Part 26

The church and tower of Cadbury is neat and small, built of stone. In this place they call walnuts _Welsh-nuts_. To the southward, on the opposite hill, corpses have been dug up: there was lately an urn full of Roman money found at Wincaunton. A little above Sutton, toward Beacon-Ash, in inclosing ground, half a peck of the same coin was found; I saw some of Tetricus. Roman _pateras_, a knife, and other antiquities, taken up thereabouts, sent to madam Thyns, now in lord Winchelsea’s custody. Many are the British stories told of Camalet, of the knights of king Arthur’s round table, of the solemn justings and tournaments there, &c. It seems, when the castle for its security was turned into a city, this was the _Colomeæ_ of Ravennas, (as Mr. Baxter has corrected it) in the later times of the Romans; unless Quincamel, not far off, can better put in its claim, to which this might be the garrison. At Long-Leat, in my lord Weymouth’s library, is a piece of lead weighing fifty pound, one foot nine inches long, two inches thick, three and an half broad, found in the lord Fitzharding’s grounds near Bruton in Somersetshire, and was discovered by digging a hole to set a gate-post in: upon it this memorable inscription, which I suppose was some trophy; communicated by lord Winchelsea.

┌───────────────────────┐ │ IMP DVOR AVG ANTONINI │ │ ET VERI ARMENIACORVM. │ └───────────────────────┘

Hence let us go, as in pilgrimage, to the famous Glassenbury; for it is a very rough and disagreeable road, over rocks and the heads of rivers: but that is much alleviated by the many natural curiosities such places afford: several times I saw _gilded ivy_ grow in the hedges, as yellow as gold; great plenty of _viorna_, _purging-thorn_, _prim-print_, and the banks every where over-grown with _fox-gloves_. Kyneton village, for half a mile together, is paved naturally with one smooth broad rock, the whole breadth of the road; so that it looks like ice. Great quarries of stone hereabouts, of the slab kind: all the uppermost layers are incredibly full of sea-shells, and would make admirable pannels to wainscot a _virtuoso’s_ summer-house, grotto, or the like, and of any dimensions; not inferior, in true value, to those brought from Italy, but too cheap. I frequently took notice that the course of the vein of the stone quarry runs north-east and south-west.

[Sidenote: +Glasenbury Torr+]

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXVII.]

Crossing the Foss road at Lyteford you enter upon a flat moorish country, full of artificial cuts and drains, like the levels in Lincolnshire. Not far before I came to Glassenbury, I observed a great bank, crossing the road, which seemed to be a Roman road. I guess there was a Roman road went from Bristol, through Axbridge, Bridgewater, Taunton, parallel to the Foss, and nearer the ocean. I have been told, between the two last places it is very fair, and paved with stone. With much labour I climbed to the top of the Torr, hanging over the town of Glassenbury. This hill, with that called Werial hill, is a long rib of elevated ground in the midst of this vast level or isle of Avalon. I observed, in its several breaks or gradations, a steepness westward. Here upon the narrow crest of the Torr, which is much the highest, the abbots built a church to St. Michael, of good square stone: the tower is left, though ruinous; and it is an excellent sea-mark: it probably cost more to carry the stone up to this _apex_, than to erect the building. There is a spring half way up it. It is certainly higher than any ground within ten miles of the place. They say here is a passage hence under ground to the abbey.

[Sidenote: +Glasenbury.+]

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXIII.]

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXVII.]

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXIV.]

