Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  Most of the tombs, shrines and chantries which Leland saw in Salisbury Cathedral were moved by Wyatt at the end of the eighteenth century; but one particularly regrets a tablet which he described as being then in “ the chapel of St Mary”:

  “Pray for the soul of Richard Poure, formerly Bishop of Sarum, who caused this Church to be commenced, in a certain ground where it now stands anciently called ‘MIRYFIELD,’ in honour of the B. V. Mary, 29 April, being the Feast of S. Vitalis, the Martyr, A.D. 1219, in the reign of King Richard I. And this Church was 40 years in building, during the reigns of 3 kings, viz, Richard I, John, and Henry IV, and it was finished 25 March A.D. 1260. The said Bishop founded a Mass of the B. V. Mary, to be solemnised daily within this Chapel, and appropriated for the maintenance of the said Mass the Rectory of Laverstoke. He was afterwards translated to the Bishoprick of Durham; and founded a Monastery at Terraunt in County Dorset, where he was born. And there his heart is interred, but his body at Durham. And he died 15 April MCCXXXVII. 21 H. III.”

  Today there is in Salisbury Cathedral no memorial to its founder. None is needed. The building itself is there to speak of him to every traveller for many miles around, while, as Leland says, “his heart is interred” in the beloved Dorset village where he was born.

  Two hundred and ninety years before the Reform Act of 1832 deprived Old Sarum of its two members of Parliament, Leland notes already that “Ther hath bene houses in tyme of Mind inhabited in the est suburbe of Old-Sarisbyrie; but now ther is not one house neither within Old-Sarisbyrie nor without it, inhabited.”

  Leland often quotes the contemporary opinion on points of historical interest, but he plainly thought that history was nothing but a series of guesses in which one man’s opinion was as good as another’s, and he was ready to back his own against any man’s.

  For instance: “Ther be 4 Campes that servid menne of warre about Stourton: one towarde the north wests part within the park, double dichid. I conjecte that here stode a maner place or castelle. My lord Stourton sayith nay.”

  In the Chalke Valley, Leland writes of the village of Ebbesbourne, but he does not know the name of Ebble for the stream flowing through it. Both he and Aubrey speak of Chalkbourne, and this fits in with the present name of Chalke Valley, for all the other valleys going towards Salisbury take their names from their streams.

  The building of Harnham Bridge by Bishop Bingham was still a sore point between Wilton and Salisbury. Leland says of this that

  “Licens was get of the king by a Bishop of Saresbyri to turn the Kingges Highway to New Saresbyri, and to make a mayn bridge of right passage over Avon at Harnham. The chaunging or this way was the totale cause of the ruine of Old-Saresbyri and Wiltoun. For afore this, Wiltoun had a 12 paroch chirches or more, and was the hedde toun of Wileshir.”

  Like most early historians, Leland was very casual in his manner of collecting information. He goes by hearsay without question. The nineteenth-century historians trained us to put our faith entirely in documentary evidence, yet in Leland’s time he had nothing more reliable than verbal tradition. Perhaps we have gone too far to the other extreme, for the notebook habit plays havoc with memory, while, in an illiterate age, there was a pride in possessing memories handed on from father to son. The newest archæologists do not pin their faith to any one method, knowing that history may “fulfil itself in many ways”. They turn from the report of the aeronaut to the results of the wielder of the shovel, and then they study the old documents, while they are not averse to listening to what the astronomer has to say. Thus it is that many reports made by early observers, and for two or three hundred years dismissed as mere “credulities”, are now being rediscovered and verified.

  But there are passages in Leland in which he describes what he himself saw happening; and we can still watch through his eyes the process of desecration when Malmesbury Abbey was being turned into a cloth factory. He is speaking of the Chapel of Ease, which was formerly a part of the abbey buildings.

  “Wevers hath now lomes in this little Chirch, but it stondeth and is a very old pece of work.… One Stumpe, an exceeding riche clothiar …” [evidently the capitalist with the chief hand in the secularisation of the Abbey buildings]. “This Stumpe’s sunne hath married Sir Edward Baynton’s daughter.… At this present tyme every corner of the vaste offices that belonged to the Abbay be fulle of lumbes to weve clooth yn, and this Stumpe entendith to make a stret or 2 for clothiers in the bak vacant ground of the Abbay that is withyn the toune walles.”

