Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in Two on a Tower, is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that attractive fact. Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of the compass, do not perhaps afford the best evidences of that age, for they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth century. For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.
To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest town in Wessex. Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence, manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.
Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and vanished streets once stood. That “once,” however, was so long ago that the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things, as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses.
Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.
Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given somewhere, by some one, of a village.
Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of a good many modern strokes. One, which hurt its pride not a little, was when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its representation and became merged in a county division. Another—but why enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns? In one respect Wareham keeps an urban character. It has two inns—the “Black Bear” and the “Red Lion”—that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses where, if you cannot obtain a desirable “cup of genuine,” why, “’tis a sad thing and an oncivilised?”
It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom of Wessex. Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour. In a nook such as this you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of those who founded it here. But, to render assurance doubly sure, those original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day, and are not walls in the common acceptation of the term, but ditches so deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick or masonry would be, and with an “angle of repose” sufficiently acute to astonish any modern railway engineer.
Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody tangle of its long history. Strong defences require determined attacks. That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast, but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays, repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by only a few dispirited defenders. In A.D. 876 these Northmen captured the place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out. Some Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the greater part of Wessex.