THROUGH WESSEX – I
"Wessex?" you say. "What county is that? We know Essex and Sussex, but where is Wessex?" Well, it is not a county, and you will not find the name on a map of England; but it is a good English name for all that, and once was the name of an important English kingdom.
When Alfred the Great became King, he ruled over Wessex, the south-western part of England, and the old name still clings to the district, which is now cut up into several modern counties.
Wessex is a land of downs and dales, and broad stretches of fertile country. It is the home of the chalk hills – those great, smooth, rolling heights, covered with short, sweet grass, on which great flocks of sheep pasture and speck the vast slopes with dots of white.
"There is hardly any part of our land which has remained so little unchanged as these Downs of Wessex. It is not because they are rugged and difficult to climb: they are not; they are often easy to surmount. There are far wilder and higher looking hills in both Wales and Scotland, which have inhabitants, which are ploughed in patches and dotted with whitewashed cottages. Yet the Downs remain lonely, their sky-line unbroken by any sign of the presence of man. Just as the Roman saw them from his trireme, the Saxon from his long ship, the Dane from his war-boat, so we see them to-day – great solitary green mounds, 600, 700, 800 feet high."
Why is this? The answer is simple. They lack water. Down their sides flow no brooks, babbling from stone to stone; they are waterless, and therefore treeless and houseless. They get plenty of rain, of course, for when the sou'-westers blow up from the Atlantic they are drenched by many a heavy storm. But the water does not run down their sides as a river, or gather in their hollows as a lake. The chalk of which they are composed is too porous for that, and the rain sinks swiftly and is lost.
Water is so abundant in almost every part of our land that we are inclined to forget that the first need of a house is its water-supply. He who thinks to build on the Downs must first reckon how deep a well he must dig through the chalk before the water can be reached. And he finds that the cost of obtaining water is so great that he must build his house elsewhere. One or two houses have been built high up on the Downs by wealthy people who were resolved to carry out a fancy. In winter the water-supply is furnished by the rain which falls on the roofs; in summer it is carted from the valley at great expense.
In some parts of the Downs water is obtained by dew-pans or dew-ponds. A space is hollowed out, as a rule, near the summit of a hill. It is circular in form, and of no great depth. It is coated with clay or cement, or some material which prevents the passage of water, and it then fills with dew and rain, and, strange to say, many of these dew-ponds never fail after they have once filled. You may visit them in perfect certainty of obtaining some water.
"Those who best know the Downs, and have lived among them all their lives, can testify how, for a whole day's march, one may never meet a man's face; or, if one meets it, it will be the face of some shepherd, who may be standing lonely, with his dog beside him, upon the flank of a green hill, and with his flock scattered all around."
Another great feature of Wessex is its broad heaths – great sweeps of country dark with furze and gorse and heath, save when they blaze in May with the yellow blossoms of the gorse, or glow in autumn with the purple of the heather.
And bordering these heaths and downs are great stretches of smiling meadow and corn land, dotted by quaint and beautiful townlets and villages. Of large towns there are but few, for Wessex knows nothing of the toil and turmoil of great industrial centres. She tills her land and tends her flocks, and those occupations mean old farmhouses and cottages, half-timbered or stone-built, roofed with red tiles or grey thatch, and little country towns, silent and sleepy save on market-days, when the farmers and dealers come in and buy and sell their cattle and their produce.
The coast of Wessex is washed by the English Channel, and through all our history no other part of our coast-line has been so busy with sailors and shipping as that which looks upon the narrow seas.
The Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, have landed at its river-mouths, and marched inland. In later days, the pirates which swarmed along the Channel have attacked and plundered its towns. All through the Middle Ages the citizens of the little towns along the shore had to be prepared at any moment to beat off the attacks of freebooters who sought plunder wherever it was to be found. Thus, in 1338, Southampton was attacked suddenly by pirates on a Sunday when the people of the town were in church, and the town was plundered and burned.
To this day the visitor notes with wonder the size and strength of some old parish churches along the coast. They seem needlessly large in view of the small population of the village, and also needlessly strong. But 500 years ago the church was also the fortress of the place. When news was brought that an enemy was near at hand, all fled into the church for protection; and while the women and children crouched before the altar, where the priest prayed for the rout of the foe, the men strung their bows, and prepared to launch showers of arrows from every window and loophole.
All through the long French wars the Wessex ports were in the thick of the fray, fitting out privateers and supplying men for the Navy. Along these coasts the press-gangs were very busy when sailors were needed for the fleet and not enough men had volunteered. The press-gang was a body of seamen, commanded by a naval officer, and sent out to seize men and carry them on board ship by force. Tales are told to this day in Wessex of a press-gang marching into a village at dead of night and rushing into cottages to drag men out of bed and make them prisoners to serve the King at sea. Sometimes the ploughman was snatched from his plough, the shepherd from his flock. At times these men returned after many years' absence to tell of their lives on board a man-o'-war, and the battles fought with Britain's enemies; others were never heard of again in their native place.
