He draws a wonderfully imaginative picture of Stonehenge—“ the judicious carelessness therein … the grand gusto like a great master in drawing, secure of the effect. Everything is proper, bold, astonishing”. And, coming down to earth, he remarks that
“the current of so many years has been more merciful to Stonehenge than the insolence of rapacious hands, by the unaccountable folly of mankind in breaking pieces off with great hammers. This detestable practice arose from the silly notion of the stone being factitious.”
Also “the unfortunate colony of rabbits translated thither” had,
he thought, weakened the foundations.
Stukeley’s fantastic theories make him amusing reading, but his
habit of close and careful observation gives him real value as an archæologist. In 1722 Stukeley first saw Avebury, using his power of observation to prove his still unproved theory that the temple was originally laid out for Serpent Worship. He considered that the Avebury circles were themselves the centre of a large conception in which the two avenues joined the serpent’s head (at the Sanctuary on Overton Hill) with the end of its tail near Windmill Hill. During the past two centuries all traces of avenue and Sanctuary have disappeared, and at his last visit to the Sanctuary in 1784, Stukeley had bitterly complained that “Farmer Green has destroyed the circules to clear the ground for plough” and so to “make a little dirty profit”.
Fifteen years ago Mr and Mrs Cunnington, the well-known Wiltshire archæologists, made up their minds to excavate the vanished Sanctuary; but, even with the help of observers from the air, no trace of the site could be found. Then Mrs Cunnington went back to Stukeley. She turned up the reference and found that, as she had surmised, he speaks of one single place from which it was then possible to see the serpent’s head from its tail. This is the crucial passage:
“In the low valley the Beckhampton avenue terminates near a fine group of barrows under Cherbury Hill … this point facing that group of barrows and looking up the hill, is a most solemn and awful place … and in this very point only you can see the Temple on Overton Hill, on the south side of Silbury Hill.”
The group of barrows is about three-quarters of a mile west of Beckhampton crossroads, and is near what is now known as Fox Covert. It is the one spot in Stukeley’s description which could be identified in 1930. Mr and Mrs Cunnington walked there. Only one point was visible in the area Stukeley described on Overton Hill. A small triangular patch of Mill Field, two and a half miles away, could be seen, and by counting the telegraph poles visible along the High Road, it became easy to define the possible area on which the Sanctuary must have stood.
Five weeks’ digging revealed all the holes of the two circles described by Aubrey and Stukeley, as well as an unsuspected circle of “ Post Holes”. The Cunningtons had indeed stood upon that “most solemn and awful place” from which Stukeley first saw the Temple in 1722. Not only that: they brought back into sight in the twentieth century the vision which Stukeley saw vanishing two hundred years earlier. Archæology here vanquishes time. Those telegraph posts which Ruskin considered as one of the modern enemies of the old days had now become, for two lovers of ancient history, their only possible path to the past.
After Stukeley the eighteenth-century Wiltshire antiquarians troubled themselves but little with any such definite details of topography. They embarked upon a riot of wild and mostly absurd guesses, theories, conjectures, assumptions, and speculations. It was a Witches’ Sabbath. Who built Stonehenge? The maddest suggestions found followers. Druids, Danes, Queen Boadicea, King Vortigern and Alfred the Great were all proposed and suggested as the founders of that mysterious Temple, by students in the “Age of Reason” which relegated to the nursery such credulous romancers as William of Malmesbury.
Instead, the “Age of Reason” produced John Smith of Boscombe, who might be used as a type of his period. In the preface to his book Smith says:
“As an inoculist of the smallpox, I rented a very convenient house in the parish of Boscombe, Wilts, by consent of those who called themselves the principal inhabitants; which I had no sooner done, but was prevented by every act of violence in the pursuit of my business by those malevolent villains, NOYSEY WRETCHES, who actually partake of the nature and quality of that brute which they daily feed on. To divert myself from these Choirophagi, I placed my attention on Stonehenge (about six miles distant), a structure which strikes every beholder with wonder and amazement.”
