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Title: The Somerset Coast
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Language: English
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THE SOMERSET COAST
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.
The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.
The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.
The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an
East Anglian Turnpike.
The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South
Wales. Two Vols.
The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”
Cycle Rides Round London.
A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.
Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.
The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”
The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
The Dorset Coast.
The South Devon Coast.
The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.
Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.
Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).
Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural.
The Manchester and Glasgow Road: This way to Gretna Green. Two Vols.
The North Devon Coast.
Half Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.
The Autocar Road Book.
The Tower Of London: Fortress, Palace, and Prison.
The Cornish Coast. North. [_In the Press._
The Cornish Coast. South. [_In the Press._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: CLIFTON BRIDGE]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE SOMERSET
COAST
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
“_Somerset, that pleasant londe which
rennith to the Severn Se._”—FULLER.
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1909
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I INTRODUCTORY 1
II THE RIVER AVON—CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE 6
III ABBOT’S LEIGH TO CLEVEDON 17
IV CLEVEDON—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: 25
COLERIDGE
V CLEVEDON (_continued_)—LITERARY 32
ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON
VI YATTON—CONGRESBURY—WICK ST. LAWRENCE 45
VII WORSPRING PRIORY—KEWSTOKE 56
VIII WESTON-SUPER-MARE 67
IX WORLEBURY—WORLE 78
X STEEP HOLM—FLAT HOLM—UPHILL—BREAN DOWN 87
XI BLEADON—BREAN—BRENT KNOLL 98
XII BURNHAM—HIGHBRIDGE—BAWDRIP—“BATH 111
BRICKS”—THE RIVER PARRET
XIII BRIDGWATER—ADMIRAL BLAKE—THE MONMOUTH 126
REBELLION
XIV CANNINGTON—THE QUANTOCKS—NETHER STOWEY, 139
AND THE COLERIDGE CIRCLE
XV STEART—STOGURSEY—THE FOLK-SPEECH OF 158
ZUMMERZET—GLATT-HUNTING AT KILVE—ST.
AUDRIES
XVI WILLITON—ST. DECUMAN’S AND THE 179
WYNDHAMS—WATCHET
XVII CLEEVE ABBEY—OLD CLEEVE—BLUE ANCHOR 189
XVIII DUNSTER 206
XIX MINEHEAD, NEW AND OLD—SELWORTHY—THE 227
HORNER
XX PORLOCK—BOSSINGTON—PORLOCK WEIR 247
XXI CULBONE AND ITS REVELS—WHORTLEBERRIES 260
XXII THE “LORNA DOONE COUNTRY” 270
XXIII OARE—MALMSMEAD—THE BADGWORTHY VALLEY—THE 286
“DOONE VALLEY”—GLENTHORNE
INDEX 299
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Clifton Bridge Frontispiece
Map of The Somerset Coast 1
Avonmouth, from Pill 18
In Portishead Church 21
Coleridge’s Cottage, Clevedon 28
Clevedon 35
Clevedon Court 43
Kingston Seymour 46
Yatton Church 48
The Rectory, Congresbury 51
Woodspring Priory 58
Reliquary in Kewstoke Church (Front) 63
Reliquary in Kewstoke Church (Back) 65
Uphill 92
Bleadon Church 99
Berrow 102
Brent Knoll 107
Brent Knoll 109
Huntspill 117
Birthplace of Admiral Blake 128
Bridgwater: St. Mary’s Church, and Corn 132
Exchange
Westonzoyland 134
Cannington 140
Nether Stowey; Gazebo at Stowey Court 143
The Coleridge Cottage, Nether Stowey 153
Nether Stowey 155
The “Mud Horse” 161
Stolford 163
Stogursey Castle 165
Kilve Church 171
Kilve: The Chantry 173
St. Audries 176
Bench-end, Sampford Brett; supposed to 184
allude to the Legend of Lady Florence
Wyndham
Watchet; Old Town Hall and Lock-up 186
Watchet 187
Entrance to Cleeve Abbey 192
The Refectory, Cleeve Abbey 197
Mysterious Effigy at Old Cleeve 201
Blue Anchor 203
Coneygore Tower, and Road into Minehead 207
Dunster Castle 210
Dunster; Castle and Yarn Market 218
Dunster Church, from the South, showing 221
old Alcove in Churchyard Wall for the
Stocks
Curious Archway, Dunster Church 223
The “Nunnery,” or “High House,” Dunster 225
Minehead 228
Seventeenth-Century Mantel, “Luttrell 230
Arms” Inn
Quirke’s Almshouses 236
Doorway of the Manor Office 238
Minehead Church 238
The Manor Office, Minehead 239
Rood-Loft Turret, Minehead 241
The Clock Jack, Minehead Church 243
Lynch Chapel 244
Packhorse Bridge, Allerford 245
Bossington 250
Porlock Church 252
Inglenook, “Ship” Inn, Porlock 254
“The Ship” Inn, Porlock 254
Porlock Weir 258
The Lodge, Ashley Combe 261
Culbone Church 263
Oare Church 287
Near Robber’s Bridge 288
Interior of Oare Church 290
Malmsmead 293
Badgworthy Valley 295
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: THE SOMERSET COAST]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: THE SOMERSET COAST]
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
ON confiding to personal friends, journalistic paragraphists, and other
Doubting Thomases, professional sceptics, chartered cynics and
indifferent persons, the important and interesting literary news that a
proposal was afloat to write a book on the Somerset Coast, the author
was assured with an unanimity as remarkable as it was disconcerting,
that there is no coast of Somerset.
This singular geographical heresy, although totally unsupported by
map-makers, who on all maps and charts show a very well-defined
seaboard, seems to be widely distributed; but it is not shared by (among
others) the inhabitants of Clevedon, of Watchet (where furious seas have
twice within the last few years demolished the harbour), of
Weston-super-Mare, Burnham, Minehead, or Porlock. The people of all
these places think they live on the coast; and it would be really quite
absurdly difficult to persuade them that they do not, or that they do
not live in Somerset.
This singular illusion, that there is no coast of Somerset, is, however,
but one among a number of current fallacies, among which may be included
the belief that:
Essex is a flat county.
London is dirty.
The virtuous are necessarily happy;
The wicked equally of necessity miserable.
All Irishmen are witty.
Scotsmen cannot see a joke.
And so forth. Essex is flat, and London grimy, only comparatively.
Natives of Huntingdonshire (which is an alternative term for flatness)
no doubt think of Essex as a place of hills; and although London may
seem grimy to the eyes of a villager from Devon or Cornwall, it is as a
City of light and purity to the Sheffielder, the inhabitants of
Newcastle, and the people of other such places of gloom.
The coast of Somerset, then, to make a beginning with it, opens with the
great port and city of Bristol, on the navigable estuary of the river
Avon, and ends at Glenthorne, where the North Devon boundary is met. The
distance between these two points is sixty miles. Throughout the entire
length of this coastline, that of South Wales is more or less clearly
visible; the Bristol Channel being but four and a half miles wide at
Avonmouth; seven and a half miles at Brean Down, by Weston-super-Mare,
and fifteen miles at Glenthorne.
The foreshore of a great part of this coast is more or less muddy; the
Severn, which you shall find to be a tea or coffee-coloured river, even
at Shrewsbury a hundred miles or so up along its course, from the
particles of earth held in suspension, depositing much of this, and the
even more muddy rivers Avon and Parret contributing a larger proportion.
The “Severn Sea,” as poetical and imaginative writers style this
estuary, known to matter-of-fact geographers as the “Bristol Channel,”
is therefore apt to be of a grey hue, except under brilliant sunshine.
But it would be most unjust to infer from these remarks, that mud, and
only mud, is the characteristic of these sixty miles. Indeed, the
Somerset Coast is singularly varied, and has many elements of beauty.
Between the noble scene of its opening, where the romantic gorge of the
Avon, set with rugged cliffs and delightful woods, is spanned by the
airy Suspension Bridge of Clifton, and the wood-clad steeps of
Glenthorne, you will find such beautiful places as Portishead and
Weston, whose scenery no crowds of vulgarians can spoil; and Dunster,
Minehead, and Porlock, which need no advertisement from this or any
other pen. I have purposely omitted Clevedon from the list above, for it
does not appeal to me.
Mud you have, naked and unashamed, practically only at Pill and the
outlet of the Avon, and again at Steart and the estuary of the Parret,
where those surcharged waters precipitate their unlovely burden.
Elsewhere, the purifying sea completely scavenges it away or kindly
disguises it. Nay, between Weston and Burnham we have even a long range
of sandhills, as pure as the sand-towans of North Cornwall or as the
driven snow.[1]
Footnote 1:
But this depends largely upon the neighbourhood in which it has been
driving.
And further, if we turn our attention to the scenery and the churches
and castles and ruined abbeys, or to the associations, of this
countryside, we shall find it an engaging succession of districts,
comparing well with some better-known and more generally appreciated
seaboards.
A specious air of eternal midsummer and sunshine belongs to the name of
Somerset. Camden, writing in the first years of the seventeenth century,
was not too grave an historian and antiquary to notice the fact; and we
find him, accordingly, at considerable pains to disabuse any one likely
to be deceived by it. He says, in his great work “Britannia”: “Some
suppose its name was given it for the mildness and, as it were, _summer_
temperature of its air.... But as it may be truly called in summer a
summer country, so it has as good right to be called a winter one in
winter, when it is for the most part wet, fenny and marshy, to the great
inconvenience of travellers. I am more inclined to think it derives from
_Somerton_, anciently the most considerable town in the whole country.”
True, it did; for Somerton was until the eighth century the capital of
the tribe of Britons known as Somersætas. Their kingdom and their
capital were finally swept away by the victorious irresistible advance
of the great Saxon kingdom of Wessex, in A.D. 710. Hence Somerset,
although we occasionally hear of “Somerset_shire_,” is not really a
shire, in the sense of being a more or less arbitrarily shorn-off
division after the fashion of the Midland shires—Leicestershire,
Northamptonshire, and many others—but is historically an individual
entity; the ancient kingdom of the Somersætas, remaining in name, though
not in fact; just as Wiltshire, wrongly so-called, is the ancient
country of the Wilsætas; Devon the land of the Damnonians, and Cornwall
the home of the Cornu-Welsh.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE RIVER AVON—CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE
BRISTOL, whence one comes most conveniently to the coast of Somerset, is
among the most fortunate of cities. It has a long and interesting
history, both in the warlike and the commercial sorts, and its citizens
have ever been public-spirited men, of generous impulses. (It is not
really necessary for the discreet historian to go into the story of
Bristol’s old-time thriving business of kidnapping and slave-trading, by
which her merchants grew wealthy, and so we will say nothing about it,
nor enlarge upon the wealth-producing import of Jamaica rum.) It has
many noble and interesting buildings, and a lovely and striking
countryside is at its very gates, while the river Avon, to which Bristol
owes the possibility of its greatness, flows out to sea, amid the most
romantic river scenery in England, at Clifton.
This immense gorge of the Avon was created, according to tradition, A.D.
33, on the day of the Crucifixion, in the course of a world-wide
earthquake accompanying that event. Then, according to that strictly
unreliable story, the hills were rent asunder, and the ancient British
camps at St. Vincent’s and at Borough Walls and Stoke Leigh had the
newly formed river Avon set between them. Geologists know better than
this, but in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Miss Ann
Powell sat upon the heights of Clifton and, contemplating the scene, was
filled with great thoughts, which she eventually poured forth in the
shape of something then thought to be poetry, the tradition was not
considered to be so absurd as it now is. In her “Clifton, a Poem,”
published in 1821, we learn some things new to history, especially as to
the year A.D. 33. Then, according to Miss Ann Powell, the Romans were
encamped here, in victorious arrogance, and the very day of the
Crucifixion chanced to be that which the Roman general had fixed for a
reception of conquered British chiefs:
Our humbled kings upon his levee wait,
This day appointed as a day of state.
Unfortunately for the poem, the Romans were not in Britain at the time.
They had not been here for eighty-seven years, since the last departure
of Julius Caesar, in B.C. 54, and were not to land on these shores again
until ten years more had passed: in A.D. 43. As a description of an
earthquake which did not happen, and an account of disasters which did
not befall people who were not here, the poem is a somewhat remarkable
production. The authoress herself is so overwrought that she mixes past
and present tenses. Let us see how Romans and Britons behaved under the
appalling circumstances:
Now darkness fast the distant hills surround;
Beneath their feet, slow trembling, mov’d the ground;
High tempests rose that shook the stately roof,
Nor was the conqu’ror’s heart to this quite proof.
“Sure nature is dissolv’d!” the Roman cry’d.
“Sure nature is dissolv’d!” the guests reply’d.
Now awful thunders with majestic sound,
And vivid lightnings separate the ground;
The crash tremendous fill’d each heart with fear;
The sound of gushing waters strikes the ear.
Ah! now destruction’s hurl’d thro’ earth and sky;
Men seeking safety know not where to fly;
They through the ramparts run to make their way;
The guards lay prostrate there with sore dismay.
The Britons mount their horses—fly in haste:
No time in idle compliments they waste.
How delicious that last line! “No time in idle compliments they waste.”
It flings us down from the heights of a world in pieces to the inanities
of the “How d’ye do’s” of afternoon teas.
Clifton Suspension Bridge, opened in 1864, is a bridge with a romantic
history. From the early years of the eighteenth century it had been
proposed to bridge the Avon at or near this point, by some means, and
thus save the descent from Clifton to Rownham Ferry, with the
uncomfortable and sometimes perilous crossing of the Avon and the climb
up to Abbot’s Leigh.
