The pole has several times been restored. Its present appearance is due to the restoration of October 1868, but the arrow vane with which it was then surmounted appears to have been blown down, and its improving mottoes—“Tanquam sagitta” (Like as an arrow), and “Sic et nos” (So even we)—lost. Another Latin inscription is Englished thus:
“Their maypole, decayed by age, the rector and inhabitants of Shillingstone, keeping their yearly May Games with all due observance, have carefully restored it on the ninth day of June 1850:
“The fading garland mourns how short life’s day,
The towering maypole heavenward points the way.
Read thou the lesson—seek to gather now
Undying wreaths to twine a deathless brow.”
All very pious and proper, no doubt, but wofully lacking in the May Day spirit of the joy of life, and more fitting to the “Memento mori” fashion of the neighbouring churchyard.
In this old church of Shillingstone—or “Shilling-Okeford,” as from the old manorial lords it was once named—the pilgrim may see by the evidence of an old tablet how a certain William Keen, a merchant of London, fleeing terror-struck from the Great Plague, was overtaken by it and died here in 1666.
The reader, versed in the oddities of place-names, will perhaps not require the assurance that the name of Shillingstone has nothing whatever to do with shillings; but if he doubts, let it at once be said that it was so called long before that coin was known. It was originally “Oakford” and became “Schelin’s Oakford,” or “Schelin’s Town,” when the manor was in Norman times given to an ancestor of those who for centuries later continued to hold it and in more elaborate fashion styled themselves Eschellings.
Down over intervening hills the road, for a little space forsaking its character of a valley route, comes beside the stream again at Piddleford—or, as the Post Office authorities prefer to call it “Fiddleford”—on the way to Sturminster Newton, the “Stourcastle” of Tess. This is the place mentioned at the opening of the story, to which Tess was driving the load of beehives from Marnhull at night, when the lantern went out and the mailcart dashing into the trap, killed the horse, Prince; thus starting the tragical chain of events that led at last to Winchester gaol.
Of Sturminster Newton, impressively styled on ordnance maps “Sturminster Newton Castle,” Leland says: “The townlette is no greate thing, and the building of it is mene,” and, although it would not occur to a modern writer to adopt that term, certainly there is little that is notable about it. There is no “minster,” no “castle,” and no “new town,” and little to say, save that an ancient six-arched bridge crosses the weedy Stour and that the battered stump of the market cross in the main street seems in its decay to typify the history of the market itself. As the church has been rebuilt, and as the castle on the outskirts is now little more than a memory, the only resort is to turn for some point of interest to that quaintly thatched old inn, the White Hart, very much older than the tablet, “W. M. P. 1708,” on its front would lead many to suppose. It was probably restored at that date, after those troublous times had passed in which the cross, just opposite, lost its shaft, and when, in the fighting in the streets between the Parliamentary dragoons and the associated clubmen of the west, this house and others were fired and Sturminster Newton very generally given over to the horrors of a brutal conflict between troops trained to arms and a peasantry unskilled in the use of the weapons with which they had hastily equipped themselves. But, unprofessional soldiers though they were, the clubmen at Sturminster gave an excellent account of themselves, killing and wounding a number of the dragoons, and taking sixteen others prisoners.