CHAPTER VII
NORTON ST. PHILIP—BATH—CORSHAM—CASTLE COMBE
There are ways from Wells to Bath somewhat shorter than the twenty-four miles by which we shall now proceed, but they take you up weariful heights, over the long, swooping contours of the Mendips. There is not, in fact, any really easy way between Wells and Bath.
We leave the city through the cathedral close, along its north side, and through the beautiful Chain Gate, a work of the Perpendicular period, connecting the cathedral with the Vicars’ College. Presently begins the long rise of Horrington Hill; and so up and again up goes the road, and past the lonely Old Down Inn, coming at length by Kilmersdon to Ammerdown and Norton St. Philip, along a true exemplar of what geography primers style “an elevated plateau, or tableland.” The delightful village of Norton St. Philip introduces a welcome change from these keen airs and strenuous heights, for it basks in the mellow atmosphere of a valley. The sweet-toned bells of Norton still charm the ear of the traveller, and are the identical “very fine ring of six bells” that Pepys heard on June 12, 1668, and pronounced “mighty tuneable,” ringing from the grey church tower that stands so stately in advance of the village. The George and the Fleur-de-Lis, are both old inns, the first of them historic as well, for it was the headquarters of the Duke of Monmouth when the furious skirmish was fought here, June 26, 1685, between his rustics and the soldiers of King James. His ploughmen won the day, but Monmouth himself had a narrow escape the next morning, when he was shot at while dressing at a window of the George.
This house belonged of old to the Priory of Hinton Charterhouse, whose ruins in the park of Hinton “Abbey,” a modern residence, may be seen adjoining the village of Hinton Charterhouse, through which we proceed on the again hilly way to Bath, which is six miles distant from it, through Midford and Odd Down.
Many volumes might be written—and, indeed, have been, are being, and yet will be written—about Bath, which is without doubt a very beautiful and ancient and likeable city, with a long history behind it, a vigorous present, and doubtless a lengthy and prosperous future, so long as its healing thermal springs shall last. The antiquity of Bath is undoubtedly pre-Roman, but to those mighty colonizers the first great development of what they styled Aquæ Solis, the “Waters of the Sun,” is due. A rival version of that title is Aquæ Sulis, supposed to incorporate the name of Sul, an unknown “early British deity”; but the discovery of a sculptured face of the sun-god, now in the museum, seems to support the first name. Of course, the great traditional founder of Bath, the true discoverer of the medicinal springs, is, according to local patriotism, Prince Bladud. A statue of him in the Grand Pump Room, erected 1669, commits Bath to a belief in the legend of that leprous Prince wandering, 863 B.C., an exile from his father’s Court, and becoming healed in these waters. But Bladud is an absolutely unhistorical personage. The Romans, however, have left very substantial relics of their presence. Does the general reader, it may be asked, ever turn aside from his generalities, and particularly consider the great space of time in which the Romans held Britain as a prosperous colony? For nearly four centuries they established themselves in this land, a settled community, with the arts and civilization brought from their native shores. Nay, they did more than this, for they Romanized the Britons and intermarried with them. England, the greatest colonizing power of the modern world, has not done so much. Less than two hundred years covers the establishment of our Indian Empire, and we have not mingled with the races of Hindostan.
Dunster Castle and Yarn Market.
The Yarn Market, in the middle of the broad street, no longer witnesses the marketing of yarn or other goods. It is, like Punster town itself, a picturesque survival.
The Roman baths at Bath are the best evidence of the solidity of the civilization then founded; and we have also to consider that Bath was then, as it still remains, the premier health-resort in these islands, and the discoveries of Roman villas at Box and elsewhere along the Avon Valley show that the district was what we should now style “residential.” The destruction of all these graces after the Roman forces left Britain, in A.D. 410, left Aquæ Solis a deserted ruin. It arose again as the Saxon “Akemanceaster,” and was a considerable town at the time of the Conquest. The springs find little mention in the Middle Ages, and only seem to have gradually won back to a right appreciation from the time of Queen Elizabeth onwards. It was the Consort of Charles I., Queen Henrietta Maria, who in 1644 began the fashionable vogue of what was then styled “the Bath”—a vogue continued and amplified in the visits of Charles II. and his Court, 1663; of the Queen of James II., 1687; and with the great favour shown the place by Queen Anne. This fashionable and therapeutic reputation was enormously enhanced in her time, the Corporation building the Pump Room in 1704, and appointing Beau Nash “Master of the Ceremonies.” Still, however, Bath was a city of merely rustic streets and medieval, or at the latest Tudor, houses; and Bath as we see it to-day only arose when Ralph Allen and John Wood began to build its stately neo-classic streets and crescents of fine houses in the middle of the eighteenth century. For the fine architectural effect thus produced Bath owes a very great deal to the fine local oolite building-stone.