Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  But to return to the oldest inhabitant, there were always certain regular feasts. On Shrove Tuesday the children paraded the village, singing their Shrovetide songs, one of which was:

  I’ve come a’shroving

  After a piece of pancake

  Or a little Truckle cheese

  Of your own making.

  Is the knives and forks put?

  Is the bread and cheese cut?

  Is the best barrel tapped?

  For I’ve come a’shroving.

  On May Day there were more children’s parades, this time carrying “lovely garlands”; and on Whit Monday the Stockton club marched up to Stockton House with a band, and there they spent the evening, dancing on the lawn till well after the moon was up. At the Harvest Home there were suppers given by the farmers, and at Christmas time mummers and carol singers filled the air with all sorts of music.

  In the first half of the nineteenth century Stockton was much excited over the building of the railway, and no doubt the more conservative and old-fashioned people felt that this hideous innovation would be the end of the old Stockton. As a matter of fact it made very little difference. Stockton still “keeps itself to itself”, and the line is banished to so deep a cutting that the trains can hardly be seen or heard as they pass. But while the building was in process Stockton displayed its usual character of hospitality. The village people organised what would now be called a canteen for the navvies; they called it then a “ soup kitchen”. In return for this gesture, Mr Bowden at the level crossing started a little school for the village boys in his hut. But the naughty boys used to put bags over the chimney so that the class should be driven out by smoke.

  In those free and independent days any national festivity was seized upon by the versatile people of Stockton as an opportunity for one of their own jollifications. Royal weddings, coronations, jubilees, homecoming of troops and such local events as the return of General Yeatman-Biggs from the Sudan—all these were excuses for fêtes arranged by the villagers in their own way.

  And while this active life was carried on in this village of under three hundred people, what always struck the newcomer was the beauty and peace of the place itself. As a continuous background to the life of the day, there remained the architecture of the church, which had been completed in successive centuries since it was first founded in the year 1200. It is set in a little side-way off the street, with as its neighbours thirteenth-century almshouses, and as a quiet contrast the mellow red brick of Long Hall.

  The main street of the village makes a harmonious curve, and the thatched cottages have their own gardens to add to their beauty. One or two good farmhouses prepare the eye for Stockton House itself, at the end of the village, placed in a well-planted park. The actual date of the house is unknown as the original inscription upon it has been broken off; but the coats-of-arms of Elizabeth and James I in the Great Bedroom suggest that it was begun in the one reign and finished in the other.

  The village is off the main Wylye Valley road. The way to it is indicated by no official number. Its most appropriate map is still that vellum one of 1640 which hangs in Long Hall, bearing the names of the tenants in the middle of the seventeenth century, and showing the open field system of that date.

  A few miles farther down the Wylye Valley comes the village of Great Wishford about which there is much to say.

  GREAT WISHFORD

  “Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!”

  This is a traditional cry with which its inhabitants awake the dawn at four o’clock in the morning of Oak Apple Day, their annual feast. The original purpose and the details of the ceremony can be found in the Sum of the Ancient Customs belonging to Wishford and Barford out of the Forest of Grovely, which was written down after Henry VIII had given the estates belonging to the Abbey of Wilton to William Herbert. In 1909 the Survey of the lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke was printed by the Roxburghe Club from the original vellum rolls; and Dr Stratton, who edited this edition, gives in his introduction a short account of the Wishford customs which are found in the book in the original Latin. He describes the various courts which watched over the rights of landlords and tenants, and then he shortly sums up the position in 1566, when the commissioners began to make their survey. He says:

  “The Customs of Great Wishford and Barford St Martin were from time to time the subject of presentment to the Court of Vert and Ven in Grovely Forest, and the claims of the suitors to estovers and common rights of pasture and pannage were declared. For these they made acknowledgement by the payment of Woodhens to the keeper. They also went on Whit-Tuesday to the Cathedral of Salisbury ‘in a dance’ carrying boughs which they reverently laid on the Altar, and at the same time paid their Pentecostals or Smoke-Farthings. About a hundred years ago, the Cathedral procession was given up, and the dance transferred to the Rectory at Wishford. Besides their estovers and their right to gather snapping wood, the inhabitants claimed the privilege of felling and bringing away on a cart ‘drawn by men’s strength’ one load of young oak trees with which they decorated the village Church and their own houses. Whatever may have been their origin, the Boughday Customs, which in the reign of Elizabeth were celebrated on Holy Thursday, were transferred at the Restoration to May 29, or Oak Apple Day, and are so observed still. A load of young oak trees could be of no service as firewood, but it must have been necessary in an age when the villagers took their flocks to the hill grazing and repaired their Summer shealings as soon as their crops in the valley were sown. This practice persisted in Scotland and Norway until recent times. The procession, religious ceremony and dance were probably Christianised forms of rites once in use at that season of the year.”

  There are two existing copies of the Sum of the Ancient Customs—one is in a manuscript book at Wishford Rectory and the other in the Wilton Estate Office.

