SHERBORNE

Much remains in pleasant Sherborne to tell of that time when it was a cathedral city, and when, after it had lost that high dignity, it was of scarce less importance as the home of a powerful Abbey. It was the pleasing, well-watered and sheltered situation, in the vale where the little Yeo or Ivel runs—the stream which, passing through Yeovil, gives that town its name—that first attracted the religious in A.D. 705, the time of that now misty and vague monarch, King Ina. The Yeo had not yet obtained that name, and was merely spoken of in descriptive and admiratory phrase as the Seir burne, an Anglo-Saxon description for a bright and clear brook which has crystallised here and at several other places in the country, into a place-name. Even in the City of London there is a Sherborne Lane, where no stream now flows, the successor, however, of a pleasant lane, where in Anglo-Saxon times a tributary of the Wall Brook flowed.

Not every one was satisfied with this choice for a cathedral site. William of Malmesbury wrote of it as “pleasant neither by multitudes of inhabitants, nor beauty of position.” But beauty is a matter of individual taste. “Wonderful, almost shameful,” he continued, “was it, that a bishop’s see should have remained here for so many years.” For three hundred and three years it so remained, the bishop’s seat being removed only in 1078, when Old Sarum, a much more inconvenient site, sterile, cramped and waterless—a place that to the Saxons was Searobyrig, the dry city—was selected, only itself to be abandoned in less than another hundred and fifty years. In the meanwhile no fewer than twenty-seven bishops ruled in succession at Sherborne and passed into the Great Beyond, leaving for the most part, very little evidence of their existence. Notable exceptions, however, were Adhelm, an early translator of the Scriptures, and Asser, whose biography of his friend and patron, Alfred the Great, is a monument to himself as well as to his subject. In the choir-aisles of the existing Abbey-church are sundry relics of those prelates, in the shape of ancient tombs with battered effigies, as near a likeness to them as possible for the sculptors to produce; and in the retro-choir are pointed out the spots where Kings Ethelbald and Ethelbert, brothers and predecessors of King Alfred, lie.

After an interval of uncertainty following the removal of the bishopric in 1078 to Old Sarum, the cathedral here was in 1139 made a Benedictine Abbey and rebuilt by Roger, Bishop of Sarum, who although he might not again remove the cathedral back to Sherborne, seems to have loved the place, and certainly lavished much care and labour upon it.

Bishop Roger was a man of energy and determination. Starting in life as a poor Norman monk, he owed his first important preferment to a curious circumstance. None could gabble through a mass more speedily than he, and he raced through a service before Henry I. so quickly, while the king was anxious to be off a-hunting, that the gratified monarch put him on the broad high road to advancement, along whose course Roger travelled far. But, if all had liked him as little as did the censorious William of Malmesbury, his journeys would have been short. To that chronicler he was “unscrupulous, fierce and avaricious,” not content to keep his own, but eager to grab the goods of others. “Was there anything contiguous to his property which might be advantageous to him, he would directly extort it, either by entreaty or purchase, or, if that failed, by force.” It must have been well, therefore, to arrange terms with this masterful personage while he was in the negotiating way, lest he took what he wanted, without so much as a “by-your-leave.” The great Norman structure he erected has largely survived, not only in its ground plan, but in the essential circumstances of its walling, for although it is outwardly a building in the Perpendicular phase of Gothic, dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, that magnificently-elaborated external show of nave and presbytery is but a later and more enriched surface, daringly grafted upon the stern and solemn Norman walls of over three hundred years’ earlier date.

The history of the great Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne very clearly retells the old tale of Bury St. Edmunds, of Norwich, and of many another great monastic centre, by which you see that these rich and powerful settlements of the religious were not generally at peace with the outside worldlings. The causes of quarrel were many. In some places the monastery was a harsh and exacting landlord; in others the imposts and hindrances placed upon the markets, whose tolls in many instances were the property of the Church, aroused bitter enmity and constant strife; and in yet more cases the maintenance of forests and game for the sport of the Lords Abbots gave rise to trouble. Poachers we have had always with us, and even in those times when to kill the stag in the Chases was a crime adjudged worthy death or mutilation, men for sport or sustenance illegally slew the game. “What shall he have who killed the deer?” Why, an ear cut off or a nose slit, at the very least of it.

