Charles G. (Charles George) Harper - Wessex

Sherborne Abbey Church

London Adam & Charles
Black
Soho Square W
1911

This is a modest, gossipy and allusive sketch of a delightful part of England, designed rather to arouse the interest and the curiosity of those not already acquainted with what I will call the Middle West than to fully satisfy it. If in this connection you choose to regard the author of these pages as a commercial traveller in the interest of Wessex, displaying samples of the picturesque wares the West of England can offer the tourist, it will entirely fit the humour in which they were penned. To aid the medium of words is added a feast of colour in the accompanying selected views, which show the lovely golden russet interior of Sherborne Abbey, the misty rich blue haze of Blackmore Vale, the architectural majesty of Wells, and much else that awaits the traveller in Dorset and Somerset.

C. G. H.

The Wessex of which I shall treat in these gossiping pages is that Wessex of romance and of the great dairy-farms, which has been little touched by the influence of railways. Hampshire and WiltshireWinchester and Salisburyhave become too closely in touch with London to stand so fully upon the ancient ways as does Dorset, with the greater part of its north-western neighbour, Somerset. But in these rural territories the countryman still talks the old broad Doset and Zummerzet speech, in which the letter o in every possible circumstance becomes a, as you will perceive in that old rhyme beginning:

A harnet zet in a holler tree,
A proper spiteful twoad was he.
And thus he zung as he did zet,
My sting is as zharp as a bagginet.

And they think, too, the olden thoughts.

Nothing can give one a greater sense of the difference between the exploited modernized coast-line and the real old Wessex than the journey from up-to-date Bournemouth to Poole, that olden nest of smugglers, and thence across to the untamed heaths and to Wareham. In this way, then, we will begin our exploration of Wessex.

Wareham is a little town which has been left to drowse peacefully in its old days. Nothing has happened in Wareham since its almost complete destruction by fire (1762), an event which here as distinctly marks an era as does the Great Fire of London in the City. It not only rubricates the local table of events with a glowing finger, but the rebuilding necessary after it has set a specious stamp of modernity upon the place, to which its long and troubled history and its two ancient churches give an emphatic denial. Mr. Hardy styles Wareham Anglebury, and it is a name which well befits a town whose story is so greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the older kingdom of Wessex. The original founders of Wareham, who were probably antecedent to the Anglo-Saxons, were very properly afraid of overseas rovers, who might sail into Poole Harbour and attack them, and they raised around the place those huge ditches and embankments which remain to this day to astonish the stranger, and are known as the walls of Wareham. Covered with grass, the summit of them forms an interesting ramble. But these defences never did confer upon Wareham the desired security. Its early story is one of continual capture, and it had been burnt so often that the inhabitants had at last feared to rebuild it and live there again; and it was a deserted place William the Conqueror found. He caused a castle to be built, but that fortress in its long career again and again invited siege and plunder, until it was at last destroyed in the troubles between Charles I. and his Parliament. The last pitiful scene was in 1685, when three rebels in the Monmouth rising were hanged on the famous walls, at a corner still known as Bloody Bank. The chief architectural interest is centred upon the ancient church of St. Martin, a curiously-proportioned building, standing piquantly beside the road outside the town, to the north, on a little bank or terrace. The antiquary perceives by a mere glance at its stilted narrow and lofty proportions that it is Saxon, and the interior discloses a lofty nave of stern unornamental appearance, with characteristic Saxon chancel arch, the whole closely resembling the interior of the Saxon church of Bradford-on-Avon. The Church of St. Mary, at the other extremity of the town, possesses a hexagonal leaden font, one of the twenty-seven leaden fonts in England.

Six miles north-west of Wareham we come to Bere Regis, a place very notable in the Hardy literature, for it is the Kingsbere of Tess of the DUrbervilles, and the Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill of Far from the Madding Crowd. Before ever it acquired the kingly prefix or suffix, it was merely Bere, a word which explained its situation amid underwoods and copses. I have all the will in the world to describe Bere Regis as picturesque; but it is not that. It is an old rather grim and grey village that has had troublesnot romantic troubles, please to understand, but economic ones. It has a pastneither scandalous nor noble, but just the past of a place that has seen better days and has sufferedsuffered, truly, in the peculiarly Dorset way, from fire. How many times the dry thatch of the cottages has gone up in flame and smoke I know not; only I knowand all may seethat experience has not made the villagers wise, for it is a long street of thatched cottages yet; and here and there is the ruin of one more recently burnt in like manner. The scattered heaps remain untouched, for it is not worth the while to rebuild in Bere Regis. That is why the heavily-thatched roofs, with little bedroom windows peering out like weary-lidded eyes, look to me grim and sad. The church is fine, and owes much of its beauty to the ancient Turberville family, something to the Abbey of Tarent, and most of all to Cardinal Morton, a native of this parish. He is said to have given the nobleindeed, the extraordinarily nobleelaborately carved, painted and gilded roof of the nave, which by itself would make the artistic reputation of a church. It is really not a West of England roof at all, but distinctly of the East Anglian type, and there are legends that explain the bringing of it here. However that may be, it is a bold and striking object; the hammer-beams carved into the huge shapes of Bishops, Cardinals, and pilgrims, with immense round faces carved on the bosses, which look down upon you with fat, complacent smiles. Add to this the fact that the figures are painted with flesh-tints and the costumes vividly coloured, and it will be guessed that this is a remarkable work. Here are interesting carved fifteenth-century bench-ends, and on two of the Transitional Norman pillars extraordinary sculptures of headsone tugging open its mouth, the other with hand to forehead. They are popularly said to be Toothache and Headache, but were probably intended to symbolize the divine gifts of speech and sight. Battered old Purbeck marble tombs of the bygone Turbervilles are seen here.