Cobbett, that sturdy Radical and consistent grumbler, had an adventure at Andover, at the ‘George Inn.’ It was in October 1826, on returning from Weyhill Fair, that he took occasion to dine here. Of course he had no business or pleasure at the ‘George,’ for he had secured a lodging elsewhere; but with that obsession of his for agitation he must needs repair to the inn and dine at the ordinary; less we may be sure for the sake of the meal than to embrace the opportunity of addressing the farmers, the cattle-dealers, cheese and hop factors, and bankers whom he knew would be dining there at Fair-time. It was an opportunity not to be missed.
He must have been sadly disappointed at first, for there were only about ten people dining; but when it was seen that this was the well-known Cobbett, the diners increased, and, after the meal was over, the room became inconveniently crowded; guests coming from other inns until at length the room door was left open so that the crowd in the passage and on the stairs, which were crammed from top to bottom, might listen to the inevitable harangue on the sins of kings, and governments, and of landowners, and the criminal stupidity of every one else.
COBBETT
At this stage of the proceedings, just as the dinner was done, one of the two friends by whom he was accompanied gave Cobbett’s health. This, na?vely adds the arch-agitator, ‘was of course followed by a speech; and, as the reader will readily suppose, to have an opportunity of making a speech was the main motive for my going to dine at an inn, at any hour, and especially at seven o’clock at night.’ That, at any rate, is frank enough.
After he had been thus holding forth on ruin, past, present, and to come, for half an hour or so, it seems to have occurred to the landlord that the company upstairs were drinking very little for so large a concourse, and he accordingly forced his way through the crowd, up the staircase, and along the passage into the dining-room. Cobbett had already cast an unfavourable eye upon that licensed victualler, and describes him as ‘one Sutton, a rich old fellow, who wore a round-skirted sleeved fustian waistcoat, with a dirty white apron tied round his middle, and with no coat on; having a look the eagerest and the sharpest that I ever saw in any set of features in my whole lifetime; having an air of authority and of mastership, which, to a stranger, as I was, seemed quite incompatible with the meanness of his dress and the vulgarity of his manners: and there being, visible to every beholder, constantly going on in him a pretty even contest between the servility of avarice and the insolence of wealth.’
The person who called forth this severe description having forced his way into the room, some one called out that he was causing an interruption, to which he replied that that was, in fact, what he had come to do, because all this speechifying injured the sale of his liquor! Can it be doubted that this roused all the lion in Cobbett’s breast? He first of all tells us that ‘the disgust and abhorrence which such conduct could not fail to excite produced, at first, a desire to quit the room and the house, and even a proposition to that effect. But, after a minute or so, to reflect, the company resolved not to quit the room, but to turn him out of it who had caused the interruption; and the old fellow, finding himself tackled, saved the labour of shoving, or kicking, him out of the room, by retreating out of the doorway, with all the activity of which he was master.’
WEYHILL FAIR
The speech at last finished, the company began to settle down to what Cobbett calls the ‘real business of the evening, namely, drinking, smoking, and singing.’ It was a Saturday night, and as there was all the Sunday morning to sleep in, and as the wives of the company were at a convenient distance, the circumstances were favourable to an extensive consumption of ‘neat’ and ‘genuine’ liquors. At this juncture the landlord announced, through the waiter, that he declined to serve anything so long as Mr. Cobbett remained in the room! This uncorked all the vials of wrath of which Cobbett had so large and bitter a supply. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘born and bred, as you know I was, on the borders of this county, and fond as I am of bacon, Hampshire hogs have with me always been objects of admiration rather than of contempt; but that which has just happened here induces me to observe that this feeling of mine has been confined to hogs of four legs. For my part, I like your company too well to quit it. I have paid this fellow six shillings for the wing of a fowl, a bit of bread, and a pint of small beer. I have a right to sit here; I want no drink, and those who do, being refused it here, have a right to send to other houses for it, and to drink it here.’
Mine host, alarmed at this declaration of independence, withdrew the prohibition, and indeed brought up pipes, tobacco, and the desired drinks himself; and soon after this entered the room with two gentlemen who had inquired for Mr. Cobbett, and laying his hand on Cobbett’s knee, smiled and said the gentlemen wished to be introduced. ‘Take away your paw,’ thundered the agitator, shaking the strangers by the hand; ‘I am happy to see you, even though introduced by this fellow.’ After which they all indulged in the English equivalent of the Scotch ‘willie waucht’ until half-past two in the morning.
‘But,’ remarks Cobbett, as a parting shot, ‘the next time this old sharp-looking fellow gets six shillings from me for a dinner, he shall, if he choose, cook me, in any manner that he likes, and season me with hand so unsparing as to produce in the feeders thirst unquenchable.’
Weyhill Fair, which brought Cobbett and the people he harangued into Andover, is a thoroughly old English institution, and although the old custom of fairs is gradually dying out, and this, the Largest Fair in England, is not so important as it was a hundred years ago, it is still a place where much money changes hands once a year. Weyhill is supposed to be one of the places mentioned in Piers Plowman’s Vision, in the line:—
At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair,
and it is the ‘Weydon Priors’ of the Mayor of Casterbridge, where Henchard sells his wife.
Weyhill Fair was once—in the fine fat days of agricultural prosperity, when England was always at war with France, and corn was dear—a six-days fair. As the ‘oldest inhabitant’ to be discovered nowadays at Weyhill will complain, shaking his head sadly the while, ‘There warn’t none o’ them ’ere ’sheenery fal-lals about in them days to do the wark o’ men and harses so’s no-one can’t get no decent living like, d’ye see?’ If by ‘’sheenery,’ you understand mechanical appliances—‘machinery,’ in fact—to be meant, you will see how distrustfully the agricultural mind still marches to the modern quick-step of progress. There is always plenty of machinery on view at Weyhill Fair: ploughs and harrows, and such like inanimate things, and machinery in motion; steam threshers, winnowers, binders, and the like, threshing, and winnowing, and binding the empty air.
‘JOHNNY’S SO LONG AT THE FAIR’
There are special days set apart—and more or less rigorously observed—for Hiring, for Pleasure, for the Hop Fair, and for the sale of sheep. This great annual fixture begins on Old Michaelmas Eve, 10th October, and lasts four days, as against the six days, that were all too short in which to do the business, up to fifty years ago. Railways have dealt the old English institution of fairs a deadly blow all over the country, and before many more years have gone the majority of them will be things of the past. Their reason for existing will then be quite gone, even as it is now going. Before railways came into being the farmer travelled little, and his men not at all. From one year’s end to the other they probably never saw a town beyond their nearest marketing centre, and they certainly never made the acquaintance of London. So, since the farmer and his men, the mistress and her maids, could not get about to buy, it follows that those who had goods to sell had need to take all the advantage possible of that great and glorious institution, the Fair.
