"Take these apples home," he said, watching me with his merry eyes; "they make the best apple pies in the world."
An armful of apples of prodigious size is not exactly the kind of thing one welcomes with a broken-down motor cycle two hundred miles from home, but I dared not refuse them, and so I stuffed them into all my pockets. Finally my good friend insisted on keeping me under his roof for the night.
After my machine had been repaired next morning I went on my way, thinking what a fine, merry, hospitable fellow the Dorset yeoman is—if you only approach him with a little caution.
* * * * * *
I left my friend the yeoman farmer with regret, regained the main road and soon came into Shaftesbury, or Shaston, as it is commonly called. This town is very curiously placed, on the narrow ridge of a chalk hill which projects into the lower country, and rises from it with abruptness. Hence an extensive landscape is seen through the openings between the houses, and from commanding points the eye ranges over the greater part of Dorset and Somerset. To add to the beauty of the position, the scarped slope of the hill is curved on its southern side. Shaftesbury is one of the oldest towns in the kingdom. Its traditions go back to the time of King Lud, who, according to Holinshed, founded it about 1000 B.C. A more moderate writer refers its origin to Cassivellaunus. However, it is certain that Alfred, in the year 880, founded here a nunnery, which in aftertimes became the richest in England, and, as the shrine of St Edward the Martyr—whose body was removed to this town from Wareham—the favourite resort of pilgrims. Asser, who wrote the Life of Alfred, has described Shaftesbury as consisting of one street in his time. In that of Edward the Confessor it possessed three mints, sure evidence of its importance; and shortly after the Conquest it had no less than twelve churches, besides chapels and chantries, and a Hospital of St John.
The view from the Castle Hill at the west end of the ridge is very extensive, and from all parts of the town you come unexpectedly upon narrow ravines which go tumbling down to the plain below in the most headlong fashion. The chief trouble in the olden days was the water supply. On this elevated chalk ridge the town was obviously far removed from the sources of spring water, and the supply of this necessary article had been from time out of mind brought on horses' backs from the parish of Gillingham. Hence arose a curious custom which was annually observed here for a great number of years. On the Monday before Holy Thursday the mayor proceeded to Enmore Green, near Motcombe, with a large, fanciful broom, or byzant, as it was called, which he presented as an acknowledgment for the water to the steward of the manor, together with a calf's head, a pair of gloves, a gallon of ale and two penny loaves of wheaten bread. This ceremony being concluded, the byzant—which was usually hung with jewels and other costly ornaments—was returned to the mayor and carried back to the town in procession.
About 1816 the Mayor of Shaftesbury refused to carry out the custom, and the people of Enmore were so put out by his omission in this respect that they filled up the wells. The Shastonians paid twopence for a horse-load of water and a halfpenny for a pail "if fetched upon the head." I heard a rather amusing story of the water-carrying days. A rustic who had been working on the land all day in the rain came "slewching" up Gold Hill, feeling very unhappy and out of temper. At the summit of the hill he passed by the crumbling church of St Peter's, but did not pass the Sun and Moon Inn. Here he cheered his drooping spirits with a measure of old-fashioned Shaftesbury XXX stingo, and, thus strengthened, he went on his way home, expecting to be welcomed with a warm, savoury supper. But the news of his call at the inn had reached his wife before he arrived home, and being rather an ill-natured person, she decided to punish him for loitering on his way. "Oh," she said to him, "as you are so wet already, just you take this steyan [earthenware pot] and fill it with water at Toute Hill spring, and don't go loafing at the Sun and Moon again." The rustic took up the pitcher without a word, filled it and returned to his sour housewife; but instead of putting the pitcher down, he hurled the contents over her, saying: "Now you are wet too, so you can go to the spring and fetch the water."
Bimport is a wide and comfortable street which skirts the north crest of Castle Hill. It is a street of honest stone houses, and readers of Jude the Obscure will look here for Phillotson's school and the "little low drab house in which the wayward Sue wrought the wrecking of her life." Their house, "old Grove's Place"—now called "Ox House"—is not difficult to find. As you come up from the Town Hall and Market House to the fork of the roads which run to Motcombe and East Stower, Bimport turns off to the left, and a hundred or so yards down is Grove's Place, with a projecting porch and mullioned windows. It was here that Sue in a momentary panic jumped out of the window to avoid Phillotson. The name of the house derives from that of a former inhabitant mentioned in an old plan of Shaftesbury. Poor, highly strung Sue Bridehead, with her neurotic temperament, could not throw off the oppressiveness of the old house. "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."
The village of Marnhull is situated in the Vale of Blackmoor, six miles from Shaftesbury. It is the "Marlott" of Hardy's novel Tess, the village home of the Durbeyfield family. It contains little of interest. The Pure Drop Inn, where "there's a very pretty brew in tap," may be the "Crown." Here John Durbeyfield kept up Tess's wedding day "as well as he could, and stood treat to everybody in the parish, and John's wife sung songs till past eleven o'clock." There is a Pure Drop Inn at Wooten Glanville and another at Wareham; one of these most probably suggested the name. The fine church is of the eighteenth-century Gothic (1718), and it has often been regarded by strangers as being three hundred years earlier. The font bowl, late Norman, was unearthed in 1898, also the rood staircase and squint and the piscina. Some ancient alabaster effigies, ascribed to the middle of the fifteenth century and representing a man in armour and two female figures, are placed on a cenotaph in the north aisle. Some authorities claim that they represent Thomas Howard, Lord Bindon, and his wives, and are of a later date. Nash Court, a little to the north, is a fine Elizabethan mansion, formerly the seat of the Husseys.