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Updated: May 12, 2025
After thinking a few moments, he added: "I am fond of Wantage; Wallingford has done me no harm; Oxford gave me many companions; I was not drowned at Dorchester beyond the Little Hills; and the best of men gave me a true farewell in Faringdon yonder. Moreover, Cumnor is my friend. Nevertheless, I like to indulge in a sort of sadness when I look over this plain."
Charley Steele and Billy Wantage walked on slowly to the house under the hill. "He's the right sort," said Billy. "He's a sport. I can stand that kind. Did you ever hear him sing? No? Well, he can sing a comic song fit to make you die. I can sing a bit myself, but to hear him sing 'The Man Who Couldn't Get Warm' is a show in itself.
Jameson of Wantage moves that the report of the Committee be accepted, and on this motion a roll-call is ordered." The doorkeepers, who must have been inspired, had already slammed the doors in the faces of those seeking wildly to escape. The clerk already had the little, short-legged desk before him and was calling the roll with incredible rapidity.
Leaving Wantage, the road to Reading runs along the crest of the hills, and on either side from the breezy uplands, the green fields, dashed with the gold of the ripening harvest, stretched away for many miles.
The White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road nothing but country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't seem to want them.
Hackpen is almost the final effort of the chalk in this direction. At its northern end it rises to 884 feet, an isolated section being crowned by Barbury Camp, ringed by its beech trees, from which there is a grand view north and west. From this point the general trend of the chalk escarpment is north-east to the Lambourn Downs, between Lambourn and Wantage.
Wantage is a quiet town, lying at the foot of the hills, and is chiefly noted as the birthplace of the great Saxon king. A granite statute of Alfred stands in the market square, representing the king with the charter of English liberties in one hand and a battle-ax in the other. As he was born more than a thousand years ago, there are no buildings now standing that were connected with his history.
And yet before we had driven into Wantage and seen King Alfred's quaint grey statue in the sun, we had seen yet a third white horse. And the third white horse was so hopelessly unlike a horse that we were sure that it was genuine. The final and original white horse, the white horse of the White Horse Vale, has that big, babyish quality that truly belongs to our remotest ancestors.
His words concerning Billy Wantage might have been either an impeachment of Billy's character and, by deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable egoism of the fop, well used to imitators. The veil between the two, which for one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now, leaded and weighted at the bottom. "I suppose you would say the same about John Brown!
Abingdon was the life of Northern Berkshire, and it is not fantastic to compare its religious aspect in Saxon times over against the King's towns of Wantage and Wallingford to the larger national aspect of Canterbury over against Winchester and London.
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