Here at Sherborne the bitterest quarrel arose from other causes. It seems that the parish church was situated at the west end of the Abbey, separated from it only by a door which the monks, exclusives always, had sought gradually to narrow, with a view of eventually blocking it up altogether. A question nearly allied with this was whether the children of the townsfolk should be baptised in the Abbey or in the parish church, and the disputes at last grew so raw that the Sherborne burgesses, very wrothy and spiteful, took to ringing their church-bells so long and so loudly that on account of the clamour, the monastic offices could not be carried on. In 1437 the points at issue were by common consent laid before the Bishop of Salisbury, who, siding with his own cloth, made an award in favour of the Abbey. Regarding this decision as an injustice, the townsfolk refused to abide by it; but there were evidently two parties in the town, for one faction, headed by a stalwart butcher, broke into the parish church with some of the monks and reduced the font to fragments. Things then, naturally grew worse, until, as Leland puts it, “The variance grew to a plain sedition, until a priest of the town church of All Hallows shot a shaft with fire into the top of that part of the Abbey Church of St. Mary that divided the east part that the monks used from that the townsmen used; and this partition happening at the time to be thatched in, the roof was set on fire, and consequently the whole church, the lead and bells melted, was defaced.”

The Choir was so seriously injured that it was taken down and rebuilt, but the rest was repaired, and still in some parts shows traces, in the reddened patches on the beautiful golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone of the internal walls, of the conflagration.

The townsfolk were made to contribute heavily to the cost of repair and rebuilding; works resulting in a more lovely interior, both in form and colour, than owned by any other considerable church in the west. A commonplace person, one no connoisseur of churches, if asked to convey a general sense of their interiors by the medium of temperature would reply that they were cold, for coldness is the effect most often produced—irrespective of the degrees registered by the thermometer—by their stonework; but here, though the mercury shrink down from the tube into close proximity with the bulb, provocative in most places of shivers, even the most matter-of-fact, irresponsive to the call of soaring arches, painted windows and delicately poised fretted roof to “lift up your hearts, O Zion!” feel a grateful sensation of warmth pervading them, apparently radiating from these walls of richly hued stone, whose natural colouring seems to fully furnish the place and render it indifferent to the rigours of the season. It is a colour compact of all the beautiful hues of this country of a rich and bountiful Nature: of honey, of apples and pears golden and russet, of autumn leaves, and of cider and October ale, with a glint of the sun through it all. It gives a beautiful and cheerful tone, quick to purge melancholy and to make the devout happier in their hallelujahs than when in the cold, if chaste, companionship of Portland stone, the mild cream purity of the oolite of Bath, the Gregorian richness of the building stone of Mansfield, or the solemn satisfaction engendered by the deep red sandstone of Devon.

The exquisite fan-vaulting of Sherborne Abbey, the finest example of that supremest effort of the last stage of Gothic art, has no superior elsewhere. That of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, and that in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, are on a larger scale, and more daring, but, although generally cited as representative, are not so truly artistic.

The old Pack-Monday fair, still an annual institution at Sherborne, is a two days’ market, originating with the completion of the repairs and the vaulting of the nave, under Abbot Peter de Ramsam, or Rampisham, in 1504. Tradition has it that, the last stone well and truly laid and the great church at last again in order, the masons and their kind were paid off and bidden depart by midnight on the Sunday after Old Michaelmas Day. Accordingly, Pack-Monday fair is opened every year at the stroke of midnight on the Sunday succeeding October 10th, to the accompaniment of a din of horn-blowing and the uncouth banging of tin cans.