Bitterly disappointed in the old days were those who, from some reason or another, were prevented from coming to this Promised Land of gay and glittering stalls and booths. Jolly and convivial, on the other hand, were those who had the luck to be able to come. ‘Oh, dear! what can the matter be? Johnny’s so long at the Fair,’ commences an old country song. We can guess pretty well what the matter was, just as certainly as if we had been there ourselves. Johnny, of course, had got too much cider, or strong, home-brewed October ‘humming ale’ into him, and, as the rustics would put it, ‘couldn’t stir a peg, were’t ever so.’ And so the girl he left behind him at the farmhouse had need of all the patience at her command while she waited for his return. She probably didn’t much care—for Johnny’s sake; rather for another reason. As thus:—
He promised he’d buy me a fairing to please me;
A bunch of blue ribbons to tie up my bonny brown hair.
It was the blue ribbons she wanted, you see. Let us, dear friends, hope she got them.
Many dangers threatened the Johnnies—the Colin Clouts of that time. The fair was the happy hunting-ground of Sergeant Kite, who used to treat the dull-witted fellows until they were stupid as owls, when, hey presto! the Queen’s Shilling was clapped into their nerveless palms, and they woke the next morning to find themselves duly enlisted, with a bunch of parti-coloured ribbons fixed in their hats as a token and badge of their military servitude. Then ‘what price’ those blue ribbons lying forgotten in the pocket for the disconsolate fair one? Nothing under a fine of twenty pounds sterling sufficed to release a recruit in those days, and as few families could then afford that ransom, the fair was a turning-point in the career of many a lusty fellow.
The recruiting sergeant still does a little business at Weyhill, but his claws are nowadays cut very close.
Weyhill, as you approach it, is situated, much to your surprise, not on a hill at all, but rather on the flat. It is a mere nothing of a village, and beyond the parish church, the inevitable inn, and the equally inevitable farmhouse, houses are very much to seek.
THE HORSE FAIR
The stranger who happens upon the place at any other than fair time is astonished by the large numbers of open sheds and the numerous clusters of long, low, thatched, and white-washed cottages, situated on a wide, open, grassy common beside the road, all empty, and every one bearing boldly-painted announcements, in black paint, of ‘Hot Dinners,’
‘Refreshments,’ and the like. The stranger might be excused if he thought this some bankrupt settlement whose vanished inhabitants, like the people of that mythical place who ‘eked out a precarious existence by taking in one another’s washing,’ had lived on selling refreshments to each other until they had finally all died of indigestion. He would be very much mistaken, however, in his surmise, for this is Weyhill Fair-ground in undress. If you wish to see it in full swing, you must visit the spot between 10th and 13th October, when it is lively enough.
The first day is the Sheep Fair. As many as 150,000 sheep have been sold here on this day. The Horse Fair is held every day; and an astonishing number and variety of horses there are too. Irish horses, brought all the way from Cork, Scotch horses, Welsh horses; every kind of horse, from the Suffolk Punch to the New Forest Pony. Great lumbering young cart-horses stand behind their pens with manes and tails plaited to wonderment with straw, for all the world like beauties dressed for the County Ball, and just as proud and self-conscious. Do you want to buy a horse of any kind at the Fair? Then don’t!—unless, indeed, you know all that is to be known about horses, and a bit over; otherwise the dealer will ‘have’ you, for a dead certainty. To see them showing off a horse’s good qualities and hiding his bad ones is a liberal education, but see that you acquire your knowledge at some one else’s expense. With this determination you can afford to be well amused with the waving of coloured flags on long sticks, by which the horses are made to pirouette before the eyes of likely purchasers, and can safely smile at the wily dealer’s exclamations of ‘There’s blood!’ ‘Get up, my beauty!’ and ‘Here’s the quality!’
The very pick of the horseflesh, however, does not reach Weyhill. The dealers bring their stock with them by road from Milford, Holyhead, Scotland, at the rate of ten miles a day, and as they thus have to come a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, the journey takes from ten days to a fortnight. This would be a serious expense and loss of time were it not for the fact that dealers always look to make sales along the road.
The second day of the Fair is known as Mop Fair, or Molls’ and Johns’ Day. Its official title is the Hiring, or Statute Fair. At twelve o’clock, mid-day, farm-servants, men or women, ‘Molls’ or ‘Johns,’ leave their employ, and, drawing their wages, offer themselves to be hired for the coming twelvemonth. They stand in long lines, the carters with a length of plaited whipcord in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool, and wait while the farmers come and bargain with them. When they have struck up an agreement, the men proceed to fix coloured ribbons in their hats, and do their best to have a merry time with the wages they have just received.
MINOR TRADES
There is certainly every opportunity of spending money on the spot. Steam merry-go-rounds keep up a continual screeching and bellowing; stalls with all manner of toys and nick-nacks of the most grotesque shapes and hideous colouring; cake and sweetmeat stalls, loaded, as Weyhill stalls have been from time immemorial, with Salisbury gingerbread; Aunt Sallies; try-your-strength machines, and a hundred others compete for the rustic’s coin. Then, if he wants a new suit of clothes, here is the clothier’s stall, where Hodge can bespeak a suit, wear it during the next twelve months, and pay for it next Fair, just as his father and grandfather used to do before him. All the booths visited, the horse medicines stall inspected, the latest improvements in agricultural machinery gaped at, Hodge repairs to the refreshment hovels, wherein certain crafty men who have come down for the occasion from London are awaiting him, to treat the unsuspecting yokel to drinks, to lure him on to play cards, and finally to cheat him and pick his pockets in the most finished and approved fashion. For these gentry, and for the disorderly in general, there is a police-station on the ground, with cells all complete, and with local magistrates every morning to hear cases, and to consign prisoners, if necessary, to Winchester Gaol, sixteen miles away.
The third and fourth days are now given up to the Pleasure and Hop Fairs. One of the smaller trades connected with the malting and general agricultural industries is that of malt-shovel and barn-shovel making. These are wooden shovels of a peculiar shape, and are sold only at one stall. Another of the minor businesses is that of umbrella selling. The umbrellas are very fine and large, and of a kind that would make a marked man of any Londoner who should use one in town.
