present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.

Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby line of military
settlements little. Coming up to ‘the Wen’ in 1821, and passing
Blackwater, he reached York Town, and thus he holds forth: ‘After
_pleasure_ comes _pain_’, says Solomon, and after the sight of Lady
Mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at Hartley Row) came that of the
clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘_Royal Military College of
Sandhurst_!’ Here, close by the roadside, is the _drying ground_.
Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines
covering perhaps an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to ‘_York_
Place’ on ‘_Osnaburg_ Hill.’ And is there never to be an _end_ of these
things? Away to the left we see that immense building which contains
children _breeding up to be military commanders_! Has this place cost so
little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have
seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself
this question, ‘Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing,
created by money _raised by loan_; will this thing be upheld by means of
taxes _while the interest of the Debt is reduced_, on the ground that
the nation is _unable to pay the interest in full_?’

It is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet
simplicity of the Three per Cents’ has given place to very much reduced
interest. But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture.
If Cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre
of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to
shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new
feature of the road, the lady cyclist.

[Sidenote: _BLACKWATER_]

There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town, Camberley, and York Town
now than when Cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more
‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more Tommies, more
drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most
part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with relief
that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon
the country and descends into Blackwater, where the river of that name,
so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty
wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the
entrance to the pretty village. Over this bridge we enter Hampshire,
that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk is
reached yet, until coming upon the little stream in the level between
Hartley Row and Hook, called the Whitewater from the milky tinge it has
gained on coming down from the chalky heights of Alton and Odiham. This
tinge is, however, more imaginary than real, and the characteristically
chalky scenery of Hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the Great
Western Road until Basingstoke and its chalk downs are reached.

Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the
‘White Hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever,
a village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street we come to a wild
and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats.

To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but
the old coachmen simply revelled in it, for here was the best stretch
of galloping ground in England, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it
for all they were worth, through Hartley Row and Hook, and well on
towards Basingstoke.

The famous (or infamous let us rather call them) Hartford Bridge Flats
are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of
which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save
that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be
overtaken by bad weather. Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are
well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black,
open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles
on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn
battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. The road runs, a straight and
sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its
monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. The
cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely
to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on
the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable.

Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country,
is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and
rabbits uncountable. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because its
development was suddenly arrested when the Exeter Road became deserted
for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a
veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more eloquent of old
times is the long, long street of

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON)]

[Sidenote: _HARTLEY ROW_]

Hartley Row which adjoins. Hartley Row was absolutely called into
existence by the demand in the old days of road travel for stabling,
inns, and refreshments, and is one of the most thoroughly representative
of such roadside settlements. Half a mile to the south of the great
highway is the parent village of Hartley Wintney, unknown to and
undreamt of by travellers in those times, and probably much the same as
it was in the Middle Ages. The well-named ‘Row,’ on the other hand,
sprang lip, grew lengthy, and flourished exceedingly during the sixty
years of coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was ruined. What
Brayley, the historian of Surrey, wrote of Bagshot in 1841, applies even
more eloquently to Hartley Row: ‘Its trade has been entirely ruined by
the opening of the Southampton and Great Western Railroads, and its
numerous inns and public-houses, which had long been profitably
occupied, are now almost destitute of business. Formerly thirty stage
coaches passed through the village, now every coach has been taken off
the road.’ The ‘Southampton Railroad,’ referred to here, is of course
the London and South-Western Railway, which has drained this part of the
road of its traffic, and whose Winchfield station lies two miles away.

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]

Before the crash of the ’40’s Hartley Row possessed a thriving industry
in the manufacture of coaches, carried on by one Fagg, who was also
landlord of the ‘Bell Inn,’ Holborn, and in addition horsed several
stages out of London.

Some day the coming historian of the nineteenth century will, in his
chapter on travel, cite Hartley Row as the typical coaching village,
which was called into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and with
the death of coaching was stranded high and dry in this dried-up channel
of life. All the houses

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]

[Sidenote: _OLD TRAVELLERS_]

of a village like this, which lived on the needs of travellers, faced
the road in one long street, and almost every fourth or fifth house was
an inn, or ministered in some way to the requirements of those who
travelled. It is remarkable to find so many of these old inns still in
existence at Hartley Row. Here they still stand, ruddy-faced,
substantial but plain buildings, with, notwithstanding their plainness,
a certain air of distinction. The wayfarer, well read in the habits of
the times when they were bustling with business, can imagine untold
comforts behind those frontages; can reconstruct the scenes in the
public waiting-rooms, where travellers, passing the interval between
their being set down here by the ‘Defiance’ or the ‘Regulator’ Exeter
coach and the arrival of the Odiham and Alton bye-stage, could warm
themselves by the roaring fire; can sniff in imagination the coffee of
the breakfasts and the roast beef of the dinners; or perceive through
the old-fashioned window-frames the lordly posting parties, detained
here by stress of weather, making the best of it by drinking of the old
port or brown sherry which the cellars of every self-respecting coaching
inn could then produce. Not that these were the only travellers familiar
to the roadside village in those days. Not every one who fared from
London to Exeter could afford the luxuries of the mail or stage coach,
or of the good cheer and the lavender-scented beds just glimpsed. For
the poor traveller there were the lumbering so-called ‘Fly-vans’ of
Russell and Co., which jogged along at the average pace of three
miles[3] an hour--the pace decreed by Scotland Yard for the modern
policeman. The poor folk who travelled thus might perhaps have walked
with greater advantage, ‘save for the dignity of the thing,’ as the
Irishman said when the floor of his cab fell out and he was obliged to
run along with the bottomless vehicle. Certainly they paid more for the
misery of being conveyed thus than the railway traveller does nowadays
for comfort at thirty to fifty miles an hour. Numbers _did_ walk,
including the soldiers and the sailors going to rejoin their regiments
or their ships, who appear frequently in the roadside sketches of that
period by Rowlandson and others. The poor travellers probably rode
because of their--luggage I was about to write, let us more correctly
say bundles.

[Sidenote: _PICTURESQUE OLD DAYS_]

When they arrived at a village at nightfall, they camped under the
ample shelter of the great waggon; or, perhaps, if they had anything to
squander on mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a supper of
cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed by a shake-down on straw or
hay in the stable-lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use among
the second- and third-rate inns of the old times.

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]

Those were the days of the picturesque; if, indeed, Rowlandson and
Morland and the other delightfully romantic artists of the period did
not invent those roadside scenes. Here, for instance, is Rowlandson’s
charming group of three old topers boozing outside the ‘Half Moon.’ I
cannot tell you where this ‘Half Moon’ was. Probably the artist imagined
it; but at anyrate the _kind_ of place, and scenes of this description,
must have existed in his time. Here, you will observe, the landlord has
come out with a mug of ‘humming ale’ or ‘nut-brown October’ for the
thirsty driver of the curricle, who is apparently going to market, if
we may judge by the basket of fowls tied on to the back of the
conveyance.

Scenes so picturesque as this are not to be observed in our own time,
nor are the tramps who yet infest the road, singly or in families, of
the engaging appearance of this family party. The human form divine was
wondrously gnarled and twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years
ago, according to Rowlandson and Gillray. Legs like the trunks of
contorted apple-trees, stomachs like terrestrial globes, mouths
resembling the mouths of horses, and noses like geographical features on
a large scale were the commonplaces of their practice, and this example
forms no exception to the general rule.

XVII

[Sidenote: _TREE-PLANTING_]

The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching
towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived
down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful
appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a
very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant
strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at
the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with
the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees. These oak glades do
not look particularly old; but, as it happens, we can ascertain their
exact age and at the same time note how slow-growing is the oak tree by
a reference to Cobbett’s _Rural Rides_, where, in 1821, he notes their
being planted: ‘I perceive that they are planting oaks on the
“_wastes_,” as the _Agriculturasses_ call them, about _Hartley Row_;
which is very good, because the herbage, after the first year, is rather
increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks
arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and the _real wealth_,
of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of
the planter who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because
he plants for his children’s children. The planter here is Lady Mildmay,
who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here.’

This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt
of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like
tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually
worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and
the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of
self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine
patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily,
the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these
trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those
who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render
this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own.
All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that
is to say, the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of
common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will
be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred
upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’--whoever they may have been. If
technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as
he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett
before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and
not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But
perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the
agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it.

Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but
that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the
‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to
one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for
man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles,
either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the
downs, like Winterslow Hut.

Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the
Anglo-Saxon _scora_, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names
as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in
Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of
place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook,
with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a
meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.

[Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.]

[Sidenote: _OLD BASING_]

It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church,
which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman
bishop, Saint Swithun.

Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old
coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the
‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the
right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the
town of Basingstoke.

The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the delights that await
explorers in the byeways, misses a great deal here by keeping strictly
to the highroad. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke, this
turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one in half a mile to the
pretty village of Old Basing, celebrated for one of the most stubborn
and protracted defences recorded in history. It was here that the
equally crafty and courteous Sir William Paulet, first Marquis of
Winchester, and Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth,
Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an immense palace on the
site of Basing Castle. There can be little doubt that this magnificent
person, who possessed no principles, and so kept place and power through
the troublous times that these reigns comprised, must have had his hands
in the Royal coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position for
the sale of preferments. ‘No oak, but an osier,’ as his contemporaries
said, he bowed before the tempests of religious persecution and the
whirlwinds of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by and left him
still peculating. He had become a hoary-headed sinner by the time
Elizabeth reigned, or there is no knowing but that he might have become
a Prince Consort; for when he entertained Her Majesty here in 1560: ‘By
my troth,’ said she, ‘if my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could
find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in
England.’ But she had said this kind of thing of many another.

[Sidenote: _BASING HOUSE_]

The successors of this gorgeous nobleman--not being Lords
Treasurers--could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so
demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place,
fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road,
and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s
Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton
at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John,
fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘_Aimez Loyaulté_,’ he wrote
with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and,
provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house
speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued
through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do
for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and
lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come
and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed
company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of
the arts; reposing after the warlike fatigues of the day in a bed whose
gorgeous trappings made it worth £1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a
company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and
fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the
arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and
careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and were slain to
the number of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes this varied
garrison was hard pressed for food, when relief would come in whimsical
fashion, as when Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared with
sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of provisions with the other;
a fitting contrast with the typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left
hand and a pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the words of
Carlyle, ‘long infested the Parliament in these quarters, and was an
especial eye-sorrow to the trade of London with the Western parts. It
stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor Colonel This and
then poor Colonel That, till the jubilant Royalists had given it the
name of _Basting_ House.’

But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced the garrisons in the
West and the Parliamentary troops could be spared from other places.
Cromwell himself was charged with the business of taking ‘Loyalty.’ It
was in September that he came to Basingstoke with horse and foot, and
established a post of observation on the summit of Winklebury, a hill
crowned with prehistoric earthworks that overlooks Worting and the
Exeter Road, two miles on the other side of the town.

Little over a fortnight later Cromwell wrote that ‘Thank God he was able
to give a good account of Basing.’ The house was taken by storm on the
14th October, ‘while the garrison was card-playing,’ as the persistent
Hampshire legend would have us believe. ‘Clubs are trumps, as when
Basing House was taken,’ is still an expression often heard at Hampshire
card-parties, and some colour is lent to this story by the poor defence
with which the furious onrush of Cromwell’s troops was met. The
attacking force lost few men, but a hundred of the defenders were
killed, and three hundred more taken prisoners. Then the place caught
fire and was utterly burnt, many perishing miserably in the great brick
vaults of the house, where they were when the fire reached them. Fuller,
that quaint seventeenth-century historian, who had been staying here,
had, fortunately, left before the arrival of Cromwell’s expedition. The
continual fighting and the booming of the guns had distracted his
attention from his work! There were others not so fortunate. Thomas
Johnson, a peaceful botanist, was killed, and one Robinson, an actor and
unarmed, was slaughtered by Harrison, the fanatic. ‘Cursed is he that
doeth the Lord’s work negligently,’ exclaimed the Puritan, as he cut him
down. Other soldiers slew the daughter of Dr. Griffith who was charging
them with being violent to her father.

