Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 13

On the whole, Dorsetshire may claim to be considered as a fairly natural and well-defined shire. Its eastern limit is formed by the swampy region at the embouchure of the Stour and the Avon; its western boundary is now purely artificial, but must originally have coincided with the valley of the Axe; and its northern extension was long marked by the great forest region of Selwood, which once swept round in an irregular crescent from Pillesdon Pen to the watershed of the Thames. Cranborne Chasse and many other patches of woodland still preserve the memory of its course; and Pen-Selwood even now keeps up the name of its “pen,” or highest point. Thus surrounded by sea, rivers, and primæval forest, the plain country of the Stour and the Frome must always have formed almost as natural a division of South Britain as Sussex itself. In the earliest historical times it made up the principality of the Celtic Durotriges, or men of the water-vale, who had their capital at Durnovaria, or Dorchester. Their great central stronghold was Maiden Castle, one of the finest ancient hill-forts in England; and the group of border fortresses which ringed round their exposed western frontier, towards the Damnonii of Devonshire, may yet be traced by the eye along all the principal heights overlooking the valley of the Axe. Beginning with the magnificent earthworks on Pillesdon Pen, this great system of tribal defences runs on by Lambert’s Castle and Coney Castle, till it reaches the sea at Musbury Castle and Hawksdown Hill, near Seaton. A similar group of Damnonian hill-forts answers to them from Membury to Beer on the opposite side of the valley. At the eastern end of the shire, again, another set of border earthworks, of which Badbury Ring, Hamilton Hill, and Hod Hill are the chief, guarded the open approaches to Dorset from Hampshire, the principality of the Belgæ, and in later days of the West Saxon intruders. But along the northern boundary we find no such line of primitive strongholds, because the wild forest region of Selwood itself afforded a sufficient protection. Few hostile tribesmen would have ventured to make their way on the war-trail through the trackless recesses of the great wood—Coit Mawr, the Welsh called it, while Silva Magna seems to have been its Latinised form; and, indeed, there is no record existing of any invasion of Dorsetshire from the north at any time.

Curiously enough, though Dorset was apparently one of the earliest conquests made by the West Saxons after their first settlement in Hampshire, we know little or nothing about the precise time or manner of its subjugation. All that we know for certain is the fact, vouched for by Gildas, the contemporary Welsh author of a little Latin tract whose authenticity is accepted by Mr. Freeman and Dr. Guest, that in the year 520, some twenty-five years after the landing of the West Saxons, they were repelled with great loss from Badbury, the main key of the eastern frontier. Probably this victory of the Romanised Durotriges saved Dorset for more than a quarter of a century. But after the English captured Old Sarum, they must probably have poured down upon Dorsetshire across the high belt of hills in the rear, and established their power in Durnovaria, whose name they corrupted into Dorceceaster or Dorchester. Once within the ring of forts, the whole champaign country must easily have fallen into their hands; though in the western half of the county the little separate valleys of the Brit, the Char, and the Lym, divided from one another by high hills, may have required to be separately conquered. Whether the English succeeded at once in occupying the valley of the Axe is very doubtful: certainly, the modern limits of the shire are most capricious in this direction. Not only does the lower Axe now belong to Devon, but even the little basin of the Lym is divided between the two counties, Uplyme being within the Devonian border, while Lyme Regis is in Dorset. There must be some good reason for this singular division of a small glen between what were once two independent States; but what that reason might be it is now perhaps impossible even to guess.

The English lords who settled down among the Durotriges in the water vale were known as the Dornsæte or Dorsæte, and they are usually spoken of as a people, not as a shire. They had their own ealdorman or dux, as the “English Chronicle” once Latinised it; which shows that the community possessed a certain local independence of its own. But, so far as we know, they always owed allegiance to the West Saxon kings at Winchester; and from a very early period they were included amongst the West Saxon folk. Originally, too, the Dorsæte had their own bishopric. In the first days of Christianity, we hear that Aldhelm was Bishop “west of Selwood,” with his see at Sherborne; and we know that he made vigorous efforts to convert the heretical British Christians of the west country to the orthodox faith of Rome. Among them, no doubt, were many Dorset and Somerset men; for we are told by Bede that he succeeded in persuading those Welshmen who were under English rule. But the independent Britons of Devon and Cornwall, the Damnonii under King Geraint, he could not succeed in converting. It seems almost like a bit of myth suddenly changed into sober history to read the surviving epistle of Aldhelm to Geraint—a name which most of us know only from Mr. Tennyson’s Idylls—addressed in due form “To the most glorious lord of the Western Kingdom, to King Gerontius, Aldhelm the Abbot sends greeting.” The name of the first Dorsetshire Bishop still clings in a corrupted form to the boldest headland of the county, St. Alban’s—or, as it should properly be, St. Aldhelm’s Head—where a ruined chapel commemorates him. Though the English doubtless settled numerously enough in Dorset—both their hundreds and their clan villages cluster thickly on the soil—yet it is probable that they spared a large proportion of the Christianised Welsh inhabitants; and both the appearance of the peasantry and the local nomenclature bear out this view. People of the dark, long-headed Celtic type abound in all the rural parts, while Pens and other British names are scattered up and down throughout the country.

Gradually, however, the Dorsæte sank to the position of a mere shire of Wessex. In the “English Chronicle,” indeed, their name is always given as that of a people, and it is not till after the Conquest that they come to be generally regarded merely as the inhabitants of Dorsetshire. But the resistance to the Danes broke down the wall of separation between the West Saxon counties; and when Devon was finally assimilated by the English in the reign of Athelstan, the importance of Dorset waned entirely. For a while Alfred united the bishopric of East Devon (the western half still remaining independent) to the see of Sherborne, to which he appointed his Welsh chaplain, Asser [of St. Davids], a graceful concession to the newly conquered Damnonian Welshmen. But when Athelstan drove out the Welsh chiefs from Exeter, the bishopric of that county was removed to Crediton, and as the main western see of Wessex was fixed at Old Sarum, Sherborne afterwards fell to the position of a mere abbey. Dorset, however, seems always to have been a favourite district with the West Saxon kings, doubtless because of the hunting in Selwood; and many of the kingly family were buried at Axminster (just across the border in Devon) or at Wimborne Minster. A great agricultural county it has always been; but it has not, and never had, any other source of wealth. The original historical shire was of course confined to the valleys of the Stour and Frome, the Vale of Marshwood, and the western dales, which form the chief arable and grazing lands; and as the forest has been cleared away, the downs of the interior have become famous for their sheep-walks. Towns are still few and small: Dorchester, a mere local centre; Poole and Bridport, two struggling harbours; and Weymouth, a watering-place of the type beloved and invented by the Georges, in the midst of a chalk country exactly like that round Brighton—these almost complete the little list. Shaftesbury, perched on the hill-top, and Lyme Regis, a decaying port artificially manufactured by Edward I., are the only others with any vitality left in them. Indeed, it might almost be said that since the English conquest, the shire, as a shire, has had no history of its own at all. Events in the history of England have of course taken place within it; but the county as a whole has gone on always in its own quiet agricultural and pleasant way. Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have been divided and amalgamated a dozen times over; but Dorset has continued Dorset alone from time immemorial, with no greater variation in its limits than that implied by an exchange with Devon of one isolated hundred or liberty for another.