At the back of the Beacon is the lonely little village of Combe, sunk deep in a hollow of the hills that rise all around it. It has a small Early English church of little interest, but the village is worth a long detour to see because of its unique position. Here was once a cell of the Abbey of Bec in Normandy. A stony hill-road goes out of the settlement southwards, between the huge bulk of Oat Hill (936 feet) and Sheepless Down, back into Hampshire. The road eventually leads to Linkenholt, another hamlet lost in the wilderness of chalk, and then by Upton to the Andover highway at Hurstbourne Tarrant on one of the headwaters of the Test. The map name is rarely used by the natives, who term the place "Up Husband"; it was officially spelt "Up Hursborn" as lately as 1830. It is a village in a delightful situation and delightful in itself, though of late years the architecture of the "general stores" has replaced some of the old timber-framed houses on the main street. But the George and Dragon, even if it shows no timbers on its long front, wears an old-fashioned air of prosperity that belongs to the coaching past. Tarrant Church, like so many others hereabouts, has been sadly "well restored," but still retains a Transitional south door and some rather remarkable wall paintings.
The Andover road rises through Dole's Wood and passes over the hill to Knight's Enham and Andover. The last-named busy little town of to-day owes much of its prosperity to the fact that it is an important meeting place of railways connecting three great trunk lines. To outward view Andover is utterly commonplace; everything ancient has been ruthlessly improved away, and that curse of the railway town, an appendix of mean red-brick villas, mars the approach from the west. It has a past, however, which goes back to such remote times that its beginnings are lost in those "mists of antiquity" which shroud so much of the country described in our preceding chapter. The "dover" in the town-name is probably the pre-Celtic root which meets the traveller when he arrives at Dover and greets him again in unsuspected places from the "dor" in Dorchester and the Falls of Lodore to the "der" in Derwent and smoky Darwen. All have the same meaning—water; and "an," strangely enough, is a later and Celtic word for the same element, the equally ubiquitous "afon." So that Andover should be a place of many waters, which it is not. A small stream—the Anton—flows almost unnoticed through the town, though its name seems to have been given occasionally to the whole of the longer Test that it meets a few miles to the south.
Written records of Andover before Wessex became a kingdom do not exist. But scraps of tessellated pavement in the vicinity show that it was a locality well known to the Romans, and the Port Way, that great thoroughfare of the Empire, passed within half a mile of the modern railway junction. In 994, Olaus, King of Norway, is said to have been baptized here, his sponsor being Ethelred the Unready. The town received its charter from King John and took part in the disagreement between Stephen and Matilda, when it had the misfortune to be burnt. It saw two of the Stuarts when the evil days for each were reaching their culmination. Charles I stayed here on his way to the last battle of Newbury, and James II slept at Priory House while retiring from Salisbury to London just before the arrival of William of Orange. The town returned two members to Parliament before the Reform Act, and afterwards one until 1885. Half legendary are some of the tales of the hustings at Andover in those days of "free and open" voting, and the old "George" seems to have been a centre of the excitement on election days, where most of the guineas changed hands and where most free drinks were handed to the incorruptibles. It was here during the candidature of Sir Francis Delaval that his attorney had occasion to send him the following bill—
"To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my leg being broken; to surgeon's bill, and loss of time and business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval £500."
This rough treatment was in consequence of the poor lawyer having, at his patron's instigation, invited the officers of a regiment quartered in the town, and the mayor and corporation, to a dinner at the "George," each in the other's name. At this same inn Cobbett, in one of his Rural Rides, had an adventure with mine host and pushed his opinions down the throat of the assembled company in his usual manner. This inn, and the "Angel," were great places in the posting days, when the Exeter Road was one of the most important arteries in England. They are among the pleasant survivals of eighteenth-century Andover, for there is nothing that appears on the surface older than that period, except the Norman door of the churchyard—all that is left of the fine building pulled down in 1840 to make way for the present imitation Early English church—and a piece of wall on the north side, a remnant of a cell belonging to the Benedictine Abbey of Saumur. About three miles west of Andover is Weyhill, a village celebrated for its fair and immortalized in The Mayor of Casterbridge. It at one time claimed to be the largest in England, but in these changed days its rural importance has diminished. The fair takes place in October and now covers four consecutive days instead of the original six. The first day is Sheep Fair followed by "Mop" (hiring), Pleasure, and Hop Fairs with horses every day and several side-shows such as "Cheese Fair" and the like. It has been thought possible that Weyhill is referred to in The Vision of Piers Plowman—"At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to the Fair."
We now propose to turn eastwards for the last time and to follow the main London road along the northern boundary of Harewood Forest through Hurstbourne Priors ("Down Husband") and then past the wide expanse of Hurstbourne Park, in which stands the seat of the Earl of Portsmouth and which clothes the northern slopes of the Test valley for more than a mile with its beautiful woods and glades. Its eastern boundary is close to Whitchurch, seven miles from Andover. Whitchurch was another famous posting centre and, like Andover, a rotten borough. Here an important cross-country route from Oxford to Winchester tapped the Exeter road and here the modern ways of the Great Western and South Western cross each other at right angles. At the famous "White Hart" Newman wrote the opening part of the Lyra Apostolica while awaiting the Exeter coach in December, 1832. The great tower of All Hallows still stands, but little besides of the old building. While the restoration was in progress a Saxon headstone was brought to light. It bears a presentment of our Lord's head with the following inscription:
HIC CORPUS FRIDBURGAE REQUIESCAT
IN PACE SEPULTUM
The old chapel of Freefolk, little more than a mile out of the town, dates from 1265 and came into existence because the winter floods on the infant Test prevented the good folk of the vicinity getting into Whitchurch. The famous Laverstock Mill, where the paper for Bank of England notes has been made for two hundred years, is not far away by the side of the high road. The owners of the Mill, and of Laverstock Park, are a naturalized Huguenot family named de Portal, whose ancestors came to England and settled in Southampton during the persecution of the Protestants that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. When Cobbett rode by the Mill he made the following unprophetic utterance:—"We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank paper is made! Thank God! this mill is likely soon to want employment. Hard by is a pretty park and house belonging to 'Squire' Portal, the paper-maker. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic shrewdness, call it 'Rag Hall!'"