SHERBORNE
By W. B. Wildman, M.A.
HERBORNE, as far as we can tell, owes its existence as a town to the fact that it was chosen in 705 to be the site where the bishop-stool was fixed of St. Ealdhelm, the first bishop of Western or Newer Wessex. Sherborne, like its daughter-towns Wells and Salisbury, is a Bishop’s town; but, unlike them, it was also, from 998 to 1539, the seat of a Benedictine Monastery. Thus Sherborne has suffered two distinct shocks in its career; the first came upon it when it lost its bishop in 1075; the second, when its Abbey was dissolved in 1539.
Another point worth mentioning concerning the past dignity of the town is this, that Sherborne, or at any rate, a part of it—Newland—was once actually a borough, as was also what we may call the suburb of Castleton.
This part of Sherborne is still called the Borough of Newland; it was given burghal privileges by Richard Poore, Bishop of Sarum, in 1228, and, according to Hutchins, it actually sent members to the House of Commons in 1343. But long after Newland got rid of this then burdensome privilege it still kept the name and other privileges of a borough, and both it and Castleton were for administrative purposes outside the Hundred of Sherborne; they kept their own tourns twice a year, and their own courts every three weeks; they had their own view of frank-pledge quite apart from the rest of the town and Hundred. It is not known to what bishop Castleton owed its title and dignity of burgus.
When Sherborne came into being, the surrounding country bore a very different look from that which we see to-day. It lay on the western edge of the great forest of Selwood, a fragment of which still remains to us here in Sherborne Castle Park. There were then no trim water-meadows, and the course of our river was marked by moor and marsh. Here, in the last fold of the Wessex hills, under which lies the great plain of Somerset, Ealdhelm’s seat was fixed, in a site central and convenient for the new district, which had barely a quarter of a century before been added to the West Saxon realm.
Sherborne was never a walled town; it lay under the protection of the fortified palace of its bishop, and in troublous times of Danish inroad its site was a safe one. The story that Swegen ravaged the town rests on nothing like contemporary evidence; on the other hand, the safety of its position, coupled with the fact that it was once the second city of Wessex, accounts for its being chosen by King Æthelbald for his capital, so to speak, when Winchester, in 860, was laid waste by the Danes; indeed, the change may have taken place soon after 856. Sherborne continued to be the capital of Wessex till about the year 878. During a considerable part of that time we may well believe that King Alfred spent his boyhood here, almost certainly during King Æthelberht’s reign; and here, in this centre of education which Ealdhelm had founded, he may well have received such education as he got during his boyhood. There is no other centre of education which has so good a claim to him; here were buried his two brothers, Æthelbald and Æthelberht, who successively reigned before Æthelred and himself. Æthelberht was his guardian after his father’s death. Alfred must have known Sherborne well; he was a benefactor of our church, and we claim his boyhood.
Sherborne
Sherborne Abbey
Sidney Heath
But besides Alfred and Ealdhelm, early Sherborne claims other heroes; Ealhstan, our bishop, the first West Saxon general to win a decisive victory over the Danes, was the right-hand man of Kings Ecgberht, Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, and Æthelberht; he was the most powerful man of his time. Here, in Sherborne, he lies buried beside Æthelbald and Æthelberht.
We claim, too, among our Sherborne bishops, St. Heahmund, who fell fighting against the Danes at Merton (probably Marden, Wilts.); Asser, the biographer of King Alfred, who is said to lie buried among us; Werstan, another warrior who fell in battle; St. Wulfsy and St. Alfwold, names rather forgotten now, but great and famous in their day. St. Osmund, who compiled the Use of Sarum, was one of our abbots; and St. Stephen Harding, the author of the Carta Caritatis, and the real founder of the Cistercian Order, is the earliest scholar of Sherborne School whom History records as such.
Nor can Sherborne forget what it owes to the great Roger Niger, that dark, stalwart Bishop of Sarum, who built the Norman Castle here and the Norman part of our Abbey Church, who organized the English Court of Exchequer, was the trusted adviser of the “Lion of Justice,” Henry I., and deserved a better end than to break his heart in a contest with such a poor creature as King Stephen.
