Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  III. SOUTH

  SALISBURY

  As one stands on the brow of Harnham Hill, near the great white rent of the deep-hewn chalk-pit that forms a well-known landmark in the country for miles around, the eye ranges over a wide and varied prospect which includes all that is vital in the past or present history of the city of Sarum. In the foreground lies the valley of the Avon, winding tortuously through the gate in the chalk-downs towards the sea, with the modern town nestling closely in its lap, all its lesser towers and steeples dominated by the tall and graceful centre spire of the most perfect cathedral in England. Beyond, again, the open undulating uplands of Salisbury Plain stretch away towards the primæval trilithons of Stonehenge: while in the middle distance a curious conical knoll, bearing even now its artificial origin on its face, marks the deserted site of Old Sarum. That great isolated dun formed, of course, the earliest Salisbury of all, the first town to which the existing name was applied. It is a natural position for a stronghold, and probably a hill-fort has crowned its summit from the days of the stone age onward: for neolithic implements of polished flint are common in the neighbourhood, and many fine specimens from local pit-dwellings are preserved in the Blackmore Museum at Salisbury. It was the neolithic men of this ancient city, in all likelihood, who raised the vast monument of Stonehenge, for its great rough-hewn sarsens are quite untouched by marks of metal tools; and the long barrows, with stone implements and long-headed skulls, which cap the downs around the primitive temple, no doubt cover the relics of the neolithic chieftains of Old Sarum. The round barrows, with bronze weapons and round skulls, belong apparently to the later Celtic princes of the same fortress, who thus placed their own tumuli beside the time-honoured standing stones of the earlier race.

  Old Sarum hill, however, owes its present shape mainly to the Romans, with some later additions of West Saxon date. When the Italian engineers had wrested this key of the Wily valley from its nameless British defenders, they seem to have quite disregarded the original earthworks, whose very existence is now vouched for only by a few scanty finds of bronze-age weapons, and to have defended the position by a simple escarpment, which still forms the main face of the knoll as we now see it. The surface consists of an elongated oval platform, containing some twenty-seven acres; and in its centre rises a circular earthwork, the bramble-covered site of the inner citadel. Our Celtic predecessors called the dun by some such name as [was little changed when] Latinised by the conquerors into Sorbiodunum or Sorviodunum. It became in their hands one of the great fortresses of the province, with military roads radiating in every direction to the other important forts at Silchester, Winchester, Dorchester, Bath, and Marlborough: for it must not be forgotten that the Roman occupation of Britain was always purely military, and that strategical reasons alone dictated the position of all the chief towns of the invaders. After the legions were withdrawn from Britain, Old Sarum fell into the hands of some native prince, whom Dr. Guest (with characteristic boldness), identifies with that doubtful Aurelius Ambrosius, mentioned by the Welsh monk Gildas, and still perhaps commemorated in the name of Ambresbury or Amesbury. But the same name crops up too universally in connection with so-called Druidical remains (from Ambresbury Banks in Epping Forest, to Dinas Emrys near Beddgelert) for the cautious antiquarian to accept its bearer as anything more than a possible eponymous myth. It is certain, however, that long after the heathen West Saxons had conquered Hampshire, and fixed their seat at Winchester, a Christian Welsh prince still bore rule at Sorviodunum, and the Britons still fought fiercely for the valley of the Avon around their ancestral sanctuary of Stonehenge. According to the Winchester chronicler, Cerdices-ford (now Chardford, near Downton, on the Avon, some six miles south of Salisbury) marked the limits of the principality seized by the real or mythical ealdorman Cerdic; while Britford, about a mile from the city, is supposed by Dr. Guest to represent the first ford in the country of the Britons [?]. Grimsdyke, which runs along the top of the downs by Cleabury, is considered as a boundary earthwork thrown up by the Welsh of Sorviodunum to check the advance of their West Saxon foes. Certainly it has its fosse turned towards Winchester and the heathen territory, while its defensive vallum faces Old Sarum and Christian Wilts.

