THE WALLOPS 155 



at Little (or Middle) Wallop, lying in a hollow where 

 a little stream trickles across the road, that any relief 

 is experienced. 



It must be Little Wallop to which Mr, Thomas 

 Hardy refers in the Mayor of Casterhrich/e, where 

 the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after tak- 

 ing up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes 

 employed at a ' pastoral farm near the old western 

 highway. . . . He had chosen the neighbourhood of 

 this artery from a sense that, situated here, though 

 at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer 

 to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be 

 at a roadless spot only half as remote.' 



The Wallops are interesting places, despite their 

 silly name. There are Over, and Nether, and Middle, 

 or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper, Lower, and 

 Little AVallop. According to one school of antiquaries 

 (who must l.)y no means be suspected of joking), the 

 Wallop district is to be identified with the ' Gual- 

 oppum' described Ijy an old chronicler, a district, 

 appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in 

 which Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There 

 are, of course, local derivations of the meaning of 

 this place-name, together with a belief that to Sir 

 John Wallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth, 

 who ' walloped the French ' in one or other of our 

 many mediseval Ijattles with that nation, we owe that 

 very active, not to say slangy verb, 'to wallop.' 

 But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a 

 little stream, called the Wallop, flowing through these 

 villages, to which they owe their generic name ; the 

 name of the stream itself derivino- from the Ano;lo- 



