The Nature of the Study
This work is one of a series looking at Q's lectures on specific poets and novelists, examining his approach, methodology and reflections.
Unlike many lecturers, then as now, Q was not in the business of delivering large amounts of information for the purpose of determining his students' thinking nor of constructing fleeting literary theories. He confronted his students with the text in the hope of making them think for themselves. Received opinions, authoritative statements and elitist dogmas were not to his taste. Rather, he came from a Couch tradition of regarding fact as more important than theory. This must have put him at odds with many, although not with all, at Cambridge, where theoretical approaches – rationalism, scientism, Marxism, Freudianism, Neo-Darwinism, eugenics, historicism and eventually Fascism – were increasingly fashionable.
Hardy seems to have adopted a not dissimilar position, interpreting free-standing intellectual ideas in terms of an ancient Dorset culture, one stretching back thousands of years. This gave him a perspective many academics lack.
This study originated as an exploration of Q's printed lectures 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy' from Studies in Literature I of 1918, and 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' in The Poet as Citizen of 1934. To this were added references to Hardy in the rest of Q's printed writings, particularly Q's comments on Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the study 'Mr George Moore' of 1896, comments to which Hardy took exception. It gradually became apparent that Hardy and Q had much in common, such as fictional writings; an awareness of political, military and intellectual events; a rootedness in a traditional community - Dorset and Cornwall, and perspectives formed in the middle of the 19th century spilling over into the inter-war period – although Hardy could never have imagined another war was possible when he died in 1928.
Q makes the point in 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy' that to understand the poet and novelist it was necessary to 'dig vertically down' into the cultural soil of Dorset. Q knew this because it was true of himself. To dig down was scarcely possible at the time, but advances in archaeology, interdisciplinary approaches, and DNA analysis have now made it possible.
A central theme in Q's writings is Hardy's struggle to find his true voice. Q saw Hardy as a poet who wrote novels for financial reasons, and, when his poetry was noticed, he abandoned the novel for verse. Yet his early verse was 'constricted' as he was 'struggling for expression'. Then 'at the age of seventy-seven, he discovers a lyrical note', the product of a 'true countryman's imagination' (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p. 197).
It was as though the Great War, as it was known until 1939, liberated him from thrall to the received culture, the culture responsible for the catastrophe. The intellectual and academic elites, steeped in wealth and privilege, could no longer claim superiority over the village boy from Stinsford with an unbroken cultural tradition behind him, one which prehistorians now assure us stretches back to the 'tribes beyond history' (ibid., p 200). Hardy had need to doff his cap to no man. Yet without the women in his life, particularly Emma Gifford, his first wife, 'a woman of remarkably strong character' (Quiller-Couch, 1934, p. 209), he might have been crushed. As Q knew Hardy personally his opinion must carry some weight.
It might be assumed that as Hardy died in 1928 and Q in 1944, this study is of historical interest only. However, in the face of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, portending a catastrophe greater than that of 1914, a similar reassessment of received culture, along with the structures of wealth and privilege which underlie it, is long overdue.
Acknowledgements
This study owes a considerable debt to references to Dorset in Barry Cunliffe's Britain Begins (2013), Timothy Darvill's Prehistoric Britain (2010), and to 'The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population' by S. Leslie et al. (2015). As to folklore, it relies on Robert Hunt's Popular Romances and Drolls of the West of England of 1865 and Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro of 1871.
For its biographical information, this study has looked at Martin Seymour-Smith's Hardy of 1994. The analyses of the poems and the stories are my own.
In relation to science – Hardy's interest in the ideas of Thomas Huxley, Darwin, and Einstein – Hoffman's and Dukas's Einstein (1975), Postmodernism and Big Science ed. Richard Appignanesi (2002), and a review by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Literary Review (September 2022) of Alison Bashford's An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family have been consulted.
Hardy poems are numbered according to Gibson, 1992.
I. Hardy, Q and a Change of Perspective
1. What this section is about
This section takes an unusual approach in looking at Thomas Hardy from a western perspective, seeing Dorset and Somerset as the eastern extension of the south-west peninsula, rather than as the heartland of Anglo-Saxon Wessex, with south-east England as its direction of focus.
The idea of Wessex as an Anglo-Saxon settlement area with the Celtic Britons marginalized in Cornwall and Wales has now been superseded. The populations of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset are largely autochthonous, deriving from migrations prior to Roman occupation, with varying percentages of later Anglo-Saxon immigrants. Research based on genetic ancestry has found that Hardy's forebears possessed genetic material dating back to the end of the Ice Age (Leslie et al., 2015).
Although largely ignored by national historians, the south-west peninsula has been a disputed area from at least the Roman conquest in AD 50-60 to the landing of Monmouth at Lyme Bay in Dorset and the subsequent failed 'Sedgemoor Campaign' of 1685, and William of Orange's invasion from Torbay in 1688.
2. Hardy and Q: similarities and differences
In 1840, Thomas Hardy was born in a cottage at Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in the county of Dorset. To the east rose the high wilderness of what he calls Egdon Heath in his novels. His earliest known poem 'Domicilium' paints a picture of the cottage:
It faces west, and round the back and side
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof (1: 1-3)
Beyond it -
. . . Heath and furze
Are everything that seems to grow and thrive
Upon the uneven ground . . .' (3: 1-3)
In the early editions of Wessex Poems, Hardy includes his own drawing of St. Michael's Church Stinsford, the Mellstock Church of his novels, with the grave of his father visible to the left of the path.
Q, who was born 23 years later in 1863, shared Hardy's deep sense of place. In the poem 'The Planted Heel' he writes about the church of his Couch forebears:
By Talland church as I did go
I passed my kindred all in a row; (1: 1-2)
Straight and silent all by the spade,
Each in his narrow chamber laid. (2: 1-2)
Q was born at Bodmin in mid-Cornwall, where his father was the local doctor, and above which stretched the heath and furze wilderness of Bodmin Moor. Both Bodmin and 'Egdon Heath' were dotted with isolated communities whose roots lay in pre-history.
Hardy was reared in the 'Hungry Forties' when Chartism was the dominating force and the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) a central issue. The Industrial Revolution was a distant phenomena in Dorset, although the Enclosure Acts had forced many agricultural labourers to the cities or to emigrate and the use of machinery was beginning to replace manual labour. The Napoleonic War was 25 years past, yet still prominent in the memory of older people, whose recollections Hardy used in his novels and poems. The Reform Bill had been passed in 1832 with the idea of permanence, although there were still those calling for further parliamentary reform.
In 1840, when Hardy was born, Q's father had yet to go for medical training at Guy's Hospital in London. He was following in the footsteps of his father, Dr Jonathan Couch of Polperro who, in 1841, was appointed a Local Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Q was not born until 1863 when Liberalism was becoming a dominant force, with calls for free-trade, universal education (1870) and further parliamentary reform (1867). Although an optimistic liberalism with its belief in progress through reform was pervasive, Marxism, militarism and Social Darwinism were slowly taking hold of the academic mind in Britain and on the continent, most ominously in Germany.
Both Q and Hardy were cradle Anglicans. Q's commitment, unlike Hardy's, never wavered, although Hardy appears not to have actually renounced Anglicanism although he did privately declare 'that the world exists is in fact absolutely logicless and senseless' (Seymour-Smith, p. 115).
Dorset and Cornwall differed in that a mineralized zone ran from the western slopes of Dartmoor to near the Land's End, with the result that this central spine played an important part in the Industrial Revolution, while Dorset remained largely unaffected by industrialization.
Cornwall, as a peninsula, is far more maritime than Dorset and more open to influences from the Mediterranean and from North America. Yet rural Cornwall has communities as isolated and traditional as those of upland Dorset. Q's father was a collector of traditional tales and passed them on.
Hardy and Q were similar in using folk culture, oral history and their local landscape as the foundation stones for their stories. They were the product of these localities, feeling the soil beneath their feet. To Hardy and Q, the Napoleonic War was 'the War', an event living still in the memories and imaginations of many. Yet a residuum of memory, via the oral tradition which extended into the distant past, remained.
Q explored the idea of the residuum of memory or 'secret' as Dr Carfax expressed it in the prologue to Castle Dor where the landscape is:
...scored over with writ of hate and love, begettings of children beneath the hazels, betrayals, appeals, curses, concealed travails...' (Quiller-Couch & Du Maaurier, p.5).
The ancient church at Talland, the circumvallations of Castle Dor at Fowey and the stone circles on Bodmin Moor were the products of his forebears. Maybe the revulsion Q experienced at the invasion by German forces of Belgium and France in 1914 was triggered by a folk memory of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. (See lectures 'Patriotism in Literature I &II' in Quiller-Couch, 1919).
Hardy was in a more ambiguous position, believing himself to be the product of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. When he travelled through 'Lower Wessex' into 'Off Wessex', he must have been aware of a relative change of atmosphere.
In April 1897, Hardy and Emma made a tour of Wessex, including Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral, where the lesson at Evensong was Jeremiah 6. No doubt Hardy had a sense of Stonehenge and other structures belonging in some way to his own cultural tradition. When Jeremiah was prophesying the 70-year Babylonian captivity of Judah (586 to 538 BC), Stonehenge was a monument older than the temple in Jerusalem (built 967-960 BC) that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed.
Remarking on August 10 on 'The misfortune of ruins' on Salisbury Plain, he wrote down from Jeremiah 6:
The day goeth away . . . the shadows of the evening are stretched out . . . I set watchmen over you, saying, Hearken to the sound of the trumpet. But they said, We will not hearken. Therefore hear, ye nations . . .To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me' (Seymour-Smith, p. 613).
Was he reflecting on Stonehenge, the temple in Jerusalem, Salisbury Cathedral or his own disappointed hopes? Or did he see them as one?
