marked out was exceeding large, near ten miles in circumference,
and ended west upon the open Downs, in view of the town of
Stockbridge.
This house was afterwards settled, with a royal revenue also, as an
appanage (established by Parliament) upon Prince George of Denmark
for his life, in case he had out-lived the queen; but his Royal
Highness dying before her Majesty, all hope of seeing this design
perfected, or the house finished, is now vanished.
I cannot omit that there are several public edifices in this city
and in the neighbourhood, as the hospitals and the building
adjoining near the east gate; and towards the north a piece of an
old monastery undemolished, and which is still preserved to the
religion, being the residence of some private Roman Catholic
gentlemen, where they have an oratory, and, as they say, live still
according to the rules of St. Benedict. This building is called
Hide House; and as they live very usefully, and to the highest
degree obliging among their neighbours, they meet with no
obstruction or disturbance from anybody.
Winchester is a place of no trade other than is naturally
occasioned by the inhabitants of the city and neighbouring villages
one with another. Here is no manufacture, no navigation; there was
indeed an attempt to make the river navigable from Southampton, and
it was once made practicable, but it never answered the expense so
as to give encouragement to the undertakers.
Here is a great deal of good company, and abundance of gentry being
in the neighbourhood, it adds to the sociableness of the place.
The clergy also here are, generally speaking, very rich and very
numerous.
As there is such good company, so they are gotten into that new-
fashioned way of conversing by assemblies. I shall do no more than
mention them here; they are pleasant and agreeable to the young
peoples, and sometimes fatal to them, of which, in its place,
Winchester has its share of the mirth. May it escape the ill-
consequences!
The hospital on the south of this city, at a mile distant on the
road to Southampton, is worth notice. It is said to be founded by
King William Rufus, but was not endowed or appointed till later
times by Cardinal Beaufort. Every traveller that knocks at the
door of this house in his way, and asks for it, claims the relief
of a piece of white bread and a cup of beer, and this donation is
still continued. A quantity of good beer is set apart every day to
be given away, and what is left is distributed to other poor, but
none of it kept to the next day.
How the revenues of this hospital, which should maintain the master
and thirty private gentlemen (whom they call Fellows, but ought to
call Brothers), is now reduced to maintain only fourteen, while the
master lives in a figure equal to the best gentleman in the
country, would be well worth the inquiry of a proper visitor, if
such can be named. It is a thing worthy of complaint when public
charities, designed for the relief of the poor, are embezzled and
depredated by the rich, and turned to the support of luxury and
pride.
From Winchester is about twenty-five miles, and over the most
charming plains that can anywhere be seen (far, in my opinion,
excelling the plains of Mecca), we come to Salisbury. The vast
flocks of sheep which one everywhere sees upon these Downs, and the
great number of those flocks, is a sight truly worth observation;
it is ordinary for these flocks to contain from three thousand to
five thousand in a flock, and several private farmers hereabouts
have two or three such flocks.
But it is more remarkable still how a great part of these Downs
comes, by a new method of husbandry, to be not only made arable
(which they never were in former days), but to bear excellent
wheat, and great crops, too, though otherwise poor barren land, and
never known to our ancestors to be capable of any such thing--nay,
they would perhaps have laughed at any one that would have gone
about to plough up the wild downs and hills where the sheep were
wont to go. But experience has made the present age wiser and more
skilful in husbandry; for by only folding the sheep upon the
ploughed lands--those lands which otherwise are barren, and where
the plough goes within three or four inches of the solid rock of
chalk, are made fruitful and bear very good wheat, as well as rye
and barley. I shall say more of this when I come to speak of the
same practice farther in the country.
This plain country continues in length from Winchester to Salisbury
(twenty-five miles), from thence to Dorchester (twenty-two miles),
thence to Weymouth (six miles); so that they lie near fifty miles
in length and breadth; they reach also in some places thirty-five
to forty miles. They who would make any practicable guess at the
number of sheep usually fed on these Downs may take it from a
calculation made, as I was told, at Dorchester, that there were six
hundred thousand sheep fed within six miles of that town, measuring
every way round and the town in the centre.
As we passed this plain country, we saw a great many old camps, as
well Roman as British, and several remains of the ancient
inhabitants of this kingdom, and of their wars, battles,
entrenchments, encampments, buildings, and other fortifications,
which are indeed very agreeable to a traveller that has read
anything of the history of the country. Old Sarum is as remarkable
as any of these, where there is a double entrenchment, with a deep
graff or ditch to either of them; the area about one hundred yards
in diameter, taking in the whole crown of the hill, and thereby
rendering the ascent very difficult. Near this there is one farm-
house, which is all the remains I could see of any town in or near
the place (for the encampment has no resemblance of a town), and
yet this is called the borough of Old Sarum, and sends two members
to Parliament. Whom those members can justly say they represent
would be hard for them to answer.
