Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  Twice over in the twentieth century the Wiltshire farmers have been driven by the risk of wartime starvation to adopt the same policy. We are now accustomed to seeing ploughland upon the downs, as well as cattle grazing upon land hitherto dedicated to sheep alone. Outwardly it takes some of the beauty from the downs, although I shall never forget the unexpected emotion of driving for the first time through nine or ten consecutive miles of golden harvest fields on the highest part of Salisbury Plain. This was in 1917, when the sudden conversion of all those acres of virgin down into arable was one of the things which saved us from starvation during the final years of the first German war. The same thing happened between 1939 and 1945.

  But what interested Defoe when he rode over the Plain in 1722 was the effect of this “new method of husbandry” upon the rural industries of the surrounding country. Rather fewer sheep were being produced, although he was amazed to hear that a hundred thousand sheep had lately been sold at Weyhill Fair. Defoe cautiously comments upon this piece of information, “ This might, I believe, be too many, yet ’tis sufficient to note, that there are prodigious quantities of sheep sold here.”

  Anyhow the numbers and fortunes of the clothiers were increasing.

  “They told me at Bradford that it was no extraordinary thing to have clothiers in that country worth, from ten thousand to forty thousand pounds a man, and many of the great families, who now pass for gentry, have been originally raised from and built up by this truly noble manufacture.”

  Defoe always liked to observe the fluidity of the social classes, and indeed he had his finger here on one of the chief English sources of strength.

  Another point which he noticed was that although the arable had taken so much of the land formerly given up to sheep, and Warminster was “now, without exception, the greatest market for wheat in England”, yet the clothiers kept up their supplies by importing wool from Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, London and Ireland; and the picture which he gives of the county at the opening of the eighteenth century is a picture of great and varied prosperity. He proudly notes that Wiltshire helped to supply London

  “with cheese, bacon and malt, three very considerable articles, beside that vast manufacture of fine Spanish cloths.… And if I may, without being partial, say that it is thereby rendered one of the most important counties in England, that is to say, important to the public wealth of the kingdom. The bare product is in itself prodigious great; the downs are an inexhausted storehouse of wooll and of corn; and the valley or low part of it is the like for cheese and bacon.”

  Between Bradford and Warminster, he says,

  “the finest medley of Spanish cloths, not in England only, but in the whole world are made.… These towns are interspersed with a very great number of villages, I had almost said, innumerable villages, hamlets, and scattered houses, in which, generally speaking, the spinning work of this manufacture is performed by the poor people; the master clothiers, who generally live in the greater towns, sending out the wooll weekly to their houses by their servants and horses, and, at the same time, bringing back the yarn that they have spun and finished, which then is fitted for the loom.”

  From this heartening account of the easy and prosperous co-operation between town and country, it is depressing to read the report on Country Planning; a Study of Rural Problems, published in 1945 by the Agricultural Economics Research Committee of Oxford. They conclude that “ the village of a few hundred people cannot survive as a healthy organism”. They have thrown up the sponge; but Defoe shows how, in the ten miles or so between Bradford and Warminster, the Wiltshire countrymen of over two hundred years ago faced the same problems and took them in their stride.

  A hundred years later we have the report of another itinerant through Wiltshire; William Cobbett, who made it, started with much the same intention as Defoe. He meant to study the economic condition of the people; but we might apply to his Rural Rides, the criticism of Aubrey on another writer, “ he made a Lesbian’s Rule … that is, he framed the monument of his own hypothesis which is much differing from the thing itself”. Cobbett’s “hypothesis” was the exposure and refutation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Malthus’ Essay on Population. Neither of these “Feelosofers” has any link with this county except in so far as they share in the Industrial Revolution which, between Defoe’s day and Cobbett’s, had altered the character of English industry and had broken down the happy balance between town and country. By nature Cobbett was a country-lover, and he had a real gift for describing rural beauty, as is seen in his description of the Avon valley:

  “On the 28th August, 1826, I came to the edge of this valley of Avon, which was my land of promise; or at least of great expectation.… The shepherd shewed me the way towards Milton, and at the end of about a mile, from the top of a very high part of the down, with a steep slope towards the valley, I first saw this Valley of Avon, and a most beautiful sight it was.… Villages, hamlets, large farms, towers, steeples, fields, meadows, orchards, and very fine timber trees, scattered all over the valley. The shape of the thing is this: on each side downs, very lofty and steep in some places, and sloping miles back in other places; but each outside of the valley are downs. From the edge of the downs begin capital arable fields, generally of very great dimensions, and, in some places, running a mile or two back into little cross valleys, formed by hills of downs. After the cornfields come meadows on each side, down to the Brook or river. The farm houses, mansions, villages and hamlets are generally situated in the part of the arable land which comes nearest the meadows.… I delight in this sort of country.”

