Memorials of Old Dorset

by Unknown

At one time there were twelve churches or chapels in Shaftesbury—St. Peter’s, St. Martin’s, St. Andrew’s, Holy Trinity, St. Lawrence’s, St. Michael’s, St. James’, All Saints’, St. John the Baptist’s, St. Mary’s, St. Edward’s, and last, but not least, the Abbey Church of St. Mary and St. Edward. Beyond the borough boundary was the Church of St. Rumbold,[57] now generally spoken of as Cann Church. Why Shaftesbury, which was never a large town, should have needed so many churches has always been a mystery. The late William Barnes suggested a theory which may partially account for it. He says that some of these churches may have been old British ones, and that the Saxon Christians could not, or would not, enter into communion with the British Christians, but built churches of their own. This is probably true, although it still fails to account for the number of churches which, on this supposition, the Saxons must have built. It must be remembered, as explained in the Introduction, that Dorset remained much longer free from the dominion of the West Saxon Kings than Hampshire, and that when it was finally conquered by the West Saxons, these men had already become Christians, so that the conquest was not one of expulsion or extermination. The Celtic inhabitants were allowed to remain in the old homes, though in an inferior position. The laws of Ine, 688, clearly show this. In Exeter there is a church dedicated to St. Petroc, who was a Cornish, and therefore Celtic, saint. Mr. Barnes thinks that the Shaftesbury churches dedicated to St. Michael, St. Martin, St. Lawrence, and the smaller one dedicated to St. Mary, may have been Celtic. St. Martin was a Gaulish saint, St. Lawrence may have been a dedication due to the early missionaries, while the two hills in Cornwall and Brittany dedicated to St. Michael show that he was a saint held in honour by the Celts. The British Church differed in certain points of observance from the Church founded by the missionaries from Rome under St. Augustine, notably as to the date of keeping Easter. Bæda says that when he was Abbot of Malmesbury he wrote, by order of the Synod of his own Church, a book against the errors of the British Church, and that by it he persuaded many of the Celts, who were subjects of the West Saxon King, to adopt the Roman date for the celebration of the Resurrection. But even if we assume that there were four Celtic churches, why should no less than eight fresh ones have been built by the West Saxons? No explanation has been offered. Possibly, however, some of the churches may have been only small chapels or chantries.

Gold Hill, Shaftesbury.

Soon after the dissolution of the Abbey, as has been said previously, all the walls above the surface were pulled down, except the one that skirts the steep lane known as Gold Hill. This wall stands, strongly buttressed by gigantic masses of masonry on the outside (some of them contemporaneous with the walls, others added afterwards), for it has to bear up the earth of what was formerly the Abbey garden. The foundations of the Abbey Church, either purposely or naturally, in the course of time were covered with soil, and so remained until 1861, when some excavations took place and sundry relics were found, among them a stone coffin containing a skeleton and an abbot’s staff and ring. The foundations were then once more covered in, but recently the Corporation obtained a twenty-one years’ lease of the ground for the purpose of more thorough investigation. All the foundations that remain will be uncovered, the ground laid out as an ornamental garden and thrown open to the public. Considerable progress has been made with this work; all except the extreme west end of the nave has been excavated to the level of the floor, and some very interesting discoveries have been made. Many fragments of delicately-carved stonework, some of them bearing the original colour with which they were decorated, were unearthed, and are preserved in the Town Hall. The excavation began at the eastern end of the church, and proceeded westward. It was found that the east end of the choir was apsidal, the form usual in Norman times, but abandoned by English builders in the thirteenth century, when many of the larger churches were extended further to the east, though in France the apsidal termination is almost universal. The form shows that the Abbey Church was rebuilt during the Norman period of architecture, and that the choir was not afterwards extended eastward, for in earlier days, as well as in the thirteenth century and later, the rectangular east end was common. The north choir aisle was apsidal internally and square-ended externally; the south aisle was much wider than the north, and was evidently extended in the fifteenth century. The foundations of the high altar are complete, and on the north side of it is a grave formed of faced stone, which probably contained the body of the founder of the Norman Church. The crypt lies outside of the north aisle, and this has been completely cleared out; its floor is sixteen feet below the level of the ground. On this floor was found a twisted Byzantine column, which probably supported a similar column in the chapel above the crypt. This is the chapel which is believed to have been the shrine of King Eadward the Martyr. A most curious discovery was made in the crypt—namely, a number of dolicho-cephalous skulls. The question arises: How did they get there? For the shape of these skulls indicates that their owners were men of the Neolithic Age! In various graves sundry ornaments and articles of dress have been found—a gold ring in which a stone had once been set, a leaden bulla bearing the name of Pope Martin V. (1417-1431), and a number of bronze pins, probably used to fasten the garment in which the body was buried. The clay used for puddling the bottom of the graves acted much in the manner of quicklime and destroyed the bodies. Several pieces of the pavement, formed of heraldic and other tiles, remain in situ. It is supposed by some that the Abbey Church once possessed a central tower and a tall spire, though it is doubtful if the spire ever existed; if it did, the church standing on its lofty isolated hill about 700 feet above the sea-level must have been a conspicuous object from all the wide Vale of Blackmore and its surrounding hills, as well as from the Vale of Wardours to the north, along which the railway now runs.