Some will have it that the old city of SORBIODUNUM or Salisbury
stood here, and was afterwards (for I know not what reasons)
removed to the low marshy grounds among the rivers, where it now
stands. But as I see no authority for it other than mere
tradition, I believe my share of it, and take it AD REFERENDUM.
Salisbury itself is indeed a large and pleasant city, though I do
not think it at all the pleasanter for that which they boast so
much of--namely, the water running through the middle of every
street--or that it adds anything to the beauty of the place, but
just the contrary; it keeps the streets always dirty, full of wet
and filth and weeds, even in the middle of summer.
The city is placed upon the confluence of two large rivers, the
Avon and the Willy, neither of them considerable rivers, but very
large when joined together, and yet larger when they receive a
third river (viz., the Naddir), which
joins them near Clarendon
Park, about three miles below the city; then, with a deep channel
and a current less rapid, they run down to Christchurch, which is
their port. And where they empty themselves into the sea, from
that town upwards towards Salisbury they are made navigable to
within two miles, and might be so quite into the city, were it not
for the strength of the stream.
As the city of Winchester is a city without trade--that is to say,
without any particular manufactures--so this city of Salisbury and
all the county of Wilts, of which it is the capital, are full of a
great variety of manufactures, and those some of the most
considerable in England--namely, the clothing trade and the trade
of flannels, druggets, and several other sorts of manufactures, of
which in their order.
The city of Salisbury has two remarkable manufactures carried on in
it, and which employ the poor of great part of the country round--
namely, fine flannels, and long-cloths for the Turkey trade, called
Salisbury whites. The people of Salisbury are gay and rich, and
have a flourishing trade; and there is a great deal of good manners
and good company among them--I mean, among the citizens, besides
what is found among the gentlemen; for there are many good families
in Salisbury besides the citizens.
This society has a great addition from the Close--that is to say,
the circle of ground walled in adjacent to the cathedral; in which
the families of the prebendaries and commons, and others of the
clergy belonging to the cathedral, have their houses, as is usual
in all cities, where there are cathedral churches. These are so
considerable here, and the place so large, that it is (as it is
called in general) like another city.
The cathedral is famous for the height of its spire, which is
without exception the highest and the handsomest in England, being
from the ground 410 feet, and yet the walls so exceeding thin that
at the upper part of the spire, upon a view made by the late Sir
Christopher Wren, the wall was found to be less than five inches
thick; upon which a consultation was had whether the spire, or at
least the upper part of it, should be taken down, it being supposed
to have received some damage by the great storm in the year 1703;
but it was resolved in the negative, and Sir Christopher ordered it
to be so strengthened with bands of iron plates as has effectually
secured it; and I have heard some of the best architects say it is
stronger now than when it was first built.
They tell us here long stories of the great art used in laying the
first foundation of this church, the ground being marshy and wet,
occasioned by the channels of the rivers; that it was laid upon
piles, according to some, and upon woolpacks, according to others.
But this is not supposed by those who know that the whole country
is one rock of chalk, even from the tops of the highest hills to
the bottom of the deepest rivers.
They tell us this church was forty years a-building, and cost an
immense sum of money; but it must be acknowledged that the inside
of the work is not answerable in the decoration of things to the
workmanship without. The painting in the choir is mean, and more
like the ordinary method of common drawing-room or tavern painting
than that of a church; the carving is good, but very little of it;
and it is rather a fine church than finely set off.
The ordinary boast of this building (that there were as many gates
as months, as many windows as days, as many marble pillars as hours
in the year) is now no recommendation at all. However, the mention
of it must be preserved:-
"As many days as in one year there be,
So many windows in one church we see;
As many marble pillars there appear
As there are hours throughout the fleeting year;
As many gates as moons one year do view:
Strange tale to tell, yet not more strange than true."
There are, however, some very fine monuments in this church;
particularly one belonging to the noble family of Seymours, since
Dukes of Somerset (and ancestors of the present flourishing
family), which on a most melancholy occasion has been now lately
opened again to receive the body of the late Duchess of Somerset,
the happy consort for almost forty years of his Grace the present
Duke, and only daughter and heiress of the ancient and noble family
of Percy, Earls of Northumberland, whose great estate she brought
into the family of Somerset, who now enjoy it.
With her was buried at the same time her Grace's daughter the
Marchioness of Caermarthen (being married to the Marquis of
Caermarthen, son and heir-apparent to the Lord of Leeds), who died
for grief at the loss of the duchess her mother, and was buried
with her; also her second son, the Duke Percy Somerset, who died a
few months before, and had been buried in the Abbey church of
Westminster, but was ordered to be removed and laid here with the
ancestors of his house. And I hear his Grace designs to have a yet
more magnificent monument erected in this cathedral for them, just
by the other which is there already.