The Cheese Fair is now a small one, dealings generally being confined to local folks, who delight in the Blackmore and ‘Blue Vinney’ cheeses of this and the adjoining counties. London dealers still attend the Hop Fair, in which many thousands of pounds’ worth of hops change hands to the drinking of much champagne, brought on to the ground by the cart-load, as in the brave days of yore. There are two distinct hop markets, the Farnham Row and the Country Side. Hops from Farnham, Bentley, Petersfield, Liphook, and other neighbouring places find a ready market. They are sold more exclusively by sample than formerly, and so only a few ‘pockets,’ as the tightly packed sacks are named, are visible. Round them dealers may be seen, rubbing the hops in their hands and smelling them with a knowing look, while the vendor cuts another sample out of the pocket for the next likely customer. He does this with a singular steel instrument called a ‘sample drawer.’ First a sharp and long-bladed knife is thrust into the hard mass, and two sides cut, and then the broad-bladed ‘drawer’ driven in and screwed tight, bringing out a compact square of hops to be tested.
By nine o’clock every night all the booths and stalls have to be closed, and stillness reigns over the scene, save for the cough of the sheep, the occasional lowing of the cattle, or the fretful whinnying of a wakeful horse. And when the last day of the Fair is done, the booths are all shut up and deserted, and desolation reigns again for a year.
ABBOT’S ANN
The trail of the Romans is over all the surroundings of Andover, and they must have loved this fishful and fertile valley well, for ample relics of extensive settlements and gorgeous villas have been unearthed by the plough. Some of the fine mosaic pavements discovered here are now in the British Museum, and every now and again the shepherd or the ploughman picks up a worn and battered coin of the C?sars in the neighbouring fields. One of the finest Roman pavements came from the village of Abbot’s Ann, a short distance away, under the shadow of the great bulk of Bury Hill, which, crowned with prehistoric earthworks of cyclopean size, frowns down upon the valley. The whimsical name of this village and that of Little Ann derive from the stream, the Ann, or Anton, on whose banks they are situated.
In this village of Abbot’s Ann there still prevails a remarkable custom. On the death of a young unmarried person of the parish, his or her friends and relatives make a funeral garland, or chaplet, similar to the one sketched overleaf, in paper, and hang it from the ceiling of the church. The interior of the building now holds quite a number of these singular mementoes, the oldest dating back to the last century. They are fashioned of cardboard and white paper, something in the shape of a crown, with elaborately cut rosettes and with five paper gloves suspended, on two of which are recorded the name, the age, and the date of death of the deceased whose memory is thus kept alive, while the other three are inscribed with texts or verses from favourite hymns. The particulars of age and death are repeated on a little wooden shield above.
Image unavailable: FUNERAL GARLAND, ABBOT’S ANN.
FUNERAL GARLAND, ABBOT’S ANN.
During the last eight years three of these memorials have been added. They are placed here after having been carried in front of the coffin on the day of the funeral. On such occasions the garland is carried by two girls, dressed in white, with curiously folded handkerchiefs on their heads. There is now only one other place in England, at Matlock, in Derbyshire, where this curious custom survives.
THE WALLOPS
These villages, together with Amport, Thruxton, Monxton, and East Cholderton, lie in the triangular district between the branching of the two great routes of the road to Exeter. Just out of Andover, on the rising road, stands the old toll-house that commanded either route, with the mileage to various towns still displayed prominently on its walls. The right-hand road leads to the Weyhill and Amesbury branch of the Exeter Road, while the left-hand fork is the main road to Salisbury. Passing this toll-house, the old road runs through an inhospitable succession of uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike to mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or drive a horse, or urge forth your wild career on a motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is chiefly a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover behind, and it is not until ‘the Wallops’ are reached, at Little (or Middle) Wallop, lying in a hollow where a little stream trickles across the road, that any relief is experienced.
It must be Little Wallop to which Mr. Thomas Hardy refers in the Mayor of Casterbridge, where the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after taking up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes employed at a ‘pastoral farm near the old western highway.... He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.’
The Wallops are interesting places, despite their silly name. There are Over, and Nether, and Middle, or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper, Lower, and Little Wallop. According to one school of antiquaries (who must by no means be suspected of joking), the Wallop district is to be identified with the ‘Gualoppum’ described by an old chronicler, a district, appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in which Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There are, of course, local derivations of the meaning of this place-name, together with a belief that to Sir John Wallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth, who ‘walloped the French’ in one or other of our many medi?val battles with that nation, we owe that very active, not to say slangy verb, ‘to wallop.’ But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a little stream, called the Wallop, flowing through these villages, to which they owe their generic name; the name of the stream itself deriving from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Weallan,’ to boil or bubble; the root of our English word ‘well.’
Of these villages, Little Wallop alone is on the road, and is merely an offshoot of the others, called into existence by the traffic which followed this course in the old coaching days. Since railways have left the roads lonely it has simply slumbered, ‘far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,’ and its inhabitants are presumably happy in their retirement; although, when days are short and nights are long, and the stormy winds do blow, it is quite conceivable that there are more cheerful and warmer situations.
Three miles from here the road leaves Hampshire and enters Wilts, and two miles onwards from that point, after passing ‘Lobcombe Corner,’ the junction of the Stockbridge road, is seen that famous old coaching inn, the ‘Pheasant,’ known much better under its other name, ‘Winterslow Hut.’
HAZLITT
There are few more desolate and cheerless places in England than the spot where this old coaching inn stands beside the open road, with the unenclosed downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold after fold. Somewhere amid these hills and hollows, but quite hidden, is the village of West Winterslow, from which the ‘Hut’ obtains its name. The place, save for the periodical passing of the coaches, was as solitary in old times as it is now, and its quiet as profound. The very name is chilling, and as excellently descriptive as it is possible for a name to be.
When, coming within sight of its isolated roof-tree from the summit of the hills on either side, the coach-guards used to blow fanfares on their bugles as a reminder for the ostler to have his fresh teams ready, the inn and its surrounding stables woke into life, and when they were gone their several ways, it dozed again. Save that it doubtless looked more prosperous then, the present appearance of ‘Winterslow Hut’ is identical with its aspect of sixty years ago. The same horse-pond by the roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same prehistoric dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no traveller, the emptiness is appalling.
To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic and essayist, during several years, for quietude. For four years, from 1808 to 1812, he and his wife lived in a cottage at West Winterslow, on the small income derived from her other cottage property there, supplemented by the sums the wayward Hazlitt earned fitfully by the practice of literature. Then they removed to London, where they disagreed, Hazlitt retiring to the ‘Hut’ in 1819, and leaving his wife in town. Nervous and irritable, he wanted quiet, nor can it be doubted that in this spot he found what he sought. He was cursed, according to the widely different beliefs of his friends, with ‘an ingrained selfishness,’ or ‘a morbid self-consciousness,’ and oil the downs he would walk, for the pleasure of having the neighbourhood all to himself, from forty to fifty miles a day. He wrote his Winterslow essays here, and his Napoleon, for whom he had an almost insane reverence. The ‘diabolical scowl’ of Hazlitt when Napoleon or any other of his pet susceptibilities were abused must have been worth seeing.