3. Interpreting Hardy from a Western Perspective
Hardy first visited Cornwall in 1870. He travelled up the Tamar valley from Plymouth to Launceston, and then west to St Juliot, an isolated settlement above the River Valency. Where the Valency flows into the sea is Boscastle. Down the coast to the west is Tintagel, with its Arthurian associations. St Juliot lies to the west of a large lowland tract bounded by Exmoor, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. Its isolation is evidenced by the fact that Hardy had to access St Juliot via Plymouth, rather than straight from Exeter.
According to Charles Henderson in his Parochial History of Cornwall, St Juliot had been served by a curate until 1865 when it became a rectory. Presumably, the Rev. Caddell Holder, who had married Emma Gifford's sister Helen, was the first rector. Henderson was unimpressed by a 'restoration' of the church, maybe the result of Hardy's visit in 1870 (Henderson, p. 87).
At St Juliot Hardy met Emma Gifford, who he later married. After Emma's death in 1912, the memory of his courtship in the parish became increasingly important to him. This brought him into intimate contact with Q, who knew the area and its people. In his printed lecture 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' (1934), Q related how Hardy used to talk of his St Juliot days with special reverence. The parish was a place of magic. In Hardy, Seymour-Smith quotes a letter from Hardy to Q's friend Sydney Cockerell:
We went to Cornwall – & saw the tablet at St Juliot, Boscastle; & thence to Tintagel.
Alas, I fear your hopes of a poem on Iseult – the English, or British, Helen – will be disappointed. I visited the place 44 years ago with an Iseult of my own, & of course she was mixed in the vision of the other (Seymour-Smith, p.826).
Yet the visit seems to have inspired the play The Famous History of the Queen of Cornwall. However, on his return he told Q on 22 October, 1916:
As to any other kind of writing interesting me . . . I sometimes wonder if it is not beneath the dignity of literature to attempt to please longer a world which is capable of such atrocities as these days have brought, & think it ought to hold its peace for ever (ibid., p. 827).
It was not until 1923, five years after the armistice, that Hardy completed and published the play.
The Tristan and Iseult legend is more properly associated with the Fowey valley, as Q and others had argued, but at some point in the Middle Ages the stories of Tristan and Arthur became intertwined. In April 1925, Q felt sufficiently certain of the Fowey Valley provenance of 'Tristan', as related in a letter to H.F. Stewart (Brittain, pp. 116-7), to commence the novel Castle Dor, which is based on the medieval manuscripts. 1925 was about two years after the completion of Hardy's play. Whether its publication had any influence on Q is unknown.
Hardy appears to have viewed Cornwall not just as 'Off Wessex', but as another land, one charged with the magic of his romance with Emma Gifford. Viewing Hardy from 'Off Wessex' is not without interest.
Yet Cornwall, Devon and Dorset are part of a peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic Ocean, of which Cornwall is but the western extremity. Archaeology and DNA analysis have discovered no Celt/Anglo-Saxon border, with the native populations deriving from migrations prior to the coming of the Romans. It might be argued that in visiting St Juliot, Hardy was not so much journeying to another land as travelling back in time.
II. Thomas Hardy as the Voice of Dorset: an investigation
1. What this section is about
Hardy is often depicted as the voice of rural Dorset, just as Walter Scott and Robert Burns are of Scotland, Charles Dickens London and, indeed, Q Cornwall.
However, in the study 'Mr George Moore', published in Adventures in Criticism, Q is more equivocal regarding Hardy, taking Tess of the D'Urbevilles as an example. Q refuses to see Tess as representative of 'Dorset women', even those who have 'illegitimate children', but rather that she is the pawn of a 'Providence' revealed in the novel as 'a savage and omnipotent bully'.
This section investigates the authenticity of certain aspects of Hardy's work in relation to Dorset.
2. Religion
Cornwall, Devon and Dorset differed in their religious make-up, a difference stemming from at least the Reformation and possibly from the time of Christianization. Dorset was Christianized from the time of the Roman Catholic mission to Canterbury in 597, while Cornwall and Devon were part of what is known as the Celtic Church which looked more to the eastern Mediterranean.
At the Reformation, opposition increased the further it progressed westwards, especially in Celtic speaking communities. Dorset embraced the ideas of the Continental Reformers, Luther, Calvin etc., more than Cornwall, giving it a strong puritan colouring. At the time of the English Civil War, Dorset and Devon were divided in their loyalties while Cornwall declared for the King, with the exception of a small number of landed families – as Q relates in the novel The Splendid Spur.
In Loyalty and Locality, Mark Stoyle describes how upland Dorset and the larger puritan towns, such as Dorchester, supported Parliament, while the vales supported the Royalists (p. 245). Subsequently, the Continental Reformed tradition continued to inform the sects of 'Old Dissent' and 'Reformed' Anglicanism. When Daniel Defoe passed through Dorchester in the 1720s, he found little division in the worshipping community of Dorchester except for their places of worship (Orme, p. 209).
In 1851, a 'Census of Religious Worship' was conducted on March 30. In Cornwall, Anglicanism and Methodism predominated, while 'Old Dissent' was marginal. In Dorset, 37.8% of the worshipping community were non-Anglicans, supporting the sects of 'Old Dissent'. 'Old Dissent' increases in importance from the Tamar eastwards: Tavistock 14.1%, Tiverton 27.5%, Honiton 23.3%, Axminster on the Dorset border, 24.7%.
The 'Index of Attendances' gives non-Anglican denominations: Dorset 37.8%, Devon 43.1% and Wiltshire 47.8%. Most non-Anglicans in Wessex appear to have derived from 'Old Dissent', with its roots in the puritans of the Civil War and in Continental Reformed theology.
The importance of religion and the nature of religious differences are evident in the stories of Walter Scott and Q, but this is scarcely true of Hardy, although Dorset was a religious county. A third of the population of Dorset, those associated in some way with 'Old Dissent', have virtually disappeared. As religious belief informed political belief, social intercourse and everyday behaviour, this is a serious omission for one seen as a Dorset writer.
In the Royal Cornwall Gazette of 19th March 1896 there is a report of a speech given by Q at a Wesleyan bazaar in Fowey. He states that in Cornwall being a member of a dissenting body was for historical reasons easier than elsewhere, where:
...the Established Church had one powerful advantage over all forms of dissent . . .the appeal of history and associations – embodied in her cathedral buildings and parish churches. It must have been hard – hard, in spite of all convictions – for men to turn aside from the Church in whose shadow their parents lay buried. The more honour to them that for conscience sake they did so . . .they had that treasure of independence . . .
Where are these convictions in the novels of Thomas Hardy? Where the sturdy independence? Yet Dorset is one of the very places Q must have had in mind.
The problem continues with Hardy's portrayal of Anglicanism. Q never demeaned the clergy of poor and rural parishes, such as the Rev. Taffy Raymond in A Ship of Stars, even if he was aware of their weaknesses. Q lived according to Anglican beliefs, as did many working people he knew. Yet it is difficult to find a practising and believing Anglican in Hardy's writings. Another section of Dorset society has been omitted.
Hardy's presentation of Dorset religion may have been acceptable to a secular urban market, but many in Dorset were probably left unimpressed.
3. Social Conditions and the Life of the Working Class
During the First World War many working class men had to be turned away from recruitment centres as unfit for military service owing to the effects of malnutrition, industrial injury or disease. The rural population of Dorset depended on the harvest, with failure spelling hunger, and hunger disease, a problem exacerbated by poor sanitation and inadequate housing. Hardy was born into the 'Hungry Forties' when these problems affected large numbers of the working population in Dorset and elsewhere.
As the son of a doctor, Q knew about this well and used his knowledge in the novella Ia. His uncle, Dr Richard Quiller Couch of Penzance, had been the author of A Statistical Investigation into the Mortality of Miners which helped establish the scientific link between health, occupation and locality. There is a revealing account of a man who in 1782 was born into a working class home and who lived until 1858, when Hardy was 18 years old. Although Richard Hampton lived in west Cornwall, his life could not have been very different from many in Dorset. In 1873, the text which had been 'taken from the lips of Richard Hampton by Mr Thomas Garland' was published by S. W. Christophers:
When I cum into this world I was a braave, healthy cheeld (but after) seven weeks I was took weth fits, which keept on 'pon me ever so long . . . my sight was turned, my faace and lembs twested . . . and 'twor all the wus for me, because I cud git nothin' but poor things to weear, awnly a few rags, an' in wenter it was busy all to keep me from shevverin' (Christophers, pp. 14-15)
Richard Hampton is a prime candidate for Hardy's understanding of malignant fate, the notion Q protested at in one of his first critical references to Hardy the novelist. Hampton takes Q's line, not Hardy's. Hampton supports this in a way Q was later to do in more intellectual detail in his studies and lectures.
I've got up many times out of bed in the dead o' night, and while the rest of 'em wud be slaipin' I used to git out, and for th' coose of an hour or moare look at the moon and the staars, and think about He that maade 'em.
He goes on:
... 'pon another occayon, when Maaster Wesley praiched at the pit, and aall the neighbours wore flockin' aways to heear'n, that theare saame hevvening my sawl was so titched that I stayed up ever so laate considerin' the hevvens and staars that God's fengers had maade (ibid, p. 19).
This can probably be dated to Sunday, August 23, 1789 when, in the evening, Wesley preached at the 'ampitheatre', or Gwennap Pit, to 'more than five-and-twenty thousand' (Wesley's Journal). Hampton was eight years old. Q's Polperro forebears were converts of Wesley, but it is unlikely that they heard him on this occasion. 1789 was the year in which Jonathan Couch was born.