Fanaticism and cupidity were fully satisfied on this occasion, save that
there were those who grumbled because the lives of the Marquis of
Winchester and his lieutenant were spared. The sack of Basing House
yielded £200,000 worth of plunder, in objects

[Sidenote: _THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE_]

[Illustration: THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.]

of art, gold and silver plate, coin, and provisions; and all partook of
it, from Cromwell to the rank and file. ‘One soldier had a hundred and
twenty pieces of gold for his share, others plate, others jewels.’ No
wonder they had, with this dazzling prospect before them, rushed to the
assault ‘like a fire-flood.’

They made a rare business of this pillage, taking away the valuables,
and selling the provisions to the country folks, who ‘loaded many
carts.’ The bricks and building materials were given away, probably
because they could not wait for the long business of selling them.
‘Whoever will come for brick or stone shall freely have the same for his
pains,’ ran the proclamation, and, considering this, it is quite
remarkable that even the existing scanty ruins of Basing House are left.

The area comprised within the defences measures fourteen and a half
acres, now a tumbled and tangled stretch of ground, a mass of grassy
mounds and hollows, overgrown in places with thickets. These ruins are
entered from the road by an old brick gateway, still bearing the ‘three
swords in pile’ on a shield, the arms of the Paulets, with ivy
overhanging and tall trees behind. A tall curtain wall of brick, with a
quaintly peaked-roofed tower at either end, now looks down upon the
Basingstoke Canal, which many strangers think is the moat, but though a
picturesque addition to the scene, it cannot claim any such historic
associations, for it was only constructed close upon a hundred years
ago.

Near by is Old Basing church, with square tower built of red brick,
similar to that seen in the ruins of the House. It is said to be of
foreign make. Bullets have up to recent years been extracted from the
south door of the church, the original oak door in use two hundred and
sixty years ago; and the flint and stone south walls and buttresses bear
vivid witness, in their patching of brick, to the ruin that befell this
part of the building in those troubled times. Strange to say, a
beautiful group of the Virgin and Child still occupies a tabernacle over
the west window, uninjured, although it can scarce have escaped the
notice of the fanatical soldiery. Within the church are memorials of the
loyal Paulets, Marquises of Winchester, and for a period Dukes of
Bolton. Their glory has departed with their great House, and although a
smaller residence was built in the meadows, close at hand, that has
vanished too.

[Sidenote: _THE ‘GREY LADY’_]

When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis of Winchester retired to
his hunting lodge of Hawk Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and,
enlarging it, made the place his residence. His son, created Duke of
Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new house on the site of the
lodge, and this is the present Hackwood Park. The existing house stands
in the midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although imposing, is a
somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost story. That bitter lawyer, Richard
Bethell, of whom it was said that he ‘dismissed Hell, with costs, and
took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope
of everlasting damnation,’ when he became Lord Chancellor and was
created Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it was to one of
his friends that the ‘Grey Lady’ of the mansion presented herself. Lord
Westbury and a party of his friends had arrived from town soon after the
purchase, and at a late hour they retired to rest, saying good-night to
one another in the corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle of
the night and found his room strangely illuminated, with the indistinct
outlines of a human figure visible in the midst of the uncanny glow.
Thinking this some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he turned
round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a later hour and see the
figure of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress. With more courage than
most people would probably have shown under the circumstances, he,
instead of putting his head under the bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon
the lady modestly retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down
and wrote an account of the occurrence; but when at breakfast Lord
Westbury and his other friends kept continually asking him how he had
slept, his suspicions as to a practical joke having been played upon him
were renewed. He accordingly parried all these queries and said he had
slept excellently, until Lord Westbury said, ‘Now, look here, we saw
that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room last night, you
know!’ Explanations followed, but the story of the ‘Grey Lady’ remains
mysterious to this day.

XVIII

The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and
odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in
1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also
favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons,
modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking
of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is
favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the
melancholy wolds that hem in Basingstoke to the north and west, or
listen to them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the undulating
farm-lands of the south.

[Sidenote: _HOLY GHOST CHAPEL_]

We have seen how Old Basing became of prime military importance from its
situation at the point where many roads from the south and west of
England converged and fell into one great highway to London; and from
the same cause is due the commercial prosperity of Basingstoke.
Basingstoke, with a record as a town going back to the time when the
Domesday Book was compiled, is yet a mere modern settlement compared
with the mother-parish of Old Basing; but it was an important place in
the sixteenth century, when silks and woollens were manufactured here.
At later periods this junction of the roads brought a great coaching
trade, and has finally made Basingstoke a railway junction. Silks and
woollens have given place to engineering works and machine-shops, and
the town, with its modern reputation for the manufacture of
agricultural machinery, bids fair at no distant date to become to
Hampshire what Colchester and Ipswich are to Essex and Suffolk.

When the Parliamentary Generals were engaged in the long business of
besieging Basing House, it may well be supposed that the town suffered
greatly at the hands of their soldiery. They, who were experts at
wrecking churches and cathedrals in a few hours, had ample opportunities
for destruction in the four years that business was about. Their
handiwork may be seen to this day--together with that of modern Toms,
Dicks, and Harrys, who have not the excuse of being fanatics--in the
ruined walls of Holy Ghost Chapel on the northern outskirts of the town.
Within the roofless walls of the chapel, unroofed by those Roundheads
for the sake of their leaden covering, are two recumbent effigies, sadly
mutilated. Perhaps Sergeant Humility-before-the-Lord Mawworm slashed
them with his pike in his hatred of worldly pomp; but his zeal did not
do the damage wrought on the marble by the recording penknives of the
past fifty years. A stained-glass window, pieced together from the
fragments of those destroyed here, is still to be seen in Basingstoke
Parish Church.

The Exeter Road leaves Basingstoke at its southwestern end, where a fork
of the highway gives a choice to the traveller of continuing to Andover
on the right, or making on the left to Winchester. The first village on
the way to Exeter is Worting, below the shoulder of Battle Down, a
village--nay, a hamlet, let us call it--of a Sundayfied stillness. Yet
Worting has had its bustling times, for here was one of the most famous
coaching inns on the road, the ‘White Hart.’ Another ‘White Hart,’ at
Whitchurch, is scarcely less celebrated in the annals of the road. In
fact, the ‘White Harts’ are so many and so notable on this road that the
historian of the highways becomes almost as ashamed of mentioning them
as of recounting the places which Cromwell stormed, or where Charles the
Second hid; the houses in which Queen Elizabeth slept, or the inns where
Pepys made merry.

[Sidenote: _OVERTON_]

Worting is followed in quick succession by the outskirts of Oakley,
Clerken Green, Deane, Ashe, and Overton. Except Overton, which is a
picturesque village lining the road, of the old coaching, or
‘thoroughfare’ type, these places are all shy and retiring, tucked away
up bye-lanes, with great parks on their borders, in whose midst are very
vast, very hideous country mansions where dwell the local J.P.’s, like
so many Rogers de Coverley in miniature, with churches rebuilt or
restored to their glory and the glory of God, and a general air of
patronage bestowed upon the villagers and wayfarers from the outside
world by those august partners. These parks, with their mile after mile
of palings bordering the road, and their dense foliage overhanging it,
are given over to solitude. An occasional gamekeeper, or a much more
than occasional rabbit or hare, are the only signs of life, with perhaps
the hoarse ‘crock’ of a pheasant’s call from the neighbouring coverts.
The air beneath the overarching trees along the road is stale and
stagnant, and typical of the life here, like the green damp on the
entrance lodges of Hall Place, where heraldic lions, sitting on their
rumps and holding what at a distance look like quart-pots from the
country inn opposite, scowl at one another across the gravelled drive.

It is a relief to emerge from this stifling atmosphere upon the open
road where Overton stands. We are fully entered here into the valley of
the Test, or Anton, a sparkling little stream whose course we follow
henceforward as far as Hurstbourne Priors. Fishermen love Overton and
this valley well, for there is royal sport here among the trout and
grayling, and in the village a choice of those old inns which the angler
appreciates as much as any one. Picturesque Overton is a doubly ruined
village, for it has lost its silk industry, together with the coaching
interest; but like the splendid bankrupts of modern high finance who
fail for millions and continue to live like princes, it continues
cheerful. Perhaps every one in the place made a competency before the
crash, and put it away where no one could touch it!

The valley broadens out delightfully beyond Overton, and the road,
reaching Laverstoke, commands beautiful views over the water-meadows,
and the open park in whose midst stands Laverstoke House, clearly seen
in passing. In this village, in the neat and clean paper-mill by the
road, is made the paper for Bank of England notes. It was so far back as
1719 that this industry was established here by the Portal family,
French Protestants emigrating from their country for conscience’ sake.
Cobbett, who hated paper-money as much as he did the ‘Wen’ in which it
is chiefly current, passed this spot in a fury. He says, with a sad lack
of the prophetic faculty, ‘We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank
paper is made! Thank God! this mill is likely soon to want employment.
Hard by is a pretty park and house, belonging to “_’Squire_” Portal, the
_paper-maker_. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic
shrewdness, call it “Rag Hall!”’ And again, ‘I hope the time will come
when a monument will be erected where that mill stands, and when on that
monument will be inscribed “_the Curse of England_.” This spot ought to
be held accursed in all time henceforth and for evermore. It has been
the spot from which have sprung more and greater mischief than ever
plagued mankind before.’

Unhappily for Cobbett’s wishes and predictions, the mill is still in
existence and is busier than it was when he wrote in 1821. There are as
many as two hundred and fifty people now employed here in the making of
the ‘accursed’ paper.

Now comes Freefolk village, with a wayside drinking-fountain and a tall
cross, with stone seat, furnished with some pious inscription; the whole
erected by a Portal in 1870, and intended to further the honour and
glory of that family. There is plenty water everywhere around, in the
river and its many runlets amid the water-meadows, but the fountain is
dry. Passing tramps are properly sarcastic, and the dry fountain and its
texts, so far from leading in the paths of temperance and godliness, are
the occasion of much blasphemy. But the pious Portals have their
advertisement.

[Sidenote: _NEWMAN AT WHITCHURCH_]

Whitchurch, two miles down the road, is approached past the
much-quarried hills that rise on the right hand and shelter that decayed
little town from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If there be
those who are curious to learn what a decayed old coaching town is like,
let them journey to Whitchurch. After much tiresome railway travelling,
and changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness of time at
Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus of the ‘White Hart’ will drive
them, rumbling over the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door
of that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future Cardinal Newman
wrote the beginning of the _Lyra Apostolica_:--

    Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?

2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth. He had come
from Oxford that morning by the Oxford-Southampton coach.

‘Here I am,’ he says, writing to his mother, ‘from one till eleven,’
waiting for the down Exeter mail. Think, modern railway traveller, what
would you say were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Templecombe
Junction, for a connection! Moreover, a bore claiming to be the brother
of an acquaintance claimed to share his room and his society at the
‘White Hart,’ and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. The future
Cardinal did not like this. He writes: ‘I am practising for the first
time the duty of a traveller, which is sorely against the grain, and
have been talkative and agreeable without end,’ adding (one can almost
imagine the sigh of the retiring scholar!), ‘Now that I have set up for
a man of the world, it is my vocation.’

The latter part of his journey was accomplished at night. Travelling
thus through Devonshire and Cornwall is, he remarks, ‘very striking for
its mysteriousness.’ It was a beautiful night, ‘clear, frosty, and
bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of vegetation is lost by night,
but bold features remain. As I came along, I had the whole train of
pictures so vividly upon my mind that I could have written a most
interesting account of it in the most approved picturesque style of
modern composition, but it has all gone from me now, like a dream.’

‘The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls a “night engagement”
with a man, called by courtesy a gentleman, on the box. The first act
ended by his calling me a d----d fool. The second by his insisting on
two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the protest that he certainly
did think me very injudicious and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him
he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maidservant stuck
atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain of his giving me the
retort uncourteous.’

