Part 20

Left high and dry upon its hill-top it can watch the trailing steam of the locomotives in the deep valley to the north as they hurry by, taking no heed of the once royal burgh, the chief mint of Dorset in the days of the West Saxon Kings, the burial-place of murdered Eadward, and of Eadmund’s wife, Ealdgyth or Elgefu, the site of the nunnery founded by Ælfred, and ruled at first by his “midmost daughter” Æthelgede or Æthelgeofu. And yet this town has a real history that can be traced back for more than 1,000 years, and a legendary one that carries us back well-nigh to the days of King Solomon, for we read in a British Brut or chronicle: “After Lleon came Rhun of the Stout Spear, his son, and he built the Castle of Mount Paladr, which is now called Caer Sefton, and there while he was building this stronghold there was an Eryr that gave some prophecies about this island.” In Powell’s _History of Cambria_ it is said:

... Concerning the word of Eryr at the building of Caer Septon on Mt. Paladour in the year after the creation of the world 3048 some think that an eagle did then speak and prophesie; others are of opinion that it was a Brytaine named Aquila (Eryr in British) that prophesied of these things and of the recoverie of the whole ile again by the Brytaines.[56]

The Brut quoted was evidently written after Dorset was occupied by the Saxons, because it says that the town was called Septon (a form of Shafton), and implies that it was not so called when Rhun built it. It is pretty certain that Caer Paladr was the Celtic name, and that the Saxon name Sceaftesbyrig is a translation of it, the modern form of which is Shaftesbury. If it was called after the name of the King who built it, it was after part of his surname Baladr or Paladr (spear), Bras (stout). Others think the spear or shaft was suggested by the long straight hill on the point of which the town was built. At a later date the name was contracted into Shaston, but this has become nearly obsolete, save in municipal and other formal documents, where the various parishes are called Shaston St. Peter’s, Shaston St. James’, etc. The name also appears on the milestones, and the inhabitants of the town are called Shastonians. No doubt the Romans captured this Celtic hill-stronghold, and as proof of this, the finding of some Roman coins has been alleged; but no written record of this period has come down to us. The real history begins in Saxon times. Ælfred came to the West Saxon throne in 871, and in 888 he founded a Benedictine Nunnery at Shaftesbury, setting over it his “medemesta-dehter” as first Abbess. This we learn from Asser, Ælfred’s friend, who tells us that he built the Abbey near the eastern gate of the town. This shows that by this time Shaftesbury was a walled town. An inscription on a stone in the Abbey Chapterhouse, so William of Malmesbury tells us, recorded the fact that the town was built by Ælfred in 880, by which he probably means rebuilt after its partial or complete destruction by the Danes.

Shaftesbury was counted as one of the four royal boroughs of Dorset (Wareham, Dorchester, and Bridport being the other three), and at the time of the Norman Conquest it was the largest of the four. Æthelstan granted the town the right of coining, and several scores of pennies struck here in his reign were found in excavating a mediæval house near the Forum in 1884-5. In the reign of Eadward the Confessor three coiners lived in the town, each paying 13s. 4d. annually to the Crown, and a fine of £1 on the introduction of a new coinage. The names, Gold Hill and Coppice (that is, Copper) Street Lane, still speak of the old mints of Shaftesbury.

On March 18th, 978, as everyone knows, King Eadward was treacherously slain at the house of, and by the order of, his stepmother. The body of the murdered King was dragged some distance by his horse, and when found was buried without any kingly honour at Wareham. On February 20th, 980, Ælfere, Eadward’s ealdorman, removed the body with all due state from Wareham to Shaftesbury, and here it was buried, somewhere in the Abbey Church. Doubtless the reason why Shaftesbury was chosen as the place of his burial was because he was of Ælfred’s kin, and this religious house had been founded by Ælfred.

