CHAPTER II. LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS. LANGPORT,' Walter Bagehot's birthplace, is a small, ancient town on the river Parret in the centre of that part of England which narrows between the Bristol and the English Channels before it again widens out into Devonshire. Langport is thirteen miles from Taunton, thirteen from Bridgwater, thirteen from Glastonbury, thirteen from Yeovil, thirteen from Crewkerne, and five from Somerton, formerly the capital of Somerset. It is quite unique-unlike any other place in England. It reminds one rather of certain small foreign towns. Viewed as a town it is tiny, and the inhabitants do not now number eight hundred. Yet it cannot be called a village; it has a market. Its importance in history and its commercial prosperity are the results of its being the first ford from the mouth of the river Parret.2 It is like a town stopped short in the making, never having expanded beyond restricted limits. For these limitations there are physical causes. Two hills rise out of the moors half a mile apart. The moors mean in Somerset those wide stretches of meadowland, flat as a lake, from which dead level rise the Mendip, the Quantock, and the Black Down Hills. They include the famous Sedgmoor, the scene of the defeat of Monmouth by Marlborough. One of the two hills 1 The name Langport stands for Llan-Church, and Porth or borth -harbour. * The river Parret was made the western boundary between the Saxons and the Britons by King Cenwalch in 658 after he had gained a victory at the Pens (Penselwood) and "drove the Britons as far as the Parret" (Saxon Chronicle). In 845 is recorded the first inroad of the Danes in the Severn "when the Wessex men made great slaughter and won the battle of the Parret ". was formerly covered by the ancient town of Langport, a crowded mass of houses, within fortified walls, interlaced with narrow alleys, and crowned by a grand early perpendicular church built on the site of a yet earlier Norman church. The town was entered on the eastern side through an archway under the Hanging Chapel, built in the latter part of the thirteenth century as the Merchants' Guild Chapel. These and the church still exist as they were in olden times. The opposite hill, Herd's Hill, is crowned by groups of huge elm trees, whose rounded masses of foliage rise with stately effect against the western sky. As a child in arms, little Walter Bagehot was taken up from the Bank House in the town, where his parents lived during the life of his grandfather, to lay the foundation-stone of the existing house on the summit of the hill. Between the two hills runs the present street of Langport which dates from some centuries back. One end is called Bow Street, Bow being the Saxon word for bridge, the other Cheapside. It owes its existence to the Romans who found it necessary to make a causeway over the moors at this point between the two hills when constructing a highway from the West Country to London. They built nine bridges to carry the road and to lift it over the swamps. This viaduct, the work of Roman engineers, was solidly constructed, and houses were gradually erected here and there on each side of it. Eventually these houses formed a street, continuing half way up the hill towards the church. It included the Bank House where Walter Bagehot A chronicler of the last century writes: "The modern House stands on the summit of Herd's Hill whence Richard Baxter on his first campaign as a Chaplain to the Cromwellian Army, must have viewed with Fairfax the flight of the Royalist Army under Lord Goring after the battle of Langport. But from that spot a history of England might be illustrated. There, beneath is Athelney, where Alfred burnt the immortal cakes which he was left to bake. There is Aller whither he took Guthrun, the Danish King, to Christian baptism; Montacute, the home of the Knightly family with its Abbey to which the Rood of Grace was brought from Watham; Sedgmoor with its memories of Monmouth's rebellion and its terrible sequel; and just the top of Burton Pillar with its story of eighty years of the Chatham reign." was born. This is a large, six-windowed, solidly built residence with spacious rooms and wide staircases next door to the Bank. The ancient town on the hill surrounding the church has disappeared with the exception of a trace here and there of a narrow alley or a relic of the old fortification walls embedded in some new structure. Covering the space occupied by the ancient buildings now stands Hill House, the residence first of the ancestors of the Bagehots, and subsequently of the Stuckey family, from about 1750 till ten years ago, together with various smaller residences and gardens. The unsafe moor reaches close up to the backs of the houses, and prevents any expansion of the town behind the street of Langport. Till within the last few years the floods would mount so high that the street itself was invaded, the water rising to the first floor of the houses and turning the street into a Venice-like canal. Means have been found to stop this mischievous invasion of the water into Langport itself, but no steps have been taken to stop the flooding of the moors. The mind of the West countryman is an economical mind. It distinctly has its limitations, and is not hastily progressive. Where economy could be effected, Walter Bagehot pointed out how the Langportians could, on the contrary, be retrogressive. Mr. Hutton