  More than half a century after the fall of Venta Belgarum — our Winchester — a West Saxon ætheling of the house of Cerdic, Cynric by name, marched at last by the Roman road across the downs to the dale of Avon and stormed or starved out Sorviodunum, which thenceforth became an integral part of the English dominions. A body of Saxon Wilsæte settled at once in the valley of the Wily. The Saxons, however, do not seem to have immediately occupied the fortress itself; their chief town was rather at Wilton in the flat alluvial stretch below, from which the county took its later name of Wiltunscir or Wiltshire. Already the Britons seem to have shortened the cumbrous name of Sorviodunum into something like Sarum; and from this abbreviated form the first English name of Searo-burh (or, as we [might] say, [the fort of Sarum]) was compounded. That is the name under which its capture is recorded in the English Chronicle, under date A.D. 552. Later on, however, by the irresistible popular tendency to invent an eponymous founder, the word took a genitive form as Searesburh, as though the meaning were the burgh of Sear. It is this form, in the oblique case Searesbyrig, that was afterwards corrupted on Norman lips to Sealisbury or Salisbury, which was the real colloquial name of Old Sarum while that town was still inhabited. Some time during the West Saxon occupation, perhaps while Alfred was struggling with the Danes for the possession of Wessex, Old Sarum was once more employed as a fortress, and the great earthen rampart and ditch which now scar the face of the glacis were then probably first thrown up. Under Edgar the Pacific it was clearly an important town, for that King held a witena-gemót here; and in the days of the Confessor it must have been one of the largest places in Wilts. Ages before, as we learn from Bede, the West Saxon diocese, owing to its unwieldy size, had been split up into two sees: one at Winchester for the pure English of Hants, and one at Sherborne for the Welsh-kin of the country beyond Selwood. Some time later a third bishop-stool was erected at Ramsbury for the eastern Welsh-kin of Wilts. Shortly after the Norman conquest, however, Bishop Herman reunited these two west-country sees, and transferred his residence to Old Sarum, in accordance with the usual Norman practice of removing bishoprics from villages to larger towns. A new cathedral was soon built, and its cruciform ground-plan can still be traced on the bare mound of the ancient city. It was for this first Salisbury Cathedral that the famous “Sarum use” was originally compiled.

  But Old Sarum was too narrow a site for the growing requirements of an English town under the new régime. A cathedral, an episcopal palace, two churches, a castle with a military garrison must have occupied nearly all the available space on the little platform, leaving small room for merchants and their houses. Moreover, when the castle was handed over to a lay castellan the monks and soldiers could not agree, while the want of water was severely felt. At length, in the reign of Henry III., Bishop Richard Poore obtained leave to remove the cathedral to a new position in the valley, between the villages of Harnham and Fisherton, now regarded as suburbs of Salisbury, but then little independent rural hamlets. Around the chosen site of his rising minster, Bishop Poore laid out the ground-plan of a fresh city with American regularity; and the result may be seen on the modern map of Salisbury, which is partitioned out into chequers, or square blocks, intersected at right angles by broad and open streets — a strange contrast to the winding lanes which have grown up irregularly in all directions in most of our old English towns. Already the merchants of Old Sarum had begun to build on the plain, and as the great cathedral rose on the level close of Miryfield a new city sprang up around it with astonishing rapidity. Henry III. granted it a charter, without which trade would have been impossible; and shortly after Bishop Bingham diverted the Icknield Street, or great western road, from Old Sarum to the new town by building a bridge across the Avon at Harnham. Roman roads were still the main
highways of traffic in England, and the diversion completed the ruin of the hill city. Under Edward III. the old cathedral was taken down to build the spire and close of the new one; while the walls of the castle were used, with the ordinary mediæval vandalism, as a common quarry. Nevertheless, as everybody knows, Old Sarum, decaying away till not a single farmhouse was left, retained its parliamentary privileges down to the days of the first Reform Act. Meanwhile, the wool-stapling trade was making new Salisbury into an important commercial centre. Chalk downs form the great sheep-walks of England; and during the later Plantagenet period, when England, like Australia at the present day, lived on the wool export, we naturally find a large mercantile town in the centre of every valley in the chalk districts. Never before or after, probably, was the relative importance of Salisbury so great. The wealth of her merchants is shown in such buildings as the hall of John Halle, one of her chief wool-staplers during the reign of Henry VI. Its splendid banqueting-room has been well restored by Pugin, and now forms one of the sights in the modern city. The guild-halls of the joiners and of the tailors, the numerous carved gables to the old houses, and the existence of four handsome mediæval churches besides the cathedral, sufficiently attest the size and riches of the town during the wool-stapling period. At a somewhat later date Salisbury acquired a reputation for clothing and cutlery, both of which manufactures are now extinct. Since the Restoration, in fact, the town has chiefly lived upon its cathedral, its position as an agricultural centre, and its trade with the surrounding country. Nevertheless, it still continues to grow with the general growth of England, and its suburbs are even now extending on every side. Its situation as an important railway centre has had much influence upon its modern development.

