Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  “There is a chapel called St Lawrence Chapel standing in the middle of the town, wherein the inhabitants found a priest to sing for the ease of them because the parish church is a quarter of a mile out of town, and converted all the lands aforewritten in Warminster to that purpose, and bare the rest of his wages of their own purses.”

  This chapel is not connected with the parish church. It was built and endowed in the reign of Edward I by two maiden sisters called Hewitt, who left it in the hands of trustees. It was rebuilt from the foundations in 1725, and so those two otherwise unknown maiden sisters have provided for six hundred years for the religious needs of their successors. The length of the town has always made it difficult to find a site sufficiently central for a church to suit all the inhabitants, and in 1830 the foundation stone of Christ Church was laid, while yet another small church was built in 1865.

  The impermanence which attends ecclesiastical buildings in Warminster seems also to have attacked its town hall. One existed in the town in 1636, on a site afterwards occupied by the Plume of Feathers, and now by the King’s Arms. In 1711 another town hall was built in the centre of the main street, but this sadly interfered with the bustle and business of the fairs and markets; and in 1830 Lord Bath presented the town with its present town hall, considered to be the “Elizabethan style” of Longleat.

  One more building must be mentioned, the old Latin School near the church. This fine and dignified building was built by Lord Weymouth in 1707 as a memento of the long stay of Bishop Ken at Longleat. One interesting pupil of this school was Dr Arnold of Rugby, who thus finds himself in an unexpected line of succession with the seventeenth-century bishop who was given a home at Longleat when he, along with the other nonjurors, had been deprived of his see in 1689.

  Following Defoe’s line from Warminster to Bradford, we first reach Westbury, which he mentions in 1722 as the chief centre of the manufacture of Spanish cloth “ in the whole world”. The villagers between Bradford and Warminster nearly all lived by spinning the yarn to be woven in the town; and the chief people in those towns were the rich clothiers. To this day the parish of Westbury includes several surrounding villages—Westbury Leigh, Chalford, Dilton Marsh, Bratton and Hayward. Thus Westbury forms, as it were, a kind of connecting link between the valley and the Plain, and within its area it possesses not only many of the trades, industries and population of each but it contains much of the beauty which we connect with both.

  The actual town of Westbury lies on low ground, but on an outstanding summit of the down above it there is carved out of the level green the White Horse of Westbury, a relic of those primitive days when art and nature were not divorced, and when the painter and sculptor did not possess studios into which they withdrew to produce their masterpieces. Who made this Westbury White Horse? Tradition connects it with King Alfred and his victory over the Danes at Ethandune nearby; and this is supported by that other white horse at Uffington, said to commemorate the first battle of that famous campaign of 871. Alfred’s victory over the Danes was not complete till 878, when he vanquished them at Ethandune a few miles from the Westbury White Horse.

  But both these wonderful chalk silhouettes may well go back to some far more pagan date. Originally they were hardly horses at all but mystical representations of some early religious symbol, and in each there appeared the sign of the Crescent Moon, which has no equine signification. The Westbury Horse, therefore, may only have been remodelled by King Alfred on a site where some more primitive emblem had been displayed. Perhaps this will console archæologists who know that the horse we now see on Bratton Down was carved by “a wretch by the name of Gee” who was steward to Lord Abingdon and came down to survey that nobleman’s estates, in the parish of Westbury, and conceived the idea of immortalising his name by remodelling the white horse.

  The name Westbury arouses very opposite associations in different people. To the country lover it recalls one of the most typical of Wiltshire views—grand desolate downland, strangely wrought by the hands of primitive men, who, whatever they did to the landscape, added to, rather than took from, its primeval grandeur. To the more modern traveller, however, it first means a well-known junction on the main line of the Great Western Railway. This is as it should be. Westbury is not ashamed to link the past with the present, nor the country with the town. In fact, its original name testifies to this dual character, Westbury-under-the-Plain.

