Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  Another mysterious footpath is St Thomas’ Path from Winterbourne to Clarendon, which remains miraculously green at all seasons of the year, and even when the thickest snow lies all round it. It is said to be the one “ used by St Thomas a Becket when he was a cure priest at Winterbourne and did use to go up to a chapell in Clarendon Parke to say masse”. St Thomas bequeathed no legacy to preserve his path. His saint-liness was enough.

  The local government was much less effective at first than were Maud Heath and Thomas a Becket. Mr Kendall, in his Farming Memoirs of a West Country Yeoman, speaks of a very heavy fall of snow in the winter of 1894–5.

  “As rural district councillor, I was compelled to have the roads of the whole parish dug without consulting the surveyor—for which I almost got mulcted in the costs—, but it was not possible to get to him. We were cut off from the world on our high lands. I managed to employ some forty men with all available horses and carts and cleared the way for our bakers’ and grocery delivery carts,—the postal system being altogether dislocated for a day or two. After the main district roads were cleared, we turned our attention to the other and less important arteries, and I paid pro tem costs myself.

  When as rural district councillor I presented the bill later on, my Council took considerable objection to paying it, since I had not consulted with our surveyor, but for the first two days it was impossible to get at him. However, my Council and I were usually on good terms, and they eventually decided to meet the costs which, for men and horse labour, even at a low rate, was considerable.”

  During the nineteenth century it was becoming more possible for people of all classes to travel about the county, though the two classes of travellers still remained largely apart. The long-distance travellers, who hitherto had mainly used their own carriages or stage coaches, were now catered for by the railways, while the purely country people were loyal to the carriers’ carts. The railways originally left Salisbury Plain alone, though by now they have nibbled as far as Bulford in the south and Lavington in the north. When the railway from Salisbury to Bristol was opened it was proposed to have a station at Langford and the platform is still in existence. The village people boycotted the new experiment, but at last one old man was persuaded to go from Langford to Salisbury on market day. When he returned he was met by his village friends who had always travelled with him in the carrier’s cart and wanted to know what he thought of the new means of transport.

  “Never was so dull in all my life,” he said emphatically. “Never stopped at a single pub. Never had a word with nobody. Just went in to Salisbury and come out. I bain’t going to do that no more.”

  The village agreed with him and the railway station was never used.

  Chapter Four

  TRAVEL RISKS

  In perils of water; in perils of robbers.

  I have fought with beasts of Ephesus.

  WHEN St Paul describes the ordeals that he went through in preaching Christianity, much of what he says seems applicable to a traveller on the Wiltshire roads during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Floods often swept travellers and their equipages off the roads; highwaymen usually possessed horses far swifter than the average wayfarer; while the beasts of Ephesus were paralleled by the lion at Winterslow.

  During the times of the Tudors and Stuarts, travelling became more possible for ordinary people. Till then the post offices had only been used by the royal messengers; but from the time of Henry VIII the ordinary traveller was also allowed to leave his own horse in the post office and continue his journey on one of the post horses (if there was one to spare). The only condition was that he guaranteed to make the corresponding exchange on the way back. The same system applied with carriage horses, and all this made road travel far easier for individuals.

  But looking back into those old days, one sees that the aftermath of war is much the same in all centuries; it has always meant the letting loose of a good many rather tough customers upon the country. There were few regular police and authority was mainly provided by the hue and cry—the recognised duty of all good citizens to share in the chase after a law-breaker.

  The “ peak periods” in the number of Wiltshire highway robbers were, first, the close of the Civil Wars. In Cromwell’s day each district had been governed by its own Major-General, and they acted with the severity and high-handedness which belongs to successful revolutionaries. They were missed when they went; for the best man to tackle the hordes of unruly men left behind by a revolution is one who himself has sprung out of it. Then again, the Peace of Ryswick at the close of the seventeenth century meant a great number of soldiers being found in the country with no means of living except what they seized for themselves; and the conditions were the same during the latter years of the French wars of the eighteenth century. In such periods of lawlessness people became accustomed to highwaymen and there was a tradition, created by the highwaymen and accepted by the countryside, that these were no ordinary criminals. They were the “gentlemen” of the roads. They rode good horses and carried expensive weapons. They were well-dressed and tried to look like the younger sons of the peerage, as indeed they sometimes were.

