Motor Tours in the West Country

by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

THE CHOIR, GLASTONBURY.

There is Glastonbury Tor before us, framed in the piers of the broken chancel-arch. It was to the summit of that hill that Richard Whiting, last Abbot of Glastonbury, who had been wont to travel in all the pomp of a prince, was dragged upon a hurdle to the gallows. Over the great gate through which his guests had so often crowded—sometimes five hundred in a day, they say—his head was set up, lest men should forget that the King loved “parcells of gilte plate” more than justice. For there was hardly a pretence of justice in the trial of Richard Whiting. Like the Abbot of Fountains, he hid the treasures of his abbey from the King’s commissioners, and, since he must be proved a traitor before these riches could be wrung from him, this act was called high treason. Neither his immense charities, nor his simple, saintly life, nor even his submission to the Act of Supremacy could save him. It was with “businesslike brevity,” says Green the historian, that Thomas Cromwell “ticked off human lives.” “Item,” he wrote among his memoranda, “the abbot of Glaston to be tryed at Glaston and also executyd there.” So Richard Whiting was hanged and quartered at the foot of that tower that still stands upon the hill, and serves him for a monument.

I am not sure whether the main entrance to the abbey, over which Whiting’s head was set, was the vanished gateway on the north side, or the still existing entrance in Magdalen Street. We pass the latter as we drive out of the town. Its newly restored archway stands on the left, beside the house that was once the “Red Lion” Inn, and quite close to the modern market-cross that is so unusually graceful. Our road skirts the foot of Wearyall Hill, where once the sacred thorn-tree grew—the miraculous tree that had been, said the monks of Glastonbury, the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.

After a few minutes of level running we climb the Polden Hills—no very arduous work—and look down upon the wide green plain of Sedgemoor. It lies on our right as we glide down the hill, and stretches far away from us to Bridgwater. It was from some spot in that blue distance that “a volley of shot and huzzas” rang out into the night, when Monmouth and his peasant army made their futile attempt to “vindicate their religion, laws, and rights;” and it was far away across those level fields that Feversham’s grim line of gibbets rose on the following day. In all this peaceful country there was not a ditch from which some poor wretch was not dragged to make sport, later on, for Jeffreys: but the ditch that hid Monmouth himself was not here, but in Dorset. As we look out upon the scene of his undoing let us forget that distant ditch, and the weakness of an exhausted, starving man, and remember only that he made a gallant end. “I shall die like a lamb,” he said on the scaffold. “I have now no fear, as you may see by my face; but there is something within me which does it, for I am sure I shall go to God. I will make no speeches: I come to die.”

Again the road is level, or nearly so; but, as is rare in level country, the surface is bad. We pass under the railway-bridge of the new Great Western line, and soon see Somerton on the crest of a hill. The road to Ilchester climbs the hill at the outskirts of the town, without actually passing through it; but it would be a pity to turn our backs on the ancient capital of the Somersœtas without a glance at its picturesque streets and old houses, whose mellow walls are so characteristic of Somerset. In the silent square that was once dominated by the castle, and is now made beautiful by an arcaded, stone-tiled market-cross, there is nothing to show that Somerton is a town of varied experiences. It has seen a vast amount of life, but prefers to say nothing about it.

Here where the “White Hart” stands, without a sign of age, once stood the palace of King Ina and his pious wife. Ina, King of the West Saxons, was “a rare example of fortitude,” we are told; “a mirror of prudence, unequalled in piety”—though he ascended the throne, as the same chronicler delicately expresses it, “more from the innate activity of his spirit than any legitimate right of succession.” Active he certainly was: a conqueror of the British, a builder of monasteries and churches and castles. We meet the records of his activities at Wells and Glastonbury, at Taunton, and here in Somerton; and even when his determined Ethelburga had persuaded him to abdicate, with some reluctance, he continued to build in Rome. It was on this hill he chiefly lived and made his laws, I believe, but his castle was burnt by the destroying Danish princes, Hinguar and Hubba. On its foundations rose the later castle that served as a prison for King John of France; but even this has left no remnant but some thick masonry in the modest walls of the “White Hart.” In this scene of long past revelry and war there is hardly a sign of life. Somerton is inhabited, apparently, by one man, two children, and a cat.

MARKET PLACE, SOMERTON.

Through cornfields and orchards and over Kingsdon Hill, on a surface that is gradually improving, we go on our way to a town that is older still than Somerton, but by no means so attractive. Indeed, Ilchester has a very dull air, though it stands on the Fosse Way and has a few relics of its Roman origin. A little more than two hundred years ago, however, its sombre streets were lively enough on a certain August day, when gay young Monmouth rode through them on a carpet of flowers and scented herbs, and the crowd swept after him along the narrow ways. What schemes for the future were in his mind we cannot guess, but at this time—during his father’s life—there was nothing on his lips more treasonable than the smiles that made the people love him. He had come “into the country to divert himself,” and for a week or two all these lanes round Ilchester and Ilminster, Chard and Yeovil, were ringing with cheers. “God bless King Charles and the protestant Duke,” the people shouted, as he rode smiling between these hedges. For he, like ourselves, left Ilchester by the Roman road, which was probably even more badly kept in those days than in these. It has, of course, the charm—in a motorist’s eyes—of straightness, but the irregular fringe of grass at the sides gives it an unkempt air that is unworthy of its origin, and it is only in patches that the surface is good. The abrupt hill on the left with the tower on its summit is the “sharp mount” that gave its name to Montacute.