The ferry at Rownham had been the property of the abbots of the
Augustinian monastery of Bristol, from 1148, and was of necessity
frequently crossed by those dignified churchmen, who in course of time,
as the size and trade of Bristol increased, derived a considerable
revenue from their rights here, which, at the Reformation, passed to
their successors, the Dean and Chapter of Bristol, who in their turn
were succeeded by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
At this point was also a ford, practicable at low water for horsemen,
but, as the tide here rises swiftly and to a height of forty-five feet,
it was generally of a hazardous character, as seems to be sufficiently
shown by the fact that in 1610 one Richard George was drowned in thus
crossing, while on December 27th of the same year the eldest son of one
Baron Snigge, Recorder of Bristol, met a like fate. On the Bristol side
stands, among other houses on the quay, the Rownham Tavern, and on the
Somerset shore stood a somewhat imposing hostelry called the “New Inn.”
The building of the last-named house of entertainment and refreshment
remains to this day, but it is now a species of tea-garden and picnic
place, with arbours in which on summer days parties may make modestly
merry and listen to the murmur of Bristol’s traffic borne, like a
subdued roar, across the river. In the rear of the old house, the
single-track Bristol and Portishead branch of the Great Western Railway
runs at the foot of the cliffs and presently tunnels under them, below
the Suspension Bridge.
The first person ever to put into shape the old aspirations of Bristol
for a bridge across the gorge of the Avon at this point was Alderman
Vick, of Bristol. He died in 1753, leaving by his will a sum of £1,000,
to be invested until the capital sum reached a total of £10,000, a sum
he imagined would be sufficient to build a stone bridge here. For
seventy-seven years this generous bequest accumulated as he had willed,
and by 1830 had reached £8,000. It was then felt, as engineering had
already made great strides, and as the suspension principle had been
tried in various places, successfully and economically, that the
bridging of this gulf should no longer be delayed. It had long been
evident that £10,000 would not nearly suffice to build a bridge of any
kind here, but it was thought that, if an Act of Parliament were
obtained for the undertaking of the work and a company formed, the
necessary funds could be found to begin the construction forthwith; the
company to be recouped by charging tolls. The Parliamentary powers were
therefore obtained, the company formed, capital subscribed, and Telford,
the foremost engineer of the day, invited to prepare plans and
estimates. Telford’s plan provided for a suspension bridge with two iron
towers, and he estimated the cost at £52,000. Telford was an engineer
first, a practical, matter-of-fact Scotsman, and not by way of being an
artist. His fine, but not sufficiently grandiose, scheme was, therefore,
rejected, and that of Brunel, who was next invited to prepare plans,
accepted, although his estimate was £5,000 higher. Brunel’s success was
undoubtedly due to the picturesque design he made, and the stress he
laid upon the fact that the romantic scenery of this spot might easily
be ruined by a mere utilitarian structure. The bridge as we see it
completed to-day is in essentials his design, but the two great towers
from which the roadway is suspended are plain to severity, instead of
being, as he had contemplated, richly sculptured. The towers, he
explained to the committee of selection, were on the model of the
gateways to the ruins of Tentyra, in Egypt, and would harmonise well
with the rugged cliffs and hanging woods of Clifton and Abbot’s Leigh.
In 1831 the foundations of Brunel’s bridge were laid, amid great local
rejoicings. Felicitations on the occasion were exchanged. Sir Eardley
Wilmot, first imagining an Elizabethan Bristolian returned to earth,
and, coming to Rownham Ferry, finding the place just the same as he had
left it three hundred years earlier, then congratulated all and sundry
on this reproach being about to vanish, in the proximate completion of
the works, and all was joy and satisfaction.
But money grew scarce; the works were more costly than had been
anticipated, and the furious riots of 1831 in Bristol rendered capital
shy and fresh funds difficult to obtain. In 1833 Brunel was desired to
reduce the estimates, and did reduce them by £4,000, at the cost of
sacrificing much of the ornamental work. In 1836 another
foundation-stone was laid, and a communication opened in mid-air across
the river, by means of an iron bar stretched across. Along this the
workmen travelled daily, suspended in a wicker basket; a sight that
every day drew fascinated crowds. A demand to cross in this manner at
once sprang up among people who wanted a new sensation, and the bridge
company earned an appreciable sum by charging for these aerial trips.
While the novelty was very new, the fare across was five shillings; it
then sank by degrees to half a crown, two shillings, and one shilling.
The total sum thus netted was £125.
Delays occurred in 1836 owing to the contractors going bankrupt, but the
company itself then assumed the work. In 1840 the great towers were
finished, but by 1843 the bridge was still but half finished, although
£45,000 had been expended. Money was again very scarce and work was at
last stopped, and in 1853 the half of the ironwork and the flooring that
had been delivered were sold to satisfy creditors.
Work was again resumed in 1860, an opportunity shortly afterwards
arising to cheaply purchase the ironwork of Hungerford Suspension
Bridge, which, built by Brunel in 1845 across the Thames, from
Hungerford Market, at the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, to the
Lambeth shore, at a cost of £100,000, was about to be removed to make
way for the iron lattice-girder bridge of the South-Eastern Railway,
still a feature of that spot.
Meanwhile, the original Act of Parliament for the building of Clifton
Bridge had expired, and it was necessary to obtain new powers, to form a
new company, and to raise more funds. All these things were
accomplished, not without considerable difficulty. The ironwork of
Hungerford Bridge was purchased for £5,000, and the new Act was obtained
in 1861. This, however, laid an obligation upon the new company to
compensate the owners of Rownham Ferry for any loss. It declared that
“persons having a right of ferry across the river Avon called Rownham
Ferry may, in some respect, be injured by the building and using of the
Bridge; and it is fit, in case such Ferry should be injured or
deteriorated thereby, that a fair compensation should be made.” It is
understood that this compensation to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners,
on behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Bristol, the old owners of the
ferry, was estimated at £200 per annum.
At length, in spite of a shortness of funds that always accompanied the
progress of the enterprise, the bridge was opened in September 1864, and
has, in all the time since then, proved to be a great convenience for
traffic making for Clevedon and adjacent parts of the coast. It has also
been a favourite resort for persons of suicidal tendencies, who have,
indeed, often come from great distances for the purpose of putting an
end to themselves; being unable to screw up a sufficiency of desperate
courage elsewhere. Indeed, instances have been known of apparently sane
and contented people, finding themselves on this height, suspended in
mid-air, being unable to resist a sudden impulse to fling themselves
off, and many others there are who, afraid of losing command over
themselves, have never yet dared face the crossing.
Mere figures do not suffice to give an idea of the majesty and sense of
vastness conjured up by Clifton Suspension Bridge, viewed either from
below, or along its lengthy roadway; the picturesqueness of the
situation has also to be taken into account. But they must needs be
given. The suspended roadway between the two great towers is 703 feet in
length and some 34 feet wide, and hangs 245 feet above the river Avon.
The towers themselves are 80 feet in height. The entire weight of the
bridge is 1,500 tons. The toll payable by foot-passengers is the modest
one of one penny each. Motor-cars pay sixpence for a single journey, or
ninepence returning the same day. A curious privilege was secured by Sir
John Greville Smyth, Bart., of Ashton Court, who very appreciably helped
on the construction by taking £2,500 shares in the company, and by a
gift of a further £2,500. In consideration of his generosity, no tolls
were payable by him personally, or any of his horses, carriages, or
servants, or by the owner for the time being of Ashton Court, for a
period of thirty years from the opening of the bridge.
Engineers and men of science tell us that suspension bridges and the
like structures are safest when they swing most. There can, therefore,
at any rate, be no doubt of the entire safety of Clifton Suspension
Bridge, which vibrates sensibly to a vigorous stamp of the foot;
alarmingly to those who have not thoroughly assimilated that engineering
rough formula of stability. That there can be too much sway or vibration
is evident by the traffic across being strictly limited in speed; while
the theory of a sudden application of heavy weights being likely to snap
the chains and rods that hold up the roadway is endorsed by companies of
soldiers marching this way being always bidden to change step. It
should, however, be said that not all engineers support this theory.
The great tower rising massively above the Somerset bank of the Avon
bears an inscription carved prominently upon its stonework: a Latin
inscription, a belated example of the priggish classicism, beloved by
pedants in the eighteenth century, which set up, all over the country,
statements wholly unintelligible to ninety-nine out of every hundred
wayfarers. “_Suspensa vix via fit_,” says this monumental line—that is
to say, rendered into English, “With difficulty can a roadway be
suspended.” The thing is self-evident anywhere, and much more so here,
when you gaze from this suspended roadway down upon the gulf, and on to
the tall masts of some sailingvessel arriving at, or leaving, the port
of Bristol. The various attempts made by passers-by at an understanding
of the Latin sentence are amusing, but the toll-taker appears to have
arrived at the sense of it, by favour, no doubt, of some one learned in
the dead languages; for he was observed by the present writer to answer
the inquiries of two ladies in this wise: “Well, you see, it’s a bit
above me; but I’ve always been given to understand it to mean that this
yer bridge was made with great difficulty.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
ABBOT’S LEIGH TO CLEVEDON
IT is a hilly road that leads from Clifton Bridge to Abbot’s Leigh,
through the noble Leigh Woods. Nightingale Valley lies down on the
right; a beautiful seclusion, well-named from those songsters of early
summer. Looking down upon it is the ancient camp of Borough Walls. An
enterprising Land Company has acquired building rights here from Sir H.
Miles, owner of these woods and of Leigh Court, and has recently built a
number of charming detached residences, irregularly disposed among the
glades; and far advanced, in disposition, in planning, and in
architectural style, beyond the methods in vogue when the suburban
villas built nearer the bridge were erected, from about 1870 to 1890.
[Illustration: AVONMOUTH, FROM PILL.]
Three miles, bearing to the right, bring the traveller down to the Avon
estuary again, at the hillside and waterside village of Pill; a queer
little place, clinging and huddling closely to the steep banks, and
ending in a short quay, where pilots and other strange waterside folk
lean and sit on walls and look across to Avonmouth, plainly visible on
the Gloucestershire shore, at the meeting of the Avon and the Bristol
Channel; a distant congeries of clustered masts, great warehouses,
railway signal-posts, and puffs of smoke and steam: all signs of the
great series of docks constructed by the somewhat belated enterprise of
Bristol, between 1880 and 1908. The delays and dangers attending the
progress of modern shipping up and down the Avon, to and from the docks
of Bristol city, have long hindered the expansion of the port, and have
left Bristol behind in that race for commercial greatness in which
Liverpool and Glasgow have emerged foremost; and now it remains to be
seen what the expenditure of millions will be able to effect in
recovering tonnage and redressing the balance of missed opportunities.
There is a ferry across to Shirehampton from Pill and those eager for
light on the subject may readily make the passage into Gloucestershire
and satisfy themselves on the spot of the likelihood of Avonmouth’s
future prosperity. The rise of Avonmouth, at any rate, means loss to the
pilots of Pill, in the diminished call there will be for their services
in guiding vessels up and down the muddy meanderings of the Avon.
A pleasant land opens out before the traveller who wends from Pill
through Easton-in-Gordano (called for short, “St. George’s”) and
Portbury, to Portishead, where the open coast is first reached.
Portishead is almost wholly delightful. The straggling village is
surprisingly unspoiled, considering its nearness to Bristol and the fact
that places further removed have been ruined by overmuch building in
recent times. There are docks, with an area of some twelve acres, at
Portishead, in the level lands below the great bluff of Woodhill and
Black Nore, and there is a single-track railway, with a terminus here;
but the brilliant future once prophesied and confidently expected for
Portishead docks has not yet been realised; and now that the great
modern docks of Avonmouth have been opened, there is even less prospect
of those of Portishead coming into that predicted success.
Attempts have been made to popularise Portishead, but as the derelict
villas on the wooded crest of Woodhill sufficiently prove, entirely
without success, and the beautiful underwoods, traversed in every
direction by footpaths, and commanding fine views over the Channel, are
as yet unspoiled. There is great beauty in this outlook upon the narrow
Channel; great beauty alike in the outlook and in the spot whence it is
obtained. It is not found in the hue of the water, which is here
coffee-coloured; but rather in the glimpses across the five-mile-wide
estuary to another land—to Monmouthshire—where the misty levels of
Caldicot are relieved by a gleam on Goldcliff.
On this side the estuary are the long levels beyond Avonmouth, in
Gloucestershire, ending in the sudden rise of cliff at Aust, where the
Old Passage across the dangerous Severn was situated in the old coaching
days, before railways and the Severn Tunnel were thought of.
This boldly projecting hill of Portishead commands the entire panorama
of the shipping that comes to and from the docks at Gloucester and
Avonmouth; and every wind that blows beats against it, so that the scrub
woods are closely knitted and compacted together. It is a place of
piercing cold and howling blasts in winter, and in summer the most
invigorating spot on the Somerset coast. The ivy-clad, storm-tossed
dwarf oaks and gnarled thorns reach down to the low, black, seaweedy
rocks, and here and there are fine houses, with gardens and
conservatories, perched within reach of the spray.
Woodhill Bay, westward of this windy point, is as sheltered as the
heights of Woodhill are exposed. Near by is the imposing new Nautical
School, which has replaced the old _Formidable_ training-ship that for
many years was a familiar sight in the anchorage of King Road.
The rise and fall of the tide at Portishead, ranging from 33 feet at
neaps to 44 feet at spring-tides, is said to be the greatest, not only
in England, but in Europe.
[Illustration: IN PORTISHEAD CHURCH.]
The old village of Portishead is quite distinct from the modern
Portishead just described. A broad straggling street, a mile long,
connects the two. Some very charming old-world houses are clustered
around this original inland Portishead, whose noble pinnacled
church-tower, rising in four stately stages, is one of the finest in
these parts of Somerset. The north aisle has towards its east end a
transverse masonry strainer, built in the middle of the fifteenth
century to prevent the walls collapsing, owing to a subsidence of the
soil. As in the case of the great stone inverted arches inserted to
support the central tower of Wells Cathedral, a century earlier, the
architects employed have attempted to mask the merely utilitarian
addition by decorative treatment. The attempt has here met with a
greater degree of success than was possible at Wells, and although the
broad arch spanning the north aisle has obviously no ecclesiastical use
or purport, save that of shoring up walls that were in danger of
falling, it is not the offensive blot it might, with less careful
treatment, easily have been made.