Our Abbot, William Bradford, will not be forgotten by lovers of architecture, for under his rule in the fifteenth century the choir of our Abbey Church was rebuilt; while to another Abbot, Peter Ramsam, we owe, later in the same century, the restoration of our nave. To Abbot Mere we are indebted for a little building, which every visitor to Sherborne knows, the Conduit, which stands in our old market-place, now called by the somewhat affected name of the “Parade.” This conduit, though it was built, as we have said, by Abbot Mere (1504-1535), is described by one of those omniscient gentlemen who have lately been enlightening us about the beauties of Wessex, as “a structure of the fourteenth century.” It originally stood on the north side of the nave of the Abbey Church, inside the Cloister Court, which is now a part of Sherborne School; but it was removed to its present site, or nearly its present site, by the school governors in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It is to this day the property of the school.
And so we are brought to the time when our ecclesiastical lords, the Bishop of Sarum and the Abbot of Sherborne, passed away from us, and their places were taken by lay lords. Here, too, we meet with famous names. We have the Protector Somerset, to whom, indirectly, Sherborne School may owe its post-Reformation endowment. We have, also, Henry, Prince of Wales, that “young Marcellus of the House of Stuart,” the eldest son of James I., whose hatchment, as that of a squire of Sherborne, still hangs in our Abbey Church; we have Walter Ralegh, that restless, strenuous soul, whose dearly-loved home Sherborne was, where he would gladly have been buried; we have John Digby, first Earl of Bristol, whose name stands high among those of English worthies in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and to have hazarded his all in a better cause. And another name insistently presents itself to anyone who has followed Sherborne history—that of Hugo Daniel Harper. To him Sherborne town and school owe much that is precious and enduring. That a little town like ours has kept something of its ancient state, that here we can still so easily call back the past of Wessex, can still see standing in beauty and dignity these buildings which the Middle Age has left us—all this is in no small degree owing to that famous headmaster of Sherborne School and to his successors.
We now proceed to write more particularly of the most interesting of these ancient buildings and institutions. They are four in number: the Abbey Church, the School, the old Castle, and the Almshouse.
With the exception of a small part of the west front of the Abbey Church, there is, so far as we can tell, not a single piece of wall standing now in Sherborne which was standing in the year 1107, when Roger of Caen became Bishop of Sarum and Abbot of Sherborne. We know that the doorway, now blocked up, on the north side of the west front of the church, and, therefore, also some of the adjoining wall, is older than Bishop Roger’s time; but with that exception, we are forced to admit that the Norman from Caen pulled down all the rest of Ealdhelm’s church. If he left any more of it, either time has destroyed this, or he so used the walls that they cannot now be recognised with any certainty. At the same time there is a piece of outside wall at the north end of the north transept, in the old slype, which looks very like pre-Norman work.
The church which Roger built extended as far east as the present church does, excluding the lady chapels; for the lady chapel of the thirteenth century must have abutted on the Norman east end, just as it now does on the Perpendicular ambulatory. The church extended probably rather further to the west than the present church does, for there exists evidence to show that, before the parish church of All Hallows was built on to the west end of the Abbey Church in the fourteenth century, the west front of the Abbey Church was embellished with a large porch of Norman work.
The chief traces of Roger’s work still existing in the church are the piers and arches that carry the tower, the transept walls, the arches leading from the transept into the side aisles of the nave, and the walls of these aisles. Other interesting traces of Roger’s work will be found in the little chapel which projects eastwards from the north transept; also in the south and west walls of the early English chapel on the north side of the north aisle of the choir, commonly called Bishop Roger’s Chapel, and now used as the vestry; these Norman walls were outside walls of Roger’s church before this early English addition was made. There is also the jamb of a window to be seen on the outside of the east wall of the south transept, the only relic which gives us an idea of what the Norman clerestory was like.
The choir of Roger’s church extended west of the central tower, and to allow room for the stall-work, the shafts of the east and west tower arches were corbelled off above the line of the stalls, as may still be seen in the existing church. That part of the Abbey nave which lay to the west of the Norman choir was used, until the building of All Hallows, as the parish church; and the fine Norman south porch, which has been rather over-restored in the nineteenth century, was, no doubt, a parochial porch, for it faces the town, not the monastic buildings, which are on the north side of the church.