In 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' from The Poet as Citizen of 1934, Q quotes from Hardy's novel Two on a Tower:
And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and formlessness there is involved the quality of decay. For all the wonder of these everlasting spheres, the eternal stars and what not, they are not eternal: they burn out like candles (Quiller-Couch, 1934, p. 214).
Q dismisses this observation of the 'illimitable depth and despair of the heavens' as the product of an 'immature astronomer', who cannot discern the order and regularity of the universe and who theologizes his observations into an 'Immanent Will, or President of the Immortals'(ibid., p. 216).
Simple Richard Hampton would have agreed. So, no doubt, would many working people in Dorset who preferred the bible to 'immature' astronomy. Q had the advantage over Hardy of coming from a scientific family. Another dedicated Cornish star-gazer was John Couch Adams of Laneast, who from perturbations in the orbit of Uranus predicted an eighth planet.
4. Love and Marriage
At the centre of Hardy's novels is the relationship between men and women, sexuality and marriage. How true is this depiction to the lives of people in rural Dorset? It is problematic to compare Dorset and Cornwall, but such a comparison should breathe caution into those commentators who talk of Victorian England and Victorian morality.
In Cornwall, the reasons for marriage in the working population were often utilitarian. Children were the one insurance against destitution in old age and that overrode all other considerations, including religious belief and social morality. Pregnancy was often a condition of marriage. When pregnancy did not result, couples were free to look elsewhere. With farmers and family businessmen, a son ensured continuity. Although Jonathan Couch's father was a fish merchant and the family was devout, Jonathan's first marriage is not untypical:
- Jane Prynn Rundle was recommended to Jonathan as a good cook.
- Jane was heavily pregnant when she married Jonathan in 1810.
- Jane died shortly after giving birth to a daughter.
- Some months later Jonathan had a vision of Jane who assured him of her eternal state.
- About five years later Jonathan married Jane Quiller.
For men requiring extra sexual satisfaction, there was the village prostitute. Jack Clemo's The Clay Kiln, set in 1938 on the industrial moors of mid-Cornwall gives a clear picture of such women, who must also have existed in rural Dorset:
[Olive Buzza] had been a village prostitute of the old-fashioned type, never bothering to wear smart clothes or jewellery or even using make-up. It was the sheer animal pull of her personality that had made her fascination so powerful to the village men (Clemo, p. 205).
Olive Buzza was a throw-back to the 19th century. Men did not seek her out, she had the power to attract and knew how to use it.
Working people in the 19th century led a basic life: food, money, religion, death and children – drink with some – were the dominating concerns. A second reason for caution is exemplified in Walter Scott's The Monastery. The novel details a marital custom called 'handfasting' which a footnote explains is common to the Scottish Uplands and the Isle of Portland in Dorset.
When we are handfasted, as we term it, we are man and wife for a year and day, that space gone by, each may choose another mate, or, at their pleasure, may call the priest to marry them for life (Scott, p. 312).
From where Scott obtained his information about 'handfasting' on the Isle of Portland is not stated, but it must have been from a reputable source. Hardy's novel The Well-Beloved is set on the Isle of Portland and draws attention to ancient customs relating to marriage. In an echo of Q's idea of 'palimpsest', Hardy presents the islanders as having existed through 'Norman, Anglian, Roman Palearic-British time' (ibid., I.11).
The isle had been the 'last stronghold of the Pagan divinities, where Pagan customs lingered yet' (ibid., I.11). These local customs governed marriage. 'Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which had prevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the old stock of the isle' (ibid., I.11).
It seems from what is stated in the text, that the ancient custom can scarcely be pagan in that it consisted in 'the formal ratification of a betrothal, according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires ' (ibid., I.11). Presumably, a betrothal formally announced before the leading member of each family with the result as binding. Nothing could be further from 'handfasting'. It is probably post-Reformation, with the children having to get the tacit agreement of the family before the church ceremony.
The seeming importance to Hardy is as a useful vehicle for a story about idealized love and the search for the ideal woman. The idea of a pagan isle may be fact or poetic fiction. The only point Scott and Hardy agree upon is that the Isle of Portland had traditional customs relating to marriage.
III. The Prehistory of the Dorset Area and its Relevance to the Writings of Thomas Hardy
1. What this section is about
This section endeavours selects references to Dorset from Barry Cunliffe's Britain Begins and Timothy Darvill's Prehistoric Britain, supplemented by other material, to construct an early history of Hardy's Dorset. There is a limited attempt to tie the writings of Hardy and Q at this point.
The reader is invited to take particular notice of solar and agricultural calendars, structures such as Maiden Castle and Stonehenge (Wiltshire), the religious importance of watery places, the belief in a world of matter and spirit where the dead can still be accessed at certain times and in certain places.
The section goes on to argue that the folk tradition of Dorset has preserved elements of pre-Christian beliefs and practices, especially in the most remote areas, and this tradition informs some of Hardy's writings. The reader is advised to read Cunliffe and Darvill in full, rather than to rely simply on inadequate summaries.
So as to provide a historical context events in Dorset are set against better known events in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
2. Hardy, Q and Pre-history
When Q gave his Cambridge lecture 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy', he argued for a new way of studying Thomas Hardy, to 'dig vertically down' through the accumulations of history to the 'tribes beyond history' (Quiller-Couch, 1918). When the lecture was published in 1918, the suggestion was difficult to implement. In the last 50 years, thanks to archaeology, carbon dating and DNA analysis, the situation has radically changed. There follow some of the interesting conclusions reached to date on these investigations using more modern techniques than those available to Q.
On October 25th 2022 the i Newspaper published an article based on a study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, headed 'Contrasting Lifestyles in Ice Age Britons revealed by ancient DNA'. Researchers had examined the DNA from a woman occupying Gough's cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, who died about 15,000 years ago, with a man from Hendrick's Cave in Wales 13,500 years ago.
By 15,000 years ago the climate had begun to warm, with hunter-gatherers migrating into north-west Europe from southern France and Iberia. Britain was accessed across dry land, as sea levels were low, or along the coast. This Late Glacial interstadial ended about 10,900 BC with the arrival of the last Ice Age.
Dr Rhiannon Stevens from the UCL Institute of Archaeology reported that:
Chemical analysis of the bones showed that the individuals from Hendrick's Cave ate a lot of marine and freshwater foods and engaged in primitive art such as decorated horse jawbones. Humans at Gough's Cave, however, showed no evidence of eating marine and freshwater foods, and primarily ate terrestrial herbivores such as red deer, bovids (such as wild cattle called aurochs) and horses (Stevens in i Newspaper, 25/10/22).
Contemporary techniques have enabled geneticists to penetrate beyond written records to a time when the ice caps were retreating enabling peoples to migrate permanently to Britain from various parts of western Europe and eventually Scandinavia. UK mapped out by genetic ancestry has identified various migrations and can confidently claim that most DNA material present today originated from before Roman occupation:
We estimate the genetic contribution to England from Anglo-Saxon migrations to be under half . . . the proportion of Saxon ancestry in C/S (central-southern) England as very likely to be under 50% and most likely in the range 10%-40% . . . clearly excluding the possibility of long-term Saxon replacement. [In the] non-Saxon parts of the UK there exist genetically differentiated subgroups rather than a general 'Celtic' population (Leslie et al).
Cornwall is distinct from Devon and Devon from Dorset. Dorset partakes of the central-southern mix. Unfortunately, there is a swathe of territory stretching from Exmoor to the chalk uplands of southern England from which few DNA samples were accessed. It is not possible to be sure of the population mix of this area of Hardy's Wessex.
Prehistoric Britain by Timothy Darvill
Timothy Darvill informs us of the occupation of Gough's Cave goes back to at least 11,390 BC, suggesting 2,500 years of occupation (Darvill, p. 50). There is reason to believe that Wessex has been occupied, although people moved south during the last Ice Age, and again during a cold snap around 6200 BC, for 15,000 years.
Darvill describes the importance of the caves in the Devon area to our understanding of the distant past. Sadly, he makes no mention of Sir William Pengelly FRS, an acolyte of Dr Jonathan Couch, who initiated the scientific investigation of these caves. Q knew Pengelly and accompanied him on 'half-holiday excursions' (Memories and Opinions, pp. 2 & 52), a friendship lasting until Pengelly's death.
In the first section of Chapter Four, Darvill repeats Colin Renfrew's argument that Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic and Slavonic languages derive from a common proto-European language originating in the Middle East. All these have a common stock of words relating to farming: e.g. herd, cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse, bee, grain (Darvill, p. 78): all words found in Hardy's writings.
Darvill argues that the genetic profile of British populations has remained stable following three main migrations (ibid., pp. 79-80). We can, then, be reasonably confident of Hardy having most of his genetic material and even some of his vocabulary deriving from these early migrations.
What is clear from recent work in all fields is that culture and language changes do not necessarily indicate changes in population. The Celtic influence seems unrelated to migration of identifiable 'Celts'. The Anglo-Saxon influence was not the result of population displacement. The gene pool stabilised after the Ice Age, and this has made a continuing contribution to the present gene pool; with the hunter-gatherers becoming farmers from about 4000 BC (ibid., pp. 48 & 77).
Dorset became and remained a well-settled area with a stable population. To put this in perspective, the legendary Menes founded the first of the 31 dynasties which ruled ancient Egypt in c. 3100 BC. The civilisation of Babylon commenced in about 2020 BC. The 'Early Chiefdom societies' in southern England can be dated to 3200-2000 BC. (ibid., p.131) The first phase of Stonehenge appeared in 2950 BC (p. 152) and the Maumbury Rings at Dorchester can be dated to this period (p. 154).
