Not far down the street lived a merchant of another sort. Sir Peter Thompson, born in Poole, but for the greater part of his life residing in London, where he carried on a large trade with Hamburg, built for his retirement the fine old Georgian house long used as a hospital. The carved doorway, with its crest and motto, “Nil conscire sibi” (not, by-the-bye, the one usually assigned to Sir Peter, which is “Nulla retrorsum”); the arms and crest displayed above the doorway, and the height and proportion of the street front, give an air of dignity to the building strangely in contrast with the neat little villas recently put up opposite. The house dates from the time of Prince Charlie, who, indirectly, was the cause of Sir Peter’s knighthood. As High Sheriff of Surrey, the fine old Whig presented a loyal address to George II. when the throne was in danger after Prestonpans, and received the honour of knighthood as a mark of the King’s appreciation. It was in the next year, the year of Culloden, that Sir Peter began the house in which he meant to spend the close of an honourable life in the company of early friends, and in the collection of rare manuscripts and objects of interest, scientific and antiquarian, for he was both an F.R.S. and an F.A.S.; he also aided Hutchins in his monumental History of Dorset. Respected for his talents and loved for his kindness, he lived there for some years in dignified ease, and died in 1770.
As yet it will be observed that we have had comparatively modern memories of Poole; but as we go nearer to the Quay, which is the most important element in Poole past and present, we come to older and older buildings, or rather parts of buildings, for it is a feature in the town that the constant, active life of the place has renewed, and so covered up, the old buildings, unlike places whose vigour has long ebbed away and left them with their antiquities unaltered to sleep away the remainder of their allotted time,
And keep the flame from wasting by repose.
And so we pass the modern Guildhall—the old Guildhall was very suitably placed in Fish Street, on the other side of the town, with the gaol, in which John Wesley’s grandfather was imprisoned, under it—and down the market till we pause before the oldest almshouses, where the authorities have put up an inscription which tells all that is certainly known of the buildings, viz., that they were first erected about the time of Henry IV., were the property of one of the mediæval religious guilds, the Guild of St. George, and were seized by the Crown in the time of Edward VI., and afterwards sold to the Corporation. The lower portion and the old wall at the back—in fact, the stonework—may be as old as the days of Joan of Arc, but there has, of course, been a great deal of alteration and rebuilding. Speaking of Joan of Arc, it may be mentioned that John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France, under whose rule she was burned, was Lord of Canford and of Poole, and a few years ago his seal was dug up in cleaning out a ditch on the Hamworthy-Lytchett road. St. James’ Church is, of course, new, though built on the site of the old church, a print of which, with its “handsome tower, covered with a cupola of tin, quite round, in the fashion of a cup,” is given in Sydenham’s History of Poole, a work of special merit, written by a competent antiquary, and full of information. Some of the old monumental inscriptions are preserved in the church, notably one to Captain Peter Joliffe. This worthy representative of the old Poole seamen distinguished himself in a sea-fight off Purbeck as follows:—Cruising with only two men in a small vessel, the “Sea Adventurer,” he saw a French privateer make prey of a Weymouth fishing-boat. Though the Frenchman was vastly superior in strength, he boldly attacked him, drove him off, recovered the prize, and then, following up his first success, manœuvred so skilfully as to drive him ashore near Lulworth, where the vessel was broken to pieces and the crew made prisoners. King William III., hearing of this brave deed, sent Captain Peter a gold medal and chain, with a special inscription. This was not his only exploit, and in later years George I. made him military commander of the town. His great-grandson, the Rev. Peter Joliffe, of Sterte, is still remembered as the pattern of a good rector.
Old Poole, as we have noted, clustered round St. James’ Church and the old Guildhall, and, as the remains testify, was mainly of stone, with the stone-flag roofs, that remind one of their Purbeck home. Very near to the church, in the yard of the St. Clement’s Inn, is a small battlemented gateway, supposed to have been a water-gate, a view which has been lately confirmed by the traces of seaweed revealed in digging. This is very probably the piece of wall of which Leland speaks as having been built by Richard III., who “promised large things to the town of Poole.” Hence, when “Richmond was on the seas,” and his storm-driven ship appeared off Sandbanks, an attempt was made to inveigle him on shore; but a warier man than Henry Tudor did not breathe, and, to the disappointment of the authorities, “he weighed up his anchor, halsed up his sails, and having a prosperous and streeinable wind, and a fresh gale sent even by God to deliver him from that peril, arrived safe in Normandy.”
