Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  While the ordinary traveller by horse or by coach seems to have thrown up the sponge without hesitation when attacked by even the most amateur highwayman, the Wiltshire farmers were generally ready to show fight. The Imber church register records the burials of two robbers there in 1716, both of them shot at different places on the same day by farmers whom they had attacked. But the last and most famous Imber story of highwaymen is that of Mr Dean of Imber, whose adventure is commemorated on an ominous-looking stone standing near the highway just where the road from the Plain descends into West Lavington. This is what is written on it:

  “At this spot Mr Dean of Imber was attacked and robbed by four highwaymen in the evening of October 21, 1839. After a spirited pursuit of three hours, one of the Felons, Benjamin Colclough, fell dead on Chitterne Down. Thos Saunders, George Waters, and Richard Harris were eventually captured, and were convicted at the ensuing Quarter Sessions at Devizes, and transported for a term of fifteen years. This monument is erected by public subscription as a warning to those who presumptuously think to escape the punishment God has threatened against Thieves and Robbers.”

  “Perils by robbers” were not the only perils which threatened Wiltshire travellers in coaching days. The Winterslow lion proves that Ephesus was not the only place where it was possible to “ fight with beasts” even as lately as the nineteenth century. The whole story appeared in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal of the following week, and we are allowed to reproduce its very detailed account:

  “On Sunday evening the 20th instant, at about a quarter before eight o’clock, as the Exeter mail coach was proceeding from this city to London, and had stopped as usual at Winterslow Hut, about seven miles from hence, for the purpose of a letter-bag being delivered by the guard, the coachman had no sooner pulled up, than the off-leader of his horses was suddenly seized by a lioness (belonging to a menagerie on its way to our fair) which he perceived had just broken loose from a caravan on the side of the road. The lioness sprung upon the horse in the most ferocious manner, seizing him by the throat, and at the same time fastening the talons of her fore paws into the upper part of the horse’s neck, and lacerating various parts of his body with the talons of her hind legs. Observing the imminent peril in which his horse was placed, the coachman called aloud for help, and the proprietor and keepers of the menagerie came to the spot, when a large Newfoundland dog belonging to the proprietor instantly seized the lioness by the leg, which occasioned her to quit the horse, and she directly fell upon the dog, and wounded him severely with her teeth and talons, (but did not kill him as has been erroneously stated in the London papers). The guard of the coach was at this time desirous of destroying the lioness by discharging his blunderbuss at her, but was prevented by the proprietor of the animal; and the coach passengers, who were of course much alarmed at the sight of so terrific a creature, escaped into the public house, where they fastened themselves in. The lioness desisted from attacking the dog, on hearing the voices of the keepers, and retired underneath a staddle granary close by where she was shortly afterwards secured, and replaced in the caravan. The coachman and guard, much to their credit, kept their posts during this perilous adventure, and the hostler of the house, with great intrepidity, went up to and held the leading horses as soon as the lioness had quitted her hold. It being then found that the injured horse could not proceed, a fresh one was procured at the public-house and the mail drove on. Two gentlemen, who were passengers, and who were acquainted with the intention to exhibit the menagerie at our fair, very properly on their arrival at Andover wrote a letter to the magistrates of this city, apprising them of the above circumstances; in consequence of which the proprietor on his arrival here was summoned before them, and directed to get his dangerous animals properly and effectually secured, which was accordingly done.—The wounded horse is now in the stables of his owner, Mr Weeks, of this city; and from the injury he has received, his recovery is deemed precarious: but should he survive, there is great reason to suppose that he will never regain his wonted strength and courage; which will not be wondered at when it is considered that the lioness was fastened on him for the space of full one minute, her long teeth (commonly called the holders) making very deep incisions in the muscular part of his neck, though happily missing the windpipe and jugular vein. It is worthy of notice that this much-injured horse has gained considerable celebrity on the turf: he is descended from the noted racer Sir Solomon, and was formerly in the possession of the Earl of Scarborough, bearing the name of Pomegranate. A pecuniary recompence has been made to Mr Weeks for the injury received by this truly valuable horse.—The lioness is an uncommonly fine young animal, only five years old, and the manner in which she was secured after her attack on the horse affords a remarkable proof of the extreme state of tameness to which such ferocious creatures are brought by the management of their keepers: when she had retired under the staddle granary her owner and his assistants, after a short deliberation, followed her upon their hands and knees, with lighted candles, and having placed a sack on the ground near her, they made her lie down upon it: they then tied her four legs, and passed a cord round her mouth, which they secured; in this state they drew her out from under the granary, upon the sack, and then she was lifted and carried by six men into her den in the caravan. To the astonishment of every one who beheld this part of the transaction (which lasted about a quarter of an hour), the lioness lay as quietly as a lamb during her removal to the caravan; but when there, she became sensible of the restraints she was under, and her rage was excessive till the cords which annoyed her were loosened.”

