A more typical Devizes character was Thomas Lawrence, the proprietor of the Bear Inn from 1772 to 1781. His wife was known as the beauty of Tenbury, for his first successful escapade was to elope with the daughter of the parson there, but soon after he came to Devizes he showed his interest in travellers who patronised his inn. There were then, as now, very few roads across the Plain, and many people lost their way on its immense expanse of green turf. At intervals of half a mile on the shortest route between Salisbury and Devizes, Mr Lawrence placed a twelve-foot high white post, marked with the number of miles separating it from each of the two towns. These were found a great help by travellers on those uncharted downs. But Lawrence became more famous for his son than for his signposts, for when he arrived in Devizes he brought with him his little boy aged three or four, who used to make drawings of the guests who came to the inn. An existing one is still inscribed at some later date, “Drawn by me when I was three weeks old, I believe.”
The innkeeper also loved poetry, and before Tommy was five years old the father would stand him up on the table ready to recite the poems of Milton or of Collins. Mr Lawrence’s slogan was, “ Gentlemen, here is my son. Will you have him recite the poets or take your portraits?”
Garrick once passed through Devizes on his way to Bath, when Tommy was placed on the table to recite a long passage from Shakespeare. When Mr Garrick was on his return journey, he called out at the entrance to the Bear, “Landlord, has Tommy learnt any more speeches, eh?” and then, turning to the little boy, he asked him whether he meant to be a painter or an actor when he grew up. Tommy thought earnestly, and then said “Both.” There is no doubt that at this time Tommy Lawrence was the most famous person in Devizes. The town was on the direct route between London and Bath, and fashionable people used to break their journey to “ spend an hour or two with Tommy Lawrence”. The Duchess of Kent and her young daughter, Princess Victoria, were among the little boy’s admirers, as were Mrs Siddons, Mrs Thrale and Fanny Burney. When Tommy Lawrence was ten years old, Sir Joshua Reynolds said of him that “this child was the most promising child he had met”. But every story of Lawrence at Devizes shows that he had a charming nature, very simple and unaffected, and in this he must have been unlike his father, who sounds as if he had the art of advertisement by heart.
MALMESEURY
The story of Malmesbury sends us back to the days of legend, and no one who knows Wiltshire will think the worse of it for that. In 974 King Edgar wrote of “that most celebrated monastery which the Angles call by the two-fold name of Maldelmesburg”. That rebus-like word combines the names of two of the great men connected with Malmesbury’s foundation—the legendary British King Malmud, and the Abbot Aldhelm, the first Bishop of Sherborne. So Malmesbury goes back to the days when Britain was inhabited by that profoundly civilised race which built Avebury and Stonehenge, and made the first roads to traverse the whole country. Malmud is a traditional king of all England in the fourth century B.C., and anyone who questions the fact of his existence must also question the existence of Avebury, Stonehenge and the countless camps and prehistoric remains on the downs. Of all the great military leaders of early Britain, we hear most about Malmud and his sons, Belinus and Brennus, who crossed the Alps some centuries before Hannibal. Tristanus, the first historian of Milan, says, “All authors concur in making Brennus, who burnt Rome at the head of the Gauls, the founder of Milan as a fortified city.” But Malmud founding Malmesbury is surely not such a tall story as that his son conquered Italy. For Malmesbury remained, for many centuries, a stronghold of whatever race possessed the south of England. But Malmud was more than a military architect. Like Moses, he was not only a soldier and a traveller but he was also a lawgiver. The Code Malmud is said to have been brought into this country about the time of Abraham, and it was largely expressed in “triads” so that it could easily be memorised. Some of these triads seem to have influenced the political thought of England from that time to this. Here are some of them:
“There are three tests of Civil Liberty, viz., Equality of Rights, Equality of Taxation, Freedom to come and go.
“There are three things that are private and sacred property to every man, Briton or foreigner—his wife, his children, his domestic chattels.
“There are three civil birthrights of every Briton—the right to go where he pleases, the right where-ever he is to protection from his land and sovereign, the right of equal privileges and equal restrictions.
