Fortunately, in the persons of Captain and Mrs. Cunnington, Wiltshire still possesses archæological in the true line of succession; and, after repeated efforts to identify the barrows and other landmarks mentioned in the old descriptions, they lighted upon a remark in Stukeley’s Abury. He is writing about the “fine group of barrows under Cherhill hill”, at which point he thought that the Beckhampton Avenue ended. He goes on, “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”.
These words gave the Cunningtons their long-sought indication. Mrs. Cunnington writes, “On going to this spot, it was found that 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 roadside, it became easy to define the possible area on which the Sanctuary must have stood”.
There it is, aeroplanes, telegraph poles and other modern “atrocities”, the advent of which so greatly shocked our parents and grandparents, are now all brought into partnership with the indispensable spade in the discovery of the buried past.
The early archæological were poets rather than scientists, but they were in many ways quite as reliable as their nineteenth-century successors. When Aubrey said that some of “the high stones of Stonehenge are honeycombed so deep that the starres doe make their nests in the holes”, he is recording a truth as definite as any scientific fact. He sees it with a poet’s eye, and this beauty of language, which belonged to the seventeenth century writers, sometimes made people inclined to discredit their facts. Really, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who founded modem archæology in Wiltshire, was not so near the earth as his poetic predecessors; for while they wrote of what they themselves had seen, the charming and popular Sir Richard went forth on an excavating excursion, employed a gang of labourers, paid them well, and then left them to get on with the digging, while he lunched long and well with the Squire. When the meal was over Sir Richard returned to the scene of action, and was shown the specimens which the workmen had found. They had decided what was worth keeping, and Sir Richard never saw exactly how or where the discoveries had been made. In spite of this, his historical insight has never been excelled.
General Pitt-Rivers was the first archaeologist I can remember. He often stayed with my parents, and to a child he appeared both far taller and far more beautiful than the ordinary race of men. I still think of him when I read in the book of Genesis, that “ there were giants on the earth in those days”. The records of his work can still be seen in his little museum at Farnham, where there exists a wonderful catalogue of the exhibits, every one of which is illustrated by the most careful, exact and delicate drawings in ink.
But although the giants of archæology have passed away as a race, perhaps the men of to-day are even more than giants. They are learning to pass on their studies from one generation to another, and so to vanquish their own mortality. We may criticise Sir Richard Colt Hoare for being limited to the science of his own day, but few people can see further than their own eyes will carry. Mr. Keiller, the learned and enthusiastic excavator of Avebury, has taught the world of archæological how to pass the process of scientific discovery from one generation to another. When he began to excavate an extremely interesting and unusual camp on Windmill Hill, he decided that future generations might advance still further in their technique. Our investigations might possibly leave out just what they wanted to know. He therefore excavated half of the site; made copious and exact reports on it; covered it up again, and handed it over, with the undeveloped part, to the nation, on the understanding that no further investigation should take place for a hundred years. This is indeed selfless devotion to the cause of science.
There is near me a site which is of historical, though not Archæological, interest, and during the years immediately preceding the war, some very exciting work was being done on it. It is Clarendon Palace. This famous building had disappeared as completely as “ the Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep”, although it had remained a favourite hunting place of the English kings until the time of Henry VII. It was now a legend. Farm buildings for ten miles round were made of stones and bricks quarried from its walls; and the village people said that a great chair of solid gold was somewhere buried in the ruins of the palace. There still remained a footpath which at all seasons of the year was miraculously green; and this was said to have been the one used by St. Thomas à Becket when he was “a cure priest at Winterbourn, and did use to go up to a chapell in Clarendon Parke to say masse”. From the site of the lost palace could still be seen the glorious view over Salisbury and Old Sarum which delighted the Plantagenet courtiers and their ladies when they returned from the chase; but trees and ragged undergrowth covered the broad plateau upon which the palace itself had stood. The excavation of Clarendon shows how, nowadays, every kind of person delights to join in the search for lost historical monuments. Professor and Mrs. Tancred Borenius started the work, and carried out the chief part of it themselves, assisted by another expert in the person of Mr. John Charlton. The Christie Millers, who own the site, were among the keenest of the searchers. A party of University undergraduates spent weeks there in the summer vacation. Working men from the surrounding villages showed themselves natural archæological, and unemployed miners from South Wales were of course masterly diggers. The result of all this work was that the ground-plan of the palace was slowly revealed. The walls of the great hall still remained standing up to a certain level, and this hall was approached by a broad stairway leading from the kitchen. The fourteenth century tiles were still in their places on the floor of the queen’s apartments; and what most of all excited the experts was the discovery of the only mediaeval tile-kiln not associated with a religious house. Here the Clarendon tiles had been made and baked; here they were laid in position; here they remained to be found in 1935.
