Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  In the part of Wiltshire almost as remote as possible from Farnham lies the village of Kington St Michael, between Chippenham and Malmesbury, and this little place was the birthplace of two of the most attractive of the early students of Wiltshire—Aubrey and Britton. In the church is a stained window to their joint memory, and when this was unveiled in the nineteenth century, the Reverend J. E. Jackson remarked on the two men having been “born as to time within 146 years; as to distance within a mile of each other”.

  John Britton’s Beauties of Wilts illustrates most of the great houses in the county. The first two volumes were published in 1801, and the third in 1825. In the twenty-four years between these two Britton had become well known as a topographer, for he published his Beauties of England and Wales during those years, and this book was a record of a walking tour made by himself and Mr Brayley in 1799. Britton’s books are well known, but the early story of his life is not so, and it is this aspect which is of interest in this chapter.

  John Britton was the son of a baker and malster at Kington St Michael, who died leaving his family very poor, so in 1775 (being then fourteen years old) the boy was apprenticed to a brother of his mother, a lawyer in London. He mentions that he made the journey by coach “at a speed of five miles per hour”. John gives a lively description of his uncle, and in fact of all his family.

  “Ungovernable passion, bordering on insanity, was the characteristic affliction of nearly all the family of the Hilliers. In my boyhood, I often saw battles between my grandfather and grandmother, these with their children, and the latter with one another. Throwing missiles and dangerous weapons at each other, swearing in the most vehement and vulgar manner, and hurling hatchets, pitchforks, stones, etc., at horses, cows, calves and other animals, were incidents of almost every day occurrence.”

  John says that he was “constitutionally a Hillier … and often a slave to such passionate excitements”, but while he was apprenticed to his uncle he cured himself of these weaknesses by reading Watts’ Logic, his Improvement of the Mind and Essay on the Conduct of the Passions and Affections and “ some other books of that class”. While he was thus training himself to become the steady and persistent student of the beauties of England, poor Britton lived through a very trying six years. He learnt nothing from his uncle, who merely apprenticed him to a wine merchant. Britton says that “these six years were dragged on as a lengthened and boring chain; for my health, always weakly, was greatly impaired by constant confinement in damp, murky cellars”. His only work was to help the porter in “bottling, corking, and binning wine”. He “stole an occasional half-hour in the morning, between seven and eight o’clock, when he visited two bookstalls in the vicinity”, and here he purchased Tissot’s Essay on Diseases incident to Sedentary People, Cornaro’s Health and Long Life, Dodge’s Reflections on Death and his Thoughts in Prison, and these with other “ numerous and pleasing writings” were read “at occasional intervals only … by candlelight, in the cellar”. Of this period he says that his “bookish amusements were very desultory and miscellaneous”. One day Britton met in the street a Mr Essex, a painter of clock faces, who became a good friend to him, and introduced him to Mr Brayley, another apprentice. The two boys entered into partnership to publish a single ballad or song which was written by Mr Brayley and entitled “ The Guinea Pig”. “It was allusive to the Passing of an Act to levy one Guinea per head on every person who used hair powder. Though ridiculous in the extreme … it was printed on fine wire-wove paper … and charged one guinea.” Britton sang this song at a smokers’ club in the Shepherd’s Well, Barbicon, and he had a great success, but unfortunately it was pirated by a song dealer, who sold more than 70,000 copies and made off with the money.

  Quite undisturbed by this, Mr Britton goes on to say that

  “strange as it may appear, it may be safely affirmed that to this juncture and circumstances are to be attributed Beauties of Wiltshire … as well as all the other works that have been jointly and separately written by us.”

  And so from his dreary wine-cellar Mr Britton had by degrees emerged to perambulate among the beauties of his own county and many others, and although he had his difficulties, he was soon accepted as a valuable worker in the new field of county history.

  Nevertheless he was obliged to “ reflect with indignation, on those indolent, haughty or ignorantly despicable beings, who refuse me information to solicitous enquiry—who treated my humble efforts with contumely or silent scorn”. He considered them “as much beneath my serious attention in the wide scale of public importance, as their arrogant notions might induce them to consider me in the vortex of their own abode”.

  In 1801, after the publication of his first two volumes of the Beauties of Wilts, Mr Britton brought out his scheme for a great Wiltshire History published by general subscription, but nothing came of this till 1853, when he was one of the committee which founded the Wilts Archæological Society, with as one of its chief objects the formation of a county museum and library which might be the nucleus of a county history.

  For some years after the end of his apprenticeship Britton coquetted with the variety stage of the day. This was evidently the result of the great success of the “Guinea Pig”; and among other things he wrote and spoke a monologue, which appeared in a programme in company with a learned dog and the musical glasses.