‘Now,’ says a literary hero-hunter, who has visited ‘Winterslow Hut,’ as a place of pilgrimage,—‘now it is a desolate place, fallen into decay, and tenanted by a labouring man and his family, cultivating a small farm of some thirty acres, and barely able to make a living out of it. In winter two or three weeks will sometimes elapse without even a beggar or tramp or cart passing the door. On the ground floor, looking out upon a horse-pond, flanked by two old lime-trees, is a little parlour, which was the one probably used by Hazlitt as his sitting-room. At the other end of the house is a large empty room, formerly devoted to cock-fighting matches and singlestick combats. It was with a strange and eerie feeling that I contemplated this little parlour, and pictured to myself the many solitary evenings during which Hazlitt sat in it enjoying copious libations of his favourite tea (for during the last fifteen years of his life he never tasted alcoholic drinks of any kind) perhaps reading Tom Jones for the tenth time, or enjoying
A LITERARY RECLUSE
Image unavailable: ‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’
‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’
one of Congreve’s comedies, or Rousseau’s Confessions, or writing, in his large flowing hand, a dozen pages of the essay on Persons one would Wish to have Seen, or On Living to One’s Self. One cannot imagine any retreat more consonant with the feelings of this lonely thinker, during one of his periods of seclusion, than the out-of-the-world place in which I stood. In winter time it must have been desolate beyond description—on wild nights especially—“heaven’s chancel-vault” blind with sleet—the fierce wind sweeping down from the bare wolds around, and beating furiously against the doors and windows of the unsheltered hostelry.’
It is not to be supposed that Hazlitt was insensible to the dreariness of the spot. ‘Here, even here,’ he says, as though the dolour of the place had come home to him, ‘with a few old authors I can manage to get through the summer or winter months without ever knowing what it is to feel ennui. They sit with me at breakfast; they walk out with me before dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented tracts, after starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven rustling above my head, or being greeted by the woodman’s “stern good-night,” as he strikes into his narrow homeward path, I can “take mine ease at mine inn,” beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I have.’
His Farewell to Essay Writing was written here 20th February 1828. He had long given up the intemperance of former years, and cultivated literature on copious tea-drinking. ‘As I quaff my libations of tea in a morning,’ he says, ‘I love to watch the clouds sailing from the west, and fancy that “the spring comes slowly up this way.” In this hope, while “fields are dank, and ways are mire,” I follow the same direction to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the dry, level greensward, I can see my way for a mile before me, closed in on each side by copse-wood, and ending in a point of light more or less brilliant, as the day is bright or cloudy.’ And so this harbinger of our own literary neurotics continues, dropping into a morbid introspective strain, pulling up his soul, like a plant, by the roots, to see how it is growing, and babbling to the world, between the jewel-work of his literature, of his follies and his unrest. Strange, that this wiry pedestrian, this apostle of fresh air, should be of the same dough of which the degenerates of our time are compounded.
It was here, however, that one of the most thrilling episodes of the road was enacted in the old days. The Mail from Exeter to London had left Salisbury on the night of 20th October 1816, and proceeded in the usual way for several miles, when what was thought to be a large calf was seen trotting beside the horses in the darkness. The team soon became extremely nervous and fidgety, and as the inn was approached they could scarcely be kept under control.
AN ESCAPED LIONESS
At the moment when the coachman pulled up to deliver his bags, one of the leading horses was suddenly seized by the supposed calf. The horses kicked and plunged violently, and it was with difficulty the driver could prevent the coach from being overturned. The guard drew his blunderbuss and was about to shoot the mysterious assailant when several men, accompanied by a large mastiff, appeared in sight. The foremost, seeing that the guard was about to fire, pointed a pistol at his head, swearing that he would be shot if the beast was killed.
Every one then perceived that this ferocious ‘calf’ was nothing less than a lioness. The dog was set on to attack her, and she thereupon left the horse and turned on him. He turned and ran, but the lioness caught him and tore him to pieces, carrying the remains in her mouth under a granary. The spot was then barricaded to prevent her escape, and a noose being thrown over her neck, she was secured and marched off to captivity again.
It is said that the horse when attacked fought with great spirit, and would probably have beaten off his assailant with his fore-feet had he been at liberty; but in his frantic plunges he became entangled in the harness. The lioness, it seems, attacked him in front, springing at his throat and fastening the claws of her fore-feet on either side of the neck, while her hind-feet tore at his chest. The horse, although fearfully mangled, survived. The showmen of the time were evidently quite as enterprising as those of these latter days, for the menagerie proprietor purchased the horse and exhibited him the next day at Salisbury Fair, with excellent results in the shape of increased gate-money.
The passengers on this extraordinary occasion were absolutely terror-stricken. Bounding off the coach, they made a wild rush for the inn, and, reaching the door, slammed it to and bolted it, to the exclusion of one poor fellow who, not active enough, found himself shut out in the road. The lioness, pursuing the dog, actually brushed against him. When she was secured, the poltroons inside the house opened the door and let the half-fainting traveller in. They gave him refreshments, and he recovered sufficiently to be able to write an account of the event for the local papers; but in a few days he became a raving maniac, and was sent to an asylum at Laverstock. For over twenty-seven years he lived there, incurable, and died in 1843.
The leader attacked by the lioness was a famous horse, even before that affair. There were many such in the coaching age. Animals unmanageable on the racecourse were frequently sold to coach-proprietors, and soon learnt discipline on the roads. ‘Pomegranate’ was his name. A ‘thief’ on the course, and a bad-tempered brute in the stable, he had worked on the Exeter Mail for some time before this dramatic episode in his career found him, for a time, a home in a menagerie.
SALISBURY
The fame of the affair was great and lasting. That coaching specialist, James Pollard, drew, and R. Havell engraved, a plate showing the dramatic scene, which was dedicated to Thomas Hasker, Superintendent of His Majesty’s Mails. In it you see Joseph Pike, the guard, rising to shoot the very heraldic-looking lioness, and the passengers encouraging him in the background, from the safe retreat of the first-floor windows. It will be observed that this is apparently the lioness’s first spring, and yet those passengers are already upstairs: at once a striking testimony to their agility and a warranty of the exquisite truth of the saying that fear lends wings to the feet.
Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be believed.
Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of modernity that quite belies its age. Few places in England have so well-ascertained an origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet, although there is the cathedral to prove its age, with the Poultry Cross, and very many ancient houses happily still standing, it has a general air of anything but medi?valism. This curious feeling that strikes every visitor is really owing to the generous and well-ordered plan on which the city was originally laid out; broad streets being planned in geometrical precision, and the blocks of houses built in regular squares.