  Between the dateless day when the white horse was first carved upon the down, and the year 1848 when the railway first came to Westbury, the town was growing up under the influence of the great woollen industry which dominated the south and west of Wilts. Its houses were the houses of the great clothiers. They were its original landowners, its first members of Parliament. In fact, one of them gives to Westbury its importance in the constitutional history of England, for it was a Thomas Longe, a great clothier, whose election as M.P. for the borough occasioned the first case of bribery and corruption known in England. Mr Longe was elected in 1571 and was said to have been “ deemed not of sufficient capacity to serve in Parliament, and confessed that he had given Anthony Garlande, mayor of Westbury, and one Watts of the same town, the sum of four pounds for that place and room of burgessship”. Mr Longe was ordered to repay the four pounds and the corporation was fined the sum of twenty pounds “for the said lewd and slanderous attempt”.

  Westbury is less remarkable than are Devizes, Wilton, Warminster, Marlborough, and other Wilts towns for fine and simple planning; but it was obviously laid out for a definite end, as a convenient centre for the wool industry which was a metropolis. It had a fine church, a town hall, a market place on the main road and some good houses.

  Trowbridge is about four miles from Westbury and since the Local Government Act of 1888 it has been the Administrative Centre of the Wiltshire County Council. In 1940 a very good County Hall was completed, one of the few modern buildings in the country which have the beauty and dignity of old government buildings. The country immediately round Trowbridge is not typically Wiltshire in character. It is neither down-land nor river valley, but is on a “mid-land” level which contains little that is memorable. The town itself at first sight is also rather characterless, but it does contain a good many eighteenth-century houses of the quietly dignified and well-proportioned type which all manner of buildings used to be in that heyday of domestic architecture.

  Besides the old and the new county offices Trowbridge also possesses a Victorian town hall and several churches, of which the most interesting is a fifteenth-century parish church. In 1814 the poet Crabbe was made the rector here, and he described himself as “dwelling in the parsonage of a busy, populous, clothing town, sent thither by ambition and the Duke of Rutland”. Such a description hardly applies to the Trowbridge of today. Its manufacture is left far behind by the cities of the Black Country. But the simple-minded Crabbe said later on, “Am I not a great fat rector, living upon a mighty income [his whole income was £800 a year], while my poor curate starves with six hungry children upon the scraps which fall from the luxurious table? Am I not this day going to dine on venison and drink claret?”

  After Trowbridge, with the flat fields surrounding it and its conventional and respectable buildings, the first impression of Bradford-on-Avon is a revelation. The situation of the town is amazing and no architect or town-planner could possibly have chosen it, for the lie of the land is such that it must obviously have been the very last place to choose to build a town upon. The streets go up and down extremely steep hills, so steep, in fact, that many of the houses are built sheer into its side, the front door on one level and the back door on another. You enter what appears to be a one-storeyed cottage in a street half-way up the town, to find yourself on the top floor of quite a big house with the bathroom door facing you. Down a good many stairs you go and now you are in a fine dignified house with quite a fresh outlook. The street from which you entered is quite forgotten and this new house stands on a hilltop with a wide view over the
river far below. It was a great feat of engineering and of building to construct this closely built town clinging to the sides of so steep a hill. Sometimes it seems that there is not room for another house at all, but even here the skilful builders will slip in a tall narrow house, one room in width, apparently held up only by the hillside and by its neighbouring houses. Such towns can, of course, be seen in mountainous countries in parts of Italy or of Switzerland, but in Bradford the early builders seem to have been overtaken by a passion for picturesqueness and frolic, and to have chosen in that mood to build their town on the most difficult site in the neighbourhood.

  So much for the actual situation of Bradford: now for its appearance. We have come into one of the stone districts of Wiltshire, where from Bath to the Cotswolds the whole country blossoms out into stone-built houses of that entrancing colour which can be seen throughout the area, all of them crowned with reposeful roofs of stone tiles. The buildings spring so naturally from the soil that they seem to have placed themselves as freely as do other works of nature, as the trees, the grass or the flowers. The stones alone must have taken the thing in hand. They needed no architect, only the builder’s trowel to pat them into place.

