The Exeter Road: the story of the west of England highway

by Charles G. Harper

street of cottages, along a road running at right angles to the Exeter highway, with its church tower peeping above the orchards and thick coppices, and a sparkling stream flowing down from the hillside. In this and other respects, it bears a striking similarity to Middle and Over Wallop.

The quiet, not to say sleepy, Dorsetshire villager who, lounging at the bend of the road, replies to your query by saying that this is ‘Tarnt Hinton,’ is the peaceable descendant of very desperate and bloody-minded men, and the like circumstances that, a mere hundred years ago, rendered them savages, would do the same by him, were they revived. The peasantry are what the law and social conditions make them. Oppress the sturdy rustic and you render him a brutal and resentful rebel, who, having an unbroken spirit, will give trouble. Treat him fairly, and he will live a life of quiet industry, tempered by gossipy evenings in the village ‘pub.’; and although he will never rise to be the mincing Strephon imagined by the eighteenth-century poets of rurality, he will raise gigantic potatoes, and cultivate flowers for the local Horticultural Society, and do nothing more tragical in all his life than the sticking of the domestic porker, or the twisting of a fowl’s neck.

The civilising of the rustic in these parts dates from the disfranchising of Cranborne Chase in 1830. The Chase, which took its name from the town of Cranborne, eight miles distant from this spot, was originally a vast deer-forest, extending far into Hants, Wilts, and Dorset. The great western highway entered it at Salisbury and did not pass out of its bounds until Blandford was reached; while Shaftesbury to the north, and Wimborne to the south, marked its extent in another direction. Belonging anciently to great feudal lords or to the Sovereign, it was Crown property from the time of Edward the Fourth to the reign of James the First. James delighted in killing the buck here, but that Royal prig granted the Chase to the Earl of Pembroke, from whom, shorn of its oppressive laws, it has descended to Lord Rivers; while the Earl of Shaftesbury also owns great tracts of woodlands here. But, singularly enough, that part of the Chase which still retains the wildest and densest aspect lies quite away from Cranborne, and in the county of Wilts, around Tollard Royal. The nature of the country and the character of the soil must needs always keep this vast tract wild, and, in an agricultural sense, unproductive. Game will always abound here in the thickets, and indeed the weird-looking hill-top plantations, called by the rustics ‘hats of trees,’ are especially planted as cover, wherever the country is open and unsheltered.

DEER-STEALERS

The severity of the laws which governed a Chase and punished deer-stealers was simply barbarous. Cranborne had its courts and Chase Prison where offenders and deer-stealers were punished by mutilation, imprisonment, or fine, according to the crime, the status of the offender, or the comparative state of civilisation of the period in which the offence was committed. But whether the punishment for stealing deer was the striking off of a hand, or imprisonment in a noisome dungeon, or merely being mulcted in a larger or smaller sum, there were always those who unlawfully killed the buck in these romantic glades. Sometimes, for the devilment of it, the dashing young blades of the countryside—sons of the squires and others—would hunt the deer.

‘From four to twenty assembled in the evening, dressed in cap and jack and quarter-staff, with dogs and nets. Having set the watchword for the night and agreed whether they should stand or run if they should meet the keepers, they proceeded to the Chase, set their nets, and let slip their dogs to drive the deer into the nets; a man standing at each net, to strangle the deer as soon as they were entangled. Frequent desperate and bloody battles took place; the keepers, and sometimes the hunters, were killed.’

Other law-breakers were of a humbler stamp, and ferocious enough to murder keepers at sight. Thus, in 1738, a keeper named Tollerfield was murdered on his way home from Fontmell Church; and another at Fernditch, near ‘Woodyates Inn.’ For the latter crime a man named Wheeler was convicted, and suffered the extreme penalty of the law; his body being hanged in chains at the scene of the murder. His friends, however, in the course of a few nights cut the body down, and threw it into a very deep well, some distance away. The weight of the irons caused it to sink, and it was not discovered until long afterwards.

One of the most exciting of these encounters between the deer-stealers and the keepers took place on the night of 16th December 1781. Chettle Common, away at the back of the ‘Cashmoor Inn,’ was the scene of this battle. The stealers, assembling in disguise at Pimperne, marched up the road through the night, and headed by a Sergeant of Dragoons, then quartered at Blandford, poured through the Thickthorn Toll-gate, armed with weapons called ‘swindgels,’ which appear to have been hinged cudgels, like flails. It would seem that the object of this expedition was the bludgeoning of a few keepers, rather than the stealing of deer. At any rate, the keepers expected them, and armed with sticks and hangers, awaited the attack. The fight was by no means a contemptible one, for in the result one keeper was killed and several disabled, while the stealers were so badly knocked about that the whole expedition surrendered, together with the Sergeant of Dragoons, who had a hand sliced off at the wrist by a hanger. The hand was subsequently buried, with military honours, in Pimperne churchyard.