it can, in like
manner, retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms
scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight
to a cause of shaking and dread.” It is an agent among agents, and
what Wordsworth finds that nature becomes seen by man’s intellect,
“an ebbing and a flowing mind.” Its lonely face, and the face of all
solitary heath-lands, are interpreted for ever in _The Return of the
Native_.
[Illustration: CAME RECTORY.
_The home of William Barnes._]
SOME DORSET SUPERSTITIONS
BY HERMANN LEA
In employing the term superstition, it is in the sense defined by Franz
v. Schonthan:—
Zwar nicht wissen—aber glauben
Heisst ganz richtig—Aberglauben.
(Not to know, but to believe; what else is it, strictly speaking, but
superstition?)
It is natural, no doubt, that superstition should decrease in the same
ratio as education and enlightenment advance, but its total extinction
need not be anticipated for a long time to come. True, its death-knell
was sounded by the first invented printing press, a contrivance
which, nevertheless, tends to some extent to foster its growth,
since “believers” read in history facts that give support to their
own beliefs. And although this survival may not exactly please the
practically minded, to the antiquary or the psychologist its extinction
would be certainly regretable.
It must not be rashly concluded that superstition goes hand in hand
with foolishness or absence of commonsense, nor must it be looked on
as a symbol of weak-mindedness. Did not Augustus Cæsar hold strong
views regarding putting the left shoe on the right foot, maintaining
that such procedure betokened some dire calamity? And again, did he
not deem the skin of a sea-calf to be a certain preservative against
lightning? Yet he was not generally regarded as a particularly foolish
or weak-minded man.
Of the various forms of superstition current at the present time, none
hold such sway as the credence in witchcraft. The date of its origin is
lost in the dim past, but we may safely surmise that it arose early in
the mind of man. Moses denounced witches in no measured terms. “Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live,” he said, and this decree survived
until a comparatively recent date. In mediæval times the law of Moses
certainly held good; it mattered nothing what position in the social
standard the accused held. In the year 1537 Lady Janet Douglas was
burned in Edinburgh on the charge of being a witch. John Knox was once
accused of being a wizard because “nothing but sorcery,” so it was
said, “could account for Lord Ochiltree’s daughter”—“ane damosil of
nobil blude”—falling in love with him—“ane old, decrepid creature of
most base degree of ony that could be found in the countrey.” Although
the days are past when witches were publicly tormented or executed,
even at the present time such a reputation is not without danger to the
supposed witch. To effect a cure from the spell cast, it used to be
considered almost essential that her blood be drawn, and within quite
recent years I have known of cases where reputed witches have been shot
at with “silver bullets,” or struck at with hay-forks or other sharp
instruments.
Having its birth in so remote a past, it is, perhaps, not to be
wondered at that witchcraft has persisted so long, that its demise is
so protracted. Until a few years ago, when the law stepped in to punish
those who made a livelihood by “conjuring”—_i.e._, pointing out witches
and producing spells to confound them—witchcraft formed an everyday
topic of conversation, and little secrecy was deemed necessary;
but now, though as staunchly believed in as ever, the subject is
alluded to in bated breath, and it is no easy matter to discover the
whereabouts of a “conjurer” or “witch-doctor.”
In the more remote corners of the county may still be heard fragments
of the old Dorset speech, and in these same out-of-the-way spots one
may chance on the strangest of superstitions and customs. Witchcraft
holds a place in the minds of the illiterate, the semi-educated, and
even the better educated, from which no amount of argument can expel
it. Thomas Hardy and William Barnes have both used the theme as a
groundwork for prose and poem. It may be interesting to note here that
Conjurer Trendle, in the former’s story entitled “The Withered Arm,”
was no fictitious personage, but had a veritable existence. He is still
well remembered (under his real name, of course) by some of the older
people who dwelt near, and the house in which he lived, in the central
portion of “Egdon Heath,” may still be traced in a heap of decayed
walls and rotten timbers.