There are corridors in the ‘White Hart’ with up and down twilight
passages, in which the guests of another day lost themselves with
promptitude and despatch. There is also a barbarically coloured
coffee-room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though Washington
Irving could have written an eloquent essay around it; and, more
essential than anything else in days of old, a capacious yard with huge
yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross

[Sidenote: _BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION_]

[Illustration: WHITCHURCH.]

roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter mails, while at
right angles goes the road between Southampton, Winchester, Newbury,
Didcot, and Oxford, little used now, but once an important route.
Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had votes but every voter
had his price, used to send two members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and
Bribery Acts which, together with the extension of the franchise and the
adoption of secret voting, have brought about the disfranchising of
rotten boroughs and the decay of such home industries as electoral
corruption, personation, and the like, have taken away much of the
prosperity of the town, which, like Andover, used to live royally from
one election to another on the venality of the ‘free and independent.’
But the last visit of the ‘Man in the Moon’ was paid to Whitchurch very
many years ago, and not even the oldest inhabitant can recollect the
days when cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously and
incapably drunk, were herded together to plump for the candidate with
the longest purse.

When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of very steep, narrow,
and crooked streets, that it still boasts some vestiges of its old silk
industry, and that it is a ‘Borough by prescription,’ all its salient
points have been exhausted. Reform has not only reformed away the
Parliamentary representation of the town, but has also swept away the
municipal authority. Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but
the offices carry no power nowadays.

Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to the village of
Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in a hollow on the Bourne, an affluent
of the Anton, and on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of
Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the banks of the stream and
the edge of the woods, but it also derives the first of its two names
from these circumstances, ‘Hurstbourne’ being obviously descriptive of
woodlands and brooklet, while the ‘Priors’ is a relic of its old lords
of the manor, the abbots of Saint Swithun’s at Winchester. These
historic and geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the
local corruption of the place-name, and that of Hurstbourne Tarrant, a
few miles higher up the stream; for they are, according to Hampshire
speech, respectively ‘Up Husband’ and ‘Down Husband.’

XIX

[Sidenote: _ANDOVER_]

The road between this point and Andover, ascending the high ground
between the Ann and the Test, is utterly without interest, and brings
the traveller down into the town at the south side of the market square
without any inducement to linger on the way. Except on the Saturday
market-day, Andover is given over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers’ dogs
lie blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs, and regard
with a pained surprise, rather than with any active resentment, the
intrusive passage of a stray customer. Tradesmen’s assistants leisurely
open casual crates of goods on the pavements, with long intervals for
gossip between the drawing of each nail, and no one objects to the
blocking of the footpath. A chance cyclist manœuvres in the empty
void of the road in the midst of the square, and collides with no one,
for the simple reason that there is nobody to collide with, and one
acquaintance talks to another across the wide space and is distinctly
heard. Formal but not unpleasing houses front on to this square,
together with the usual Town Hall, and a great modern, highly
uninteresting Gothic church, erected after the model of Salisbury
Cathedral, on the site of the old building.

For fifty-one weeks of the fifty-two that comprise the year, this is the
weekly six-days aspect of the place, varied occasionally by the advent
of a travelling circus, or the arrival of a route-marching detachment of
the Royal Artillery, who park their guns in the square, and may be seen
in the stable-yards of the inns on which they are billeted, in various
stages of dishevelment, in shirt-sleeves rolled up to elbows, and braces
dangling at waists, littering down their horses, or smoking very short
and very foul pipes.

All this idyllic quiet is blown to the winds during the week of Weyhill
Fair, the October pandemonium held three and a half miles away. Then
hordes of cattle-and horse-jobbers, hop growers and buyers,
cheese-factors, and the travellers of firms dealing in machinery, seeds,
oil-cake, tarpaulins, and half a hundred other everyday agricultural
requisites, descend upon the town. Then are dragged out from mysterious
receptacles the most antiquated of ‘flys,’ and waggonettes, and
nondescript vehicles, to be pressed into the service of conveying
visitors to the Fair, some three and a half miles from the town. Whence
they come, and where they are hidden away afterwards, is more than the
stranger can tell, but it is quite certain that their retreat is in some
corner where spiders dwell, and earwigs and other weird insects have a
home. Add to these facts the all-important one that it is generally
possible to walk the distance in a shorter time, and you have a full
portraiture of the average Weyhill conveyance.

This sleepy old place, older by many more centuries than the oldest
house remaining here can give any hint of, was not always so quiet.
There were alarums and excursions (ending, however, with not so much as
a cut finger) when James the Second, falling back from Salisbury before
the advance of his son-in-law, William of Orange, halted here. There
might have been a battle in Andover’s streets, or under the shadow of
Bury Hill, had James put a bolder front on the business; but instead of
cutting up William’s Dutchmen, he just dined overnight, and hearing in
the morning that his other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, had
slunk off with Lords Ormond and Drumlanrig, went off himself,
strategically to the rear. He was an obstinate and ridiculous bigot, and
a quite unlovable monarch, but he had a power of sarcasm. ‘What,’ said
he, hearing of the Prince’s desertion, and bitterly mimicking the absurd
intonation of that recreant’s French catch-phrase, ‘is “_Est-il
possible?_” gone too? Truly, a good trooper would have been a greater
loss.’

[Sidenote: _OLD ELECTIONS_]

After these events, that era of bribery and corruption set in, which is
mistakenly supposed to have been brought to an end through the agency
of the several Reform Acts, passed by well-meaning Legislatures to
secure the purity of Parliamentary elections. As if treating, and the
crossing of horny hands with gold were the only ways of corrupting a
constituency that the wit of man, or the address of a candidate, could
discover! The palm no longer receives the coin; but who has not heard of
the modern art of ‘nursing a constituency,’ by which the candidate,
eager for Parliamentary honours, sits down before a town, or a county
division, subscribes liberally to hospitals and horticultural societies,
cricket and football clubs, opens bazaars, and presides at Young Men’s
Christian Associations, thereby winning the votes which would in other
days have been acquired by palming the men and kissing all the babies?
This tea-fight business gives us no picturesque situations like that in
which Charles James Fox figured. Fox was canvassing personally, and
called upon one of the bluff and blunt order of voters, who listened to
his eloquence, and remarked, ‘Sir, I admire your abilities, but damn
your principles!’ To which Fox supplied the obvious retort, ‘Sir, I
admire your sincerity, but damn your manners!’

Andover no longer sends a representative to Parliament, but in the brave
old days it elected two. With a knowledge of the wholesale purchasing of
votes that then went on, it will readily be perceived that Andover, with
two members to elect, must have been a place flowing with milk and
honey; or, less metaphorically, a happy hunting-ground for guineas and
free drinks. It was somewhere about a hundred and fifty years ago that
Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a prominent rake and practical humorist of
the period, was canvassing Andover. One voter amid the venal herd was,
to all appearance, proof against all temptations. Money, wine, place,
flattery had no seductions for this stoic. The baffled candidate was
beside himself in his endeavours to discover the man’s weak point; for
of course it was an age in which votes were so openly bought and sold
that the saying ‘Every man has his price’ was implicitly believed. Only
what _was_ this particular voter’s figure? Strange to say, he had no
weakness for money, but was possessed with an inordinate desire to see a
fire-eater, and doubted if there existed people endowed with that
remarkable power. ‘Off went Delaval to London, and returned with Angelo
in a post-chaise. Angelo exerted all his genius. Fire poured from his
mouth and nostrils--fire which melted that iron nature, and sent it off
cheerfully to poll for Delaval!’

This was that same Delaval whose attorney sent him the following bill of
costs after one of his contests:--

     To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my
     leg being thereby broken; to surgeon’s bill, and loss of time and
     business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval, £500.

And cheap too.

[Sidenote: _PRACTICAL JOKING_]

They kept this sort of thing up for many years; not always, however,
throwing solicitors out of hotel windows; although rival political
factions often expressed their determination to throw one another’s
candidate in the Anton, after the fashion of the bills posted in the
town during a contest in the ’40’s, which announced in displayed type--

                      LORD HUNTINGTOWER FOR EVER!

                    SIR JOHN POLLEN IN THE RIVER!!

              CATCHING FISH FOR HIS LORDSHIP’S DINNER!!!

History does not satisfy us on the point whether or not those furious
partisans carried out their threat; or whether, if they did, their
victim afforded good bait.

This Lord Huntingtower was the eldest son of the late Earl of Dysart,
and a well-matched companion of the late Marquis of Waterford. Roaming
the country-side on dark nights, mounted on stilts, with sheets over
their clothes and hollowed turnips on their heads with scooped-out holes
for eyes and mouth, and lit with candles, they frightened many a timid
rustic out of his dull wits. In daytime they played practical jokes on
the tradesfolk of Andover. For example, entering a little general shop
in the town, Lord Huntingtower asked for a pound of treacle. ‘Where
shall I put it?’ asked the old woman who kept the shop, seeing that the
usual basin was not forthcoming.

‘P-pup-pup-put it in my hat,’ said my Lord, who stuttered in
yard-lengths, holding out his ‘topper.’ The pound of treacle was
accordingly poured into the Lincoln and Bennett, and the next instant it
was on the shopkeeper’s head.

This was the manner in which Lord Huntingtower endeared himself to the
people--those, that is to say, who were not the victims of his
pleasantries.

That kind of person is quite extinct now. They should have (but
unfortunately they have not) a stuffed specimen in the Natural History
Museum at South Kensington; because he is numbered with the Dodo, the
Plesiosaurus, and the Mastodon. The Marquis of Winchester who flourished
at the same period as my Lords Huntingtower and Waterford was of the
same stamp. He had the fiery Port Countenance which was the sign of the
three-bottle man, and his life and the deeds that he did are still
fondly remembered at Andover, for his country-house was at Amport, in
the immediate neighbourhood. He was the Premier Marquis of England, and
although up to his neck in mortgages and writs, an extremely Great
Personage. Let us, therefore, take our hats off as humbly as we know how
to do.

When he was at his country-place he worshipped at the little village
church of Amport. Sometimes he did not worship, but slept, lulled off to
the Land of Nod by the roaring fire he kept in his room-like pew. On one
occasion it chanced that he was wide awake, and, like the illustrious
Sir Roger de Coverley, leant upon the door of that pew, and gazed around
to satisfy himself that all his tenantry were present. Then an awful
thing happened, the hinges of the door broke, and it fell with a great
clatter to the ground, and the Marquis with it. He said ‘Damn!’ with
great fervour and unction, and everybody laughed. No one thought it--as
they should have done--shocking, which shows the depravity of the age.

[Sidenote: _THE MARQUIS AND THE SQUIRE_]

There is no doubt whatever about that depravity, which, like the worm in
the bud, has wrought ruin among our manners since then. How sad it is
that we are not now content to call upon Providence to

    Bless the squire and his relations
    And keep us in our proper stations;

but are all too intent upon ‘getting on,’ to defer to rank, or take a
spell at the delightful occupations of tuft-hunting and boot-licking!
Even in those days this horrid decadence had begun to manifest itself,
as you will see by the story of this same Marquis and Mr. Assheton Smith
of Tedworth Park. Mr. Smith could (as the saying goes) have ‘bought up’
the impoverished Marquis of Winchester several times over, and not have
felt any strain upon his resources. Moreover, he was a Squire of great
consideration in these parts, and as Master of the Tedworth Hunt,
something of a rival in importance. For which things, and more, the
Marquis hated him, and on one occasion took an opportunity of reproving
him publicly before the whole field, in the fine florid language of
which he had so ready a command. Possibly Mr. Smith had committed the
unpardonable indignity of showing my lord the way over a particularly
stiff fence he was hesitating at. At any rate the language of the
Premier Marquis was violent, and contained some reference to the
disparity between their respective ranks. But the Squire was ready with
his retort. He said, ‘Anyhow, I’d sooner be a rich Squire than a poor
Marquis!’ The field smiled, because the reduced circumstances of the
Marquis of Winchester had been notorious ever since his father had been
secretly buried at midnight in the family vault at Amport, for fear the
bailiffs should seize the body for debt.

