Eight thousand years in the life of an English village
‘The Dorset Ooser Dines’
Story 27 of 38
Robert Fripp
Copyright Robert Fripp 2013
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Cover
A young Victorian couple.
Source: 25.media.tumblr.com
Cover design: The Design Unit, Wimborne
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Table of Contents
The Dorset Ooser Dines
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Endnote on the Dorset Ooser
The Author’s Note
Books by Robert Fripp
Reach me Online
A List of my Stories
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~ WESSEX TALES ~
‘ The Dorset Ooser Dines ’
circa 1880
The last known photo* of the Dorset Ooser’s head, 1891.
Photo, J.W. Chaffins and Sons, Yeovil
*The Plain Text e-version cannot reproduce photographs.
“There is really no reason why the Bull should no longer break in upon our Christmas festivities as he did forty years ago… There was a time [in Child Okeford] when the Bull, [usually called the Dorset Ooser] came to the feast uninvited. … At the period I speak of the tenants danced unsuspectingly until the fatal moment when the Bull rushed in. He was entirely covered with a bull’s shaggy hide. His horns were long and sharp, and his eyes were of grey-blue glass, very unearthly and fearsome. A sort of valance hid his legs. The cross-stick that carried his head could be turned from side to side in realistic fashion. As he was blind a keeper led him from one to another of the shrieking damsels, and when he had one of them pinned into a corner it was small wonder that she went into hysterics. … He became so lively after supper that his keeper had all his work cut out to keep him from goring his fellow-revellers.”
The Reverend J. H. Cooke, 1921, The Vicar of Shillingstone, Dorset.
Half an hour’s trudge from Child Okeford, lodged between a yew-wood on Hambledon Hill and an oxbow bend in the River Stour, a great house in Jacobean style stands in grounds of time-enriched simplicity, a simplicity that would have pleased that seventeenth century man of many parts, John Evelyn. A little more than two hundred years before the events of this tale took place, Evelyn’s book Sylva set British landowners cocooning their noble houses, households and themselves in manicured deer parks, shaded—seldom to excess—by great, sometimes exotic trees.
By the time Queen Victoria had warmed her throne for forty years, many a sapling planted by a landowner grateful to survive the Civil Wars had become a tree as majestic, as baronial, as the halls near which they were so meticulously placed. Many such trees would outlive the baronial pretensions of the once-great families that built the houses and stocked the parks.
By the 1880s, the reign of the landed gentry was in severe decline, as grain from virgin lands beyond the seas sapped the basis of land-rent economics. But the drama was not played out, not yet. If the sky looked threatening, the heaviest rain was still some miles off. This was a time of premonitions. Yes, that’s it: A time of old money wrestling with new premonitions.
It was the generous practice of the lady whose happy fate had placed her in this great house to invite her tenants to a feast and ball each Christmas-tide. It was a time when fields were dead and hearts and hopes looked longingly to spring.
Thus they came, the self-confident among them as much at ease as their hostess—and more prominent than she on the national stage. Others came stiffly, in the best that they wore to church on High Sundays. Their hostess, sensible of her lesser tenants’ limited means and social standing, was careful not to require the event be designated ‘formal’. Walking-out attire was sufficient for many.
Some arrived in dread anticipation of an evening they must spend in durance vile, exposed, they felt, like clodhoppers among their social ‘betters’. These endured the genuine and happy hospitality of their landlady and hostess rigid with trepidation. Brave men who’d faced down Russian guns before Sebastopol quailed through weeks of fright at the prospect of this annual event. If some arrived already well fortified against the evening rather than against the cold, well, who could rightly blame them?
Come late afternoon, carriages started arriving—small and great, dog-cart and armorial-painted coach alike—their owners ushered like royalty through the great portal and into the Presence, to a receiving room where a roaring fire and hot punch lay waiting to disarm and loosen lips tied up as much by awkwardness as frost.