St. Peter’s Church is the oldest building in the town, but it is late Perpendicular in style. It is noteworthy that it has not, and apparently never had, a chancel properly called so; no doubt a ritual chancel may have been formed by a wooden screen. A holy-water stoup is to be seen on the left hand as one goes into the entrance porch at the west side of the tower. The richly-carved pierced parapet of the north aisle bears the Tudor rose and the portcullis, and so shows that this part of the church was built early in the sixteenth century.

Many of the houses in the town are old, but not of great antiquity. Thatched cottages abound in the side lanes, and even the long main street, which runs from east to west, has a picturesque irregularity on the sky-line. The most interesting house is one in Bimport, marked in a map dated 1615 as Mr. Groves’ house. It stands near the gasworks and the chief entrance to Castle Hill. It is a good example of a town house of the early sixteenth century, and contains some well-carved mantelpieces of somewhat later date. This house has served various purposes—at one time it was an inn, and some years ago narrowly escaped destruction. It, however, did escape with only the removal of its old stone-slabbed roof, in place of which one of red tiling has been substituted. An additional interest has been given to this old building by its introduction into Jude the Obscure as the dwelling-place of the schoolmaster Phillotson, from a window of which his wife Sue once jumped into the street. Beyond this house is one known as St. John’s, standing as it does on St. John’s Hill, more of which hereafter. It was, in great measure, built of material bought at the sale of Beckford’s strange and whimsical erection known as Fonthill Abbey, of which the story is told in the Memorials of Old Wiltshire. In the garden of St. John’s Cottage is a curious cross, in which are two carved alabaster panels, covered with glass to preserve them from frost and rain.