In about 2500 BC, the Beaker culture, which originated in Iberia, arrived via north-west France. Stonehenge continued to develop through the Beaker period. Darvill demonstrates how between 2950 and 1700 BC, Stonehenge went through four phases. the nature of the beliefs underlying the monument and similar structures is unknown, although there are clues. It is to be argued later that these clues provide some insight into what might be termed the base level of Hardy's writing, the beliefs and superstitions of the more isolated Dorset communities.
It is thought that Stonehenge was originally approached from the north-east, with the axis of the trilithon horseshoe open to the north-east and the rising midsummer sun, while the Great Trilithon provided a 'sightline to the setting midwinter sun' (ibid., p. 180). The Bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in Pembroke where folklore evidences healing springs. 'Oral tradition' ascribes 'healing properties' to the Bluestones at Stonehenge. Hence we have midsummer and midwinter sun, a monument, and water with healing properties. This seems to bring us into the context of some elements of Hardy's stories and poems.
The most relevant section is Darvill's 'Cosmologies and Beliefs' where he proposes that there was a tripartite division of the world held at this time, which became more pronounced with the arrival of the Beaker Culture:
1. The Heavens, specifically the cyclical movements of the sun, with its rising and setting at midsummer and midwinter;
2. The ground, where monuments are aligned to the movements of the sun, with midsummer and midwinter as of special importance. Grooved-ware culture, which became dominant in the Wiltshire-Dorset area around 1700 BC, showed the importance of the sun in its monuments, rock art and pottery. This was further developed by Beaker Culture, especially in gold sun-disks from 2500 BC, which reveals an influence from the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East;
3. The Underworld, symbolised by rivers, springs and bogs, and seen as a 'watery underworld' (ibid., p.179).
Darvill includes a table showing: ' Provisional cosmological schemes for the daily cycles of the sun based on archaeological material dating to the second millennium BC from north-west Europe' citing sources: Kaul in Clark (ed.) The Dover Bronze Age Boat, Oxford, 2004; Kristiansen and Larsson, The Rise of Bronze Age Society, CUP, 2005 (ibid., p226). This table reveals how belief developed while remaining true to its original conception.
Between 800 BC and 600 BC – the time of the Assyrian Empire – influence stemming from continental La Tene Cultures penetrated Britain, whether or not accompanied by a movement of population, and for which ancient writers used the term 'keltoi' or 'celti'. Darvill places Dorset in the southern Hillfort zone, with a fortified Homestead zone to the west. Styles of pottery changed four times between 800 BC and 200 BC. (ibid., Table I, p. 248). Maiden Castle in Dorset, as known now, was constructed at this time.
By 600 BC – in 586 BC Nebuchadnezzar exiled Judah to Babylon and the Temple of Solomon was destroyed – Europe was in a trading relationship with the Mediterranean, with increasingly important ports at Hengistbury Head and Poole Harbour in Dorset, and metal trading ports in Cornwall and Devon.
In the section 'Rivers, Shafts, Wetlands, Human Heads, and Cosmology' (ibid., pp. 290-2), Darvill explains how the obsession with water continued. Male deities seemed to be associated with the sky and the tribe, with the sun travelling the heavens by day; and female deities with fertility and the earth, and the sun travelling the underworld, a place of waters, by night. Added to this was the cult of the severed head.
In the pre-Roman period, hillforts such as Maiden Castle in Dorset were important. When the Romans arrived in AD 43 these had to be taken one by one, no doubt with serious slaughter. Maiden Castle was then abandoned, with Dorchester or Durnovaria as the regional Roman centre. St Paul was then on his missionary journeys through the eastern Mediterranean, with his address to the Athenians dated to about AD 50. By AD 60-1 Wessex lay under Roman control, with a legionary centre at Exeter, while by AD 70-1 military activity had extended north towards Scotland. The Romans were also involved from AD 60-73 in a Jewish war, which resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple and a Jewish diaspora, the consequences of which we are still living with today.
Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe
Another source of detailed information, with frequent references to Wessex, is Britain Begins (2012) by Barry Cunliffe. Chapter Three describes the first movement of hunter-gatherers into Britain during the glacial interstadial prior to about 10,900 BC. They made their homes in Gough's Cave, Cheddar Gorge, and in south-west Wales, before the Younger Dryas Event turned southern Britain into tundra.
The Glacial Interstadial effectively ended about 9600 BC. Migration then and subsequently followed two main routes: by sea from Iberia and south-west France; by a progressively narrowing land bridge from Northern France and Belgium: 'these were the first Britons, the ancestors of a significant component of the present-day British population' (Cunliffe, p. 102).
In the section 'The Story Told by DNA' Cunliffe includes one study which suggests that 68% of English and 79% of Cornish people have an ancestry which 'predates c. 4000 BC', so that 'immigration over the more recent 6000 years must have been comparatively slight' (ibid., pp. 128-130). Such evidence suggests that Hardy and Q had an ancestry in Britain stretching back over 6000 years, to the 'tribes beyond history' of Q's lecture, with the culture of Cornwall and Dorset a 'palimpsest'.
In the Neolithic Period hunter-gatherers turned into subsistence farmers, the first monuments to the dead and causeway camps were constructed, and there is the first evidence of armed conflict, such as at Hambledon Hill in Dorset (ibid., Chapter 5).
Chapter Six: 'Mobilizing Materials: A New Connectivity, 3000-1500 BC', describes the movement from stone to copper and bronze, and the arrival of a Bell Beaker culture from the Tagus area of Portugal. The great monuments of Dorset, including Stonehenge and Flagstones, date from this period, when 'the entire landscape seemed to belong to the gods' (ibid., p. 191). The wealthy dead tended to be buried in massive barrows or smaller scattered ones.
Chapter Eight: 'The Productive Land in the Age of Warriors, 1500-800 BC', describes a culture, becoming increasingly Celtic, common to both sides of the English Channel, with Hengistbury Head in Dorset as an important harbour and Maiden Castle in Dorset as the centre of an organized hierarchical society. The Solar Calendar slowly gave way to the Agricultural Calendar, which the Church later Christianized. As rural Anglicans, Hardy and Q were reared on the basis of a calendar stretching back over 3000 years. This structure is evident in their writings; yet also is the Solar Calendar.
In the section 'Watery Places', Cunliffe describes how bronze objects were consigned to rivers, lakes and bogs in large quantities, suggesting offerings to 'chthonic deities', a practice continued into the Iron Age.
The association of watery places with gods and spirits can be seen in Hardy's poems, such as 'Vagg Hollow' (610). A footnote describes Vagg Hollow as a marsh near Ilchester where 'Merchandise' was transferred from canal-boats to wagons.
Chapter Nine: 'Episodes of Conflict, 800-60 BC', that Wessex lay in a hillfort-dominated zone where warfare is evident. 'La Tene' art styles, often called Celtic, spread to Britain, with Hengistbury Head as a central port. In 'By the Barrows' (216), Hardy identifies a battlefield and the supposed barrows of the slain on 'The He'th' near 'Mellstock' (Stinsford). In 'Moth-Signal' (324), set on 'Egdon Heath', is an 'Ancient Briton/ From the Tumulus'.
In Chapter Ten: 'Interlude Approaching the Gods', Cunliffe confronts the vexed question of the druids, and he uses Roman sources to build up a picture of druidic religion. According to Julius Caesar in Bellum Bellicum, the druids believed in the trans-migration of souls. Also:
They hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements, about the size of the universe and the earth, about the nature of the physical world, and about the power and properties of the immortal gods . . .' (ibid., p. 343).
The system of belief appears more open than often thought.
It is interesting that cosmology occupied a central role in the creative visions of Hardy and Q, lying at the centre of the dispute between them, a dispute that was never resolved.
From what Cunliffe says there appeared to be a relationship between the earth, especially watery places, fire and the sky. Female gods, 'land-based, often associated with rivers and springs', were balanced by male 'tribal gods' (ibid., p. 354).
Cunliffe also describes how 'men and animals' were used for 'ritual killing' by being 'set on fire' (ibid., p. 342). The 'power of the immortal gods can be appeased only if one human life is exchanged for another' (ibid., p. 342). Whether similar practices associated with fire sacrifice and water survived in Dorset is unknown to this present writer, but they did in Cornwall. In his book Romances and Drolls of the West of England (1865) with a contribution by Dr Thomas Couch, Q's father, Robert Hunt includes a section on 'Fire Worship'. Hunt details a belief, existing into the early 19th century, that 'a living sacrifice appeased the wrath of God', particularly a calf or lamb, while the 'burning of blood, drawn from a deceased animal, has been a very common mode of appeasing the spirits of disease'.
On the eve of June 24 or Midsummer there were 'Baal Fires' or bonfires. In Ireland they occurred on May-Day and were called 'la na Bealtina'. In Penzance, there was a direct relationship between fire and water, as an account by Richard Edmonds says:
It is the immemorial usage in Penzance and the neighbouring towns and villages to kindle bonfires and torches on Midsummer-eve; and on Midsummer-day to hold a fair on Penzance quay, where the country folks assemble from the adjoining parishes in great numbers to make excursions on the water . . . I have, one these occasions, seen boys following one another, jumping through flames higher than themselves . . . and the heathen believed that all persons, and all things, submitted to this ordeal, would be preserved from evil throughout the ensuing year (pp. 206-214).
Other Sources of Information
During the Roman period, Dorset was the province of the Durotriges, whose language was Celtic and whose capital was Dorchester: on Hardy's map this is 'Casterbridge' in 'South Wessex'. The Belgic Atrebates, whose roots appear to have lain in northern Gaul, occupied 'Upper Wessex' to the east. The Dumnonii, with their capital at Exeter, occupied Devon and Cornwall, divided by Hardy into 'Lower Wessex' and 'Off Wessex'. How far meaningful Roman influence extended west of Exmoor-Dartmoor is a matter of scholarly debate.