THROUGH WESSEX – II
The time of the French wars, too, was the time when the smugglers were in their glory. The Government laid heavy duties on spirits, lace, and such things, and employed a large body of officers, called "preventive men," to watch the seaports and coasts, and take care that no such articles came into the land without paying duty.
But, for all that, many and many a cask of brandy and parcel of lace came over from France, and was smuggled ashore under cover of night, or upon some very lonely stretch of coast. The usual method of the smugglers was this: a vessel laden with contraband goods would appear at an arranged place upon an arranged time. With the darkness of night a number of boats put off to her and received the cargo, and pulled back to the beach. Here would be a band of comrades with a number of strong, swift horses. The horses were loaded with the casks and bundles, and then away they were driven full-gallop up-country towards a safe hiding-place, where the goods could be stored until sold.
The trade was very profitable, for the duty was so heavy that the smuggler, if he made a successful run, could sell his goods far more cheaply than a merchant who had paid duty, and could yet make a large profit. But the preventive officers were always on the watch, and it was a constant struggle between them and the smugglers. Sometimes the officers won. They caught the smugglers and captured the goods. But the smugglers often showed fight, and when both parties were well armed, the affair would become a pitched battle, in which men were killed or wounded on both sides.
As a rule, however, the smugglers depended on hoodwinking and eluding the preventive men, and endless were their devices to gain their ends. Sometimes a vessel appeared off the coast behaving in a suspicious manner and leading the officers to believe she carried a cargo of contraband goods. At nightfall she exchanged signals with the shore, but when she was boarded, nothing wrong could be discovered. She was merely a decoy, and while the preventive men had been kept busy with her movements, another vessel had landed a cargo at some other point along the coast.
Along the shore are still to be seen many old houses, where devices have been arranged to aid smugglers. There may be a secret cellar entered by a hidden door, where casks were placed till the officers were out of the way, or a sliding panel in the wainscot, worked by a spring, is the door of a cupboard where bundles of lace could be concealed. Then there are secret hiding-places for the smugglers themselves when pursued by their enemies. In one house there is a stone wall which looks perfectly solid. But if a particular stone be pressed, a piece of the wall swings aside and gives entrance to a tiny closet built in the thickness of the wall. Here is just room for a man to hide, and when the door is closed on him, no one who does not understand the secret could discover where he is.
But the smugglers would soon have been suppressed had they not had many friends in the countryside. Many a farmer took care to turn a blind eye when he suspected that the smugglers were using one of his barns or sheds as a hiding-place. He knew very well that when they went he would find a cask left behind, and he took it, and nothing was said. The preventive officers made capture of contraband goods in the strangest of places – in the cellars of squires, who were justices of the peace and supposed to aid them, and more than once in a church, where a parish clerk or sexton, in league with the smugglers, had stowed away the forbidden casks and bales.
As for the smugglers themselves, they practised a thousand tricks to outwit their enemies of the law: they shod their horses backwards to throw their pursuers off the scent, they gave false information to draw the officers astray, they tried every device known to outwit them. One day a very active and zealous officer, much dreaded by the smugglers of his neighbourhood, made his appearance in a small fishing village at a very awkward time. In a cove below the cliff there was a string of loaded horses waiting for the darkness to come up the cliff road and gallop inland with their burdens. The preventive officer rode up to the inn, where the landlord, secretly quaking, for he was one of the smugglers, made a great show of welcoming him.
In a short time there was an uproar in the village street; one of the fishermen appeared to be beating his wife severely, and there was a great hubbub for a time. Before long the ill-treated woman came into the room where the officer was making a meal, and, apparently in a state of anger and agitation, accused her husband of being a smuggler, and offered to post the officer in a spot where he should have ample evidence of the guilt of the villagers.
"I'll put ye within a yard of 'em as they pass by," said the woman, "and then ye can get all their names and know where they are."
The officer, feeling sure that she was inspired by a spirit of revenge, agreed to follow her directions, and, as dusk began to settle down, he crept quietly to the back of her house, a spot which overlooked the cliff road.
The woman met him, and cautioned him not to make a sound. "For," said she, "if they get to know of ye, they'll take your life; they be such terrible smugglers hereabouts."
She bade him get into a large cask beside the back-door, and pointed out that he could see all who passed through the bung-hole. Eager to discover the smugglers and the way they would take, he did so. But no sooner was the unlucky man in the cask than a cover was popped on it by the woman's husband, hidden near at hand, and the cover was held down until it was firmly secured by hammer and nails. Then a spigot was driven into the bung-hole, and a voice shouted, "Come on, boys! We've boxed him up."
At the next moment the preventive officer heard the tramp of hoofs as the horses filed past the cask where he was shut up in utter darkness. The whole thing had been a trick from beginning to end. The quarrel between husband and wife had been a sham one, intended to lure the officer into the trap, and there he was fast in the cask; nor was he released until the smugglers were far beyond reach of pursuit.
