Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Edith Olivier

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  EPILOGUE

  Edith Olivier

  Wiltshire

  Edith Olivier (1872–1948) was born in the Rectory at Wilton, Wiltshire, in the late 1870s. Her father was Rector there and later Canon of Salisbury. She came from an old Huguenot family which had been living in England for several generations, and was one of a family of ten children. She was educated at home until she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her first novel, The Love Child, was published in 1927 and there followed four works of fiction: As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s (1928), The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf’s Blood (1930) and The Seraphim Room (1932). Her works of non-fiction were The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934), Mary Magdalen (1934), Country Moods and Tenses (1941), Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (1945), Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1945), her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (1938) and, posthumously published, Wiltshire (1951).

  IGLEA

  SOMEWHERE in Wiltshire (and historians have never agreed where) there was, in the year 878, a field called Iglea—the island pasture. In that year, at the season of Whitsuntide, when, as the Bible tells us, “Kings go forth to battle”, there were two nights and a day during which the future of all England hung upon what happened on that little lost piece of land, a tiny island somewhere in the Wylye River. For those few hours the name comes to life out of the unknown; and then Iglea floats back to Nowhere, beyond the distinguishing lines of latitude and longitude. In its brief history-life this island pasture was the arena upon which there assembled for the first time the English militia called together by its creator, King Alfred.

  A great Danish army had wintered at Chippenham, and now took advantage of the spring to march into the heart of Wessex. King Alfred, who had spent the winter in Athelney burning cakes and eating his heart out over the state of his country, now sent a secret summons to the newly formed home guard, calling on them to meet him at Egbert’s Stone, near where the Deverill joins the Wylye. It had been a hard winter for the Wessex people, their king beaten and probably dead, while the enemy raided the country from his strongholds at Chippenham and Devizes, driving away the few remaining cattle, and taking the last corn out of the barns. Much of Wiltshire was then a land of primeval forest and swamp; but now, through the thickly wooded valleys to the south and west of the plain, the militiamen made their way to the rendezvous, mostly moving in parties of twos and threes.

  Although rumour had reported for many months that the King was dead, yet Alfred’s name was still a magnet to draw men from their homes, and when the fighting men reached Egbert’s Stone, there they found him waiting.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says:

  “In the seventh week after Easter, he rode to Ecgbryht’s Stone to the east of Selwood. And there came to meet him all Somersetshire and Wiltshire and Hamptonshire, the part of it that was behind the sea, and they were glad of him. And he went forth within one night to Iglea, and within one night after, to Ethandune, and there fought against all the horde and put them to flight, and rode after them as far as the encampment and sat there fourteen nights. Then the horde gave him hostages, and many oaths they would go out of his Kingdom and they promised him that their King would receive baptism. And they so did.”

  Two nights and a day were enough to change a rabble of Saxon stragglers into an army ready to follow the first great English military leader to the supreme victory of his reign. There must have been something magic in that en-isled field which has never been important enough to find its way on to a map.

  Iglea—those two little syllables have the succinct richness of the early Saxon tongue. In primitive languages words long retain the character of hieroglyphics. One noun may represent, in pictorial form, several objects of somewhat similar shape. Dr R. C. Alexander once wrote that

  “in all Germanic languages the eye, an egg, and an island are synonymous. The syllable appears as, Aeg, Aegh, Eag, Eage, or Ege. Each meaning can merge metaphorically into the next. Our own word island is in fact eye land and ought to be spelt so.”

  So the first syllable of Iglea conveyed to the ear of men in the ninth century a concentration of meanings. In this case it did mean primarily an island, but it also meant an egg, that oval which contains the germ of a new birth. Further, it meant the eye, a still more significant oval, with, floating in its centre, the iris, by which light passes into the body. Indeed, the eye can be said to represent the centre of human personality. It might be the Ego itself. In 878 the sound Ig still retained its visual, geographical and symbolic meanings. The little island from which those Wessex men set out to meet the Danes spoke to them of the eye through which they looked upon the world, or it reminded them of the beginning of a new life.

  But Iglea has another syllable. Lea is the Saxon meadow or open field. This was the core of the English farm, as it has since been the core of English country life. Such an idea was alien to the Romans when they left England four or five hundred years before: it had grown up in the intervening centuries.

  To the Roman colonists, their Empire appeared as a great solar system with Rome as its source of life and light. Each colony was a planet revolving round its sun, and the highly engineered imperial roads were the vehicles of gravitation making it all into one entity. Similarly, within each colony the different localities were connected by their own Roman roads with the native metropolis. Thus everything hung upon the far-off, invisible, ever-present idea of Rome.

  The social system of the Saxons was quite another thing. For them, each farm or homestead was a centre. To every man his own lea.