That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, thought Salisbury ‘a very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city’—a view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish I could tell you to which inn it was that he resorted to have dinner, and to await the arrival of Martin. A coaching inn, of course, for Martin came by coach from London. But whether it was the ‘White Hart,’ or the ‘Three Swans’ (which, alas! is no longer an inn), or the ‘King’s Arms,’ or the ‘George,’ is more than I or any one else can determine.
NEW SARUM
Salisbury is by no means desperate or dissipated, even though it be market-day, and although itinerant cutlery vendors may still sell seven-bladed knives, with never a cut among them, to the unwary. It is true that Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us, in On the Western Circuit, a picture of blazing orgies at Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he should have been; and it is true that by ‘Melchester’ this fair city of Salisbury is meant; but you can conjure up no very accurate picture of this ancient place from those pages. The real Salisbury is extremely urbane and polished, decorous and well-ordered. It is graceful and sunny, and has, in fact, all the sweetness of medi?valism without its sternness, and affords a thorough contrast with Winchester, which frowns upon you where Salisbury smiles. One need not waver from one’s allegiance to Winchester to admit so much.
Salisbury is still known in official documents as ‘New Sarum.’ It is, nevertheless, of a quite respectable antiquity, its newness dating from that day, 28th April 1220, when Bishop Poore laid the foundation-stone of the still existing cathedral. There are romantic incidents in the exodus from Old Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile and a half away, to these ‘rich champaign fields and fertile valleys, abounding with the fruits of the earth, and watered by living streams,’ in this ‘sink of Salisbury Plain,’ where the Bourne, the Wylye, the Avon, and the Nadder flow in innumerable runlets through the meads.
Old Sarum was old indeed. Its history strikes rootlets deep down into the Unknown. A natural hillock upon the wild downs, its defensible position rendered it a camp for the earliest aboriginal tribes, who, always at war with one another, lived for safety’s sake in such bleak and inhospitable places when they would much rather be hunting and enjoying life generally in the sheltered wooded vales and fertile plains. These tribes heaped up the first artificial earthworks that ever strengthened this historic hill, and they were succeeded during the long march of those dim centuries by Romans, Saxons, and Danes. The Romans, with their unerring military instinct, saw the importance of the hill, and added to the simple defences they found there. They called the place Sorbiodunum, and made it a great strategic station. The Saxons strengthened the fortifications in their turn, and at the time of the Norman Conquest a city had grown up under the shelter of the citadel.
In its deserted state to-day, the site of Old Sarum vividly recalls the appearance presented by an extinct volcano, the conical hill rising from the downs with the suddenness of an upheaval, and the area enclosed within the concentric rings of banks and ditches forming a hollow space similar to a crater. The total area enclosed within these fortifications is about 28 acres. Within this space was comprised that ancient city, and in its very centre, overlooking everything else, and encompassed by a circular fosse and bank, 100 feet in height, stood the citadel. The site of this castle is now overgrown with dense thickets of shrubs and brambles; the fragments of its flint and rubble walls, 12 feet thick, and some remaining portions of its gateways affording evidence of its old-time strength.
OLD SARUM
Within this city, enclosed for centuries by the ring-fence of these fortifications, stood the cathedral, in a position just below the Castle ward. Its exact site and size (although not a fragment of it is standing) were discovered in the summer of 1834. That portion of the vanished city had been laid down as pasture, and the drought of that year revealed the plan of the cathedral, in a distinct brown outline upon the grass. This building, completed in 1092 by Bishop Osmund, furnished the stone in later years for the spire of Salisbury Cathedral and for the walls of the Close, in which, by St. Anne’s Gate, many sculptured fragments of these relics from Old Sarum may yet be seen.
A variety of circumstances brought about the removal of the cathedral from Old Sarum. Water was lacking on that height, and winds raged so furiously around it that the monks could not hear the priests say Mass; and, worse than all, during the Papal Interdict, the King, in revenge for many ecclesiastical annoyances, transferred the custody of the Castle of Old Sarum from the bishops to his own creatures, who locked the monks out of their monastery and church on one occasion when they had gone on some religious procession. When the monks returned, they found entrance denied them, and were forced to remain in the open air during the whole of a frosty winter night. There was no end to the hardships which those Men of Wrath brought upon the Church. No wonder that Peter of Blois cried out, ‘What has the House of the Lord to do with castles? It is the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple of Baalim. Let us in God’s name descend into the plain.’
The removal decided upon, it remained to choose a site. Tradition tells us that the Virgin Mary appeared to Bishop Poore in a vision, and told him to build the church on a spot called Merryfield; and has it that the site was chosen by the fall of an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old Sarum. If that was the case, there must have been something miraculous in that shot, for the place where Salisbury Cathedral is built is a mile and a half away from those ramparts. But perhaps the bishop or the legends used the long bow in a very special sense.
The cathedral was completed in sixty years, receiving its final consecration in 1260; but the great spire was not finished until a hundred years later. The city was an affair of rapid growth, receiving a charter of incorporation seven years after being founded. Seventeen years later, Bishop Bingham dealt a final blow at the now utterly ruined city of Old Sarum by diverting the old Roman road to the West from its course through Old Sarum, Bemerton, and Wilton, and making a highway running directly to New Sarum, and crossing the Avon by the new bridge which he had built at Harnham. Old Sarum could by this time make little or no resistance, for it was deserted, save for a few who could not bring themselves to leave the home of their forefathers. Wilton, however, which was a thriving town, bitterly resented this diversion of the roads, and petitioned against it, but without avail. From that date Wilton’s decline set in, and the rise of New Sarum progressed at an even greater speed. A clothing trade sprang up and prospered, and many Royal visits gave the citizens an air of importance. They waxed rich and arrogant, and were eternally
THE MARTYRS
Image unavailable: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).
SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).
quarrelling with the bishops, one of whom they murdered in the turbulent times that prevailed during Jack Cade’s rebellion. Bishop Ayscough was that unfortunate prelate. He had cautiously retired to Edington, but a furious body of Salisbury malcontents marched out across the Plain, and dragging him from the altar of the church, where he was saying Mass, took him to an adjacent hill-top, and slew him with the utmost barbarity. It was for the benefit of these unruly citizens that one of Jack Cade’s quarters was consigned from London to Salisbury and elevated there on a pole, as a preliminary warning. Full punishment followed a little later.
It is really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story, which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution still stain the records of the Church; nor, although the very reading of them turn brain and body sick, and make even the architectural enthusiast almost turn away in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may God grant that they ever be forgotten, as in the England of to-day they would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity, damnable frauds, how they smirch those sculptured stones and cry insistently for remembrance!
Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry the Eighth, was alive to it all, and cleared away the false relics; the ‘stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets of wood,’ which he found here; but, with less courage than others, he recanted in Mary’s reign. Sherfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he lived in less dangerous times for such men. It was in 1629 that he smashed the stained-glass window, representing the Creation, in St. Edmund’s Church. In other times he would assuredly have been burnt for this act; as it was, he was summoned before the Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window did not contain a true history of the Creation, and objected that God was represented as ‘a little old man in a long blue coat,’ which he held was ‘an indignity offered to Almighty God.’ He was committed to the Fleet Prison for this, fined ￡500, and required to apologise to the Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate Mr. Sherfield!
MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS
This fair city has been almost as much of a Golgotha as the settlements of savage African kinglets are wont to be. Shakespeare has made mention of the execution of the Duke of Buckingham here in 1484 by Richard the Third, but many an one has suffered and left no such trace. That such executions were generally unjust and almost always too severe is their sufficient condemnation; but the hanging of Charles, Lord Stourton, in 1556, is an exception. The affair for which he was put to death was the murder of the two Hartgills, father and son, at Kilmington, Somerset, and it affords an unusually instructive glimpse into the manners of the period. It seems that William Hartgill had long been steward to the previous Lord Stourton, the father of Charles. Like most stewards, he had profited by his stewardship, over and above his salary, to a considerable extent. There was no friendship wasted between him and the new lord, but the quarrels which had taken place between William Hartgill and his son on the one side, and Charles, Lord Stourton, and his servants on the other, finally came to a head when my lord demanded a written undertaking from his mother that she would never marry again, and that Hartgill should be bond for the undertaking being kept. The widowed Lady Stourton was residing at the Hartgills’ house when this demand was made. She refused to have anything to do with such a paper, and Hartgill bluntly declined as well. Lord Stourton would then appear to have determined on revenge for this defeat, and eventually, after the Hartgills had been on several occasions waylaid, threatened, and attacked by his servants, he conceived the devilish plan of a pretended reconciliation over this and other disputes in the village churchyard of Kilmington, the occasion to be used as a means of taking them off their guard, and finally disposing of them. The two victims were suspicious of this apparent friendliness; but, unhappily for them, eventually agreed to meet in that God’s Acre, on 12th January 1556, there to settle all accounts and differences. They met, and, at a previously arranged signal, Lord Stourton’s servants rushed upon the Hartgills and stabbed and battered them to death in a revoltingly cruel manner, while their master looked on with approval. The details of this cold-blooded atrocity are fully set forth in the trials of that period, for the satisfaction of any one greedy of horrors.
THE DEVIL’S HEALTH
This was in the reign of Queen Mary, when Protestants were burned at the stake with the approval of Roman Catholics; but not even in those brutal times could this affair be hushed up. Lord Stourton was arrested, brought to trial in London, and, together with four of his servants, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. Justice was commendably swift. The two Hartgills had been done to death on the 12th of January, and on the second day of March in the same year my lord set out under escort from the Tower of London for Salisbury, the place of execution. The melancholy cavalcade came down the Exeter Road, the chief figure in it set astride a horse, with legs and arms pinioned. The first night they lay at Hounslow, the second at Staines, the third at Basingstoke, and thence to Salisbury, where, in the Market Place, on the morning of the 6th of March, they hanged him with a silken cord. His servants were turned off at the end of quite common hempen ropes, which doubtless did their business quite as neatly. The body of this prime malefactor, the organiser of the crime, was buried with much ceremony in the cathedral, but those of the lesser criminals were treated (we may suppose) with less reverence, because you may search the building in vain for tomb or epitaph to their memory. But—quaintest touch of all—the silken rope by which Lord Stourton swung was suspended here, over his tomb, where it remained for many a long year afterwards.
The next outstanding landmark in the way of executions is the hanging of a prisoner who had just been awarded a sentence when he threw a brickbat at the Chief Justice. His lordship was considerably damaged and for this assault pronounced sentence of death upon him. The execution took place at once, outside the Council House, the unfortunate man’s right hand being first struck off.
The Civil War did not result in anything very tragical for Salisbury, the operations in and around the city being quite unimportant. The ‘Catherine Wheel Inn,’ however, was the scene of much alarm among the superstitious, when, according to a gruesome story, the Cavaliers assembled there, having toasted the King and the Royal family, proceeded to drink the health of the Devil,—and the Devil appeared, the room becoming filled with ‘noisome fumes of sulphur, and a hideous monster, which was the Devil, no doubt,’ entering, and grabbing the giver of the toast, flying away with him out of the window.
Salisbury was the scene of Penruddocke’s rising for the King in 1655. He was a county gentleman, of Compton Chamberlayne, and with some others and a band of a hundred and fifty horsemen, rode into the city at four o’clock in the morning of 14th March. They seized the Judges of Assize in their beds, opened the doors of the prison, and imprisoned the judges in the place of the released convicts. Then, finding the citizens too timid to join them in their revolt against Cromwell, they sped across country, into Devon, where they were captured.
Charles the Second was welcomed by Salisbury’s citizens, just as they welcomed every one else; practising with much success St. Paul’s admirable precept, to be ‘all things to all men.’ When James the Second came here, on his way to meet, and fight, the Prince of Orange, he was escorted, with every show of deference and respect, to his lodgings at the Bishop’s Palace by the Mayor, and when he had slunk away, and the Prince came, less than four weeks later, and was lodged in the same house, the same Mayor did precisely the same thing.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century onward the citizens began to dearly love kings and great personages, or, if they did not love them, effectually pretended to do so. When plague ravaged the city of London, no one coming from that direction was allowed to enter Salisbury, and even Salisbury’s own citizens returning home from that infected centre were obliged to remain outside for three months, while goods were not permitted to be brought nearer than Three Mile Hill. But Charles the Second and his Court, flying from London from the disease, were welcomed all the same!
BRUTAL SCENES
Coach passengers entering Salisbury even so late as 1835 were sometimes witnesses of shocking scenes that, however picturesque they might have rendered medi?val times, were brutalising and degrading in a civilised era. Almost every year of the nineteenth century up to that date was fruitful in executions. In 1801 there were ten: seven for the crime of sheep-stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf, and one for highway robbery. The practice of hanging criminals on the scenes of their crimes afforded spectacles of the most extraordinary character, as instanced in the procession that accompanied two murderers, George Carpenter and George Ruddock, from Fisherton Gaol, on the north-west of the city, to the place of their execution on Warminster Down, 15th March 1813. Such parades were senseless, since no one ever dreamed of a rescue being attempted; but, all the same, the condemned men, placed in a cart and accompanied by a clergyman preaching of Kingdom Come, preceded by the hangman and followed by eight men carrying two coffins, were escorted all the way by a troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry, followed by some two hundred constables and local gentlemen, all walking and carrying white staves; with bailiffs, sheriffs, under-sheriffs, magistrates, a hundred mounted squires, a posse of ‘javelin men,’ more clergymen, the gaoler and his assistants, more javelin men and sheriff’s officers, more yeomanry, and, at last, bringing up the rear, a howling mob, numbering many thousands. As for the central objects in this show, ‘they died penitent,’ we are told; and indeed they could do nothing less, seeing to what trouble they had thus put a goodly proportion of the county.
