y used by the
natives, who term the place "Up Husband"; it was officially spelt "Up
Hursborn" as lately as 1830. It is a village in a delightful situation
and delightful in itself, though of late years the architecture of the
"general stores" has replaced some of the old timber-framed houses on
the main street. But the George and Dragon, even if it shows no
timbers on its long front, wears an old-fashioned air of prosperity
that belongs to the coaching past. Tarrant Church, like so many others
hereabouts, has been sadly "well restored," but still retains a
Transitional south door and some rather remarkable wall paintings.

The Andover road rises through Dole's Wood and passes over the hill to
Knight's Enham and Andover. The last-named busy little town of to-day
owes much of its prosperity to the fact that it is an important
meeting place of railways connecting three great trunk lines. To
outward view Andover is utterly commonplace; everything ancient has
been ruthlessly improved away, and that curse of the railway town, an
appendix of mean red-brick villas, mars the approach from the west. It
has a past, however, which goes back to such remote times that its
beginnings are lost in those "mists of antiquity" which shroud so much
of the country described in our preceding chapter. The "dover" in the
town-name is probably the pre-Celtic root which meets the traveller
when he arrives at Dover and greets him again in unsuspected places
from the "dor" in Dorchester and the Falls of Lodore to the "der" in
Derwent and smoky Darwen. All have the same meaning--_water_; and
"an," strangely enough, is a later and Celtic word for the same
element, the equally ubiquitous "afon." So that Andover should be a
place of many waters, which it is not. A small stream--the
Anton--flows almost unnoticed through the town, though its name seems
to have been given occasionally to the whole of the longer Test that
it meets a few miles to the south.

Written records of Andover before Wessex became a kingdom do not
exist. But scraps of tessellated pavement in the vicinity show that it
was a locality well known to the Romans, and the Port Way, that great
thoroughfare of the Empire, passed within half a mile of the modern
railway junction. In 994, Olaus, King of Norway, is said to have been
baptized here, his sponsor being Ethelred the Unready. The town
received its charter from King John and took part in the disagreement
between Stephen and Matilda,