If you don’t give me some,
If you don’t give me none,
I’ll knock down your door
With a great marrow bone
And a-way I’ll run.
The result of this threat was that the children were given hot half-pence, apples, eggs, a piece of pancake, or a hunch of ruckle-cheese. A ruckle-cheese was a small sour-milk home-made cheese, weighing about one pound. It could be ruckled—i.e., rolled along the ground. Hence its name. In the evening the “Lent-crocking” began. Those people who had not given the children anything when they came “a-shroving” were then punished by having pieces of crockery and pans and other missiles thrown at their doors. In this way real damage was often done, and the two parish constables do not seem to have interfered. The practice of shroving is still continued in the present village of Milton: it is one of the customs that have survived the demolition of the old town. It obtains in other Dorset parishes, but is gradually dying out.
The Abbey churchyard was a very large one. Its area was about three times the area of the Abbey Church. The sports which took place therein have been already mentioned. It was also used as a public flogging-place for offenders against the law. Lord Milton, when he decided to pull down the old town, had all the headstones in the churchyard removed, broken up, or buried. In converting the churchyard into lawns, many bones of parishioners were turned up and irreverently treated; and the superstitious tradition in the present village is that, in consequence of this, Lord Milton died of a gruesome disease. There was an ancient cross in the churchyard called the “Druid’s Cross,” and also a preaching cross.[41] It is hardly necessary to add that these perished with the churchyard.
The old Grammar School, founded by Abbot Middleton in 1521, was also pulled down. It was one of the chief public schools in the south-west of England, and was known as “the Eton of the West.”[42] It had, as a rule, between eighty to one hundred boys, mostly boarders, sons of the leading county families. There were several boarding-houses for the boys in Milton, and the existence of the school helped on the prosperity of the town. Two of its most distinguished alumni were Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s favourite captain, who in after life did not forget his old friends at Milton[43]; and Thomas Beach, a native of Milton, the famous Dorset portrait painter, who from 1772 to 1800 “limned the features of everybody who was anybody.”
It must be admitted, reluctantly, that the Grammar School boys were an undoubted nuisance to Lord Milton. They lived within a stone’s throw of his mansion, they broke into his privacy and seclusion, they scoured his gardens and plantations in every direction, stole his fruit, and disturbed his game. Records exist of the expulsion of some boys bearing the most honoured of Dorset names for persistent stone-throwing down chimneys, and for stealing cucumbers from the Abbey gardens, and game-fowl eggs for the purpose of rearing birds to compete in fighting. In the Abbey Church the Grammar School boys sat in a large gallery which stretched from the rood-loft to the west wall. This gallery was pulled down by Lord Milton’s orders as soon as he had removed the school. The headmaster and assistant-masters of the school, being in Holy Orders, frequently held the position of Vicar or Curate of the Abbey Church. Among them was John Hutchins, the Dorset historian, who was Curate of the Abbey and “usher” of the school.[44]
It must not be thought that Lord Milton’s “fine quarter-deck high-handedness” aroused no outcry. The parishioners regarded his action as a cruel piece of tyranny, and they resisted it with stubborn and obstinate opposition.[45] For over twenty years his lordship was involved in considerable trouble and expense while gradually getting all the houses into his possession, in order that he might raze them to the ground. Mr. Harrison, a resident solicitor, refused to sell his lease, although he was offered three times its value; so Lord Milton let the water from the “Abbot’s Pond” (a small pond which then lay just below the Abbey Church) creep around the premises. Mr. Harrison at once entered an action against his lordship for flooding his house, and the lawyer won the case. A few days afterwards Lord Milton went to London, and on his way to Blandford he heard the Abbey bells ringing. This he interpreted as a sign of parochial joy at his defeat and departure; and nothing would satisfy him but the sale of the offending bells. The bells were really ringing to commemorate Guy Fawkes’ Day: it was November 5th. But the bells had to go: “the autocrat” had spoken. And his friend, the Dean of Norwich, had said that “bell-ringing caused much idleness and drinking.” There is a record that, when the parishioners saw their bells carted away, they stood at their house-doors weeping, even though two of the bells were saved for the new Church of St. James.