At Portishead is the terminus of that quaint short railway, some twelve
miles in length with the long many-jointed name, like some lengthy
goods-train—the Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway;
familiarly (for life is short and busy) the “W.C. and P.L.R.” This is a
single-track line, of ordinary gauge, originally planned for a
steam-tramway, when the Parliamentary powers for its construction, as
between Weston and Clevedon, were first obtained in 1887. The Act
authorising the extension to Portishead was obtained in 1898.
The first portion, between Weston and Clevedon, was opened December 1st,
1897. In the interval between 1887 and 1897 the Light Railways Act had
been passed, and the methods of construction were modified in
accordance. This was the first line to be opened under the Light
Railways Act, and has therefore the interest attaching to a pioneer. The
W.C. and P.L.R. has, in the few years it has been opened, conferred many
benefits upon a district almost wholly agricultural and hitherto
peculiarly inaccessible.
The coast between Portishead and Clevedon is formed principally by the
long steeply shelving hill-range known for the greater part of its
length as Walton Down, thickly covered with woods. The road on to
Clevedon runs in the valley formed between the landward dip of these
heights and the rise of other hills yet further inland, dominated by the
camp-crested summit of Cadbury Hill. In the pleasant vale thus formed,
runs easily the W.C. and P.L.R. aforesaid.
There are two villages along this road, Weston and Walton, both equipped
with the “Gordano” suffix, lest they should, perhaps, be confounded with
other Westons and Waltons. They are not remarkable villages, and the
church at Walton has been rebuilt; so that the place holds no particular
interest for the stranger. But the church of Weston-in-Gordano, a small
Perpendicular building, retains in its porch an unusual and very
interesting feature: a wooden musicgallery over the doorway, approached
by a short flight of stone steps in the thick side wall of the porch
itself. This gallery appears to have been used by the church choir in
olden times, principally for the singing of the canticle for Palm
Sunday, “Gloria Laus et Honor,” and for Christmas hymns; but it has, for
centuries past, remained unused and is now merely an archæological
curiosity.
As the stranger approaches Clevedon, his attention cannot fail to be
attracted by a singular castle-like group of buildings upon the skyline,
on the right hand. This is the so-called “Walton Castle,” built in the
reign of James the First by the Paulets, then owners of the surrounding
lands, as a hunting-lodge. Castle-building after the mediæval style had
long been extinct, but this lodge was designed, for picturesqueness’
sake, in that old manner. It is a flimsy and fast-decaying sham.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
CLEVEDON—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: COLERIDGE
CLEVEDON is now entered by the modern suburban developments of Walton
Park. Suburbs and light railways, and all the things they mean, do not
come into the minds of those who have merely read of Clevedon and have
not been there. Clevedon to these untravelled folk means Coleridge and
Tennyson and Hallam, a certain “quiet cot,” a stately Court and a lone
church on a hilltop, overlooking the Severn Sea. These are essentials;
the rest is incidental. But when you come at last to Clevedon, you
discover, with a pained surprise to which you have no sort of a right,
that the position is altogether reversed: these literary landmarks and
associations are the incidentals, and the essentials—well, _what_ are
they? It would puzzle even an old-established resident of Clevedon to
say. Nothing matters very much at Clevedon—except that half the houses
are to let; and _that_ is a matter of moment only to the owners of them
and to the tradesfolk. How do people make shift to pass the time here?
They don’t care for literature: they don’t stroll the sands, for there
are none; and they don’t walk, for it is a neighbourhood of atrocious
hills, except on the way to the railway-station, the dust-destructor,
and the gas-works.
What is it, then, they do? I will tell you. They sit upon the rocks,
waiting for the next mealtime and refusing (rightly) to support the
miserable creatures who, calling themselves “pierrots,” infest the
front. In the exiguous public gardens old ladies of both sexes knit
impossible and useless articles or pretend to read the newspapers, and
wonder why they ever came to the place.
The paradoxical tragedy of Clevedon is that there is at once too little
and too much of it: too little sea-front, and a great deal too much of
the town in these later times built beside it; but the place must indeed
have been delightful in 1795, at the time when Samuel Taylor Coleridge
brought his bride here from Bristol, where they had been married, in the
church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He was twenty-three, and a visionary
immersed in German metaphysics and the Kantean philosophy; and had but
recently been bought out of the 15th Light Dragoons, in which in a
moment of despair and starvation, he had enlisted. Four months of
military duties untempered with glory, but strongly savoured with
riding-lessons and stable-fatigue, did not make him a more practical
man; and he remained in all the sixty-two years that made up his span of
life, although the most gifted of all the clever Coleridge family, an
amiable dreamer.
The dreams in which he and Southey and other friends were at this time
immersed were concerned with a fantastic kind of Socialism they were
pleased to style a “Pantisocracy,” in which ideal state all property was
to be held in common, and all spare time was to be occupied with
literature; a truly terrible prospect! This ideal community was to be
established in North America, on the Susquehanna river, there to live a
life of plain living and high thinking, punctuated with washing up the
domestic dishes, weeding the potato-patch, and propagating a new
generation of prigs. But money was needed for the starting of this
pretty and pedantic scheme, and because “Pantisocracy” (Heavens! what a
name!) did not appeal, and was never likely to appeal, to any one who
was master of any honest coin of the realm, it remained a vision. It
failed for want of money; and, human nature being what it is, it would
still have failed disastrously had funds been provided.
So our Pantisocrats remained in England; “Myrtle Cottage,” Clevedon,
remaining for a little while the address of the Coleridges, until they
removed to Nether Stowey. We may fairly suppose that here this wayward
genius, a brilliant talker, a poet of gorgeous ideas and noble language,
but a man constitutionally infirm of purpose, and made yet more
inconstant by deep reading of mystical German philosophy that led to
mental blind alleys, lived the happiest time of his life. We obtain an
early first glimpse of him—the second day after arrival—in his letter to
Cottle, the amiable and helpful bookseller of Bristol, who greatly
befriended Coleridge and Southey when they needed friendship most:
To his “dear Cottle” he wrote, October 6th, 1795: “Pray send me a
riddle, slice, a candle-box, two ventilators, two glasses for the
washstand, one tin dust-pan, one small tin tea-kettle, one pair of
candlesticks, one carpet-brush, one flour dredge, three tin
extinguishers, two mats, a pair of slippers, a cheese toaster, two large
tin spoons, a Bible, a keg of porter, coffee, raisins, currants, catsup,
nutmegs, allspice, cinnamon, rice, ginger, and mace.”
[Illustration: COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON.]
The imagination readily pictures the essentially unpractical Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, certainly not well versed in domestic economy, taking
down this list of household small gear from his “pensive Sara”;
prepared, with the receipt of them, to open his campaign for existence
against an indifferent world.
He sang the praises of that early home in no uncertain manner:
Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose
Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The sea’s faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch
Thick jasmins twined: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The Valley of Seclusion!
You might indeed so call it now, if inclined to poetry, but you would be
wholly wrong. The painful fact must be recorded that “Myrtle Cottage”
stands beside the road, directly on the busiest route between the
railway-station and the sea-front (such as the sea-front is), and that
flys, “charleybanks,” wagonettes, motor-cars, and all conceivable
traffic come this way. Indeed, this cottage and its trim fellow are now
almost the only vestiges in the road left of the Clevedon that Coleridge
knew. What little remained of the rocky bluff at the back is now being
actively blasted and quarried away by the local authority, in its
attempt—highly successful, too—at matching the place with the London
district of Notting Hill. Property owners have already filled Clevedon
with stuccoed semi-“Italian” villas on the Ladbroke Grove model, that
became discredited a generation ago; the kind of property that has
dismal semi-underground dungeons called “breakfast-rooms” (by way of a
penitential beginning of the day), and long flights of stone steps to
the front door, alleged to be ornamental, and certainly excessively
tiring. This is a kind of property that never, or rarely, lets nowadays;
and Clevedon has many empty villas.
The white-paled, red-tiled trim cottages—Coleridge’s and another—are
among the pleasantest sights of Clevedon, by reason of their
unconventional, homely style, and the fine trees that surround and
overhang them. Tiles, you will observe, have replaced the thatch of the
poet’s description; but the jessamine still twines over the porch. Five
pounds a year, the landlord paying the taxes; that was the rent of this
then idyllic spot.
It should here be added that doubts have recently been expressed as to
the genuine nature of the tradition that makes “Myrtle Cottage” the
temporary home of Coleridge. And not only have these doubts been
expressed, but very strongly worded statements have been made, to the
effect that the real Coleridge Cottage was in the valley at East
Clevedon, adjoining Walton-in-Gordano. But the matter is controversial,
and at any rate the legend—if, indeed, it be but a legend—that has
attached to the cottage popularly known as Coleridge’s, has had so long
a start that it will be difficult, if not impossible, ever to demolish
it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
CLEVEDON (_continued_)—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON
BUT Clevedon has more prominent literary associations than that just
considered, and has a place unforgettable in poetry by reason of
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” that lengthy poem written by the future
laureate to the memory of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who, born in
1811, died untimely, at the age of twenty-two, in September 1833.
Arthur Hallam, a son of that Henry Hallam who is generally alluded to as
“the historian”—although it would puzzle most of those airy, allusive
folk to name offhand the historical works of which he was the
author—would appear to have been _in posse_ an Admirable Crichton. He
composed poetry and wrote philosophical essays at a tender age, thought
great and improving things, and had already begun to set up as something
of a paragon, when death rendered impossible the fulfilment of this
early promise. There were at that time some terribly earnest young men,
ready and willing—if not realty able—to set the world right. Prophets
and seers abounded in that dark first half of the nineteenth century,
when religion was at odds with the comparatively new era of steam and
machinery. Each one had a panacea for the ills of the age, and each had
his own little band of devoted admirers, devoted on condition that he
should in his turn spare a little admiration for those who hung upon his
words and doings. Prigs and prodigies stalked the earth, preaching new
gospels. They formed mutual-admiration societies, wherein each protested
how vastly endowed with all the virtues and all the intellect possible
was the other; and before they had outgrown their legal definition of
“infants” and had come of age and become technically men, were ready
with criticisms and appreciations of Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, and
were laying down the laws of conduct in this life, with speculations
upon what awaits us in the next. It was a morbid, unhealthy generation;
but at the same time, these sucking philosophers were not without the
tradesman instinct, and zealously combined to advertise one another.
Thus, the early Tennysonian circle at Cambridge was a Society of Mutual
Encouragement, with its eyes well fixed on publicity. How valuable were
some of these early friendships may well be guessed from the one
outstanding fact that it was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton,
one of this circle, who at an early date, when Tennyson himself was
little more than a hopeful promise as a poet, procured by his influence
with Sir Robert Peel, the then Prime Minister, a pension of £200 a year
for his friend. It fortunately proved a wise selection; but in the case
of Tennyson’s over-elaborate post-mortem praise of his friend Hallam, we
have foisted upon us a very high estimate of one who, although engaged
to the poet’s sister, Emily, and thus additionally endeared to him, had
not yet proved himself beyond this narrow circle. He was, therefore, no
fitting subject for the “rich shrine,” as Tennyson himself styled it, of
“In Memoriam,” but should have been mourned privately.
The connection of the Hallams with Clevedon was through the mother of
Arthur. She was a daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, of Clevedon Court.
Arthur Hallam died in Austria, and his body was brought to Clevedon for
burial; hence the allusion in the poem, in that metre Tennyson fondly
imagined himself had originated:
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darkened heart that beat no more:
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
The Wye is hushed nor moved along,
And hushed my deepest grief of all,
When filled with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.
Clevedon church was selected as the resting-place of Arthur Henry
Hallam, “not only from the connection of kindred, but on account of its
still and sequestered situation on a lone hill that overhangs the
Bristol Channel.”
[Illustration: CLEVEDON.]
Much has been altered at Clevedon since 1833, when that decision was
made. The village has become a small town, of some six thousand
inhabitants, and although the ancient parish church is still at the very
fringe of modern boarding-house and lodging-house developments, yet no
one could now have the hardihood to describe its position as “lone.”
All this, if you do but consider awhile, is entirely in keeping with the
change of sentiment since that time when the poem was written.
Everything is more material. We no longer examine our souls at frequent
intervals, to see how they are getting on—after the manner of children
with garden plants. The practice is equally injurious to souls and to
plants. Yes, even in this material age, among those who have not
forgotten or denied their God there is a better spirit than that which
characterises the “In Memoriam” period. The faith that is demanded of
the Christian—the faith of little children—was not in these troubled
folk. The assurance we have of Divine infinite goodness and mercy was
not sufficient for them. They must needs enquire and speculate, and seek
to reason out those things that are beyond research and scholarship. A
great deal of mental arrogance is wrapped up in these semi-spiritual
gropings and fumblings towards the light. You see the attitude of the
consciously Superior Person therein, and all these troubles leave you
cold and unsympathetic; and all the more so when it is borne in upon you
that they were carefully pieced together and prepared for the market
during a space of sixteen years.
The inevitable result of the piecemeal and laborious methods employed is
that the belated poem lacks cohesion, and although there are gems of
thought and expression embedded in the mass of verbiage, it must needs
be confessed that “In Memoriam” is a sprawling and unwieldy tribute. The
“rich shrine” erected has indeed a great deal of uninspired journeyman
work, and is, in fact, not a little ruinous. It is safe to conclude that
portions only of it will survive, while “Maud,” that line poem of
passion, will endure so long as English verse is read.