writes: "In early days (Langport) returned two Members to Parliament until the burgesses petitioned Edward I. to relieve them of the expense of paying their Members, a quaint piece of economy of which Bagehot frequently made humorous boast". Long ago means might have been found of draining the moors and preventing their being flooded, had not the native mind been bent another way. These floods are potent fertilisers of the soil, and the farmer, being anxious to fertilise his land without expense, does not desire that the floods should be restrained. To his mind any advantage which might accrue to the neighbourhood from developing industries through extending the town of Langport was problematical and far off; whereas the expenditure which would be necessary in order to manure his land would be a matter of immediate and disagreeable importance to him. These moors give their name to the county, sea-moor-settlers Somersetee. There is a something curiously soothing and romantic in the feeling which these widespreading lonely lands inspire. Free, far-reaching, and almost uninhabited, like the sea they are absolutely untormented by any innovation of modernity. Rows of pollarded willow trees are planted along the edge of the rough roadways that now and then cross the moors, and by the side of the rhines, ditches which gleam in water tracks among the meadows. Like the olive of the South, their pointed-leaved foliage turns from grey-green to silver as they are swept by "the everlasting wash of air" which rushes over the flat plains from the far-away sea. Growing as luxuriantly as they like, all kinds of lovely things flourish and bloom undisturbed in the water or on the edge of these rhines-bullrushes, the flowering rush of the delicate pink asphodel-like flower, yellow irises, forget-me-nots, willow weed, loose-strife, and meadow sweet, and countless other rare delights, many of them treasures to botanists. Here and there, at long intervals, a farmstead has found a little rise in the moor whereon to perch itself. There is hardly a view over these stretched-out lands which does not include at least one or two of the beautiful square church towers for which Somerset is famous, rising massively out of clumps of elm trees, or from low-thatched roofs of village cottages nestled around them. They strike the welcome note of an art allied in its quality to all this unspoilt nature. But such incidents are but as a ship on the wide waters of the sea; a spot which only marks more distinctly the contrast between the amount of work done by nature in the scene, and that constructed by human hands. There are three points from which the characteristic features of this scenery can be most clearly viewed. Two of these are specially associated with Walter Bagehot, and the third, perhaps more particularly in my mind, with his friend, Richard Hutton. Standing by the grave of Walter Bagehot, but a few yards distant from the south side of Langport Church, and looking over the low wall which separates the grave from the steep southern side of the hill, you see the river Parret gliding away towards Muchleney Abbey, the child of the famous Glastonbury Abbey, nestled with its church tower among trees and thatched cottages. Past Muchleney, away stretch the moors with their rows of pollarded willows, with here and there a cluster of elm trees, moor and trees softening from green into a purple middle distance; then they melt into a blue which gets misty and far away before the rising ground is reached, topped by three hills marking the domain of Montacute, the beautiful home of the Phelips family. One of these three hills is verily a Somerset Pentelicus. From its side is quarried the famous Ham-Hill stone which for centuries has made beautiful many churches, mansions, and cottages all over this part of the world. Quaintly enough it is now to be found also in Piccadilly! Away past Montacute again the flat land stretches, now a faint silvery mist with here and there a blotch of azure to show it is earth not sky, away till the blue line of the Dorset hills determines the horizon. On leaving the churchyard and turning to the right, passing Hill House and through the archway surmounted by the thirteenth-century Hanging Chapel, one sees rising straight from the ground one of the great glories of this country-side-the almost unrivalled tower of Huish Episcopi Church, a treasured feature from many points in the grounds of Herd's Hill. Like Langport Church, it stands on the site of an older Norman edifice. The chief entrance is still through a fine Norman doorway. When Walter Bagehot was young one vicar served the two churches, and the afternoon Sunday services, to which he was taken as a boy by his mother, were held alternately at Langport and at Huish Episcopi. Following a road which rises from Huish on to high ground to the north you look down on Low Ham, its ancient church and the ruined walls of the mansion of romantic traditions, across valleys to the Tor at Glastonbury and to ranges of the Mendip above Wells. After passing again another very fine church, that of High Ham, most notable for the exquisite carving of its old oak screen, the road leads along a ridge to a point of view over the moors called Turn Hill. This is the widest and most extended view which can be got of the moors. It includes the whole of Sedgmoor and, among many other churches, that of Chedzoy, where part of the King's Army |