  And today, from an aeroplane, the whole county of Wilts must still appear as an Iglea—an oval island pasture, measuring about fifty-five miles by thirty-seven. This “ landscape of the uplands” has been described as “an ocean of rolling grass”; and, with its distinct and yet unaccented separateness, it looks like the green eye of England.

  The earth has other areas which possess a like spirit of isolation. It is sometimes created by an unmistakable boundary like the hills which “ stand about Jerusalem”; or it may be a defence erected by men, as were the walls of Jericho.

  A famous boundary is the great wall of China which has stood for over two thousand years. The writers of The Desert of Gobi speak of its “ Beauty and Dignity, redeeming the clumsiness and grotesqueness of its structure”; but those qualities in the ancient building would never have been enough to keep apart the teeming millions on the east and the unknown tribes to the west. The pacific Confucian civilisation was its own defence. The great wall was no barrier.

  Hadrian’s Wall on the English and Scottish borders did not keep Douglas and Percy from poaching on each other’s preserves: they were too much alike for that. Nor did
the Siegfried and Maginot lines save Europe from war in 1939. Concrete is the weakest of protections, unless there is behind it a spiritual guard. The true Jerusalem “is built as a city that is at unity in itself”.

  Wiltshire does possess such a spiritual unity; though Salisbury Plain, its unique physical feature, has never been a bond of union. Quite the reverse. Till the days of motors the Plain was an almost impassable division between North and South Wilts. Yet there has ever been an individual spirit knitting the county together as securely as if it were surrounded by a great wall of China.

  This spirit contains many elements. Some are geographical arising out of sheer propinquity; some racial; some linguistic (a very strong link that); some—and perhaps the strongest of all—grow out of a deep subconscious awareness of shared history and prehistory. Much of this history is family history. Local names have persisted in the same villages for many generations, appearing again and again on the memorials in the churches and churchyards. In 1909 the Roxburgh Club printed for the first time a Rent Roll of the Wilton estate which had been made in 1544. It was then found that the families of many tenants taken over at that time from the Abbey were still living in the same villages.

  And this happened all over the county. When I was a child the Parliamentary Register for Winterslow contained only two surnames—the names of families which had once owned the whole village. In the nineteenth century the land had become small holdings owned by all the villagers.

  The Esturmy family of Wulf Hall near Marlborough were for three hundred and fifty years, beginning with the time of Henry II, Hereditary Chief Wardens of Savernake Forest. Then the senior branch of the family ended with three daughters, one of whom married an ancestor of the Ailesbury family, while another became the great-great-grandmother of Jane Seymour, Queen of England, and the ancestress of the Dukes of Somerset. The rest of the Esturmys became humble people living in the district, till in 1940 a company of the Home Guard was formed in the village of Oare. Then a farm labourer named Sturmey naturally rallied to keep watch and ward over the land where his forbears had (unknown to himself) for so many years been the wardens. So there is a blood bond holding Wiltshire men together, although, unlike the Scottish clans, these old families possess neither tartans for their rank and file nor titles for their chieftains.

  The West Saxons came to Wiltshire in 552. They arrived as conquerors, but they had not long been in the county before their natural characteristics asserted themselves. They were at heart a farming people, and they made their first homes in the wide valleys about Wilton and Salisbury, seeing that this was just the country for their flocks and herds. Unlike their foes and neighbours the Danes, these Saxons were not primarily fighting men, although they had already shown that they belonged to the breed of the “méchant animal—quand on l’attaque il se defend”. This trait has not yet been outgrown.

  The newcomers settled down beside the aborigines, taking over the old names for natural objects such as rivers, hills and woods; but when they built a village they gave it a Saxon name. To a large extent the races coalesced and intermarried; though it is still common to meet a Wiltshire man who looks entirely Germanic, tall, fair-headed, blue-eyed and well-built. He moves and speaks slowly. On the other hand, there are men with just as much right to be called natives, dark little men moving and talking rapidly. These two races have shared the county for fourteen hundred years, and in that time they have between them created the county spirit.

  Chapter One

  SOME EARLY WRITERS ABOUT WILTSHIRE

  ANYONE who thinks of writing about Wiltshire must first of all know and love those who have gone before him. He will find this well worth while. Local historians are a race apart, and theirs is a very winning race. Although in real life arch geologists are combative fellows, each wedded to his own theories, and still more to his own ways of reaching those theories, yet when they take pen in hand to write their books, they one and all share a mellow grace. Some of the earliest Wiltshire books are little beyond unconnected notes jotted down on the spot, and yet this very shapelessness brings them close to their readers, who seem to be actually in the room with the author, sharing his colloquialisms, his personal tastes and his prejudices. These old writers have seen so definitely what there is to be seen, and they describe it with a complete lack of self-consciousness. And then there is always a beauty about old-fashioned language, if only because it is old-fashioned.

