Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

PART FOURTH
AT SHASTON

---

‘Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before
the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him
profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better
than a Pharisee.’
*
J. M
.

---

 
IV.–i.
S
,* the ancient British Palladour,
‘From whose foundation 
first such strange reports arise,’
(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague
imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magni
ficent apsidal abbey,
the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines,
chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions––all now ruth-
lessly swept away––throw the visitor even against his will into a
pensive melancholy which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless
landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-
place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and
bishops, knights and squires. The bones of King Edward ‘the
Martyr,’* carefully removed hither for holy preservation, brought
Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every
part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far
beyond English shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age
the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With the
destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a
general ruin: the Martyr’s bones met with the fate of the sacred pile
that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.
The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still
remain; but strange to say these qualities, which were noted by many
writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreci-
ated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest
spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day.
It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing
scarp, rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out
of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle
Green over three counties of verdant pasture––South, Mid, and
Nether Wessex––being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant
traveller’s eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible to
a railway, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles,
and it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the

---

north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that
side.
Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston, or Pal-
ladour. Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and
within living memory, horses, donkeys, and men may have been seen
toiling up the winding ways to the top of the height, laden with tubs
and barrels 
filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers
retailing their contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.
This di
fficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd
facts, namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a roof
behind the church, and that in former times the town passed
through a curious period of corruption, conventual and domestic,
gave rise to the saying that Shaston was remarkable for three con-
solations to man, such as the world a
fforded not elsewhere. It was a
place where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church
steeple, where beer was more plentiful than water, and where there
were more wanton women than honest wives and maids. It is also
said that after the middle ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay
their priests, and hence were compelled to pull down their churches,
and refrain altogether from the public worship of God; a necessity
which they bemoaned over their cups in the settles of their inns on
Sunday afternoons. In those days the Shastonians were apparently
not without a sense of humour.
There was another peculiarity––this a modern one––which
Shaston appeared to owe to its site. It was the resting-place and
headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans, shows, shooting-
galleries, and other itinerant concerns, whose business lay largely at
fairs and markets. As strange wild birds are seen assembled on some
lofty promontory, meditatively pausing for longer 
flights, or to
return by the course they followed thither, so here, in this cli
ff-town,
stood in stulti
fied silence the yellow and green caravans bearing
names not local, as if surprised by a change in the landscape so
violent as to hinder their further progress; and here they usually
remained all the winter till they turned to seek again their old tracks
in the following spring.
It was to this breezy and whimsical spot that Jude ascended from
the nearest station for the 
first time in his life about four o’clock one
afternoon, and entering on the summit of the peak after a toilsome
climb passed the 
first houses of the aerial town, and drew towards