This common practice is all the more historically an outrage, for had there been no Minster, there would have been no town of Wimborne. It derives from an early religious settlement, founded in A.D. 700 near the site of the forgotten Roman station, by Cuthburga, one of those unsatisfactory princess spouses of the pietistic period of Saxon dominion, who, married to the King of Northumbria, refused him conjugal rights and finally established herself here, living a life of “continual watchings and fastings,” and finally dying of them. We are not concerned to follow the mazes of the early history of town and church. It suffered the usual plunderings and burnings, the nuns were occasionally carried off, sometimes against their will, at other times with their consent, and at last, somewhere about A.D. 902, monks replaced them. The whole foundation was re-established by Edward the Confessor, and remained as a Collegiate church until 1547, when it was disestablished, its revenues seized, and the building wholly converted to the purposes of a parish church.
Wimborne Minster might be made the subject of a lengthy architectural disquisition. Its two towers, western and central, are themselves pointers to its history; for they show, not in the different periods at which they were built, but in the richness of the one and the comparative plainness of the other, the combined uses of the building in days of old. The central tower, of transitional Norman design, and remarkably like the towers of Exeter cathedral, was originally surmounted by a stone spire, which fell in 1600. Its elaboration is explained by its having been a part of the monastic church, while the western tower erected about 1460, belonged to the parochial building.
The church, endowed with two—and two dissimilar—towers, is a splendid feature in the streets of the old town. It and the town gain dignity and interest in an amazing degree, and here in Wimborne the pinnacled battlemented outlines “make” both town and Minster, in the pictorial sense. They bulk darkly and largely across the yellow sandiness of the broad market-place, and sort themselves into endless and changeful combinations down the narrower streets. Apart, too, from these important considerations, the Minster is exceptionally rich in curious features, outside its architectural details.
Our ancestors possessed a quaint mixture of serious devotion and light-hearted childishness, and we are the richer for it. Thus, high up on the external wall of the western tower, the observant will notice the odd little effigy, carved, painted and gilt, resembling a grenadier of a century ago, or a French gendarme of a past régime: it is difficult to assign it with certainty, and assuredly it does not look so old as 1600, the date when it is stated to have been placed here. His business is that of a quarter-jack, and he strikes the quarters upon a bell on either side of him. The clock within, an astronomical contrivance made in 1320 by that same ingenious Glastonbury monk, Peter Lightfoot, who was the author of the famous clock of Wells Cathedral, represents the courses of the sun, moon, and stars.
The Minster, in short, is a museum of antiquities, found particularly interesting by the half-day excursionists from Bournemouth who are its chief visitors and carry away a fine confused recollection of their scamper round it. Here, in a room above the vestry, is the Chained Library, a collection of over two hundred and forty volumes, mostly chained to iron rods. Some of the books are very early, but the collection was formed in 1686. Perhaps, for the sake of its story, the copy of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World” is even more interesting than “The Whole Duty of Man” and the “Breeches Bible,” for it still displays the carefully mended hundred leaves burnt through when the boy, afterwards poet, Prior fell asleep over his reading of it and upset the candle, with this result. Each damaged page was neatly mended by him and the missing letters so carefully restored that it is difficult, until attention is drawn to the repair, to detect anything exceptional. Prior was born at Wimborne in 1664, as a brass tablet in the western tower to his “perennial and fragrant” memory tells us.
Etricke never regained popularity in his district, and lived for eighteen years longer, a shunned and soured man. The story tells how he took what may surely be regarded as the odd and altogether insufficient revenge of declaring that he would be buried neither in the church of Wimborne nor out of it, and accordingly in his lifetime had a niche prepared here, in the wall, where the polished black slate sarcophagus, still seen above ground, was placed. He was eccentric beyond this, for he had conceived the date of his death and caused it to be boldly carved on the side, between two of the seven shields of arms that in braggart fashion are made to redound to the glory of the Etricke family. That year he had imagined would be 1691, but he actually survived until 1703, and the date was accordingly altered (as seen to this day) when at last, to the satisfaction of Wimborne, he did demise. For the keeping of his tomb in good repair he left twenty shillings annually, a sum still administered by the Charity Commissioners; and it certainly cannot be said that he does not receive value for his money, because his eccentric lair is maintained, heraldic cognisances and all, in the most perfect condition. Any ill-will this solemn personage may have felt towards Wimborne is altogether robbed of satisfaction nowadays, and his gloomy ghost may, for all we know, be enraged at the thought of the attraction his eccentricity has for visitors and the trade in photographs it has provoked, much to the material well-being of the town.