The tower up to the floor of the bell-chamber is Norman. Over the pier-arches which carry it, except on the east side, there is a passage in the thickness of the wall, with an arcade of semi-circular arches resting on circular and octagonal shafts, eleven inches in diameter. On the east side the Norman pier-arch was removed at the rebuilding of the choir in the fifteenth century, and the removal of this arch so weakened the tower that its condition in the course of years became dangerous. The tower was made secure in 1884-5, and these shafts on the north-west and south sides of the lantern, which had been concealed by the fifteenth century masonry, were again displayed to view.
A large lady chapel was added in the thirteenth century; the fine Early English arch, by which it was entered from the church, may still be seen in the east wall of the ambulatory. The centre of this arch is to the south of that of the fifteenth century arch, and hence the corbels of the Perpendicular vaulting do not correspond at all with the Early English arch; one of them is actually constructed to hang as a pendant, free of this arch altogether.
The changes made inside the church in the fourteenth century were so slight as to need no mention. Outside the church, however, a great change took place, for towards the end of this century the church of All Hallows was built. The great west porch was pulled down so that All Hallows might stand directly against the west front of the Norman church. There are still to be seen remnants of All Hallows, viz., the lower part of the north wall of the north aisle, and four responds built into the west wall of the Abbey Church. When All Hallows was standing with its pinnacled western tower, one would have seen a church some 350 feet long, with a central and a western tower. This latter tower had a ring of bells of its own, at least five in number; and it was to this ring of the parish, not to the Abbey, that Wolsey gave our great bell.
In the fifteenth century Sherborne saw great things in the way of building; not only was the Almshouse then built, but the church also underwent those changes which gave it the appearance it keeps to-day. The choir was taken down during the last year or two of Abbot John Brunyng’s rule, and rebuilt from the ground by his successor, William Bradford (1436-1459). During this same century the smaller lady chapel, called the Bow Chapel, was built, and the nave restored in the style of the time by Abbot Peter Ramsam (1475-1504). To these two men we owe our present splendid fabric. Any visitor to Sherborne Abbey can for himself easily perceive the differences which mark off the choir as a building from the nave. The choir from floor to vault is one harmonious piece of work, so lovely, so complete, that the wit of man could scarcely design anything finer; while the nave is a compromise, for in the nave yet stand the old Norman piers cased in Perpendicular panelling, and the effect which the nave gives us is that of two stories distinctly marked off the one from the other, the lower story bearing strong traces of its Norman origin, the upper or clerestory plainly a Perpendicular work, and worthy of the companion clerestory of the choir. The pillars of the southern arcade of the nave are not opposite those of the northern arcade, and the arches are of different widths; the clerestory arches of the nave, on the other hand, are of equal widths, and hence the clerestory arches are not directly above the arcade arches. This compromise has, however, been effected so cleverly that few people notice the irregularity.
The rebuilding of the Abbey Church choir in the fifteenth century recalls to our mind the great quarrel between the Abbey and the townsfolk, which came to a head in the year 1437. It has already been noted that in ancient times the townsfolk had been allowed by the Abbot and Convent to use the western part of the Abbey Church nave as a parish church. Thus the Abbey Church had become a divided church—part was conventual, part parochial. But as time went on this arrangement ceased to please one or other, or both, parties, and the consequence was that All Hallows was built at the west end of the Abbey Church for the use of the parishioners. After this addition was made, the large Norman doorway at the west end of the south aisle of the Abbey Church nave was narrowed by the insertion of a smaller doorway. Now, All Hallows had not the status of a parish church; technically, the parish church was still the western part of the Abbey Church nave, and here it was still necessary for all Sherborne children to be baptised in the font, which originally stood where the present font stands. The parishioners, to get to the font, had to enter All Hallows’ Church, and pass thence into the Abbey Church through the Norman doorway, which had been narrowed. This the parishioners regarded as a grievance. It appears, also, that the Abbot had moved the font from the place where it now stands to some other site which the parishioners regarded as inconvenient. The parishioners, therefore, in 1436, took the law into their own hands, and eight of them are charged before the bishop with having set up a font in All Hallows. The Abbot, of course, regarded this as a usurpation of the rectorial rights of the Convent; he complained, also, of another grievance, to wit, that the parish bells rang to matins at too early an hour, and disturbed the morning