Miracles soon began to be worked at his tomb. He appeared, so it was said, to a lame woman who lived at some distant spot, and bade her go to his grave at Shaftesbury, promising that if she went she should be healed of her infirmity. She obeyed his injunction, and received the due reward for her faith. The grave in which the King was laid did not, however, please him as a permanent resting-place. First he indicated his dissatisfaction by raising the tomb bodily, and then when this did not lead to an immediate translation of his relics, he appeared in visions and intimated his desire to have a fresh grave. This was about twenty-one years after his burial in the Abbey. The grave was opened, and, as was usual in such cases, a sweet fragrance from it pervaded the church. His body was then laid in the new tomb in a chapel specially dedicated to him. Possibly this chapel stood over the crypt on the north side of the north choir aisle. The day of his death, March 18th, and the days of the two translations of his relics, February 20th and June 20th, were kept in honour of the King, who, for what reason we cannot tell, was regarded as a saint and martyr. His fame spread far and wide, and brought many pilgrims and no small gain to the Abbey. At one time the town was in danger of losing its old name, Shaftesbury, and being called Eadwardstowe, but in course of time the new name died out and the old name was revived. Pilgrims were numerous, and possibly sometimes passed the whole night in the church. In order to make a thorough cleansing of the floor after their visits more easy, a slight slope towards the west was given to the choir pavement, so that it might be well swilled. A similar arrangement may be seen in other churches.

At Shaftesbury, too, was Eadmund Ironside’s wife buried; and on November 12th, 1035, Knut the Dane died at Shaftesbury, but was not buried in the Abbey, his body being carried to the royal city of Winchester and laid to rest within the Cathedral Church there. Up to the time of the Conquest the Abbesses bore English names; after that time the names of their successors show that Shaftesbury Abbey formed no exception to the rule that all the most valuable church preferments were bestowed on those of Norman and French birth. Through every change of dynasty the Abbey of Shaftesbury continued to flourish, growing continually richer, and adding field to field, until it was said that if the Abbot of Somerset Glaston could marry the Abbess of Dorset Shaston they would together own more land than the King himself. The Abbess held a barony, and ranked with the mitred Abbots, who had the privilege of sitting in Parliament, and it was said that her rank rendered her subject to be summoned by the King, but that she was excused from serving on account of her sex. At last the time came for the Abbey to be dissolved. More prudent than Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury—who refused to surrender and was hanged on St. Michael’s Hill, overlooking his wide domains—Elizabeth Zouche, the last Abbess of Shaftesbury, gave up to Henry VIII., on March 23rd, 1539, the Abbey with all its property, valued at £1,329 per annum, and received in lieu thereof the handsome pension of £133 a year for her own use. At this time there were fifty-four nuns within its walls, each of whom received a pension varying from £7 down to £3 6s. 8d.; the total amount given in pensions was £431.

From the day of the Dissolution the glory of Shaftesbury began to pass away. In an incredibly short space of time the Abbey was demolished, and when Leland visited the place a few years later the church had entirely disappeared. There was much litigation between the town and those to whom the Abbey lands had been granted—the Earl of Southampton and Sir Thomas Arundel—and this dispute continued for fifty years, greatly impoverishing the town.

