TREE-PLANTING

The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees. These oak glades do not look particularly old; but, as it happens, we can ascertain their exact age and{109} at the same time note how slow-growing is the oak tree by a reference to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, where, in 1821, he notes their being planted: ‘I perceive that they are planting oaks on the “wastes,” as the Agriculturasses call them, about Hartley Row; which is very good, because the herbage, after the first year, is rather increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and the real wealth, of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of the planter who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because he plants for his children’s children. The planter here is Lady Mildmay, who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here.’

This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily, the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own. All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that is to say,{110} the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’—whoever they may have been. If technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it.

Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the ‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles, either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the downs, like Winterslow Hut.

Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the Anglo-Saxon scora, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook, with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.{111}
Image unavailable: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.
THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.

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OLD BASING

It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church, which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman bishop, Saint Swithun.

Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the ‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the town of Basingstoke.

The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the delights that await explorers in the byeways, misses a great deal here by keeping strictly to the highroad. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke, this turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one in half a mile to the pretty village of Old Basing, celebrated for one of the most stubborn and protracted defences recorded in history. It was here that the equally crafty and courteous Sir William Paulet, first Marquis of Winchester, and Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an immense palace on the site of Basing Castle. There can be little doubt that this magnificent person, who possessed no principles, and so kept place and power through the troublous times that these reigns comprised, must have had his hands in the Royal coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position for the sale of preferments. ‘No oak, but an osier,’ as his contemporaries said, he bowed before the tempests of religious persecution and the whirlwinds of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by and{114} left him still peculating. He had become a hoary-headed sinner by the time Elizabeth reigned, or there is no knowing but that he might have become a Prince Consort; for when he entertained Her Majesty here in 1560: ‘By my troth,’ said she, ‘if my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in England.’ But she had said this kind of thing of many another.
BASING HOUSE

The successors of this gorgeous nobleman—not being Lords Treasurers—could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place, fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road, and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John, fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘Aimez Loyaulté,’ he wrote with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and, provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of the arts; reposing after the warlike{115} fatigues of the day in a bed whose gorgeous trappings made it worth ￡1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and ............