CRANBORNE CHASE 245 



street of cottages, along a road running at right 

 angles to the Exeter highway, with its church tower 

 peeping above the orchards and thick coppices, and 

 a sparkling stream flowing down from the hillside. 

 In this and other respects, it bears a striking similarity 

 to Middle and Over Wallop. 



The quiet, not to say sleepy, Dorsetshire villager 

 who, lounging at the bend of the road, replies to your 

 query by saying that this is ' Tarnt Hinton,' is the 

 peaceable descendant of very desperate and bloody- 

 minded men, and the like circumstances that, a mere 

 hundred years ago, rendered them savages, would do 

 the same by him, were they revived. The peasantry 

 are what the law and social conditions make them. 

 Oppress the sturdy rustic and you render him a 

 brutal and resentful rebel, wdio, having an unbroken 

 spirit, will give trouble. Treat him fairly, and he 

 w^ill live a life of Cjuiet industry, tempered by 

 gossipy evenings in the village 'pub.'; and although 

 he will never rise to be the mincing Strephon imagined 

 by the eighteenth -century poets of rurality, he wdll 

 raise gigantic potatoes, and cultivate flowers for the 

 local Horticultural Society, and do nothing more 

 trao-ical in all his life than the stickino- of the 

 domestic porker, or the twisting of a fowl's neck. 



The civilising of the rustic in these parts dates 

 from the disfranchising of Cranborne Chase in 1830. 

 The Chase, which took its name from the town of 

 Cranborne, eight miles distant from this spot, was 

 originally a vast deer-forest, extending far into Hants, 

 Wilts, and Dorset. The great western highw^ay entered 

 it at Salisbury and did not pass out of its bounds 