Much of the beauty of the Abbey interior is due to the loving care of the restoration executed by the Digbys of Sherborne Castle, between 1848 and 1858, at a cost of over £32,000. The church of All Hallows at the west end, which caused all the trouble, was demolished after the dissolution of the monastery, when the Abbey was sold to the town for use as a parish church and All Hallows itself thereby became a redundancy. Its situation and its ground-plan can still be traced on the paths and lawns and on the ragged walls and makeshift patchwork that serve as West Front to the Abbey.

An ancestor of the restoring Digbys is commemorated by a pretentious mountain of marble in the south transept, with an epitaph, written by a bishop, setting forth with much antithetical rhodomontade his many virtues of activities and renunciations:

“Here Lyes John, Lord Digby, Baron Digby of Sherborne and Earl of Briftol. Titles to which ye merit of his Grandfather firft gave luftre And which he himfelf laid down unfully’d. He was naturally enclined to avoid the Hurry of a publick Life, Yet carefull to keep up the port of his Quality. Was willing to be at eafe, but fcorned obfcurity. And therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw Himfelf within a narrower compafs, or to fhun fuch expence As Charity, Hospitality and his Honour call’d for. His Religion was that which by Law is Eftablisfhed, and the Conduct of his life fhew’d the power of it in his Heart. His distinction from others never made him forget himfelf or them. He was kind and obliging to his Neighbours, generous and condefcending to his inferiours, and juft to all Mankind. Nor had the temptations of honour and pleafure in this world Strength enough to withdraw his Eyes from that great Object of his hope, which we reafonably affure ourfelves he now enjoys.

MDCICVIII.”

Sherborne Abbey Church

The surroundings of the Abbey closely resemble cathedral precincts, and lead the well-informed stranger to remember that Sherborne cherishes hopes of some day being again erected into the head of a bishop’s see, when that talked-of formation of a new diocese, carved out of the great territorial domains of Salisbury and of Bath and Wells, shall be an accomplished fact.

The usual and properest way of coming to the Abbey, after you have glimpsed the fine picture it makes looking down Long Street, is past the Conduit—usually called the Monks’ Conduit—standing on the pavement of Cheap Street, and through a time-worn archway and a narrow alley of small shops and old houses. The Conduit, built about 1360, an open octangular building greatly resembling a market-cross, was originally in the centre of the cloister-garth, to the north of the Abbey, on a part of the site now occupied by the admirable Grammar School, founded by Edward VI. from the spoils of the dissolved monastery, and grown in these days to be one of the foremost schools of the country.

Cheap Street, the principal thoroughfare of Sherborne, is, like similar business streets in other West Country towns, composed of houses of many periods and all sizes. It is built generally of that sunny Ham Hill ferruginous sandstone, quarried for many years at Stoke-sub-Hamdon, six miles to the northwest of Yeovil. That fine old hostelry, the “New Inn,” now swept away, was built of it. This vanished house was the original of the “Earl of Wessex,” in The Woodlanders, in whose yard Giles Winterborne is observed by his old sweetheart from the balcony, while he is engaged with the business of cider-making:

“The chief hotel at Sherton Abbas was the “Earl of Wessex”—a large stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the opposite houses.”

The castle, some distance outside the town to east, adjoining the village of Castleton, was originally the combined palace and fortress of the Bishops of Sherborne. The remaining fragments, on their woody knoll overlooking the Yeo, in what is now Sherborne Park, are those of the stout keep built by that ambitious, and unscrupulous Bishop Roger, of Henry I.’s time. Despite the curse, called down by the equally ferocious and saintly Osmund, upon any who should dare to alienate the castle from the bishops of Sherborne, it was wrested from them on several occasions, perhaps sometimes in direct unbelieving challenge to that quis separabit; at others, certainly, because, in the fashion of the times, the bishops had taken part in the political troubles, the pitched battles and weary sieges of contending factions, and, having the ill-luck to side with the defeated party, suffered with them in body and estate. For over two hundred years, from 1139 to 1355, it was thus alienated, and Osmund’s curse slept. Those who owned the castle were not executed, or imprisoned, or made to suffer beyond the usual mediÆval average, perhaps because it took no account of developments arising from mitred follies and errors of judgment. At last, having been Crown property for many generations, the stronghold and its surrounding lands were granted to Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom, after a futile proposal had been made to fight him for it, in gage of single combat—a fourteenth-century example of Kingsley’s “muscular Christianity”—it was purchased by the bishop for 2,500 marks; a cheap lot. Whether the earl, in Etonian phrase, “funked it,” imagining the bishop’s steel would be fellow to “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” and as invincible, who shall say? At any rate, Bishop Wyvil, this strenuous champion, who feared neither the ordeal of the sword nor of the purse, entered into the gates of his predecessors of old time, and died here, after a residence of twenty years. The brass to his memory, in the north-east transept of Salisbury Cathedral, displays a representation of Sherborne Castle, with a figure of the bishop’s champion armed with a battle axe, by which it will be seen that it was not scandalously, in his own proper person, that the bishop was prepared to fight, but by a deputy, skilled in arms, and supported by the ghostly terrors of that ancient curse.

