by Grant Allen
Curiously enough, though Dorset was apparently one of the earliest conquests made by the West Saxons after their first settlement in Hampshire, we know little or nothing about the precise time or manner of its subjugation. All that we know for certain is the fact, vouched for by Gildas, the contemporary Welsh author of a little Latin tract whose authenticity is accepted by Mr. Freeman and Dr. Guest, that in the year 520, some twenty-five years after the landing of the West Saxons, they were repelled with great loss from Badbury, the main key of the eastern frontier. Probably this victory of the Romanised Durotriges saved Dorset for more than a quarter of a century. But after the English captured Old Sarum, they must probably have poured down upon Dorsetshire across the high belt of hills in the rear, and established their power in Durnovaria, whose name they corrupted into Dorceceaster or Dorchester. Once within the ring of forts, the whole champaign country must easily have fallen into their hands; though in the western half of the county the little separate valleys of the Brit, the Char, and the Lym, divided from one another by high hills, may have required to be separately conquered. Whether the English succeeded at once in occupying the valley of the Axe is very doubtful: certainly, the modern limits of the shire are most capricious in this direction. Not only does the lower Axe now belong to Devon, but even the little basin of the Lym is divided between the two counties, Uplyme being within the Devonian border, while Lyme Regis is in Dorset. There must be some good reason for this singular division of a small glen between what were once two independent States; but what that reason might be it is now perhaps impossible even to guess.
The English lords who settled down among the Durotriges in the water vale were known as the Dornsæte or Dorsæte, and they are usually spoken of as a people, not as a shire. They had their own ealdorman or dux, as the “English Chronicle” once Latinised it; which shows that the community possessed a certain local independence of its own. But, so far as we know, they always owed allegiance to the West Saxon kings at Winchester; and from a very early period they were included amongst the West Saxon folk. Originally, too, the Dorsæte had their own bishopric. In the first days of Christianity, we hear that Aldhelm was Bishop “west of Selwood,” with his see at Sherborne; and we know that he made vigorous efforts to convert the heretical British Christians of the west country to the orthodox faith of Rome. Among them, no doubt, were many Dorset and Somerset men; for we are told by Bede that he succeeded in persuading those Welshmen who were under English rule. But the independent Britons of Devon and Cornwall, the Damnonii under King Geraint, he could not succeed in converting. It seems almost like a bit of myth suddenly changed into sober history to read the surviving epistle of Aldhelm to Geraint — a name which most of us know only from Mr. Tennyson’s Idylls — addressed in due form “To the most glorious lord of the Western Kingdom, to King Gerontius, Aldhelm the Abbot sends greeting.” The name of the first Dorsetshire Bishop still clings in a corrupted form to the boldest headland of the county, St. Alban’s — or, as it should properly be, St. Aldhelm’s Head — where a ruined chapel commemorates him. Though the English doubtless settled numerously enough in Dorset — both their hundreds and their clan villages cluster thickly on the soil — yet it is probable that they spared a large proportion of the Christianised Welsh inhabitants; and both the appearance of the peasantry and the local nomenclature bear out this view. People of the dark, long-headed Celtic type abound in all the rural parts, while Pens and other British names are scattered up and down throughout the country.
Gradually, however, the Dorsæte sank to the position of a mere shire of Wessex. In the “English Chronicle,” indeed, their name is always given as that of a people, and it is not till after the Conquest that they come to be generally regarded merely as the inhabitants of Dorsetshire. But the resistance to the Danes broke down the wall of separation between the West Saxon counties; and when Devon was finally assimilated by the English in the reign of Athelstan, the importance of Dorset waned entirely. For a while Alfred united the bishopric of East Devon (the western half still remaining independent) to the see of Sherborne, to which he appointed his Welsh chaplain, Asser [of St. Davids], a graceful concession to the newly conquered Damnonian Welshmen. But when Athelstan drove out the Welsh chiefs from Exeter, the bishopric of that county was removed to Crediton, and as the main western see of Wessex was fixed at Old Sarum, Sherborne afterwards fell to the position of a mere abbey. Dorset, however, seems always to have been a favourite district with the West Saxon kings, doubtless because of the hunting in Selwood; and many of the kingly family were buried at Axminster (just across the border in Devon) or at Wimborne Minster. A great agricultural county it has always been; but it has not, and never had, any other source of wealth. The original historical shire was of course confined to the valleys of the Stour and Frome, the Vale of Marshwood, and the western dales, which form the chief arable and grazing lands; and as the forest has been cleared away, the downs of the interior have become famous for their sheep-walks. Towns are still few and small: Dorchester, a mere local centre; Poole and Bridport, two struggling harbours; and Weymouth, a watering-place of the type beloved and invented by the Georges, in the midst of a chalk country exactly like that round Brighton — these almost complete the little list. Shaftesbury, perched on the hill-top, and Lyme Regis, a decaying port artificially manufactured by Edward I., are the only others with any vitality left in them. Indeed, it might almost be said that since the English conquest, the shire, as a shire, has had no history of its own at all. Events in the history of England have of course taken place within it; but the county as a whole has gone on always in its own quiet agricultural and pleasant way. Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have been divided and amalgamated a dozen times over; but Dorset has continued Dorset alone from time immemorial, with no greater variation in its limits than that implied by an exchange with Devon of one isolated hundred or liberty for another.
THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
A solitary fragment of the submerged tract which once occupied the entire dry bed of the English Channel still stretches in a long line due south of Weymouth to the Bill of Portland, and afterwards runs out for some distance under the sea as a submarine ridge, making for the opposite and corresponding French uplands of the Côtentin and the Cap la Hogue. Though now united to the mainland by a bold curve of accumulated shingle, the Chesil Bank, this solid mass of oolitic limestone nevertheless rightly deserves its ordinary popular name of “the Island”; for its three sides are all alike worn down into precipitous cliffs by the action of the waves; and the singular causeway which now joins its western face to the Dorsetshire coast some ten miles lower down, though itself of immemorial antiquity, does not date back by any means so far in geological time as the original isolation of the great triangular rock which forms its terminus. In other words, the modern peninsula was once a real island, and its reunion with the mainland is in fact a matter of comparatively recent physical rearrangement. Seen from the centre of the great West Bay, at Seaton or Lyme Regis, Portland even now resumes its insular appearance; for the Chesil Bank is there quite lost below the curve of the horizon, and the huge block of stone stands out against the sky-line in shape like a long wedge, with its high blunt end turned towards the mainland, and its sloping point running out seaward till it loses itself imperceptibly in the surging waters of the Race. From this point of view its outline suggests to fancy the notion of a gigantic basking whale, with his back just raised above the sea-level, but with his humped neck well elevated above the calm surface. Looked at from the Nothe directly opposite, however, the island recalls rather the rock of Monaco, but on a far larger scale — projected farther afield into a much grimmer, grayer, and more stormy sea. Here the highest portion of the mass, nearly 500 feet above high-tide mark, exactly faces the spectator, who thus looks down on it at once in its biggest and at least characteristic aspect. The tapering shape, which slopes so paradoxically from the land side to seaward, instead of from the sea-cliff to landward, as in most other promontories,
is indeed entirely lost in this, the most familiar view from the neighbourhood of Weymouth; it is only from the two comparatively unfrequented bays to east and west, towards Lulworth and Charmouth, that the real contour of the huge slanting rock is seen to anything like advantage.
The reason why this solitary block of solid stone has survived the whole of the neighbouring lowland is not far to seek, from the geological point of view. Portland consists of an outlying mass of harder oolitic strata, which have resisted the waves of the Channel, while the softer surrounding clays and greensands, whose relics form the cliffs and slopes of the two lateral bays, have all been gradually washed away on either side by the ceaseless action of the water. Moreover, the Portland beds themselves are tilted up in an inclined plane, from the sea landward, so that the surface follows the natural dip of the strata; and the same beds are found at pretty nearly the same depth below the soil in all parts of the island. Indeed the whole of this Dorsetshire country is everywhere seamed and traversed by numerous faults, which have thrown up the rocks in adjoining places at very different angles. The southern half of Portland still retains something of its primitive appearance: a poor, bleak, barren, wind-swept plateau, destitute of tree or hedge, and divided by bare stone walls into small rectangular fields, where the black-faced sheep which become famous as Portland mutton find a scanty herbage under the shelter of these frequent artificial barriers against the omnipresent wind. Each wall is built of thin slate-like layers of stone from the unmerchantable beds (to adopt the local language): and instead of a gate, it is pierced by a broad gap filled in loosely with large round boulders, which can be easily removed by the hand to let in and out the flock or the farmer’s cart. Stone, in fact, forms the substratum and the whole raison d’être of Portland; it fulfils every function which would elsewhere be fulfilled by wood or any other possible material. Here and there one comes across a little hopeless-looking cultivation; but the mass of the plateau is down in rock, and the greater part of the population lives entirely by exporting the island piecemeal. The entire northern and higher half is a succession of quarries and stoneworks. The very summit of the slope is crowned by the ramparts of the Verne fortifications; and beyond this spot the convicts from Portland Prison are now busily engaged in levelling the surrounding inequalities, so as to give the guns of Fort Victoria a clean sweep across the entire peninsula. Farther on come the free-labour quarries, where acre after acre has been stripped of its useless surface-strata — the dirt-bed and the other Purbeck layers — in order to arrive at the good building-stone below. A large part of the island has already been shipped away to London and elsewhere: and innumerable tramways in a perplexing network are still employed in carrying off ship-loads of what yet remains. Even before the great excavations began to score its soil, Portland must have presented the dreariest and bleakest panorama in the British Isles. At the present day, when prison, military works, and quarries have done their worst, it is one of the most ugly sights to be seen in the world. Of course it attracts accordingly vast numbers of excursionists and sight-seers, who spend a happy day in toiling up to the summit of the highest hill in order to see the wretched prisoners working at their endless task under the charge of armed warders.