To the present writer—if a personal note may be permitted—the tone and
outlook of this long-sustained effort are alike depressing. This is not
robust poetry, and for the already morbid-minded it is easily
conceivable that it might even be disastrous.
Tennyson in those early years had what we cannot but think the great
misfortune not to possess a local knowledge. He made a personal
acquaintance with what was then the little village of Clevedon only when
“In Memoriam” was completed, and was thus unfortunately unable to verify
some of his most important descriptive details. He visited Clevedon only
belatedly, and knew so little of the circumstances, although he publicly
mourned his friend so keenly and at such length, that he was not quite
sure where they had laid him. We observe him trying twice to place the
grave, and failing:
’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
Or else, he proceeds to say, if not in the churchyard, then in the
chancel:
Where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.
Leaving aside that shockingly infelicitous alliterative expression, “the
grapes of God,” intended to convey the meaning of “communion wine,” we
know that neither in the churchyard nor in the chancel was the body of
Arthur Hallam laid, but in the south transept. But he continues:
And in the chancel like a ghost,
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn,
making another bad shot. This, however, was remedied in later editions,
in which “dark church” was substituted for “chancel.” But, since
Clevedon church is not exceptionally dark, why not the word “transept,”
which would be absolutely correct and certainly more poetic and less
clumsy than “dark church”?
The white marble tablet to the memory of Arthur Hallam is fixed, with
those to his father and others of the family, on the west wall of the
little transept. Speaking of it, the poet says:
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name
And o’er the numbers of thy years.
It is the ghastly morbidness of this that at first arrests the reader’s
attention, and a closer examination does not by any means impress him;
for surely to describe a moonbeam as a “flame,” moonlight in fact, in
appearance, and in the long history of poetic thought being notoriously
cold and the very negation of heat, is a lapse from the rightness of
things more characteristic of a poetaster seeking at any cost a rhyme to
“name” than the mark of a great poet.
It has long been the fashion among those who shout with the biggest
crowd to point scornfully at the critic who, discussing “In Memoriam”
soon after it was published, wrote: “These touching lines evidently come
from the full heart of the widow of a military man.” This has been
termed “inept.” Now, if we turn to the dictionaries, we shall find the
commonly received definition of that word to be “unfitting.” But was it,
indeed, unfitting? The opinion of that critic did not actually fit the
facts; but the morbid tone of the poem, and the singularly feminine ring
of such phrases as “The man I held as half-divine,” “my Arthur,” and the
like, seem to many a reader to be a perfect justification of the aptness
of the critic’s views; and remind us that none other than Bulwer Lytton
once referred to Tennyson as “school-miss Alfred.”
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
There is the critic’s ample defence. To a healthily constituted mind,
that verse is more than ordinarily revolting.
The humble little hilltop church of St. Andrew, anciently a fisherman’s
chapel, has many modern rivals in suburbanised Clevedon; but in it is
centred all the ecclesiastical interest of the place. It is chiefly a
Transitional-Norman building, with aisleless nave and chancel, north and
south transepts, and central tower of Perpendicular date, but plain to
severity. The pointed Transitional arch is the finest and most elaborate
part of the building and is richly moulded. Hagioscopes command views
from either transept into the chancel. Near the chancel arch is a
curious miniature recumbent effigy, two feet six inches in length, in
the costume of the sixteenth century, representing a woman, of which no
particulars are known. It is thought to be that of a dwarf. The Hallam
and Elton monumental tablets are on the walls of the south transept; of
plain white marble, with characteristically bald monumental-mason’s
lettering; the very _ne plus ultra_ of the commonplace and
matter-of-fact, and very trying indeed to hero-worshipping pilgrims. For
ornament and display of mosaic and gilding the visitor should turn to
the reredos, recently placed in the chancel. Whether he will delight in
it, after the severity of the tablets, is a matter for individual
prejudices; but he surely will not feel delighted by being approached by
a caretaker with pencil and notebook and a request for a gift towards
the restoration fund—which doubtless includes the cost of this
theatrical reredos. It has come to this: that the Tennysonian
association has been made the excuse and stalking-horse for badgering
the visitor for sixpences. The wise visitor, whether he approves of
elaborate restoration or not, will leave those who called the tune to
pay the piper, and will further leave to the Elton family of Clevedon
Court, who draw an excellent revenue from their property here, the duty
and the pleasure of footing the bills that may yet be unsatisfied.
Clevedon Court lies away back on the direct Bristol road, over a mile
distant from the church and the sea, and removed from the modern
developments of the place, which at one and the same time have largely
enriched its owners, the Elton family, and have rendered the
neighbourhood less desirable as a residence to them. Ever, with each
succeeding phase of Clevedon’s growth, the sweetly beautiful valley that
runs up hither from the sea is further encroached upon by houses, until
at the present time a few outlying blocks are within sight of the Court
itself. The recently opened light railway also bids fair to be the
prelude to further building-operations.
Meanwhile, the grounds of the Court remain as beautiful as ever,
ascending to a long and lofty ridge, heavily wooded. The Court itself,
of which the interior is not generally shown, stands prominently facing
the park wall and the road, only a few yards away, and is quite easily
to be seen. It is a long, low mansion, a singular mass of Gothic gables,
chimneys, and terraces, dating originally from the early years of the
fourteenth century, when it was built by the De Clyvedons. Court and
estates passed with an heiress by marriage to one Thomas Hogshaw, thence
in the same manner to the Lovell family, and from them to the Wakes,
whose arms and allusive motto, “Wake and Pray,” are to be found in parts
of the house altered by them about 1570. The Wake family sold their
possessions at Clevedon to Digby, Earl of Bristol; and finally the
executors of the third Earl sold them to the Elton family in the time of
Queen Anne.
Great destruction was caused to the west front of the Court by the fire
that broke out in November 1882, but the damage has been so skilfully
repaired that, to any save the closest inspection, the building retains
the aspect it had long presented. The chief feature of the principal
front, of fourteenth-century date, is the entrance-porch, with
portcullis, and room over. Here, midway along the irregular front, is a
very large square window, filled with curiously diapered tracery.
Thackeray, who often visited here, as a friend of the Rev. William H.
Brookfield and his wife, Jane Octavia, sister of Sir Charles Elton, then
owner of Clevedon Court, has left a somewhat striking pencil sketch of
the building, viewed from this point. The house is the original of
“Castlewood,” in his novel, “Esmond.”
[Illustration: CLEVEDON COURT.]
Clevedon Court was largely rearranged in the time of Queen Elizabeth, in
accordance with the ideas of comfort then prevailing, considerably in
advance of those that ruled when it was originally built, in the reign
of Edward the Second. But it was left to the remarkable people who ruled
when the nineteenth century was yet young to further modernise the
ancient residence, and they perpetrated strange things: painting and
graining interior stonework to resemble oak, and the like atrocities;
the highest ambition of builders and decorators in that era of shame
being to treat honest materials as though they were not to be shown for
what they really were, and to make them masquerade as something else. No
one ever was deceived by the plaster of that age, pretending to be
stone; and stone that was given two coats of paint and tickled with a
grainer’s comb, and then finished off with varnish, never yet made
convincing oak, any more than “marbled” wall-papers looked or felt like
real marble; but those were then conventional treatments, and were
followed and honoured all over the land.
At the same time, the ancient oak roof of the hall of Clevedon Court was
hidden behind a plaster ceiling.
But the house is not sought out only for its antiquity, or for the
beauty of its situation, or even for its Thackeray associations. After
all, does any considerable section of the public really care for
Thackeray landmarks? Writers of literary gossip, of prefaces to new
editions, may affect to think so, but, in fact, Thackeray does not
command that intimate sympathy which Dickens enjoys. Sentiment does not
attach itself to the satirist, who, in the odd moments when he, too,
sentimentalises, is apt to be suspected, quite wrongly, of insincerity.
It is for its Tennyson associations that Clevedon Court is sought by
most tourists.
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CHAPTER VI
YATTON—CONGRESBURY—WICK ST. LAWRENCE
THE main road from Clevedon to Kingston Seymour trends sharply inland,
passing the little village of Kenn. Seaward the flat and featureless
lands spread to an oozy shore; Kenn itself, an insignificant village,
standing beside a sluggish runnel of the same name. From this place
sprang the Ken family, which numbered among its members the celebrated
Bishop of Bath and Wells, who owed his preferment from a subordinate
position at Winchester to his having, while there, refused to give up
his house for the accommodation of Nell Gwynne. Charles the Second was a
true sportsman. He respected those who were true to themselves, whether
it were an unrepentant highwayman, whom he could pardon and fit out with
a telling nickname; or a Church dignitary whose conscience forbade him
to curry favour by housing a King’s mistress. So, in 1684, when a choice
was to be made of a new Bishop of Bath and Wells, the King declared that
no one should have it but “the little black fellow that refused his
lodging to poor Nelly.”
The Ken family finally died out in the seventeenth century, after having
been settled here over four hundred years. A small mural monument to
Christopher Ken and his family, 1593, remains in the little church,
rebuilt in 1861 and uninteresting; but with a pretty feature in the
unusual design of the pyramidal stone roof of its small tower.
Beyond Kenn, in a lonely situation midway between Yatton and the coast
at the point where the waters of the Yeo estuary glide and creep, rather
than fall, into the sea, stands the village of Kingston Seymour. The
country all round about is more remarkable for the rich feeding its flat
pastures afford the cows than for its scenic beauties. If it were not
for the luxuriant hedgerows and the fine hedgerow trees, it would be
possible to say, with the utmost sincerity, that this corner of Somerset
was tame and dull. But the dairy-farmers who occupy it so largely draw
great prosperity from these flat meadows.
[Illustration: KINGSTON SEYMOUR.]
Within the beautiful and delicately graceful old church of Kingston
Seymour are tablets recording the floods once possible here, and the
destruction wrought by two such visitations, in 1606 and 1703. An
epitaph records the odd bequest of a certain “J. H.,” in bequeathing
“his remains” to his acquaintance, and their still more singular joy at
the legacy:
He was universally beloved in the circle of
His acquaintance; but united
In his death the esteem of all,
Namely, by bequeathing his remains.
The centre of this district is Yatton, which now draws all surrounding
traffic by reason of its junction station on the Great Western Railway.
Here the traveller changes for Clevedon, or for Cheddar and Wells, or
for Wrington Vale. Yatton takes its name from the river Yeo, which oozes
near by, and itself hides in that form of spelling the Celtic word _ea_,
for water, akin to the modern French _eau_. Thus Yatton is really,
derivatively, the same as Eton, near Windsor, the water-town beside the
river Thames; Eaton by Chester, on the river Dee, and many other places
throughout the country with the affix of “ea” or “ay.” An alternative
derivation, as arguable as the first, makes Yatton derive from the
“gate,” or gap, in the neighbouring hills, through which the Yeo drains
on its way from Wrington. The village itself stands somewhat high, but
overlooks a very considerable tract of low-lying country, formerly in
the nature of a creek, as proved by modern discoveries of a Roman
boat-house and similar waterside relics near by.
The business brought by the junction-station of the Great Western
Railway at Yatton has effectually abolished the village-like rustic
character of the place. It is more by way of a townlet of one long
street, remarkable for the unpleasing prominence of blank walls
enclosing the grounds of residents whose desire for privacy appears to
be excessive.
The great feature of Yatton is, however, its fine church. No traveller
can have journeyed much on the Great Western Railway without having
noticed, as his train approached Yatton, the singular effect produced by
the tall tower of this fine building, surmounted by a spire that has
lost the last third part of its original height, and has been finished
off with small pinnacles. The effect is almost uncanny, but by no means
unpleasant, and the proposals that have from time to time been made to
complete the spire are altogether to be deprecated. No records remain by
which it can with certainty be said that the spire was ever completed
when the church was at last finished, after building operations that
extended from 1486 to 1500; but the evidence afforded by the Late
Perpendicular cresting and pinnacles that finish off the incomplete
structure, and are contemporary with it, seems to point to one or other
of two hypotheses: that funds finally proved insufficient, almost on the
eve of the works being brought to a conclusion; or that the builders
were alarmed by signs of their having already placed as much weight upon
the tower as it could possibly bear.
[Illustration: YATTON CHURCH.]
It is a noble church, designed in the last phase of pure Gothic
architecture, with some few remains of Early English and Decorated from
a former building, demolished to make way for this larger and more
splendid place of worship. Here in the De Wyke chantry is the altar-tomb
of Evelina de Wyke and her husband, _c._ 1337; and near by is that of
Sir Richard Cradock Newton, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1448, and
his wife, Emma, or Emmota, Perrott. The recumbent effigies of the Judge
and his lady are very fine. He wears the robes of his office and a
collar with links of “S.S.,”—mystic letters generally considered to
signify “Souveraigne,” and to be a badge of Lancastrian loyalty. This
example is considered to be the earliest known. The “garbs,” or
wheatsheaves of the Judge’s coat-of-arms, may still be traced, as also
the arms of his wife—three pendant golden pears on a red field, in
punning allusion to “Perrott.”
Here also is the tomb of the Judge’s eldest son, Sir John Newton, and
his wife, Isabel Chedder. All these had, in their time, greatly to do
with the rebuilding and beautifying of Yatton church.
A curious epitaph in the churchyard, to the memory of a gipsy who died
in 1827, reads:
Here lies Merrily Joules,
a beauty bright,
Who left Isac Joules, her
heart’s delight.
Prominent, close by, is the boldly stepped base of a churchyard cross,
of which the shaft has long disappeared. Surviving accounts prove it to
have been erected at a cost of £18, in 1499.
Yatton church, as we have seen, has a spire, an unusual feature with
Somerset churches. Here, however, a small group of spires or spirelets
occurs, including also those of Congresbury, Kingston Seymour, Kenn, and
Worle. Congresbury spire is the most prominent of all, both from its own
height and from the position it occupies in the vale below Yatton.