“There are three sons of captives who free themselves—a bard, a scholar and a mechanic.
“There are three persons who have a right to public maintenance, the old, the babe, the foreigner who cannot speak the British tongue.”
How much the British race has learnt from Malmud!
Malmesbury remained a stronghold after the Saxons had settled in Britain, and then there arrived the Irish missionary who seems almost as legendary as Malmud. This was Madulf, whose name would really be too like Malmud’s to carry conviction were he not vouched for by his famous pupil Aldhelm, who really did exist and who said that Madulf existed too.
In 640 Madulf founded a school here, to which Ina, King of Wessex, sent his nephew Aldhelm as a pupil. By 675 the pupil had become the headmaster of the school, which he afterwards turned into an abbey. In 705 Ina made Aldhelm the first Bishop of Sherborne, and he still held that position when he built two new churches at Malmesbury, as well as founding abbeys at Bradford-on-Avon and at Frome.
Yet another name is connected with the city and the abbey of Malmesbury. This is King Athelstan, who reigned from 924 to 940. He was the grandson of Alfred the Great, and possessed plenty of the family’s beauty and gifts. He won a great victory over the Danes at Malmesbury, in memory of which he gave to the burgesses, in 930, a gift of five hundred acres of land. The Charter runs, “I give and grant to them that royal Heath near my little town of Norton, for their aid given to me in my conflict with the Danes.” These “Commoners’ Lands” are still appreciated as so important to the town of Malmesbury that when its new corporation was granted in 1886, the old corporation was “permitted to remain in being as a perpetual Close Corporation for the management of the Commoners’ Lands, and other properties among which were their old records”.
Athelstan has been called the great “benefactor of the town”, and descriptions of him are full of romance. His grandfather made him a knight when he was quite a boy, giving to him a “scarlet cloak, a belt studded with diamonds, and a Saxon sword with a golden scabbard”. He also possessed wonderful treasures given to him by other European sovereigns, among which were
“such perfumes as had never been seen in England before; jewels that illuminated the countenances of the beholders: fleet horses, champing golden bits: alabaster vases on which the figures seemed to move with life: the sword of Constantine the Great bearing his name in golden letters, and on the pummel six plates of gold with an iron spike said to have been used at the Crucifixion of Our Lord: the spear of Charlemagne, said also to have pierced Our Saviour’s Side: a diadem so sparkling that the more you looked at it the more you were dazzled; beside a portion of the Holy Cross and Crown of Thorns.”
These last two relics he left to the monastery of Malmesbury.
Malmesbury Abbey stands on a peninsula which rises above the confluence of the Avon and Newton Brooks almost as strikingly as does the peak of Teneriffe from the Atlantic. The magnificent ruin of the abbey we see today was by no means the original one. This was built in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and shows the transition from the finest Norman type, through the various Early English styles, to the Perpendicular. Each century contributed of its best to the great building.
The monastery at Malmesbury was the last in Wiltshire to be suppressed by Henry VIII. It was surrendered in 1549, and the site and buildings were committed to the care of Sir Edward Baynton. Certain parts of the monastery were deemed to be superfluous, and these Sir Edward handed over to his deputy, William Stump, “an ex
ceeding rich clothier”. Stump was just the kind of man Henry liked to meet when he had an abbey in hand, and it was not long before the clothier had bought the whole site from the King. He decreed that the smaller parish church was superfluous and demolished it, and turned the nave of the abbey church into the parish church.
Aubrey, writing two hundred years later, says that Stump meant to build two streets for his workmen to live in, upon various parts of the abbey and its precincts. In this observation he was quoting from Leland, who says:
“The hole logginges of th’abbay be now longging to one Stumpe, an exceeding rich clothiar, that boute them of the king. This Stumpe was the chef causer and contributor to have th’abbay chirch made a paroch chirch. At this present tyme every corner of the vaste houses of office that belongid to th’abbay be full of lumbes to weeve cloth yn, and this Stumpe entendith to make a strete or 2 for cloathiers in the back vacant ground of the abbay that is withyn the town waulles. There be made now every yere in the town a 3,000 clothes.”