slumbers of the monks. For though they got up at midnight to sing matins and lauds, they went to bed again, and slept till the hour for prime, somewhere between 6 and 7 a.m. Abbot Bradford, therefore, appealed to the Bishop of Sarum, Robert Nevile, who came to Sherborne and held an inquiry on the 12th November, 1436, in what is now the chapel of the school, but was then the Abbot’s hall. He examined one hundred or more of the parishioners, many of whom had not approved of the high-handed course taken in the matter of the font. After a thorough investigation, the Bishop, by the advice of his counsel learned in the law, gave his decision from his manor of Ramsbury, on the 8th January, 1437. It was to this effect—(a) that the font in All Hallows was to be at once utterly destroyed and removed and carried out of the church by those who had caused it to be set there; (b) that the ringing of the bells to matins for the parishioners throughout the year was not to be made till after the sixth hour had struck on the clocka or horologium of the monastery, except on the following solemn feasts: All Saints, Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter; (c) that the font of the Abbey Church was to be replaced in its old accustomed position, and all infants born or to be born in Sherborne were, as of old, to be baptised therein; (d) that the intermediate door and entrance for the procession of parishioners to the font was to be enlarged and arched so as to give ample space and bring it to its original form; (e) that the manner of the procession and other ceremonies about the font were to be observed in the old and wonted way; (f) that there must be made, at the expense of the monastery, in the nave of the monastic church, close to the monks’ choir, a partition, so that there should be a distinct line of separation between the monks and the parishioners; (g) that the replacing of the Abbey Church font in its wonted place, and the enlarging of the door, must effectually be completed before the following Christmas.
This admirable judgment was not received by the disputants with the respect which it deserved; delays and evasions on both sides brought about a violent termination of the dispute. The monks induced “one Walter Gallor a stoute Bocher dwelling yn Sherborne” to enter All Hallows, where “he defacid cleane the Fontstone; the townsmen, aided by an Erle of Huntindune lying in these Quarters ... rose in playne sedition ... a Preste of Alhalowes shot a shaft with fier into the Toppe of that part of St. Marye Church that divided the Est Part that the monks usid; and this Partition chauncing at that tyme to be thakked yn the Rofe was sette a fier, and consequently al the hole Chirch, the Lede and Belles meltid, was defacid.” After the fire the monks were induced to agree to the legal transformation of All Hallows’ Chapel into the parish Church, in order to get rid of the parishioners altogether.
The monks never removed the smaller doorway by which the old Norman entrance was narrowed; there it stands to this day, a monument of that stormy time, and connected with it there is still a curious tale to tell. Among the eight parishioners who, “casting behind them the fear of God,” set up the obnoxious font in All Hallows, and complained of the narrowed doorway, there was a certain Richard Vowell. Anyone who now examines this doorway will notice that the wall, which now blocks it up, is almost wholly occupied by a large monumental tablet to the memory of Benjamin Vowell, who died in 1783, and to his three wives; thus, as Professor Willis neatly showed, the doorway which in the fifteenth century Richard Vowell felt to be too narrow, Benjamin Vowell in the eighteenth blocked up altogether. The “partition” referred to, which was being thatched, must have been the tower, which was being raised in height, and was covered with a temporary roof of thatch to keep out the rain; no doubt, also, the new choir, which was already built as high as the springing-stones of the vault, was also thatched for the same purpose. The reddened stones in the choir and tower still bear witness to this fire.
John Barnstaple, last Abbot of Sherborne, surrendered the Abbey into the hands of King Henry VIII. on the 18th March, 1539. He received a pension of £100 a year, and the Rectory of Stalbridge in 1540; this living had been in the patronage of the Abbot and Convent. He died in 1560; we know neither the place of his death nor of his burial, but he certainly was not buried at Stalbridge; he left a small legacy to Sherborne School.
Henry VIII. sold the Abbey Church, and the demesne lands of the Abbey, to Sir John Horsey, of Clifton Maybank; Sir John, in 1540, sold the Abbey Church to the parishioners; the lead, however, with which the church was roofed, had not been granted to Sir John, and the parishioners had to buy that through him from the King. The parishioners appear to have begun at once to sell All Hallows for building stone. The parish accounts for 1540 and 1541 are missing, but that for 1542-3 shows the process of selling going merrily on, until, finally, in the account for 1548-9, we get the last of it in such entries as these: “George Swetnam, for vi. yerds off one syde off the Tower, xxs.; Robert ffoster, for foundation stones of ye Northe Syde of ye Tower, xiiis.; Mr. Sergyer, for a yard off the grace table off the sowthe syde and for the dore yn the north syde off ye Towr, xs.”!
