My road from Warminster to Devizes lay through Westbury, a nasty odious rotten-borough, a really rotten place. It has cloth factories in it, and they seem to be ready to tumble down as well as many of the houses. God’s curse seems to be upon most of these rotten-boroughs. After coming through this miserable hole, I came along, on the north side of the famous hill, called Bratton Castle, so renowned in the annals of the Romans and of Alfred the Great. Westbury is a place of great ancient grandeur; and it is easy to perceive that it was once ten or twenty times its present size. My road was now the line of separation between what they call South Wilts and North Wilts, the former consisting of high and broad downs and narrow valleys with meadows and rivers running down them; the latter consisting of a rather flat, enclosed country: the former having a chalk bottom; the latter a bottom of marl, clay, or flat stone: the former a country for lean sheep and corn; and the latter a country for cattle, fat sheep, cheese, and bacon: the former by far, to my taste, the most beautiful; and I am by no means sure that it is not, all things considered, the most rich. All my way along, till I came very near to Devizes, I had the steep and naked downs up to my right, and the flat and enclosed country to my left.
Very near to Bratton Castle (which is only a hill with deep ditches on it) is the village of Eddington, so famed for the battle fought here by Alfred and the Danes. The church in this village would contain several thousands of persons; and the village is reduced to a few straggling houses. The land here is very good; better than almost any I ever saw; as black, and, apparently, as rich, as the land in the market-gardens at Fulham. The turnips are very good all along here for several miles; but this is, indeed, singularly fine and rich land. The orchards very fine; finely sheltered, and the crops of apples and pears and walnuts very abundant. Walnuts ripe now, a month earlier than usual. After Eddington I came to a hamlet called Earl’s Stoke, the houses of which stand at a few yards from each other on the two sides of the road; every house is white; and the front of every one is covered with some sort or other of clematis, or with rose-trees, or jasmines. It was easy to guess that the whole belonged to one owner; and that owner I found to be a Mr. Watson Taylor, whose very pretty seat is close by the hamlet, and in whose park-pond I saw what I never saw before; namely, some black swans. They are not nearly so large as the white, nor are they so stately in their movements. They are a meaner bird.
Highworth (Wilts),
Monday, 4th Sept.
I got here yesterday, after a ride, including my deviations, of about thirty-four miles, and that, too, without breaking my fast. Before I got into the rotten-borough of Calne, I had two tributes to pay to the Aristocracy; namely, two Sunday tolls; and I was resolved that the country in which these tolls were extorted should have not a farthing of my money that I could by any means keep from it. Therefore I fasted until I got into the free-quarters in which I now am. I would have made my horse fast too, if I could have done it without the risk of making him unable to carry me.
RIDE FROM HIGHWORTH TO CRICKLADE AND THENCE TO MALMSBURY.
Highworth (Wilts),
Monday, 4th Sept. 1826.
When I got to Devizes on Saturday evening, and came to look out of the inn-window into the street, I perceived that I had seen that place before, and always having thought that I should like to see Devizes, of which I had heard so much talk as a famous corn-market, I was very much surprised to find that it was not new to me. Presently a stage-coach came up to the door, with “Bath and London” upon its panels; and then I recollected that I had been at this place on my way to Bristol last year. Devizes is, as nearly as possible, in the centre of the county, and the canal that passes close by it is the great channel through which the produce of the country is carried away to be devoured by the idlers, the thieves, and the prostitutes, who are all tax-eaters, in the Wens of Bath and London. Pottern, which I passed through in my way from Warminster to Devizes, was once a place much larger than Devizes; and it is now a mere ragged village, with a church large, very ancient, and of most costly structure. The whole of the people here might, as in most other cases, be placed in the belfry, or the church-porches.
All the way along the mansion-houses are nearly all gone. There is now and then a great place, belonging to a borough-monger, or some one connected with borough-mongers; but all the little gentlemen are gone; and hence it is that parsons are now made justices of the peace! There are few other persons left who are at all capable of filling the office in a way to suit the system! The monopolizing brewers and rag-rooks are, in some places, the “magistrates;” and thus is the whole thing changed, and England is no more what it was. Very near to the sides of my road from Warminster to Devizes there were formerly (within a hundred years) 22 mansion-houses of sufficient note to be marked as such in the county-map then made. There are now only seven of them remaining. There were five parish-churches nearly close to my road; and in one parish out of the five the parsonage-house is, in the parliamentary return, said to be “too small” for the parson to live in, though the church would contain two or three thousand people, and though the living is a Rectory, and a rich one too! Thus has the church-property, or, rather, that public property which is called church property, been dilapidated! The parsons have swallowed the tithes and the rent of the glebes; and have, successively, suffered the parsonage-houses to fall into decay. But these parsonage-houses were, indeed, not intended for large families. They were intended for a priest, a main part of whose business it was to distribute the tithes amongst the poor and the strangers! The parson, in this case, at Corsley, says, “too small for an incumbent with a family.” Ah! there is the mischief. It was never intended to give men tithes as a premium for breeding! Malthus does not seem to see any harm in this sort of increase of population. It is the working population, those who raise the food and the clothing, that he and Scarlett want to put a stop to the breeding of!