This great monastery in superstitious times held the first place for fame and sanctity. Here the christian doctrine first found admittance in Britain, or early tradition has amused us: it is not unlikely the fact may be true, though the persons and circumstances invented: however, it is not to be doubted but king Ina built their church; as one of the most ancient, so the most wealthy and magnificent, loaded with revenues by the Saxon kings, and perhaps the British before them. Truly the abbot lived in no less state than the royal donors: no wonder, when his revenue was equivalent to 40,000l. per ann. he could from the Torr see a vast tract of this rich land his own demesnes, and seven parks well stored with deer belonging to the monastery. It is walled round and embattled like a town, a mile in compass: as yet there are magnificent ruins; but within a _lustrum_ of years, a presbyterian tenant has made more barbarous havock there, than has been since the Dissolution; for every week a pillar, a buttress, a window-jamb, or an angle of fine hewn stone, is sold to the best bidder: whilst I was there they were excoriating St. Joseph’s chapel for that purpose, and the squared stones were laid up by lots in the abbot’s kitchen: the rest goes to paving yards and stalls for cattle, or the highway. I observed frequent instances of the townsmen being generally afraid to make such purchase, as thinking an unlucky fate attends the family where these materials are used; and they told me many stories and particular instances of it: others, that are but half religious, will venture to build stables and out-houses therewith, but by no means any part of the dwelling-house. The abbot’s lodging was a fine stone building, but could not content the tenant just mentioned, who pulled it down two or three years ago, and built a new house out of it; aukwardly setting up the arms and cognisances of the great Saxon kings and princes, founders, and of the abbots, over his own doors and windows: my friend Mr. Strachey had taken a drawing of it very luckily just before, which I have put in its proper place, plate 37. Nothing is reserved intire but the kitchen, a judicious piece of architecture: it is formed from an octagon included in a square; four fire-places fill the four angles, having chimneys over them: in the flat part of the roof, between these, rises the arched octagonal pyramid, crowned with a double lantern, one within another: there are eight curved ribs within, which support this vault, and eight funnels for letting out the steam through windows; within which, in a lesser pyramid, hung the bell to call the poor people to the adjacent almery, whose ruins are on the north side of the kitchen: the stones of the pyramid are all cut slaunting with the same bevil to throw off the rain. They have a report in the town, that king Henry VIII. quarrelling with the abbot, threatened to fire his kitchen: to which he returned answer, That he would build such a one as all the timber in his forest should not burn.

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXVI.]

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXV.]

[Sidenote: TAB. XXXVII.]

The church was large and magnificent: the walls of the choir are standing, twenty-five fathom long, twelve broad: there is one jamb at the east end of the high altar left: hereabouts were buried king Edgar, and many of the Saxon kings, whose noble ashes ought to have protected the whole: two pillars of the great middle tower are left next the choir: on the north side is St. Mary’s chapel, as they told me; the roof beat down by violence, and a sorry wooden one in its place, thatched with stubble to make it serve as a stable: the manger lies upon the altar and niche where they put the holy water. St. Edgar’s chapel is opposite to it; not much left of it, beside the foundations: the north and south transepts are quite demolished. They say king Arthur was buried under the great tower. A small part of the south side wall of the body of the church remains, which made one side of the cloysters; and the arch at the west end, leading to the chapel of Joseph of Arimathea, the patron and asserted founder of the whole. This they say was the first christian church in Britain. The present work is about the third building upon the same spot: it is forty-four paces long, thirty-six wide without: it is so intire, that we could well enough draw the whole structure, as in plate 35. the roof is chiefly wanting: two little turrets are at the corners of the west end, and two more at the interval of four windows from thence, which seem to indicate the space of ground the first chapel was built on: the rest between it and the church was a sort of anti-chapel. Underneath was a vault now full of water, the floor of the chapel being beaten down into it: it was wrought with great stones. Here was a capacious receptacle of the dead: they have taken up many leaden coffins, and melted them into cisterns. Hence is the subterraneous arched passage to the Torr, according to their notion. The roof of the chapel was finely arched with rib-work of stone: the sides of the walls are full of small pillars of Sussex marble, as likewise the whole church; which was a little way of ornamenting in those days: they are mostly beaten down: between them the walls are painted with pictures of saints, as still easily seen. All the walls are overgrown with ivy, which is the only thing here in a flourishing condition; everything else presenting a most melancholy, though venerable aspect. On the south side the cloysters was the great hall. The town’s people bought the stone of the vaults underneath to build a sorry market-house, contributing to the ruin of the sacred fabric, and to their own: what they durst not have done singly, they perpetrated as a body, hoping vengeance would slip between so many: nor did they discern the benefit accruing to the town from the great concourse of strangers purposely to see this abbey, which is now the greatest trade of it, as formerly its only support; for it is in a most miserable decaying condition, as wholly cut off from the great revenues spent among them. There are many other foundations of the buildings left in the great _area_, but in the present hands will soon be rooted up, and the very footsteps of them effaced, which so many ages had been erecting. Though I am no encourager of superstitious foppery, yet I think, out of that vast estate, somewhat might have been left, if only to preserve old monuments for the benefit of our history. The abbot’s hall I have been told was curiously wainscoted with oak, and painted with coats of arms in every pannel. The mortar of these buildings is very good, and great rocks of the roof of the church lie upon the ground, consisting chiefly of rubble stone untouched by the fanatical destroyers, who work on the hewn stone of the outside, till a whole wall falls when undermined a little. Throughout the town are the tattered remains of doors, windows, bases, capitals of pillars, &c. brought from the abbey, and put into every poor cottage.