Other Sources of Information: Davies and Morris
In The Isles: A History Norman Davies states: 'The Dumnonii were "the People of the Deep", but whether the link was with mining or fishing or with the Otherworld or with something else, one cannot tell' (Davies, p. 56).
Generally, there seems to have been a merging of Roman and Celtic deities, at least at the official level, with Druidism and the cult of the head extirpated. Meaningful Christianization appears to have commenced from the west, what is called the Celtic church, and from the east, the Roman Catholic church centred at Canterbury. The church, as far as possible, incorporated and Christianized pagan celebrations, as Darvill shows in 'Table J', p. 342.
The exception was the Summer Solstice for which there was no Christian equivalent. It seems plausible, therefore, to seek some sort of pagan continuation in folk culture around midsummer's day. This study hopes to demonstrate that a continuation existed and is evident in the writings of Hardy and Q.
Saxonization involved a displacement of language not of people. In his The Age of Arthur Morris comments that Saxon annals say:
...that the kingdom of Wessex owed its origin to Cerdic, who was in command of a number of separate Saxon forces under named leaders, at a date that was originally about 480, Cerdic is the only founder of an English Kingdom who has an unequivocally British name (Morris, p. 103).
Morris was writing this in 1993, before DNA evidence was available.
3. The Post-Roman Period with Special Reference to Hardy's Wessex.
This section is a study of the peoples of the south-west peninsula in the Early Medieval period, looking specifically at the native peoples and Anglo-Saxon immigrants, with reference to Hardy's Wessex. It assesses the validity of the 'replacement' model, whereby the native peoples were replaced by Anglo-Saxons from Germany over a period of time, against a 'palimpsest' model, as suggested by Q, where each wave of immigration overlies the former without obliterating it.
The study distinguishes between what it terms 'hard evidence', the product of archaeological investigation and DNA analysis, and 'soft evidence', coming from documents open to bias of various sorts, and a theory of place-names which suggests that they reveal genetic ancestry at a specific location. A third element is hypothesis, speculation and received opinion.
The study argues that with the increasing amount of archaeological evidence available, aided by increasingly sophisticated scientific techniques, and a nationwide survey of DNA conducted in 2015, the reliance on 'soft evidence', which has been used to support the 'replacement' model, has now to give way to 'hard evidence', involving a radical reassessment of the history of the south-west peninsula.
East Dorset lies at a join between the south-west maritime peninsula and southern-central England. Dorset was seen as integral to the post-Roman kingdom of Wessex as Cornwall and Devon were to Dumnonia. Hardy saw himself as a man of Wessex and presumably with Anglo-Saxon genetic ancestry. He was aware of pre-Saxon times, as his writings very occasionally show, but Anglo-Saxon Wessex appears integral to his imagination. Hardy scholarship seems to unquestioningly accept this.
A post-Roman feature of western Britain and Ireland are standing stones with Christian inscriptions in Latin, occasionally Irish Ogham, of which the south-west peninsula contains over fifty. A few remain in their original positions, others have been used as building materials or gate posts.
Most Christian memorial stones, which date from about 450 to possibly 800, lie to the west of the River Exe, usually isolated but occasionally in pairs, with Lundy Island having a group of four. Quite remarkably, Dorset has five, grouped in the churchyard of Lady St Mary at Wareham in East Dorset. No doubt they were originally dispersed.
There may be further Dorset stones lying below the surface or embedded in buildings or with the surface engravings obliterated by time. Dorset rock is less durable than south-west granite.
Memorial stones, the artefacts of archaeological investigation, and the results of DNA analysis provide hard evidence about the past. No records from Dumnonia, except for a king list, have survived to balance Anglo-Saxon records. Yet with the increasing amount of 'hard evidence' a reinterpretation of the history of the south-west is possible, with consequences for Hardy scholarship. This short study is a modest contribution.
Christian Inscribed Stones
The value of seeing Dorset as part of a south-west peninsula cultural tradition is illustrated by C.A. Ralegh Radford in the Holbeche Corfield Lecture of 1975: 'The Early Inscriptions of Dumnonia', a post-Roman kingdom stretching from Scilly to the River Parrett in west Somerset, but not as far as Dorset.
Radford dates the stones from c. 450 to c. 700, representing 'the earliest group of written records that has survived in contemporary form from the Insular Celtic world'. They were carved into free-standing 'Tall stone pillars', often six feet in height, with Latin on one side and occasionally Irish Ogham on another. By 1975 just over 40 had been discovered, the most easterly group at Wareham in east Dorset, some distance east of the Dumnonian border and not far from Hardy's birthplace.
The Christian inscribed stones show a continuing tradition, but not the earliest evidence of Christianity in Dorset. Caradoc Peters in The Archaeology of Cornwall states that 'A late Roman cemetery outside Roman Dorchester shows that Christianity thrived there'. There were also Christian mosaics in villas at Hinton St Mary and Frampton (Peters, p. 110).
This hard evidence seems to support the 'palimpsest' theory against the 'replacement' one.
A New Paradigm
The stones provide the archaeologist with hard facts about a continuing religious tradition from the Late Roman period through to the time of Saxon Christianity. DNA analysis evidences the continuation of Late Roman populations. From this, a new paradigm can be constructed to counter the 'replacement' theory which has already been questioned by some. However, Anglo-Saxon records provide an easy narrative, with Anglo-Saxons pushing the native peoples ever further to the west with a border being finally established along the River Tamar. Place-name analysis fits this idea almost perfectly, as does the idea of the extirpation of Christianity until the Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons in 597.
In Castle Dor Q counters with the 'palimpsest' theory, whereby each migration overlies but does not obliterate what has come before (Quiller-Couch & Du Maurier, p.5). Q was not totally alone in questioning the 'replacement' theory. In the introduction to his exploration of the romances and drolls of the West of England(1865), Robert Hunt notes how Devonshire up to the River Exe 'was known as "Danmonium", or even more recently as "Old Cornwall" ', suggesting a folk memory of over a thousand years (Hunt, p. )
This sort of material was dismissed by historians of 'Anglo-Saxon England'. In Pearce's ground-breaking The Kingdom of Dumnonia. Studies in History and Tradition in South Western Britain, AD 350-1150, Q and Hunt are ignored, but Radford's work is fully acknowledged, with photographs of inscribed stones on plates 21 to 23, illustrating a map 'Early inscriptions on Stone' (Pearce, p. 20). A study follows entitled 'Inscriptions on Stone' (pp. 11-30). Pearce estimates that about 50,000 individual stones had to date (1978) been identified.
In the section 'Place-Names', Pearce claims that 'Used critically, and after due philological scrutiny, place-names can be one of the principal keys to the settlement history of the early Medieval centuries', (pp. 18-19) basing this hypothesis on Kenneth Jackson's Language and History in Early Britain (1953).
In the section 'The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle', Pearce claims the 'Chronicle' as giving 'a narrative of West Saxon conquest' from Wiltshire to Cornwall, the whole south-west peninsula. The map 'Dumnonia and Wessex' (p. 95) records supposed 'Battle sites (after Hoskins 1960)'.
William Barnes and Dorset Dialect
The 'replacement' theory appears to have informed the philological and literary work of Hardy's Dorset mentor William Barnes (1800-1886). Q's Cambridge lecture on Barnes precedes the one on Hardy in The Poet as Citizen.
In his 'A Dissertation on the Dorset Dialect' -prefaced to his Poems of Rural Life, from which Q quotes, Barnes asserts that Dorset is 'a separate offspring from the Anglo-Saxon tongue'. Dorset dialect 'is a broad and bold shape of the English as the Doric was of the Greek', being:
...purer, and in some cases richer, than the dialect which is chosen as the national speech: purer inasmuch as it retains many words of Saxon origin for which English substitutes echoes of Latin, Greek or French derivation; and richer inasmuch as it has distinctive words for many things which book-English can hardly distinguish but by periphrasis (Barnes quoted in Quiller-Couch, 1934, pp.186-87).
In response to this Q lets Barnes off lightly, as he invariably did with those he believed to be honestly mistaken. In various writings Q demonstrates how Barnes must be misguided. Q believes that Barnes saw 'the Dorset speech [as] the lingering relic of pure West Saxon . . . The older folk of Dorset (he held) drew in the true phonetic with their mother's milk' (ibid., pp187-188). In other words, Dorset English derives from the Teutonic speech of Saxony, having been handed down through the generations from the time of immigration to the present day.
Q does not question the assumption in the lecture on Barnes, his contention being that languages have to grow and expand or die. Yet the assumption is challenged elsewhere. He contends that the sounds of English are not those of German and the character of English is not that of German.
Barnes' observation that 'the Dorset dialect is a broad and bold shape of the English language, as the Doric was of the Greek' is challenged in Q's introduction to The Oxford Book of English Prose:
Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm . . . with a speech malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, . . . [so] that the whole purpose moves to music (Quiller-Couch, 1925, p. xvii).
Q's argument is more fully developed in the lecture 'Patriotism in English Literature II' from Studies in Literature I where he argues that:
i. 'by structure of his vocal organs a German is congenitally unable to read our poetry';
ii. a German cannot articulate 'the soft th'. . . or a 'full sibilant' or 'labials beyond the throat';
iii. Nor can a German 'feel. . . the last, most delicate, harmonies,' of English.
iv. As for Beowulf, it contains 'not one word about our England' (Quiller-Couch, 1918 pp.313-315)
Q was unconvinced by the arguments of Barnes.