  A robber named Biss, who was hanged at Salisbury in 1695, was supposed to belong to a good family owning property in the hamlet of Biss, which is part of Upton Scudamore near Westbury, and was even susspected of being the son of Sir Walter Biss, the parson of Bishopstrow. The Reverend Walter owned a small property at Chicksgrove near Tisbury, and was fined by the Roundheads for adherence to the King. Biss the highwayman started the legend that highwaymen were modern Robin Hoods, and in a ballad in his honour he says to his judge:

  “What say you now, my honoured Lord,

  What harm was there in this?

  Rich, wealthy misers was abhorred

  By brave, freehearted Biss.”

  Those were the palmy days of the Wilts highwaymen, for Biss had a contemporary named Davis, known as the “Golden” farmer, who ostensibly gained his living as an innkeeper and farmer, but really spent the better part of forty years galloping about Salisbury Plain as a highway robber. He was not a Wiltshireman by birth, though his exploits nearly all took place on the lonely Wiltshire downs which gave such a good chance to the robber. Davis was born during the Civil War and was hanged at Tyburn in 1689. One remarkable thing about nearly all these highway robbers is that both the thieves and their prey were really frightened of each other. Directly there was any suspicion of the approach of a highwayman, the rider or the occupants of a coach at once collected their money and valuables and got them ready to hand over without unpleasant parley. Consequently a highway robbery, as a rule, was a very brisk episode, and the Gentlemen of the Road were almost at once free to gallop off after another victim. No wonder they brought home so much each day. On the other hand, the highwayman himself was not taking any risks. If he was cautious he found his money was easy money, and a purse or a couple of watches were to be had for the asking. William Davis showed his caution when he robbed the Duchess of Albemarle, on the Plain, as she was returning from a visit to Clarendon. She was the wife of General George Monk. An early account of this episode says that

  “though attended by several postilions and outriders, her whole cortège was arrested by the arms of a single man, who either pistolled or daunted the foremost riders, and then directed his menaces to the lady in her chariot. He tore off two of her diamond rings, and made an ineffectual dash at her watch. Had he known the lady better, he would probably have spared his pains. She was no hysterical Miss, ready to swoon at the sight of danger; but one of whom it is recorded that she could always reduce her husband to instant servility by a volley of Drury Lane ribaldry. This faculty she had early inbibed, when, as one of the washing-women in the Tower, she first exercised her soft influance over George Monk while a prisoner in that fortress.”

  But it was not the language of the Duchess which sent Davis galloping away with nothing but a couple of diamond rings. He espied on the horiz
on a distant cloud of dust and he followed the usual practice of his fellow-tradesmen, showing the approaching cavalcade nothing but a clean pair of heels.

  James Whitney was another of the well-born highwaymen of the day. He was the son of a Doctor of Divinity, who had been rector of Donhead St Andrew, near Shaftesbury, and had been ejected from that living by the Parliamentarians because of his Royalist sympathies. James Whitney first appeared during the winter of 1692, when there was “a most alarming outbreak of the plague of highwaymen”.

  Whitney collected a small gang of confederates, and between them they

  “pillaged the Oxford stage coach in broad daylight after a most bloody fight. A waggon laden with £15,000 of the public money was stopped and ransacked. As the latter operation took some time, all travellers looking on were seized and guarded till the affair was over; and if on horseback their horses were shot or hamstrung to hinder pursuit. Some jovial squires were riding after a hare, and were themselves run down by nine hunters, and compelled to empty their pockets; and another time the Duke of Marlborough lost 500 guineas.”

  The only force capable of capturing Whitney was a troop of dragoon guards, who got him “ after a terrible conflict”, during which he killed one and wounded several. He tried to get off by offering to raise for the King’s service in Flanders a troop of horse entirely composed of highwaymen of Windsor Forest, but this could not save him, and he was hanged at Smithfield in 1693.