  The remarkable thing about the Wishford Festival is that, while its history certainly goes back to primeval times, there is no trace in the Oak Apple Day festivities of any artificial revival of some “olde” and archaic custom. The Wishford Feast is a completely natural and spontaneous gala on the part of the village people of today. It requires no bolstering up from earnest students of folklore. To spend Oak Apple Day in Wishford is to see history being lived with gaiety, correctness and conviviality.

  Nevertheless, those “ earnest students” may be able to throw some light on the origins of this most enjoyable festival; for it is impossible not to connect the Wishford Bough Day with other Midsummer Feasts. It is too much like them. Mr. J. U. Powell, writing just forty years ago in the Wilts Archæological Magazine, thinks that here we get a glimpse not only into early life but into primitive religion, for, he says, we find in Russia, Bohemia, Sweden and other parts of the Continent the custom of cutting down a tree and bringing it home.

  “All over Russia, every village and town is turned, a little before Whitsuntide, into a sort of garden. Everywhere along the streets young birch trees stand in rows, every house and every room is adorned with boughs: even the engines upon the railways are for the time decked with green leaves.… It is connected with the idea of the Tree Spirit, possessed of beneficent influence upon the growing crops.”

  Although early Nature religions were certainly not dead in the country parts of Wiltshire till centuries after the introduction of Christianity, we need not go so far back as that to find precursors of the Grovely customs. At any rate they can prove their connection with ancient British farm practices. It is well known that early British settlements were all on the hill-tops, leaving the valleys to woodland and marshes. Gradually “the people descended as the valleys were reclaimed from marsh and wood; that is, as tillage gradually succeeded pasturage, and the Neolithic herdsman became the Bronze Age farmer. But when the Spring came, the shepherds still drove their flocks to the hills for the Summer pasturage.” The details of the distribution of rights and duties between the lord of the manor and the Wishford people laid out in the Sum of Wishfo
rd customs show exactly this old system of summer pasturage for the flocks, which under the new landlord had to be adapted to fresh conditions.

  Underlying all the customs in the Sum was this fundamental principle:

  “None may put any cattle whatsoever into the said forest save only those persons who by ancient custom and right may justify the same.… Anyone finding unauthorised cattle may do therein according to the custom of the forest for the preservation of good pasture for the deer and for such cattle as of right and ancient custom are justifiable to pasture there.

  “The Lords of Wishford Magna and Barford St Martin and all their Freeholders and Tenants in every the said manors have ever had and by Right and Ancient Custom ought to have free common of pannage (pasturage from mast and acorns) in all Grovely for all their hogs and pigs, at all times of the year save only Sow Hogs above one year old in the Fence Month only.

  “The old custom is, and time out of mind hath been, that the People and Inhabitants of Wishford Magna and Barford St Martin may lawfully gather and bring away all kind of dead snapping wood boughs and sticks that be in the woods of Grovely at their Pleasure without Controulment; and none other besides them at any Time may lawfully fetch any away.”

  In spite of this limitation we find that in 1608 the freeholders of Wishford were complaining that “ Good Wife White of Stapleford and others there, John Hooper of Stoford and divers others there, John Baker of Everall, the Clerk of Newton and divers others there, and out of Ditchampton some, and out of Wilton very many, —do often resort into Grovely Wood and fetch fern and wood there, without any authority for doing thereof”.

  “The Lord of Wishford Magna hath had, and of Right ought to have, the office of the Forester in Grovely.” This rule means the duty of seeing that the customs were respected on both sides was left to the resident lord of the manor.

  The Sum was not only concerned with serious details of pasturage and of forestry: provision was also made for frolic:

  “The aforesaid Lords, Freeholders, and Tenants, of Great Wishford and Barford St Martin, have had, or of Right should ever time out of mind have, yearly brought unto them against every Whitsunday by the Ranger or his Assigns one fat Buck, the one half to Wishford and the other to Barford to make merry withal amongst the neighbours. And the Ranger is to have from each of the manors of Wishford and Barford one white Loaf and one Gallon of Beer and a Pair of Gloves or twelve pence in money for the whole; and if the Ranger do not bring or send the fat Buck, then the Inhabitants of either the said Manors, or any of them, after that day, may go into the said Forest, and kill and bring away a Buck for each of the said Parishes at their Pleasures, and then the said Ranger is not to have anything.

  “Item. The Lords, Freeholders, Tenants and Inhabitants of the Manor of Great Wishford, or so many of them as would, in ancient time, have used to go in a dance to the Cathedral Church of Our Blessed Lady in the city of New Sarum on Whit Tuesday, in the said county of Wilts, and there they made their claim to their custom in the forest of Grovely in these words,

  ‘Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!’ ”

  This custom was kept up until the nineteenth century, and Grace Read, the last survivor who took part in it, described it as a “regular revel, with booths and shows erected in the Close”. She died in her eighty-eighth year in 1871 and with her died the last echo of the steps heard for so many centuries before the high altar in Salisbury Cathedral and also of the tune to which the Wishford villagers danced there.