DNA Analysis and the South-West Peninsula
Historians have evinced little interest in the writings of Hunt and Q. They might have been wiser had they done so. Science has now provided evidence less easily evaded.
Peter Donnelly, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford, who co-led the study published in Nature in 2015 was in no doubt that sophisticated modern techniques accurately identify 17 groups in Britain based on DNA analysis and that these relate to specific geographical areas. This present writer had the privilege of hearing Sir Walter Bodmer speak on the project at the Morrab Library in Penzance, which was one of the locations used.
In the south-west peninsula three distinct groups are distinguished:
a. Cornwall to the west of the River Tamar;
b. Devon, although with a noticeable extension to about the River Parrett;
c. to the east of this line, including Dorset.
Unfortunately, a swathe of country from Somerset through Salisbury Plain attracted few if any responses.
The DNA study claims to have settled the:
...ongoing historical and archaeological controversy about the extent to which the Saxons replaced the existing Romano-British populations' . . . [the] 'proportion of Saxon ancestry' in the most Saxonized areas of central-southern England is in the range of 10%-40%' (Donnelly in Callaway, 2015).
In other words, even in areas most heavily settled by Saxon immigrants, 60% to 90% of the population derive from pre-Roman times. The study clearly supports the idea of 'palimpsest'.
Place-names and Documents
Place-names, therefore, reflect language use, not the DNA of the local population, and certainly not settlement patterns. Furthermore, documents such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle do not provide a meaningful narrative history of the south-west peninsula. The history of the south-west peninsula has to be rewritten and on the basis of verifiable fact, not on supposition, hypothesis and academic convenience. The logical conclusion of this is that documentary evidence – chronicles, charters, monastic records – should only be accepted if supported by a second independent source. What kings claim to rule is not the same as what they actually rule. Lines should not be drawn on maps as though Early Medieval kingdoms were modern states with hard borders and border police.
Christian Memorial Stones
Christian memorial stones provide verifiable fact, as do substantial quantities of Mediterranean artefacts found by archaeologists at various locations throughout the south-west peninsula – see Cunliffe, fig. 12.25, p. 442. where the main source areas are Egypt, North Africa and Turkey.
Peter Brown of Princeton University writes:
International trade provided opportunities for revenue: the fleets of the patriarch of Alexandria sailed to Cornwall in the early seventh century . . (Brown, 1971, p. 156).
He develops this in The Rise of Western Christendom, Triumph and Diversity, AD 200-1000: '. . .Tintagel became a fortress city, sporadically supplied with prestige goods – wine, oil, and lamps from Africa, even from Eygpt' (Brown, 2003, p. 130).
Of Dumnonia Dr Caradoc Peters says in The Archaeology of Cornwall: 'Dumnonia was still a stable and authentically Roman state, nurturing Roman values and civilisation' (Peters, p. 116); an assertion supported from hard and soft evidence.
Yet Anglo-Saxon England, c. 550-1087 by Sir Frank Stenton in The Oxford Histories of England series makes but three index references to Dumnonia, with other general histories being similarly dismissive.
Thomas Hardy and the South West Peninsula
Hardy's understanding of the south-west peninsula seems to be much in line with contemporary opinion. At the opening to The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, James Gibson has placed a map of Hardy's Wessex, namely North, Upper, Mid, South, Outer and Lower, with an inset for 'Off Wessex'. This is not the historical Wessex, although a part of it, perhaps to Hardy the heart of it. Stinsford, Dorchester and Wareham are included under fictitious names in 'South Wessex'. Although a small number of his poems show an awareness of pre-Saxon monuments and peoples, there seems no reason to believe that he saw himself as other than essentially a Saxon, an identification William Barnes would have encouraged.
A close reading of the map shows the boundary of 'Lower Wessex' to lie east of Dartmoor and 'Off Wessex' to be Cornwall. However, 'Lower Wessex' is peripheral to the area which stimulated his imagination and which is crowded with his locations. The boundary of this lies in a line from the estuary of the Parrett to that of the Axe, the ancient Dumnonian border. Hardy country is essentially 'South Wessex' or Dorset.
Only one other area seems to have exercised similar influence over his imagination, a corner of north-east Cornwall centred on St Juliot, where he first met Emma Gifford. The sense of distance and otherness is exemplified in the poem 'When I Set Out for Lyonesse' (254), which according to the poem is 100 miles from Stinsford, approximately correct as the crow flies but further by road, and much further by road to St Juliot. 'Lyonesse' is a mythical land, one lying drowned between the Lizard and the Lands End, as Dr Carfax explains to Notary Ledru in Q's novel Castle Dor. To Hardy it included Cornwall, which in the poem possesses a mythical significance.
The Evidence for Diversity in the Religion of Dorset
Radford leaves a discussion of the five stones residing in the churchyard of Lady St Mary at Wareham, in east Dorset, to the end of his lecture. He states that the: 'series runs from the late 6th century to the 8th/9th and all save the latest of the stones commemorate persons bearing British names'. He then notes how persons with British names appear as landholders on documents at the time of King Ine of Wessex (Radford pp.688-726). This suggests language transfer from Celtic to Saxon took place at the top of society in East Dorset during Ine's reign. No doubt by 800 the process had been completed.
Radford sees the five Wareham stones as 'outliers', although they made up 10% of the total in 1975, and the only ones located on a Romano-British settlement:
The church of Lady St Mary at Wareham was in Saxon days an old minster; the stones prove that this old minster was the successor of a "clas" or monastery of the old British type . . .
Radford was convinced that the 'hard evidence' shows an unbroken Christian tradition at Wareham from British 'clas' to Roman monastery to Anglican church. Further archaeological research reveals remarkable diversity:
- The 'chi-rho' symbol at Hinton St Mary, Frampton and possibly Halstock (Pearce, p. 28).
- A late Roman cemetery at Poundbury, near Dorchester (Peters, p. 110)
- Mosaics, possibly showing 'Gnostic' influence, in villas at Frampton and Hinton St Mary (Peters, p. 110, ref. D. Perring, Gnosticism in fourth century Britain; the Frampton mosaics reconsidered, Britannia XXXIV, 2003, pp. 97-127).
Peters suggests that the christianization of 'urban areas', as at Exeter and Dorchester, as evidenced by 'villa estates', was counterpoised by a new paganism in rural areas, evidenced by a new 'pagan temple in Maiden castle', near Dorchester, and the 'depositing of hoards alongside rivers' further west (pp. 110-111).
The evidence of probable Christian gnosticism suggests both contact with the eastern Mediterranean and a diversity of Christian belief. It is likely that whether orthodox or heterodox, native British Christianity did not necessarily take kindly to the Roman mission and the imposition of a foreign hierarchy. Yet ecclesiastical sources, such as Bede's History of the English Church and People, make no mention of a native Christianity.
It is difficult to believe that the Dorchester-Wareham area of Dorset to be singular. Diversity in various forms was probably the norm. As can be seen today from Russia and China, isolation and persecution does not obliterate Christianity but forces it underground. When it does emerge it is not necessarily welcoming to dictat from outside.
The standard historical model, based on Anglo-Saxon texts such as Bede's History of the English Church and People, which fitted neatly into the 'replacement' theory, was that conquest by pagan Saxons extirpated Christianity throughout England. Following the arrival of a mission by Pope Gregory, under St Augustine of Canterbury, a confident 'English Church' expanded westwards and northwards against rather disorganized, anachronistic and slightly heterodox Celtic churches, with the Synod of Whitby in 664 demonstrating the superiority of the Roman form.
The 'hard evidence' makes the standard model no linger credible.
It is fascinating to speculate that the diversity in Dorset later revealed itself in Lollardy, Protestantism and nonconformity. Hardy's own vision possibly owed more to the distant past than to the time in which he lived.
For a discussion of Hardy and gnosticism see Hardy by M. Seymour-Smith, Chapter 28, 'A Malignant God?'.
How Saxonized were Dorset and Devon at the Time of King Alfred?
Wareham is not simply of interest in what Radford calls 'the period of transition', because its subsequent history casts doubt on how Saxonized it actually became. In the 'Burghal Hidage', Wareham is shown to be one of the four defensible towns of King Alfred, with the minster within its defences. Cunliffe includes a map (fig. 13. 24) with the information that it served as a point of 'resistance against Viking armies' (Cunliffe, p. 476). He also records how in 875 the Vikings took Wareham, Exeter etc., apparently with no archaeological evidence of conflict or destruction (pp. 473-4). The gates were opened by the inhabitants!
Pearce records the 'Danes' at Exeter in 893, again with no evidence of conflict. In 878, the Danes had fought the Saxons at Countisbury Hill on the north Devon coast, which the chronicler Aethelweard records as a Saxon defeat: 'the Danes actually won the battle' (Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages, p. 114). When Alfred raised a 'large army' near Penselwood, on the Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire junction, he was joined by men from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire (Cunliffe, p. 475; Stenton, p. 252-3), but not Dorset and Devon. The battle took place at Edington in 878 against the Danes. Yet The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle claims King Alfred gave to Bishop Asser 'Exeter with all the "parochia" belonging to it in Devon and Cornwall' in 890 (Pearce, p. 115, ref. Stevenson, 1959). Between 875 and 893 Alfred appears to have exercised no effective control over Cornwall, Devon or Dorset.
The history of the south-west peninsula during the Early Medieval period has traditionally been characterized as a struggle between Anglo-Saxon and Celt, with the Danes as a fleeting phenomenon, possibly allied with the Cornish. This may be because the Danes left no written records. 'The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population' shows a small but identifiable imprint of migrants originating in south Sweden and Denmark on the populations of Devon and to a lesser extent Cornwall (see Fig. 2: 'European ancestry profiles for the 17 UK clusters'). Scandinavians came and stayed, no doubt allied with the local population against the Anglo-Saxons from the east.