It may be interesting to set down here what the parishioners paid for the Abbey Church and lead. We have already noted that the parish accounts for 1540 and 1541 are missing. They were not missing, however, in the eighteenth century, as is evident from an entry in the parish account book in use from 10th April, 1721, to 4th April, 1809. This entry is due to Francis Fisher, a Sherborne attorney, who was steward to the Governors of the School during the years 1720-1730. He tells us that by an indenture made the 28th September, 1545, between the King on the one part and Sir John Horsey on the other, the parishioners paid £230 for the body of the church and tower and for the lead. He adds that the parish account rolls give us the following information: In 1540 the parish paid £40 for the church, in 1541 £26 13s. 4d. for the same, in 1541 £17 17s. 6d. for the bells of the Abbey, in 1542 £100 for the lead, in 1544 £80 in full payment for the church and lead. So that, if the King got in 1545 £230, and the parish actually paid £264 10s. 10d., Sir John put into his pocket the balance. However we may regard this matter, the parishioners of Sherborne made an excellent bargain.
No man can doubt but that the dissolution of the monastery meant serious loss to Sherborne. Its Abbots had ruled wisely and well, as far as we can judge, a strip of territory stretching, though not in an unbroken line, from Stalbridge to Exmouth. Anyone who will make for himself a map of the manors in Dorset and Devon belonging to our Abbey, will see that this is so; and besides these, our Abbey held other lands as well, so that when Sherborne ceased to be the caput of this fair estate, much that had once come our way ceased to come hither any more. Though the presence of the school here has in later times done much to redeem this loss, one cannot say that it has entirely done so.
The Entrance to Sherborne School.
Of all the ancient institutions in Sherborne, that one which has kept its dwelling-place longest, which is to-day what it was before Wessex became one with England, is Sherborne School. The old Castle is a ruin, the Almshouse dates only from the fifteenth century, the Abbey Church became the parish church only in 1540. But the School, though it suffered pecuniary loss in 1539 by the dissolution of the monastery, suffered no breach of continuity; it was in existence when the Almshouse was founded, it educated St. Stephen Harding in the eleventh century, and we have no reason to think that its existence suffered any break from Ealdhelm’s day till then. A school with such a history may well call forth some reverence from those who love Wessex and know something of its history. Our school has roots which stretch down into the very beginnings of things Christian among the West Saxons, and there is certainly no existing school in Wessex that can rival its claim to antiquity.
Sherborne School is fortunate in possessing many ancient documents illustrative of its history; among these special mention must be made of a series of accounts commencing in 1553 and continuing to the present time. Only eleven are missing. Till towards the end of the eighteenth century they are written on rolls of parchment, and are for the most part in excellent condition. Besides these there are a few early court rolls of the school manors at Bradford Bryan and Barnesby, Lytchett Matravers and Gillingham, and schedules and leases of its other lands. Among these documents, too, are records belonging to the old chantries, with the lands, of which Edward VI. endowed the school; some of these go back to the reign of Henry VII.
There is no existing minute book of the governors’ proceedings older than that which begins in 1592; but, luckily, a draft of minutes exists relating to the years 1549 and 1550, relating, that is to say, to the time of transition from the old condition of things which obtained before the dissolution of the monastery, to the new condition created by the charter granted to the school by Edward VI. The series of minute books from 1592 onward is complete.