Shaftesbury received its first municipal charter in the second year of James I.; a second charter was granted in 1666 by Charles II. From that time Shaftesbury led an uneventful life, broken at times by the excitement of contested elections, which were fought with great bitterness, and the consumption of much beer and the giving of much gold. The town was originally represented by two members; the two first of these sat in the Parliament of the twenty-fifth year of Edward I. At the time of the Reform Bill of 1832 it lost one member, and in 1885 it ceased to be a Parliamentary Borough, and was merged in the Northern Division of Dorset. At the election of 1880 a singular incident took place, which will show how high party feeling ran in the ancient borough. The candidate who had represented the constituency in the previous Parliament was defeated, and after the declaration of the poll, about nine o’clock in the evening, his disappointed partizans indulged in such violent and riotous conduct that the successful candidate and his friends could not leave the room in the Town Hall where the votes had been counted. Stones were thrown at the windows, some of the police were injured, but the besieged barricaded the doors of the building, closed the shutters, and waited with patience, while the angry mob outside, for the space of four or five hours, yelled like wild beasts disappointed of their prey. At last, finding that they could not effect an entrance and make a fresh vacancy in the constituency by killing the new member, the crowd began to drop off one by one, and by two o’clock in the morning the siege was practically raised, and the imprisoned member and his friends were able to get out and reach their hotel unmolested. Some of the rioters were tried, but evidence sufficiently clear to identify the men who had wounded the police was not to be obtained, and the accused were acquitted. This was the last time Shaftesbury was called on to elect a member; and as the town stands quite on the borders of the new district of North Dorset, the poll is not now declared from the Town Hall window at Shaftesbury, but at Sturminster Newton, a town more centrally situated.

At one time there were twelve churches or chapels in Shaftesbury—St. Peter’s, St. Martin’s, St. Andrew’s, Holy Trinity, St. Lawrence’s, St. Michael’s, St. James’, All Saints’, St. John the Baptist’s, St. Mary’s, St. Edward’s, and last, but not least, the Abbey Church of St. Mary and St. Edward. Beyond the borough boundary was the Church of St. Rumbold,[57] now generally spoken of as Cann Church. Why Shaftesbury, which was never a large town, should have needed so many churches has always been a mystery. The late William Barnes suggested a theory which may partially account for it. He says that some of these churches may have been old British ones, and that the Saxon Christians could not, or would not, enter into communion with the British Christians, but built churches of their own. This is probably true, although it still fails to account for the number of churches which, on this supposition, the Saxons must have built. It must be remembered, as explained in the Introduction, that Dorset remained much longer free from the dominion of the West Saxon Kings than Hampshire, and that when it was finally conquered by the West Saxons, these men had already become Christians, so that the conquest was not one of expulsion or extermination. The Celtic inhabitants were allowed to remain in the old homes, though in an inferior position. The laws of Ine, 688, clearly show this. In Exeter there is a church dedicated to St. Petroc, who was a Cornish, and therefore Celtic, saint. Mr. Barnes thinks that the Shaftesbury churches dedicated to St. Michael, St. Martin, St. Lawrence, and the smaller one dedicated to St. Mary, may have been Celtic. St. Martin was a Gaulish saint, St. Lawrence may have been a dedication due to the early missionaries, while the two hills in Cornwall and Brittany dedicated to St. Michael show that he was a saint held in honour by the Celts. The British Church differed in certain points of observance from the Church founded by the missionaries from Rome under St. Augustine, notably as to the date of keeping Easter. Bæda says that when he was Abbot of Malmesbury he wrote, by order of the Synod of his own Church, a book against the errors of the British Church, and that by it he persuaded many of the Celts, who were subjects of the West Saxon King, to adopt the Roman date for the celebration of the Resurrection. But even if we assume that there were four Celtic churches, why should no less than eight fresh ones have been built by the West Saxons? No explanation has been offered. Possibly, however, some of the churches may have been only small chapels or chantries.