  In his Autobiography Britton described his first visit to Lord Lansdowne, who introduced him to the beauties of a Wiltshire mansion:

  “Up to the age of twenty-six I had never conversed with a nobleman, or scarcely with a gentleman in the higher ranks of society.… I had been admitted … into the wine cellars of Sir William Chambers, and had spent two days with Mr Scrope and his aged mother at Castle Combe.… I now approached Bowood … and asked incoherent questions about the marquis, the house, etc.; the porter was perplexed, and called the footman, who consulted the valet, and he appealed to the butler, who good-naturedly construed my wishes, and introduced me to his noble master, who was seated in a well-filled and spacious library, and who appeared to my dizzy vision like something superhuman.”

  So began John Britton, and the rest of his contribution to the history of Wilts is in his books and in his Collection, as much of it as is in Devizes Museum.

  The mention of this museum brings us to Canon Goddard, one of the most learned and certainly one of the most unselfish of nineteenth-century archæologists. In 1890 he was made one of the general secretaries of the Archæological Society and editor of its magazine, and he retained these two posts till the end of 1942, when he felt obliged to retire “ on account of advancing years”. For most of this time Canon Goddard was also the librarian of the Society’s Library at Devizes, and future generations will continue to owe a great debt of gratitude to him for his personal work on the Bibliography of Wiltshire which he compiled. Canon Goddard was not superior to the use of the typewriter, and part of this bibliography has been typed, but the greater part of it exists in the extremely beautiful and clear script which he wrote himself. This will always bring him near to the students of the future. He also made an index of the newscuttings collected in the library. This runs into nineteen volumes and is partly still in manuscript. Canon Goddard himself inserted in it no less than thirty-eight thousand entries, and in the latter part of this collossal work he had the valuable help of Mr Pugh.

  About the time when Canon Goddard became secretary to the Society, he was busy with the late Mr George Dartnell in compiling a Glossary of Wiltshire Words which was published in 1893. At any time this would have been a valuable book, but as a matter of fact the work was undertaken only just in time. The dialect was already dying out, although, as the compilers say in their preface, “good old English as at base it is,—for many a word or phrase used daily and hourly by the Wiltshire labourer, has come down almost unchanged, even as regards pronunciation, from his anglo-saxon forefathers,—it is not good enough for him now. One here, and another there, will have been up to town, only t
o come back with a stock of slang phrases and misplaced aspirates, and a large and liberal contempt for the old speech and the old ways.”

  The words were collected one by one over a long period and throughout many walks into remote parts of the county. Many of them were already out of date by the time the Glossary was published, and many more have since vanished. If Mr Goddard had done only that one thing, the debt owed to him by lovers of Wiltshire would be beyond paying. This racy, expressive, direct, often onomatopoetic and, even more often, poetic, speech carries with it the true Wiltshire humanity, and when it dies it will take with it much that will have gone for ever. We must thank the two compilers of the glossary for saving this living (if dying) speech, for a few more decades in the hearts of lovers of their county history.

  Chapter Three

  TRAVEL AND TRAVELLERS

  FOR many centuries anyone thinking of travelling from one part of Wiltshire to another had to face almost insurmountable difficulties: in fact, hardly anyone ever did think of doing it. Two road systems existed, and the slogan for travelling on these roads might well have been, “Ye’ll tak the high road and I’ll tak the low road”. Travellers for different purposes did this and so they seldom met.

  All traces of the primeval inhabitants of the county are on the downs. There they built their mysterious temples, camps and barrows; and the broad green ways curving just below the summits remain to show us the paths they took from one settlement to another. The valleys remained impenetrable marshes and morasses, overgrown with woodland and thicket, and the home only of wolves, snakes and evil insects.

  When the Romans came to this island, they maintained this primitive geography. Like their predecessors, the newcomers avoided the valleys where the streams made their uncertain way through the tangle. The downs were the only possible foundations for those finely engineered roads which symbolised, all over the Roman world, the power and glory of the Empire; and which would indicate, to generations long after their own, the direct routes between the Imperial City and such minor metropolises as Salisbury, Canterbury, York, Chester and the rest. Early travellers on these roads must have had the appearance of seafaring men, their eyes set only on far horizons; and as they passed over the undulating chalk surface of the Plain, they felt, beneath their feet, something calling to mind the close relationship of this soil with the ocean bed from which it had sprung.

  About the end of the fifth century the Saxons began to arrive in the county. They changed all this. Instead, they went direct to the river valleys, and there they built their farms and hamlets, between which rough roads soon appeared following the course of the streams. These farmers wished to go no farther than to the next village. Rome was not built in a day, nor could it be reached in one; and so they had little interest in it. These pastoral people thought, like their flocks, in terms of a day’s journey. That meant a very few miles in the England of the seventh century. Saxon roads began as mere tracks from farm to farm, or often from ford to ford, as the village names testify; and the nearest church steeple was good enough as a journey’s end.

  These two road systems—of the downs and of the valleys—were apart not only because of their situations. They did not meet because they were the products of two fundamentally different types of mind—the Global Mind and the Neighbourly Mind. The history of Wiltshire between 1066 and 1946 is the history of the gradual unification of the county and of these two mental types. This was largely a matter of transport—the way in which new methods developed, superseded or combined the old road systems, attracting passengers who would use them both. The pack-horse, the farm wagon, the stage coach and the carrier’s cart all appealed each to its own class of traveller; and when railways first appeared in the county, they skirted rather than crossed the Plain. The motor car or bus is the first vehicle to unify travel all over Wiltshire.