Repulsive as the island is, however, every part of it possesses a singular and melancholy interest of its own. To the south end, near the Bill and the lighthouses, where the ridge stretches seaward in the dangerous submerged bank known by the suggestive title of the Shambles, no quarrying has yet marred the native grimness of its rugged and honeycombed cliffs. Here, too, the Portland spurge and other peculiar wild flowers which once covered the island still linger on scantily in a few sheltered or unnoticed crannies. On the east side, again, the ivy-covered pentagonal tower of Rufus’s Castle, a rude Norman keep, caps an isolated block of stone and overlooks a fine tumbled mass of broken undercliff, with a craggy shore on either side and a magnificent view across the Weymouth bay to the white chalk bluffs of Lulworth and the jutting promontory of St. Aldhelm’s Head. These undesecrated spots fortunately lie well away from the beaten track; and hither, accordingly, the happy-day order of excursionists seldom penetrates. Even the central plateau itself is not without a certain fascination of a dismal sort. On its unverdured summit stand half-a-dozen considerable hamlets (for the whole population numbers more than 10,000 persons), each grouped around its own spring of water, and completely regardless of shade or shelter. Water, indeed, is the great natural want of the island; and the very names of the hamlets, such as Fortune’s Well and Southwell, clearly show why the houses were first placed in their present very uncomfortable situations. To this day the precious springs are kept religiously under lock and key, while even the rain-water is carefully hoarded in rough reservoirs. The streets and cottages have a straggling gaunt stony appearance, and withal a certain lost colonial air: one feels as though one had strayed suddenly from an English town into the midst of some broken-down Colorado mining settlement. The queer unfinished parish church of St. George’s, built in an indescribable quasi-classical style of eighteenth-century architecture, midway between Wren and a Byzantine basilica, helps to keep up this colonial local tone. Its predecessor was destroyed by a landslip at the pretty chine which still bears the memorial name of Church Hope. Yet the island is no new settlement; it has an ancient history, too: besides its oolitic fossils and its petrified trees, it can boast a British fossway, a Roman sarcophagus, and a fair display of [what used to be known as] “Samian” ware; while in purely English times it finds mention twice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a convenient landing-station for the northern pirates. Rufus’s Tower, whether rightly named or not, is at least as old as the days of Stephen; and Portland Castle dates from the reign of Henry VIII. In those times, however, the island was but a great lonely sheep-walk, held by under-tenants as a royal manor, and inhabited by a small race of peculiar people, who did not intermarry with the distant foreigners of the Dorset mainland. It was not till the seventeenth century that the Portland stone was brought into notice by Inigo Jones as the material for the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall; and since then it has been abundantly employed for St. Paul’s Cathedral and many other well-known buildings. Excavation has now apparently denuded more than half the surface [of the Isle]; while the heaps of useless upper stone with which it has littered the surrounding fields have made a naturally desolate piece of gray and dusty scenery more gray and more dusty in its outer aspect than ever.
SOMERSET
No county in England has so much history of its own as Somerset. Perhaps the reason may be found in its complete want of natural boundaries. East Anglia and Sussex, like Spain and Italy, stand off as real physical individualities, which survive and subsist in spite of all ethnographical or political changes; but Somerset rather resembles the Low Countries and the Slavonian marches in being the natural battle-ground of hostile races and languages. For some centuries, the irregular bit of country between the Avon and the Exe formed the debateable border disputed by the English of Wessex and the Damnonian Welsh of Devon and Cornwall; and when at last the county assumed its present shape as an English shire, it would have been impossible to describe its limits except in the meaningless geographical fashion as bounded on the east by Wilts, on the south by Dorset, and on the west by Devon. It shares the valley of the Avon with Wilts and Gloucester, the valley of the Parrett with Dorset, and the valley of the Axe with Devonshire; while its part of Exmoor, of the Black Downs, and of the Exe basin is cut off across country by a purely arbitrary line running at right angles to the hill-ranges and river-courses. Such an artificial division as this must clearly have been created by history, instead of creating history for itself.