How the Dukes of Somerset came to quit this church for their
burying-place, and be laid in Westminster Abbey, that I know not;
but it is certain that the present Duke has chosen to have his
family laid here with their ancestors, and to that end has caused
the corpse of his son, the Lord Percy, as above, and one of his
daughters, who had been buried in the Abbey, to be removed and
brought down to this vault, which lies in that they call the Virgin
Mary's Chapel, behind the altar. There is, as above, a noble
monument for a late Duke and Duchess of Somerset in the place
already, with their portraits at full-length, their heads lying
upon cushions, the whole perfectly well wrought in fine polished
Italian marble, and their sons kneeling by them. Those I suppose
to be the father of the great Duke of Somerset, uncle to King
Edward IV.; but after this the family lay in Westminster Abbey,
where there is also a fine monument for that very duke who was
beheaded by Edward VI., and who was the great patron of the
Reformation.
Among other monuments of noble men in this cathedral they show you
one that is very extraordinary, and to which there hangs a tale.
There was in the reign of Philip and Mary a very unhappy murder
committed by the then Lord Sturton, or Stourton, a family since
extinct, but well known till within a few years in that country.
This Lord Stourton being guilty of the said murder, which also was
aggravated with very bad circumstances, could not obtain the usual
grace of the Crown (viz., to be beheaded), but Queen Mary
positively ordered that, like a common malefactor, he should die at
the gallows. After he was hanged, his friends desiring to have him
buried at Salisbury, the bishop would not consent that he should be
buried in the cathedral unless, as a farther mark of infamy, his r />
friends would submit to this condition--viz., that the silken
halter in which he was hanged should be hanged up over his grave in
the church as a monument of his crime; which was accordingly done,
and there it is to be seen to this day.
The putting this halter up here was not so wonderful to me as it
was that the posterity of that lord, who remained in good rank some
time after, should never prevail to have that mark of infamy taken
off from the memory of their ancestor.
There are several other monuments in this cathedral, as
particularly of two noblemen of ancient families in Scotland--one
of the name of Hay, and one of the name of Gordon; but they give us
nothing of their history, so that we must be content to say there
they lie, and that is all.
The cloister, and the chapter-house adjoining to the church, are
the finest here of any I have seen in England; the latter is
octagon, or eight-square, and is 150 feet in its circumference; the
roof bearing all upon one small marble pillar in the centre, which
you may shake with your hand; and it is hardly to be imagined it
can be any great support to the roof, which makes it the more
curious (it is not indeed to be matched, I believe, in Europe).
From hence directing my course to the seaside in pursuit of my
first design--viz., of viewing the whole coast of England--I left
the great road and went down the east side of the river towards New
Forest and Lymington; and here I saw the ancient house and seat of
Clarendon, the mansion of the ancient family of Hide, ancestors of
the great Earl of Clarendon, and from whence his lordship was
honoured with that title, or the house erected into an honour in
favour of his family.
But this being a large county, and full of memorable branches of
antiquity and modern curiosity, I cannot quit my observations so
soon. But being happily fixed, by the favour of a particular
friend, at so beautiful a spot of ground as this of Clarendon Park,
I made several little excursions from hence to view the northern
parts of this county--a county so fruitful of wonders that, though
I do not make antiquity my chief search, yet I must not pass it
over entirely, where so much of it, and so well worth observation,
is to be found, which would look as if I either understood not the
value of the study, or expected my readers should be satisfied with
a total omission of it.
I have mentioned that this county is generally a vast continued
body of high chalky hills, whose tops spread themselves into
fruitful and pleasant downs and plains, upon which great flocks of
sheep are fed, &c. But the reader is desired to observe these
hills and plains are most beautifully intersected and cut through
by the course of divers pleasant and profitable rivers; in the
course and near the banks of which there always is a chain of
fruitful meadows and rich pastures, and those interspersed with
innumerable pleasant towns, villages, and houses, and among them
many of considerable magnitude. So that, while you view the downs,
and think the country wild and uninhabited, yet when you come to
descend into these vales you are surprised with the most pleasant
and fertile country in England.
There are no less than four of these rivers, which meet all
together at or near the city of Salisbury; especially the waters of
three of them run through the streets of the city--the Nadder and
the Willy and the Avon--and the course of these three lead us
through the whole mountainous part of the county. The two first
join their waters at Wilton, the shiretown, though a place of no
great notice now; and these are the waters which run through the
canal and the gardens of Wilton House, the seat of that ornament of
nobility and learning, the Earl of Pembroke.
One cannot be said to have seen anything that a man of curiosity
would think worth seeing in this county, and not have been at
Wilton House; but not the beautiful building, not the ancient