Shaftesbury owes what distinction it possesses to its position, and this is due to its geological formation. A long promontory[58] of Upper Greensand runs from the east, and ends in a sharp point where the steep escarpments facing the north-west and south meet. On the triangle formed by these two the town is built. Looking out from the end of this high ground we may see a conical, wooded hill known as Duncliffe; this is an outlier of the same greensand formation; all the rest of the greensand, which once occupied the space between, has been gradually washed away, and the surface of the lower ground consists of various members of the Jurassic series. Under the greensand lies a bed of Gault, a blue-coloured clay impervious to water; and, as the greensand rock is porous, the gault holds up the water that percolates through the greensand, with the result that a thickness of about twenty-five feet of the lowest bed of the greensand is full of water, while the upper layers are dry. Hence, to get water to supply the town, wells would have to be sunk to the depth of 150 feet. Some such wells were, indeed, sunk in mediæval times, but were not satisfactory. It is only in recent times that regular water-works, with pumping-engines, reservoir, and mains, have been constructed, and Shaftesbury had to depend for water until that time on a supply obtained from springs at Enmore Green, a village situated under the hill and to the north of the town. This gave rise to a quaint and curious custom. On the Sunday next after the Festival of the Invention of the Cross, May 3rd (the day was changed in 1663 to the Monday before Ascension Day), the Mayor and burgesses of Shaftesbury went down to the springs at Enmore Green with mirth and minstrelsy, and, chief of all, with a staff or bezant adorned with feathers, pieces of gold, rings and jewels, and sundry dues—to wit, a pair of gloves, a calf’s head, a gallon of ale, and two penny loaves of fine wheaten bread: these were presented to the bailiff of the manor of Gillingham, in which the village of Enmore Green was situated. Moreover, the Mayor and burgesses, for one whole hour by the clock, had to dance round the village green hand in hand. Should the dues not be presented, or the dance fail, the penalty was that the water should no longer be supplied to inhabitants of the borough of Shaftesbury. The decoration of the bezant was a costly matter; the original one, of gilded wood in the form of a palm-tree, was in the possession of Lady Theodora Guest, and has been presented by her ladyship to the Corporation of Shaftesbury. The water was brought up in carts drawn by horses, and strong ones they must have been, for the hill they had to climb is one of the steepest in the neighbourhood. The fixed price for a bucketful of water was a farthing. From the scanty supply of drinking-water it came to pass that a saying got abroad that Shaftesbury was a town where “there was more beer than water”; to which was added two lines describing other noteworthy characteristics of the place—namely, that “here there was a churchyard above the steeple,” and that the town contained “more rogues than honest people.” Once during the writer’s fifteen years’ sojourn in the town some accident happened to the pumping apparatus at the water-works, and for several weeks the inhabitants were thrown back upon the old source of water supply. Day after day water-carts might be seen slowly passing along the streets, while servants or housewives came out from every doorway with empty pails or buckets, though they were not called upon to pay their farthings for the filling of them, as the expense was borne by the owners of the water-works.

In the old coaching days Shaftesbury was a livelier place than now, since the London and Exeter coaches, with their splendid teams and cheerful horns, passed through it daily, changing their horses at the chief hostelry. When the Salisbury and Yeovil Railway (afterwards absorbed by the London and South-Western) was planned it was intended to bring the line, not indeed through the town, but within a half-mile or so of it, with a station under the hill; but the bill was here, as in many another place, opposed by the landowners, with the result that the line was not allowed to come within about three miles of Shaftesbury, and was carried through the neighbouring town of Gillingham, which from that time began to increase, while Shaftesbury decreased. Periodically there has been an agitation for a branch line or a loop or a light railway running from Tisbury and passing near Shaftesbury, and joining, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Wareham, the line to Weymouth. But all the agitation has ended in nothing practical.

The beauty of its scenery and the clearness of its air have raised a hope in the minds of some of its inhabitants that Shaftesbury may become a summer health resort; but as long as the town is so difficult of access these hopes do not seem likely to be fulfilled to any great extent.

There are scarcely any historical events connected with Shaftesbury besides those already mentioned; but it is worthy of notice that once for a short time two royal ladies were held prisoners at the Abbey. Robert the Bruce, when on one occasion things were not going well with him, entrusted his second wife, Elizabeth, and her step-daughter, Marjory (the only child of his first wife, Isabella of Mar), to the care of his younger brother, Nigel Bruce, who was holding the strong Castle of Kildrummie, near the source of the Don, in Aberdeenshire. The castle was besieged by the English, under the Earls of Lancaster and Hereford, but when the magazine was treacherously burnt the garrison had to surrender. Nigel Bruce was taken to Berwick, tried, condemned, and executed. Elizabeth and Marjory were carried off across the border, and, with a view of placing them far beyond all chance of rescue, were ultimately handed over to the Abbess of Shaftesbury in 1313. King Edward II. allowed them twenty shillings a week for their maintenance, a sum of much greater value in those days than now. After the battle of Bannockburn (June, 1314), the Earl of Hereford, who had been taken prisoner by Bruce, was given up in exchange for the Queen, who during all her married life, with the exception of two years, had been in the hands of the English, for she had been married in 1304, and had been taken prisoner in 1306.