  The village of Cherhill lies about a mile off the main London–Bath road, and in this village there existed practically throughout the eighteenth century a famous gang of highwaymen. Mr Plenderleath, rector of Cherhill from 1860 to 1892, relates that even in the middle of the nineteenth century “my own uncle, who was born in 1776, when he heard of my having accepted a living in Wiltshire, solemnly exhorted me never to think of driving across the downs without my servant and myself being provided with firearms”. The Cherhill “gang” had just come to an end in Mr Plenderleath’s day, so it was only by hearsay that he could know that “ one of these men is reported to have sometimes gone out upon his marauding expeditions in the summertime without a stitch of clothing, as he said that not only did such an apparition frighten people upon a dark night, but also that a naked man was less easily recognised than one who appeared in ordinary costume”.

  The most famous name among Wiltshire highwaymen is that of Thomas Boulter, the son of a Poulshot miller, whose whole time on the road lasted only three years—he was born in 1748, took to highway robbery in 1775 and was hanged at Winchester in 1778. The miller’s son did not pose as an aristocrat, but he had a great eye for effect. His appearance was striking, with fair hair, good figure and “ tip-top riding gear” made by the smartest of sporting tailors. All this was part of his stock-in-trade. It was also a part of what attracted him to the profession, coupled with the excitement of the life. The Poulshot mill ground too slowly for him. He wanted change and danger, and one cannot but admire him because he found it for himself, and in his chosen career he served an apprenticeship to no man. His original apprenticeship had been in his father’s mill, where he worked steadily till the year 1774, when he was twenty-six years old. By then he could bear this stationary life no longer, and he resolved to follow the course of the mill stream which all his life till then he had watched hurrying past him on its way to the sea.

  He left Wiltshire for the Isle of Wight, where his sister had lately opened a milliner’s shop. He had a little capital in the Poulshot mill, and he now took this out and invested it in a grocery business in the same house where his sister sold hats. A year of this was enough, and as he found he was losing money rather than making it, he resolved to waste no more time, and one day he went off to Portsmouth, where it was quite easy to buy the essentials of the trade he now had in mind. He brought back to Newport a couple of pistols and the necessary ammunition, but he at once saw that his ambition to be a highwayman had no future in that small island. He told his sister that he must go to see his people at Poulshot, and he left for the mainland. Riding a hired horse, he started for Stockbridge, and in a quarter of an hour he met the Salisbury diligence, containing two passengers. At this moment he didn’t feel a bit like a highwayman and in his own account he says that he thought, “Now I must begin or else go home as poor as I came out.” He then describes how

  “a feeling of irresolution and tremour was for a time so overpowering that he rode past the diligence two or three times before he could muster resolution to pronounce the decisive word stand. At length he turned short round, ordered the driver to stop, and in less than two minutes he had robbed both passengers of their money and watches, saying that he was much obliged to them for he was in great want, and wished them a pleasant journey.”

  Three years later, when Boulter had been sentenced to death at Winchester Assizes, he was given a respite of three weeks in order to write an account of his career, and from this it is possible to obtain not only a list of the crimes he committed but some impression of the man he was. He remained to the end a Wiltshire villager. That overpowering feeling of irresolution and tremor makes him very human, as does the fact that in all his robberies he never took a life. He wanted the fun of the life on the roads without its brutality.

  He soon found that his victims were as frightened of him as he had been of them in that first encounter. With Boulter, the transference of purses and watches from passengers to highwayman took place as quietly and courteously as a transaction on the Stock Exchange. This gives him a peculiar quality among the men of his trade, and shows that he had a real gift for freebootery, maintaining the freedom of both actors in the scene. The difference between them is that Boulter quickly overcame his initial panic, while his victims did not.