From the school statutes much can be gathered about the character of the education given in the school. The oldest statutes of the post-Reformation epoch are lost; they were based, as we learn from the accounts, on those drawn up by Dean Colet for his school, once attached to St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 1592, however, a new set was drawn up for the School of Sherborne by its visitor, Richard Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, who, as Dean of Peterborough some years before, had imposed on him the terrible task of attending Queen Mary Stuart on the scaffold. Great stress is laid in these statutes on the “abolishing of the Pope of Rome and all fforrein powers superiorities and authorities.” From time to time after this new statutes were made to suit the changing educational and political views. The statutes all still exist, except those made in 1650 by the Puritans; of these all trace is lost, except the bill for engrossing them, which amounted to 25s. Statutes were drawn up in 1662 by Gilbert Ironside, Bishop of Bristol, which the Governors were unwilling to accept, because by these statutes the headmaster was protected from arbitrary interference on the part of the Governors. It was not till 1679 that Bishop William Gulston succeeded in making them accept a new body of statutes, which contain almost all that Gilbert Ironside proposed, together with some additional matter. In Bishop Ironside’s draft and Bishop Gulston’s statutes, it is laid down that it is never lawful “for subjects to take up armes agt theire Soveraigne upon any pretence wtsoever.” The language used in and out of school in all official matters was Latin, and no scholar was to go about the town alone, but with “a companion one of the Schollars that may be a witness of his conversation and behaviour under penalty of correction.” The system of monitorial rule has always been in vogue in the school; in 1592 these rulers are called Impositores—a somewhat awkward term one must admit; in 1662 and 1679 they are called Prepositores; nowadays they are called Prefects. In 1679 they were four in number: “One for discipline in the Schoole, to see all the Schollars demeane themselves regularly there, the Second for manners both in the Schoole and abroad any where, the Third for the Churche and Fields, the Fourth to be Ostiarius, to sitt by the doore, to give answere to strangers and to keepe the rest from running out.”
When the assizes were held at Sherborne, the judge sat in what is now the schoolhouse dining-hall—it was then the big schoolroom; and just before the assizes took place, we get from time to time an entry of the following kind in the school accounts: “for washinge of ye King, 6d.” The King referred to is the statue of Edward VI., which still adorns the room; it is of painted Purbeck marble, and is the work of a certain Godfrey Arnold; it cost £9 5s. 4d., and was set up in 1614.
The two royal coats of arms, which may still be seen on the south wall of the old house of the headmaster, and over the south door of the schoolhouse dining-hall, were taken down by order of a Commonwealth official in 1650; but they were carefully preserved, and were restored to their old positions at the Restoration. That on the old house dates from 1560; that on the dining-hall from 1607. They used to be bright with tinctures and metals, but since 1670 they have been “only washed over with oil or some sad colour, without any more adorning.” The chronogram on the dining-hall is unique, for it can be made to give two different dates, according to the ways in which the significant letters are taken. Mr. Hilton, our chief authority on chronograms, knows of no other which gives two dates in this fashion. The first date which our chronogram gives is 1550, the date of the granting of the charter; the second date which it gives is 1670, that of the rebuilding of the dining-hall.
Among other school buildings of ancient date we must not omit the library, partly of the thirteenth century, but certainly restored in the fifteenth; and the school chapel, with its undercroft of the twelfth century, and its upper story of the fifteenth. The undercroft is a very precious relic of the past, but the school chapel, which was once the Abbot’s Hall, has undergone changes and additions; it still keeps its fine fifteenth century timber roof. The library, on the other hand, has gone through little change. It was the Guest House of the Monastery, and has kept its timber roof of the fifteenth century. It is curious that the windows on the east side of the room are not quite opposite those on the west side, nor is the divergence uniform; the large window in the south end of the room is not in the middle of the wall, but rather towards the west side.
The modern buildings of the school harmonize well with the older work, for they are all built of the same lovely stone, and the style in which they are built, though it is in no sense an imitation of this older work, is yet in harmony with and worthy of it. One of these buildings deserves more than passing notice, viz., the new big schoolroom, completed in 1879. The whole group of buildings, with its surroundings, classrooms, museum, laboratory, drawing school, music house, Morris tube range, bath and fives courts, deserves more attention than it usually gets from visitors to Sherborne. These sojourners often forget that the north side of the exterior of the church is likely to be as interesting as the south side; if once they take the trouble to get to this north side, they will be surprised to find how much fine work, ancient and modern, is to be seen there.
Sherborne Old Castle is situated on an elevated piece of ground to the east of the town; this ground is about 300 yards long by 150 yards broad; the surface has been made level, and an oval area, 150 yards long by 105 yards broad, has been traced out, and its edges scarped to a steep slope, with a ditch about 45 feet deep. The material taken away in forming this scarp and ditch has been thrown outward, so that the counter scarp is formed of a mound more or less artificial. It was within this area, above described, that our Pageant of 1905 was given.