The Danes who defeated the Anglo-Saxons, maybe with Dumnonian help, on Countisbury Hill in 878 had probably come from Ireland or Wales with the aim of establishing a trading station in north Devon (see Cunliffe, Fig. 13.20, p. 468). When the standard model is put to one side, a more meaningful one can be constructed from the hard facts.
The Norman Conquest
Where The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a degree of credibility, as it handles contemporary events, although hardly objectively, is when recording the late Saxon and early Norman period. In The Norman Conquest, Marc Morris sets Anglo-Saxon and Norman records side by side, revealing all too clearly the degree of bias. When it comes to hard facts Morris turns to The Domesday Book 1086, specifically to a computer-aided analysis (Morris, p. 336) of the text. As Anglo-Saxon chroniclers appear to have significantly exaggerated the extent of the Saxon conquest, so they endeavoured to suppress the full consequences of the Norman conquest, because, as Morris states, the reality was 'too painful to contemplate' (ibid., p. 333).
The Domesday Book consists of 832 folios containing about two million words in an investigation of about '13,000 places and 30,000 manors' (ibid., pp. 307-9). It reveals nothing less than the de-Saxonization of England from top to bottom. By 1086, 20 years after the Battle of Hastings there were:
- Saxon bishops - one
- Saxon aristocrats - none
- lesser Saxon nobles - none
- 1000 tenants-in-chief - 13 Saxon or half-Norman
- Saxon King's thegns - none
- 8000 subtenants - 90% Norman
- Saxon middle thegns - none
(Morris acknowledges Williams, Green, Carpenter, Baxter, see his Notes and Bibliography).
How quickly the south-west peninsula, with its centre at Exeter, the old capital of Dumnonia, came under Norman control is unclear, but it seems to have been effected by 'a Breton follower called Brian' (ibid., p. 215) and his Breton associates. This is Brian fitz Eudo, Count of Penthièvre, a relation of Duke Alan of Brittany. One of the associates was Judhael who came to control south Devon (Stenton, p. 621), and whose forebears might have hailed from there at the time of the 'Great Emigration' of the post-Roman era (see Cunliffe, p. 430, map 13.4, p. 452).
Whether Britons emigrated from Dorset is unknown, but in his discussion of the subject Cunliffe points out the close connection between the 'ports of the south coast' and ports in north Armorica which possibly facilitated the 'exodus referred to by Gildas' and later emigration (Cunliffe, pp. 429-30). However, the link of language had been severed at least two hundred years before the Norman conquest, so that any memory would have been superficial and of little value to Brian.
According to Morris, Harold's sons effected landings in Somerset and Devon, with a final defeat in the summer of 1069 by 'Brian'. (Morris, p. 222-4). On the second occasion, the Godwines landed at Barnstaple from a fleet of over 60 vessels. Presumably, the landings were coordinated with a rising of Saxon or Saxonized landholders from Dorset to Cornwall who had been dispossessed or who feared dispossession.
As the defeat of the Godwines was not followed by slaughter and 'wasting', as happened in Sussex, the Welsh borders, various rebellious towns, Yorkshire, where the population was reduced by 75%, and the far north-east (Morris, p. 313-4), the native people could not have been involved, having little sympathy for their Saxon overlords. At least the Bretons spoke their language.
After Brian fitz Eudo died or returned to Brittany, Robert, Count of Mortain -William's half-brother- became Earl of Cornwall, no doubt with the Breton-Normans have effectively replaced the pre-Conquest landholders (see J. Carley The Origins of the Earldom of Cornwall). The replacement of churchmen, landholders and tenants was virtually complete by the time of the Domesday Survey of 1086. Some of these families, such as the Courtneys of Devon, continued in importance to Q's day. Q dedicated the novel The Ship of Stars to the Rt Hon. L.H. Courtney, M.P.
The importance of the Bretons to the economy of Devon and Cornwall, possibly Dorset, is illustrated in names such as Bretonside at Plymouth. The first vicar of Talland, the mother church of the Couches, is recorded in the Bronescombe registers as 'Warine dicto le Brettone' (Whetter, p. 218).
A Norman family that was to prove of significance to Q and eventually Hardy was that of Richard son of Thorold. He came to possess the Honour of Cardinham, estates situated in the vicinity of the River Fowey steeped in 'Tristan and Yseult' associations. The last of the Cardinan line was Ysolda de Cardinan who married Sir Thomas de Tracy (see C. Henderson, Essays in Cornish History, 'Fowey').
The Norman Gunnar family held Dimelihoc or Dimeliock in the parish of St Dennis, a location found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's De Historia Regum Britanniae and associated with King Arthur (Pearce, p. 151).
Hardy's poem 'At Castle Boterel'(292) is set at Boscastle, the estate of the Norman Boterel or Botreaux family who came to Cornwall well after the Conquest.
According to Morris, the de-Saxonization of England went further than dispossession. Eventually all England's 15 cathedrals and all but one of the major abbeys were demolished and rebuilt. Castles were erected throughout the land, whether to protect the Normans from the population or from each other, and new laws were enacted (Morris, p. 334).
Morris argues that initially William hoped to move into the kingship as had the Dane Cnut in 1016. He quotes William of Poitiers that after the coronation William 'made many wise, just and merciful provisions'(ibid.,p. 201). Yet Orderic Vitalis describes how the English 'plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed' (ibid., p. 209). William of Poitiers in comparing William with Cnut comments: 'Cnut the Dane slaughtered the noblest of your sons, young and old, with the utmost cruelty, so that he could subject you to his rule and that of his children' (ibid., p. 265).
The antagonism which led to the plotting seems not to have been the result of simple anti-Normanism, but of a 'land-grab'. Normans, Bretons, Flemings and other continentals 'grabbed whatever they could' (ibid.,p. 283). When the dispossessed took to arms, their rebellions were ruthlessly suppressed with huge areas being taken over by the king or a Norman overlord. Computer analysis of The Domesday Book reveals how large areas were economically ruined in the process, although not in the south-west peninsula.
It could be argued that William was completing what Cnut had begun, the de-Saxonization of England.
Conclusion: The Relevance to Hardy Scholarship
The hard evidence, and to an extent the soft evidence also, questions the meaning of Anglo-Saxon, Celt, kingdoms, effective control, settlement patterns and many other terms of convenience used by historians of the Early Medieval Age. The 'replacement' model is seemingly redundant.
If the Hardy scholar looks at Dorset through the glass of received historical opinion, what meaningfully is seen? Does it even matter? Q says it does.
If Hardy is to be understood by digging downwards through accumulated layers of history, as Q advises in the lecture 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy', it matters a great deal.
4. Reflections on the Survival of the Folk Tradition
It is not known when Celtic was first and last used in Dorset, how long meaningful Christianization took or the importance to ordinary people of Norman-French culture. Some form of cultural continuation is evident from the folk tradition.
The first absolute rejection of the folk tradition and of the medieval church's appropriation of pagan festivals came with the theology of the Reformation, then the puritanism of the English Civil War and Interregnum and, after 1660, with the Nonconformists who by Hardy's day came under the banner of 'Old Dissent'; in Cornwall, it was Methodism, as Hunt recognises. Jonathan Couch is a rare example of a Methodist who acknowledged folk traditions and practices.
The second absolute rejection was in the form rationalism, scientism and materialism. These held the folk tradition and associated phenomena in contempt. This extirpated the last vestiges of the tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries, and still governs academic opinions. What is not in accordance with its dogmas is dismissed and ridiculed.
Works such as those of Robert Hunt and Jonathan Couch record the final authentic stage, the dying embers.
5. The Rational and the Irrational: A Possible Folklore Survival
Archaeologists have uncovered records from literate Middle Eastern societies showing an accurate grasp of the orderly working of the heavens and the predictability of certain heavenly events. This seems to be the case at Stonehenge. The Universe is seen as a harmony.
Shorn of its unsavoury aspects, such as the cult of heads, this is the view adopted by Q – 'the Universe is not a Chaos, but a Harmony' as he wrote in his lecture on 'Herbert and Vaughan' (Quiller-Couch, 1918, p.121). He also adopts the notions of material and spiritual, body and soul, human and divine. He rejects the idea of a solely material universe, the product of chance, randomness and conflict, maintained (somehow) by the laws of physics. The universe is orderly, not determined or chaotic.
In his lecture 'Shelley I', Q viewed the post-Napoleonic period as a tragedy, when injustice and repression defied reason and orderly change. This resulted, later in the century, in the proliferation of conflict driven theories such as Marxism, militarism and 'the Darwinian hypothesis, to be interpreted pretty swiftly into struggle-for-life competition, Nature's first law . . . And so inevitably came War' (Quiller-Couch, 1922, p ) - in fact, two wars, the Bolshevik and Chinese Communist Revolutions and Fascism – followed today by ecological catastrophe and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Q acknowledges the irrational, that which cannot be explained in rational terms, but refuses to see any practical value in using it as a tool for understanding the world we live in.
Hardy's view is less clear. As Seymour-Smith informs us, on June 30, 1899, Charles Hooper, the Secretary of the Rationalistic Press Association, contacted Hardy about becoming an Honorary Associate. On July 2, Hardy replied:
My own interest lies largely in non-rationalistic subjects, since non-rationality seems, so far as one can perceive, to be the principle of the universe. By which I do not mean foolishness, but rather a principle for which there is no exact name, lying at the indifference point between rationality and irrationality (Seymour-Smith, p. 621).
Hardy seems to be taking a position between the rational and the irrational. One wonders what Hooper made of it.