There are, for good or ill, no such sportsmen nowadays as there were in
the times before railways came and brought more competition into
existence, making life a business and a struggle, instead of the
light-hearted and irresponsible game that the sporting squires at least
found it. Noble sportsmen do not nowadays, when detained by stress of
weather in a country inn, while away the tedium of the afternoon by
backing the raindrops racing down the window-panes and betting fortunes
on the result. No, that very real bogey, ‘agricultural depression,’ has
stopped that kind of full-blooded prank, and the titled in these
progressive times find their account on the ‘front page’ of
company-promoters’ swindles instead. They barter good names for gold,
and lick the boots of wealthy rogues, instead of kicking their bodies.
Where their fathers scorned to go the sons delight to be. Would the
fathers have done the like had ‘agricultural depression’ come earlier?

The noblemen and the sporting squires of old lived in one mad whirl of
excitement. They gambled on every incident in their lives, and sometimes
even on their death-beds; like the old gamester who, when the doctor
told him he would be dead the next morning, offered to bet him that he
would not! We are not told whether or not the medical man backed his
professional opinion.

[Sidenote: _OLD SPORTSMEN_]

One of the most illuminating side-lights on these truly Corinthian folk
is the story which tells how Lord Albert Conyngham and that classic
sportsman, Mr. George Payne, were travelling from London to Poole by
post-chaise in the last decade of the coaching days--that is to say,
between 1830 and 1840. They found the journey tedious, and so played
écarté, in which they grew so interested that they continued playing all
day and into the night, the chaise being lit with the aid of a patent
lamp which Mr. Payne always took with him on a long journey. The play
was high; £100 a game, with bets on knaves and sequences, and had been
continued with varying success, until when they were passing in the
darkness of night through the New Forest, Mr. Payne, who had been a
heavy loser for some time, had a run of luck. In midst of this exciting
play the post-boy, who, in the secluded glades of the Forest, had
managed to lose the road, stopped the chaise and, dismounting, tapped at
the window. But so engrossed were the two travellers in the cards that
they had not noticed that the conveyance was standing still, and the
post-boy stood tapping there for a long while before he was heard.

‘What on earth do you want?’ angrily asked the winning gambler,
indignant at this interruption.

‘Please, sir,’ replied the post-boy, ‘I’ve lost my way.’

‘Then,’ rejoined Mr. Payne, pulling up the window with a bang, ‘come and
tell us when you’ve found it, and be damned to you!’

XX

Cobbett, that sturdy Radical and consistent grumbler, had an adventure
at Andover, at the ‘George Inn.’ It was in October 1826, on returning
from Weyhill Fair, that he took occasion to dine here. Of course he had
no business or pleasure at the ‘George,’ for he had secured a lodging
elsewhere; but with that obsession of his for agitation he must needs
repair to the inn and dine at the ordinary; less we may be sure for the
sake of the meal than to embrace the opportunity of addressing the
farmers, the cattle-dealers, cheese and hop factors, and bankers whom he
knew would be dining there at Fair-time. It was an opportunity not to be
missed.

He must have been sadly disappointed at first, for there were only about
ten people dining; but when it was seen that this was the well-known
Cobbett, the diners increased, and, after the meal was over, the room
became inconveniently crowded; guests coming from other inns until at
length the room door was left open so that the crowd in the passage and
on the stairs, which were crammed from top to bottom, might listen to
the inevitable harangue on the sins of kings, and governments, and of
landowners, and the criminal stupidity of every one else.

[Sidenote: _COBBETT_]

At this stage of the proceedings, just as the dinner was done, one of
the two friends by whom he was accompanied gave Cobbett’s health. This,
naïvely adds the arch-agitator, ‘was of course followed by a _speech_;
and, as the reader will readily suppose, to have an opportunity of
making a speech was the main motive for my going to dine at _an inn_, at
any hour, and especially at _seven o’clock_ at night.’ That, at any
rate, is frank enough.

After he had been thus holding forth on ruin, past, present, and to
come, for half an hour or so, it seems to have occurred to the landlord
that the company upstairs were drinking very little for so large a
concourse, and he accordingly forced his way through the crowd, up the
staircase, and along the passage into the dining-room. Cobbett had
already cast an unfavourable eye upon that licensed victualler, and
describes him as ‘one Sutton, a rich old fellow, who wore a
round-skirted sleeved fustian waistcoat, with a dirty white apron tied
round his middle, and with no coat on; having a look the _eagerest_ and
the _sharpest_ that I ever saw in any set of features in my whole
lifetime; having an air of authority and of mastership, which, to a
stranger, as I was, seemed quite incompatible with the meanness of his
dress and the vulgarity of his manners: and there being, visible to
every beholder, constantly going on in him a pretty even contest between
the servility of avarice and the insolence of wealth.’

The person who called forth this severe description having forced his
way into the room, some one called out that he was causing an
interruption, to which he replied that that was, in fact, what he had
come to do, because all this speechifying injured the sale of his
liquor! Can it be doubted that this roused all the lion in Cobbett’s
breast? He first of all tells us that ‘the disgust and abhorrence which
such conduct could not fail to excite produced, at first, a desire to
quit the room and the house, and even a proposition to that effect. But,
after a minute or so, to reflect, the company resolved not to quit the
room, but to turn him out of it who had caused the interruption; and the
old fellow, finding himself _tackled_, saved the labour of shoving, or
kicking, him out of the room, by retreating out of the doorway, with all
the activity of which he was master.’

[Sidenote: _WEYHILL FAIR_]

The speech at last finished, the company began to settle down to what
Cobbett calls the ‘real business of the evening, namely, drinking,
smoking, and singing.’ It was a Saturday night, and as there was all the
Sunday morning to sleep in, and as the wives of the company were at a
convenient distance, the circumstances were favourable to an extensive
consumption of ‘neat’ and ‘genuine’ liquors. At this juncture the
landlord announced, through the waiter, that he declined to serve
anything so long as Mr. Cobbett remained in the room! This uncorked all
the vials of wrath of which Cobbett had so large and bitter a supply.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘born and bred, as you know I was, on the borders
of this county, and fond as I am of bacon, Hampshire hogs have with me
always been objects of admiration rather than of contempt; but that
which has just happened here induces me to observe that this feeling of
mine has been confined to hogs of four legs. For my part, I like your
company too well to quit it. I have paid this fellow six shillings for
the wing of a fowl, a bit of bread, and a pint of small beer. I have a
right to sit here; I want no drink, and those who do, being refused it
here, have a right to send to other houses for it, and to drink it
here.’

Mine host, alarmed at this declaration of independence, withdrew the
prohibition, and indeed brought up pipes, tobacco, and the desired
drinks himself; and soon after this entered the room with two gentlemen
who had inquired for Mr. Cobbett, and laying his hand on Cobbett’s knee,
smiled and said the gentlemen wished to be introduced. ‘Take away your
paw,’ thundered the agitator, shaking the strangers by the hand; ‘I am
happy to see you, even though introduced by this fellow.’ After which
they all indulged in the English equivalent of the Scotch ‘willie
waucht’ until half-past two in the morning.

‘But,’ remarks Cobbett, as a parting shot, ‘the next time this old
sharp-looking fellow gets _six shillings_ from me for a dinner, he
shall, if he choose, _cook me_, in any manner that he likes, and season
me with hand so unsparing as to produce in the feeders thirst
unquenchable.’

XXI

Weyhill Fair, which brought Cobbett and the people he harangued into
Andover, is a thoroughly old English institution, and although the old
custom of fairs is gradually dying out, and this, the Largest Fair in
England, is not so important as it was a hundred years ago, it is still
a place where much money changes hands once a year. Weyhill is supposed
to be one of the places mentioned in _Piers Plowman’s Vision_, in the
line:--

    At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair,

and it is the ‘Weydon Priors’ of the _Mayor of Casterbridge_, where
Henchard sells his wife.

Weyhill Fair was once--in the fine fat days of agricultural prosperity,
when England was always at war with France, and corn was dear--a
six-days fair. As the ‘oldest inhabitant’ to be discovered nowadays at
Weyhill will complain, shaking his head sadly the while, ‘There warn’t
none o’ them ’ere ’sheenery fal-lals about in them days to do the wark
o’ men and harses so’s no-one can’t get no decent living like, d’ye
see?’ If by ‘’sheenery,’ you understand mechanical
appliances--‘machinery,’ in fact--to be meant, you will see how
distrustfully the agricultural mind still marches to the modern
quick-step of progress. There is always plenty of machinery on view at
Weyhill Fair: ploughs and harrows, and such like inanimate things, and
machinery in motion; steam threshers, winnowers, binders, and the like,
threshing, and winnowing, and binding the empty air.

[Sidenote: ‘_JOHNNY’S SO LONG AT THE FAIR_’]

There are special days set apart--and more or less rigorously
observed--for Hiring, for Pleasure, for the Hop Fair, and for the sale
of sheep. This great annual fixture begins on Old Michaelmas Eve, 10th
October, and lasts four days, as against the six days, that were all too
short in which to do the business, up to fifty years ago. Railways have
dealt the old English institution of fairs a deadly blow all over the
country, and before many more years have gone the majority of them will
be things of the past. Their reason for existing will then be quite
gone, even as it is now going. Before railways came into being the
farmer travelled little, and his men not at all. From one year’s end to
the other they probably never saw a town beyond their nearest marketing
centre, and they certainly never made the acquaintance of London. So,
since the farmer and his men, the mistress and her maids, could not get
about to buy, it follows that those who had goods to sell had need to
take all the advantage possible of that great and glorious institution,
the Fair.

Bitterly disappointed in the old days were those who, from some reason
or another, were prevented from coming to this Promised Land of gay and
glittering stalls and booths. Jolly and convivial, on the other hand,
were those who had the luck to be able to come. ‘Oh, dear! what can the
matter be? Johnny’s so long at the Fair,’ commences an old country song.
We can guess pretty well what the matter was, just as certainly as if we
had been there ourselves. Johnny, of course, had got too much cider, or
strong, home-brewed October ‘humming ale’ into him, and, as the rustics
would put it, ‘couldn’t stir a peg, were’t ever so.’ And so the girl he
left behind him at the farmhouse had need of all the patience at her
command while she waited for his return. She probably didn’t much
care--for Johnny’s sake; rather for another reason. As thus:--

    He promised he’d buy me a fairing to please me;
    A bunch of blue ribbons to tie up my bonny brown hair.

It was the blue ribbons she wanted, you see. Let us, dear friends, hope
she got them.

Many dangers threatened the Johnnies--the Colin Clouts of that time. The
fair was the happy hunting-ground of Sergeant Kite, who used to treat
the dull-witted fellows until they were stupid as owls, when, _hey
presto!_ the Queen’s Shilling was clapped into their nerveless palms,
and they woke the next morning to find themselves duly enlisted, with a
bunch of parti-coloured ribbons fixed in their hats as a token and badge
of their military servitude. Then ‘what price’ those blue ribbons lying
forgotten in the pocket for the disconsolate fair one? Nothing under a
fine of twenty pounds sterling sufficed to release a recruit in those
days, and as few families could then afford that ransom, the fair was a
turning-point in the career of many a lusty fellow.

The recruiting sergeant still does a little business at Weyhill, but his
claws are nowadays cut very close.

Weyhill, as you approach it, is situated, much to your surprise, not on
a hill at all, but rather on the flat. It is a mere nothing of a
village, and beyond the parish church, the inevitable inn, and the
equally inevitable farmhouse, houses are very much to seek.

[Sidenote: _THE HORSE FAIR_]

The stranger who happens upon the place at any other than fair time is
astonished by the large numbers of open sheds and the numerous clusters
of long, low, thatched, and white-washed cottages, situated on a wide,
open, grassy common beside the road, all empty, and every one bearing
boldly-painted announcements, in black paint, of ‘Hot Dinners,’

‘Refreshments,’ and the like. The stranger might be excused if he
thought this some bankrupt settlement whose vanished inhabitants, like
the people of that mythical place who ‘eked out a precarious existence
by taking in one another’s washing,’ had lived on selling refreshments
to each other until they had finally all died of indigestion. He would
be very much mistaken, however, in his surmise, for this is Weyhill
Fair-ground in undress. If you wish to see it in full swing, you must
visit the spot between 10th and 13th October, when it is lively enough.