  Then comes the Lesbian’s Rule. Cobbett can’t keep off

  “the folly, the stupidity, the inanity, the presumption, the insolence, and barbarity of those numerous wretches who now have the audacity to propose to transport the people of England upon the principle of the monster Malthus, who has furnished the unfeeling oligarchs and their toad-eaters with the pretence that man has a natural propensity to breed faster than food can be raised for the increase. … What ignorance, impudence, and insolence must these base wretches have … the baseness, the foul, stinking, the carrion baseness of the fellows that call themselves ‘ country gentlemen,’ that is, that the wretches, while railing against the poor and the poor rates, while affecting to believe that the poor are wicked and lazy, while complaining that the poor, the working people, are too numerous and that the country villages are too populous, the Carrion baseness of these wretches is that … they never even whispered a word against pensioners, placemen, soldiers, parsons, fundholders, tax-gatherers, or tax-eaters.…

  Then he changes his attitude towards the prosperous houses of the Avon valley and says

  “all these mansions, all these parsonages, aye and their goods and furniture, together with the clocks, the brass kettles, the brewing vessels, the good bedding and good clothes and good furniture, and the stock in pigs or in money of the inferior classes, in this series of once populous and gay villages and hamlets … all these have been, by the accursed system of taxing … and by the well-known exactions of the state—all these have been by these accursed means conveyed away to the hands of the tax-eaters and monopolists.… There is in the men calling themselves English country gentlemen, something superlatively base. They are, I sincerely believe, the most cruel, the most unfeeling, the most brutally insolent, I know I can safely take my oath, of all the creatures that God ever suffered to disgrace the human shape.… These base and plundering and murderous sons of corruption … perjured, suborning, insolent and perfidious miscreants openly sell the countrymen’s rights and their own souls.”

  Cobbett was horrified to see men

  “digging potatoes for their Sunday dinner, or coming home with them, or going out to dig them.… It was one of the greatest villains upon earth (Walter Raleigh) who, they say, first brought this root to England. He was hanged at last. What a pity, since he was to be hanged, that the hanging did not take place before he became such a mischievous d
evil as he was in the latter two-thirds of his life.”

  Cobbett loathed the boroughs and small towns of England almost as much as he loathed Sir Walter Raleigh, the tax-collectors and the country gentlemen. This is what he says about the “vile, rotten borough of Calne”. He passed in it

  “an ill-looking, broken-winded place, called the Town Hall, I suppose, I poured out a double dose of execration upon it. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire’. For in about ten miles more, I came to another rotten hole called Wootton Bassett. This also is a mean vile place.”

  After all this violence it is a relief to read Cobbett asked a “very smart and pretty woman … who seemed to be about thirty years old”, the way to the “rotten borough of Ludgershall” about four miles away.

  She did not know.

  ‘ “Pray were you born in this house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how far have you ever been from this house?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been up the parish and over to Chute.’

  That is to say, the utmost extent of her voyages had been about two and a half miles! Let no one laugh at her, and, above all, let not me, who am convinced that the facilities which now exist of moving human bodies from place to place are among the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals, and, of course, of happiness.”

  So we leave William Cobbett with this final malediction of the breathless speed of travel in the rollicking days of the mail-coach.

  Chapter Two

  MORE OF OUR PREDECESSORS

  IN the century which followed Defoe’s tour through Wiltshire, the industrial aspect of the county, like others in the south, was completely changed. No longer could it be said “ that without being partial, this was one of the most important counties to the public wealth of England”. Our wool trade lost its pre-eminence. The woolpacks remained in their legendary graves under Salisbury Cathedral. Staple Ashton, near Trowbridge, had been so called from the stone pillar which stood in the centre of the village to mark the place of the Wool Market established by Royal Charter in 1349. Its name was changed. It became Steeple Ashton, a name now associated with its fine church tower. This was the result of the invention of machinery and the develop ment of the coal mines. The wool industry now moved to the coal country.

  The same century saw the birth of a completely new view of Wiltshire and what it means, and this view has lasted till today. Wiltshire is still a great agricultural county; but it is now noted mainly for its antiquities. Curiously enough, though these antiquities have always been there, for many centuries, few people seem to have noticed them. Stonehenge was hardly mentioned between Langtoft in the thirteenth century and Sir Philip Sidney’s “near Wilton sweet huge heaps of stones are found”, in Queen Elizabeth’s day. It was James I who seems to have been the first to realise that these “heaps of stones” were worth studying.

  Inigo Jones says that

  “In his Progress in the year 1620, King James, being at Wilton and discoursing of this Antiquitie, I was sent for by the Rt Hon. William then Earle of Pembroke, and received there his Majestie’s commands to produce out of mine own Practice in Architecture, and experience in Antiquities abroad, what possibly I could discover concerning of Stonehenge.”

  Inigo Jones was obviously not particularly attracted by this royal commission. His genius was then in full flood, and during the next twenty years he was busy at Whitehall, Greenwich, Chelsea, Wilton and other supreme artistic creations. To study Stonehenge would be the pastime for an idle hour, if he ever had one. Moreover it meant making bricks without straw, for he had practically no materials to use. Documents there were none; and the epoch of the spade had not arrived. Archæology was in the guessing stage.