In the town are two churches; the upper a handsome fabric, with a fine tower of good design, adorned with figures in niches: at the east end of the church-yard is a curious old tomb inscribed with ancient English letters, but so worn with trampling on, that I could make little out of it, except the name of the interred Alleyn. The George inn is an old stone building, called the Abbot’s inn, where chiefly the pilgrims were lodged that came strolling hither, and idling their time away for sanctity: stone and timber are liberally bestowed on it: a coat of arms of the kings of England, supported by a lion and a bull, over the gate, and many crosses: the bed I lay in was of large timber, with great embossed gilt pannels, and seemed to have been the abbot’s.

When I left this place, I passed through a great gate built across the road under the abbey wall, with a lesser portal by the side of it; which I suppose was some boundary of the abbey-lands, and part of their extravagance; for the abbot’s revenues being inconsumable in their way of life, they prodigally threw it away in building, as one method of perpetuating their name: another they had which was very useful, the making great and high causeways, along this moory country, for facilitating travelling and commerce; the remains of which I saw here and there, and wished they had been in better repair. I passed by the side of Werial hill, where grew the famous hawthorn that blossomed at Christmas; I suppose, an early blooming white-thorn: but that it so strictly observed Christmas day to an hour, nay a minute, as they here assert, I believe no more than the vulgar derivation of the hill, with more of the dregs of monkery. Somerton is an old town, that gives name to the whole county, once the royal seat of the West-Saxon kings: the steeple is octangular: probably it was a Roman town. I saw a camp upon a great copped high hill on the right hand, as I travelled. At Ilchester town end I fell into the Foss road again.

[Sidenote: +Ischalis.+]

[Sidenote: TAB. LXXII.]

This station of the Romans is situate on the south side of the river Ivel, or Yeovil, the _Velox_ of Ravennas. Pillbridge, a little lower, seems to retain the name: it is the _Uzella_ of Ptolemy. I perceived immediately that this place had been originally encompassed with a wall and ditch, and traced out the manifest _vestigia_ thereof quite round: it was an oblong square 300 paces in length, 200 in breadth, standing upon the oblique points of the compass, conform to the Foss way, which passes through the town exactly from north-east to south-west: the north-east side of the city lay against the river, where I saw foundations of the wall here and there, and took up several Roman bricks in searching for it in the gardens: the ditch on the north-west side is become a road, called Yard-lane, as going behind the yards and gardens: then it runs through the friery garden; for the religious had extended their bounds beyond the city, and turned the road on the outside: then it goes along the road on the back of Mr. Lockyer’s garden: it is now visible between the Yeovil road and the southern angle; then runs through another garden, being for the most part levelled by the gardener, who showed me the track of it, and had by times, in digging, taken up remainders of the wall, with many coins, bricks, tiles, and other antiquities. I bought some coins of him, among which the brass one of Antoninus Pius depicted in the plate; on the reverse, Britannia sitting on a rock with a military ensign. Sir Philip Sydenham has a great quantity of coins found here, and the minister of the parish gave many to the learned Mr. Coke of Norfolk. This gardener showed me many square paving bricks in the floor of his house, and told me he dug up a great brass coin, as big as half a crown, under the foundation of the wall, which doubtless would have discovered to us the _area_ of its building. Crossing the Sherburn and Limington road, we find the ditch again, turning up to the river-side, on the eastern angle, conformable to the scheme; where it is again inclosed into gardens and pastures: the occupier of the gardens there informed me too, that he had frequently dug up the like antiquities, together with the foundations of the wall. The quickset-hedge that fences in the garden stands on the edge of the ditch, and observes its turn at that angle of the city: by the new mill it meets the river. In all the gardens hereabouts, by the Borough-green, they find foundations of old houses; and some run across the present streets, now visible above ground. This ditch, when perfect, admitted the water of the river quite round. Mr. Lockyer’s house is built upon subterraneous arches. They say here have been sixteen parish-churches, and foundations are to be found all the town over; and that the suburbs extended southward, especially on the Yeovil road, which formerly had a gate: it is not to be doubted but that there were gates at the passage of all the other streets. They say the bishop of Bath and Wells has a manuscript relating to the ancient state of this town. They have the same tradition as in many other places, that the old city was set on fire by matches tied to the tails of sparrows, let fly from a place called Stannard-cross hill. As soon as I came into the inn, (the Swan) I saw a great parcel of the little stones of a tesselated pavement, found but two days before, in a garden over the way near the river: a croud of people came immediately out of curiosity to see it, and tore it up: I saw some of the remainder _in situ_, about two foot deep, laid in strong mortar upon a hard gravelled floor: I made the owner melancholy with informing him what profit he might have got by preserving it, to show to strangers. The Foss-way retains its name, and makes the principal street: the pavement thereof, or the original ford across the river, may be seen on the west side of the bridge, made with great flag stones. Upon the bridge is an old chapel, called Little St. Mary’s: at the foot of the bridge within the town is another, called White-chapel; both converted into dwellings. Foundations of houses, chimney-pieces, and the like, have been dug up in the meads on the west side the town, and on both sides the river, with stone coffins and other funeral _apparatus_. The head of the mayor’s staff or mace is a piece of great antiquity in cast brass: there are four niches with four images, two kings, a queen, and an angel: it seems to have been the crosier of some religious house: round the bottom is wrote, in two lines, *+ JESU DE DRUERJE + NEME DUNETMJE*. In the northern angle beyond the old ditch of the city, towards the river, have been some bastions and modern fortifications, of the time of king Charles I.