“Coomsbury”—for that is the local shibboleth—is a considerable village,
taking its name traditionally from “St. Congar,” son of some uncertain
“Emperor of Constantinople.” This really very autocratic personage
endeavoured to marry his son to a person whom the young man could not
love, and he fled his father’s Court; wandering in wild and inclement
lands, until he came at last to this then particularly wild and
unwholesome region. We cannot avoid the suspicion that the lady must
have been a terror of the first water; or, alternatively, that Congar
was not altogether weather-proof in the upper storey. He is said to have
founded a hermitage here, A.D. 711, and a baptistry at which the heathen
were admitted to the Church; and King Ina, we are told, became his most
powerful patron. At last he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died
there; but his body was conveyed back to Congresbury.
Thus the legend, which has no historical foundation whatever, and
appears to be an ancient, but entirely idle tale: the name of
Congresbury being really, in its first form, an Anglo-Saxon Königsburg;
or, in modern English, Kingston. But “St. Congar,” although he finds no
place in learned hagiologies, is still a belief at “Coomsbury,” and the
villagers point to the stump of an ancient yew-tree as “St. Congar’s
walking-stick.”
The church itself is large and fine, but not so fine as that of Yatton.
In the churchyard is the base of an ancient cross, and in the village
itself a tall shaft of the fifteenth century, with the cross replaced by
a ball.
[Illustration: THE RECTORY. CONGRESBURY.]
The rectory was until towards the end of the eighteenth century wholly a
fifteenth-century building; but the clergy of that time, little disposed
towards archæology, and with marked leanings towards a certain standard
of stately comfort and display, procured the building of the present
large but ugly parsonage, and degraded the old building into a kitchen
and outhouse. The expansive (and expensive) ideas of that time have for
some generations past proved expensive indeed to the incumbents of
Congresbury, for the large house and great lofty rooms cost much to keep
in repair, and the ideas of the present-day clergy are not so nearly as
they were like those of the old-fashioned free-handed country squires.
In Congresbury churchyard a lengthy epitaph upon a former inhabitant
incidentally tells us that belated highwaymen still troubled these parts
in 1830, a period when most other regions had long seen the last of
those unknightly “Knights of the Road”:
_In Memory of_
CHARLES CAPELL HARDWICKE
of this Parish
died
July 2nd 1849
aged
50 years
And was buried at Hutton
His Friends
Erected this Monument
To Record
their admiration of his
Character
and
their regret at his
Loss
A.D. 1871
He was of such courage that being attacked by a highwayman on
the heath in this parish, Oct. 21st, 1830, and fearfully wounded
by him, he pursued his assailant and having overtaken him in the
centre of this village, he delivered him up to Justice.
The old rectory, happily still standing, was built about 1446. Its chief
interest lies in the projecting porch; the doorway surmounted with a
sculptured panel enclosing the figure of an odd-looking angel with a
cross growing out of his head, holding in his hands a scroll inscribed
“_Laus Deo_.” The archway is pointed in the manner of an Early English
arch, and sculptured with an imitation of the “dog-tooth” moulding of
that period. Stone shields bear the arms of Bishop Beckington, and of
the Pulteney family.
From Congresbury it is possible to again approach the coast, coming by
level roads that run through flat alluvial lands to Wick St. Lawrence, a
small and solitary village standing near the banks of the Yeo estuary.
The writer grows tired of writing, and the reader doubtless as weary of
reading, of the richness of the land in these parts; but the occasion
for and the necessity of this continued allusion are at least proofs of
the fertility of Somerset and of the abundance of the good gifts
bestowed upon this fortunate county, whose soil even oozes plentifully
out at its river-mouths and in the way of muddy deposits conspicuously
advertises this form of wealth. There can be no possible doubt of the
great importance the dairying business has assumed in these parts. It
has already been noted at Yatton, and here again the traveller by road,
who thus sees the country intimately, is impressed, not only with the
rich pastures, but with the beautiful stock he sees in them or driven
along the road; and also with the numbers of carts he observes, with
from one to half a dozen milk-churns, driven smartly across country to
the nearest railway-station, to catch the up trains for Bristol or
London.
The road to Wick St. Lawrence—_i.e._ St. Lawrence’s Creek—after crossing
the Great Western Railway midway between Yatton and Puxton, winds
extravagantly between high hedges, passing only an occasional farmhouse.
Rarely the stranger in these parts meets any other wayfarers than
farming folk, and the children of Wick St. Lawrence at sight of him
stand stock-still, with fingers in mouths, quaint figures of combined
curiosity and shyness, clad in the old rustic way in homely clothes and
clean “pinners.”
The remains of a many-stepped fifteenth-century village cross stand
opposite the church: all steps and not much cross, ever since some
village Hampdens in the long ago showed their hatred of superstition by
leaving only about a foot and a half of the shaft. The church itself,
with tall and rather gaunt tower, is a Late Perpendicular building, with
elaborate stone pulpit. Here is an epitaph which would seem to have its
warnings for those who might feel disposed to extend their explorations
to the mud-flats of the Yeo estuary at low tide:
To the memory of James Morss, of this parish, yeoman, who dy’d
November ye 25th 1730, aged 38 years.
Save me, O God, the mighty waters role
With near Approaches, even to my soul:
Far from dry ground, mistaken in my course,
I stick in mire, brought hither by my horse.
Thus vain I cry’d to God, who only saves:
In death’s cold pit I lay ore whelm’d with waves.
Beyond the village, the road winds again in fantastic loops, and is
crossed, without the formality of gates by the W. C. and P.L.R. This
weird concatenation of initials sounds like a mass-meeting of household
sanitary appliances, but those readers who have diligently persevered
through the earlier pages of this book will understand that the Weston,
Clevedon and Portishead Light Railway is meant. Thenceforward, after
more windings through a thinly peopled district, the road wriggles on to
Worle; sending off a branch to the left hand for Woodspring, Swallow
Cliff, and Sand Bay.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
WORSPRING PRIORY, KEWSTOKE
THE Augustinian Priory of Worspring, or Wospring, now called
“Woodspring,” stands in a very secluded situation in this little-visited
nook of the coast, projecting abruptly into the Bristol Channel
north-west of Wick, and terminated in that direction by St. Thomas’s
Head: a promontory which owes its name directly to the Priory itself,
partly dedicated to the Blessed St. Thomas of Canterbury. The roads of
this district are perhaps better to be termed lanes; and they are lanes
of old Devonian character: narrow, hollow, with high banks and hedges,
stony and winding. The land is purely agricultural. Thus, except for a
few farmers’ carts and waggons, or for those more than usually
enterprising tourists and amateurs of ancient architecture and
ecclesiastical ruins who spend their energies in seeking out the remains
of Woodspring Priory, the stranger has until now been but rarely seen. A
new complexion has, however, been put upon matters by the coming of what
is known locally, “for short,” as the “W. C. and P.L.R.”; _i.e._ the
Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway, already described; and
now learned archæologists, enthusiastic, but perhaps not always endowed
with the stamina and endurance of explorers, travel hither in the
company of picnic parties, to whom any ruin in a picturesque setting is
a sufficient excuse for an afternoon afield. “Hither,” however, is here
a generous term, for the railway does not come within a mile and a half
of the spot. But “every little helps,” as the trite proverb tells us.
The name of “Woodspring” does not appear in print before 1791, when it
is found in Collinson’s “History of Somerset.” Before that date it was
always referred to as “Worspring.” The name has puzzled many, but it is
really a simple corruption of the original term, “Worle-spring,”
indicating the situation of the Priory on a rill that descended to these
levels by the sea from the neighbourhood of Worle heights.
The Priory was founded in the first instance by Reginald FitzUrse, as a
chapel of expiation of his share in the murder of Thomas à Becket. It
was in 1210 refounded on a much larger scale by William de Courtenay,
grandson, on the maternal side, of William Tracy, another of those
sacrilegious knights. Courtenay endowed it as a home of Austin Canons
and triply dedicated the establishment in honour of the Blessed Virgin
Mary, the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and St. Thomas à Becket; and it
was further enriched by lands bequeathed by Maud, the daughter, and
Alice, the granddaughter, of the third murderer, le Bret or Brito: Alice
expressing the devout hope that the intercession of the blessed martyr
might always be available for herself and her children.
The seal of the Priory is curious. In the lower portion of the usual
vesica-shaped device is an allusion to the dedication to St. Thomas of
Canterbury, in the form of a representation of his martyrdom: Becket
being shown falling by the altar, on which stands a chalice, at the
moment of his skull being cleft by Richard le Bret’s sword, which
protrudes, immensely large in proportion to the figure of the
Archbishop, from the border.
[Illustration: WOODSPRING PRIORY.]
After more than three hundred and twenty years of an almost unruffled
existence, this obscure religious house was suppressed in common with
others, and its fabric and possessions confiscated. It was surrendered
on September 27th, 1536, and the monks turned adrift upon the world,
perhaps too late in life to set about the performance of any honest
work; but by no means with that utter indifference as to whether they
were clothed and fed, or went in rags and starved, that the apologists
for monkery and critics of Henry the Eighth and his Ministers of State
would have us believe. No: unless they had proved contumacious, the
rulers and the brethren of the disestablished religious houses were
pensioned. The last Prior of Woodspring, Roger Tormenton, who was
appointed in 1525, received a pension of £12 per annum upon his
surrendering the Priory in 1536—a sum equal to nearly £100 at present
values. The Priory itself was then leased for twenty-one years to Edward
Fettiplace, of Donington, Berkshire: one of the formerly numerous family
of that name once settled chiefly in that county and in Oxfordshire, but
now utterly extinct. Passing through many hands, it is now among the
properties of the Smyth-Pigott family, owners of much land hereabouts,
including the site of Weston-super-Mare.
There can surely be no farmhouse more ecclesiastical in appearance than
that of Woodspring Priory. As the traveller approaches it across the
rough occupation-roads of two large pastures, he sees the noble central
tower of what was the Priory church rising exquisitely from a
characteristically English rural scene of tall elms, profuse hedgerows,
and succulent grass. Rude wooden field-gates and rutty tracks partly
filled with straw combed off passing heavy-laden farm-waggons by
projecting brambles, conduct him into a farmyard where porkers grunt
from their sties and cows low from their linhays in a not unmusical
orchestration; the grey and lichened stonework of the Priory tithe-barn
and the tall tower surrounding them with an unwonted halo of romantic
association. On that spot where, in the olden days of Woodspring’s
pride, the porter slid back his hatch in the gatehouse, in answer to the
stranger’s knock, the pigs snuffle in their troughs and thrust pink
snouts through palisades, enquiring curiously who comes this way. A
fantastic thought possibly occurs to the modern pilgrim that they might
be re-incarnations of those old fat porters themselves; and a glance
into those pig-houses further discloses fine Berkshires there, as sleek
and well-larded as any greasy mediæval Prior.
The entrance to the farmyard is flanked with a somewhat noble effect by
heavy sculptured stones bearing shields. That on the right hand bears
the sacred symbols of the five wounds of our Lord, with a heart in the
centre; while on the left is the heraldic coat of the Dodingtons,
anciently among the benefactors of the Priory; a chevron between three
bugle-horns, stringed, two and one; a crescent for difference.
Less remains of the Priory church than might be at first supposed from
the majestic bulk of the tower and the tall buildings that once formed
nave and aisles. The choir has entirely disappeared, and the nave
itself, with the north aisle of three bays, has been divided into floors
for the purposes of a dwelling-house. It may thus readily be imagined
that the interior is as little ecclesiastical in appearance as can well
be; although it is true that winding stone staircases serve instead of
ordinary domestic stairs, and that here and there some ancient carved
corbel, fashioned in the likeness of a human head, projects from walls
otherwise to all appearance secular; its stony countenance seeming to
grin and gibber in the flickering light of a bedroom candle. Clustered
stone pillars, too, thrusting through upper floors, and ending in
capitals and sweeping arches, would convince the stranger that he had
found himself in some farmhouse entirely out of the common order. Even
the coalcellar, which was once a part of the north aisle, has its
features, and the coals repose on incised slabs and other memorials of
the dead. The cloisters, also, have disappeared; and the monks’
refectory, a detached building on the south side, is now a waggon-shed,
its windows filled in with bricks. A peep within discloses a fine
open-timbered roof. The only building that yet retains its ancient use
is the Prior’s Barn, still, as in bygone centuries, the storehouse of
grain, straw, and hay. At the east end of it is a doorway, now blocked
up, formerly leading by nineteen steps down to the existing pool called
the “Holy Well.” The “Prior’s Pool” is the name of a pond in the meadows
westward, to which an avenue of elms leads.
Sand Bay, nearly as large as Weston Bay, but quite lonely, stretches
from St. Thomas’s Head and Swallow Cliff to Anchor Head,
Weston-super-Mare. Shingle and sand continue in an unbroken semicircular
sweep, fringed by pastures, to the neighbourhood of Kewstoke, a small
village situated on a shelf of rock below the craggy uplands of Worle
Hill, and yet raised above the meadows. Nowadays Kewstoke is greatly
afflicted in summer by brakes and traps, and strollers from Weston, for
it is but two miles from the town, and there are the beautiful Kewstoke
woods fringing the road all the way. It thus forms an easy and popular
morning or afternoon trip, in spite of the fact that a small toll is
payable for the use of it—this being really a private road cut by a
Smyth-Pigott in 1848, and used by the public only at the pleasure of
those all-pervading landowners of this neighbourhood. Indeed, were it
not for this fine level road through the dense woods, Kewstoke would
scarcely ever be visited, save by young and energetic people, prepared
to circle round by the rugged old way through Worle.