And so, in the possession of the bishops of Salisbury who, to all intents and purposes, and within the meaning of old Oswald, were successors and representatives of the Bishops of Sherborne, the castle remained until 1540, when, in the dissolution of religious houses, it was seized and afterwards granted to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. Then the curse seems to have come into its own again, for Somerset ended, where many other good and true were cut off, on Tower Hill. Although subsequently restored to the bishop of Salisbury, it was again alienated by Bishop Cotton to Sir Walter Raleigh, as payment for favours and promotion received when that hero and courtier was in the enjoyment of royal smiles. Raleigh, as every one knows, ended tragically, after long-drawn misery, in 1618, on the same spot where Somerset had suffered sixty years earlier. And well, the superstitious may think, was it that by legal quirks and quibbles James I. succeeded in chousing Raleigh’s son out of his inheritance, for the ill-omened possession continued to work disaster. James bestowed it upon his favourite, the despicable Robert Carl, Earl of Somerset, who, convicted of being accessory to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, was condemned to die, but was reprieved, and finally released by the timid James, to die obscurely in 1645. Something of a blundering curse, this, one may think, to miss scoring a “bull” on so admirable and easy a mark.

The king then conveyed the property to Digby, Earl of Bristol, the “Earl of Severn” of the slight story of Anna, Lady Baxby, in A Group of Noble Dames. When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle was garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early besieged by the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the Parliament. It happened here—as so often it did in their internecine strife—that there were relatives engaged on either side in this siege. The Earl of Bristol’s son, George, Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell, sister of the Earl of Bedford. She it was, the “Anna, Lady Baxby,” of the story, who rode out secretly to her brother, and told him that if he were determined to reduce the castle, he “should find his sister’s bones buried in the ruins.” But the investment continued until, finding himself weaker than he had supposed, the marquis offered to surrender on terms. If they were not accepted he proposed, with the Lady Anne’s consent, and indeed at her wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the enemy’s marksmen do their worst. The Earl of Bedford was not proof against this, and it is said, raising the siege, retired.

But this plan would not always work. Three years later, in 1645, when Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol’s stepson, was in command, a greater than the Earl of Bedford appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned it to surrender. This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west of England. For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front of the castle, which then surrendered, with its garrison of fifty-five gentlemen and six hundred soldiers. With that surrender came the final ruin, for the castle was “slighted,” or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents and the spoils of “the lodge,” sold to the people of Sherborne. This “Lodge” was the mansion which even then had been built near by, the castle already proving too inconvenient for the ideas of those times. It is the so-called “Castle” of to-day, still the seat of Digbys, collateral and commoner descendants of the old owners. Sir Walter Raleigh built the centre portion of it in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures show, and Digbys the later wings. Their crest, the singular one of an ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the entrance to the courtyard. In the park is still shown a stone seat, said to be that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was resting and smoking his first pipe of tobacco, when his pipe was dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of water thrown over him by his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as tobacco was then a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and, in the expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s reports, “well alight.”

The Lodge, now the “Castle,” was a halting-place of the Prince of Orange on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in 1688. He slept here a night, and from a printing-press in the house was issued his address to the people of England.