Executions for all manner of crimes were so many that it would be idle to detail them; but some stand out prominently by reason of their circumstances. For example, the hanging of Robert Turner Watkins in 1819, for a murder near Purton, presents a lurid scene. His wife had died of a broken heart shortly after his arrest, and his mother was among the spectators of his end. The same kind of procession accompanied him across Salisbury Plain to the place of execution, and a similar mob made the occasion a holiday. Mother and son were able to bid one another farewell, owing to an unexpected halt on the road; and when they made a halt for the refreshments which the long journey demanded, the condemned man’s children were brought to him.
‘Mammy is dead,’ said one. ‘Ah!’ replied the man, ‘and so will your daddy be, shortly.’ At the fatal spot he prayed with the chaplain, and was allowed to read to the people a psalm which he had chosen. It was Psalm 108, which, on reference, will not prove to be particularly appropriate to the occasion. Then he blessed the fifteen thousand or so present, felt the rope, and remarked that it could only kill the body, and was turned off, amid the sudden and unexpected breaking of one of the most terrific thunderstorms ever experienced on the Plain.
HUMANE JURIES
They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801, for stealing a horse, and afterwards discovered that he was innocent, according to a monument still to be seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett suffered death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed in 1820 by William Lee, who died for the same offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for arson; but public opinion had already been aroused against such severity, judges and juries taking every advantage offered by faults in the drawing up of indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty of murder whose crimes were then met by capital punishment. The statutes left no choice but death for the convicted incendiary, the horse-or sheep-stealer, and many another; and so many a guilty person was acquitted by judges and juries horrified by the thought of incurring blood-guiltiness by sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed loopholes for escape, and so when the straw-rick, to which a prisoner was charged with setting fire, was proved to have been hay, he was found ‘Not guilty.’ Blackstone called this action taken by juries ‘pious perjury,’ and so it certainly was when, to avoid shedding blood, they used to find ￡5 and ￡10 notes which prisoners sometimes were charged with stealing, to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few shillings, according as the case required.
The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were enacted at the close of 1830, when the so-called ‘Machinery Riots,’ which had spread all over the country, culminated here in fights between the Wiltshire Yeomanry and the discontented agricultural labourers, who, fearing that steam machinery, then
Image unavailable: ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.
ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.
ALDERBURY
beginning to be adopted, was about to take away their livelihood, scoured the country in bands, wrecking and burning farmsteads and barns. The ‘Battle of Bishop Down,’ on the Exeter Road between ‘Winterslow Hut’ and Salisbury, was fought on 23rd November, and was caused by the collision of a large body of rioters who were marching to the city with the avowed object of pillaging it, and a mixed force of yeomanry and special constables. All the coaches, together with every other kind of traffic, were brought to a standstill. Stone-throwing on the part of the rioters, and bludgeoning by the special constables were succeeded by charges of the yeomanry, and the contest resulted in the capture of twenty-two rioters, who were locked up in Fisherton Gaol. The next day a number of rioters were surprised in the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ Alderbury, and marched off to prison; and the day after, twenty-five were taken in a fight near Tisbury, after one of their number had been killed. There were no fewer than three hundred and thirty prisoners awaiting trial when the Special Commissioners arrived for that purpose on 27th December. Many of the prisoners were transported, and others had short terms of imprisonment; but a leader, called ‘Commander’ Coote, who was captured by two constables at the Compasses, Rockbourn, was hanged at Winchester.
And now for some little-known literary landmarks. Salisbury, of course, is the scene of some passages in Martin Chuzzlewit; but it is outside the city that we must go, on the road to Southampton, to find the residence of that eminent architect, Mr. Pecksniff; or the ‘Blue Dragon,’ where Tom Pinch’s friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary’s Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name of Mr. Pecksniff’s home, but the house is only vaguely indicated in the novel. It is different with the ‘Blue Dragon,’ which is an undoubted portrait of the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ at Alderbury, despite the fact that the sign-board has since disappeared. ‘A faded, and an ancient dragon he was; and many a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a faint, lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind legs; waxing, with every month that passed, so much more dim and shapeless, that as you gazed on him at one side of the sign-board, it seemed as if he must be gradually melting through it, and coming out upon the other.’
The ‘Green Dragon’ is a quaint gabled village inn, standing back from the road. It is even more ancient than any one, judging only from its exterior, would suppose, for a fine fifteenth-century mantelpiece, adorned with carved crockets and heraldic roses, yet remains in the parlour, a relic of bygone importance.
As for Mrs. Lupin, the landlady, it is supposed that Dickens drew the character from a real person. If so, how one would like to have known that cheery woman. Do you remember how Tom Pinch left Salisbury to seek his fortune in London? and how Mrs. Lupin met the coach on the London road with his box in the trap, and a great basket of provisions, with a bottle of sherry sticking out of it? and how the open-handed fellow shared the cold roast fowl, the packet of ham in slices, the crusty loaf, and the other half-dozen items—not forgetting the contents of the bottle—with the coachman and guard as they drove along the old road to London through the night?
A WORD-PICTURE
‘Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burial-grounds about them, where graves are green, and daisies sleep—for it is evening—on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut slice by slice away, and showing in the waning light like ruined gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!’
Quite so. And an excellent picture of the coaching age, although ‘Yoho!’ smacks too much of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that word when he surely meant ‘Tallyho!’ Nor is this a correct portrait of the Exeter Road by any manner of means. Dickens, usually so precise in topographical details, has generalised here. A true and stirring picture of country roads in general, there are farms, and villages, and churches all too many for this highway. It should have been ‘Yoho! across the bleak and barren down. Yoho! by the blasted oak on the lonely common,’ and so forth, so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was that water-splash doing on a main road in the flower of the coaching age, when all the runnels and streams across the mail routes were duly bridged? But it is not very odd that Dickens should have been so inexact here, for he began Martin Chuzzlewit in 1843, and it was not until long after the book was published, in 1848, that he really explored the Exeter Road. Forster tells us that Dickens, in company with himself, Leech, and Lemon, stayed at Salisbury in the March of that year, and ‘passed a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s “Hut” at Winterslow.’
