The Mayor of Casterbridge

Hardy's Casterbridge is Dorchester barely disguised: the Roman amphitheatre at Maumbury Rings where Henchard keeps his furtive meetings, the King's Arms on the High Street where the mayor holds his banquet, the corn-market where a hay-trusser who once sold his wife at a country fair has risen to preside, the Ten Hatches weir on the Frome where he goes to drown. Hardy mapped his home town so exactly he later published the keys. Only Weydon-Priors, drawn from Weyhill in Hampshire, sits well outside the town.

Michael Henchard

Weydon-Priors Fair (Weyhill)

Weydon-Priors, ch. I · 0% through the novel

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.

Here, drunk on rum-laced furmity at the fair, the hay-trusser Michael Henchard auctions his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor for five guineas. The whole novel turns on this morning at Weyhill's fairground, the shame Henchard spends the rest of his life trying to outrun.

inspired by Weydon-Priors is Hardy's name for Weyhill in Hampshire, whose great sheep and hiring fair supplied the scene. It lies some 60 miles north-east of Casterbridge, well outside the book's Dorchester setting, so it is flagged as an excursion.

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