The first day is the Sheep Fair. As many as 150,000 sheep have been sold
here on this day. The Horse Fair is held every day; and an astonishing
number and variety of horses there are too. Irish horses, brought all
the way from Cork, Scotch horses, Welsh horses; every kind of horse,
from the Suffolk Punch to the New Forest Pony. Great lumbering young
cart-horses stand behind their pens with manes and tails plaited to
wonderment with straw, for all the world like beauties dressed for the
County Ball, and just as proud and self-conscious. Do you want to buy a
horse of any kind at the Fair? Then don’t!--unless, indeed, you know all
that is to be known about horses, and a bit over; otherwise the dealer
will ‘have’ you, for a dead certainty. To see them showing off a horse’s
good qualities and hiding his bad ones is a liberal education, but see
that you acquire your knowledge at some one else’s expense. With this
determination you can afford to be well amused with the waving of
coloured flags on long sticks, by which the horses are made to
pirouette before the eyes of likely purchasers, and can safely smile at
the wily dealer’s exclamations of ‘There’s blood!’ ‘Get up, my beauty!’
and ‘Here’s the quality!’

The very pick of the horseflesh, however, does not reach Weyhill. The
dealers bring their stock with them by road from Milford, Holyhead,
Scotland, at the rate of ten miles a day, and as they thus have to come
a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, the journey takes from ten days
to a fortnight. This would be a serious expense and loss of time were it
not for the fact that dealers always look to make sales along the road.

The second day of the Fair is known as Mop Fair, or Molls’ and Johns’
Day. Its official title is the Hiring, or Statute Fair. At twelve
o’clock, mid-day, farm-servants, men or women, ‘Molls’ or ‘Johns,’ leave
their employ, and, drawing their wages, offer themselves to be hired for
the coming twelvemonth. They stand in long lines, the carters with a
length of plaited whipcord in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of
wool, and wait while the farmers come and bargain with them. When they
have struck up an agreement, the men proceed to fix coloured ribbons in
their hats, and do their best to have a merry time with the wages they
have just received.

[Sidenote: _MINOR TRADES_]

There is certainly every opportunity of spending money on the spot.
Steam merry-go-rounds keep up a continual screeching and bellowing;
stalls with all manner of toys and nick-nacks of the most grotesque
shapes and hideous colouring; cake and sweetmeat stalls, loaded, as
Weyhill stalls have been from time immemorial, with Salisbury
gingerbread; Aunt Sallies; try-your-strength machines, and a hundred
others compete for the rustic’s coin. Then, if he wants a new suit of
clothes, here is the clothier’s stall, where Hodge can bespeak a suit,
wear it during the next twelve months, and pay for it next Fair, just as
his father and grandfather used to do before him. All the booths
visited, the horse medicines stall inspected, the latest improvements in
agricultural machinery gaped at, Hodge repairs to the refreshment
hovels, wherein certain crafty men who have come down for the occasion
from London are awaiting him, to treat the unsuspecting yokel to drinks,
to lure him on to play cards, and finally to cheat him and pick his
pockets in the most finished and approved fashion. For these gentry, and
for the disorderly in general, there is a police-station on the ground,
with cells all complete, and with local magistrates every morning to
hear cases, and to consign prisoners, if necessary, to Winchester Gaol,
sixteen miles away.

The third and fourth days are now given up to the Pleasure and Hop
Fairs. One of the smaller trades connected with the malting and general
agricultural industries is that of malt-shovel and barn-shovel making.
These are wooden shovels of a peculiar shape, and are sold only at one
stall. Another of the minor businesses is that of umbrella selling. The
umbrellas are very fine and large, and of a kind that would make a
marked man of any Londoner who should use one in town.

The Cheese Fair is now a small one, dealings generally being confined to
local folks, who delight in the Blackmore and ‘Blue Vinney’ cheeses of
this and the adjoining counties. London dealers still attend the Hop
Fair, in which many thousands of pounds’ worth of hops change hands to
the drinking of much champagne, brought on to the ground by the
cart-load, as in the brave days of yore. There are two distinct hop
markets, the Farnham Row and the Country Side. Hops from Farnham,
Bentley, Petersfield, Liphook, and other neighbouring places find a
ready market. They are sold more exclusively by sample than formerly,
and so only a few ‘pockets,’ as the tightly packed sacks are named, are
visible. Round them dealers may be seen, rubbing the hops in their hands
and smelling them with a knowing look, while the vendor cuts another
sample out of the pocket for the next likely customer. He does this with
a singular steel instrument called a ‘sample drawer.’ First a sharp and
long-bladed knife is thrust into the hard mass, and two sides cut, and
then the broad-bladed ‘drawer’ driven in and screwed tight, bringing out
a compact square of hops to be tested.

By nine o’clock every night all the booths and stalls have to be closed,
and stillness reigns over the scene, save for the cough of the sheep,
the occasional lowing of the cattle, or the fretful whinnying of a
wakeful horse. And when the last day of the Fair is done, the booths are
all shut up and deserted, and desolation reigns again for a year.

XXII

[Sidenote: _ABBOT’S ANN_]

The trail of the Romans is over all the surroundings of Andover, and
they must have loved this fishful and fertile valley well, for ample
relics of extensive settlements and gorgeous villas have been unearthed
by the plough. Some of the fine mosaic pavements discovered here are now
in the British Museum, and every now and again the shepherd or the
ploughman picks up a worn and battered coin of the Cæsars in the
neighbouring fields. One of the finest Roman pavements came from the
village of Abbot’s Ann, a short distance away, under the shadow of the
great bulk of Bury Hill, which, crowned with prehistoric earthworks of
cyclopean size, frowns down upon the valley. The whimsical name of this
village and that of Little Ann derive from the stream, the Ann, or
Anton, on whose banks they are situated.

In this village of Abbot’s Ann there still prevails a remarkable custom.
On the death of a young unmarried person of the parish, his or her
friends and relatives make a funeral garland, or chaplet, similar to the
one sketched overleaf, in paper, and hang it from the ceiling of the
church. The interior of the building now holds quite a number of these
singular mementoes, the oldest dating back to the last century. They are
fashioned of cardboard and white paper, something in the shape of a
crown, with elaborately cut rosettes and with five paper gloves
suspended, on two of which are recorded the name, the age, and the date
of death of the deceased whose memory is thus kept alive, while the
other three are inscribed with texts or verses from favourite hymns. The
particulars of age and death are repeated on a little wooden shield
above.

[Illustration: FUNERAL GARLAND, ABBOT’S ANN.]

During the last eight years three of these memorials have been added.
They are placed here after having been carried in front of the coffin on
the day of the funeral. On such occasions the garland is carried by two
girls, dressed in white, with curiously folded handkerchiefs on their
heads. There is now only one other place in England, at Matlock, in
Derbyshire, where this curious custom survives.

[Sidenote: _THE WALLOPS_]

These villages, together with Amport, Thruxton, Monxton, and East
Cholderton, lie in the triangular district between the branching of the
two great routes of the road to Exeter. Just out of Andover, on the
rising road, stands the old toll-house that commanded either route, with
the mileage to various towns still displayed prominently on its walls.
The right-hand road leads to the Weyhill and Amesbury branch of the
Exeter Road, while the left-hand fork is the main road to Salisbury.
Passing this toll-house, the old road runs through an inhospitable
succession of uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike to
mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or drive a horse, or urge
forth your wild career on a motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is
chiefly a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover behind,
and it is not until ‘the Wallops’ are reached, at Little (or Middle)
Wallop, lying in a hollow where a little stream trickles across the
road, that any relief is experienced.

It must be Little Wallop to which Mr. Thomas Hardy refers in the _Mayor
of Casterbridge_, where the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after
taking up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes employed at a
‘pastoral farm near the old western highway.... He had chosen the
neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at
a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare
was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.’

The Wallops are interesting places, despite their silly name. There are
Over, and Nether, and Middle, or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper,
Lower, and Little Wallop. According to one school of antiquaries (who
must by no means be suspected of joking), the Wallop district is to be
identified with the ‘Gualoppum’ described by an old chronicler, a
district, appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in which
Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There are, of course, local
derivations of the meaning of this place-name, together with a belief
that to Sir John Wallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth, who
‘walloped the French’ in one or other of our many mediæval battles with
that nation, we owe that very active, not to say slangy verb, ‘to
wallop.’ But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a little
stream, called the Wallop, flowing through these villages, to which they
owe their generic name; the name of the stream itself deriving from the
Anglo-Saxon ‘Weallan,’ to boil or bubble; the root of our English word
‘well.’

Of these villages, Little Wallop alone is on the road, and is merely an
offshoot of the others, called into existence by the traffic which
followed this course in the old coaching days. Since railways have left
the roads lonely it has simply slumbered, ‘far from the madding crowd’s
ignoble strife,’ and its inhabitants are presumably happy in their
retirement; although, when days are short and nights are long, and the
stormy winds do blow, it is quite conceivable that there are more
cheerful and warmer situations.

Three miles from here the road leaves Hampshire and enters Wilts, and
two miles onwards from that point, after passing ‘Lobcombe Corner,’ the
junction of the Stockbridge road, is seen that famous old coaching inn,
the ‘Pheasant,’ known much better under its other name, ‘Winterslow
Hut.’

XXIII

[Sidenote: _HAZLITT_]

There are few more desolate and cheerless places in England than the
spot where this old coaching inn stands beside the open road, with the
unenclosed downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold after fold.
Somewhere amid these hills and hollows, but quite hidden, is the village
of West Winterslow, from which the ‘Hut’ obtains its name. The place,
save for the periodical passing of the coaches, was as solitary in old
times as it is now, and its quiet as profound. The very name is
chilling, and as excellently descriptive as it is possible for a name to
be.

When, coming within sight of its isolated roof-tree from the summit of
the hills on either side, the coach-guards used to blow fanfares on
their bugles as a reminder for the ostler to have his fresh teams ready,
the inn and its surrounding stables woke into life, and when they were
gone their several ways, it dozed again. Save that it doubtless looked
more prosperous then, the present appearance of ‘Winterslow Hut’ is
identical with its aspect of sixty years ago. The same horse-pond by the
roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same
prehistoric dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been
capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting
its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in
the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either
direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no
traveller, the emptiness is appalling.

To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic
and essayist, during several years, for quietude. For four years, from
1808 to 1812, he and his wife lived in a cottage at West Winterslow, on
the small income derived from her other cottage property there,
supplemented by the sums the wayward Hazlitt earned fitfully by the
practice of literature. Then they removed to London, where they
disagreed, Hazlitt retiring to the ‘Hut’ in 1819, and leaving his wife
in town. Nervous and irritable, he wanted quiet, nor can it be doubted
that in this spot he found what he sought. He was cursed, according to
the widely different beliefs of his friends, with ‘an ingrained
selfishness,’ or ‘a morbid self-consciousness,’ and oil the downs he
would walk, for the pleasure of having the neighbourhood all to himself,
from forty to fifty miles a day. He wrote his _Winterslow_ essays here,
and his _Napoleon_, for whom he had an almost insane reverence. The
‘diabolical scowl’ of Hazlitt when Napoleon or any other of his pet
susceptibilities were abused must have been worth seeing.