It must be obvious how exquisitely fitted, both by reason of its situation and circumstances, ‘Winterslow Hut’ is for the novelist’s use, and that, had he explored it before, that wild spot would have found a place in the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit, together with detailed references to some of Salisbury’s old coaching inns, of which there were many, this being a meeting-place of several roads, besides being on the great highway to the West.
VANISHED INNS
So far back as 1786 there were three coaches passing through Salisbury on their way from London to Exeter, daily. Firstly, the ‘Post Coach’ every morning at eight o’clock, with the up coach to London every afternoon at four o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Secondly, a mail coach, specially advertised as carrying a guard all the way, every morning at ten o’clock, Sundays excepted, and the up mail every night at ten o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Thirdly, a ‘Diligence,’ which passed through every night about eight o’clock, the up coach at twelve, midnight. All these coaches stopped, and were horsed, at the ‘White Hart.’ In 1797 there were five coaches to and from London, daily, and three on alternate days; and three waggons, two every day, the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
In those times, when highwaymen were numerous and daring and travellers appropriately anxious, stage-coach proprietors in Salisbury advertised the fact of their conveyances being provided with an armed guard, and that any one making an attempt at robbery would be handed over to justice. But, notwithstanding such bold announcements, all the friends and relatives of citizens daring the journey to London used to assemble on the London road and tearfully watch the coaches as they toiled up Bishop Down and over the crest of Three Mile Hill, into the Unknown. The spot is still called ‘Weeping Cross.’
Of the old Salisbury coaching inns, a goodly number have been either pulled down or converted to other purposes. The ‘King’s Head,’ the ‘Maidenhead,’ the ‘Sun,’ the ‘Vine,’ the ‘Three Tuns,’ and others have entirely disappeared; and the ‘Spread Eagle,’ the ‘Lamb,’ ‘Three Cups,’ ‘Antelope,’ and the ‘George’—where Pepys stayed and was overcharged—have become shops or private residences; while the beautiful old ‘Three Swans’ was converted into a Temperance Hotel five years ago.
There is a passage in Sir William Knighton’s Diary under date of 1832, which, although written without any special emphasis, is highly picturesque and informative on the subject of travelling at that time. It gives in one phrase a glimpse of the waiting-room which was a feature of all-coaching inns, and in another shows that it was possible to bargain for fares. Only in this instance the bargain was not struck.
He had come at half-past one in the morning into Salisbury by a cross-country coach, and waiting for the arrival of the mail to Exeter, ‘sat quietly by the fire in the common dirty room appropriated to coach passengers.’
For twenty minutes, he says, he had for companion a man who had just disengaged himself from an irritable rencontre with the coachman of the mail. He had waited from two o’clock in the afternoon to go on to Bristol, but when the time arrived he quarrelled with the coachman about whether he should pay nine shillings or twelve, the passenger insisting upon nine, the whip three shillings more; upon which the traveller decided not to go, returned to the coachroom, and ordered his bed. Sir William asked him if it really was worth while to lose the time and to pay for a bed at the inn over this unsuccessful negotiation, and to this the man replied that it was not. ‘In fact,’ said he, ‘we have both been taken in. The coachman thought I would pay, and I thought he would take my offer.’
It is a nine-miles journey, due north from Salisbury to Stonehenge, but although it would, under
PEPYS AT OLD SARUM
Image unavailable: VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD SARUM.
VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD SARUM.
other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope of this work to travel so far from the highway, we need have no compunction in making this trip, for it brings us to one of the most interesting places on the Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter—to Stonehenge, in fact, and passes by the wonderful terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old Sarum looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying houses of Salisbury, and if you come upon it when a storm is impending, as in Constable’s picture, the impression of size and strength created is one not soon to be forgotten. As to coming upon it in the dark, as Pepys did, the sight is awe-inspiring.
Time and place conspired to frighten him. ‘So over the Plain,’ he says, ‘by the sight of the steeple, to Salisbury by night; but before I came to the town, I saw a great fortification, and there alighted, and to it, and in it; and find it prodigious, so as to fright me to be in it all alone at that time of night, it being dark. I understand since it to lie that that is called Old Sarum.’
To climb the steep grassy ramparts, one after the other, and to descend into and climb out of the successive yawning ditches is a tiring exercise, but perhaps in no other way is it possible to gain anything like a proper idea of the strength of the place. Nor in there any more sure way of arriving at the relative scale of it than by observing the stray cyclist standing on the topmost ramparts and gazing toward the distant spire of Salisbury.
There are other things than ancient history that make Old Sarum memorable. It was the head and front of the electoral scandals that brought about the great Reform Act of 1832. Although it contained neither a single house nor an inhabitant, Old Sarum survived as a Parliamentary borough until that date, and regularly returned two members. Lord John Russell, introducing the Reform Bill to the House of Commons, remarked that Old Sarum was a green mound without a single habitation upon it, and like Gatton, also an uninhabited borough, returned two members, while great towns like Birmingham and Manchester were entirely without Parliamentary representation. The two members sent to Parliament were merely the nominees of the Lord of the Manor, elected by two dummy electors who, shortly after each dissolution of Parliament, were granted leases in the borough of Old Sarum—leases known as ‘burgage tenures.’ Their voting done, they quietly surrendered their leases, which were not granted again until a like occasion arose. The elections took place at the ‘Parliament Tree,’ which, until 1896 (when it was blown down in a snowstorm), stood in a meadow between the mound and the village of ‘Stratford-under-the-Castle.’ It was supposed to have marked the site of the Town Hall of the vanished town. Cobbett, riding horseback past the spot, anathematised this ‘rotten borough’ and the system that allowed such things. He calls it ‘The Accursed Hill.’ The only house standing near is the ‘Old Castle Inn.’
Beyond it the road dips steeply to the downs, and so continues, with regular undulations, unsheltered from storms or frosts, or the fierce heat of the summer sun, to Amesbury.
Image unavailable: OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).
OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).
AMESBURY
Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley between these downs. It was on the alternative coach route taken by the ‘Telegraph,’ ‘Celerity,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Subscription’ coaches, which, leaving Andover, came by Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, and ‘Park House Inn.’ This way came the ‘Telegraph’ coach on its journey to London, 27th December 1836, through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of which we find copious mention on every one of the classic roads. It began when they reached Wincanton, and from that place they struggled on up to the Plain, where it was a white world of scurrying snowflakes, howling winds, and deep drifts. Down into Amesbury, and to the hospitable ‘George’ there, was but a momentary respite, for the determined coachman, although immediately snowed up in the open country beyond the village, sent for help and, assisted by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of Andover, with that fortune which is said to favour the brave. That is to say, he and His Majesty’s mails got through to London, where the story was duly chronicled in the papers of the period.
Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless driving, and for endeavouring to take too much of the road; but the lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this description was correct, the matter dropped.