  The Salisbury Journal was far more interested in the lioness than in the passengers and we hear nothing more of them since they were “of course much alarmed at the sight of so terrific a creature, escaped into the public house, where they fastened themselves in”. There they were left, presumably in comparative safety. But evidently they found a lioness far more alarming to meet than any number of highwaymen.

  Lastly there were perils by water, perhaps the most frequent of all. An old inhabitant of Dean, near the south-east boundary of Wiltshire, relates that she remembers how in the mid-nineteenth century a man was digging for peat in a neighbouring parish, when he found a quantity of iron fragments and the skulls of horses. This recalled the loss, more than a century earlier, of a coach with four horses, somewhere in that neighbourhood. One cold November night the Southampton coach had reached Andover in a furious snowstorm, and the passengers refused to go any farther. They took refuge for the night in the Andover inn, but the driver, who was little more than a boy, insisted on going on alone. He was never heard of more, and the country people were convinced that he had been spirited away by the Devil. That year the snow lay in deep drifts on the ground from November to March, and when at last it melted and the roads could be seen once more, there was no trace of the coach and horses. After a century it could now be presumed that the boy, confused by the snow, had driven off the road and he and his coach and horses had been swallowed up in the marsh, to lie buried for a hundred years beneath the heather.

  Such were the dangers of the roads even in a civilised county like Wiltshire, and we can well believe with what fervour a traveller embarking on a fifty miles journey would have used the petition in the Litany: “ That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water”.

  Chapter Five

  NATIVE BUILDING MATERIALS

  From the sheepfold to the tombstone

  IN the old days they said that Salisbury Cathedral was built upon woolpacks. The phrase was not meant to be taken literally, though, remembering the seven hundred years during which the weight of that enormous building has stood unshaken upon the marsh, the speakers might be excused for thinking there must be something unknown between the foundation and the walls. Of course, the allusion was to the riches gained by the men who built the Cathedral from the millions of sheep that then wandered at large upon Salisbury Plain, restrained by no barriers, and probably watched
over by a shepherd boy and a sheepdog. They were like the flocks of Job of whom the little boy sang

  “They need no guard. God is their ward,

  And ever is my master’s help and stay.”

  Even as late as fifty years ago there was in Wiltshire no more familiar sight or sound than that described by A. G. Street, in his childhood memories—“A flock of sheep flowing down the lane” on its way to the fair. Life in a South Wilts village was little but a peaceful passage from the sheepfold to the tombstone. The hurdles sheltering the ewes in the lambing season were woven by local craftsmen from the willow withes grown in the neighbouring water meadows; and the tombstones were carved from local stone by the village mason. A sheep-pen in a field had the same unpremeditated beauty as the churchyard at Heytesbury, at Boyton or at Enford. Thus does fairness grow out of fitness, and this is the quality of the old Wiltshire buildings. We have our native materials, and we can never go far wrong while we continue to use them. But shall we?

  The most ancient buildings in the county are of course the prehistoric temples at Avebury and Stonehenge, built of the local Sarsen stones, though the word Sarsen shows that the people who named them thought that they came from far away, as the Saracens had done. This was because, by the time the word was coined, the builders had got into the way of taking their material secondhand; they did not look for the stones in their natural positions. Like Tom Robertson and Farmer Green at Avebury, they found it saved trouble to use old buildings as their simplest quarries. The splendour of the completed Avebury made them fancy that those great upright monoliths must have been brought from far away, when really the temple builders could have collected them in great numbers on the downs without the trouble of digging. They lay upon the earth’s surface like the manna which the Israelites picked up every morning round their camps, although they were a bit more cumbersome. The Book of Exodus could never have described a Sarsen stone as “a small round thing, as small as the hoarfrost on the ground”; but in its own gigantic way it does, like manna, seem to exude from the earth and to lie upon it. The only large number now remaining in situ is the group called the Grey Wethers, near Clatford, a few miles from Marlborough.

  Till a hundred and fifty years ago similar “ Vallies of Stones” were among the prides of the Marlborough Downs; but most of these strange, monstrous geological specimens must now be looked for chopped up and incorporated in the walls of churches, barns, houses and other buildings in North Wilts. Thanks to Farmer Green, the village of Avebury is almost entirely a patchwork made from fragments of the monoliths which once stood proudly erect to form the mysterious circle of the temple. In their original unhewn condition they seemed themselves to have created this great prehistoric architecture: Canon Goddard once pointed out in The Wiltshire Magazine that, from the days of Farmer Green onward, Sarsens were used over a large part of north-east Wilts as material for buildings on quite another scale. He writes that

  “If you enter Wiltshire from Little Hinton or Bishopston, and travel by Swindon and Wroughton and Broad Hinton to Avebury and Kennet, and so to the Pewsey Vale at Alton … you will observe that … until you come down into Pewsey Vale, Sarsen stones in one form or another will be your constant companions. You will see them split up into gateposts in the fields, or into cubes for the pitching of every farmhouse or cottage pathway, and you will observe that the majority of the older cottages and houses, those at least which date from the seventeenth or early eighteenth century … are built either of Sarsen or of the hard chalk marl.… In the parish Church … look carefully at the base of the tower, and the foundation of the buttresses, you will find that in Church after Church, their sole foundations are large blocks of Sarsen stone.”