Beyond the river is a village adjoining, called North-over, with a church; at Mrs. Hoddle’s, hard by, I saw a grey-hound bitch, from whose side a skewer of wood seven inches long had worked itself out from the stomach: we have some such rare cases in medicinal histories. They talk of a castle standing where now is the gaol, and that the tide came formerly up hither, though now it reaches not beyond Langport. West of this, some time since, they dug up some bones in a leaden case, as big as a band-box, laid in a hollowed stone; and near it, under a tree, was a vault of stone, where a body was found lying at full length. Langport is moted about, as they tell me, and probably was a Roman town. These were all the remarkables I met with at _Ischalis_, where I staid but half a day.

[Sidenote: Foss _road_.]

[Sidenote: +Hamden-hill.+ Ro. _camp_.]

[Sidenote: TAB. XLIV.]

Hence I continued my journey along the Foss, which I observed paved with the original work in many parts: it is composed of the flat quarry-stones of the country, of a good breadth, laid edgewise, and so close that it looks like the side of a wall fallen down, and through the current of so many ages is not worn through: a glorious and useful piece of industry, and, to our shame, not imitated; for small reparation from time to time would have preserved it intire, and where it is so much wanted in a dirty country. As I rode, on my left hand I saw the pleasant view of Montacute hill, a copped round eminence incompassed at bottom with a broad verge of wood, so that it looks like a high-crowned hat with a fringed hat-band: here has been a castle and chapel at top, and below it a religious house built by the earl of Moriton in the time of William the Conqueror.[133] Another hill near it, much of the same figure. Between them and the Foss, upon the same hilly ridge, is a Roman camp called Hamden hill, with a double ditch about it; to which leads a vicinal Roman way from the Foss through Stoke. The Foss is very plain and strait hither, and to Petherton bridge near South Petherton, once the palace of king Ina: here was formerly a wooden bridge, but ruinous, where two children were drowned, as they say; whereupon their parents rebuilt it of stone, and caused their _effigies_ to be cut upon a stone which lies at the foot of the bridge. In a field not far off, two years ago a pot full of Roman coin, to the quantity of six pecks, was dug up. Beyond this the Foss grows intricate and obscure, from the many collateral roads made through the badness and want of reparation in the true one; yet it seems to run through Donington, which stands on a very high hill, and, when mounted, presents us with a vast scene of Devonshire. I suppose this Foss went on the east side of Chard, and so by Axminster and Culliton, to Seaton or _Moridunum_, where properly it begins; whence if we measure its noble length to the sea-coast in Lincolnshire, at Grimsby or Saltfleet, where I imagine it ends, it amounts to 250 Roman miles in a strait line from north-east to south-west. Your lordship presented me with an oyster, found a little northward of Axminster, where the very fish appears petrified with its cartilaginous concretion to the shell, all in their proper colours.

[Sidenote: +Chard.+]

The street of Chard runs directly east and west, where formerly was kept a large market on Sundays. Beyond this to Honiton is a very bad road of stones and sand, over brooks, spring-heads, and barren downs. From the hill-tops about Stockland I first had sight of the southern ocean; a most solemn view, a boundless extent of water thrown into a mighty horizontal curve. Beyond Honiton the scene of travelling mended apace, and the fine Devonshire prospects entertained the eye in a manner new and beautiful; for here the hills are very long and broad, the valleys between proportional, so that the vastly-extended concavity presented an immense landscape of pastures and hedge-rows distinct, like a map of an actual survey, and not beyond ken: these are full of springs, brooks, and villages, copses and gentlemen’s seats; and when you have passed over one hill, you see the like repeated before you, with Nature’s usual diversity. They told me of a great kairn, or heap of stones, on Black down, called Lapper-stones; probably a sepulchral monument.

[Sidenote: +Isca Dumnoniorum.+]

[Sidenote: TAB. LXXIII.]