WAREHAM That is a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as unspoilt as those of “Egdon,” but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect. The Return of the Native, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this heart-lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their brooding neighbours. They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer still digs, and runs his truckloads on crazy tramways down to the quays upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn. Fragments of Roman pottery, made from this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found, but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad. Much of Poole’s prosperity is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of that This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe. It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the blinding whiteness characterising those of Purbeck PetrÆa, as it may be named. Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour. Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come, past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic bridge spanning the Frome itself. Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary’s, one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight. Five of the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a school. Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes. Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in Two on a Tower, is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that attractive fact. Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of the compass, do not perhaps afford the best To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest town in Wessex. Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence, manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle. Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and vanished streets once stood. That “once,” however, was so long ago that the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things, as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses. Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants. Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given somewhere, by some one, of a village. The Walls of Wareham It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom of Wessex. Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour. In a nook such as this you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of those who founded it here. But, to render assurance doubly sure, those original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day, and are not walls in the common acceptation of Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody tangle of its long history. Strong defences require determined attacks. That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast, but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays, repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by only a few dispirited defenders. In A.D. 876 these Northmen captured the place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out. Some Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the greater part of Wessex. Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were re-established. The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source of many troubles soon to come. It was surprised and seized for the Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of mediÆval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself ceases to keep tally. Few people looked on: most took an active part, and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times. The obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences. The Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the “dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no town”; but this course was not adopted. Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds. In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit and prophet, one Peter of Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town. Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the roof of it. Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet, handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle, may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,” heaped up with magnificent emphasis. They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act, two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes. |