‘Now,’ says a literary hero-hunter, who has visited ‘Winterslow Hut,’ as
a place of pilgrimage,--‘now it is a desolate place, fallen into decay,
and tenanted by a labouring man and his family, cultivating a small farm
of some thirty acres, and barely able to make a living out of it. In
winter two or three weeks will sometimes elapse without even a beggar or
tramp or cart passing the door. On the ground floor, looking out upon a
horse-pond, flanked by two old lime-trees, is a little parlour, which
was the one probably used by Hazlitt as his sitting-room. At the other
end of the house is a large empty room, formerly devoted to
cock-fighting matches and singlestick combats. It was with a strange and
eerie feeling that I contemplated this little parlour, and pictured to
myself the many solitary evenings during which Hazlitt sat in it
enjoying copious libations of his favourite tea (for during the last
fifteen years of his life he never tasted alcoholic drinks of any kind)
perhaps reading _Tom Jones_ for the tenth time, or enjoying

[Sidenote: _A LITERARY RECLUSE_]

[Illustration: ‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’]

one of Congreve’s comedies, or Rousseau’s _Confessions_, or writing, in
his large flowing hand, a dozen pages of the essay on _Persons one would
Wish to have Seen_, or _On Living to One’s Self_. One cannot imagine any
retreat more consonant with the feelings of this lonely thinker, during
one of his periods of seclusion, than the out-of-the-world place in
which I stood. In winter time it must have been desolate beyond
description--on wild nights especially--“heaven’s chancel-vault” blind
with sleet--the fierce wind sweeping down from the bare wolds around,
and beating furiously against the doors and windows of the unsheltered
hostelry.’

It is not to be supposed that Hazlitt was insensible to the dreariness
of the spot. ‘Here, _even_ here,’ he says, as though the dolour of the
place had come home to him, ‘with a few old authors I can manage to get
through the summer or winter months without ever knowing what it is to
feel _ennui_. They sit with me at breakfast; they walk out with me
before dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented tracts, after
starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven
rustling above my head, or being greeted by the woodman’s “stern
good-night,” as he strikes into his narrow homeward path, I can “take
mine ease at mine inn,” beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with
Signor Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I have.’

His _Farewell to Essay Writing_ was written here 20th February 1828. He
had long given up the intemperance of former years, and cultivated
literature on copious tea-drinking. ‘As I quaff my libations of tea in
a morning,’ he says, ‘I love to watch the clouds sailing from the west,
and fancy that “the spring comes slowly up this way.” In this hope,
while “fields are dank, and ways are mire,” I follow the same direction
to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the dry, level greensward,
I can see my way for a mile before me, closed in on each side by
copse-wood, and ending in a point of light more or less brilliant, as
the day is bright or cloudy.’ And so this harbinger of our own literary
neurotics continues, dropping into a morbid introspective strain,
pulling up his soul, like a plant, by the roots, to see how it is
growing, and babbling to the world, between the jewel-work of his
literature, of his follies and his unrest. Strange, that this wiry
pedestrian, this apostle of fresh air, should be of the same dough of
which the degenerates of our time are compounded.

XXIV

It was here, however, that one of the most thrilling episodes of the
road was enacted in the old days. The Mail from Exeter to London had
left Salisbury on the night of 20th October 1816, and proceeded in the
usual way for several miles, when what was thought to be a large calf
was seen trotting beside the horses in the darkness. The team soon
became extremely nervous and fidgety, and as the inn was approached they
could scarcely be kept under control.

[Sidenote: _AN ESCAPED LIONESS_]

At the moment when the coachman pulled up to deliver his bags, one of
the leading horses was suddenly seized by the supposed calf. The horses
kicked and plunged violently, and it was with difficulty the driver
could prevent the coach from being overturned. The guard drew his
blunderbuss and was about to shoot the mysterious assailant when several
men, accompanied by a large mastiff, appeared in sight. The foremost,
seeing that the guard was about to fire, pointed a pistol at his head,
swearing that he would be shot if the beast was killed.

Every one then perceived that this ferocious ‘calf’ was nothing less
than a lioness. The dog was set on to attack her, and she thereupon left
the horse and turned on him. He turned and ran, but the lioness caught
him and tore him to pieces, carrying the remains in her mouth under a
granary. The spot was then barricaded to prevent her escape, and a noose
being thrown over her neck, she was secured and marched off to captivity
again.

It is said that the horse when attacked fought with great spirit, and
would probably have beaten off his assailant with his fore-feet had he
been at liberty; but in his frantic plunges he became entangled in the
harness. The lioness, it seems, attacked him in front, springing at his
throat and fastening the claws of her fore-feet on either side of the
neck, while her hind-feet tore at his chest. The horse, although
fearfully mangled, survived. The showmen of the time were evidently
quite as enterprising as those of these latter days, for the menagerie
proprietor purchased the horse and exhibited him the next day at
Salisbury Fair, with excellent results in the shape of increased
gate-money.

The passengers on this extraordinary occasion were absolutely
terror-stricken. Bounding off the coach, they made a wild rush for the
inn, and, reaching the door, slammed it to and bolted it, to the
exclusion of one poor fellow who, not active enough, found himself shut
out in the road. The lioness, pursuing the dog, actually brushed against
him. When she was secured, the poltroons inside the house opened the
door and let the half-fainting traveller in. They gave him refreshments,
and he recovered sufficiently to be able to write an account of the
event for the local papers; but in a few days he became a raving maniac,
and was sent to an asylum at Laverstock. For over twenty-seven years he
lived there, incurable, and died in 1843.

The leader attacked by the lioness was a famous horse, even before that
affair. There were many such in the coaching age. Animals unmanageable
on the racecourse were frequently sold to coach-proprietors, and soon
learnt discipline on the roads. ‘Pomegranate’ was his name. A ‘thief’ on
the course, and a bad-tempered brute in the stable, he had worked on the
Exeter Mail for some time before this dramatic episode in his career
found him, for a time, a home in a menagerie.

[Sidenote: _SALISBURY_]

The fame of the affair was great and lasting. That coaching specialist,
James Pollard, drew, and R. Havell engraved, a plate showing the
dramatic scene, which was dedicated to Thomas Hasker, Superintendent of
His Majesty’s Mails. In it you see Joseph Pike, the guard, rising to
shoot the very heraldic-looking lioness, and the passengers encouraging
him in the background, from the safe retreat of the first-floor windows.
It will be observed that this is apparently the lioness’s first spring,
and yet those passengers are already upstairs: at once a striking
testimony to their agility and a warranty of the exquisite truth of the
saying that fear lends wings to the feet.

XXV

Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a
Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the
unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile
Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted
road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling
around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is
coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently
in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary
height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of
travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be
believed.

Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of
modernity that quite belies its age. Few places in England have so
well-ascertained an origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and
eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet, although there is the
cathedral to prove its age, with the Poultry Cross, and very many
ancient houses happily still standing, it has a general air of anything
but mediævalism. This curious feeling that strikes every visitor is
really owing to the generous and well-ordered plan on which the city was
originally laid out; broad streets being planned in geometrical
precision, and the blocks of houses built in regular squares.

That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, thought Salisbury ‘a
very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated
city’--a view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish I could
tell you to which inn it was that he resorted to have dinner, and to
await the arrival of Martin. A coaching inn, of course, for Martin came
by coach from London. But whether it was the ‘White Hart,’ or the ‘Three
Swans’ (which, alas! is no longer an inn), or the ‘King’s Arms,’ or the
‘George,’ is more than I or any one else can determine.

[Sidenote: _NEW SARUM_]

Salisbury is by no means desperate or dissipated, even though it be
market-day, and although itinerant cutlery vendors may still sell
seven-bladed knives, with never a cut among them, to the unwary. It is
true that Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us, in _On the Western Circuit_, a
picture of blazing orgies at Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better
than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
should have been; and it is true that by ‘Melchester’ this fair city of
Salisbury is meant; but you can conjure up no very accurate picture of
this ancient place from those pages. The real Salisbury is extremely
urbane and polished, decorous and well-ordered. It is graceful and
sunny, and has, in fact, all the sweetness of mediævalism without its
sternness, and affords a thorough contrast with Winchester, which frowns
upon you where Salisbury smiles. One need not waver from one’s
allegiance to Winchester to admit so much.

Salisbury is still known in official documents as ‘New Sarum.’ It is,
nevertheless, of a quite respectable antiquity, its newness dating from
that day, 28th April 1220, when Bishop Poore laid the foundation-stone
of the still existing cathedral. There are romantic incidents in the
exodus from Old Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile and a
half away, to these ‘rich champaign fields and fertile valleys,
abounding with the fruits of the earth, and watered by living streams,’
in this ‘sink of Salisbury Plain,’ where the Bourne, the Wylye, the
Avon, and the Nadder flow in innumerable runlets through the meads.

Old Sarum was old indeed. Its history strikes rootlets deep down into
the Unknown. A natural hillock upon the wild downs, its defensible
position rendered it a camp for the earliest aboriginal tribes, who,
always at war with one another, lived for safety’s sake in such bleak
and inhospitable places when they would much rather be hunting and
enjoying life generally in the sheltered wooded vales and fertile
plains. These tribes heaped up the first artificial earthworks that ever
strengthened this historic hill, and they were succeeded during the long
march of those dim centuries by Romans, Saxons, and Danes. The Romans,
with their unerring military instinct, saw the importance of the hill,
and added to the simple defences they found there. They called the place
_Sorbiodunum_, and made it a great strategic station. The Saxons
strengthened the fortifications in their turn, and at the time of the
Norman Conquest a city had grown up under the shelter of the citadel.

In its deserted state to-day, the site of Old Sarum vividly recalls the
appearance presented by an extinct volcano, the conical hill rising from
the downs with the suddenness of an upheaval, and the area enclosed
within the concentric rings of banks and ditches forming a hollow space
similar to a crater. The total area enclosed within these fortifications
is about 28 acres. Within this space was comprised that ancient city,
and in its very centre, overlooking everything else, and encompassed by
a circular fosse and bank, 100 feet in height, stood the citadel. The
site of this castle is now overgrown with dense thickets of shrubs and
brambles; the fragments of its flint and rubble walls, 12 feet thick,
and some remaining portions of its gateways affording evidence of its
old-time strength.

[Sidenote: _OLD SARUM_]

Within this city, enclosed for centuries by the ring-fence of these
fortifications, stood the cathedral, in a position just below the Castle
ward. Its exact site and size (although not a fragment of it is
standing) were discovered in the summer of 1834. That portion of the
vanished city had been laid down as pasture, and the drought of that
year revealed the plan of the cathedral, in a distinct brown outline
upon the grass. This building, completed in 1092 by Bishop Osmund,
furnished the stone in later years for the spire of Salisbury Cathedral
and for the walls of the Close, in which, by St. Anne’s Gate, many
sculptured fragments of these relics from Old Sarum may yet be seen.

A variety of circumstances brought about the removal of the cathedral
from Old Sarum. Water was lacking on that height, and winds raged so
furiously around it that the monks could not hear the priests say Mass;
and, worse than all, during the Papal Interdict, the King, in revenge
for many ecclesiastical annoyances, transferred the custody of the
Castle of Old Sarum from the bishops to his own creatures, who locked
the monks out of their monastery and church on one occasion when they
had gone on some religious procession. When the monks returned, they
found entrance denied them, and were forced to remain in the open air
during the whole of a frosty winter night. There was no end to the
hardships which those Men of Wrath brought upon the Church. No wonder
that Peter of Blois cried out, ‘What has the House of the Lord to do
with castles? It is the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple of Baalim. Let
us in God’s name descend into the plain.’

The removal decided upon, it remained to choose a site. Tradition tells
us that the Virgin Mary appeared to Bishop Poore in a vision, and told
him to build the church on a spot called Merryfield; and has it that the
site was chosen by the fall of an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old
Sarum. If that was the case, there must have been something miraculous
in that shot, for the place where Salisbury Cathedral is built is a mile
and a half away from those ramparts. But perhaps the bishop or the
legends used the long bow in a very special sense.

