Bridport was, in those days when it remained a busy place, a town keenly interested in the flax, hemp, twine, and rope industries; and rope and twine walks, where the old methods are even yet in use, are still features of its less prominent lanes and alleys, but the unobservant and the incurious, who to be sure form the majority of travellers, might pass, and do pass, through Bridport, without thinking it any other than a quiet market town, dependent solely upon surrounding agricultural needs and weekly village shopping.
When hemp was grown in the neighbourhood of Bridport, in those bustling days when the manufacturers of the town supplied the King’s Navy with ropes, and criminals were suspended by this staple article of the town, the expression “stabbed with a Bridport dagger,” was a pretty, or at least a symbolical, way of saying that a man had been hanged. It was a figure of speech that quite escaped that matter-of-fact antiquary, Leland, when in the time of Henry VIII. he came to Bridport and stolidly noted down: “At Bridport be made good daggers.”
One is disposed to sympathise with Leland in that egregious error of his, for which he and his memory have been laughed at for more than three hundred and fifty years. How his shade must writhe at the shame of it! He was, doubtless, tired and bored, for some reason or another, when he reached Bridport, and to his undoing, took things on trust. And nowadays, every one who writes the very leastest scrap on Bridport has his fling at the poor old fellow; and I—conscience tells me—insincerely do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy!
Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of Fellow Townsmen, was descended from the hemp and rope-merchants of Bridport, as the story, in several allusions, tells us.
South Street, leading from the Harbour Road into the right and left course of the main street, contains most of the very few buildings of any great age. Among them is the little Gothic, gabled building now a workmen’s club, but once the “Castle” inn. Here, too, is the church, ancient enough, but restored in 1860, when the two bays were added to the nave; probably the incident referred to by Mr. Hardy: “The church had had such a tremendous practical joke played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to be scarce recognisable by its dearest old friends.”
There is, in this otherwise rather bald interior of Bridport church, a curious mural tablet to the “Memory of Edward Coker, Gent. Second son of Capt. Robert Coker of Mapowder, Slayne at the Bull Inn, in Bridpurt. June the 14th Añ. Dõ. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer under the late Dvke of Mvnmovth in that Rebellion.”
The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but modernised. It is the original of the “Black Bull” in Fellow Townsmen.
Six miles due north of Bridport lies the little town of Beaminster, the “hill-surrounded little town” of which Angel Clare’s father was vicar. “Sweet Be’mi’ster” says Barnes:
“Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist abound
By green and woody hills all round,”