Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [523]
A sharpshooter had got him.
Five days later, when Saratoga capitulated, Captain Adam Shockley, fortunate to be only wounded in the shoulder, was one of the handful of men who remained of the five hundred and forty-one who had constituted the 62nd regiment.
Of the few who did remain, some in the next two years were sent to Virginia, others escaped to New York. The regimental band defected to the rebels and served in a Boston regiment. In 1782, the Springers regiment was reconstituted and by chance, when regiments of the line were given county titles that year, were called The Wiltshire Regiment.
The defeat at Saratoga was a turning point. From that time on, though the fighting continued, until Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the British Government looked not for victory, but for the least damaging peace they could negotiate. America was going to be lost.
He only received one letter from his father at this time. It was very brief, and informed Adam that his second wife had died, leaving him alone with his two children.
His own captivity lasted a little over a year. He was not badly treated; indeed his captors and he had many discussions and he left them finally with a sense of friendship that surprised him.
But at last, in the spring of 1779, with the wound in his shoulder nearly healed, Captain Adam Shockley returned, for the first time in over twenty years, to his family home in Sarum.
He wondered what he would find there.
A damp March wind from the west, small grey clouds chasing across a clear, pale blue sky. Sweeping ridges of brown earth and short grass, neatly arranged into large fields marked off by walls of loose grey stone.
The stagecoach: four fine horses, well-matched, two chestnut and two greys, driver and a man in the coachman’s box both in tall hats, almost conical; up front three chilled passengers, one a woman, their faces reddened by the wind; one man behind gazing down at the huge open basket where the luggage was stowed. Inside, four men paying full fare, sitting in comfort on leather upholstery, windows pulled up, very warm. The huge wheels gliding smoothly.
The Bristol to Bath stagecoach was indeed a fine, rapid and fashionable conveyance as it rolled easily along the turnpike road.
Turnpikes: Bristol to Bath; Bath via Warminster down to Wilton; Wilton to Sarum. Put another way: medieval port, to Roman spa, to Saxon capital, to the bishop’s new city, already five centuries old.
Turnpikes: there had been nothing like these broad roads in England since Roman times, fourteen hundred years before. They were installed now on all the main routes between major towns, as hard and smooth as a gravel drive. They supplanted the old cartways and tracks that had been used – except during the more civilised Roman period – as the principal roads since prehistoric times.
They were privately run: each set up with its charter of authority from Parliament, each with its shareholders; and its toll gates. Some of the turnpike trusts owned the right to toll large stretches of highway, some only two or three miles; but they were profitable and efficient. The Forest family was a major shareholder in several of them.
To Adam Shockley, returning after so many years, England was a surprise.
“Why, the whole country,” he remarked, “it’s all fashioned by man!”
For the landscape of England and the landscape of America had nothing in common at all. The latter was virgin forest or open land in which man made his modest habitation. But in England, even on the sweeping empty ridges, the hand of man had cut down, shaped, and rearranged wood, ploughed field and pasture for thousands of years. If there were woods, it was because landowners chose to keep them there for shooting or for timber. If there were wastes, it was because, like as not, human hands had once cut down the forests that covered them and the ancient soil had eroded away. True, there