The cathedral was completed in sixty years, receiving its final
consecration in 1260; but the great spire was not finished until a
hundred years later. The city was an affair of rapid growth, receiving a
charter of incorporation seven years after being founded. Seventeen
years later, Bishop Bingham dealt a final blow at the now utterly ruined
city of Old Sarum by diverting the old Roman road to the West from its
course through Old Sarum, Bemerton, and Wilton, and making a highway
running directly to New Sarum, and crossing the Avon by the new bridge
which he had built at Harnham. Old Sarum could by this time make little
or no resistance, for it was deserted, save for a few who could not
bring themselves to leave the home of their forefathers. Wilton,
however, which was a thriving town, bitterly resented this diversion of
the roads, and petitioned against it, but without avail. From that date
Wilton’s decline set in, and the rise of New Sarum progressed at an even
greater speed. A clothing trade sprang up and prospered, and many Royal
visits gave the citizens an air of importance. They waxed rich and
arrogant, and were eternally

[Sidenote: _THE MARTYRS_]

[Illustration: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).]

quarrelling with the bishops, one of whom they murdered in the turbulent
times that prevailed during Jack Cade’s rebellion. Bishop Ayscough was
that unfortunate prelate. He had cautiously retired to Edington, but a
furious body of Salisbury malcontents marched out across the Plain, and
dragging him from the altar of the church, where he was saying Mass,
took him to an adjacent hill-top, and slew him with the utmost
barbarity. It was for the benefit of these unruly citizens that one of
Jack Cade’s quarters was consigned from London to Salisbury and elevated
there on a pole, as a preliminary warning. Full punishment followed a
little later.

XXVI

It is really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through
the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the
cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the
Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story,
which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an
exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in
Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution
still stain the records of the Church; nor, although the very reading of
them turn brain and body sick, and make even the architectural
enthusiast almost turn away in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may
God grant that they ever be forgotten, as in the England of to-day they
would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity, damnable frauds, how they
smirch those sculptured stones and cry insistently for remembrance!

Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry the Eighth, was alive to
it all, and cleared away the false relics; the ‘stinking boots, mucky
combs, ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great bullocks’
horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets of wood,’ which he found
here; but, with less courage than others, he recanted in Mary’s reign.
Sherfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he lived in
less dangerous times for such men. It was in 1629 that he smashed the
stained-glass window, representing the Creation, in St. Edmund’s Church.
In other times he would assuredly have been burnt for this act; as it
was, he was summoned before the Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window
did not contain a true history of the Creation, and objected that God
was represented as ‘a little old man in a long blue coat,’ which he held
was ‘an indignity offered to Almighty God.’ He was committed to the
Fleet Prison for this, fined £500, and required to apologise to the
Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate Mr. Sherfield!

[Sidenote: _MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS_]

This fair city has been almost as much of a Golgotha as the settlements
of savage African kinglets are wont to be. Shakespeare has made mention
of the execution of the Duke of Buckingham here in 1484 by Richard the
Third, but many an one has suffered and left no such trace. That such
executions were generally unjust and almost always too severe is their
sufficient condemnation; but the hanging of Charles, Lord Stourton, in
1556, is an exception. The affair for which he was put to death was the
murder of the two Hartgills, father and son, at Kilmington, Somerset,
and it affords an unusually instructive glimpse into the manners of the
period. It seems that William Hartgill had long been steward to the
previous Lord Stourton, the father of Charles. Like most stewards, he
had profited by his stewardship, over and above his salary, to a
considerable extent. There was no friendship wasted between him and the
new lord, but the quarrels which had taken place between William
Hartgill and his son on the one side, and Charles, Lord Stourton, and
his servants on the other, finally came to a head when my lord demanded
a written undertaking from his mother that she would never marry again,
and that Hartgill should be bond for the undertaking being kept. The
widowed Lady Stourton was residing at the Hartgills’ house when this
demand was made. She refused to have anything to do with such a paper,
and Hartgill bluntly declined as well. Lord Stourton would then appear
to have determined on revenge for this defeat, and eventually, after the
Hartgills had been on several occasions waylaid, threatened, and
attacked by his servants, he conceived the devilish plan of a pretended
reconciliation over this and other disputes in the village churchyard of
Kilmington, the occasion to be used as a means of taking them off their
guard, and finally disposing of them. The two victims were suspicious of
this apparent friendliness; but, unhappily for them, eventually agreed
to meet in that God’s Acre, on 12th January 1556, there to settle all
accounts and differences. They met, and, at a previously arranged
signal, Lord Stourton’s servants rushed upon the Hartgills and stabbed
and battered them to death in a revoltingly cruel manner, while their
master looked on with approval. The details of this cold-blooded
atrocity are fully set forth in the trials of that period, for the
satisfaction of any one greedy of horrors.

[Sidenote: _THE DEVIL’S HEALTH_]

This was in the reign of Queen Mary, when Protestants were burned at the
stake with the approval of Roman Catholics; but not even in those brutal
times could this affair be hushed up. Lord Stourton was arrested,
brought to trial in London, and, together with four of his servants,
found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. Justice was commendably
swift. The two Hartgills had been done to death on the 12th of January,
and on the second day of March in the same year my lord set out under
escort from the Tower of London for Salisbury, the place of execution.
The melancholy cavalcade came down the Exeter Road, the chief figure in
it set astride a horse, with legs and arms pinioned. The first night
they lay at Hounslow, the second at Staines, the third at Basingstoke,
and thence to Salisbury, where, in the Market Place, on the morning of
the 6th of March, they hanged him with a silken cord. His servants were
turned off at the end of quite common hempen ropes, which doubtless did
their business quite as neatly. The body of this prime malefactor, the
organiser of the crime, was buried with much ceremony in the cathedral,
but those of the lesser criminals were treated (we may suppose) with
less reverence, because you may search the building in vain for tomb or
epitaph to their memory. But--quaintest touch of all--the silken rope by
which Lord Stourton swung was suspended here, over his tomb, where it
remained for many a long year afterwards.

The next outstanding landmark in the way of executions is the hanging of
a prisoner who had just been awarded a sentence when he threw a brickbat
at the Chief Justice. His lordship was considerably damaged and for this
assault pronounced sentence of death upon him. The execution took place
at once, outside the Council House, the unfortunate man’s right hand
being first struck off.

The Civil War did not result in anything very tragical for Salisbury,
the operations in and around the city being quite unimportant. The
‘Catherine Wheel Inn,’ however, was the scene of much alarm among the
superstitious, when, according to a gruesome story, the Cavaliers
assembled there, having toasted the King and the Royal family, proceeded
to drink the health of the Devil,--and the Devil appeared, the room
becoming filled with ‘noisome fumes of sulphur, and a hideous monster,
which was the Devil, no doubt,’ entering, and grabbing the giver of the
toast, flying away with him out of the window.

Salisbury was the scene of Penruddocke’s rising for the King in 1655. He
was a county gentleman, of Compton Chamberlayne, and with some others
and a band of a hundred and fifty horsemen, rode into the city at four
o’clock in the morning of 14th March. They seized the Judges of Assize
in their beds, opened the doors of the prison, and imprisoned the judges
in the place of the released convicts. Then, finding the citizens too
timid to join them in their revolt against Cromwell, they sped across
country, into Devon, where they were captured.

Charles the Second was welcomed by Salisbury’s citizens, just as they
welcomed every one else; practising with much success St. Paul’s
admirable precept, to be ‘all things to all men.’ When James the Second
came here, on his way to meet, and fight, the Prince of Orange, he was
escorted, with every show of deference and respect, to his lodgings at
the Bishop’s Palace by the Mayor, and when he had slunk away, and the
Prince came, less than four weeks later, and was lodged in the same
house, the same Mayor did precisely the same thing.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century onward the citizens began
to dearly love kings and great personages, or, if they did not love
them, effectually pretended to do so. When plague ravaged the city of
London, no one coming from that direction was allowed to enter
Salisbury, and even Salisbury’s own citizens returning home from that
infected centre were obliged to remain outside for three months, while
goods were not permitted to be brought nearer than Three Mile Hill. But
Charles the Second and his Court, flying from London from the disease,
were welcomed all the same!

XXVII

[Sidenote: _BRUTAL SCENES_]

Coach passengers entering Salisbury even so late as 1835 were sometimes
witnesses of shocking scenes that, however picturesque they might have
rendered mediæval times, were brutalising and degrading in a civilised
era. Almost every year of the nineteenth century up to that date was
fruitful in executions. In 1801 there were ten: seven for the crime of
sheep-stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf, and one
for highway robbery. The practice of hanging criminals on the scenes of
their crimes afforded spectacles of the most extraordinary character, as
instanced in the procession that accompanied two murderers, George
Carpenter and George Ruddock, from Fisherton Gaol, on the north-west of
the city, to the place of their execution on Warminster Down, 15th March
1813. Such parades were senseless, since no one ever dreamed of a rescue
being attempted; but, all the same, the condemned men, placed in a cart
and accompanied by a clergyman preaching of Kingdom Come, preceded by
the hangman and followed by eight men carrying two coffins, were
escorted all the way by a troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry, followed by some
two hundred constables and local gentlemen, all walking and carrying
white staves; with bailiffs, sheriffs, under-sheriffs, magistrates, a
hundred mounted squires, a posse of ‘javelin men,’ more clergymen, the
gaoler and his assistants, more javelin men and sheriff’s officers, more
yeomanry, and, at last, bringing up the rear, a howling mob, numbering
many thousands. As for the central objects in this show, ‘they died
penitent,’ we are told; and indeed they could do nothing less, seeing to
what trouble they had thus put a goodly proportion of the county.

Executions for all manner of crimes were so many that it would be idle
to detail them; but some stand out prominently by reason of their
circumstances. For example, the hanging of Robert Turner Watkins in
1819, for a murder near Purton, presents a lurid scene. His wife had
died of a broken heart shortly after his arrest, and his mother was
among the spectators of his end. The same kind of procession accompanied
him across Salisbury Plain to the place of execution, and a similar mob
made the occasion a holiday. Mother and son were able to bid one another
farewell, owing to an unexpected halt on the road; and when they made a
halt for the refreshments which the long journey demanded, the condemned
man’s children were brought to him.

‘Mammy is dead,’ said one. ‘Ah!’ replied the man, ‘and so will your
daddy be, shortly.’ At the fatal spot he prayed with the chaplain, and
was allowed to read to the people a psalm which he had chosen. It was
Psalm 108, which, on reference, will not prove to be particularly
appropriate to the occasion. Then he blessed the fifteen thousand or so
present, felt the rope, and remarked that it could only kill the body,
and was turned off, amid the sudden and unexpected breaking of one of
the most terrific thunderstorms ever experienced on the Plain.

[Sidenote: _HUMANE JURIES_]

They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801, for stealing a horse,
and afterwards discovered that he was innocent, according to a monument
still to be seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett suffered
death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed in 1820 by William Lee,
who died for the same offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for
arson; but public opinion had already been aroused against such
severity, judges and juries taking every advantage offered by faults in
the drawing up of indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty
of murder whose crimes were then met by capital punishment. The statutes
left no choice but death for the convicted incendiary, the horse-or
sheep-stealer, and many another; and so many a guilty person was
acquitted by judges and juries horrified by the thought of incurring
blood-guiltiness by sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed
loopholes for escape, and so when the _straw_-rick, to which a prisoner
was charged with setting fire, was proved to have been _hay_, he was
found ‘Not guilty.’ Blackstone called this action taken by juries ‘pious
perjury,’ and so it certainly was when, to avoid shedding blood, they
used to find £5 and £10 notes which prisoners sometimes were charged
with stealing, to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few
shillings, according as the case required.

The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were enacted at the close of
1830, when the so-called ‘Machinery Riots,’ which had spread all over
the country, culminated here in fights between the Wiltshire Yeomanry
and the discontented agricultural labourers, who, fearing that steam
machinery, then

[Illustration: ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.]

[Sidenote: _ALDERBURY_]

beginning to be adopted, was about to take away their livelihood,
scoured the country in bands, wrecking and burning farmsteads and barns.
The ‘Battle of Bishop Down,’ on the Exeter Road between ‘Winterslow Hut’
and Salisbury, was fought on 23rd November, and was caused by the
collision of a large body of rioters who were marching to the city with
the avowed object of pillaging it, and a mixed force of yeomanry and
special constables. All the coaches, together with every other kind of
traffic, were brought to a standstill. Stone-throwing on the part of the
rioters, and bludgeoning by the special constables were succeeded by
charges of the yeomanry, and the contest resulted in the capture of
twenty-two rioters, who were locked up in Fisherton Gaol. The next day a
number of rioters were surprised in the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ Alderbury,
and marched off to prison; and the day after, twenty-five were taken in
a fight near Tisbury, after one of their number had been killed. There
were no fewer than three hundred and thirty prisoners awaiting trial
when the Special Commissioners arrived for that purpose on 27th
December. Many of the prisoners were transported, and others had short
terms of imprisonment; but a leader, called ‘Commander’ Coote, who was
captured by two constables at the Compasses, Rockbourn, was hanged at
Winchester.