  After that interview at Wilton, Inigo Jones lived for thirty-one years; and not until three years after his death did his pupil and son-in-law, John Webb, publish, in his master’s name, The most notable Antiquitie in Great Britain, vulgarly called Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain.

  By this time King James, Lord Pembroke and Jones himself were all dead, and the book was dedicated by Webb to Philip, Lord Pembroke, who had then succeeded.

  But the impetus given by King James did not die out. It set off a host of students upon that perennial and most exciting of learned pastimes, the tournament of the origin of prehistoric monuments. So this means that the Wiltshire writers to be studied in this chapter are first of all historians and not travellers describing what they saw around them. Most of the eighteenth-century archæologists might be described in Bishop Warburton’s words about Stukeley (who happens to be the most able of them all): “a strange compound of simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstition, and antiquarianism”. Nevertheless they had a great deal of charm.

  In his preface to Inigo Jones’ report on Stonehenge, Webb says that all he had to work on were “some few indigested notes”, jotted down by his master, and from these he made Jones’ seventy-two pages into two hundred and twenty-eight. The whole thing reads like the half-remembered fragments of many quite interesting talks; but there is one aphorism which probably does show what Inigo Jones really thought about the King’s proposal: “Let every man judge as it pleases him”.

  He plainly knew too much history to attribute the building of Stonehenge to “the Druids” and to leave it at that; for the loyal Webb would not have set this down as Jones’ opinion if he did not know a good deal about his master’s views.

  “Certainly Stonehenge could not be builded by the Druids. I find no mention that they were at any time studious in Architecture, or skilful in anything else conducing thereto. Academies of Designe were unknown unto them. Publique lectures in the Mathematiques were not read among them. Nothing of their painting, not one word of their sculpture is to be found, or scarce of any science (philosophy and astronomy excepted) proper to inform the judgment of Architecture.”

  Further, Inigo Jones seems to have remarked that, so far as he has studied them, Druidical temples were usually groups of trees; and his final summing up of the learning of the Druids was that it “consisted more in contemplation than in practice”.

  There is one delightful passage in which we really seem to receive Jones’ personal reaction to the beauty of the stones themselves:

  “The stones at Aibury having, through long time, got the same crustation upon them, are in like manner, coloured, grained, bedded, weighty, and of a like difficulty in working as those at Stonehenge. Some of which, being of a whiteish colour are inter-mixt and veined here and there with red: some of a lightish blew, glister as of minerals amongst them, some, for the most part white, perplext as it were with ruddy colouring: some, dark grey and russet, differing in kind as those at Aibury do. Some of them again, of a greyish colour, are speckl’d and intermixt with dark green and white, together with yellow amongst it, resembling after a sort, that kind of marble which the Italians call Pozzevero.”

  Webb felt obliged to carry to its logical conclusion Jones’ idea that Stonehenge, if not Druidical, must have been built by the Romans. So he covered the building with imaginary classical “orders”. This, he felt sure, was what would have been approved by his beloved “ modern Vetruvius”.

  The appearance of these “ orders” let loose some lively controversy which lasted throughout the eighteenth century. It is not in itself particularly interesting but it let the contemporary antiquarians show their paces.

  The most able of the archæologists who now came upon the scene was Dr William Stukeley, rather unkindly polished off by Mr E. V. Lucas as “ an unconventional clergyman, neither enthusiastic nor eminent”. But though his theories were generally wrong his facts were nearly always right, and this delightful and studious man was in his day an unequalled observer. In spite of Mr Lucas, he showed some unexpected enthusiasms, one being for eclipses; for in 1784 he postponed for an hour the service in his London church, to give the congregation the chance of seeing the eclipse of the sun. Then his enthusiasm about his collection of Greek coins was at the root
of one of his rather wild theories:

  “The uniformity of the faces drawn in each and all of the sculptures of Antiquity, gives much reason to think they are copies from one true original. I shall give a full account of the heathen gods and demigods who mean really the persons of Moses and Josua, the two generals of Bacchus or Jehovah.”

  In a book of drawings still belonging to a member of his family, Stukeley identifies Apollo with Phut, a son of Ham whose name appears in the Book of Genesis; and it was Stukeley who first observed that the measurements of Stonehenge were in cubits, as were those of the tabernacle of Moses and of Solomon’s temple. He loved these cross-references between the Biblical, classical, and ancient British civilisations, and he says that he has “ pursued this amusing topick through very many of the ancient patriarchs before and after Phut”.

  He must have been a delightful travelling companion and describes a lady staying in the house with him who was

  “somewhat of an airy temper, and accompanied me in several of my Rambles to view Antiquitys, Roman Camps, and the like. We traveld together like Errant Vertuosos, and when we came to an old ruined Castle we climbed together, mutually helping each other … and when I had occasion to draw a view of them out, she held my inkhorn or paper, and was very serviceable and assistant, and all without any reserve or immodesty; nor could any aged Philosophers have conversed together with more innocent familiarity or less guilt, even in thought or intention. Nor could travailing Curiosity or Antiquarian Researches be rendered so agreeable as with a fair and witty Companion and Fellow-laborer.”