CHAPTER XIV
BERE REGIS
This “blinking little place,” and now perhaps a not even blinking, but fast asleep village, was at one time a market-town, and, more than that, as its latinised name would imply, a royal residence. Kingsbere, said to mean “Kingsbury”—that is to say, “King’s place” or building—really obtained its name in very different fashion. It was plain “Bere,” long before the Saxon monarchs came to this spot and caused the latter-day confusion among antiquaries of the British “bere,” meaning an underwood, a scrub, copse, bramble, or thorn-bed, with the Anglo-Saxon “byrig.” We have but to look upon the surroundings of Bere Regis even at this day, a thousand years later, to see how truly descriptive that British name really was. It was of old a place greatly favoured by royalty, from that remote age when Elfrida murdered her stepson, Edward the King and Martyr, at Corfe Castle, and thrashed her own son Ethelred here with a large wax candle, for reproaching her with the deed. Those events happened in A.D. 978, and it is therefore not in any way surprising that no traces of the ferocious Queen Elfrida’s residence have survived. Ethelred, we are told, hated wax candles ever after that severe thrashing, and doubtless hated Bere as well; but it was more than ever a royal resort in the later times of King John, who visited it on several occasions in the course of his troubled reign. Thenceforward, however, the favours of monarchs ceased, and it came to depend upon the good will of the Abbots of Tarent Abbey and that of the Turbervilles, who between them became owners of the manor.
The village street of Bere is bleak and barren. It is a street of rustic cottages of battered red brick, or a compost of mud, chopped straw, and lime, called “cob,” built on a brick base, often plastered, almost all of them thatched: some with new thatch, some with thatch middle-aged, others yet with thatch ancient and decaying, forming a rich and fertile bed for weeds and ox-eyed daisies and “bloody warriors,” as the local Dorsetshire name is for the rich red wall-flowers. Sometimes the old thatch has been stripped before the new was placed: more often it has not, and the merest casual observer can, as he passes, easily become a critic of the thoroughness or otherwise with which the thatcher’s work has been performed, not only by sight of the different shades belonging to old and new, but by the varying thicknesses with which the roofs are seen to be covered. Here an upstairs window looks out immediately, open-eyed, upon the sunlight; there another peers blinkingly forth, as behind beetling eyebrows, from half a yard’s depth of straw and reed, shading off from a coal-black substratum to a coffee-coloured layer, and thence to the amber top-coating of the latest addition. Warm in winter, cool in summer, is the testimony of cottagers towards thatch; and earwiggy always, thinks the stranger under such roofs, as he observes quaint lepidoptera ensconced comfortably in his bed. Picturesque it certainly is, expensive too, although it may not generally be thought so; but it is more enduring than cheap slates or tiles, and, according to many who should know, if indeed their prejudices do not warp their statements, cheaper in the long run.
It is, in fine, not easy to come to a definitive pronouncement on the merits or demerits, the comparative cheapness or costliness, of rival roofing materials. The cost of the materials themselves, payments for laying them, and the astonishing difference between the enduring qualities of thatch well and thatch indifferently laid forbid certitude. But all modern local authorities are opposed to thatch, chiefly on the score of its liability to fire. All the many and extensive fires of Dorsetshire have been caused by ignited thatch; or else, caused in other ways, have been spread and magnified by it. Yet, here again your rustic will stoutly defend the ancient roofing, and declare that while such a roof is slowly smouldering, and before it bursts into a blaze, he can dowse it with a pail of water. No doubt, but that water, from a well perhaps two hundred feet deep, and that ladder from some neighbour half-a-mile away, are sometimes not to be brought to bear with the required celerity.
This, let it be fervently said, is not an attack upon thatch: it is but the presentation of pros and cons, and is no argument in favour of that last word in utilitarian hideousness, corrugated galvanized iron, under whose shelter you freeze in winter and fry in summer.
Meanwhile, here are ruined cottages in the long street of Bere, whose condition has been brought about by just such causes, and whose continuation in that state is due, not to a redundancy of dwellings, but because the Lady of the Manor at Charborough, despising the insignificant rents here, will not trouble about, or go to the expense of, rebuilding.
Hence the gaps in the long row, like teeth missing from a jaw.
Not a little hard-featured and stern at first sight, owing to the entire absence of the softening feature of gardens upon the road, this long street of Bere has yet a certain self-reliant strong-charactered aspect that brings respect. It has, too, the most interesting and beautiful church, rich in historical, and richer in literary, associations.