by Grant Allen
But in the beginning of the seventh century a West Saxon king, Cynegils, listened to the missionaries who had been sent over to Kent a generation earlier, and was baptized at Dorchester-on-Thames by a Gaulish bishop. Christianity must have spread downward, however, very slowly, for the kings and chiefs were always the first converts in England; and it probably did not reach remote corners like King’s Peddington for many years. Long after Cynegils and his two Christian successors, we find a pagan West Saxon king; and outlying places, such as Wight, remained wholly heathen till considerably later. But the old minster at Winchester was founded as early as 648; Glastonbury was set up under English rule (for there had been a Welsh monastery there before) some forty years later; and Wimborne dates from the first years of the eighth century. A bishop of Wessex, “west of Selwood,” was appointed about the same time. So, long before Cynewulf gave the manor of High Peddington to the monks of Sherborne, the Churnside people must certainly have been at least imperfectly Christianised. How imperfectly we can see from the still surviving folk-lore and the long lingering belief in witchcraft, which was but the secret worshipping of the proscribed gods. The change of faith on the part of their chief at Winchester made little difference to the descendants of the Peadingas at Peddington, still less to the dark and long-headed serfs of Churney and Upchurn. As late as the days of Cnut they still practised open heathendom, which brought down upon them the anger of the Danish king. The reports of witch trials under James I., and even under Charles II., sufficiently show that they still practised it in secret down to the seventeenth century, if not even to the reign of George III.
VII. DANES’ HILL
Westward of King’s Peddington a pretty path leads through the warren — that beautiful broken undercliff of chert and greensand, brought down by almost yearly landslips, and thickly overgrown with bracken and clematis; while beyond it the tall chalk cliffs hem in a very small seaward combe, through which a mere thread of water worms its way between the hills to a tiny shingle beach, fronted by the half-dozen tar-plastered houses that form the fishing hamlet of Gamelby. Antiquarian visitors prick up their ears in a moment at the very mention of the name. A Gamelby in Wessex, a Gamelby within three statute miles of King’s Peddington — it seems altogether too strange, too delightfully romantic, to be really true. Yet there the fact remains, and the reasons for it are clear enough to any one who has once seen that retired little combe, hemmed in by high defensible hills on every side, and opening only to the sea in front. But why not a Gamelby here as well as elsewhere? asks the unantiquarian mind. What is there about the name to make it such a curiosity in Wessex or in any other part of the United Kingdom? Simply this. The word is purely and wholly Danish. In the Scandinavian North we expect to find Whitbys, and Derbys, and Kirbys, and Harrowbys; and we do find them all through the Danish and Norse parts of England from Cumberland to Suffolk: but in purely English Wessex they are naturally almost unknown. The termination common to them all was introduced into Britain by the Northern wickings; and no place-names of this type are to be found in documents earlier than the Danish conquest of half England. The old name of Derby, as we get it in Beda, is Northweorthig, or, as we should now spell it, Norworthy; the old name of Whitby was Streoneshalh, or, as we should now spell it, Strenshal. Wherever we meet with towns or villages of this type, we may be quite sure that there has once been a Scandinavian colony upon the spot.
Yet so rare is a Scandinavian colony in Wessex that here at Gamelby one might be inclined to doubt the unsupported testimony of the “by” were it not the incontestable evidence offered us by the “Gamel.” There is no getting rid of “Gamel” in any way. It is a most indubitable Danish name, of excellent pedigree; and Orm, the son of Gamel, is a famous person in late Northumbrian history. Moreover, the chalk down just above the hamlet is known to this day as Danes’ Hill, and the manor is entered under that title, in very choice Norman Latin, by King William’s commissioners in the Exeter Domesday. On the summit of the down, half obliterated by time and hedges, one may still trace the lines of some ancient earthworks; and these earthworks were almost indubitably raised by the Danes, from whom the hill derives its title, for they exactly accord with similar Danish works in the Cheshire Wirral and on the low peninsular nesses of East Anglia. Most curious of all, on the reach of the Churn which bends rounds the ridge of downs to the north of this isolated combe, stands a village called Beckford-in-England; and the strangeness of the name has given rise to a foolish piece of folk-lore among the gossips of the place. A tramp, it is said, once fell asleep in the spring time on top of a haystack. During the night the floods rose, and the haystack, with the sleeper upon it, was carried away by the river to this spot. When the tramp awoke, he fancied he must be sailing over to France; and after the stack grounded on the shallows of the ford, he called out to some bystanders to know the name of the place. Being told that it was Beckford, he exclaimed in surprise, “What! Beckford in England?” — and Beckford-in-England has therefore been the name of the village ever since. As a witness to the truth of this story, the little inn bears for its sign a man floating in a river on a haystack. This is the sort of nonsense which is offered to the inquiring stranger as the result of local antiquarian research. But the inquiring stranger easily reflects for himself that “beck” is a Scandinavian word; and that when the Danes owned a petty domain of their own at Gamelby, the far side of the ford over the beck was naturally spoken of by them as being in England, whereas the near side was in Daneland. Long after the very existence of the Danes had been utterly forgotten, the silly myth was no doubt invented to explain the curious fact that a village in the heart of an English shire should bear so queer a name as Beckford-in-England.