  Leland is a matter-of-fact and very honest observer, giving not only reports of what he saw, but also unconsciously giving a picture of the mind of an ecclesiastical student at the opening of the sixteenth century.

  A hundred years later came John Aubrey, as different from Leland as chalk is from cheese, as we say in Wiltshire, meaning as far apart as the north is from the south of Salisbury Plain. There is nothing of the government official about John Aubrey. He was a natural archæologist, and he wrote for pleasure, not from duty.

  For several generations Aubrey was rather discredited as a historian. He was supposed to be nothing but an incorrect and credulous gossip, and no earnest student took any notice of what he said. The truth is that he was so amusing that earnest students could not think what he was up to. But of late years he has come into his own, and many of the greatest archæological discoveries are really rediscoveries of Aubrey.

  Anthony Wood, who lived at the same time, bitterly disliked his contemporary, and did his best to discredit him, for reasons more frivolous than historical. The two met first in 1667, and several years later Wood describes this occasion rather spitefully.

  “Mr. Aubrey was in a sparkish garb and came to town with his man and two horses, spent high, and flung out A. W. at all reckonings. But his estate of £700 per an being afterwards sold, and he reserving nothing of it to himself, liv’d afterwards in a very sorry condition, and at length made shift to run out by hanging Edm Wyld Esq. and others.… He was a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed. And being exceedingly credulous would stuff his many letters sent to A. W. with folliries and misinformations, which sometimes would guide him into paths of errour.”

  Wood was evidently disappointed in Aubrey, whom he had looked on as a rich young man likely to give him the entrée into just the society he admired, the rich and cultivated noblemen who founded the Royal Society. Unluckily, quite early in life, what between paying off his father’s debts and being involved in various losses, Aubrey lost quite a lot of money, and so he sold his Wiltshire properties at Easton Priors and at Broadchalk, and ceased to be the landed proprietor whom Wood would have been proud to know. Thereafter Aubrey never was a rich man, but though, as he said, his affairs had “run kim-kam”, Wood seems to have been the only friend to turn against him. A few extracts from Aubrey’s autobiography will show what manner of man was this early enthusiast for the county of Wilts.

  In an amusing jumble of the first and third persons, Aubrey begins by telling us that

  “when a boy, bred at Eston, (in erermiticall solitude) – was very curious. His greatest delight was to be with the artificers that came there, e.g. joyners, carpenters, cowpers, masons, and understood their trades.… I was always enquiring of my grandfather of the old time, the rude loft, the ceremony of the priory etc.… my wit was always working.”

  He remembers that

  “the fashion then was to save the ferrules of their bookes with a fals cover of old manuscript, which I was too young to understand; but I was pleased with the elegancy of the writing and the coloured initiall letters.… In my grandfather’s dayes the manuscripts flew about like butterflies. All the musick bookes, account bookes, copie bookes, etc. were covered with old manuscripts, as we cover them now with blew paper or marbled paper; and the glovers of Malmesbury made great havock of them, and gloves were wrapped up no doubt in many good pieces of Antiquitie.… I remember the rector here … had several manuscripts of t
he Abbey. He was a proper man and a good fellow; and, when he brewed a barrell of the speciall ale, his use was to stop the bung-hole, under the clay, with a sheet of manuscript; he sayd nothing did it so well; which methought did grieve me then to see.”

  This boy was indeed father to the man who thus begins his Natural History of Wiltshire:

  “I was from my childhood affected with a view of things rare, which is the beginning of philosophy; and though I have not had leisure to make any considerable proficiency in it, yet I was carried on with a strong impulse to undertake this taske: I knew not why, except for my own private pleasure. Credit there was none; for it gets the disrespect of a man’s neighbours.… But I could not rest quiet till I had obeyed this secret call.… I am the first that ever made an essay of this kind for Wilts, and for ought I know, in the nation, having begun it in 1656.”

