Memorials of Old Dorset

by Unknown

It has been asserted recently—and, indeed, proved to the satisfaction of many local authorities—that the course of a Roman aqueduct can be traced here and there to the west of Dorchester skirting the adjacent valleys and hills. It is believed to have been an open water-course, obtaining its supply from the source of a small stream some twelve miles distant.

Perhaps, however, the most remarkable relic of the Roman occupation is the amphitheatre, said to be the best preserved in Britain. It is larger than the so-called “Bull Ring” of Cirencester, and, being quite free from trees and bushes, stands out more boldly than the similar work at Silchester. It is built of chalk, now covered with grass, somewhat elliptical in plan, the height of the sides being given as about 30 feet, and the internal measurements 218 feet by 163 feet. On each side of the entrance there are walks which ascend gradually to the centre of the mounds, where there are small platforms as if for seating the principal spectators or judges, but there are no traces of steps or ledges for the accommodation of the general public; and, judging by the remarks of early Roman writers, it is very probable that the people were obliged to stand throughout the public games.

But in addition to these more obvious relics of a bygone age, the subsoil of Dorchester is full of treasures that emphasise the Roman occupation. It would be impossible to describe in these pages even the most interesting of the objects that have been brought to light in recent years, but it is fortunate that they find their way very frequently to the County Museum, of which the people of Dorset are justly proud. It must suffice at the present time to mention that in its cases may be seen a fine collection of objects made of Kimmeridge shale; glass hairpins, brooches and bracelets, and a metal mirror; pottery of all kinds; many examples of mosaic floors, fragments of wall plaster retaining their brilliant colouring, three curious antefixæ, a Roman sword handle, which is believed to be almost unique, and a base and capital of a column of a temple. In looking at these memorials of the past, and stepping the while on the ancient pavements, the mind is taken back with irresistible force to the men and women who made use of them in their daily occupations—the Romans, who for a period of four hundred years exercised their wise and beneficial influence over the people of Britain.

THE CHURCHES OF DORSET

By the Rev. Thomas Perkins, M.A.

UT of about three hundred churches which are to be found in Dorset, three stand out as far ahead of all the rest—the church (once collegiate, now parochial) of Wimborne Minster; the church of the Benedictine Abbey at Sherborne, now the parish church; and the great Benedictine Abbey Church at Milton, now in parochial use. These three, which receive separate treatment in the present volume, are the only three Dorset churches that can rank with the great parish churches of England.

There were before the Reformation many religious houses, each with its own church, in the county, but at the time of the Dissolution, in the reign of Henry VIII., most of these, as being of no further use, fell into decay, and their ruins were regarded as quarries of hewn stone whenever such material was needed in the neighbourhood. Of the Benedictine nunnery of Shaftesbury, once one of the most wealthy religious foundations in the kingdom, nothing remains save the foundations, which recent excavations have disclosed to view; of Cistercian Bindon, only the gatehouse and a few ivy-clad walls, rising only a few feet above the ground; of Benedictine Cerne, a splendid barn and a beautiful gatehouse, and a few fragments incorporated in some farm buildings; of its daughter abbey at Abbotsbury, a still larger barn, testifying to the wealth of the community, and some ruined walls—this is all that remains to mark the spots where day after day through many centuries the words of prayer and praise rose almost without ceasing, and monks and nuns lived their lives apart from the busy world, spending their time in meditation, in adorning their churches with the carving of capital and boss or miserere, in copying and illuminating manuscripts, in teaching the young, in giving alms to the needy, in tilling their lands in the days while yet they cherished the high ideals of the founders of their orders, before they lapsed into luxury and riotous living.

A few monastic barns remain in other places, as at Tarrant Crawford and Liscombe. These owe their preservation to the fact that they could at once be utilized; for those who received grants of abbey lands, no less than their predecessors, required buildings wherein to store their corn; whereas the refectory, dormitory, cellars, and other domestic buildings designed for a community of monks or nuns were useless when such communities no longer existed; and the churches, unless they could be turned to account as parish churches, would also be of no use.

After the three great ministers already mentioned there is a wide gap, for though many of the Dorset parish churches are of architectural or archæological interest, either generally or because they contain some special object—a Saxon font, a Norman doorway, a Decorated Easter sepulchre, a canopied tomb, or the effigy of a noble who fought in the French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—yet as a rule the churches are comparatively, if not actually, small, and are for the most part built in the Perpendicular style, the most prosaic and uninteresting of the mediæval styles of architecture, though in mason-craft it can hold its own against all the rest. And, moreover, Dorset Perpendicular is not equal to that which is to be found in the neighbouring county of Somerset. We look in vain for the splendid fifteenth century towers which are the glory of the Somerset churches; here and there in isolated places, and, strange enough, not on the Somerset border, we find traces of the Somerset influence; but for the most part the Dorset towers are utilitarian appendages, not structures carefully designed with a view to beauty of outline and richness and appropriateness of ornament, as the finest of the Somerset towers are. Spires of mediæval date are rare in Dorset. There are but two—one at Winterborne Steepleton, near Dorchester, and one at Trent, a parish added for administration purposes to the County of Dorset in 1895; there is a spire also at Iwerne[15] Minster, but it cannot be called a mediæval one, for though the tower of this church was formerly surmounted by a beautiful spire, yet that to be seen to-day is only a reproduction, built of some of the stones of the old spire, which was taken down at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The upper part above the lower of the two moulded bands, preserves the original slope; the lower has a different slope, as the builder had, in a vertical distance of about ten feet, to connect the base of the original spire with the horizontal section of the upper part, which was originally about thirty feet above the base. The original spire was forty feet in height; the present one is only twenty feet. The stone not used in the rebuilding was sold to a road contractor for metalling the roads.