  Our oldest roads go back to two or three thousand years before Christ, and though they had no foundations, and can justifiably be called “ tracks” because they indicate the footprints of actual passers-by in those dim ages, yet they can nearly always still be traced. They are not, and never were, local roads. In fact, the most remarkable thing about them, and about the men whose footsteps stamped them out, is that they have remained visible in their lofty solitude, although their destination was far from visible to the men who made them, and was far beyond the range of many centuries after them. They originally passed between camps, burial grounds and sacred places, and brought these into touch with very far-off landmarks. The ancient buildings were set into a plan which included all the great spaces around them. Avebury and Stonehenge are the consummation of the vast landscapes in which they are set. Primeval roads have their part in primeval architecture.

  Yet without mechanical means of transport or mechanical tools for building, these people saw not only the county of Wiltshire but the whole island of Great Britain as a great unity. Today, with our unprecedented power of travelling swiftly over great spaces, we seldom recognise the stupendous design of this ancient road system. We evidently cannot; or we should not see, as we often do, in the hitherto solitary spaces of some noble landscape, an incongruous and ill-proportioned bungalow, interrupting for miles around the peace and harmony of Nature’s eternal plan.

  Who, then, were the men whose long forgotten journeys first marked out those “broad, green roads … their turf, from long trampling, finer and darker in colour than on the surrounding land”? They were the builders of Avebury and Stonehenge, and they must have travelled many thousands of times from their temples in Wiltshire to the places where they worked—the tin mines and the gold washings of Cornwall, the flint quarries of Sussex and of Carnarvonshire, the lead deposits of Wales or of Derbyshire and the Somerset limestone. At certain seasons of the year those roads must have been crowded with men walking on their periodical pilgrimage between work and worship. Now they are left to a few lovers of beauty or lovers of walking, with, occasionally, a shepherd and his flock, or a tramp who knows the shortest cut to the nearest pub. Present-day walkers only use short lengths of the roads which were originally made by the footsteps of men who thought little of going from Wiltshire to Wales or to Yorkshire on foot. There are in Wiltshire seven Roman roads and most of them had been deserted for centuries till the soldiers came to Salisbury Plain in 1899. Like the primitive roads they mostly traversed the high ground which the Saxons had left in order to farm in the valleys, and so these fine roads had had very little use. For instance, on the Foss Way between Cirencester and Bath, twenty-nine miles, there is now not a village, and for long distances it is a farm road or grass-grown track.

  Nowadays these green roads almost seem as if they were natural pleats in the virgin soil of the downs, or the trace of dried-up streams which once flowed athwart a valley. It seems that they must be purely a natural phenomenon; and yet for more than a thousand years they were the only engineered roads in this island. If there had been in the Roman days any “old-fashioned folk who hankered after the good old days”, how exasperated they must have been by the gangs of slaves who noisily threw up the dirt and rubble required to build a Roman road. But those men did a good job of work, for often, even now, if you dig beneath the turf, you can still find an unshaken Roman pavement, almost strong enough to bear a convoy of tanks. Our Roman roads have now and again had this strain put upon them when they found themselves upon a strip of road where the later road-builders had followed the old route.

  In the days of King Arthur the Roman roads were comparatively modern and it must have been by the one which passes from Old Sarum to the Mendips that the wonderful funeral procession described by Sir Thomas Mallory went from Amesbury to Glastonbury. He writes in the Morte d’ Arthur:

  “When Sir Lancelot was come to Almesbury within the Nunnery, Queen Guenever died but half an hour afore … and there was ordained an horse bier; and so with an hundred torches ever burning about the corpse of the Queen, and ever Sir Lancelot with his seven fellows went about the Horse bier, singing and
reading many an holy orison, and frankincense upon the bier incensed. Thus Sir Lancelot with his seven fellows went on foot from Almesbury unto Glastonbury. And when they were come to the Chapel and Hermitage there, she had a dirge with great devotion.”

  If the legendary Arthur has his place in history (and I think he has), it must have been just after the Romans had left Britain and during the first Saxon invasions, so in his time the Roman road to Glastonbury was in good condition. Though Mallory only mentions Sir Lancelot and his “seven fellows”, it is obvious that the Queen’s funeral procession was far more important than this would make it appear. And all through the succeeding centuries, when the village people had long given up any attempt at preserving the Roman road, funerals and Royal processions fearlessly moved across the country despite the condition of the tracks which they had to follow. In fact, while the roads were so bad that we should not call them roads at all, they were used for all sorts of ceremonies, and must have been far more entertaining than they became later. Like life in general, travel in the Middle Ages was more splendid than comfortable. In Wiltshire we have historical records of funerals which seem outwardly to have been more impressive than Queen Guinevere’s, when there were literally no roads for them to travel upon. Dangerous roads never hindered pageantry, nor did they prevent gay crowds, like the Canterbury pilgrims, from making long and festive journeys across country.