In the novel Two in a Tower, Hardy seems to be siding with irrationality. This is how Q understood the following quotation:
And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and formlessness there is involved a quality of decay . . . The senses may become terrified by plunging among them [the stars] and they are, but there is a pitifulness even in their glory. Imagine them all extinguished...(Hardy quoted by Quiller-Couch, 1934, p.214)
Is this a folk memory? Is this what was actually experienced at Stonehenge? Were Hardy's forebears worshipping an 'Immanent Will . . . weaving life without purpose . . .' as Q expressed it in 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' (ibid., p216).
To understand Hardy and Q, to appreciate the difference between them, to grasp the problems they are struggling with, it is indeed necessary to dig downwards into the pre-history of south-western Britain.
How all this is worked out in the folk beliefs and practices described in Hardy's novels and poems will be explored in Part II.
6. Remote Communities and the Folk Tradition
Some years ago the present writer had the privilege of knowing a woman who in the 1950s had visited some of the remoter villages of Dorset as a peripatetic special needs teacher. She related how isolated many of these communities still were. A hundred years before, when Hardy started writing, that would have been even more the case.
Many areas of rural Cornwall, St Juliot for instance, were similarly isolated, none more so than around Bodmin Moor and the northern coastal area. Q grew up in Bodmin, where his father, Dr Thomas Q. Couch, had a medical practice. Thomas was an authority on folklore. He was born at Polperro in 1826, with his father having been born in 1789 and his grandfather in 1739.
Although the folk tradition is little regarded by academics in general and historians in particular, it carries the memory of the community, giving an insight into how people experienced the world, something written documents rarely do. It is disregarded because of a belief in intellectual progress. People in the past are invariably dismissed as superstitious, gullible and simplistic. Yet if someone from 1750 were to return, seeing a world on the brink of environmental and nuclear catastrophe, the response might be not so much admiration as incomprehension and contempt.
Hardy seems to be a person living in two worlds, or maybe more than two. Having been born in rural Dorset in 1840, he inherited a traditional culture. From his reading of Darwin and later Einstein he encountered a scientific perspective. There was also the perspective of literary culture. From this he endeavoured to formulate a personal view, one he could live and write by.
There are numerous references in Seymour-Smith's biography to Darwin and Huxley, one to Einstein, and endless references to literary figures, including Q. Yet in 1919, while placing a sprig of holly on the grave of his grandfather for Christmas Eve, an 'old man (whom he had never known) appeared to him in eighteenth century costume.' He followed the figure into Stinsford church, only to find it completely empty (Seymour-Smith, pp. 829-30). Then on October 27, 1927, he saw 'a dark man', one he had seen 'a few years ago' and interpreted it as a premonition of death (ibid., p. 862).
Such phenomena were well known to Q from family accounts. Whether he himself experienced them is unknown. His roots were similarly traditional and he refused to repudiate them, in spite of his considerable knowledge of science and the arts. This rootedness resulted in both Hardy and Q seeing rationalism as an inadequate dogma. When the Secretary of the Rationalist Press Association contacted Hardy on June 30, 1899, he replied:
My own interest lies largely in non-rational subjects, since non-rationality seems, so far as one can perceive, to be the principle of the universe (ibid., p. 621).
Einstein, according to Hoffman and Dukas, battled against a 'probabilistic universe' governed by 'chance'. A universe governed by 'scientific laws . . . was not something that Einstein could prove. It was a matter of faith and feeling and intuition' (Hoffman and Dukas, p. 193). In various of his lectures Q expresses it slightly differently: we can 'apprehend' but not 'comprehend' the universe, and the apprehension is of a harmony.
In Chapter 28 of Hardy, 'A Malignant God?', Seymour-Smith suggests that Hardy's view of the universe owed something to 'ancient. . . gnosticism' (Seymour-Smith, p. 617) and 'an old gnostic habit of thought' (ibid., p. 620). That this possibly came to him from the Dorset past is not explored. If we accept Q's advice that to understand Hardy we have to dig downwards, then the possibility strongly presents itself.
DNA analysis has revealed to us that the native peoples of Dorset derive from migrations long before the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The superficiality of Saxonization is strongly suggested. Seeing Hardy from a western perspective and from an area Hardy called 'Off Wessex' may be of considerable value. This digging downwards must particularly apply to the remotest and most isolated communities where tradition has proved stronger than innovation.
Bibliography
Appignanesi, R. ed. (2002) Postmodernism and Big Science. UK: Icon
Bede, ed. Sherley-Price (1955) History of the English Church and People. UK: Penguin
Brown, P., (1971) The World of Late Antiquity. London: Thames and Hudson.
Brown, P., (2013) The Rise of Western Christendom. UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Callaway, E. 'UK Mapped out by Genetic Ancestry', Nature (2015) https:doi.org/10.101038/nature.2015.17136
Carley, J. (2003) The Origin of the Earldom of Cornwall. Cornwall: R.I.C.
Chomsky, N. (2002) On The Nature of Language. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Christophers, S.W. (1873) Foolish Dick the Pilgrim Preacher. London: Haughton & Co.
Clemo, J. (2000) The Clay Kiln. St Austell: Cornish Hillside.
Coles, P. 'Einstein and the Birth of Big Science, & Hawking and the Mind of God', in Appignanesi, R., above.
Couch,B. (1891) The Life of Jonathan Couch, F.L.S.. Liskeard: John Philp
Couch, J. (1871) History of Polperro. Truro: Lake.
Cunliffe, B. (2013) Britain Begins. Oxford: O.U.P.
Darvill, T. (2010) Prehistoric Britain, UK: Routledge.
David-Neel, R. (1938) With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. UK: Penguin.
Davies, N. (2000) The Isles: A History. UK: Macmillan.
Dimbleby, J. (2022) Barbarossa. UK: Penguin.
Douglas-Fairhurst, R. (2022) 'All in the Genes'. Review of An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxford Family, by A. Bashford. Literary Review , 511.
Edwards, E.C. (1974) A History of West Cornwall Hospital. Cornwall: private publication.
Fernandez-Armesto, F. (1995) Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years. UK: Black Swan
Graves, R. (1957) Goodbye To All That, London: Cassell.
Hamilton Jenkin, A.K (1970) 'Cornwall and Its People' in Cornwall and the Cornish. Newton Abbot: David & Charles.
Hardy, T. (1992) The Complete Poems. ed. Gibson, J. UK: Papermac
Hardy, T. (1929) Life's Little Ironies. UK: Macmillan.
Hardy, T. (1929) Wessex Tales. UK: Macmillan.
Harrod, R.F. (1972) John Maynard Keynes. UK: Penguin.
Henderson, C. (1964) The Cornish Church Guide and Parochial History of Cornwall. Truro: Bradford Barton.
Henderson, C. (1963) Essays in Cornish History. Truro: Bradford Barton.
Gardiner, J. (ed). (2000) History Today's Who's Who in British History. UK: Collins & Brown.
Hobsbawm, E. (1994) Age of Extremes. London: Joseph
Hoffman, B. and Dukas, H. (1982) Einstein. UK: Granada
Hunt, R. (1871) Romances and Drolls of the West of England. London: Hotten.
Huxley, L. (1900) T.H. Huxley, Life and Letters. UK: Macmillan.
Leslie, S., Winney, B., Hellenthal, G. et al. 'The fine-scale genetic structure of the British Population' Nature 519, 309-314.
Morris, J. (1996) The Age of Arthur. UK: Phoenix.
Morris, M. (2013) The Norman Conquest. London: Windmill.
Orme, N. (1991) editor. Unity and Variety. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Pearce, S. (1978) The Kingdom of Dumnonia. UK: Lodenek.
Peters, C. (2005) The Archaeology of Cornwall. Fowey, Cornwall Editions Limited.
Popper, K. (1982) Unended Quest. UK: Collins/ Fontana.
Quiller-Couch, A. (1896) Adventures in Criticism. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Quiller-Couch, A. (1918) Studies in Literature I. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Quiller-Couch, A (1922) Studies in Literature II. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Quiller-Couch, A (1934) The Poet As Citizen. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Quiller-Couch, A. (1945) Memories and Opinions edit. Roberts, S.C. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Quiller-Couch , A. & Du Maurier, D. (1962) Castle Dor. London: Dent.
Radford, R. (1975) The Early Christian Inscriptions of Dumnonia. Cornwall: Cornish Archaeological Society.
Rowse, A.L. (1998) A Cornish Childhood. Truro: Truran.
Royal Cornwall Gazette 19/3/1896.
Russell, B. (1946) History of Western Philosophy. UK: Allen & Unwin.
Scott, W. (1853) The Monastery. Edinburgh: Adam & Blackmore.
Seymour-Smith, M. (1994) Hardy. London: Bloomsbury.
Smart, N. (1992) The World's Religions. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Stenton, F. (1947) Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: O.U.P.
Stevens, Dr R. (2022) 'Nature, Ecology and Evolution, Contrasting Life-styles in Ice-Age Britons revealed by Ancient DNA'. i newspaper, 25/10/2022.
Stone, N. (2008) A Short History of WWI. UK: Penguin.
Stoyle, M. (1994) Loyalty and Locality. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Swinton, E. editor (1930s) Twenty Years After, vol. II. London: Newness.
Synge, J.M. (1907) Aran Islands. London: Matthews.
Synge, J.M. (1941) Plays, Poems, Prose. London: Dent
Taylor, A.J.P. (1986) English History 1914-1945. Oxford: O.U.P.
Tolstoy, L. (1971) War and Peace Vol. 1, trans. Edmonds, R. UK: Penguin.
Whetter, J. (1998) Cornwall in the 13th Century. Gorran, Cornwall: Lyfrow Trelyspen.
Wood, M. (1981) In Search of the Dark Ages. BBC.