The town hall of Malmesbury is a nineteenth-century building, but one pair of the interesting maces is pre-Commonwealth. It bears the arms of the Stuarts, and escaped being sold when both sides in the Civil War were raising as much money as possible to pay their soldiers.
MARLBOROUGH
A few years ago an unknown man lay dying in a hospital in the East End of London. He had no friends, no visitors, no letters, and no one even knew his name. He was just a fragment of jetsam thrown up from the London docks. One day when the chaplain came to see him, he seemed restless. He tried to speak. The chaplain bent over him, saying. “ Do you want anything?” At first there was no answer: then a sudden light of memory lit up the dying face. He said words: “The Marlborough Downs in the rain.” The light failed him; he fell back dead.
That man must have been a native of Marlborough. He did not ask, as a passing visitor would do, for fine weather on the downs. The natives see their beauty in all weathers.
Marlborough has one distinction. It is about the coldest place in the country. It lies in a depression among the highest downs in Wiltshire, and as one approaches it from above, the town has a quiet serenity and beauty, which it retains “come wind, come weather”. Its broad High Street is fringed with good old houses. There is a church at each end of the town, a town hall and a public school. Yet the name of Marlborough is always linked with the word “castle”. There is now no castle to be seen, and yet these other buildings seem unimportant enough to have been after-thoughts.
Richard Cœur de Lion had a foster-brother named Alexander Neckham, who wrote a poem called “The Praise of Divine Wisdom”. Only one couplet relates to Marlborough:
Great Merlin’s grave
Its name to Marlborough in Saxon gave.
and the town’s motto contains these words, “Where are sage Merlin’s bones?”
These two quotations obviously connect Marlborough Castle with the Marlborough Mound, a mysterious earthwork something on the lines of Silbury but infinitely smaller, and the mediæval Marlborough Castle was obviously built to make use of this strong position which was already found on the site. It probably dates from the days of the famous Bishop Roger, and was, like Devizes, besieged more than once in the wars between the Empress Maud and Stephen. There are records of a good many repairs during the reign of Henry III, but when Leland visited Marlborough in 1541 he only saw the ruins of a great castle with the dungeon tower on its mound still half-erect. Soon after this some member of the family of the protector Somerset made Leland’s “ruins” into a dwelling-house, and in 1713 Lord Hertford (later the seventh Duke of Somerset) married one of the Thynnes of Longleat and brought her to live in a new castle which he had just erected on the same site. Lady Hertford was “a toast” for the poets of the day. The next generation turned the castle into an inn, which had a great reputation in coaching days. It was this inn which became the school house of Marlborough College, and it is this school which now gives to Marlborough its chief activities. They have quite superseded the ancient fame of Merlin.
WILTON
Four miles west of Salisbury the long ridge surmounted by Grovely and Great Ridge woods which parts the river valleys of the Wylye and the Nadder drops suddenly down to the water level. Two miles farther on the two rivers join, and, in the piece of level land which lies between them before they meet, the town of Wilton lies. It therefore has a very limited and definite space and one which was from the first utilised to the best advantage.
The borough of Wilton is older than the kingdom of England, and the beginnings of the two were closely connected. We must go back to the Dark Ages, for it was as long ago as A. D. 519 that the first Anglo-Saxon was given the right of King, and he received it at Wilton. In A.D. 495, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that “there came two Aldermen to Britain, Cerdic and Cynric his son, with five ships at the place which is called Cerdices Ora, and on the same day fought against the Welsh”. Cerdices Ora is Charford near Downton, and after this battle the West Saxons moved up the Avon and settled at Wilton, where they were known as the Wilsaetes or Royal Family, and here they considered themselves as “a race apart”. The Wilton people still hold that opinion. The Chronicle continues: “A.D. 519. In this year Cerdic and Cynric assumed the kingdom of the West Saxons, and the royal offspring of the West Saxons has reigned from that day.”
Wilton was the capital of the kingdom of Wessex till, in 838, Egbert united the seven states of the heptarchy into one, and so created the kingdom of England. The first treaty bringing this about was signed at Richmond in Surrey, between Egbert and the Archbishop of Canterbury, but this document had no constitutional force till it had been ceremonially signed by the King in his palace “in my royal borough of Wilton”. Both these documents can still be seen in the Record Office, where it is possible to compare the writing of the two scribes.