Soon after the dissolution of the Abbey, as has been said previously, all the walls above the surface were pulled down, except the one that skirts the steep lane known as Gold Hill. This wall stands, strongly buttressed by gigantic masses of masonry on the outside (some of them contemporaneous with the walls, others added afterwards), for it has to bear up the earth of what was formerly the Abbey garden. The foundations of the Abbey Church, either purposely or naturally, in the course of time were covered with soil, and so remained until 1861, when some excavations took place and sundry relics were found, among them a stone coffin containing a skeleton and an abbot’s staff and ring. The foundations were then once more covered in, but recently the Corporation obtained a twenty-one years’ lease of the ground for the purpose of more thorough investigation. All the foundations that remain will be uncovered, the ground laid out as an ornamental garden and thrown open to the public. Considerable progress has been made with this work; all except the extreme west end of the nave has been excavated to the level of the floor, and some very interesting discoveries have been made. Many fragments of delicately-carved stonework, some of them bearing the original colour with which they were decorated, were unearthed, and are preserved in the Town Hall. The excavation began at the eastern end of the church, and proceeded westward. It was found that the east end of the choir was apsidal, the form usual in Norman times, but abandoned by English builders in the thirteenth century, when many of the larger churches were extended further to the east, though in France the apsidal termination is almost universal. The form shows that the Abbey Church was rebuilt during the Norman period of architecture, and that the choir was not afterwards extended eastward, for in earlier days, as well as in the thirteenth century and later, the rectangular east end was common. The north choir aisle was apsidal internally and square-ended externally; the south aisle was much wider than the north, and was evidently extended in the fifteenth century. The foundations of the high altar are complete, and on the north side of it is a grave formed of faced stone, which probably contained the body of the founder of the Norman Church. The crypt lies outside of the north aisle, and this has been completely cleared out; its floor is sixteen feet below the level of the ground. On this floor was found a twisted Byzantine column, which probably supported a similar column in the chapel above the crypt. This is the chapel which is believed to have been the shrine of King Eadward the Martyr. A most curious discovery was made in the crypt—namely, a number of dolicho-cephalous skulls. The question arises: How did they get there? For the shape of these skulls indicates that their owners were men of the Neolithic Age! In various graves sundry ornaments and articles of dress have been found—a gold ring in which a stone had once been set, a leaden bulla bearing the name of Pope Martin V. (1417-1431), and a number of bronze pins, probably used to fasten the garment in which the body was buried. The clay used for puddling the bottom of the graves acted much in the manner of quicklime and destroyed the bodies. Several pieces of the pavement, formed of heraldic and other tiles, remain _in situ_. It is supposed by some that the Abbey Church once possessed a central tower and a tall spire, though it is doubtful if the _spire_ ever existed; if it did, the church standing on its lofty isolated hill about 700 feet above the sea-level must have been a conspicuous object from all the wide Vale of Blackmore and its surrounding hills, as well as from the Vale of Wardours to the north, along which the railway now runs.

St. Peter’s Church is the oldest building in the town, but it is late Perpendicular in style. It is noteworthy that it has not, and apparently never had, a chancel properly called so; no doubt a ritual chancel may have been formed by a wooden screen. A holy-water stoup is to be seen on the left hand as one goes into the entrance porch at the west side of the tower. The richly-carved pierced parapet of the north aisle bears the Tudor rose and the portcullis, and so shows that this part of the church was built early in the sixteenth century.

Many of the houses in the town are old, but not of great antiquity. Thatched cottages abound in the side lanes, and even the long main street, which runs from east to west, has a picturesque irregularity on the sky-line. The most interesting house is one in Bimport, marked in a map dated 1615 as Mr. Groves’ house. It stands near the gasworks and the chief entrance to Castle Hill. It is a good example of a town house of the early sixteenth century, and contains some well-carved mantelpieces of somewhat later date. This house has served various purposes—at one time it was an inn, and some years ago narrowly escaped destruction. It, however, did escape with only the removal of its old stone-slabbed roof, in place of which one of red tiling has been substituted. An additional interest has been given to this old building by its introduction into _Jude the Obscure_ as the dwelling-place of the schoolmaster Phillotson, from a window of which his wife Sue once jumped into the street. Beyond this house is one known as St. John’s, standing as it does on St. John’s Hill, more of which hereafter. It was, in great measure, built of material bought at the sale of Beckford’s strange and whimsical erection known as Fonthill Abbey, of which the story is told in the _Memorials of Old Wiltshire_. In the garden of St. John’s Cottage is a curious cross, in which are two carved alabaster panels, covered with glass to preserve them from frost and rain.