When and how the Danes got to the Churnside district it is not difficult to guess. From the days of Ecgberht in Wessex onward, Scandinavian pirates in their lightly-built long ships were always hovering around the coast of England, doing a little plundering and robbing as occasion offered; and there were few better places for them to land in than the fiords of the west country, from Cornwall to Dorsetshire. The peninsula of Cornwall itself was still inhabited by free West Welsh, always ready to make a raid against their English neighbours — as, indeed, their English neighbours always richly deserved. In Devonshire the Welsh had not yet forgotten their fellowship with their Cornish brothers nor given up their native Celtic speech; and even in the days of Æthelstan they remained as a distinct nationality in Exeter itself. Here, then, and in the largely Celtic lands to the east, the Danes could always count upon finding allies; and so from the beginning of the struggle this south-western corner of Wessex was the favourite point from which to attack the West Saxon kings. Even before Ecgberht’s time the wickings had made descents upon Dorsetshire, where they came like thunderbolts upon the poor peaceable Christian people. The West Saxon peasants of the coast, good simple souls, had long since settled down into quiet and honest tillers of the soil, having no particular quarrel with anybody, and protected from war by their insular position. Now and then the Churnside folk were called, it is true, by their overlord at Winchester, to resist an attack of the Mercians, or to aid him in subjugating recalcitrant Sussex; but as a rule they lived peacefully on their own farms at Peddington, defending their corn-plots from the crows, and seeing that the wolves did no harm to their pigs in Churnhead forest. When first a few ship-loads of heathen pirates landed in Wessex, the simple people did not know what an invasion meant. They were as astonished as the West-countrymen of our own day would be by a raid of the Kurds or the Dyaks on Torquay or Weymouth. “The King’s reeve rode to them,” says the English Chronicle in its naïf way, “and would drive them to the king’s ham, for he knew not what they were.” The Danes had small regard for reeves, however, and slew the good, honest steward on the spot. But before long the West-countrymen learned, only too well, what the wickings really were. Towards the close of Ecgberht’s reign the king himself had to come down and fight thirty-five ship-loads at Charmouth, on the borde
rs of Dorset and Devon, “and there was great slaughter made, and the Danes kept the battle-field.” There, too, you may see their fortified camp still crowning the top of Coney Castle hill. Two years after, another fleet of pirates landed in Cornwall, stirred up the West Welsh, and marched with them to Hengston, where the West Saxon king put both hosts to flight. Years later, when the Danes held half England, a third host landed at King’s Peddington, and burned the church, besides plundering the lands of Sherborne Abbey. The ealdorman of the shire came against them, and the bishops of Sherborne and Carchester came too; for when the heathen were burning God’s churches even good churchmen felt they might take mace in hand to defend their homes. There was no such thing possible, however, as a united resistance: that implies organisation, communications, commissariat, and many other civilised devices whereof the West Saxons knew nothing; but each shire fought as best it might for itself, and was satisfied if it could only drive away the wickings to the next shire on either side. The wickings had to fight hard; they said themselves, with their own fierce and candid humour, that they had never met with harder hand-play in England than the two bishops gave them; but in the end the ealdorman and one of the bishops were among the killed, and the Danes once more kept possession of the field. It was then, doubtless, that the unknown Gamel settled down in this isolated and protected little cove, and, with the sea before him and the hills behind him, fortified himself in his petty principality till the peace under Alfred enabled him to become a quiet English landholder. There are traces of many such little Danish settlements on rocky islets or peninsular promontories of the west country; but not many of them occur in such land-bound positions as that overshadowed by the mouldering earthworks of Danes’ Hill.
VIII. DOMESDAY BOOK.
From the days when Gamel the Dane settled in the little seaward combe of Gamelby to the days when William the Norman “held deep speech with his witan about this land, how it was peopled,” our Churnside history is almost an absolute blank. True, some time between those two dates — most probably in the reign of Edward the Confessor — the round-arched doorway in the Peddington Church was set up; for even our most iconoclastic architectural expert and archæologist allows that the door in question, now built round by the present late decorative tower, is a genuine pre-Norman relic, “and one of the finest specimens of early Romanesque architecture in all England.” But, with this trifling exception, there is no direct evidence, documentary or otherwise, as to the state of Churnside between the Danish inroad and the Norman conquest. Domesday, however, comes in upon us as usual with a whole flood of light. It tells us all about King’s Peddington (not yet a Royal manor), from the abbot and the staller down to the very number of cows and pigs in the parish. “King Wilhelm caused to be written,” says the grave Peterborough Chronicler, with his delightful barbaric simplicity, “what or how much each man had who was a holder of estate in England, in land, or in cattle, and how much money it might be worth. So very narrowly he bade it be sought out that there was not one single acre, nor one yard of land, nor even — shame it is to tell, but him it shamed not to do it — an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine that was not set down in his writ.” We can almost fancy we are listening to a modern Hindu complaining against the monstrous indelicacy of the Indian census.
