Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were re-established. The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source of many troubles soon to come. It was surprised and seized for the Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years later, in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning, recaptured the town after a three-weeks’ siege. At length the treaty of peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk—those few of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to survive—an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking around and reviewing their position. “Hope springs eternal,” and these remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town was again besieged and taken. That event was an incident in the contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt.
That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of mediæval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself ceases to keep tally. Few people looked on: most took an active part, and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times. The obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences. The Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the “dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no town”; but this course was not adopted.
Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds. In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit and prophet, one Peter of Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of Corfe. For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and his way, it will be allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity.
Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town.
Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the roof of it. Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet, handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle, may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,” heaped up with magnificent emphasis.
They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act, two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes.
CHAPTER XIII
WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS
Leaving Wareham by West Street, where there is a “Pure Drop” inn, perhaps suggesting the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at far-away Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of Bindon Abbey.