Shaftesbury owes what distinction it possesses to its position, and this is due to its geological formation. A long promontory[58] of Upper Greensand runs from the east, and ends in a sharp point where the steep escarpments facing the north-west and south meet. On the triangle formed by these two the town is built. Looking out from the end of this high ground we may see a conical, wooded hill known as Duncliffe; this is an outlier of the same greensand formation; all the rest of the greensand, which once occupied the space between, has been gradually washed away, and the surface of the lower ground consists of various members of the Jurassic series. Under the greensand lies a bed of Gault, a blue-coloured clay impervious to water; and, as the greensand rock is porous, the gault holds up the water that percolates through the greensand, with the result that a thickness of about twenty-five feet of the lowest bed of the greensand is full of water, while the upper layers are dry. Hence, to get water to supply the town, wells would have to be sunk to the depth of 150 feet. Some such wells were, indeed, sunk in mediæval times, but were not satisfactory. It is only in recent times that regular water-works, with pumping-engines, reservoir, and mains, have been constructed, and Shaftesbury had to depend for water until that time on a supply obtained from springs at Enmore Green, a village situated under the hill and to the north of the town. This gave rise to a quaint and curious custom. On the Sunday next after the Festival of the Invention of the Cross, May 3rd (the day was changed in 1663 to the Monday before Ascension Day), the Mayor and burgesses of Shaftesbury went down to the springs at Enmore Green with mirth and minstrelsy, and, chief of all, with a staff or bezant adorned with feathers, pieces of gold, rings and jewels, and sundry dues—to wit, a pair of gloves, a calf’s head, a gallon of ale, and two penny loaves of fine wheaten bread: these were presented to the bailiff of the manor of Gillingham, in which the village of Enmore Green was situated. Moreover, the Mayor and burgesses, for one whole hour by the clock, had to dance round the village green hand in hand. Should the dues not be presented, or the dance fail, the penalty was that the water should no longer be supplied to inhabitants of the borough of Shaftesbury. The decoration of the bezant was a costly matter; the original one, of gilded wood in the form of a palm-tree, was in the possession of Lady Theodora Guest, and has been presented by her ladyship to the Corporation of Shaftesbury. The water was brought up in carts drawn by horses, and strong ones they must have been, for the hill they had to climb is one of the steepest in the neighbourhood. The fixed price for a bucketful of water was a farthing. From the scanty supply of drinking-water it came to pass that a saying got abroad that Shaftesbury was a town where “there was more beer than water”; to which was added two lines describing other noteworthy characteristics of the place—namely, that “here there was a churchyard above the steeple,” and that the town contained “more rogues than honest people.” Once during the writer’s fifteen years’ sojourn in the town some accident happened to the pumping apparatus at the water-works, and for several weeks the inhabitants were thrown back upon the old source of water supply. Day after day water-carts might be seen slowly passing along the streets, while servants or housewives came out from every doorway with empty pails or buckets, though they were not called upon to pay their farthings for the filling of them, as the expense was borne by the owners of the water-works.

In the old coaching days Shaftesbury was a livelier place than now, since the London and Exeter coaches, with their splendid teams and cheerful horns, passed through it daily, changing their horses at the chief hostelry. When the Salisbury and Yeovil Railway (afterwards absorbed by the London and South-Western) was planned it was intended to bring the line, not indeed through the town, but within a half-mile or so of it, with a station under the hill; but the bill was here, as in many another place, opposed by the landowners, with the result that the line was not allowed to come within about three miles of Shaftesbury, and was carried through the neighbouring town of Gillingham, which from that time began to increase, while Shaftesbury decreased. Periodically there has been an agitation for a branch line or a loop or a light railway running from Tisbury and passing near Shaftesbury, and joining, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Wareham, the line to Weymouth. But all the agitation has ended in nothing practical.

The beauty of its scenery and the clearness of its air have raised a hope in the minds of some of its inhabitants that Shaftesbury may become a summer health resort; but as long as the town is so difficult of access these hopes do not seem likely to be fulfilled to any great extent.