“Walter the son of Ivo,” says the great Survey, “holds Pedingatune. Edric the Staller held it in King Edward’s time. Before King Wilhelm came into England” — that is Domesday’s exquisitely official manner of alluding to the wholly unrecognisable reign of Harold— “Edric died.” Then it goes on to describe the part of the manor belonging to Walter, now King’s Peddington; and the part belonging to Sherborne Abbey, now Peddington Abbas or High Peddington. Disentangling the living facts from all this dry mediæval Latin — this hash of bad English, misspelt by Norman pens, this jargon of soc and demesne, of carucates and bordars, of harsh contractions and crabbed syntax — we can still perhaps picture to ourselves the Churnside which King William’s commissioners came down to see. There was as yet no considerable village on the sea front; perhaps there was even less of a village than in the old Euskarian and Celtic times, or in the days of the first Peadingas. The Parish itself was now in the main a pure agricultural manor, owned by a lord who was the feudal superior of all the churls within its boundaries. This change had been taking place even “before King William came into England”; for ever since the English had been exposed to the raids of the wickings it had become almost a matter of necessity for the poorer freeman of the old constitution to seek himself a lord, under whose protection he might place himself, and to whom he must owe in return certain customary dues of labour. It was the fear of the Gamelby Danes which drove the men of Churney and Peddington to commend themselves to the chief landholders of their districts, and which thus set up the feudal system in Churnside. For, like all other phases of the English Constitution, the feudal system was not made but grew. To suppose, as most old-fashioned school-books used to suppose, that it was all settled in a day by a Royal proclamation, an Act of Parliament, or a decree of the Witena-gemót, is much on a par with that other supposition, not wholly unknown to American tourists, that you may buy a printed copy of the British Constitution, neatly and explicitly set forth in appropriate if somewhat high-flown phraseology, just like the Constitution of the United States.
The people whom William’s delegates found in Churnside were still essentially the same people as ever. There was the substratum of dark Celts and Euskarians; there was the small body of free English churls; and there was one new element in the person of Walter son of Ivo, a Breton from the neighbourhood of Dinan. For here, as elsewhere, the close study of local history shows us — what it is sometimes hard to see on a larger scale — that at bottom population changes but very little. New factors are superadded from time to time; but the old factors still remain; and so all our history is one and continuous — the ancient is always reappearing in the modern. But the arrangement of the population was undergoing great changes. The old customary village life had broken down; the land that once belonged to the community was now the property of a single owner; and the English churls, lately bound down by feudal ties to their English lord, were now still more tightly bound down to their French master. Edric the Staller himself had joined Harold’s army, but fell at Stamford Bridge. William forgave his son, and permitted him to hold Peddington till the great English rebellion, when the young man joined the Exeter insurgents. Then William put out his eyes, cut off his feet, and gave the lands to Walter the Breton. From that day to this the descendants or representatives of Walter, or those who purchased from him, have owned the soil of King’s Peddington. So we rightly speak of their occupation as feudal in origin, because it has supplanted the old communal land tenure of the inhabitants: and though the relation of the tenants to the lord has passed from one of labour-rents to one of money-rents, it is still essentially a feudal relation all the same. No such system has ever existed at King’s Peddington or elsewhere in the world, except as the result of a military régime supplanting the common holding of the land by all the community.
The details of the great Survey suffice to give us a very graphic picture of the general aspect of Churnside during the early Norman time. All the valley was now cultivated by the churls and serfs of the various owners — Walter himself, Sherborne Abbey, the Danish proprietor who still held Gamelby, and so forth — but the hill-sides were even yet covered with dense forest, which ran inland till it joined the vast belt of Selwood, the great woodland barrier that cut off all the half-Celtic western peninsula of England from the more purely Teutonic shires on the east. The villages seem to have been a good deal broken up; for population is always thicker and more concentrated round little nuclei when the people till their own plots than when they cultivate the soil as serfs for their lords. The old Romanesque church, the wooden hall of the manor house, the huts of the churls who shoed the lord’s horses and ploughed the carucates in the dale, still marked the site of the old Celti
c, Roman, and English settlement at King’s Peddington; but the mass of the people were scattered among little hovels in the outlying leys, hursts, and dens, where they cut their lord’s wood, burnt his charcoal, looked after his game, fed his pigs on acorns and beechmast, or tended his sheep, his horses, and his cattle in the clearings still exposed to the attacks of straggling wolves. The range of the forest, and the position of the clearings, can even now be traced by the names of the upland farms which embody the leys, hursts, and dens of the early feudal period. A belt of Brockleys, Wadhursts, Everdens, and the like girds round the old arable tract for miles and miles continuously, preserving the memory of the badgers, the wild boars, the beavers, and the deer, whose very names have long since ceased to have any significance in our modern speech. The entire constitution of society was wholly altered. In the place of the old free, self-supporting community, we get a community labouring entirely for the advantage of a single lord. His artisans and cultivators lived in immediate dependence in his own hall; his serfs worked for him in the outskirts. From the point of view of King’s Peddington, that is what we mean by feudalism. The glitter was seen at Winchester and London; the squalid reality in Churnside. And though the seeds of this feudalism had been sown long before, it was William’s Survey that fixed it firmly on the soil for ever.