There are legends of St. Kew at Kewstoke. On the rocky crest of Worle
Hill, looking down upon the village, is an ancient excavation of some
twenty feet by twelve, popularly known as “St. Kew’s Cell”; and the long
rude flight of over two hundred rocky steps towards it is, of course,
“St. Kew’s Steps.” But not the most patient archæologist has ever traced
any genuine association with St. Kew here. The place-name has, however,
a real connection with that so-called “cell” on the height, for the
excavation was a part of the elaborate defensive works constructed by
ancient peoples on the summit of the Hill: a kind of guard-house
situated in a difficult approach, where a small garrison could easily
from behind a palisade or stockade hinder the advance of many. It is an
ascertained fact that here, at various periods of strife, throughout
many centuries, people of widely sundered eras have taken up a defensive
position. Among the many curious finds made in or near this pit was an
ancient silver fibula, or ring, coeval with the Phœnicians who are
traditionally said to have traded to these coasts three thousand years
ago; a Saxon knife; coarse early pottery; remains of a fifteenth-century
spear, and the hilt of a seventeenth-century sword.
[Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (FRONT).]
Although the sea in those times flowed to the very base of this hill,
just below where the village church now stands, and submerged the site
of the present broad meadowlands, it seems absolutely certain that the
name of Kewstoke does not, as so often asserted, derive from the Celtic
word “kewch,” or boat; and does not mean “the place of boats.” The
hilltop guard-house gave the name, as may clearly be seen in Domesday
Book, that valuable sidelight upon place-names, as also upon many other
things. There we find “Chiwestock,” the not greatly corrupted version
from the original form. It appears to mean “the stockade on the ridge.”
The church, dedicated to St. Paul, is a small building, without aisles.
Here is a fine Norman south door, but the principal features are Late
Perpendicular. The elaborate stone pulpit dates from about 1500. The old
churchwardens’ accounts abound with curious items, among them that of
1702. “Item: gave unto 7 poor ship carpenters that had their bones
broken at Bristoll, O. I. O.” Doubtless the benevolent churchwardens
gave this shilling with strict injunctions to the seven broken-up
carpenters not to be so extravagant as to spend it all at once. But
whatever they did, it is quite certain that the ratepayers of Kewstoke
admonished the churchwardens against this and other reckless charities,
and gave them to fully understand that any future benevolences must come
out of their own personal pockets.
There are no ancient monumental brasses in Kewstoke church; a fact
perhaps fully accounted for by the following entry in the accounts:
“1748. Item: paid for casting the ould brasses, 23 at 6_d._ ... 11. 6.”
So there we perceive the accumulated monuments of centuries going in one
plunge into the melting-pot.
[Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (BACK)]
An interesting discovery was made during the restoration of Kewstoke
church in 1849. A block of stone sculptured with a half-length figure,
supposed to represent the Virgin Mary, built firmly into the north wall
under the sill of a window, had long been a curious object of the
interior of the building, and was by some antiquaries considered to be a
heart-shrine. The greatly defaced figure appeared to be holding a
shield. To satisfy curiosity, the stone was removed, disclosing a small
arched hollowed-out chamber at the back, in which was a greatly decayed
oak vessel, or cup, partly split open by warping. At the bottom of this
was a dry black incrustation, pronounced to be congealed human blood. It
was supposed, from the circumstances of the founding of Woodspring
Priory, and from the fact of a cup, or chalice, forming a part of the
Prior’s seal, that this relic was nothing less than a precious portion
of the martyr’s blood—the greatest treasure owned by the Priory. It was
further thought that the monks, foreseeing the troubles of the
dissolution of the religious houses, caused the relic to be secretly
removed and placed here, in Kewstoke church. It is now in Taunton
Museum.
The Kewstoke woods, largely of scrub-oak, closely woven and interlaced
and compacted together by the winds off the Channel, descend in tangled
thickets to the water’s edge. At the end of them, a picturesque
toll-gate marks the beginning of the modern pleasure-resort of
Weston-super-Mare. No one need have the remotest shadow of a doubt that
he has arrived, for the crowds of excursionists here and on that
Walhalla of noisy enjoyment, Birnbeck Pier, make themselves very fully
seen and heard.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
WESTON-SUPER-MARE
WESTON-SUPER-MARE has frequently been styled the “Western Brighton.” It
matters little or nothing to those who invent these impossible parallels
that the places thus compared with one another have nothing in common;
and certainly Weston (for few there be who give it the longer name) is
as little like Brighton as any place well can be. Weston fringes the
bold curve of the shallow and sandy Weston or Uphill Bay, sandy inshore:
a mile-broad expanse of mud at low water. Brighton is built on a
straight coastline, part of the town standing on the clifftops of Kemp
Town, and the narrow beach is exclusively shingle. At the back of
Brighton run the treeless chalk hills of the South Downs; behind Weston
stretch the levels that extend further inland as far as Sedgemoor.
Brighton took its rise in the middle Georgian period, about 1780; Weston
remained an insignificant village until the first quarter of the
nineteenth century.
While it is certainly a mistaken compliment to compare the situation of
Weston with that of Brighton, it is, on the other hand, unfair to
Brighton to pretend that, as a town, Weston approaches it, for size or
splendour. But in every respect the places are so wholly dissimilar that
it would be the worst of mistakes to play the one off against the other.
One of the very earliest discoverers of Weston was Mrs. Piozzi, the Mrs.
Thrale of earlier years, friend of Dr. Johnson. Writing hence in 1819,
she mentions the fine qualities of the air: “The breezes here are most
salubrious: no land nearer than North America when we look down the
Channel; and ’tis said that Sebastian Cabot used to stand where I now
sit, and meditate his future discoveries of Newfoundland.”
The reference to “no land nearer than North America,” with the cautious
proviso, “when we look down the Channel,” strikes the modern observer,
who in fine weather distinctly sees the busy towns of the South Wales
coast and the smoke-wreaths of its factory chimneys, not more than ten
miles distant, as particularly quaint. The old county historians have
little to say of Weston, and what they have to remark is concerned only
with the descent of the manor.
Even so comparatively recently as 1824—five years, it will be noted,
later than Mrs. Piozzi’s raptures—Weston remained a very small place, as
shown in an old engraving published at the time in Rutter’s “Westonian
Guide.” It consisted, it would appear, of the parish church of St. John,
just rebuilt, and some thirty houses. A few trees, of a distinctly
Noah’s Ark type, looked upon the sands, occupied by two
bathing-machines, a shed, a horse and cart, and twelve widely
distributed people of uncertain but pensive character. Such was the old
inheritance of the Pigott and Smyth-Pigott family, who have owned the
manor of Weston, with much else in the neighbourhood, since 1696.
But the evidence afforded by the frontispiece to “Rutter’s Guide,” which
shows Weston like some sparse settlement on a desolate shore, does not
tally with the statements contained in the booklet itself, in whose
pages we read:
“The fishermen’s huts have almost disappeared and the town now contains
about two hundred and fifty houses; a large portion of which are
respectable residences,[2] and even some elegant mansions; but
notwithstanding this, its general appearance is little inviting to the
stranger, especially in gloomy weather, or when the ebb of the spring
tides leaves open large tracts of beach. But on a fine summer evening,
when the tide is in, nothing can be more beautiful than the scene which
it presents: numerous groups walking on its smooth and extensive sands,
intermingled with a variety of carriages, horses, fishermen wading with
nets, and the villagers enjoying the exhilarating breeze after the
fatigues of the day.”
Footnote 2:
This is good hearing.
The seaside was at that time in process of being discovered. At
innumerable spots around our coasts fisher villages were then being
transformed into elegant resorts, which were saved from becoming vulgar
by the sufficient facts that the working classes could not afford
holidays, and that, if they could, the means of transport were lacking.
When tedious and expensive coach journeys were the only methods of being
conveyed, it is obvious that wage-earners could spare neither the time
nor the money for what would have been to them, under the most
favourable circumstances, an enterprise. But those classes were quite
content to do without the week’s or fortnight’s holiday at the seaside
which appears nowadays to be regarded as the birthright of most men,
women, and children. They were not then educated up to holidays, and
were content to work week in and week out through the year, never
questioning the scheme of things that gave to the few that leisure they
themselves could never enjoy.
It is a little difficult nowadays to realise the exclusive Weston that
was; although, to be sure, those days when it still posed as exclusive
are not so far distant but that many old people in the town can
recollect them perfectly well.
The beginning of the end of this old-time attitude of aloofness may be
dated from 1841, when the Bristol and Exeter Railway that was—the Great
Western that is—was opened to Worle, in continuation of the line from
Paddington to Bristol; being completed the whole way to Exeter in 1844.
The early history of railways is not yet ancient history, but it is
already old enough to be obscured and made romantic by legends, some
true, others coloured with that passion for the picturesque which
transfigures history everywhere. Stories are told, as they are told
everywhere, with a great deal of truth in them, of local objections to
the railway. We hear of the passionate opposition offered by the
Smyth-Pigotts and by the inhabitants of Weston to a proposal to run the
main line near the town; with the result that it was constructed no
closer than a mile away inland. The two thousand inhabitants who then
constituted the town of Weston shortsightedly rejoiced at this victory,
which was very speedily found to be a costly one; the branch tramway
laid down from the main line, with railway carriages dragged slowly into
the place, to a shed situated in the rear of the present Town Hall,
proving an undignified entrance that not many visitors cared to
experience twice. But for ten years this remained the way into the town
by rail. A proper branch line was afterwards built from Worle, but still
Weston station remained a terminus, until the new loop line was made, in
1884, coming through the town and rejoining the main at Uphill and
Bleadon station.
Another local railway legend, of some interest, relates to a forlorn
platform that no living person ever saw put to any manner of use. It
stood some distance to the north side of the existing station for Uphill
and Bleadon, and was popularly supposed to be a station erected by the
Company in accordance with the letter (certainly not with the spirit) of
an agreement entered into between the Company and a local landowner
through whose land the railway had been made, at an extravagant cost, in
consequence of the high price this freeholder had put upon his holding.
He, it appears, finally insisted upon having a station built for his own
personal convenience, and the Company agreed. But nothing had been said
about trains stopping there, and so no tickets were ever issued to or
from this freak building, and no trains ever halted at it.
Nowadays with its twenty-five thousand inhabitants, Weston welcomes,
instead of repelling, the visitor. Nay, more: it has arrived at that
stage of existence to which most other seaside towns have come, and
lives for and on visitors, and when the summer season is over ceases to
be its characteristic self; always remembering that in winter its
climate is mild and inviting to invalids.
It has long been the fashion in many quarters to depreciate
Weston-super-Mare, and to style it “Weston-super-Mud.” Mud there is in
plenty, far out in this shallow bay, and it is exposed for a great
distance at the ebb, but it never intermingles with the fine broad
yellow sands that form a paradise for children along the entire two
miles’ sweep of the bay, from Anchor Head to Uphill, and make a fine
track for the donkey rides that are so great a feature of the children’s
holidays here. The scenery surrounding Weston is delightful and
singularly romantic. Boldly placed in mid-Channel are those twin, but
strongly dissimilar islets, the Steep Holm and Flat Holm, the last-named
provided with a prominent white lighthouse, and both in these latter
days the site of massive forts presenting an embattled front to any
possible hostile voyage up the Severn Sea. These islets are outlying
fragments of the Mendip range of hills, which ends south of the town in
the quarried hills of Bleadon and Uphill, and in the almost islanded
gigantic bulk of Brean Down. Overhanging the town on the north is that
other outlier of the Mendips, Worle Hill. In every direction, therefore,
we find hills peaking up with a suddenness and an outline almost
volcanic in appearance. The air, too, of Weston is brisk and enjoyable;
and if there be indeed nothing of interest in the town itself, modern
creation as it is, the same criticism is applicable to many another
seaside resort. The stranger, therefore, who has for many years been
familiar with severe and undiscriminating criticisms of Weston finds it,
when at last fate brings him hither, a very much more likeable place
than he had dared hope.
It must, however, be said that Weston is not select. It is popular, in
the sense that Yarmouth, Blackpool, and Southport (to name none others)
are popular. It caters of necessity for the crowd, for the crowd is at
its very threshold. Half an hour’s railway journey from Bristol, and a
mere ten miles’ steamer voyage from Cardiff and other populous Welsh
ports, would render useless any attempts that might be made to keep
Weston as a preserve for the comparatively few rich, leisured, and
cultured persons who might give its Parade a better tone, but certainly
would not do the shopkeeping class much good. And to do the people and
the local authorities of Weston the merest justice, they make no such
attempts, foredoomed to failure as they would be. I do not know what the
motto of Weston-super-Mare may be, nor even indeed if it has one. If not
already furnished in this respect, it might well be “Let ’em all come.”