  After the “ revel” was suppressed, two women as a deputation from the Bough bearers went with oak branches which they reverently laid on the altar of the Cathedral Church while the rest of the inhabitants assembled at the Town’s End Tree in Wishford and went in procession through the village carrying oak branches. So it will be seen that the present Wishford festivities are directly descended from the very earliest.

  But there are other legends connected with Wishford which are quite independent of these ancient customs. The first is the story of the Bonham tomb which commemorates Thomas and Edith Bonham who died in 1473 and 1469. Sir Richard Colt Hoare, in his Modern Wilts, says of this tomb:

  “There is a very old monument in memory of one Bonham, Lord of the Manor, in solid stone at full length, drest in pilgrim’s habit with a leathern belt round his waist, and pouch or scrip by his side: and as report says he was the father of seven children born at one birth, and all brought to church in a sieve to be baptized. The occasion of this wonderful event was said to be, that their family coming on very fast, they were mistrustful that they should not be able to maintain them, and so agreed to part for seven years, and if neither party was seen or heard of, to be at liberty to marry again. He went abroad, and she was in England with the babies; the time was nearly expired, and the lady on the point of marriage. The news was made known to him by a witch, who conveyed him home instantly, and he found his lady to be married the next day. He was at first denied admittance, for he had not shaved himself the whole time, and no one remembered his person till he produced the ring they had broken. Then he was introduced to his lady who acknowledged him, and at the next birth she had seven children, and it is said was buried in the church, and the representation of them laid in brass which is now to be seen.”

  The local tradition at Wishford is that the small and curious female figure, on the same stone as the cushion on which Thomas Bonham’s head rests, represented the witch whispering to him that his wife was about to be married to another man on the morrow, and that she would spirit him off home to forbid the match. The little brass effigies of the nine children have some of them been destroyed, but the incisions in the stone which originally contained them are still to be seen.

  There is another fine tomb in Wishford church which is of a considerably later date: this is the beautiful monument to Sir Richard Grobham and the Lady Margaret his wife. Sir Richard was steward to Sir T. Gorges of Longford Castle, whose wife was a Scandinavian lady and a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s, who not only made her a lady-in-waiting but also presented her with the hull of a ship belonging to the Spanish Armada which had been wrecked in Southampton Water. This hull contained so much treasure that it not only made Gorges a rich man for life and enabled him to build Longford Castle, but there was enough of the fortune left to make his steward also a rich man. Grobham came to Wishford and acquired the manor there. Here he won great fame as a hunter, and of him it is said that, “ This great warrior slew a wild boar in Grovely woods, which was the terror of all the neighbourhood, with his sword alone, which sword is now to be seen, and the real cap of armour which he wore.”

  Sir Richard Colt Hoare says that in his day the banner, sword, helmet and crest of Grobham were still hung over the east window. The Grobham crest is “a boar’s head, or”. That of Grobham-Howe, “a dexter arm in armour, erased below the elbow fessways, and holding in the hand a scimitar erect proper, pierced through a boar’s head couped sable”. The crest over the altar has disappeared, but Sir Richard Grobham and his wife still lie at peace side by side against the north wall of the chancel and the Wishford people have not forgotten the man who saved them from that wild boar “which was the terror of the whole neighbourhood”.

  Mr Goulden, schoolmaster of Wishford during the nineteenth century, wrote a commonplace book which throws a good deal of light on the customs of his day. He says:

  “In the summer of 1857 I was measuring some land on Mr Attwater’s Farm. I enquired the name of the field and was told “The Boar’s Tree”, because the Boar was stabbed there and got through the river and into the meadow on the opposite side, and there died. For two hundred years afterwards, the person who occupied the Farm (now in the hands of Thomas Attwater) claimed a pook of hay from the spot where it died, and one of the men, James Scott, who is now in the Almshouse, said, he had driven the wagon backwards many a time and taken up the hay. The last farmer who claimed it was a Mr Moody.”

  Another curious ancient custom still practised at Wishfor
d is the annual sale of the “Midsummer tithes”. These are derived from two pieces of water meadow at Bonham’s and Abbey Mead which are sold annually at sunset on Rogation Monday. A quarter of an hour before sunset the bidders are called by the ringing of the church bell, and the parish clerk or churchwarden paces up and down the church path carrying the key of the church. At five minutes before sunset he proceeds to the church porch and there holds an auction of the grass. As the sun sets the grass is knocked down to the last bidder, and the auctioneer’s hammer is the church key, which is struck on the stone at the gate.

  WEST DEAN

  West Dean lies on the very borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire, and it has been the home for many centuries of people of considerable culture and artistic taste. There are traces of very early British inhabitants, but the first evidence of real civilisation is provided by the Roman remains which were first discovered as long ago as 1741. Nothing of these can now be seen at Dean; most of the finds have been carried off to museums—most of them to London, whither they were removed by the Society of Antiquaries in the very first year of their discovery, and having since been lost. The Salisbury Museum secured later specimens, and the authorities here have been more careful of their treasures.