Thirty-one thirty-sixths of Dr Smith’s book (he would delight in that singularly meaningless fraction) consist of summaries of the writings of his predecessors who had occupied themselves about Stonehenge. This leaves five thirty-sixths for himself. The book is a good example of the futility of trying to build without any foundation at all. Smith did not even build his house upon the sand. His was entirely a castle in the air, for he was convinced that Stonehenge was originally built in order “to show the steady, uniform, and orderly motions of the heavenly bodies”. He therefore dedicated it to the Duke of Queensbury, “ as a symbol of your Grace’s steady, uniform, and orderly conduct through life”.
Dr Smith begins by saying that the Grand Seniors who lived nearer than we to the building of Stonehenge could do nothing but wonder at it, and dared not labour to explain it, “ lest they should lose their labour, and themselves also … how then should we, sillie freshmen, unlock this closet?” But he does.
The key he uses is the stone called the Friar’s Heel, which he at once “ suspected to be the Index that would disclose the use of this structure; nor was I deceived”. The Friar’s Heel must be a cumbersome key to handle, and very dizzy work poor Smith seems to have found it. But it gave him the title of his book, and the meaning of what had hitherto been conceived to be a temple. Not at all.
“CHOIR GAUR” is the “ GRAND ORRERY OF THE ANCIENT DRUIDS”, and in this title Smith demonstrates that the stones are a colossal Druidical instance of an invention made about fifty years before by Lord Cork. This was a piece of mechanism representing the motions of the planets about the sun, and Smith saw Stonehenge as an attempt to represent in the planetary sphere the
“triumphal dancing and singing together at the time and place of victorie which was the common practice of the ancients. But all this singing and dancing did but beat the aire uncapable of any legible impression in which posterity might read this glorious victorie; therefore they thought it expedient to erect this monument as their trophie and as such a gazett as all the world might gaze at, and admire their heroical valour through all generations.”
Dr Smith wrote his book without learning any of the latest theories about Stonehenge, but when he had finished it he read Wood of Bath’s description of Stonehenge, which had been published about four years earlier. He thought “ at the first perusal that he had subverted my whole plan”. To his relief he then discovered that
“one Gaffer Hunt of Ambresbury built a hut against the upright stone of Mars; and attended there daily with liquors, to entertain the traveller, and show him the stones. His cellar was under the great stone next the hut. He was there when Mr Wood surveyed the Temple.”
The inference seems to be that the effect of Gaffer Hunt’s liquors was “ an excuse of Mr Wood’s throwing this stone which the hut stood against, into a right line with his plan”. So he missed altogether the Heavenly Dance or “Choir Gaur”, “from whence, probably, the choirs of all churches derived their names”.
“Probably”—that is the key word rather than the Friar’s Heel. It was the key to most of the conclusions drawn by the “ learned and honest Antiquarians” of this day, with their “simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, and superstition”.
At the head of Dr Smith’s book is a quotation from Virgil, Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas; but now comes an antiquarian of a very different type, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who took as his motto, We speak from facts, not theory. Sir Richard has been called the patriarch of barrow-digging, and his method has been followed
by all subsequent students. The past hundred years have made the word “prehistoric” out of date. Documents may be the work of prejudiced writers. They may be the work of those who know less than they imagine. But the finds of the barrow-digger, if they have not been disturbed from their original gîte, are bound to tell the truth as far as they go. During the years when the nineteenth century was dawning, two men were often seen riding together on the downs above Heytesbury, and they were the two most typical archæologists of the day. William Cunnington (1754–1810) was advised by his doctor to lead an out-of-door life and he therefore came to live in Heytesbury in the first years of the nineteenth century. As he said, he soon “noticed barrows”, and very soon he began to dig in them. By 1804 he was joined in this practice by Sir Richard Hoare, who had already excavated in Italy, Germany, Holland, Bohemia and Wales. Now he found that his native county offered him the richest harvest of all.