  Aubrey’s contributions to the study of archæology and his knowledge of the old Wilts manuscripts will be often referred to in this book. But his first love of the county came from nothing so scholarly as this. As a boy he used to talk, as we know, with those “artificers, joyners, carpenters, cowpers and masons”, and to the end he was quickly sensitive to the spirit of country people. He rode across the Plain as though he were in Navarre, Verona, the Forest of Arden or on the sea coast of Bohemia. He observes that

  “generally in the rich vales, they sing clearer than on the hills, where they labour hard and breathe a sharp ayre. This difference is manifest between the Vales of North Wilts and the South.… In North Wilts the milkmayds sing as shrill and cleare as any swallow sitting on a berne. According to the severall sorts of earth in England (and so all the world over) the Indigense are respectively witty or dull, good or bad.… To write a true account of the severall humours of our own countrey would be too sarcasticall and offensive: this should be a secret whisper in the eare of a friend only, and I should superscribe here,

  Pinge duos angues—locus est sacer; extra

  Mei ite. PERSUIS SATYR.

  Well then, let these Memoires lye concealed as a sacred Arcanum.

  “In North Wiltshire, and like the Vale of Gloucestershire (a dirty clayey country) the Indigenas or Aborigines speake drawling and are phlegmatique, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit; hereabout is but little tillage or hard labour, they only milk the cowes and make cheese; they feed chiefly on milke meates, which cooles their braines too much, and hurts their inventions. These circumstances make them melancholy, contemplative, and malicious; by consequence whereof come more law suites out of North Wilts, at least double to the Southern parts. And by the same reason they are generally more apt to be fanatiques: their persons are generally plump and feggy: gallipot eies, and some black; but they are generally handsome enough. It is a woodsere country, abounding much with sowre and austere plants, as sorrel, etc. which makes their humours sowre, and fixes their spirits. In Malmesbury Hundred, etc. (ye wett clayy parts) there have ever been reputed witches.

  “On the downes, sc. the south part, where ’tis all upon tillage, and where the shepherds labour hard, their flesh is hard, their bodies strong: being weary after hard labour, they have not leisure to read and contemplate of religion, but goe to bed to their rest, to rise betime the next morning to their labour.

  “Captain Stokes, in his ‘ Wiltshire Rant’, printed about 1650, recites ye strangest extravagancies of religion that were ever heard of since the time of the Gnosticks. The rich wett soile makes them hypo-chondricall.… Mem, That North Wiltshire is very worme-woodish and more litigious than South Wilts.

  “The downes or Salisbury Plaines … are the most spacious plaines in Europe, and the greatest remaines that I can heare of of the smooth primitive world when it lay all under water.… The turf is of a shorte sweet grasse, good for the sheep, and delightfull to the eye, for its smoothnesse like a bowling green.… About Wilton and Chalke, the downes are intermixt with boscages, nothing can be more pleasant, and in the Summer time doe excell Arcadia in verdant and riche turfe and moderate aire.… The innocent lives here of the shepherds do give us a resemblance of the Golden Age.… In this tract is ye Earle of Pembroke’s noble seate at Wilton; but the Arcadia and the Daphne is about Vernditch and Wilton; and those fine romancy plaines and boscages did no doubt conduce to the hightening of Sir Philip Sydney’s phansie.”

  In this delightfully poetic passage I must remark on Aubrey’s word romancy. This is the first use in English literature of an adjective derived from romance. In 1654 John Evelyn wrote that “the goodly plain, one of the most delightful prospects in nature, reminded me of the pleasant lives of shepherds we read of in “Romances”; so just at that time the oldest English form of fiction was asking for a word to define the atmosphere which creates it and which it creates. From romancy the word shifted to romantic, but the idea was first expressed by the most romantic of our Wiltshire historians. Another instance of the romantic way in which he saw Stonehenge is when he writes “severall of the high stones of Stonehenge are honeycombed so deep that the starres do make their nests in the holes”.