  In the parts of Wiltshire where Sarsens were not to be picked up, the old builders used other material equally accessible and also more easily handled. There are houses, churches, barns and walls in the south part of the county which are built entirely of chalk, and which (whatever may be said nowadays as to the impermanence of this material) sometimes date back to Norman times. The one condition for durability in a chalk building is that it must have “a good hat and a good pair of boots”—which means protection from damp at top and bottom. Strangers in Wiltshire sometimes admire the “ quaintness” of the thatched walls they find in the lanes, not appreciating that these are by no means instances of pretty and useless fashion. The first builders of thatched walls did not think of the artistic appearance of their work: they were concerned with its purpose, and so are their followers today.

  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom says, “ Some man or other must present wall: and let him have some plaster, or some lome, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall.” Then he must have something more or “ it shall be called Bottom’s dream because it hath no bottom”. And if it has no bottom the scene is bound to lead, as Shakespeare’s did, to the tragic end, “ the wall is down”.

  The chalk walls of Wiltshire were cheap, practical and easy to build. They could be carried out entirely by unskilled labour. A “pug” made of chalk and water was rammed into a mould made between boards. The following day the boards could be removed, leaving the block ready to be bonded together with moist chalk mixed with a little sand. The foundations of such a wall were made from Sarsens if available, or from the stones of some previous building. The ruins of Old Sarum, the Cathedral and its houses were quarries for many generations, and stones from Old Sarum can be traced in the foundations of many buildings in the Salisbury area. Wilton Abbey produced many more. So did Clarendon Palace. Derelict buildings were seldom left derelict. At Quidhampton, near Salisbury, can be seen some old houses that demanded more skill in working than do the “pug”-made buildings. These houses are entirely built of solid blocks of chalk alternating with flint panels. These flints were skilfully cut so as to bring their black sides to the surface, after which they were mounted upon a brick foundation which remained invisible. The effect is very definite chess-board.

  Some early buildings in the Shrewton neighbourhood must have forgotten the golden rule about the “ good hat and good boots” required by chalk buildings, or their cottages would surely have stood up against the “ awful visitation” of 1841. Inscribed on some cottages in the village of Shrewton is the following record:

  “These cottages,

  Builded in the year of our Lord 1842,

  From a portion of the fund subscribed by the Public

  To repair the losses sustained by the poor

  Of this and five neighbouring parishes

  In the great Flood of 1841,

  Are vested in the names of twelve Trustees,

  Who shall let them to the best advantage,

  And after reserving out of the rents

  A sum sufficient to maintain the premises in good

  repair,

  Shall expend the remainder in Fuel and Clothing,

  And distribute the same amongst the poor of the said

  parishes,

  On the 16th day of January for ever, being the

  Anniversary

  Of that AWFUL VISITATION.”

  Chalk gained dignity and beauty when it was used, as at Quidhampton and other places, with that other local and easily accessible material, flint. Flints “ worked themselves up”, as the country people say, to the surface of the soil, and the women used to collect them off the ploughland. The original purpose of this was to prevent the plough from being blunted by the stones, but the flints soon asserted themselves as desirable building materials. The famous palace of Clarendon was built of flints, so were Bemerton Church and George Herbert’s parsonage. Audley House in Salisbury is another building largely of flint.

  Chalk and flint mix well, as do flint and stone, and both of these combinations can be seen in the chessboard pattern in many finely designed manor-houses and farmhouses throughout the county. Lake House in the Avon valley is a beautiful building of flint and stone.

  When “the Public” subscribed to that fund “to repair the l
osses sustained by the poor” in the Great Flood of Shrewton and its neighbouring parishes, they did not rebuild in chalk. They used brick. Hitherto there had not been many brick houses in villages, and when they began to use it in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the bricks they liked were of a rather unimaginative yellowish-white colour. At Shrewton, as at other places, the tone was not positive enough to jar upon an eye accustomed to the native hues of the soil; but as the century went on (and still more as it gave way to the twentieth century) the brick invasion began to do a great deal of harm to the appearance of the county. Most of the council houses built between the two German wars are singularly out of place in Wiltshire. They are generally built of red brick, and a particularly ugly red brick too. They jar upon their surroundings like a trombone playing a duet with a harpsichord. This is one of the penalties of an age of rapid transport. Neighbourhoods are no longer dependent upon local materials, and the building industry adapts itself to the age of speed. So we must have machine-made bricks, because a machine can “turn out” thirty thousand bricks a day, while the hand-worker averages about eight hundred.