Sir Richard writes of the “ intense pleasure” which he “experienced in those rides on the Wiltshire downs with my Magnus Apollo, Mr Cunnington”; and again he tells of “ a most interesting ride, full of novelty and information … returned to Everley gratified and benefited, as usual, by my ride amongst the Britons”—and he had eyes not only for the ancient Britons, for he tells of a gala day at Marlborough when he found thirteen hundred and thirty-three “partakers of conviviality seated at one long table from the market house to St Peter’s church, nearly half a mile”. He thought this a “pretty sight”.
Sir Richard was very popular among his contemporaries, so much so that archæologists of a later and more severe date criticise him because when he went to dig in a village, he generally lunched with the Squire, and was so delightful a guest that he was always kept talking for half the afternoon. Meanwhile, as is related by an
“aged shepherd of Salisbury Plain who belonged to Sir Richard’s gang … Sir Richard stopped at the Girt House and instructed the men to dig down from the top until they got near to the level of the natural soil, when they were to send or wait for him. Then the search was continued.”
Any finds were laid by for Sir Richard’s inspection when he came; so it was the gang which settled what was worth keeping and who also removed the finds from their original places. This, of course, does not accord with the modern method of digging and measuring; but probably those early excavators would anyhow not have remarked the particular points which have significance for men of a later date. And the agreeable guest at those luncheon parties did something even more worth while for British archæology. He kindled among the other guests some of his own enthusiasm and patience, so that he is still the inspirer of many a young Wiltshire archæologist.
Sir Richard opened three hundred and seventy-nine barrows, and he was generally right in estimating their relative dates: this was obviously the first point to look for when no one so far had investigated them at all. General Pitt Rivers later remarked that “a scientific study of human osteology had not commenced in Sir Richard’s time, and his mind was a blank on all anthropological subjects. He thought it right” to bury skeletons quickly without measuring them; “and in only one instance he describes a skeleton, saying that it grinned horribly, a ghastly smile, a singularity I never before noticed”. The General himself was profoundly interested in anthropology, and his remark on the grinning skeleton is that “when we think of the large amount of racial evidence that he destroyed in this way … it is almost enough to give any lover of antiquity a ghastly smile”.
Sir Richard may have been no expert in skeletons, and he looked for another kind of “ facts not theories” when he set out upon those enjoyable “ rides amongst the Britons” with Mr Cunnington. As one turns over the colossal tomes of his Ancient Wilts and Modern Wilts, realising that he was all the time breaking what was practically fresh ground, one sees how far easier he made it for all his successors to find their way among the monuments of the ancient inhabitants of this county.
He must have been personally such a delightful man that he gathered round him a host of coadjutors who took charge each of different volumes of his history, and who continued this work after he was dead. Ancient Wilts is in three volumes, while Modern Wilts is divided into the various Hundreds of South Wilts, and in each of these Sir Richard has a partner to help him. The work was not finished, and it does not include the northern part of the county.
In addition to this great work Sir Richard left in the cellars of Stourhead a large number of his finds, and these were acquired for Devizes Museum by Henry Cunnington in 1878.
If no individual member of the Cunnington family has the outstanding personality of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, yet between 1878 and the present day there has never been a time when the name of Cunnington was not prominent among Wiltshire archæologists. In that time they have created a collective family person which has not died but goes on from one generation to another, accumulating a store of knowledge and folk memory, growing ever more and more valuable to the county:
William Cunnington No. I (1754–1810). The one who rode with Hoare.
William Cunnington No. II (1813–1906). In 1852 he bought the Britton Collection, and founded the Wiltshire Society.
Henry Cunnington (1820–1887). Bought Hoare’s Stourhead collection and presented it to the Devizes Museum.
The present Mr and Mrs Cunnington, married in 1887. Their chief work has been done at Woodhenge, the Sanctuary, Silbury Hill and Wansdyke.