THROUGH WESSEX – III
Wessex has many beautiful and peaceful country towns, and of these an admirable example may be seen in Dorchester, the county town of Dorsetshire, a place often called the capital of Wessex. This very ancient town has seen the whole of the history of Wessex, the land of the West Saxons. Before a Saxon settled in the country it was a splendid city, the home of Roman nobles and the camp of Roman soldiery. The Romans knew it as Durnovaria, and they filled it with houses and adorned it with temples and theatres. To this day Roman remains are being discovered. An old house is pulled down and the foundations cleared away, and in the work the diggers come upon pavements which were laid down by Roman hands and trodden by Roman feet. Very often pottery and ornaments are discovered, and now and again a more striking relic still – the pick strikes into a Roman grave and lays bare a manly form which once marched with the legions, or the figure of a Roman maiden, whose ornaments still lie among her mortal remains.
After the Romans came the Saxons, and Dorchester was still a place of much importance. In 1003, Sweyn of Denmark plundered and burned the place and overthrew the walls in revenge for the massacre of Danes on St. Brice's Day in the previous year. But the town was soon rebuilt, and its history runs on through the centuries with outbreaks of fire and plague and records of martyrdoms, until war visited it again during the great Civil War. Dorchester stood against Charles, and saw some severe skirmishing in its neighbourhood, but no fighting of any great importance. But the reign of Charles's second son, James II., saw Dorchester leap into terrible prominence, for here, on September 3, 1685, was opened the "Bloody Assize." Sedgemoor had been fought, the rebellion of Monmouth had been broken, and the infamous Judge Jeffreys had come down to the West to strike terror into the hearts of all who had wished well to Monmouth.
More than 300 people had been crammed into Dorchester Gaol, and nearly all of them were condemned to death. Of these, some forty or fifty were executed, and others condemned to be whipped in terribly severe fashion, and to suffer long terms of imprisonment and heavy fines.
After the Monmouth Rebellion, Dorchester sank back into the peaceful history of a quiet country town – a history unbroken, save for local events of fire and storm, until to-day. The town still preserves much of its ancient character, and is a most interesting and picturesque place, and, on market-days, is thronged by people of typical Wessex appearance – dealers, farmers, carters, labourers, and pedlars.
To the south of the town stands a great amphitheatre, which is said to have been built by the Romans about the time of Agricola. It is called Maumbury Rings, and is a series of raised mounds enclosing an open space. It is calculated that some 12,000 spectators could have been seated round the amphitheatre, each enjoying an excellent view of the combats of gladiators or wild beasts in the arena below.
But a still more wonderful relic of former days is to be seen two miles south of Dorchester – the huge British earthwork, now known as Maiden Castle. It is an immense camp or hill-fort, built on the flat summit of a natural hill, and it must have cost the Britons who built it an immense amount of labour. It is the greatest British camp in existence, stretching 1,000 yards from east to west, and 500 from north to south, and enclosing an area of 45 acres. The whole is surrounded, in some places with two, and in others with three, ramparts nearly 60 feet high, and very steep. When these ramparts were manned by the warriors of the British tribe gathered within the fort, it was no easy place to storm.
Wessex has not many rivers, and most of them are not of any great size, but they are famous among fishermen for the splendid trout which they breed. These streams, running through the chalk, are marvellously clear; in many cases the stones may be counted at the bottom of a pool 10 or 12 feet deep, and this clearness makes the catching of the trout and grayling which live in them no easy affair.
The largest Wessex river is the Avon, which flows past Salisbury Plain, with its wonderful monument of Stonehenge; passes through Salisbury, whose beautiful cathedral spire is a famous landmark, and runs into the English Channel.
Stonehenge is the most ancient of all the ancient monuments of Wessex. We say that this camp was the work of the Britons; that pavement was laid by the Romans; but no one knows what manner of men raised the mighty standing-stones at Stonehenge. Nor do we really know why they were raised. We believe it was for the purpose of worship – that the stones form an ancient temple – but of this we cannot be quite sure.
Stonehenge consists of two circles of great stones, set upright in the ground. Across some of these stones others are placed to form arches, and though many have been broken or thrown down, there are still enough of them in position to show us the original shape of Stonehenge. The outer circle is about 100 yards round, and was formed by huge monoliths or single blocks of stone, each 15 feet high and 7 feet broad. The inner circle is 8 feet from the outer, and is composed of smaller stones about 6 feet high. There are two ovals, formed of large stones, and the inner oval contains a huge slab of rock, which is thought to have been an altar.
The question at once springs to our lips, Who raised these enormous blocks of stone, and set them up in so exact a fashion? It is one which learned men are unable to answer. The general opinion is that Stonehenge was formed as a temple for the worship led by the Druids, the priests of the ancient Britons, but of this one cannot be certain. The men who built Stonehenge have left no other record of their mighty labours save the vast stones they raised, and the secret of this most ancient monument is lost in the darkness of prehistoric days.