WIMBORNE MINSTER

Wimborne Minster or “Warborne” in Two on a Tower—is, or was, for the Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the town, the Vindogladia of the Antonine Itinerary. If you speak of it in the curt irreverent way of railways and their time-tables, or in the equally curt, but only familiar, manner of its inhabitants, it is merely “Wimborne.” In their mouths, elision of the “Minster” merely connotes affection and use, as one drops the titles or the “Mister” of a friend, in speaking of him; but in the case of railway usage it is the offensive familiarity of the ill-bred, or, at the least, a derogatory saving of space and type.

This common practice is all the more historically an outrage, for had there been no Minster, there would have been no town of Wimborne. It derives from an early religious settlement, founded in A.D. 700 near the site of the forgotten Roman station, by Cuthburga, one of those unsatisfactory princess spouses of the pietistic period of Saxon dominion, who, married to the King of Northumbria, refused him conjugal rights and finally established herself here, living a life of “continual watchings and fastings,” and finally dying of them. We are not concerned to follow the mazes of the early history of town and church. It suffered the usual plunderings and burnings, the nuns were occasionally carried off, sometimes against their will, at other times with their consent, and at last, somewhere about A.D. 902, monks replaced them. The whole foundation was re-established by Edward the Confessor, and remained as a Collegiate church until 1547, when it was disestablished, its revenues seized, and the building wholly converted to the purposes of a parish church.

Sturminster Marshall

Anthony Etricke’s Tomb, Wimborne Minster

Wimborne Minster might be made the subject of a lengthy architectural disquisition. Its two towers, western and central, are themselves pointers to its history; for they show, not in the different periods at which they were built, but in the richness of the one and the comparative plainness of the other, the combined uses of the building in days of old. The central tower, of transitional Norman design, and remarkably like the towers of Exeter cathedral, was originally surmounted by a stone spire, which fell in 1600. Its elaboration is explained by its having been a part of the monastic church, while the western tower erected about 1460, belonged to the parochial building.

The church, endowed with two—and two dissimilar—towers, is a splendid feature in the streets of the old town. It and the town gain dignity and interest in an amazing degree, and here in Wimborne the pinnacled battlemented outlines “make” both town and Minster, in the pictorial sense. They bulk darkly and largely across the yellow sandiness of the broad market-place, and sort themselves into endless and changeful combinations down the narrower streets. Apart, too, from these important considerations, the Minster is exceptionally rich in curious features, outside its architectural details.

Our ancestors possessed a quaint mixture of serious devotion and light-hearted childishness, and we are the richer for it. Thus, high up on the external wall of the western tower, the observant will notice the odd little effigy, carved, painted and gilt, resembling a grenadier of a century ago, or a French gendarme of a past rÉgime: it is difficult to assign it with certainty, and assuredly it does not look so old as 1600, the date when it is stated to have been placed here. His business is that of a quarter-jack, and he strikes the quarters upon a bell on either side of him. The clock within, an astronomical contrivance made in 1320 by that same ingenious Glastonbury monk, Peter Lightfoot, who was the author of the famous clock of Wells Cathedral, represents the courses of the sun, moon, and stars.

The Minster, in short, is a museum of antiquities, found particularly interesting by the half-day excursionists from Bournemouth who are its chief visitors and carry away a fine confused recollection of their scamper round it. Here, in a room above the vestry, is the Chained Library, a collection of over two hundred and forty volumes, mostly chained to iron rods. Some of the books are very early, but the collection was formed in 1686. Perhaps, for the sake of its story, the copy of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World” is even more interesting than “The Whole Duty of Man” and the “Breeches Bible,” for it still displays the carefully mended hundred leaves burnt through when the boy, afterwards poet, Prior fell asleep over his reading of it and upset the candle, with this result. Each damaged page was neatly mended by him and the missing letters so carefully restored that it is difficult, until attention is drawn to the repair, to detect anything exceptional. Prior was born at Wimborne in 1664, as a brass tablet in the western tower to his “perennial and fragrant” memory tells us.

The Wimborne Clock-Jack But of paramount interest to sightseers, far transcending the ironbound deed-chests, some hollowed from a single trunk, and the tombs of the noble and knightly, is the last resting-place of Anthony Etricke, in the south wall of the choir aisle. Anthony Etricke was a personage of some local distinction in his day, for besides being a man of wealth, he was first Recorder of Poole. He has also won a little niche in the history of England by no effort of his own: a distinction thrust upon him by circumstance, and one which might have fallen upon any other local magistrate. Sentimentally speaking, it is also a wholly invidious and undesirable fame or notoriety, and was so regarded by the good folk of the town. Etricke, residing at Holt, near the spot where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was captured, was the magistrate before whom the wretched fugitive was brought. Another might possibly, greatly daring, have secured the escape of that romantic figure, and by so doing at the same time have altered the course of English history and earned the admiration of those who admire chivalric deeds. But Etricke was not of this stamp, and was, moreover, of that old faith which the bigoted James was striving to reintroduce: while Monmouth was the Protestant champion. Alas! poor champion. Etricke at once performed his bounden duty as a magistrate, and also satisfied his own private feelings; and Monmouth ended miserably.

Etricke never regained popularity in his district, and lived for eighteen years longer, a shunned and soured man. The story tells how he took what may surely be regarded as the odd and altogether insufficient revenge of declaring that he would be buried neither in the church of Wimborne nor out of it, and accordingly in his lifetime had a niche prepared here, in the wall, where the polished black slate sarcophagus, still seen above ground, was placed. He was eccentric beyond this, for he had conceived the date of his death and caused it to be boldly carved on the side, between two of the seven shields of arms that in braggart fashion are made to redound to the glory of the Etricke family. That year he had imagined would be 1691, but he actually survived until 1703, and the date was accordingly altered (as seen to this day) when at last, to the satisfaction of Wimborne, he did demise. For the keeping of his tomb in good repair he left twenty shillings annually, a sum still administered by the Charity Commissioners; and it certainly cannot be said that he does not receive value for his money, because his eccentric lair is maintained, heraldic cognisances and all, in the most perfect condition. Any ill-will this solemn personage may have felt towards Wimborne is altogether robbed of satisfaction nowadays, and his gloomy ghost may, for all we know, be enraged at the thought of the attraction his eccentricity has for visitors and the trade in photographs it has provoked, much to the material well-being of the town.

Wimborne Minster; The Minster and the Grammar School

The pilgrim of the Hardy country, come to Wimborne—I should have said “Warborne”—to see that Grammar School where, to quote Haymoss Fry, “they draw up young gam’sters’ brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way,” is like to be disappointed, for the place where “they hit so much larning into en that ’a could talk like the day of Pentecost” is no longer an ancient building. ’Tis true, the foundation is what the country folk might call an “old arnshunt” thing enough, being the work indeed of that very great founder of schools and colleges, the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII. It was refounded by Queen Elizabeth, who stripped all the credit of this good deed in a naughty world from the memory of the pious countess, and willed that it should be styled “The Grammar School of the Foundation of Queen Elizabeth in Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset.” That was pretty bad, but worse came with the whirling years. James I., like the shabby fellow he was, raised a question respecting the validity of its charter, and was only bought off with £600; and Charles I., unlike the noble, magnanimous sovereign he is commonly thought to be, bled the institution to the tune of another £1,000, by a similar dodge. The wonder is that it has survived at all, and not only survived, but flourished and was able, so long ago as 1851, to build itself that new and substantial home which is so scholastically useful, but at the same time disappointing to the literary pilgrim who, at the place where Swithin St. Cleeve was educated, hoped to find a picturesque building of mediÆval age.