An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a pretentious mountain of marble in the south transept, with an epitaph, written by a bishop, setting forth with much antithetical rhodomontade his many virtues of activities and renunciations:
“Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne and Earl of Briftol. Titles to which ye merit of his Grandfather firft gave luftre And which he himfelf laid down unfully’d. He was naturally enclined to avoid the Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of his Quality. Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned obfcurity. And therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw Himfelf within a narrower compafs, or to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his Honour call’d for. His Religion was that which by Law is Eftablisfhed, and the Conduct of his life fhew’d the power of it in his Heart. His distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or them. He was kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous and condefcending to his inferiours, and juft to all Mankind. Nor had the temptations of honour and pleafure in this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that great Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now enjoys.
MDCICVIII.”
The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral precincts, and lead the well-informed stranger to remember that Sherborne cherishes hopes of some day being again erected into the head of a bishop’s see, when that talked-of formation of a new diocese, carved out of the great territorial domains of Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an accomplished fact.
The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you have glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street, is past the Conduit—usually called the Monks’ Conduit—standing on the pavement of Cheap Street, and through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small shops and old houses. The Conduit, built about 1360, an open octangular building greatly resembling a market-cross, was originally in the centre of the cloister-garth, to the north of the Abbey, on a part of the site now occupied by the admirable Grammar School, founded by Edward VI. from the spoils of the dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one of the foremost schools of the country.
Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is, like similar business streets in other West Country towns, composed of houses of many periods and all sizes. It is built generally of that sunny Ham Hill ferruginous sandstone, quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six miles to the northwest of Yeovil. That fine old hostelry, the “New Inn,” now swept away, was built of it. This vanished house was the original of the “Earl of Wessex,” in The Woodlanders, in whose yard Giles Winterborne is observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he is engaged with the business of cider-making:
“The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the “Earl of Wessex”—a large stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the opposite houses.”
The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining the village of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and fortress of the Bishops of Sherborne. The remaining fragments, on their woody knoll overlooking the Yeo, in what is now Sherborne Park, are those of the stout keep built by that ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of Henry I.’s time. Despite the curse, called down by the equally ferocious and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to alienate the castle from the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested from them on several occasions, perhaps sometimes in direct unbelieving challenge to that quis separabit; at others, certainly, because, in the fashion of the times, the bishops had taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles and weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to side with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and estate. For over two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it was thus alienated, and Osmund’s curse slept. Those who owned the castle were not executed, or imprisoned, or made to suffer beyond the usual mediæval average, perhaps because it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies and errors of judgment. At last, having been Crown property for many generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands were granted to Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a futile proposal had been made to fight him for it, in gage of single combat—a fourteenth-century example of Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity”—it was purchased by the bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot. Whether the earl, in Etonian phrase, “funked it,” imagining the bishop’s steel would be fellow to “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and as invincible, who shall say? At any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous champion, who feared neither the ordeal of the sword nor of the purse, entered into the gates of his predecessors of old time, and died here, after a residence of twenty years. The brass to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury Cathedral, displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure of the bishop’s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it will be seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper person, that the bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy, skilled in arms, and supported by the ghostly terrors of that ancient curse.
And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to all intents and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald, were successors and representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne, the castle remained until 1540, when, in the dissolution of religious houses, it was seized and afterwards granted to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. Then the curse seems to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where many other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill. Although subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again alienated by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for favours and promotion received when that hero and courtier was in the enjoyment of royal smiles. Raleigh, as every one knows, ended tragically, after long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same spot where Somerset had suffered sixty years earlier. And well, the superstitious may think, was it that by legal quirks and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh’s son out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued to work disaster. James bestowed it upon his favourite, the despicable Robert Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being accessory to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to die, but was reprieved, and finally released by the timid James, to die obscurely in 1645. Something of a blundering curse, this, one may think, to miss scoring a “bull” on so admirable and easy a mark.