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Cranborne

Cranborne Chase: Deer-stealers, Poachers and Gamekeepers

Jan 5th, 2013
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The Cranborne Chase we know today is a small remnant of its ancient splendour. When the Chase belonged to the Crown it was an immense tract of woodland with rides made through the woods, planted on each side with evergreens to provide food for the deer. The Chase had for a long period belonged to the Earls of Gloucester, but in King John’s reign and from Edward IV’s time to the reign of James I it belonged to the Crown. Records from the reign of Elizabeth I state that the office of Warden and Ranger of the Chase was granted to Henry, Earl of Pembrokeshire, for life. However, in James I’s reign, the free Chase and Warren was granted to William, Earl of Salisbury, and his heirs, and all the rights and privileges of the Chase were transferred to the Lord of the Manor at Cranborne, as was the custom; he was also the Lord of the Chase.

North of the main Blandford to Salisbury road it still has some fine avenues of trees and the boundary line between Dorset and Wiltshire runs through it. Between Tollard Royal and Ashmore Down there is some of the finest scenery in the north of Dorset. A series of long narrow valleys lie between very steep ridges while the valleys are called Bottoms; there is Rotherley Bottom right in the Chase, Malacombe Bottom between Rotherley Down and Berwick Down; Ashmore Bottom on the other side of Berwick Down, and Quarry Bottom near Ashmore Down. In ancient times they might all have been river valleys, as the gravel in the bottoms indicates died-up watercourses. On Berwick Down there are numerous low banks and shallow ditches which were probably cultivation banks in prehistoric times.

William Chafin wrote Anecdotes respecting Cranborne Chase in September 1816. About gamekeepers he says:  “In the grant of the Chase, it is not the feed of the deer only that is granted, but the inclusive property of all undergame of every denomination”. He tells of a time when there was no such person as a game-keeper throughout the whole chase and relates that the first person to appoint a gamekeeper was Mr Doddington, later Lord Melcombe.

At the time George Chafin was the Head Ranger of the whole Chase, he died in 1766. One day he met Doddington’s game-keeper, who had a gun and dogs with him. After some argument Chafin ordered the game-keeper to go home and tell the person who sent him that, if he ever came again to this or into any part of the Chase with gun and dogs, the dogs would be shot and he himself prosecuted.

A few days later the Ranger met the same man near the same place and, having a gun in his hand, put his threat into action, shooting three dogs with one shot as their heads were close together drinking in a small puddle of water.

Mr Doddington was far from pleased. He set off for London the next day and sent a Challenge to Chafin to meet him in London and give him satisfaction for the affront. George Chafin, a Member of Parliament for the County of Dorset as well as Ranger of the Chase, went to the expense of buying a sword, which was never used and to this day has never seen blood.
 
It seems that when Chafin and his friend, Jacob Bankes Esq, at that time Member of Parliament for Shaftesbury went to see Mr Doddington to fix a time and a place for their duel they found him peacefully inclined and happy to acknowledge his error. Mr Doddington invited them both to dine with him and instead of fighting a duel they became good friends to the end of their days.

On the night of 10th of December 1780 there was a fight between the keepers and deer-stealers on Chettle Common in Bursye-Stool Walk. A gang of deer stealers met at Pimperne, headed by a Sergeant of Dragoons named Blandford who was stationed in the town of that name.

They came to the Chase in the night, in disguise and armed with swindgels, an offensive weapon resembling flails to thresh corn. They attacked the keepers, breaking the knee-cap of the stoutest man in the Chase and they broke three ribs of another keeper. The keepers re-grouped and moved on their opponents and one of Sergeant Blandford’s hands was severed from his arm and fell to the ground. The Dragoon was carried to the Lodge and Peter Beckford, who at the time was Ranger for the Walk, brought Mr Dansey, an eminent surgeon, to dress the wound. As soon as Sergeant Blandford was well enough to be moved he was committed to Dorchester gaol, where he joined his companions; his hand was buried in Pimperne Churchyard. Several of the offenders were employees of Mr Beckford. All were found guilty and sentenced to be transported for seven years but this was commuted to confinement in gaol for an indefinite term.