  That is the first impression, but as history slowly asserts itself it is evident that the town of Bradford is something far other than a succession of very picturesque heaps of stones.

  The first historical figure known to be connected with Bradford was St Aldhelm, born about 640, who was Abbot of Malmesbury and then founded an abbey at Bradford. He was a far more individual and romantic figure than one expects in an abbot, for before all things he was a bard who sang to the harp the legends of the Christian religion, standing on the bridge near where the people passed and singing so musically that they all stopped to listen. In 705 Aldhelm was made the first Bishop of Sherborne, and once on his way from there to Bradford he stopped to preach near Warminster. He thrust his pastoral staff into the earth and used it as the site for his pulpit. As he preached it sprouted and became a tree—Bishop’s Tree, now Bishop’s Trow. This episcopal bard was the first Englishman to write Latin poetry, and he also translated the Psalms into English and wrote English poetry of his own which was much admired by King Alfred. In Salisbury Cathedral Library there is an eleventh-century manuscript of St Aldhelm’s De laude virginitatis (in Praise of Virginity), a very favourite book in the Middle Ages.

  In 1125 William of Malmesbury wrote the first life of St Aldhelm, who, he says, is “ generally supposed to have built a monastery at Bradford on Avon, and to this day at that place there exists a little church he is said to have built in honour of the death of St Lawrence.”

  The church William of Malmesbury speaks of is still to be seen at Bradford, and it is one of the most perfect examples of Saxon architecture existing in this country today. Whether the one we see is the one actually built by Aldhelm has been questioned by so many learned men that anyone taking William of Malmesbury on trust is obviously no scholar. All we can say on that point is that here is indeed a very beautiful Saxon church which was rediscovered in 1858 by Prebendary Jones, then Vicar of Bradford, for that is simply a romantic story. To appreciate it it is not necessary to study carefully the “ one hundred and eighty-three ecclesiastical edifices each containing more or less Saxon work” which exist in England, and to decide exactly to which architectural period this church originally belonged. Possibly some new generation of learned men may some day discover that Canon Jones never existed, but meantime we can enjoy the so far unquestioned story of the nineteenth century which tells that some time in the 1850’s he was supervising some repairs to some old cottages near the parish church. While these were going on two carved stone angels were discovered which set him thinking that they must have been connected with an ancient building. Soon afterwards when he was walking on the hill above Bradford he observed three important-looking roofs standing out among this group of cottages. They were indeed unlike the buildings of the last two centuries and they might indeed well have set him thinking, for they turned out to be the roofs of the nave, chancel and porch of the long-lost Saxon church. It was not until 1871 that Canon Jones succeeded in separating this church from the later buildings and so showing to the world the Saxon church we know today. The whole thing is another instance of the gift possessed by the Bradford builders of slipping in a fresh house wherever there was, or was not, the smallest bit of space to contain it. This habit was deeply rooted among them long before any respect had begun to be shown to “antiquities”, for they were practical men resolved that wherever a building had been, or could be, safely suspended upon the side of the steep hill on which their town was built, there a dwelling-house should be placed.