Older than the piece of wall, older than the almshouses, and older, indeed, than anything else in Poole, is that much-battered, much-altered building now known as the Town Cellars. The Great Cellar, or King’s Hall, or Woolhouse, to give it the various names it was once known by, was in all probability, as the names import, a place in which goods were stored. It was always manor property, rented by the Corporation in later years, but more likely originally a place used by the lords of the manor of Canford to store the dues levied in kind, to which they were entitled by the charter of Longespée. On the inner side stood a small prison called the Salisbury, also belonging to the manor, and by this were the stocks, still remembered by old people. Modern conjecture, catching at the ecclesiastical appearance of the pointed doorways and cusped windows, and ignoring the fact that such features were common to sacred and secular buildings alike, has imagined a monastery here, but the utter absence of evidence, the absolute silence of all records, the fact, too, that Leland, who visited Poole, and mentions all of importance from the antiquary’s point of view, has nothing to say of any such institution, and, finally, the authority of Abbot Gasquet, whose note on the subject may be given in full—“Poole, ‘A Friary,’ No friary: the grant 3 Edward VI. seems to have been of gild property”—seem to be conclusive against the theory. The place has been cut right through by the street from St. James’ Church to the Quay, and is so shown on the revised Ordnance Map, while the original block is entire in a plan of Poole dated 1768. It must have been very narrow in proportion to its width, and parts of the work are very roughly executed. Possibly this is the “fair town house of stone on the Kay” of which Leland speaks, unmutilated in his day. Old and battered as it is, no inhabitant of the town should view it without reverence, for it is part of the long past. Built about the end of Edward the Third’s reign, it must have played its part in stirring times. Poole, during the Hundred Years’ War, was a place of much importance, and shared in the ups and downs of that long war—now helping to take Calais, and again destroyed in the great raid of John de Vienne, who paid with fire and sword in the declining years of Edward the score run up at Cressy and Calais and Poitiers. The old building was the centre of a fierce struggle about five hundred years ago. At that time the port of Poole was a thorn in the side of Frenchman and Spaniard, and its leader, Henry Paye, was the dread of the Channel and of the shores of the Bay of Biscay. The Drake of his age, half admiral and half pirate, he was commander of the King’s ships one year and raiding the Spanish coast the next. It is a Spanish chronicle that lifts the veil for a moment and shows us the Poole of the
Plantagenets clustering round the Church of St. James and along the Quay, its inhabitants ready at a moment’s notice for war; archers and men-at-arms mustering to the warcry; the very doors so constructed that they could be used as “pavaisses,” or large shields, against the murderous cross-bow bolts—everything betokening a population living in a state of war, and revealing a lively picture of the coast towns when there was no regular fleet, and self-help was the order of the day. We owe this glimpse to the Spanish Cronica del Conde D. Pero Niño, the substance of which, as far as it affects Poole, is given by Southey in his Naval History of England. The attack on Poole was a revenge raid in consequence of Henry Paye’s doings on the Spanish coast. Early in the morning the joint Spanish and French fleet entered the harbour, and the Spaniards landed. Taken by surprise, with their leader away, the men of Poole proved their mettle. A large building (which we, without hesitation, identify with the Town Cellars), full of arms and sea-stores, was fiercely defended, and when this had been carried by assault and set on fire, the fighting was continued in the streets. So terrible was the hail of shafts that the Spaniards recoiled, and only the landing of fresh men enabled them at last to drive back the English. Henry Paye’s brother led the townsmen with great gallantry, but was killed on the spot, and then, apparently, his men drew off. The Spaniards and their French allies, who at first held aloof, but came bravely to help when the first repulse took place, then returned to their ships with a few prisoners; and the curtain again falls.
And so we leave the old town while yet the smoke broods sullenly over the Town Cellars, and the warcry of Spain yet echoes among the narrow stone streets of the East Quay.
BRIDPORT
By the Rev. R. Grosvenor Bartelot, M.A.