That royal palace is probably buried under Kingsbury Square, the charming little quadrangle with its green turf and its pollarded limes, which now look completely Georgian. No one would guess that here was proclaimed in the ninth century the first King of all England.
Egbert then founded a small Benedictine priory at Wilton, and King Alfred made this into an abbey to commemorate his victory over the Danes in 871, the site of which is marked by a barrow on the high ground in the Deer Park. The Abbess of Wilton was the first among the four who were given the right to sit in the House of Lords, and the Abbey was a school where many Saxon princesses were educated, including Saint Edith, the daughter of King Edgar, and Wilton’s patron saint. As a borough Wilton from the first possessed a mint and there are still in existence coins minted here in King Edgar’s reign.
Wilton retained its dignity after the conquest, when another Queen Edith made it into a kind of royal dower house. She was the widow of Edward the Confessor and the sister of Harold, and was a close friend of the Conqueror, who is said to have “ loved welle Seynt Edus Abbay, and meche gode to hit he oft tymes dede”. William’s son, Henry I, married Matilda, the niece and pupil of the Abbess of Wilton, and he showed his interest in the place by at once renewing all its old privileges in a charter which is still in existence. Many subsequent charters confirmed and extended these, but they were all superseded by the more democratic charter of 1884 granted by Queen Victoria. The last Wilton Queen brought the town to disaster, for Queen Matilda, daughter of the Empress Maud, made the place for a time her headquarters during the war with Stephen. It was burnt to the ground.
Till the Abbey was dissolved in 1541, the church was the most influential power in the place. There were then thirteen churches here, including the cathedral-like chapel of the Abbey and the priory of St John of Jerusalem.
When the new Salisbury followed the cathedral down from Old Sarum, in the thirteenth century, this mushroom city obtained from the King a charter allowing them to hold a market. King Henry’s charter had not secured for Wilton any exclusive right to this, but it was a very important point, for fairs and markets were the main cent
res of trade in the country districts. Wilton took the law into its own hands. The only bridge over the Nadder and the Wylye was here, so that everyone going to Salisbury from the west had to pass through the town. So the bailiffs of Wilton made a practice of “waylaying, hindering, stopping, and beating” the merchants before they could reach Salisbury. But the new town possessed a strong weapon in the person of Bishop Bingham, who built Harnham Bridge and had the road diverted to go to the city that way. This, with the subsequent loss of the Abbey, might have made an end of Wilton, but for the coming of the Herberts, to whom, in the person of William, created first Lord Pembroke, Henry VIII granted, in 1544, “the Abbey and lands of Wilton in perpetuity”. The arrival of the Herberts at once brought Wilton into the current of Renaissance art and literature and their magnificent entertainments were an everyday sight there during the next two centuries. This might have been rather apart from the Wilton people, but the Pembrokes were not like that. During the seventeenth century Wilton was beginning to use the wool which was the chief product of the downs, to manufacture something unlike the usual cloth and blankets, so they began to make “ somewhat coarse and inferior” carpets. Thomas, the eighth Earl, obtained a charter from William III, which made the Wilton weavers into a corporation and “prohibiting all persons not licensed by the corporate body from carrying on a similar business within four miles of Wilton”. But Thomas’ son and successor Henry, the architect Earl, travelled much on the Continent, where he saw the fine work of French and Belgian weavers. He then became dissatisfied with the home products, and tried to persuade Louis XV to lend him some weavers to teach their craft in Wilton. But that king was not inclined to set up a rival firm, even though the factory would be more than four miles away. He refused. Henry seemed to give up the idea, and instead he offered to buy an enormous cask of canary wine, for which he paid an enormous price. When it reached Wilton, out stepped Anthony Duffosy and Peter Jemaule, the King of France’s two most skilled weavers, and here they settled and taught the Wilton people to make the most delicate kind of carpet ever produced in this country.
Wiltshire Page 18
