In 1642 the walls were solidly repaired, and outside works thrown up at, among other points, Maumbury Ring. Watch was kept day and night at the gates and on St. Peter’s Tower. But the spirit of the town strangely failed when, on the approach of the enemy, one Master Strode predicted that the walls would hold off the King’s men for just half-an-hour. The Governor, Sir Walter Erle, hearing that Lord Carnarvon was coming with two thousand men, and Prince Maurice’s artillery besides, promptly left the place, and the citizens opened the gates on a promise that they should be spared violence. Carnarvon would have kept the promise with chivalrous fidelity, but Maurice let his men loose, and Dorchester was so badly handled that Carnarvon threw up his command and went to serve the King in person. A little later the town behaved much more bravely, and baffled a small Irish force under Lord Inchiquin till help from Weymouth completed the rout of the Royalists. Later again Essex occupied the town in force; and then Sir Lewis Dives, for the King, surprised it with brilliant success, but was badly beaten on a second attempt. Yet later there was a skirmish at Dorchester, when the royalist Mercurius says that no less a captain than Cromwell himself was put to flight by Lord Goring; but the account lacks full confirmation. A story of that skirmish clings to a corner of lower Fordington, a curve in the road near Grey’s Bridge, known as Tupp’s, or Tubb’s, Corner; it is said that a Cromwellian hero of that name fled thereby at a speed memorable for all time.
A still darker experience than that of war awaited Dorchester not long after. When Monmouth fought at Sedgemoor (1685) our Dorset peasants were among the bravest of his rude but heroic army. And when the abortive rising was over, the Bloody Assizes began, and Jeffreys sat at Dorchester. His lodgings are still shown, the most striking house-front in the town, with its black timbers and long, low windows; and still, in the Town Hall, is kept the chair from which the terrible Chief Justice, in a court hung with red, dealt out death with grim smiles and ghastly jests. Nearly three hundred men, told that it was their only hope, pleaded guilty, but for most of them the only result was a few days’ respite. Seventy-four were executed at Dorchester, with all the horrible circumstances of death for treason. For years afterwards grim human relics of that evil time still clung to the railings round St. Peter’s, greeting the entering worshippers.
Sidney Heath 1901
Judge Jeffreys’ Lodgings
This was not quite the last scene of horror at Dorchester, though it was alone in its dreadful kind. As late as within the eighteenth century an unhappy woman, convicted of the murder of her husband, was hanged and then burned within Maumbury, amidst a vast gazing multitude.
It is a relief to think that about the same time the town put on a beauty of a sort unique, I think, in England. The walls had somehow largely disappeared within the last half of the seventeenth century; and now it was proposed to plant double rows of trees all along the line of their foundations. By 1712 the planting was complete, and for nearly two complete centuries Dorchester has been surrounded by the noble range of avenues which we call The Walks, renewed from time to time, and kept with increasing care. From close to Glide Path Hill (“Glippath”) the visitor can walk under long successive aisles of sycamores or chestnuts on a well-laid gravel road, now facing east, now south, now west, now north, till he finds himself close to the foot of High Street, within ten minutes of his point of departure. I have seen the noble avenues at King’s Lynn, and those of the Backs at Cambridge are only less dear to me than our Walks. But I do not think that anything even there can quite equal these bowery ramparts of our ancient town—certainly not when we put together the natural charm and the historical interest.
The Walks were still young about the year 1730, when a poet, in the course of a tour from London to Exeter with a group of friends, rode through Dorchester. It was Pope’s intimate, John Gay. The travellers first saw the town, of course, from Stinsford Hill, over a foreground which then, no doubt, was less full of trees. The reaches of the Frome and the broad water-meadows pleased Gay, as well they might, and in his delightful verse-journal we read his impression:
Now the steep hill fair Dorchester o’erlooks,
Border’d by meads and wash’d by silver brooks.
In 1762 we find recorded as noteworthy the paving and fencing of a side-walk in the lower High Street; and in 1774 came the first public lighting of the streets. A decade later Miss Burney (Mme. D’Arblay) gives a lively picture of Dorchester as she saw it when travelling in the suite of George III. to Weymouth: “The city had so antique an air, I longed to investigate its old buildings. The houses have the most ancient appearance of any that are inhabited that I have happened to see; and inhabited they were indeed! There was an amazing quantity of indigenous residers—old women and young children,” who, as she shrewdly remarks, could not have come in from a distance, and so formed an index of population. Yet the town could not have counted then more than 3,000 inhabitants. It contains now just 10,500.