Chapter XIV., is still the subject of much heated controversy among
Dickens commentators. Sandwiched as it is (in the story told by a stranger to the Pickwickians at “Eatanswill”) between Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds, it appears to be a vague recollection dragged in, neck and crop, by Dickens, of some inn he had casually noticed in 1835, when travelling between London and Bristol. “But,” it has been asked, “_what_ inn was he thinking of, if indeed, of any specific inn at all?”
The Bagman with the Lonely Eye, who told the story of Tom Smart and the widow-landlady of this wayside hostelry, spoke of Tom Smart driving his gig “in the direction of Bristol” across the bleak expanse, and of his mare drawing up of her own accord “before a roadside inn on the right-hand side of the way, about half a quarter of a mile from the end of the downs.”
We are met here, at the very outset, by some puzzling discrepancies and by a wide choice, “Marlborough Downs” being a stretch of wild, inhospitable chalk-down country extending the whole of the fourteen miles between Marlborough and Devizes, and being still “Marlborough Downs” at the threshold of Devizes itself. Moreover, the same characteristic features are common to both the routes to Bath and Bristol that branch at Beckhampton and go, left by way of Devizes, and right through Calne and Chippenham.
The “half a quarter of a mile from the end of the Downs” by the Devizes route brings you, in the direction Tom Smart (of the firm of Bilson and Slum) was going, to a point a half, or three quarters, of a mile from Devizes town, where, neither on the right hand nor the left, was there ever an inn. The same distance from the end of this weird district on the Calne and Chippenham route conducts to the “Black Horse” inn at Cherhill, full in view of the great white horse cut on the hillside in 1780, and standing, correctly enough, on the right-hand side of the way. Could this inn possibly have been the house referred to by Dickens? I have never seen it suggested.
Indeed, earnest people who would dearly, once for all, wish to settle this knotty point, are like to be embarrassed by the numerous inns, not one of them greatly resembling the house described by Dickens, that have claims to be considered the original, and stand, _all_ of them, upon the proper side of the road. Some commentators press the claim of the “Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms” at Manton, or Clatford, a mile out of Marlborough, and local opinion at the time of _The Pickwick Papers_ being written identified the house with the lonely inn of Shepherd’s Shore, midway between Beckhampton and Devizes, in the very midst of the wild downs--the downs of Marlborough--that are there at their wildest and loneliest. Whatever the correctitude or otherwise of what should be an expert view, certainly the inn of Shepherd’s Shore is a thing of the past, as in the story, where it is described as having been pulled down. There were, indeed, at different periods two inns so called, and now both are gone. “Old Shepherd’s Shore” stood, as also did the new, beside the Wansdyke, but at a considerable distance in a north-westerly direction, on the _old_ road to Devizes, now a mere track. Of “New Shepherd’s Shore” only a fragment remains, and although that fragment is inhabited, it is not any longer an inn.
The scene is entirely in accord with the description of the Downs in the Bagman’s Story (only the spot is in the _midst_ of the wilderness, and not near the end of it), and he who even nowadays travels the still lonesome way will heartily echo the statement that there are many pleasanter places. The old coachmen, who had exceptional opportunities of observation, used to declare that the way between Beckhampton and Shepherd’s Shore was the coldest spot on all the road between London and Bath.
The eerie nature of the spot is emphasised by the circumstance of the remaining portion of the house standing beside that mysterious pre-historic earthwork, the great ditch and embankment of the Wansdyke, that goes marching grimly across the stark hillsides. The Wansdyke has always impressed the beholder, and accordingly we find it marked on old maps as “Deuill’s Ditch.”
The name of “Shepherd’s Shore” has been, and still is, a sore puzzle to all who have cause to write of it. Often written “Shord,” and pronounced by the country folk “Shard,” just as old seventeenth-century Aubrey prints it, antiquaries believe the name to derive from “shard,” a fragment: here specifically a break in the Wansdyke, made in order to let the road (or the sheep-track) through; “shard” itself being the Middle-English version of the Anglo-Saxon “sceard,” a division, a boundary, or a breach.
The name may, however, as I conceive it, be equally well a corrupt version of “Shepherd’s Shaw.” “Shaw” = the old Anglo-Saxon for a coppice, a clump of trees, or a bush. We see, even to-day (as of course merely a coincidence) a clump of trees on the mystic tumulus beside the remains of the house: trees noticeable enough on these otherwise naked downs, now, as from time immemorial, a grazing-ground for sheep. In this view Shepherd’s Shore would be equivalent to “Shepherd’s Shaw,” and that to “Shepherd’s Wood,” or “Shepherd’s Bush.” A shepherd’s bush was commonly a thorn-tree on a sheep-down, used as a shelter, or as a post of observation, by shepherds watching their flocks. Such bushes, by constant use, assumed distinctive and unmistakable forms,[15] and in old times were familiarly known by that name.
But, to resume matters more purely Dickensian: it is the “Waggon and Horses” inn at Beckhampton that most nearly realises the description of the house in _The Pickwick Papers_, although even here you most emphatically go up into the house (as the illustration shows) instead of taking “a couple of steep steps leading down.” It is “on the right-hand side of the way,” and being at a kind of little cultivated oasis at the hamlet of Beckhampton, where the roads fork on the alternative routes to Bath and Bristol, it may be considered as “about half a quarter of a mile” from the recommencement (not the end) of the Downs.
The “Waggon and Horses” is just the house a needy bagman such as Tom Smart would have selected. It was in coaching days a homely yet comfortable inn, that received those travellers who did not relish either the state or the expense of the great “Beckhampton Inn” opposite, where post-horses were kept, and where the very _élite_ of the roads resorted.
“The humble shall be exalted and the proud shall be cast down,” and it so happened that when the Great Western Railway was opened to Bath and Bristol on June 30th, 1841, the great inn fell upon ruination, while its humbler neighbour has survived--and does very well, thank you. It should be added that in the view presented here you are looking eastward, back in the direction of Marlborough. The great dark hill beside the road in the middle distance is the vast pre-historic tumulus, the largest known in Europe, famous as Silbury Hill.
The great house that was once “Beckhampton Inn” is now, and long has been, Mr. Samuel Darling’s training-stables for racehorses. There is probably no better-kept lawn in England than that triangular plot of grass in front of the house, where--as you see in the picture--the roads fork.
The “Angel” at Bury St. Edmunds, the scene of many stirring incidents in Chapters XV. and XVI., is an enormous house of very severe and unornamental architecture, that looks as though it were an exercise in rectangles and a Puritan protest in white Suffolk, dough-like brick, against the mediæval pomps and vanities of the beautiful carved stone Abbey Gatehouse, upon which it looks, gauntly, across the great open, plain-like, empty thoroughfare of Angel Hill. This, the chief coaching-and posting-house of Bury, was built in 1779 upon the site of a fifteenth-century “Angel,” and the present structure still stands upon groined crypts and cellars.
None may be so bold as to name for certain that tavern off Cheapside in