In his book William Chafin mentions hawking and says it was: “the most predominant amusement and was followed by all the gentry at a great expense”. He says of cock-fighting: “…it was a favourite diversion at this time and cocks were bred at different Lodges in the Chase. But in our days of refinement, this amusement of cock-fighting hath been exploded, and in a great measure abandoned, being deemed to be barbaric and cruel”.

No more game-keepers were heard of in the Chase until Lord Rivers, then Mr Pitt, was called upon to represent the County of Dorset in Parliament. Some saw this as an opportunity to install game-keepers in the Chase, something Mr Pitt found convenient to over-look. Very soon there were numerous game-keepers at work in the Chase. Records show that in 1828 there were as many as twelve thousand head of deer roaming across the Chase and these were the charge of keepers who worked for the Rangers.

Hutchins included a print of a noted deer-hunter in his costume, from a portrait by Byng in 1720, with the comment: “The deer-hunter of 200 years-ago was on-all-fours with the poacher of his day, no better and no worse. He was not ashamed of his occupation, nor was it considered a disgraceful one in any sense, and the result was the disappearance of the deer. The only point of contrast discoverable is that old-time poachers were the gentry and modern-time poachers are not”.

 

General Pitt-Rivers and the Cranborne Years

Nov 19th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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For the first eighty years of the 19th century the history of Cranborne Chase was something of a closed book. That this area in the north east of Dorset was especially rich in monumental evidence of England’s earliest agricultural societies was well known, but few excavations had been carried out here.

But all that was to change when, in 1880, a landmark shift in the Chase’s ownership took place. In that year General Augustus Lane Fox inherited the Rivers Estate from his great uncle and adopted the name Pitt-Rivers. The Rivers seat in Dorset was at Rushmore House, a country residence on Cranborne Chase, now the Sandroyd School. But Pitt-Rivers was no mere landowner of the idle rich kind. Rather, his twenty or so years at Rushmore saw the greatest flourishing and fruits of his life-long interest in archaeology and a revolution in our understanding of the prehistory of Cranborne’s extensive royal hunting district. Indeed, Sir Mortimer Wheeler considered Pitt-Rivers to have been the greatest antiquarian and excavator of his day.

Before Pitt-Rivers, whatever digs did take place on the Chase most likely amounted to little more than unscientific haphazard pillages for treasure more than anything else, and certainly led to no lasting or comprehensive understanding of the prehistoric settlers of the area. By the time he had gone to his grave Pitt-Rivers had explored or excavated a multiplicity of sites on or adjoining his Cranborne estate and had set detailed and systematic excavation on a firm professional foundation.

In his years at Cranborne, Pitt-Rivers’ work teams sifted and meticulously recorded the Bronze Age cemetery on Martin Down, a Romano-British village at Woodcutts, and Wor Barrow on Handley Hill – the first ever in-depth excavation of a Neolithic long barrow. He further explored a Roman villa at Iwerne Minster and was the first archaeologist to carry out a detailed investigation of the mysterious Bokerley Dyke along Dorset’s north east border. Pitt-Rivers wondered if this earthwork might be a trap for deer, as Blagdon to the east was once Dorset’s largest deer-park. Seeking explanations for archaeological mysteries caused him to entertain all possibilities.

This fascination for unlocking the secrets of the past, as well as an almost kleptomanial fetish for anthropological artefacts expressed itself long before Pitt-Rivers came to Dorset. Born in 1827, the son of William Augustas of the wealthy Lane-Fox gentry family of Hope Hill, Yorkshire, young Augustus entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1841, being commissioned into the Grenadier Guards on passing out four years later. In 1852 Lane-Fox toured Europe to study methods of gunnery instruction, then became a gunnery instructor himself during service in the Crimean War.
In 1885 he went to Malta to train soldiers in rifle use after a medical had found him unfit for further service in the Crimea.

Following the Trent Affair early in the American Civil War, Lane-Fox was sent to Canada, but returned after only six months to serve as Assistant Quartermaster General in Cork, Ireland from 1862 to 1866. It was during these four years that he embarked upon his first excavations. From 1873 to 1877 he served a term as Commander of the West Surrey Brigade Depot in Guildford.