XXVIII

And now for some little-known literary landmarks. Salisbury, of course,
is the scene of some passages in _Martin Chuzzlewit_; but it is outside
the city that we must go, on the road to Southampton, to find the
residence of that eminent architect, Mr. Pecksniff; or the ‘Blue
Dragon,’ where Tom Pinch’s friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary’s
Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name of Mr. Pecksniff’s
home, but the house is only vaguely indicated in the novel. It is
different with the ‘Blue Dragon,’ which is an undoubted portrait of the
‘Green Dragon Inn,’ at Alderbury, despite the fact that the sign-board
has since disappeared. ‘A faded, and an ancient dragon he was; and many
a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour
from a gaudy blue to a faint, lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he
hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind legs;
waxing, with every month that passed, so much more dim and shapeless,
that as you gazed on him at one side of the sign-board, it seemed as if
he must be gradually melting through it, and coming out upon the other.’

The ‘Green Dragon’ is a quaint gabled village inn, standing back from
the road. It is even more ancient than any one, judging only from its
exterior, would suppose, for a fine fifteenth-century mantelpiece,
adorned with carved crockets and heraldic roses, yet remains in the
parlour, a relic of bygone importance.

As for Mrs. Lupin, the landlady, it is supposed that Dickens drew the
character from a real person. If so, how one would like to have known
that cheery woman. Do you remember how Tom Pinch left Salisbury to seek
his fortune in London? and how Mrs. Lupin met the coach on the London
road with his box in the trap, and a great basket of provisions, with a
bottle of sherry sticking out of it? and how the open-handed fellow
shared the cold roast fowl, the packet of ham in slices, the crusty
loaf, and the other half-dozen items--not forgetting the contents of the
bottle--with the coachman and guard as they drove along the old road to
London through the night?

[Sidenote: _A WORD-PICTURE_]

‘Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and
people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into
the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound
upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the
five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the
road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with
rustic burial-grounds about them, where graves are green, and daisies
sleep--for it is evening--on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams
in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past
paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut slice
by slice away, and showing in the waning light like ruined gables, old
and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry
water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!’

Quite so. And an excellent picture of the coaching age, although ‘Yoho!’
smacks too much of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that word
when he surely meant ‘Tallyho!’ Nor is this a correct portrait of the
Exeter Road by any manner of means. Dickens, usually so precise in
topographical details, has generalised here. A true and stirring picture
of country roads in general, there are farms, and villages, and churches
all too many for this highway. It should have been ‘Yoho! across the
bleak and barren down. Yoho! by the blasted oak on the lonely common,’
and so forth, so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was that
water-splash doing on a main road in the flower of the coaching age,
when all the runnels and streams across the mail routes were duly
bridged? But it is not very odd that Dickens should have been so inexact
here, for he began _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in 1843, and it was not until
long after the book was published, in 1848, that he really explored the
Exeter Road. Forster tells us that Dickens, in company with himself,
Leech, and Lemon, stayed at Salisbury in the March of that year, and
‘passed a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting
Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s “Hut” at Winterslow.’

It must be obvious how exquisitely fitted, both by reason of its
situation and circumstances, ‘Winterslow Hut’ is for the novelist’s use,
and that, had he explored it before, that wild spot would have found a
place in the pages of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, together with detailed
references to some of Salisbury’s old coaching inns, of which there were
many, this being a meeting-place of several roads, besides being on the
great highway to the West.

[Sidenote: _VANISHED INNS_]

So far back as 1786 there were three coaches passing through Salisbury
on their way from London to Exeter, daily. Firstly, the ‘Post Coach’
every morning at eight o’clock, with the up coach to London every
afternoon at four o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Secondly, a mail coach,
specially advertised as carrying a guard all the way, every morning at
ten o’clock, Sundays excepted, and the up mail every night at ten
o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Thirdly, a ‘Diligence,’ which passed
through every night about eight o’clock, the up coach at twelve,
midnight. All these coaches stopped, and were horsed, at the ‘White
Hart.’ In 1797 there were five coaches to and from London, daily, and
three on alternate days; and three waggons, two every day, the other on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

In those times, when highwaymen were numerous and daring and travellers
appropriately anxious, stage-coach proprietors in Salisbury advertised
the fact of their conveyances being provided with an armed guard, and
that any one making an attempt at robbery would be handed over to
justice. But, notwithstanding such bold announcements, all the friends
and relatives of citizens daring the journey to London used to assemble
on the London road and tearfully watch the coaches as they toiled up
Bishop Down and over the crest of Three Mile Hill, into the Unknown. The
spot is still called ‘Weeping Cross.’

Of the old Salisbury coaching inns, a goodly number have been either
pulled down or converted to other purposes. The ‘King’s Head,’ the
‘Maidenhead,’ the ‘Sun,’ the ‘Vine,’ the ‘Three Tuns,’ and others have
entirely disappeared; and the ‘Spread Eagle,’ the ‘Lamb,’ ‘Three Cups,’
‘Antelope,’ and the ‘George’--where Pepys stayed and was
overcharged--have become shops or private residences; while the
beautiful old ‘Three Swans’ was converted into a Temperance Hotel five
years ago.

There is a passage in Sir William Knighton’s Diary under date of 1832,
which, although written without any special emphasis, is highly
picturesque and informative on the subject of travelling at that time.
It gives in one phrase a glimpse of the waiting-room which was a feature
of all-coaching inns, and in another shows that it was possible to
bargain for fares. Only in this instance the bargain was not struck.

He had come at half-past one in the morning into Salisbury by a
cross-country coach, and waiting for the arrival of the mail to Exeter,
‘sat quietly by the fire in the common dirty room appropriated to coach
passengers.’

For twenty minutes, he says, he had for companion a man who had just
disengaged himself from an irritable rencontre with the coachman of the
mail. He had waited from two o’clock in the afternoon to go on to
Bristol, but when the time arrived he quarrelled with the coachman about
whether he should pay nine shillings or twelve, the passenger insisting
upon nine, the whip three shillings more; upon which the traveller
decided not to go, returned to the coachroom, and ordered his bed. Sir
William asked him if it really was worth while to lose the time and to
pay for a bed at the inn over this unsuccessful negotiation, and to this
the man replied that it was not. ‘In fact,’ said he, ‘we have both been
taken in. The coachman thought I would pay, and I thought he would take
my offer.’

XXIX

It is a nine-miles journey, due north from Salisbury to Stonehenge, but
although it would, under

[Sidenote: _PEPYS AT OLD SARUM_]

[Illustration: VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD
SARUM.]

other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope of this work to
travel so far from the highway, we need have no compunction in making
this trip, for it brings us to one of the most interesting places on the
Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter--to Stonehenge, in fact, and
passes by the wonderful terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old
Sarum looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying houses of
Salisbury, and if you come upon it when a storm is impending, as in
Constable’s picture, the impression of size and strength created is one
not soon to be forgotten. As to coming upon it in the dark, as Pepys
did, the sight is awe-inspiring.

Time and place conspired to frighten him. ‘So over the Plain,’ he says,
‘by the sight of the steeple, to Salisbury by night; but before I came
to the town, I saw a great fortification, and there alighted, and to it,
and in it; and find it prodigious, so as to fright me to be in it all
alone at that time of night, it being dark. I understand since it to lie
that that is called Old Sarum.’

To climb the steep grassy ramparts, one after the other, and to descend
into and climb out of the successive yawning ditches is a tiring
exercise, but perhaps in no other way is it possible to gain anything
like a proper idea of the strength of the place. Nor in there any more
sure way of arriving at the relative scale of it than by observing the
stray cyclist standing on the topmost ramparts and gazing toward the
distant spire of Salisbury.

There are other things than ancient history that make Old Sarum
memorable. It was the head and front of the electoral scandals that
brought about the great Reform Act of 1832. Although it contained
neither a single house nor an inhabitant, Old Sarum survived as a
Parliamentary borough until that date, and regularly returned two
members. Lord John Russell, introducing the Reform Bill to the House of
Commons, remarked that Old Sarum was a green mound without a single
habitation upon it, and like Gatton, also an uninhabited borough,
returned two members, while great towns like Birmingham and Manchester
were entirely without Parliamentary representation. The two members sent
to Parliament were merely the nominees of the Lord of the Manor, elected
by two dummy electors who, shortly after each dissolution of Parliament,
were granted leases in the borough of Old Sarum--leases known as
‘burgage tenures.’ Their voting done, they quietly surrendered their
leases, which were not granted again until a like occasion arose. The
elections took place at the ‘Parliament Tree,’ which, until 1896 (when
it was blown down in a snowstorm), stood in a meadow between the mound
and the village of ‘Stratford-under-the-Castle.’ It was supposed to have
marked the site of the Town Hall of the vanished town. Cobbett, riding
horseback past the spot, anathematised this ‘rotten borough’ and the
system that allowed such things. He calls it ‘The Accursed Hill.’ The
only house standing near is the ‘Old Castle Inn.’

Beyond it the road dips steeply to the downs, and so continues, with
regular undulations, unsheltered from storms or frosts, or the fierce
heat of the summer sun, to Amesbury.

[Illustration: OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).]

[Sidenote: _AMESBURY_]

Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley between these downs.
It was on the alternative coach route taken by the ‘Telegraph,’
‘Celerity,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Subscription’ coaches, which, leaving
Andover, came by Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, and ‘Park House Inn.’ This way
came the ‘Telegraph’ coach on its journey to London, 27th December 1836,
through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of which we find copious
mention on every one of the classic roads. It began when they reached
Wincanton, and from that place they struggled on up to the Plain, where
it was a white world of scurrying snowflakes, howling winds, and deep
drifts. Down into Amesbury, and to the hospitable ‘George’ there, was
but a momentary respite, for the determined coachman, although
immediately snowed up in the open country beyond the village, sent for
help and, assisted by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to
every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of Andover, with that
fortune which is said to favour the brave. That is to say, he and His
Majesty’s mails got through to London, where the story was duly
chronicled in the papers of the period.

Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came
into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th
July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the
roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to
others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according
to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless
driving, and for endeavouring to take too much of the road; but the
lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving
three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this
description was correct, the matter dropped.

XXX

And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from
Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an
awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come
upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness
of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a
literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the
mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by
the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an
immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably
vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of
the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round
it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the
brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on
the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like,
offers an insoluble riddle to archæologists of all the ages.

No one, despite the affected archaisms and the

[Sidenote: _STONEHENGE_]

[Illustration: THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’
ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY
(AFTER JAMES POLLARD).]

sham archæology, has described Stonehenge so impressively as that
‘wondrous boy’ Chatterton:--

    A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,
    Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,
    It ne could be the worke of human handes,
    It ne was reared up by menne of claie.
    Here did the Britons adoration paye
    To the false god whom they did Tauran name,
    Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,
    Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;
    Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,
    As they were met in council for to bee.

Stonehenge was probably standing when the Romans came to Britain, and
doubtless astonished them when they first saw it as much as any one
else. Its surroundings were not very different then from now. A
farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has appeared on the ridge
of the down of late years, and possibly a road which did not exist in
days of old: these alone have changed the aspect of the vast solitude in
which the hoary monument stands. No hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon
the meagre grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in general:--

    Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;
    No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,
    Much less a house or a cottage for miles.

This, saving that intrusive farmstead, still holds good here; and
although every one is inevitably disappointed with Stonehenge, as first
seen at a distance, looking _so small_ and insignificant in the vastness
of the bare downs in which it is set, the place, and not the great
stones merely, impresses by its sadness and utter detachment from the
living world, its loves and hates and interests. The birds forget to
sing in this loneliness, which is awful in winter and not less awful in