Across the history of this collective personality, which covers nearly a century and a half, stands the figure of General Pitt Rivers. Like Colt Hoare he owned a property in the south-west of the county, and also like him he was interested not only in the past but in the present inhabitants of Wiltshire. This tall, handsome Guards officer approached archæology from quite a fresh angle. He had already organised a new system of education for musketry instructors and he took a great interest in the historical and scientific study of weapons. Palæolithic stone implements led him straight to anthropology, and he founded the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford to house his collection of specimen skeletons. This was why he so much regretted that his predecessor, Colt Hoare, had paid so little attention to this side of his work.
In 1880 General Pitt Rivers inherited the estate of Rushmore in the midst of most interesting and hitherto unstudied prehistoric monuments. He at once began to dig in Cranborne Chase and Wansdyke, and between 1887 and 1898 he published privately four great volumes describing his finds and the conclusions he drew from them. Fortunately the General was a masterly and careful draughtsman, and to his scientific descriptions of the sites and the objects he discovered he added completely accurate drawings of every one. His method of excavating is described in great detail, and one thing which he says is that where there is no sign upon the surface of the ground having been disturbed, it is possible to discover this “ by hammering the turf with a pick or other instrument—the sound given out by ground already disturbed being much deeper than that of undisturbed chalk”.
The difference between these two famous Wiltshire excavators has thus been summed up: “ Sir Richard dug to find objects of antiquity, while the General dug to gain evidence as to the history of the earth-works he excavated, and as to the lives lived by the people by whom those earth-works were erected”.
Those four volumes of his “give us a picture of village life in this part of England during the later years of the Roman occupation”, and this is graphically shown in the Farnham Museum, just across the Dorset border, which he founded to display the agricultural and household implements of country people all over the world and during many centuries.
But the Farnham Museum means a great deal more than that. It is indeed a wonderful revelation of the character of the man who planned it, built it, furnished it and filled it with a most comprehensive collection of treasures from all parts of the world. As this collection was made by General Pitt Rivers, of course it must begin with skulls, bones and skeletons, so arranged by the General as to be of great value to students of
anthropology. The museum is a great surprise, standing as it does in the midst of uninhabited downland, and built in such a way as to combine beauty with utility—an art which has since the General’s day fallen into disuse. Pitt Rivers used to say that the country people did not have a fair deal, as in remote villages there was not the opportunity that townspeople had of enlarging their minds by seeing museums and picture galleries. Once he had begun his museum he soon went beyond his original idea of exhibiting ancient agricultural and household tools and utensils. The collection of these at Farnham is a very fine one, but the various departments show ceramics, enamel, ivories, pottery and carvings in many materials. One of the rooms is dominated by a replica of the head of Nefertiti, the original of which dates back three thousand years. I have said that the museum itself reveals the character of General Pitt Rivers, but even more revealing is the private catalogue. This was made by the General and his staff, and is a most careful and detailed account of the exhibits, their origins and (in those cases where they were bought) the prices paid for them and in what year. Every exhibit is not only thus described but is illustrated by a very delicate pencil and watercolour drawing. There are over three thousand drawings in the nine volumes comprising the catalogue.
General Pitt Rivers was no ordinary archæologist. His interest was in life itself, and he enjoyed the personal side of excavating, the information given by his “ finds” as to the actual life of the people in this country in far distant eras, but he was equally interested in the people of his own day. So he opened the Farnham Museum freely every day for all the people round. But he was not content with merely that; he understood people too well to think that any number of them were they country or towns people would be entirely satisfied with staring for ever at a museum. So he set his building near to the ancient Larmer Tree, a prehistoric place of meeting and he enthusiastically made this into a place of holiday for the country people. The museum and grounds were always open and on many days in the year there were games and sports. Teas could always be bought, and the band which the General organised from people living on the estate generally played on Sundays. At that time it was a rare thing for a country landowner indiscriminately to encourage the local people to gatecrash into his privacy in this way, and it was also a new thing to encourage these crowds on a Sunday. But that is what the General was like.
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