When Pitt-Rivers took up his residence at Rushmore House in 1880, having had two previous residences in London, he was in the twenty-seventh year of his marriage to Alice Stanley, eldest daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley, Cheshire, and had nine children. His Cranborne estate amounted to 27,000 acres, and the Pitt-Rivers family had an annual income of a little under £20,000. For the rest of his life the management of the estate would be left to an agent, while the General kept a tight rein on his affairs.

After leaving Ireland he had conducted excavations in London, Yorkshire and Sussex before moving to Cranborne Chase. In 1861 Pitt-Rivers joined the Ethnological Society of London and the Anthropological Society slightly later. In 1864 he was elected to the Society of Antiquarians. By this time the Lieutenant General had compulsively amassed a huge collection of anthropological artefacts – mostly from dealers, but some from his own excavations.

The General would typically arrive at a site with his workman at 7 a.m. Pitt-Rivers recognised the importance of studying modern artefacts in order to understand those of the past. He recorded all finds on a site, no matter how trivial (including rubbish), with their contexts, developing the concept of typology: the classification in a chronological sequence of finds showing evolution over time. Close attention had to be paid to stratification, and the workers had to be fully trained. Pitt-Rivers thought that excavation should only be carried out under proper supervision. In later life he documented his fieldwork, had detailed plans drawn up, even having models made.

In 1883 he was appointed the first ever Inspector of Ancient Monuments, inclusion on the record of which precluded a landowner from destroying or defacing a monument he owned. Between 1887 and 1896 Pitt Rivers published in several volumes his ‘Excavations on Cranborne Chase’, which was warmly received at Salisbury. The work from excavation to publication needed the help of reliable clerical assistants and draughtsman, which the excavator himself handpicked. During a lecture to the Royal Archaeological Institute he pointed out the typically low cranium of early men’s skulls (he himself even invented and built a craniometer to measure them.)

Pitt-Rivers also became pre-occupied with the origin of local place names. He was sure funding would be adequate if the gentry could look beyond hunting and shooting, and criticised newspaper editors for ignoring “sensible things” like archaeology. But the General did not allow his own preferences to overrule the desires of others.

It must not be thought Pitt-Rivers set out to amuse the agricultural classes; he intended to educate them as well. The finds from his excavations on Cranborne Chase and exhibits from abroad were cleverly displayed to instruct and enlighten visitors. And he had ample means to explore the Chase; it was said that one could walk to the coast without leaving the Rivers estate.

But if Pitt-Rivers was a first class excavator; he was no less successful in brightening the lives of the local population. He encouraged as many as 40,000 to visit the estate annually, drawn by a bandstand, open-air theatre and zoo he established in the grounds of Rushmore Park. He opened an area known as the Larmer Grounds to the public on Sundays. The menagerie also became a laboratory for experiments in the cross-breeding of cattle and yaks – early forays into genetic engineering, which won Pitt-Rivers a fellowship of the Zoological Society.

But some of the activities also drew criticism. Ralph Wightman said of Pitt-Rivers that he “succeeded in shocking most of the countryside – I can remember elderly non-conformist relatives describing it (i.e. the opening of the Larmer Grounds) with obvious disapproval”. The Vicar of Sixpenny Handley complained about the noise from the General’s private band in the pleasure grounds. Many did not share Pitt-Rivers enthusiasm for disturbing burial places: the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, for one, believed the desecration of graves to be sacrilege.

Disapproval was also voiced after the General opened a museum and pub – called the Museum Arms – in nearby Farnham. To this museum he donated some 20,000 of the objects in his collection in 1884, though many more were left in Rushmore and in his London homes. Pitt-Rivers was awarded an honorary degree in 1886. He died in 1900 at the age of 73, his ashes being deposited in a black marble reliquary high in a wall-niche at Tollard Royal Church.

The material from Cranborne Chase has been relocated to the Salisbury and Wilts Museum, where a gallery to the memory of the excavator has been created. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford also exhibits many of his collections together with a reconstruction of the Woodcutts Romano-British village.