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THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE Volume 77 for 1982 (published 1983), pp. 152—154

DEFOE AND THE WHITE HORSE

In vol. 2 of his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1725) Defoe refers correctly to 'the Vale of White Horse, as 'tis called, which in Berkshire'.[1] Yet two pages further on he seems distinctly uncertain about its exact location:

Between this town of Marlborough, and Abington, westward, is the Vale of White Horse: The inhabitants tell a great many fabulous stories of its being so called; but there is nothing of foundation in them all, that I could see; the whole of the story is this; Looking south from the vale, we see a trench cut on the side of a high green hill, this trench is cut in the shape of a horse, and not ill-shap'd, I assure you. The trench is about two yards wide on the top, about a yard deep, and filled almost up with chalk, so that at a distance, for it is seen many miles off, you see the exact shape of a White Horse; but so large, as to take up near an acre of ground, some say almost two acres. From this figure the hill is called, in our maps, White Horse Hill, and the low, or flat country under it, the Vale of White Horse. It is a very fertile and fruitful vale, and extends itself from Farrington almost to Abington, tho' not exactly in a line: Some think 'twas done by the Saxons, whose device was a white horse, and is so still.[2]

Two years later he misplaced it completely. In A Brief Deduction of the Original, Progress, and Immense Greatness of the British Woollen Manufacture (1727), he wrote:

The clothing trade first erected in the towns of Oakingham, Reading, Newbery, and Andover, in the counties of Wiltshire and Berkshire, is now spread farther along into Wiltshire and Somersetshire, extending along a vast tract of ground from the edge of Gloucestershire to the side of Dorsetshire, for near an hundred miles, through the richest and most fruitful vale in all the west part of England, called the Vale of White-horse, and including the populous towns of Malmesbury, Tedbury, Cirencester, Stroud, Marshfield, Caln, Chipenham, Devizes, Bradford, Trowbridge, Froom, Warminster, Westbury, and many more, with innumerable populous villages.[3]

As none of the towns listed by Defoe is within a dozen miles of the Vale of White Horse, this might be dismissed simply as an example of slipshod inaccuracy on his part; but it is worth while to examine how the error could have arisen. When writing his Tour he seems to have worked with Edmund Gibson's 1695 edition of Camden's Britannia at his elbow, open at the appropriate county map by Robert Morden. These maps provided him with a topographical framework, into which he could insert his recollections of recent or not-so-recent travel, reinforced by information gleaned from Camden himself and from the 'Additions' included in the 1695 edition, as well as other sources. Finishing with Wiltshire on his way from Cornwall to London, he would have turned to Morden's map of Berkshire, where, in addition to the spellings 'Barkshire', 'Farington', 'Abington', he would have found White Horse Hill and the Vale of White Horse.[4] Camden, on the very next page, would have told him that the latter took its name 'from I know not what shape of a White Horse, fancy 'd on the side of a whitish chalky hill [5] while the Additions added only: 'I leave to others to determine . . . whether the White Horse on the hill-side was made by Hengist, since the Horse was the Arms or Figure in Hengist's standard.'[6] This was presumably the source of Defoe's comment on the possible Saxon origin of the horse; but the actual description is his own.

It is difficult to reconcile the detail in this description with his vagueness as to the location of the Vale of White Horse; and there is nothing else in the Tour or elsewhere to suggest that he had ever visited the Vale or its neighbourhood. If he had never seen, or even heard of, the Uffington White Horse until reading the sketchy remarks by Camden and his continuator, he may well have taken these to refer to a figure with which he must have been familiar, the Westbury White Horse. This was in an area that Defoe knew well. When he had been at Norton St Philip with Monmouth in 1685 his mind must have been on other things; but he had also spent some time in West Wiltshire in 1705, visiting, among other places, 'Bradford, Trubridge, Westbury'[7] and the latter part of Letter IV of his Tour seems to follow an actual journey, probably made about August 1723, returning from the SW to London, through Frome, Trowbridge, Bradford, Devizes, Marlborough, Newbury and Reading.[8] That the Westbury White Horse was already in existence can be inferred from the statement by the Rev. Francis Wise in 1742 that it had been 'wrought within the memory of persons now living or but lately dead'.[ 9] Defoe's efforts to reconcile his recollection of the Horse with Morden's map would account for his vagueness and confusion about the location of the White Horse Vale — 'Between... Marlborough, and Abington, westwards' — 'from Farrington almost to Abington, tho' not exactly in a line'. By 1727 he seems to have convinced himself that what he had once simply called 'that Great Vale of Trade' [10] was really the Vale of White Horse.

If this is so, then Defoe's Tour contains the earliest account of the original Westbury Horse, antedating Wise's brief comments by 17 years, and the rather ambiguous notes and sketch made in 1772 by Richard Gough, by nearly half a century. What light does it throw on the original horse?

Defoe's opinion that the horse was 'not ill-shap'd, I assure you' came from someone who prided himself on his knowledge of horses.[11] It is certainly more complimentary than most 18th-century comments on the Uffington horse, and thus supports the view that it was not the latter that he was describing.

Morris Marples, in White Horses and Other Hill Figures, held that while Gough's description seemed to imply a solid figure, his drawing was more consistent with a linear one; and he left the question open.[12] Defoe's description of a 'trench' clearly indicates a linear horse. Anyone casually observing the figure from a distance might well imagine, if he thought about it at all, that it had been made simply by removing the turf. The details Defoe gives about the trench, 'two yards wide on the top, about a yard deep, and filled almost up with chalk', tally closely with Marples's account of the method used in cutting linear figures.[13] This suggests that Defoe had either obtained information from local inhabitants, or had actually examined the horse on the ground.

Marples deduced from Wise's report that the horse had been cut about 1700 or a little earlier.[14] Defoe's remarks about 'a great many fabulous stories' as to its origin may appear to contradict this; but these remarks are probably only a slight embroidering of what he had read in Camden and the Additions about the Uffington Horse, and need not be taken too seriously. On the other hand, he can have heard nothing from the local inhabitants to make it impossible for him to believe that it might have had a Saxon origin. This suggests that it was already well established when he knew the area, and may imply that it had been cut a few decades earlier than Marples suggests. [15]

F. Bastian

1. Tour (Everyman edition), 1, 284. Now, however, in Oxfordshire.

2. Ibid., I, 286.

3. In Laura Ann Curtis (ed.), The Versatile Defoe (1979), 185.

4. William Camden, Britannia, ed. Edmund Gibson (1695), between columns \}6 and l.?

5. Ibid., col. ]}7.

6. Ibid., cols. 150-1.

7. G. H. Healey (ed.), The Letters of Daniel Defoe (1955), 103-4, UO-U.

8. Tour, 1, 279—94. The dating evidence relates to his outward journey by a more southerly route.

9. Francis Wise, Further Observations on the White Horse and other Antiquities in Berkshire (1742), quoted in Morris Marples, White Horses and Other Hill Figures (1970), 68-9.

10. Healey, 103.

11. See Tour, 1, 75-6; 2, 77-8, 221-2.

12. Marples, 23, 71.

13. Ibid., 21-2.

14. Ibid., 69.

15. The Additions for Wiltshire in the 1695 edition of Camden's Britannia were supplied by Thomas Tanner, later Bishop of St Asaph, who had been born and brought up a few miles away at Market Lavington. He devoted 15 lines to Bratton Castle, but made no mention ot a White Horse immediately below it. This however does not necessarily mean that it was not there, merely that it was not regarded as an antiquity.