Less than half of the palace has yet come back to light, but I hope that this work will be carried on when peace returns to the countryside.
3 Literary Pilgrimages
THERE ARE PARTS OF ENGLAND WHERE THE PILGRIM HAS no need of signposts. His way is illumined by a lighthouse which cannot be blacked-out even to-day, for it shines with “the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the Poet’s dream”. I mean those neighbourhoods which are associated with the names of poets and artists. To these we have always made pilgrimages, and to them we can still find our way.
If I think first of the Lake Country, perhaps it is because Wordsworth not only lived there, but wrote a Guide to the Lakes, and a guide, moreover, which was famous enough for Matthew Arnold to affirm that one of the earliest pilgrims to the Poet’s Shrine asked Mr. Wordsworth whether he had ever written anything except the Guide to the Lakes. I know one ought to think that man a buffoon, but personally, I love him—his candour and his taste. Wordwsorth is a guide well worth following to-day. And he remains so in spite of the fact that he violently attacked the railway as an approach to the Lakes, and I can guess what he would think of the motor-bus. He wrote that “the wide-spread waters … the steep mountains and the rocky glens” could only “ be profitably enjoyed by a mind disposed to peace.… Go to a pantomine, a farce or a puppet-show”, he says, “ if you want noisy pleasure—the crowd of spectators who partake your enjoyment will, by their presence and acclamations, enhance it.’’
But it must not be thought that Wordsworth is out of touch with the spirit of to-day, for his suggested approach to the Lake Country was completely twentieth century. He invites the pilgrim to reach it by air. He tells his imaginary companion to “ suppose our station to be upon a cloud hanging midway between the mountains of Great Gavel and Scawfell’’;—from there he will see the whole country spread out before him.
In other ways Wordsworth’s Guide is still a useful book to take to the Lake Country. It is still apposite to remind the pilgrim that “Fastidiousness is a wretched t
ravelling companion”, and the poet makes no secret that he who is fastidious about the weather will miss much of the magic of the Lake Country. He admits that “it has been ascertained that twice as much rain falls here as in many parts of the island”, but he glories in the beauty of “the showers, darkening, or brightening, as they fly from hill to hill”, and in the “Vapours descending towards the valleys with inaudible motion” which “give a visionary character to everything around them”. So it is that there often occur in the Lake Country “ days which are worth whole months”.
But Wordsworth is not always in the clouds, and he comes down to earth in his record of how this country of lake and mountain, of waterfall, stream and tarn, nevertheless owes much of its character and beauty to those who have lived there in past days. The Lords of the Manor, the Abbots, the shepherds, the dalesmen and the “statesmen” have left behind them the buildings in which they lived and worked, all fulfilling their own functions and imparting an individual beauty to the scene.
This brings us to Wordsworth’s own Lakeland homes, none of which are described in his Guide, but all of which now attract the traveller. Cockermouth, where he was born, lies just outside the Lake Country, but when he came back to Westmoreland as a man he lived in three different houses—“ Dove Cottage” and “Allan Bank” at Grasroere, and “ Rydal Mount” a few miles away. Dove Cottage is the place of pilgrimage, and nowhere else can there be a house which so completely holds the fragrance of those early days as does this little cottage, described day by day in Dorothy’s diary, and with its garden still filled with flowers descended from those she planted. The brother and sister arrived at Dove Cottage at 4.30 in the darkening afternoon of December 20, 1799, and years afterwards old Molly Fisher, their next-door neighbour, told Dorothy she “ mun never forget t’laal striped gown and t’laal straw bonnet as ye stood here”. Every inch of the cottage and garden comes to life in Dorothy’s journal, and indeed their diminutiveness is such that every inch tells. There never can have been so tiny a place which held so much. The orchard, still reached by the little stone steps which William built, must be the smallest orchard ever made—a narrow space of green in which it is possible to stand and touch the two sides by stretching out one’s arms. A green linnet, or a butterfly, would be quite prominent inhabitants of this doll’s orchard. And all about this homely paradise there spread “the Intimations of Immortality” for the Ode was written in the orchard. Thanks to Dorothy, it is possible to place and to date the writing of many of Wordsworth’s most exquisite lyrical poems in the few feet covered by the house, the garden and the orchard.
Stratford-on-Avon is not so remote as the Lake Country, and in his native town Shakespeare is almost buried under Shakespeariana. In spite of this, one still feels with Edward Fitzgerald that to visit Stratford is “an event in one’s life”. One shares his impression. “ It was not the town itself”, he wrote, “or even the church that touched me most; but the old Footpaths over the Fields which He must have crossed three Centuries ago.’’
