The manor-house of Bingham’s Melcombe, within its courtyard, is a perfect example of a sixteenth-century country residence. The courtyard, entered by a gatehouse, discloses stone-gabled buildings at the sides, with the highly carved and decorated projecting gable of the hall in front; displaying with a wealth of mantling the Bingham coat of arms, the whole overgrown with trailing roses.
A wild, chalky country, very knobbly and with constant hills and dales, leads away to westward, past Melcombe Horsey, to the hamlet and starved hillside farms of Plush, where flints abound, water is scarce, and farmers are obliged to depend largely upon the “dew-ponds” made on the arid downs. Here is Dole’s Ash farm, the original of “Flintcomb Ash,” the “starve-acre place” where Tess toiled among the other weariful hands in the great swede-fields, “a hundred odd acres in one patch,” with not a tree in sight: Rainbow-land is not all fertile and roseate. The farm, as Mr. Hardy describes it, is situated “above stony lanchets—the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes,” and is at the other extreme from the fertility and sheltered beauty of the Valley of the Frome, the “Vale of Great Dairies.”
Very different from the forbidding westerly range from Bingham’s Melcombe is the country immediately to the east. There the village of Milton Abbas lies enfolded between the richly wooded hills, where the little Mill Bourne rises, at the foot of an alarming but wonderfully picturesque descent; and the woodland shade comes to the back door of every cottage.
Milton Abbas is a remarkable place, and owes its long lines of regularly spaced cottages, all of the same design, to the autocratic whim of Joseph Damer, Baron Milton and first Earl of Dorchester, who (then a commoner) purchased the large and beautiful estate in 1752, and, demolishing the old village, which rose humbly on the outskirts of the magnificent abbey, rebuilt it, a mile away, in 1786. Milton Abbas is, indeed, the precursor of many recent “model” villages, and typical of the highhanded ways of the eighteenth-century landed gentry, who could not endure the sight of a cottage from the windows of their mansions; and so forthwith, in the manner of Eastern potentates, whisked whole villages and populations away from between the wind and their gentility. Each cottage is built four-square, with thatched roof and equidistant doors and windows, all in the Doll’s House or Noah’s Ark order of architecture, and there is scarce a pin to choose between any of them. Half-way down the street is the almshouse, and opposite is the church, and from their presence it will be seen that Lord Dorchester’s village-transplanting was complete and highly methodical. Now that time has weathered his model village, and the chestnut trees planted between the cottages have grown up, Milton Abbas is a not unpleasing curiosity.
But Milton Park, beyond the village, contains the greatest surprise, in the almost perfect condition of the surviving abbey church, rising in all the stately bulk and beautiful elaboration of a cathedral; beside the great mansion built for Lord Dorchester in 1771 by Sir William Chambers, familiar to Londoners as the architect of Somerset House.
That explorer of this Wessex unknown country, this Land Beyond the Rainbow, who, setting forth uninstructed in what he shall find, comes all unwittingly upon this generally unheard-of abbey, is greatly to be envied, for it is to him as much of a surprise as though its existence had never been breathed beyond the rim of the hills down in whose hollows it lies hid; and to him falls the exquisite pleasure of what is nothing less than a discovery. Coming into the park, all unsuspectingly, the abbey church is disclosed against a wooded background of hills, strikingly like the first glimpse of Wells Cathedral, underneath the Mendips.
Milton Abbey, the “Middleton Abbey” of The Woodlanders, was founded so early as A.D. 933, by Athelstan, and in thirty years from that date became a Benedictine monastery. Nothing, however, of that early time has survived, and the great building we now see belongs to the period between 1322 and 1492, when it was gradually rebuilt, after having been struck by lightning and wholly destroyed in 1309. But the noble building rising so beautifully from the gravel drives and trim lawns of this park is but a completed portion of an intended design. It consists of choir, tower, and north and south transepts, and extends a total length of 132 feet. Had not the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 put an end to this lovely retreat of the Benedictine fraternity, a nave would have been added. To Sir John Tregonwell, King’s Proctor in the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, fell what may reasonably be called this fine piece of “spoil”; for the price of one thousand pounds at which he bought the monkish estates of Milton Abbas can scarce be regarded as adequate purchase money. Coming at last into the hands of Joseph Damer, the domestic offices of the monastery, which had until then survived in almost perfect condition, were with one exception utterly destroyed, and the existing mansion built in a bastard “Gothic” style, as understood by Chambers. The sole exception is the grand Abbot’s Hall, enshrined within that eighteenth-century building, and entered from the farther side of the great quadrangle. Now in use as a drawing-room, there is probably no more stately room of that description in existence. It has the combined interest and beauty of size, loftiness and exquisite workmanship in stone and carved wood, with antiquity.