The remains of the Castle are as follows: parts of the curtain wall, with the gatehouse, the keep, the chapel and hall, along with other parts of the domestic buildings—all ruinous. The builder of this castle was Bishop Roger; and William of Malmesbury, who knew it well, has described the masonry in glowing terms. All that remains is of this Norman period, though it was somewhat restored and altered in the fifteenth century. The keep belongs to the class of square keeps. To judge from two windows of the chapel which still remain in a fragmentary condition, that building must have been of a very ornate character. The barrel vaulting of the basement of the keep is worth study, and a Norman pillar, still standing and supporting a quadripartite vault, is well known to students of architecture. There is also a Norman chimney with three flues in the gatehouse.
The ruinous condition of the Castle is not so much due to time as to gunpowder, for in 1645, after the Castle was taken by Fairfax, it was blown up by order of the Long Parliament, so as to be no longer tenable as a fortress. After this, while the troops of the Parliament occupied Sherborne, their barracks were the school, and their “Court of Guard” the schoolhouse dining-hall.
This is not the place to deal with the vicissitudes in the tenure of Sherborne Castle—how the Bishops of Sherborne lost and regained it. It finally passed from Bishop Henry Cotton into the hands of Queen Elizabeth in 1599. Sir Walter Ralegh had, however, been tenant of it since 1592, and when Queen Elizabeth got the fee-simple of it, she gave it to Ralegh. Ralegh, however, did not care to live in it; other magnates in this part of the world were building fine modern houses, and he followed their example. Thus arose the modern Castle, known in former days as Sherborne Lodge, on the other side of the lake, the central and loftier part of which is due to Ralegh. There is no trace of any evidence that Sherborne Castle was ever besieged before the great Civil War. It was used at times in the Middle Ages as a prison; for example, in King John’s reign. King John himself stayed here in 1207 and in 1216.
After some tragic vicissitudes the Sherborne estate came to the Digbys in 1617, and since this date, with the exception of the troublous period of the great Civil War, it has remained with them.
Sherborne Castle was twice besieged during the Civil War, first in 1642, and again in 1645. The first siege was uneventful and unimportant. In 1644 Charles I. had been here after his successful campaign in the West; Prince Rupert, too, had come, and there had been great doings with reviews of men in Sherborne Park, after which followed the second battle of Newbury and the self-denying ordinance and the creation of the New Model. The second siege, that of 1645, was more important; not only was Fairfax drawn hither by it, but Cromwell, too, came as general of cavalry. Though the Parliamentary troops destroyed much of the old castle that we should like to see standing now, we must, on the whole, acquit them of having done any great injury to the buildings of the church or school.
In 1688, King William III.—then Prince of Orange—on his advance from Exeter to London, stayed in the modern castle here; his proclamation to the English people is said to have been printed in the drawing-room at a printing-press set up on the great hearth-stone, which was cracked by it.
Let us now turn to the last of our four ancient institutions, viz., the Almshouse. This institution is certainly older than the year 1437, in which year, by a license from King Henry VI. to Robert Nevile, Bishop of Sarum, to Humfrey Stafford, Kt., Margaret Goghe, John Fauntleroy, and John Baret, it was refounded in honour of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist. It is actually older than this, because some accounts of the charity exist for a few years prior to this date. Some day, no doubt, the history of the institution will be more fully worked out than it is at present. Plenty of material exists in its account rolls which could hardly fail to throw light on old Sherborne life.
According to the deed of foundation, there were, we are told, to be twenty brethren, called the Masters of SS. Johns’ House—they are now called master and brethren—together with a perpetual priest to pray for the good estate and the souls of the founders and inmates. The house was to contain twelve poor men and four poor women, who were to be governed by one of themselves, called the Prior, of their own election, and a woman of domestic ability was to buy their food and dress it, wash their clothes and make their beds, who should be called the Housewife of SS. Johns’ House. The older part of the building was finished in 1448, and here still stand, not much altered from what they were then, the chapel, ante-chapel, and dining-hall, with a long dormitory over the dining-hall; this dormitory used to open into the chapel, so that the sick and infirm might hear the service, and, so far as they could, join in it. The chapel contains an interesting triptych of the fifteenth century by a Flemish artist, name unknown. One cannot imagine a more desirable haven of rest than this for those who are fortunate enough to become its inmates.
Enough has now been told to show that among old English towns Sherborne holds a peculiarly interesting place. It still keeps much of its old-world look and ancient dignity, and its inhabitants, many of whom bear the names of the old stock who were living here in in the time of Henry VI., are a kindly race, among whom it is a pleasure and a privilege to live.