N the days when vikings, pirates, and roving sea-dogs ruled the waves it was a decided advantage for the shipping merchant to reside in a port which lay a mile or so up a river-mouth rather than on the coast itself. Fourteenth century Weymouth folk knew this to their cost. Dwellers they were in a growing hamlet on the sea-coast, with no church of their own, so they had to walk over the hill to Mass at Wyke Regis. Whilst thus employed in pious worship, down swooped the French ships on their defenceless abodes, and when they returned to their Sunday dinner their homesteads were a smouldering ash-heap. After that, they decided to build a chapel of their own on high ground, whence the eye of the watchman could sweep the horizon in search of strange craft.
Such a sudden surprise as this could never have occurred at Bridport. Following Wareham’s good example, the builders of this ancient town had an eye to communication by land and sea. They hugged the Roman Road, and at the same time they lay snug up a river-mouth. The Brit, which rises in the upland slopes of Axnoller Hill, amidst some of the finest Wessex scenery, after a short course through Beaminster Town, past the beautiful Tudor mansion of Parnham and the villages of Netherbury and Melplash, unites with the Symene and the Asker streams at Bridport Town, and thence flows into West Bay, a mile further on, at Bridport Harbour.
Whether in Roman times this place had any importance cannot now be definitely determined. If, however, the name of the station, Londinis, on the Icen Way from Dorchester to Exeter, be but a Latinised form of Lyndaen—i.e., “Broad Pool”—then there is reason to believe that Bridport High Street, which runs along the edge of Bradpole parish, is on the old Roman Road. That Bradpole was only a hamlet of Bridport is shown by the fact that not until the year 1527 had the former parish any right to bury its parishioners anywhere except in the churchyard of the latter place. The evidence of the name of the town certainly favours Roman occupation; “port” in this case is not derived from a personal source; this is the “door, or gate, of the Brit.”
We have more clear evidence of its growing importance in the Saxon period. The name of its western suburb, “Allington,” is always in mediæval days written “Athelington,” “the town of the nobles.” Hence the fashion in modern London of the aristocracy flocking to the “West End,” is, after all, only an imitation of an example set by Bridport long years ago. In Edward the Confessor’s reign one hundred and twenty houses stood in this Dorset town, which, in comparison with the other towns of the county, came next to Dorchester and Wareham. Bridport, too, had a mint of its own, and its mint-master paid well for the privilege of coining.
The Norman Conquest does not appear to have been an unmixed blessing in these parts. In Domesday Survey the town is shown to have gone back considerably. Twenty houses are stated to be desolate, and the people impoverished. All these bad times, however, had passed away before the reign of King John, when Bridport was already famous for its manufacture of rope, sailcloth, and nets, and these have been its staple industries down to modern days. As early as the year 1211 the Sheriff of Dorset paid the goodly sum of £48 9s. 7d. for 1,000 yards “of cloth by the warp to make sails of ships, and for 3,000 weights of hempen thread according to Bridport weight for making ships’ cables, and 39 shillings for the expenses of Robert the Fisher whilst he stayed at Bridport to procure his nets.” Let us hope “Bridport weight” was, as it is now, specially good for the price.
Residents in the town in these days are almost tired of the threadbare witticism about the “Bridport dagger,” but, for the sake of the uninitiated, it must be repeated here. When anyone wished to speak tenderly of some person who died at the hangman’s hand, he described him as being “stabbed with a Bridport dagger.” John Leland, the itinerant chronicler of the days of Henry VIII., came here and heard the joke, but it never penetrated his prosaic skull, so he gravely recorded in his note-book: “At Bridporth be made good daggers.” Suffice it to say that Newgate was duly supplied in those days (as the old Morality play, Hycke Scorner, tells us) with:
Ones a yere some taw halters of Burporte.
Whilst an Act of Parliament of 1528 says that “time out of mind they had used to make within the town for the most part all the great cables, ropes, hawsers, and all other tackling for the Royal Navy.” This industry has left its mark upon the architecture of the place. The streets are broad, to allow every house its “rope walk.” Some fine examples of mediæval domestic architecture are extant, notably the one now used as the Conservative Club on the east side of South Street, evidently a merchant’s house of Tudor days.
Few country towns were so rich in ecclesiastical foundations as was Bridport in the Middle Ages. It possessed the present Parish Church of St. Mary, which then had seven altars and numerous chantries; after much restoration (during which the tomb of a great-grandson of Edward I. perished), it is even now a noble example of the piety of prosperous merchants. There were, besides, the churches of St. Andrew, where now the Town Hall stands, and St. Swithun, in Allington. Other religious foundations included the Priory, now the rope factory; the double chantry chapel of St. Michael, where now is extant only the lane of that name; the Hospital of St. John, at the East Bridge; the Mawdelyn Leper House, in Allington; and the Chapel of St. James, in Wyke’s Court Lane. One can well imagine that clerical interests might sometimes clash amidst such a galaxy of places for worship. In fact, in the reign of Henry VIII. Sir John Strangwayes, Steward of the Borough, lodged a complaint with the Chancellor of the Diocese “against the disorder of certain chantry priests residing at Bridport.” This was evidently a harbinger of the coming dissolution of monastic foundations, which confined the worship of the town to two churches under one rector.