  By his simple, polite manner of robbing, Boulter had secured a good forty pounds and seven watches by the time he got to Poulshot, and he rode back to the Isle of Wight with more than twice that amount. He now had the money to rest for a bit, but the virus was in his blood. He could never settle again in the back of a milliner’s shop, and he was off again before long. He “borrowed” and used any good horse which he saw standing in a field, though he eventually got possession of a famous horse named Black Bess which had been reared by Peter Delmé of Erlestoke, in which village another of Boulter’s sisters was in service. Black Bess had been the name of Dick Turpin’s celebrated mount, and Boulter’s was often presumed to be the same horse; but Black Bess I would have been well over forty by Boulter’s day, so we cannot say more than that his mount may have been of the same breed. But Boulter followed the method of the post horses of the period, and was always ready to leave his own tired horse in exchange for any fresh beast which he saw unguarded.

  In course of time Boulter picked up a confederate, one Caldwell, a far more desperate character than himself, and the two made common cause till the end. Their life was a wild round of horses carried off and left behind when useless, or of terrific days when they rode from Maidenhead to Poulshot in seven hours, or from Blandford to Weymouth, Honiton and Exmouth, making a haul of five hundred pounds a day. One little episode of that day was the story of how a lady burst into tears when he took a ring off her finger, when with great gallantry he returned it to her, saying that it was evidently of more value to her than to him. Most of his exploits were on the Plain between Winchester and Devizes, and when he went farther afield he was less lucky. At York he was caught, and was sentenced to death within fifteen days, but eventually he was pardoned on promising to “reform his life and enter his Majesty’s service”. He did this with enthusiasm and “ for the first four days he promised fair to be a good soldier”; but when he found that he had to “preserve the stiff posture of the parade ground” he discovered that his new profession of arms would never square with his tastes. He deserted that very night, before he had ever actually donned his uniform, and that was the end of soldiering for Boulter.

  His next adventures were all of them in Wiltshire, but at last he ventured once more out
of his home county and was arrested at Birmingham. He cut a hole in the prison wall and escaped; but the year was 1777 when war with France had just broken out again and all the ports were shut. Dover, Portsmouth and Bristol were each tried in vain. He could not get out of the country. At last he reached Bridport, where a “ perfidious landlord” handed him over to the police. That was the end of his escapes.

  “On Wednesday 19th August 1778, at twelve o’clock at noon, a dismal cart passed slowly out of Winchester castle, and proceeded to the gallows outside the city, bearing Thomas Boulter, James Caldwell, and Read the executioner. Caldwell behaved throughout with great decency, but did not appear much concerned at his approaching fate. Boulter was very penitent. He said little, beyond stating that he had left an account of the transactions of his life, which he had desired should be printed for the information of the public. And thus ended ‘ this feverish dream’.”

  The figure of Boulter was a popular one in Wiltshire, and he really was a hero in his time, and a few months after his execution a highwaywoman was incited by his example to take to the roads. This was Mary Sandall, a Baverstock woman “of about twenty-four years of age, of middle stature, and by no means of a masculine aspect”. She was seen trotting along the highroads in the vicinity of Wilton, “dressed as a man, mounted astride on a good horse, armed at all points, and looking out for adventure”. This person stopped a Mrs Thring of North Burcombe, who was walking on the Turnpike Road when “a person on horseback came up, and after some little conversation, drew forth a pistol, and with great coolness and intrepidity, and in the usual style of a highwayman, demanded her money”. Mrs Thring thought there was nothing for it but “ to imitate the conduct of many far more able bodied persons than herself” and she promptly handed over all she had—two shillings and a black silk cloak. But the robber was not satisfied and tried to “disengage her finger rings and shoe buckles”. Now Mrs Thring perfidiously said that she saw her husband coming. This frightened the highwayman into “ clapping the spurs to his horse and riding off”. Mrs Thring at once raised the alarm, and a hue and cry was set in motion. They soon caught this very amateur thief, who was even more amateur than they had suspected, for “what was the astonishment of all present to discover, upon closer examination, that the prisoner was not only a woman, but a neighbour whose features they all recognised”. On the following day the highwaywoman appeared before the local magistrates, when Mrs Thring “swore positively to her person as also to a sixpence and halfpenny found on her”. At the following assizes “ the case was fully proved, and the sentence of death was recorded, which, however, was soon after respited”. Those last four words are the only successful part of the story of a female’s entry into the highwayman’s rôle.