The Hardy Country: Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels

by Charles G. Harper

Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral site. William of Malmesbury wrote of it as “pleasant neither by multitudes of inhabitants, nor beauty of position.” But beauty is a matter of individual taste. “Wonderful, almost shameful,” he continued, “was it, that a bishop’s see should have remained here for so many years.” For three hundred and three years it so remained, the bishop’s seat being removed only in 1078, when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site, sterile, cramped and waterless—a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig, the dry city—was selected, only itself to be abandoned in less than another hundred and fifty years. In the meanwhile no fewer than twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at Sherborne and passed into the Great Beyond, leaving for the most part, very little evidence of their existence. Notable exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator of the Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron, Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his subject. In the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church are sundry relics of those prelates, in the shape of ancient tombs with battered effigies, as near a likeness to them as possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the retro-choir are pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and Ethelbert, brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.

After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the bishopric in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139 made a Benedictine Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum, who although he might not again remove the cathedral back to Sherborne, seems to have loved the place, and certainly lavished much care and labour upon it.

Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination. Starting in life as a poor Norman monk, he owed his first important preferment to a curious circumstance. None could gabble through a mass more speedily than he, and he raced through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king was anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him on the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger travelled far. But, if all had liked him as little as did the censorious William of Malmesbury, his journeys would have been short. To that chronicler he was “unscrupulous, fierce and avaricious,” not content to keep his own, but eager to grab the goods of others. “Was there anything contiguous to his property which might be advantageous to him, he would directly extort it, either by entreaty or purchase, or, if that failed, by force.” It must have been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what he wanted, without so much as a “by-your-leave.” The great Norman structure he erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in the essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is outwardly a building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, that magnificently-elaborated external show of nave and presbytery is but a later and more enriched surface, daringly grafted upon the stern and solemn Norman walls of over three hundred years’ earlier date.

The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very clearly retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and of many another great monastic centre, by which you see that these rich and powerful settlements of the religious were not generally at peace with the outside worldlings. The causes of quarrel were many. In some places the monastery was a harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and hindrances placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were the property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant strife; and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game for the sport of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble. Poachers we have had always with us, and even in those times when to kill the stag in the Chases was a crime adjudged worthy death or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance illegally slew the game. “What shall he have who killed the deer?” Why, an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the very least of it.

Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other causes. It seems that the parish church was situated at the west end of the Abbey, separated from it only by a door which the monks, exclusives always, had sought gradually to narrow, with a view of eventually blocking it up altogether. A question nearly allied with this was whether the children of the townsfolk should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church, and the disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long and so loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic offices could not be carried on. In 1437 the points at issue were by common consent laid before the Bishop of Salisbury, who, siding with his own cloth, made an award in favour of the Abbey. Regarding this decision as an injustice, the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently two parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart butcher, broke into the parish church with some of the monks and reduced the font to fragments. Things then, naturally grew worse, until, as Leland puts it, “The variance grew to a plain sedition, until a priest of the town church of All Hallows shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the Abbey Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the time to be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and consequently the whole church, the lead and bells melted, was defaced.”

The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and rebuilt, but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows traces, in the reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone of the internal walls, of the conflagration.

The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of repair and rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior, both in form and colour, than owned by any other considerable church in the west. A commonplace person, one no connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a general sense of their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply that they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often produced—irrespective of the degrees registered by the thermometer—by their stonework; but here, though the mercury shrink down from the tube into close proximity with the bulb, provocative in most places of shivers, even the most matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of soaring arches, painted windows and delicately poised fretted roof to “lift up your hearts, O Zion!” feel a grateful sensation of warmth pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly hued stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the place and render it indifferent to the rigours of the season. It is a colour compact of all the beautiful hues of this country of a rich and bountiful Nature: of honey, of apples and pears golden and russet, of autumn leaves, and of cider and October ale, with a glint of the sun through it all. It gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in the cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild cream purity of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the building stone of Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction engendered by the deep red sandstone of Devon.

The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest example of that supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art, has no superior elsewhere. That of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, and that in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but, although generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.

The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at Sherborne, is a two days’ market, originating with the completion of the repairs and the vaulting of the nave, under Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504. Tradition has it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great church at last again in order, the masons and their kind were paid off and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old Michaelmas Day. Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened every year at the stroke of midnight on the Sunday succeeding October 10th, to the accompaniment of a din of horn-blowing and the uncouth banging of tin cans.

Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving care of the restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne Castle, between 1848 and 1858, at a cost of over £32,000. The church of All Hallows at the west end, which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the dissolution of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town for use as a parish church and All Hallows itself thereby became a redundancy. Its situation and its ground-plan can still be traced on the paths and lawns and on the ragged walls and makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the Abbey.