  During the Middle Ages the history of Bradford is largely the history of certain families, all, or nearly all, connected with the wool trade. They are the families of Horton, Hall, Methuen, Manvers and Long. The town was growing prosperous and more and more people were coming into the place to transact business connected with the market; and so the clothiers felt the need for good bridges in the town. Two very fine ones were built at this time—the Town Bridge with, at its eastern end, what Aubrey called “ a little chapel as at Bath for masse”. This bridge was originally merely a packhorse bridge only wide enough for pedestrians or for a single horse carrying a pack. The larger transport was compelled to cross the river by the ford. As time went on this bridge was enlarged to take all sorts of traffic and now a large bridge was built near the grand old Barn, one of the prides of the town. This Barn was probably built about the first half of the fourteenth century by Gilbert of Middleton, a bold, energetic man, who was not only lord of the manor at Bradford but was also a prebendary of no less than five cathedrals. Barton Barn has been described as “like a long nave with double transepts, being 170 feet in length and 20 feet in breadth—indeed, including the transepts, no less than 60 broad”. The roof of this barn is a most remarkable structure, mostly supported by its own roof-timbers which carry the weight direct to the ground so as to keep it off the walls. The marks of the master masons can still be recognised on the walls, so that it is possible to see how many men were employed in this great and difficult task. The parish church owes much to the families of Hall and of Horton; but the most famous of all the buildings of this period is Kingston House, probably dating from the very end of the sixteenth century. This house was chosen as a model of English architecture to be copied at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Like Hardwick Hall, Kingston House “has more glass than wall” and was built in the new style which was then superseding the mediæval manor-houses all about. In some ways it is reminiscent of Longleat, not twenty miles away, though that broke further fresh ground. Aubrey spoke of the “house of John Hall of Bradford … best built house for the quality of a gentleman in Wiltshire, built all of freestone full of windows”. From the Hall family the house passed, through the marriage of Rachel Baynton, the grand-daughter and sole heiress of John Hall, to the Duke of Kingston, and then acquired the name of Kingston House. The Duchess of Kingston was the heroine of the chief cause célèbre of the eighteenth century, for she was prosecuted for bigamy. Hannah More describes the trial, to which she went with Mr Garrick: “… in full dress by seven. You will imagine the bustle of five thousand people getting into one hall.” The severe Hannah remarks that the Duchess has “ but small remains of that beauty of which kings and princes were once so enamoured. She is large and ill-shaped. There was nothing white but her face; and had it not been for that, she would have looked like a bale of bombazeen.”

  The Duchess was certainly a surprising figure to appear among the Bradford clothiers. She loved display and good food. Horace Walpole said that at one of her fêtes, “ on all the sideboards and even on the chairs were pyramids and troughs of strawberries and cherries; you would have thought her the protege of Bertumnus himself”. Instead of this, she was the granddaughter of good Mr Hall of Bradford-on-Avon.

  The Duchess of Kingston brings Bradford into a world far apart
from the world of those respectable wool merchants who built the barns, bridges and almshouses of their native town. We are, in fact, not far from the famous Mr Shrapnel of Bradford who invented the monstrous shell still called by his name. However, contemporary with Mr Shrapnel was the builder of a very lovely house, carrying Bradford into quite a new architectural tradition. This is Wood of Bath, who built Belcombe House at Bradford as a home for himself in 1735. Here the cramped space offered by the steep hillside gives place to an almost level park containing some magnificent ilexes and other forest trees dotted about on the grass and surrounding a large pond. Here and there are little classic temples, casinos and grottoes delighting the heart of the designer of Bath, and these buildings include a rural cottage in the romantic manner just coming in vogue. All this is surprising in Bradford, but the house itself is far more unexpected. In the first place Wood found himself compelled to follow the Bradford method and to draft his house on to an earlier building—in this case, the magistrates’ house which contains the old justice’s room. But Wood’s own house is so complete that it is hard to believe that it does not compose the whole of the dwelling. The tiny Octagon Room might almost belong to the palace of the Fairy Queen, its ceiling rich with elaborate plaster-work, its playfully decorated shelves and its very narrow windows, the shutters of which are gay with Cupids and roses. The drawing-room is a more important-looking room and is not so enchantingly playful, although the ceiling is adorned with a plasterwork pattern of leaves and the friezes are richly baroque. From all this gay frivolity one passes upstairs to the justice’s room, with over it the prison, a horrible dark little cell, the entrance to which is almost too small for the slimmest figure to squeeze through. Like the early Bradford builders who stuffed six or seven cottages into the Saxon church, Mr Wood built a little holiday house beneath a prison.