And they do already come in very considerable numbers. But this, it
should be said, is not to pretend that Weston is either so large, or so
besieged with immense crowds of visitors, as Blackpool and the other
popular resorts already mentioned. Still the streets, the long curving
Parade, and the sands are in July, August, and September as densely
crowded as any lover of humanity in masses could reasonably desire, and
the place is as fully furnished with strictly unintellectual amusements
as the average lower middle-class holiday-maker could hope for, outside
Blackpool and Yarmouth. Here is a pier, the “Grand Pier” it is called,
thrusting forth a long arm from the centre of the Parade into the
shallow waters of the bay, with a huge concert pavilion midway, and a
further lengthy arm going on and on until it rivals Southend pier
itself, with a total length of 6,600 feet, or something like a mile and
a quarter; the intention being to enable the excursion steamers to touch
at the pier-head. An electric railway runs the length of this prodigious
affair, which entirely eclipses the old Birnbeck Pier under Anchor Head:
really a pier-like bridge connecting the rocky isle of Birnbeck with the
mainland. From the isle itself three pier-arms project in different
directions, and to these the excursion steamers from Bristol, Cardiff
and other ports have hitherto come. Such dreams of delight await the
incoming visitors on this siren isle that many day-excursionists to
Weston proceed no farther. The place abounds with every kind of
amusement, except the intellectual variety: water-chutes, switchback
railways, try-your-weight and try-your-strength machines, and battalions
of other penny-in-the-slot mechanisms; and, above all, a damned
something that may be espied from the shore, like a huge giant’s-stride
pole with baskets whizzing in dizzy fashion around it; the said baskets
being filled with people who have paid a penny each for the privilege of
being given a sensation which must be a colourable imitation of
sea-sickness. The channel called the Stepway, which separates Birnbeck
from Anchor Head at high tide, is readily crossed at low water; but the
place has its hidden dangers, in a very swift current that sweeps
suddenly through when the tide again begins to flow; as may be seen by
personal observation, and in the evidence offered by a tablet in
Clevedon church, which records the deaths in 1819 by drowning of Abraham
and Charles Elton, two sons of Sir Abraham Elton, who at the ages of
thirteen and fourteen were thus cut off: “In crossing from Bearnbeck
Isle, at Weston-super-Mare, the younger became involved in the tide,
when the elder plunged to his rescue. The flood was stronger than their
strength, though not their love, and as ‘they were lovely and pleasant
in their lives,’ so ‘in their death they were not divided.’”
Midway between Birnbeck and the Grand Pier is a projecting rock, once an
island called Knightstone, now connected with the shore and made the
site of the Knightstone Pavilion and Baths.
Add to these varied delights the presence of hundreds of itinerant
vendors on Parade and sands, and barrows innumerable in the busy
streets; and throw in a very plentiful supply of teashops, restaurants,
and dining-rooms in the centre of the town, whose proprietors or their
agents stand on the pavement and shout for custom, and you will have a
very fair notion of what Weston is like. To these items, however, must
be added Grove Park, with its mansion, the old manor-house of the
Smyth-Pigotts, and, the Clarence Park, and one other. Finally, conceive
that indispensable feature of a modern watering-place, an electric
tramway, and there you have Weston-super-Mare.
Everything is very new, and probably the one ancient object is the
chancel of the parish church, which seems to have escaped rebuilding,
but is not, at any rate, of much interest. In the church is the
following curious epitaph:
Of two brothers born together,
Cruel death was so unkind
As to bring the eldest hither,
And the younger leave behind.
May George live long,
Edgar dy’d young,
For born he was
To Master Sam Willan, Rectour
of this place, and Jane his wife,
Sep. 5, 1680, and buryed Feb.
the eleventh, 1686. The 9th
did put an end to all his pain,
And sent him into everlasting gain.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
WORLEBURY—WORLE
ALL the ebullient modernity of Weston is looked down upon by the
immemorially old, from that overhanging vantage-point, Worle Hill, where
the ancient camp and fortress of Worlebury, dwelling-place and
stronghold of many ancient peoples, shows traces of occupation by a race
who flourished some four thousand years since. Worlebury passed through
many hands, but the last people who sheltered there died in ruthless
battle thirteen centuries ago.
Worlebury rises to a height of 357 feet above Weston, and although
modern villas here and there impinge upon it, and the spire of Holy
Trinity Church and the unlovely backs of houses are a thought too
insistent from these grey ramparts of prehistoric times, it is in many
ways as remote from the seething crowd beneath as its height would
imply. The camp of twenty acres is divided into two unequal parts by a
ditch. It is conjectured that the larger portion was the place of
refuge, and the smaller the actual fortress, of the race who constructed
it. The whole is irregularly enclosed by ramparts of loose pieces of
limestone and rocky banks, roughly of live successive ranges, but here
and there, in places thought weakest, of as many as seven. On the side
facing the sea, where the limestone rocks of Worle Hill go precipitously
down, and artificial defence was not required, there are no ramparts.
This hilltop was until about 1820 a barren spot, quite innocent of
trees, but the plantations made at that time by the Smyth-Pigott of the
period have by now resulted in a crown of beautiful woodlands of larch,
oak, and other trees. Amid these woods the extraordinary ancient
ramparts of loose limestone fragments, the broadest of these defences
about a hundred feet across, glimmer greyly, like petrified rivers. The
flakes and knobs of stone, broken up and placed here in such immense
quantities and with incredible labour, vary in size from about that of
an ordinary brick to three times those dimensions, and are as clean and
sharp to-day as though but recently quarried.
It is not an easy matter to climb over these successive banks and
ditches, and it is quite evident that those who at different periods
stormed these defences and slew those who occupied them, must have been
determined people, little daunted by the losses they must needs have
suffered in the advance. The early defenders were men who used the sling
for chief weapon of defence, and great numbers of slingers’
platforms—little flat spaces contrived in strategical positions along
the sloping sides of the hill—remain, like so many primitive artillery
emplacements; while quantities of their ammunition—pebble-stones that
are not in the course of nature found on the crests of limestone
hills—may be picked up.
The first people, it is thought, who seized this hilltop, were Belgic
tribes from over seas, who, landing in the shallow waters that then
spread where the meadows below Kewstoke are now, or in the lakelike bay
on whose side Weston now stands, fortified the summit and held it as a
base from which to make further advances. The natives of these parts,
whose lands those ancient raiders coveted, were chiefly lake-dwellers,
living on the many islets that then studded these marshy seas and
salt-water lagoons, or housed on pile-dwellings ingeniously constructed
in the waters themselves. Larger communities of them lived for safety
inside stockades, whose fragments have been discovered of recent years
at Meare, in the neighbourhood of Glastonbury, where evidence of the
conflicts that followed the appearance of the raiders was found, in
charred remains of wrecked homes. Evidence was not wanting that this was
a conflict in which both sides suffered, and among the remains of a
stockade unearthed recently was found the trophy of a woman’s head,
which the science of ethnology proved to have been that of a person
belonging to the raiders’ tribes. Thus it appeared that the
lake-dwellers had seized and murdered one of their enemies’ women, and
had fixed the head upon a stake of their defences, by way of derision.
Those who first seized Worle Hill, and made the camp of Worlebury,
evidently intended to stay, for they constructed many well-like
dwelling-pits in the hilltops. Some of these remain. They are about four
feet deep, and had originally a surrounding wall, about two feet high. A
roof of boughs and twigs, kept in place by flat slabs of stone,
completed a specimen dwelling. We know so much for a certainty, because
in excavating examples of these houses the original roof has been found,
with the boughs and twigs and the flat stone slabs that had been
especially brought from the lias strata of Nailsea by these ancient
folk. Plentiful signs remained that at some period this camp had been
rushed and every dwelling burnt out, for charred barley was found,
together with remains of burnt logs and wattle-work roofing. Under the
remains of these roofs were pebble-stones, part of the ancient
occupants’ sling ammunition; and relics of their last meals, in the
shape of bones of birds and rabbits. Some flint arrow-heads also were
discovered, and, secreted behind a rocky ledge in one of these pits,
some iron ring-money. So, on some day of red ruin, at a date no man can
give, the first camp of Worlebury was destroyed.
Centuries passed, and the hilltop apparently was given over to solitude,
and nature buried these relics of a desperate day under moss and grass.
Whether, as sometimes has been supposed, the Romans at a later age
stormed a British camp on this height, is at least uncertain. The only
things Roman ever found here were some coins, and they may well have
belonged to the Romanised Britons who, after the withdrawal of the Roman
garrisons of Britain, fell a prey to the more virile barbarians from the
north of Europe, and retreated before them, being driven mercilessly
from one fortified post to another, and slain in many thousands. The
last great struggle in Worlebury took place at this period. Arthur, the
half-legendary King Arthur of so many romances, the great warrior-king
of more than three hundred years earlier date than Alfred the Great, had
been at length slain, in A.D. 542; and the Saxon onset, checked by his
successes, was renewed. Ceawlin, the great Bretwalda of the powerful and
rapidly growing kingdom of Wessex, overthrew the Britons at the bloody
battle of Barbury Hill, near Swindon, in A.D. 556, and in A.D. 577, with
great slaughter, gained the battle of Dyrham, between Bath and Bristol;
all those parts we now know as Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, together
with parts of Somerset, being thereby added to the kingdom of Wessex.
Soon after the battle of Dyrham, Ceawlin captured Worlebury, where the
Britons had taken refuge, and the evidence of what was then wrought here
was still visible in 1851, when archæologists systematically excavated
and examined the turf that covered the ancient pit-dwellings. In one pit
were found three skeletons, doubled up and lying across one another,
evidently just as they had been flung there after the fierce onset of
the storming party. The skull of one was cleanly gashed in two places,
as though by a sword; doubtless in this case the “saexe,” the short
sword the Saxons used, and from which, indeed, their name derives.
Another had a wound in the thigh and an iron spear-head was found
embedded in the spine. Evidently this was the framework of a warrior who
had been taken in the rear while engaging in executing a strategical
retreat; or, as we used to say at school, “doing a bunk.” Unfortunately
he had not started early enough. The third skeleton was that of a bolder
man of war, who had stayed to see it out and scorned to run, with the
result that he received a huge stone in the skull, and his collarbone
was driven up into his jaw. It was then too late to leave, and in fact
his bones remained here for close upon thirteen hundred years, with
these evidences of his ill-advised stand, plain to see. But his soul
goes marching on.
Other pit-dwellings contained skeletons, portions of rusted arms,
potsherds of a rude type of earthenware vessels, and beads; many of them
superimposed upon the infinitely older relics of the earlier defenders.
Many of them are to be seen in the collections of the Somerset
Archæological Society at Taunton. There is prominently displayed the
skull of a slaughtered warrior with no fewer than seven gashes in it. He
must have been a bonny fighter, to have attracted all this hewing and
slashing that at last put him out of action; or else the crowd
concentrating their efforts on him wasted those energies that might with
greater advantage have been distributed more evenly over the stricken
field. We can know nothing of who he was. No monument was ever raised to
his memory. But, although it may at first sight seem to be an indignity
that his shattered skull should be exposed here, yet, when you more
closely consider the rights and the wrongs of it, is this not his best
monument—showing that he fought for all he was worth, and was only slain
by overpowering odds? _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!_
Worle (locally “Wurle”) itself is a detestable village of vulgar and
poverty-stricken shops and out-at-elbows cottages, a blot on its
surroundings. As Weston rose from insignificance, Worle, which was
anciently its market-town and centre of supplies, sank into obscurity,
and now the sole interest of the place is its pretty church, containing
some good miserere seats. It was of old the property of Worspring
Priory, and Richard Spring, one of its later Priors, was at the same
time vicar of Worle. He resigned the Priory in 1525. His initials are
found carved on one of the misereres. A small stone in the churchyard is
inscribed:
A Maiden in Mold
60 years old
JOANNA
1644
The registers contain some curious items, among them, under date of
1609, the following note:
“Edward Bustle cruelly murthered by consent of his owne wyfe, who, with
one Humfry Hawkins, and one other of theyre associates, were executed
for the same murther, and hanged in Irons at a place called Shutt
Shelfe, neere Axbridge, and the body of the said Bustle barberously
used, viz., his throte cutt, his legs cutt of, and divers woundes in his
body, and buryed in a stall, was taken up and buryed in the church yard
at Worle, March Xth. A good president (_sic_) for wicked people.”
Apparently the degree of criminality of the unhappy Edward Bustle’s wife
was not great, for she not only escaped this hanging which, according to
the wording of the above note, she suffered, but married in the
following October a certain bold man, by name Nicholas Pitman.
A violent, but unexplained, local antipathy to lawyers was formerly
manifested at Worle, by the contumelious drumming out of any member of
the legal profession who chanced to be discovered in the village. Some
embittered page of local history is no doubt concerned in this now
obsolete custom, but this is probably almost as far removed in the
annals of the place as those distant ages when Worle was by way of being
a seaport. Where the flat meadows now spread, maplike below the village,
and where the Great Western Railway runs, ships in dim bygone æons rode
at anchor. Proof of that forgotten fact was accidentally discovered of
recent years, when, in digging the foundation of a new brewery, an
ancient anchor was unearthed from the sandy subsoil.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X
STEEP HOLM—FLAT HOLM—UPHILL—BREAN DOWN
IF one might dare so greatly as to make one prominent comparison to the
disadvantage of Brighton and the advantage of Weston, it would be this:
that the seascape off Brighton beach is a mere empty waste of waters.
What shipping there is to be occasionally seen is observed going far
away out in the Channel; there so broad that it might be, for all the
evidence there is to the contrary, the wide ocean itself. Here at
Weston, on the other hand, where the Bristol Channel is so narrow that
the coast of South Wales is easily to be seen, a constant passage of
shipping enlivens the outlook. Here also are those picturesque islets,
Steep Holm and Flat Holm, that have so companionable and cheerful a
presence.
The two Holms that stand forth so picturesquely midway in the Channel
deserve some detailed description, for they not only form prominent
objects in every view from Weston, but have a curious history. Both are
favourite places for excursions by sailing skiffs or motorboats, and if
there be those persons who cannot obtain a sufficiency of sea-bathing on
Weston shores, Flat Holm affords plenty. The name, “Holm” is Norse for
“island,” and remains evidence of the Danish descent upon these coasts
in A.D. 882. The Saxon names for the isles, as given in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, were “Stepanreolice”; and “Bradanreolice”; _i.e._ “Steep Reel
Island,” and “Broad Reel Island”: the word “reel” being probably an
allusion to their supposedly reel-like shape; Steep Holm a long and
narrow rock, rising abruptly, with steep and jagged limestone cliffs, to
a height of 256 feet above the sea; and Flat Holm presenting a broad,
flat, egg-like form.
It was on Steep Holm that Gildas, the bitter and melancholy monkish
Celtic chronicler of the woes that befel Britain after the death of King
Arthur, wrote his Latin complaint, _Liber Querulus de Excidio
Britanniæ_, telling how the country was overrun by the Saxon hordes in
the fifth and sixth centuries.