William Hall visited Stratford in 1694 and he says that the well-known inscription above Shakespeare’s grave was written by the poet to suit “the capacity of clerks and sextons, for the most part a very ignorant set of people”. Hall thinks that but for this curse the sexton would certainly have transferred Shakespeare’s remains to the bone-house. These are the lines which checked that sexton’s sacrilege:
GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.
So though his admirers have not disturbed his coffin, they have made his native town into a sarcophagus.
Yet the little streets remain; and many of the houses; and the river; and the meadows; and the way to Shottery where Anne Hathaway lived. The plays themselves “ tell us some of the memories which Shakespeare carried with him out of his boyhood, sometimes a little picture which is meaningless to anyone who knows nothing of his childhood; sometimes a romantic episode, embedded in his writing like a precious stone in a mine, and giving unconscious testimony to “the hole of the pit whence” it was “ digged”. Shakespeare’s works contain many allusions indicating memories of Stratford-on-Avon between the years 1575 and 1585.
Fortunately for us there has been in recent years a literary pilgrim to Stratford-on-Avon who made some most revealing discoveries. Madame Longworth de Chambrun stayed for some time in the neighbourhood, and she pottered about among old leases, records and the reports of coroners’ inquests. In her Shakespeare: Actor—Poet, she brings Shakespeare’s Stratford to life, by reviving all kinds and sorts of people who lived about it in his day, people whom he may, or may not, have known personally, but whose figures filled the streets he walked in. They were the subjects of conversation and gossip in the days when the young poet was gathering his impressions.
All visitors to Stratford know Shakespeare’s birthplace, but all may not know that his father did not occupy the whole house. Madame de Chambrun’s researches into contemporary Warwickshire leases discovered that the house was then divided into three. The Shakespeares lived in the middle one of these, having as neighbours on either side Richard Horneby, the blacksmith, and William Wedgwood, the tailor. This throws new light upon Hubert’s description in King John of the crowd brought into the street by the rumour that the French had landed:
I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news;
Who with his shears and measure in his hand
Standing on slippers (which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet)
Told of a many thousand warlike French.
To recall to life that one scene alone makes it worth while to go to Stratford and to stand where that little boy stood nearly four hundred years ago.
In the accounts of coroners’ inquests, Madame de Chambrun found some most telling evidence. In the very year of Shakespeare’s birth, a macabre tragedy took place in the town, and as it concerned the family of one of the principal townsmen, no doubt it was talked of for years in the hearing of the little boy.
A young woman named Charlotte Clopton was buried in her family vault, which was re-opened some years later for another burial. Then it was found that Charlotte must have been in a trance when they thought her dead. She had awoken and got off her bier, to dash her head unavailing against the door of the tomb, and in her unavailing struggles to break her way to daylight, she had seized as tools the dead men’s bones that lay about on the ground. She was still clutching them in her hands when they found her.
This frightful story must have haunted Shakespeare, and he makes Juliet say, before she drinks the fatal draught:
O! if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears,
And madly play with my forefather’s joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains.
Madame de Chambrun came upon the report of another coroner’s inquest which took place in Stratford when Shakespeare was sixteen. Here one reads the story of Katherine Hamlett’s death. The girl was found drowned, after an unhappy love affair, and the jury had to decide whether or no they should return a verdict of felo de se. The parents pleaded that the girl had died by accident, for at the place where the body was found, a great willow leant across the stream, and her clothes were entangled in its roots. It was contended that she had climbed upon the tree trunk and bent over to dip in the stream the flowers which were found in her hand. There is no doubt that the Queen in Hamlet knew this tragic story, for she says:
There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook,
That shews his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastic g
arlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, netdes, daisies, and long purples.…
There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies, and herself,
Fell in the weeping brook.
The evidence given by the witnesses at this inquest is largely reproduced in the talk of Shakespeare’s gravediggers.
A pilgrimage to Woodbridge and its neighbourhood is to step into that world of Edward Fitzgerald’s, where there is neither earth nor sea, but only atmosphere. He seems to have been one with the quiet, anonymous sweep of sea and land which blend together to make East Anglia. The very names, of his correspondents—Cowell, Lowell and the like—have captured the rounded echoes of those amphibious distances, and to spend a few days in Fitzgerald’s country is like peacefully sitting with Sabrina Fair,
“Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.’’
Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam was one of the famous books of the nineteenth century, but in it you may look in vain for the translator. Nor can you catch this elusive being in the Calderon Plays. He wished to be unrecognised, and that is why he gave his great poetic gifts chiefly to the task of translating other men’s masterpieces. But you do get him in his letters, and in them he lives to-day.
Yet he remains elusive, for we, who only read the letters, in many ways know as much of him as his correspondents did. He summed himself up when he wrote to John Allen:
Country Moods and Tenses Page 6