  Moreover, these men have created the Wiltshire we see today. They saw and described various aspects of the county, the different stages which it had reached, the different occupations and interests which absorbed the people as the years went by; and they have recorded all these things for us. From their fragments there has grown up the Wiltshire of today. It is like a great building rising out of the ground, tier above tier, and it is not finished yet.

  Then there are county historians of a later date. These were men who felt that as gentlemen, Wiltshiremen and scholars they owed a duty not only to the county but to the English language. They could never be slipshod. They are less natural than their predecessors and at first they seem less enchanting and more pompous; but now their ways of speech have also become old-fashioned and one reads them too with delight.

  About the middle of the last century, in Wiltshire as in other counties, men began to realise that local history was an exciting and a living thing which would, however, soon be dead if they, as responsible county leaders, did not take the trouble to keep it alive. So in the year 1853 a number of county magnates met together and founded the Wiltshire Archæological and Natural History Society, which, among its other activities, has continued to publish twice a year the Wiltshire Archæological Magazine—a storehouse of the old studies and an instigator of the new.

  At the Society’s first meeting Lord Lansdowne, its Patron, denied that archæologists were, as was sometimes thought, merely “ a sort of learned triflers over things of no interest or value,

  Nought but a world of old nick-nackets,

  Of rusty swords and fusty jackets.”

  On the contrary, he continued, “ this pursuit has assumed a position of honour and respect in popular estimation, and has been elevated to the rank of a science”.

  Later in the evening Canon Jackson declared that “ it is the business of a topographer to drag, as it were, the Pool of Lethe; to recover facts and events that have fallen into that melancholy receptacle of things forgotten.… Every parish in England has some history belonging to it; and almost every one contains some peculiar relic or fragment; some curious church or cross; some battlefield, old mound, or the like.”

  In these stately and grandiloquent phrases, the Wilts historians of the eighteen-fifties proclaimed their purpose in founding their Society; but first of all they admitted their debt to their predecessors. So too must we.

  The first man to travel in this county with the avowed aim of seeking for the “ old nick-nackets” hitherto sunk in the “Pool of Lethe” was John Leland, an early type of civil servant, for he actually had an official position under Henry VIII. Although by birth a Londoner, Leland was a parson holding two Wiltshire livings, Newton near Pewsey, to which he was presented by the Crown, and West Knoyle, given to him by Cicely Bodenham, the last abbess of Wilton. There is some irony about this last appointment; for the King’s purpose in recalling the scholarly Leland from the living he had previously held near Calais was to make use of his historical knowledge to catalogue the church documents and treasures which the King intended to loot from the ecclesiastical establishments of this country. This was the original purpose of Leland’s Itinerary, though future generations treated it simply as one of the first of the road books.

  Leland’s Commission under the Great Seal authorised him to “travel over England in search of Antiquities, with power to inspect the Libraries of Cathedrals, Abbeys and other Ecclesiastical Establishments”. Unfortunately Leland was unable to complete this work, and all he left was a collection of notes of varying fullness. Fu
ller says that “this Leland, after the death of his bountiful patron Henry VIII, fell distracted and so died; uncertain whether his brain was broken with weight of work or want of wages”. Probably the former, for Edward VI gave a liberal pension to his father’s old servant.

  Leland’s work was not meant to be an “itinerary” at all. If finished, it would rather have been among the first of those reports, on one aspect or another of public work, with which we are now so painfully familiar. Nowadays they emanate from offices which have echoed for many hours to the tapping of typewriters, consuming a vast quantity of paper, while the finished products are ceremoniously despatched by the Stationery Office to many other offices.

  Leland, on the other hand, did not work in an office, and in making his report he consulted no previous files. He simply rode about noting down whatever seemed to him to be relevant to his Commission. The first thing that struck him as important was, how to get about the country at all, and what the country looked like as he rode through it. That is why his book became, willy-nilly, an “ Itinerary”. He travelled at a time when, more than in any previous period of English history, the old order was about to change, and to change so rapidly that in a very few years very little of what he saw would be left in its place. The “ antiquities” which had been for so many centuries in the safe keeping of deans and canons, abbots and abbesses would before long be deposited in the King’s Treasury, unless their owners were quick enough to hide them out of sight, like the Wilton abbess’s ring, dug up, more than three centuries later, on the site of the abbey garden.

  Most of the monastic buildings which Leland saw have now disappeared, pulled down by their new owners, who replaced them with more convenient dwelling-houses in the modern “ Renaissance” style. Very little remains to show how the nuns lived except at Lacock Abbey, where the refectories, chapter house, the dormitories and the cloisters are almost unchanged.