  MAIDEN CASTLE AND DORCHESTER

  A pleasant walk, at first along the Roman road with its overhanging avenue of sycamores or chestnuts, and then across an open sweep of English chalk down, leads from the square ramparts which still gird round modern Dorchester to the vast prehistoric earthworks of Maiden Castle. Nowhere else in Britain have the ancient inhabitants left so gigantic a relic of their forgotten enmities: Maiden Castle holds among British strongholds the same place that Stonehenge holds among megalithic monuments. In both cases it is significant that the great work stands among the bare undulations of the chalk country, and overhangs the utmost border of a rich alluvial lowland. The Mai-Dun, to give it its proper title [?], is the most stupendous of all the Celtic duns that cluster thickly in all similar sites over the length and breadth of Britain. Its open central platform occupies the summit of a jutting down, abutting on the Ridgeway, about two miles south of Dorchester. Before getting to this central area, however, the visitor must climb to the top of three several steep ramparts, and descend again into the ditch-like bottom of three several deep fosses. Each time he fancies he has reached the goal of his day’s expedition, and each time he is obliged to descend once more into a great ravine which divides him from the next ridge or from the final rampart. Near the west end alone a zigzag gateway, defended by over-lapping ends, which enclose a sort of insulated mound and other outworks, admits him through a comparatively level road to the interior of the great earthwork. At the present moment, however, this one practicable entrance is sufficiently defended for all practical purposes against the solitary tourist by a long-horned white bull, who might almost represent to fancy the cattle of the old Durotriges themselves, and who seems by no means disposed to admit the hostile Saxon into the safe retreat of his Celtic ancestors. There is nothing for it, therefore, but to climb over the three almost perpendicular ridges and fosses as best one may, among the hare-bells, the devil’s bits, and the clustered campanulas which make the steep slopes blue even now with their nodding blossoms. It is a hard pull, but a quarter of an hour takes one over it; and then the view opens over a wide uneven area, where the herd of the white bull raise their heads from their grazing to stare the solitary intruder in the face.

  The inner area alone covers an irregular surface of forty-five acres, roughly oval, or, rather, hour-glass-like in form; the entire fortification, including the ramparts, covering a gross extent of 115 acres. Merely to walk once round the circuit of the inner defences makes in itself a fair constitutional, for the distance is scarcely less than two miles and a quarter. The fosses have been excavated out of the solid chalk, and the material so removed has been heaped up to form the intervening ramparts. No broad flat implements like our own spades were used in their construction: to a military eye the work bears abundant evidence of having been performed by the aid of narrow bronze celts alone, with which a small quantity of the subsoil was removed at a time. The view from the top of the inner ridge, shifting at each curve, sufficiently explains the nature and origin of this stupendous prehistoric fortification. The castle looks on every side save one over bare and bleak chalk down, crested here and there by the dark patches of heath which mark the undenuded tertiary strata. On the tallest of these, known as Black Down, rises the octagonal tower of Hardy’s Monument: scattered over the lower crests are innumerable barrows, which sometimes similarly preserve in their corrupted names some faint memories of earlier heroes. They are all of the round or true Celtic type, and they belong therefore to the same race as the builders of Maiden Castle. But on the one remaining side, towards Dorchester, the castle looks down upon perhaps the widest and longest strip of alluvial lowland in all England; and this strip gives us the true raison d’être of earthworks and of barrows alike. Such a position formed the absolute ideal of a Celtic principality. Cultivation was then confined to the flat river valleys; grazing was then confined to the open treeless downs. Man had not yet begun to hew his way through the natural forests that covered all the secondary plateau and primary hills of England, where now we find the richest corn-land of the whole country. Hence the primitive Celt required most of all an alluvial stretch for his rude tilth and an open chalk tract for his sheep and cattle. In the valley of the Wily and the Avon near Salisbury, and in the valley of the Var or Frome near Dorchester, he found these advantages combined, perhaps, to a greater degree than in any other district of Britain. It is not without reason, then, that in the one country we find the vast hill-fort of Old Sarum, the prehistoric circle of Stonehenge, and an endless surrounding array of ancient tumuli, while in the other we find the immense fortress of Maiden Castle, the long terraces of the Dorset downs, and the innumerable barrows that stud the sky-line of all the boundary hills. There can be very little doubt that, though mountains and passes made some other tribes more difficult for the Romans to subdue, the Belgæ of the Avon and the Durotriges of the Frome were intrinsically the most powerful as well as the most numerous of southern British tribes, and inferior only to the great horde of the Brigantes who held the still broader and more fertile plain of York.