The Hardy Country: Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels

by Charles G. Harper

Shaftesbury’s streets are in fact more than ordinarily commonplace, and its houses grossly tasteless. It is as though, despairing of ever bringing Shaftesbury back to a shadow of the magnificence of history and architecture it once enjoyed, the builders of the modern town built houses as plastiferously ugly as they could. “Shaston” is described with a wonderful sympathy and lightness of touch by Mr. Hardy:—“The ancient British Palladour was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions—all now ruthlessly swept away—throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires. The bones of King Edward ‘the Martyr,’ carefully removed thither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle Ages the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin; the martyr’s bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.”

“The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but, strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day. It has a unique position on the summit of an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid, and Nether Wessex—being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller’s eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible by a railway, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side. Such is, and such was, the now-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.”

That finely inaccurate chronicler, or rather romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who never lacked “historical” details while his imagination remained in good preservation, has some picturesque “facts” to narrate of Shaftesbury. It was founded, says he, by Hudibras, grandfather of King Lear, a trifle of 950 years before the Christian era. Between that shamelessly absurd origin and the earliest known mention of the place, in A.D. 880, when Alfred the Great founded a nunnery here, there is thus a gulf—a very yawning gulf, too—of one thousand, eight hundred and thirty years.

“Caer Palladour,” as it had been in early British times, became “Edwardstow” when, in the year 979, the body of the young king “martyred” at Corfe Castle was translated from its resting-place at Wareham, but although his shrine was the scene of many miracles and greatly resorted to, we do not find that change of name so greatly favoured as was the like change made in East Anglia, when, early in the eleventh century, the town that had been Beodric’s Weorth became, with the miracle-mongering of St. Edmund’s shrine, that town of St. Edmundsbury which we know as Bury St. Edmunds. No: as the expressive modern slang would phrase it, the name of “Edwardstow” never really “caught on,” and Caer Palladour, which had in the beginning of Saxon rule become “Shaftesbyrig,” has so remained.

Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury are the fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely and with difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies, painfully digging on the spot once occupied by it; and the great abbey estates, the booty at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to, Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, now belong to the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest of a wheatsheaf is prominent in the town.

There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury; St. James’s, as you climb upwards towards the town, and Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s in the town itself. It is St. Peter’s which is seen in the illustration of Gold Hill, by whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from the deep recesses of the Vale. This is the most difficult approach, paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps, so that in wet weather the hillside shall not slip away into those depths; and with the craggy sides shored up by ancient stone buttresses of prodigious bulk. The building that closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a narrow entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market House.

There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to Shaftesbury, but this shows it on its most characteristic side.

Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex novels with Jude the Obscure, for here it was that the long-suffering and inoffensive Phillotson—who (why?) always reminds me of Wordsworth—obtained the school, which he and the distracting Sue were to jointly keep. Their house, “Old Grove’s Place,” is easily recognisable. You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of the roads that run severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on the edge of the plateau. It is an old house with projecting porch and mullioned windows through which it would be quite easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one inside; and the upper room over the entrance is not too high above the pavement for any one who, like Sue, leaped from the window, to alight without injury. Those people are probably few who feel an oppressiveness in old houses such as that which worried the highly strung and neurotic Sue Bridehead: “We don’t live in the school, you know,” said she, “but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old Grove’s Place. It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully. Such houses are very well to visit, but not to live in. I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many previous lives there spent. In a new place like these schools, there is only your own life to support.”

Close by are the schools. Looking upon them the more than usually sentimental pilgrim, with, it may be, some ancient tender passages of his own, stored up in the inviolate strong-box of his memory, to be unlocked and drawn forth at odd times, may think he identifies that window whence Sue, safely out of reach, spoke with Jude, standing down on the footpath, and said, “Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!”