  Aubrey goes on to say that

  “the festivalls at sheep-shearing seeme to bee derived from the Parilia. In our western parts … the sheep-masters give no wages to their shepherds, but they have the keeping of so many sheep, pro rata; soe that the shepherd’s lambs doe never miscarry.… Their habit, I believe … is that of the Roman or Arcadian shepherds; … sc. a long white cloake with a very deep cape, which comes halfway down their backs, made of the locks of the sheep. There was a sheep-crooke …, a sling, a scrip, their tar-box, a pipe or flute, and their dog. But since 1671, they are grown so luxurious as to neglect their ancient warme and useful fashion, and goe à la mode.… Before the civill warres I remember many of them made straw hatts, which I thinke is now left off, and our shepherdesses of late years (1680) doe begin to worke point, whereas before they did only knitt coarse stockings.”

  “There were no rates for the poor in my Grandfather’s days; but for Kingstone St Michael (no small parish) the Church-Ale at Whitsuntide did the business.… Such joy and merriment was every holy day; which days were kept with great solemnity and reverence. These were the days when England was famous for Grey Goose Quills.… This country was full of religious houses. Old Jaques (who lived where Charles Hadnam did) could see from his house the nuns of the Priory of St Mary’s come forth into the Nymph-Hay, with their roques and wheels to spin, and with their sewing work. He would say that he hath told three score and ten; tho’ of nuns there were not so many; but in all with lay sisters, as widows, Old Maids and young girls, there might be such a number. This was a fine way of bringing up young women, who are led more by example than precept, and a good retirement for widows and grave single women to a civill, virtuous and holy life.…”

  Aubrey had a very musical ear and he has preserved for future generations the sound of all that pastoral gaiety. Writing of Bishops Cannings, he says that in his day that parish “ would have challenged all England for musique, football and ringing”, while his own village of Broadchalke possesses “one of the tuneablest rings in Wiltshire, which hangs advantageously; the river running near the churchyard which meliorates the sound”. “Tuneablest rings” and “meliorates”—how those words exactly convey the sound of a country peal of bells across the water.

  On April 3rd, 1722, twenty-five years after the romantic and light-hearted John Aubrey, the precise and industrious Daniel Defoe set out from the city of London on his “Tour in Circuits”. He was only in this county for a few months, and he saw a very different Wiltshire from his predecessor. Defoe was no poet, but a very terre-à-terre traveller, sincerely interested in the well-being of dwellers in the villages he passed through. What he saw he described in unmatchable prose. He laughed at the idea that the city of Salisbury could ever have occupied the site of Old Sarum. “As I see no authority for it other than mere tradition, I believe my share of it, and take it ad referendum.”

  For those who do not enjoy the
“ shifting … roving … and magotie-headed Aubrey” this new observer gives a refreshingly prose, if not prosaic, account of the everyday life of the shepherds who had “become so luxurious” as to give up their old “ warme and useful fashion” in dress, and to “ goe à la mode”. Defoe’s prose is as pure in his account of his tour as it is in his other writings, and he is the first of the Wiltshire authors to give any picture of the industries of the county. This is what he specially looked for, and he saw those industries going through one of their many transitions. In every age there are contemporary criticisms of all changes, and in each generation there are those who say “the old is better”. Defoe was not one of these. He was pleased with nearly everything he saw, but then he was a newcomer to the county, with no sentimental memories of the past. He looked at Wiltshire from a business point of view and he remarked that most of the changes he saw in process were improvements.

  He was greatly impressed by the sheep on the downs.

  “The great number of these flocks is a sight truly worth observation … ’tis ordinary for these flocks to contain from three to five thousand in a flock, and several private farmers hereabouts have two or three such flocks.”

  He wrote much about the “ new method in husbandry” saying that

  “our ancestors … would perhaps have laughed at anyone that would have gone about to plow up the wild downs and hills, where the sheep were wont to go. But experience has made the present age wiser and more skilful in husbandry, for by only folding the sheep upon the plowed land, those lands which otherwise are barren, and where the plow goes within three or four inches of the solid rock of chalk, are made fruitful and bear very good wheat, as well as rye and barley.”