The reason for this strong and enduring belief is not difficult to
find; thought-transference, mental telepathy, hypnotism, are all
scientifically admitted; that our ancestors observed the effects of
these “sciences,” attributing the causes to some easily explainable or
at least plausible reasons, is more than probable.
When attempting to trace to their origin some of the stories current,
one cannot help feeling that in many cases the so-called witch stood
more in need of pity than condemnation, for it required only very
scanty evidence for her to be thus branded. Gilfillan speaks of a
witch as “a borderer between earth and hell”—a view which was probably
shared by the majority of people. Goldsmith, on the contrary, was for
giving the accused the benefit of the doubt. “If we enquire,” he says
in sarcastic strain, “what are the common marks and symptoms by which
witches are discovered to be such, we shall see how reasonably and
mercifully those poor creatures were burned and hanged who unhappily
fell under that name.”
If I were required to define a witch of the present day I should
state it as being the second-hand evidence of numbers of people who
have been “overlooked,” or bewitched, and who have given me detailed
descriptions. A witch, then, is an individual, male or female—usually
the latter—who by reason of certain gifts or powers is able to exert
an influence over another. She generally includes in her dress some
red token—perhaps a red hat, red shawl, or red cloak. She is able to
transform herself into the likeness of almost any animal, chiefly that
of a cat or hare, and is also able to become invisible; when assuming
the guise of an animal, she in no way hides her identity from those
who are conversant with the ways of witches, a witch-hare or witch-cat
differing in many particulars, both in appearance and gait, from the
ordinary hare or cat. It has been said that two animals only she cannot
simulate—lambs and donkeys; the usual Scriptural reasons being adduced.
Her power is nearly always inherited, and I have heard it argued that a
certain woman of my acquaintance, who was perfectly inoffensive, must
necessarily be a witch because her mother was one. This power may be
used either for good or ill, and may be directed against an animal or
a human being. I have been informed, in strict confidence, of certain
signs by which a witch may be recognised, and to test the accuracy of
my informant, I have many times asked people whom I knew but slightly
whether so-and-so was not a person credited with superhuman powers,
and, nine times out of ten, have been answered in the affirmative.
Hence it would seem that these tokens are well known and generally
admitted.
The immediate effect on a person who has been “overlooked,”
“ill-wished,” or “hagrod” (Dorset for “hag-ridden”), as it is variously
called, consists as a rule of some sort of indisposition. This
gradually increases to severe sickness, and finally death supervenes.
The disease is usually of an extremely subtle nature, defying accurate
diagnosis, and is often termed by the medical man mental or hysterical.
Sometimes the stricken individual will merely pine away gradually,
refuse food, complain of nothing definite, yet preserve an entire
reticence as to any supposable cause. On the other hand, it does
happen occasionally that the effect of the “overlooking” is extremely
sudden—perhaps a fatal accident from an apparently natural cause.
Again, the ill-wishing may take the form of a comparatively harmless
nuisance—the butter may fail to “come” in the churning, the fowls may
suddenly cease laying, the cows may refuse to “give down” their milk,
or the pig, intended for an early fattening, may object to partake of
the most savoury mixture prepared with consummate care. Perhaps the
horses will refuse to pull fairly at their loads, or may stop entirely
when encountering a small hill.
A “conjurer” or “white witch” is an individual who, possessed of
certain gifts (to some considerable extent hereditary), is able to
point out to those who consult him (or her—for either sex may have the
qualifications) the person who is causing the mischief. One necessary
attribute is that he be a “seventh of a seventh,” _i.e._, a seventh
child of a parent who, in his turn, was a seventh child. It does not
follow that this peculiarity in itself is sufficient to produce a
conjurer, but without it he cannot be one. One point, however, is
shared by such-born people, and that is, entire immunity from the
effects of ill-wishing, and a capability of identifying any other
person gifted with the powers of ill-wishing others.