Of Celtic Somerset we know very little. It seems to have been mainly included in the territory of the Damnonians; but since the greater part of the region then consisted of undrained fens and marshes— “moors,” as local phraseology still has it — there was little chance of its filling any large place in early annals. Only the vale of Avon
, on its eastern border, afforded any favourable area for primitive agriculture; and there the hill-forts of the early inhabitants still cluster thickly above the rich lowlands at Caer Badon, Little Solisbury, Lansdown, Stantonbury, Maes Knoll, and many other isolated heights. Hither, in case of hostile invasion from the men of Dorset or of Gloucester, the Caer Badon people carried up their women and children, their sheep and cattle, and their household goods. The rest of the shire was almost wholly occupied by the unbroken forest of Selwood, the bare uplands of Mendip and Exmoor, and the immense marshy wastes around the sources of the Axe, the Parrett, and the Yeo. When the Romans came, Somerset fell into their hands with the first conquest of South Britain; and the dale of Avon remained the most important part of the shire as it now stands. The hot springs at Bath made the Romans fix their most fashionable station in the valley below Caer Badon; and to this new city they gave the name of Aquæ Sulis from the neighbouring hill-fort of [Sul] now Little Solisbury. From Bath, through the very heart of the marshland, they drove their great road, the Foss Way, to Exeter and onward, so as to connect the outlying and doubtfully loyal peninsula of Devon and Cornwall with their main strategic centre at Cirencester. But the relics of their occupation remain most thickly only in the immediate vale of Avon, or along the line of the Foss itself; the wild marshy and hilly country behind probably received little attention from soldiers and administrators who regarded Britain chiefly as a feeder of the empire, and so confined their interests to its corn-growing portions. The rich oolitic dale round Aquæ Sulis doubtless stood out like a little oasis or island of Roman civilisation and agriculture, girt round on every side by forest, fen, or down, the wild hiding-places of half-tamed Celts.
When the Romans went away, Bath had its own petty British King, whose dominions were perhaps confined to the Avon valley; while other Romanised princes ruled independently at Gloucester and Cirencester — the Glevum and Corinium of the Italian settlers. For a while the English conquerors of the east and south coasts left the British kinglets of the western watershed unmolested in their little territories. But after the subjugation of Wilts and Dorset, the West Saxons began to turn towards the basins of the Atlantic slope. Near the close of the sixth century, about a hundred and thirty years after the first landing of the English in Britain, Cuthwine and Ceawlin, princes of the West Saxons, “fought against the Welsh,” says the English Chronicle, “and slew three Kings, Conmail and Condidan and Farinmail, at the place cleped Dyrham, and took three chesters from them, Gloucester, and Cirencester, and Bath.” In the general history of England this victory at Dyrham Park on the Cotswolds has an immense strategical importance, from the fact that it cut in two the British resistance, dividing the unconquered territory into Wales proper on the north and West Wales (that is, Devon and Cornwall) on the south; so that henceforth the West Saxons were able to advance steadily step by step against the Damnonian Welsh, whom they drove to the Axe, to the Parrett, to the Exe, to the Tamar, and at last to the sea; until in the end all Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall became swallowed up in Wessex, without fear of interference from the Welsh proper on the north, who had themselves similarly to retreat before the steady onward advance of English Mercia. But as regards the restricted history of Somerset, the interest of the Battle of Dyrham lies in the fact that then for the first time did Englishmen begin to settle within the limits of the modern shire. As usual, the heathen invaders seized first on the richest and most agricultural portion of the district, the old Romanised lowlands around Bath. This little corner, the nucleus of modern Somerset, extended only from the Avon to the Axe. The English overlords who settled down among the deserted Roman villa homesteads, in the place of the Kings of Bath, called themselves the Sumorsæte — a word which is obviously analogous to Dorsæte and Defnsæte, though the meaning of the first element in the name possibly cannot now be recovered. Perhaps it was the old local Celtic title for the people of the valley; in which case the word would designate the English overlords as “settlers among the Sumor tribe.” Ethnographical researches leave very little doubt that the Romanised British people even of this earliest Somerset must have been largely spared as slaves by the Teutonic conquerors.