In later centuries the Saxons themselves fell upon evil times, and were
overcome by stronger races, or waged inconclusive defensive wars with
other oversea marauders. Thus the isles were the scene of a hostile
descent from Brittany in A.D. 918. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us,
in doleful language, of the miseries of that time; how a numerous fleet,
commanded by Earls Ohtor and Rhoald, pillaged either shore from these
fastnesses, and how finally they were defeated and Earl Rhoald slain, on
the mainland; when “few of them got away, except those alone who there
swam out to the ships. And then they sat down on the island of
Bradanreolice, until such time as they were quite destitute of food; and
many men died of hunger, because they could not obtain any food.” At
length a famished remnant at last dispersed to South Wales and Ireland,
and thus ingloriously faded out of history. Seventy years later, that is
to say A.D. 988, the Danes, ravaging these coasts, made Steep Holm a
base, and in 1066, after the Battle of Hastings, Gytha, mother of the
brave but unfortunate Harold, took refuge here from the Norman.
Steep Holm, one and a half miles round, is not an easy place to
approach, having only two landings. It is the nearest of the two from
Weston, being but three miles offshore, while Flat Holm is five and a
half miles distant. The area of Steep Holm is, roughly, seventy acres.
Geographically it is situated in the parish of Brean. It is the property
of Mr. Kemeys-Tynte, of Cefn Mably, Cardiff, and is partly leased to the
War Office, which maintains six heavy batteries here; the Gordon, Rudder
Rock, Split Rock, Laboratory, Summit, and Tombstone forts, mounted with
modern heavy guns, crowning the cliffs. Here also is a Lloyd’s
signalling station, together with an inn, formerly a residence built by
Mr. Kemeys-Tynte, who at one time resided here.
Steep Holm was formerly known as the home of the single peony, a wild
flower peculiar to the island; but enthusiastic botanists would appear
to have by this time collected it so extensively from the wild, ivy-hung
cliffs that it is not now to be found. But wild birds, of aquatic and
other varieties, still abound. Scanty remains of an obscure
fourteenth-century priory, in the shape of a dilapidated wall with no
architectural features, are left. A ruined inn, roofless, a melancholy
sight to thirsty souls, is left on the island, relic of the illegitimate
enterprise of a fugitive publican and sinner, who, fleeing to this
sanctuary for debtors, outside the ordinary jurisdiction of the petty
courts, imagined himself, wrongly as it appeared, also beyond the reach
of the Inland Revenue.
Flat Holm is geographically and politically in South Wales, is the
property of the Marquess of Bute, and is situated in the parish of St.
Mary, Cardiff. Once a year the vicar and curate of St. Mary’s visit the
island and hold service in the barracks. Four batteries are situated on
the island: the Castle Rock, Farm, Lighthouse and Well batteries. The
tall white lighthouse that shows up so prominently from the shore at
Weston is situated on Flat Holm, and rises to a height of a hundred and
fifty-six feet. A singular phenomenon obscured the light in February
1902, when a shower of sticky whitish-grey mud fell and completely
covered the lantern. Scientific men explained this happening as due to a
portion of a dust-shower driving from the Sahara, and being converted
into mud by the Channel mists. A day’s hard work was necessary before
the glass was properly cleaned.
A light was first shown here in 1737, when it consisted of a brazier of
burning coals; no very effectual beacon on foggy nights. Nor was it
greatly improved by the early years of the nineteenth century, for it
was then still possible for such disasters as that of the _William and
Mary_ to happen. This unfortunate ship was wrecked in 1817, between Flat
Holm and Lavernock Point, which marks the extremity of Brean Down; and
sixty lives were then lost.
The present light, of the occulting variety, has a power of 50,000
candles, and is visible for eighteen miles.
The total population of Flat Holm is twenty. Here is an inn. There are
two fresh-water springs on the island.
There is much charm in the curious islanded and semi-islanded features
of the Weston outlook. Boldly rising from sea-level to the left of the
long front of the town, are the great hunchbacked masses of Brean Down
and Uphill.
Uphill stands romantically at the mouth of the Axe, marked from great
distances by its abrupt hill rising to a hundred feet above the plain,
but looking much loftier. It is made further noticeable by the ruined
church that stands prominently on its barren summit. The seaward side is
scarred by limestone quarries into the likeness of cliffs, at whose feet
the turbid waters of the Axe crawl sluggishly to the sea, between deep,
muddy banks. This was the site of a Roman station and port, whence the
lead and other minerals mined by those strenuous ancients on the Mendip
hills were shipped. From Old Sarum, a distance of fifty-five miles, a
Roman road has been traced, going by Charterhouse-on-Mendip, and ending
here. Antiquaries give the name of the Roman station as _Ad Axium_,
following the lead of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who himself invented the
name. Still on the hilltop, near the church, may be traced the
earthworks that once enclosed the Roman fort, and many coins of that
period have been found here. Down below is a limestone cavern
accidentally discovered in 1826, when it was found to contain bones of
the hyæna and other animals long extinct in Britain: long centuries
before ever the Romans came.
[Illustration: UPHILL.]
In Domesday Book Uphill is found as “Opopille,” a form which takes the
place-name almost entirely out of the category of names descriptive of
the physical features of the spot, and places it in that of personal
names. For “Uphill” is, in short, not what it seems, and does by no
means refer, in its true form, to the hill. It is, reduced to the name
first given, “Hubba’s Pill”; that is to say, Hubba’s Creek, or harbour.
All creeks, and many small streams on either side of the Bristol
Channel, are “pills.” This particular name was first conferred in A.D.
882, the year when these Channel coasts in general were attacked by
Danish raiders under the leadership of one Hubba, who was slain in
battle with Alfred the Great, either near Appledore, on the North Devon
Coast, at a place still known as “Bloody Corner,” or at Cannington, near
the river Parret, in the neighbourhood of Bridgwater, supposed to be the
“Cynuit” of ancient chronicles where the “heathenmen” were also utterly
defeated by the great King.
Those sea-rovers were naturally attracted by the safe harbours afforded
by such estuaries as these of the Parret and Axe, and laid up their
piratical craft here. Probably Hubba’s flotilla first anchored in the
Axe before moving on to final disaster at Cynuit; and the stay, it might
be supposed, could not have been short, for the place to have been given
his name. Moreover, between Uphill and Bleadon we have the ferry known
at this day as “Hobbs’s Boat,” this name itself hiding, in another
corrupted form, that of the ancient chieftain.
Here, then, is good news for the Hobbses of modern times, writhing
perhaps under the possession of so ungainly and apparently plebeian a
name, and wishing they were Mount joys or Mauleverers, or something of
equally aristocratic sound. Any Hobbs may, it is clear, derive from
Norse berserkers, and who knows but Biggs and Triggs also, and their
like!
Oh! what a chance of high romance
Lies hid in names like Hobbs;
There’s balm therein for all their kin,
And eke for Squibbs and Dobbs.
And Viking blood its daring flood
May pour in veins of Snooks:
Crusaders’ dash with conduct rash
Inflame the frame of Jukes.
_Per contra_, oft a noble name
Is borne by alien loon,
And Rosenberg is “Rossiter,”
Cohen becomes “Colquhoun.”
Around Park Lane, with might and main,
You hear the rumour wag
That “Gordon” may be Guggenheim,
And “Mervyn,” “Mosenbag.”
Romance we trace in commonplace,
And fact that custom shocks.
Thus we come daily face-to-face,
With cunning paradox.
Thus again we have, in the undoubted derivation of the name of Uphill,
another instance of that eternal truth: “Things are not always what they
seem.” Yet who, looking at this most notable hill, rising so suddenly
from the surrounding levels, would doubt, without the evidence of
ancient forms, that the name was and could be nothing else than
descriptive of the peculiarly striking geography of the spot?
The Norman clerks who, travelling from place to place, compiled Domesday
Book from information received on the spot, very often made a singular
hash of the place-names they heard from the Saxon, who spoke what was to
those newcomers a difficult language. “Opopille,” the best those Norman
emissaries could make of “Hubba’s Pill,” sounds very like a sudden and
violent Norman appearance, and the shaking of some unfortunate Saxon
churl, with the rough question put to him. “Vat is zat which you call
zis place here, hein?” and the reply, “Oh, sir! don’t shus-shake me like
that: ’Ubba-pup-pille, sir.”
The ruined church of St. Nicholas has not been in that condition so long
as might be supposed. It was in use until April 5th, 1846. From Norman
times it had stood here, and the religious fervour of many generations
had proved easily equal to this arduous climb to the hilltop, a very
real exercise, alike of piety and of the body. But hilltop churches must
in modern times expect less faithful attendance, and must be resigned to
compete, on terms disadvantageous to themselves, with dissenting chapels
more fortunately situated in the levels. Thus, when, in the first half
of the nineteenth century, the roofs of the old church of Uphill were
discovered to be in a highly dilapidated condition, a long-sought
opportunity was seized to abandon the building, which was otherwise not
in any desperate structural condition. A new church was accordingly
built below, and the old building unroofed and left to the winds of
heaven and the fowls of the air. Even the old font was left here to
unregarded desecration for a number of years. The chancel, it will be
observed, has been re-roofed to serve as a mortuary chapel; for the
churchyard still receives the bodies of parishioners. Stoutly the
ancient walls yet stand, and sharp to this day are the carvings of the
Norman north porch and the grim, uncanny faces of the uncouth gargoyles
that look out over Weston and the bay.
Brean Down, that huge, almost islanded hill—a sort of miniature
Gibraltar—that rises from the Axe marshes and the sand-flats opposite
Uphill, to a height of 321 feet, looks from Weston, and from Uphill
itself a place quite easy to arrive at, but, as sheer matter of fact, no
one can reach it by road under nine miles, by way of Bleadon and Brean
village. In a direct line from Uphill, across the river Axe, Brean Down
is only about a mile and a half away. The readiest method of reaching
this spot is by the ferry across the Axe at the end of Weston sands, a
threepenny passage, generally, at low water, the matter of walking along
planks laid in the mud, and a pull of three or four boat’s lengths. And
then you have the breezy isolation of all Brean Down before you; and you
will have it very much to yourself. Wild birds and wild flowers are the
only habitants of the Down, once you have left the farmhouse on the
flats behind, but the place has been the subject of not a few ambitious
schemes. The summit was fortified in 1867, but suddenly ceased to be so
in July 1900, when the magazine was blown up by a soldier firing his
rifle into it. Whether he did this by accident, as a novel way of
committing suicide, or as an ill-advised joke, does not appear, because
there was nothing left of him from which to seek an explanation.
A grand scheme was formulated in 1864, which a fine harbour was to be
built under the lee of the Down, with piers, quays, and all the usual
appurtenances of a steam-packet station, together with a railway from
the Great Western. The huge sum of £365,000 was expended upon the pier,
but the scheme eventually came to nothing, and the derelict works were
finally destroyed in the storms of December 1872. So those far-distant
merchants, the pre-Roman Phœnicians, who are said to have used this spot
as a commercial port, are not immediately likely to have any successors.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
BLEADON—BREAN—BRENT KNOLL
TO reach the village of Brean and to come in touch again with the coast
on leaving Weston-super-Mare, Uphill village is passed, with a choice of
roads then presenting itself: a short road with a penny toll to pay, or
a slightly longer one, free. Either one of these brings you down into
the flat lands under the scarred and quarried sides of Bleadon Hill,
some 550 feet high. The handsome Perpendicular tower of Bleadon church
groups beautifully with a fine fifteenth-century village cross.
Thenceforward, across the flats, now rich meadows, through lanes with
much fine hedgerow timber, the way leads to Lympsham, a village rebuilt
by the local squire, who happened to be also the parson, over half a
century ago. Every cottage is in a more or less domestic Gothic style,
as Gothic was then understood, strongly flavoured with ecclesiasticism.
The manor-house itself is Gothic, something after the Strawberry Hill
manner of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century date, and really
deplorable, were it not that the beautiful and well-wooded grounds, and
the magnolias that clothe the walls, soften the effect. The church of
St. Christopher, immediately opposite, and encircled by beautiful elms
and oaks, has a fine tower that noticeably leans to the west.
[Illustration: BLEADON CHURCH.]
From Lympsham the road turns abruptly to the coast at Brean, winding and
turning unweariedly this way and that, over the open marshes; with deep
dykes, half-filled with water and mud, on either side, and willows of
every age, from saplings like walking-sticks to reverend ancients,
hollow and riven with age, lining them.
Thus shall we come at length to Brean, as into the end of all things;
for, truly, the spot is desolate. Not, let it be said, with an ugly
desolation; for, although as you approach the sea, and the good alluvial
earth becomes more and more admixed with sand, the surroundings become
mere waste land, these are wastes with their own charm and beauty to any
but a farmer, to whose eyes nothing can be so beautiful as a ripening
field of good corn when prices are likely to rule high, or a healthy
field of swedes when he has much stock to feed.
Here a road runs parallel with the coast, under the lee of the impending
sand hills, so that if you would catch the merest glimpse of the sea,
you must climb to the summits of them and look down.
Brean church lies considerably below the level of these surrounding
sand-towans, which menace it in a manner not a little alarming in the
view of a stranger. But the sand here, at any rate, has done its worst,
for although in places across the narrow road it stands higher than the
church tower, it is largely held down at last by a sparse growth of
coarse grass, and the very height and massiveness of these sandhills
act, under the circumstances, as a shield against the clouds of other
sand still blowing in during rough weather from the sea.
The church of St. Bridget is a small blue-grey limestone building of the
Perpendicular period, of rough character, scarcely distinguishable from
a little distance as a church, and remarkable only for having its dwarf
tower finished off with a saddlebacked roof. It is, as a matter of fact,
only the remaining portion of the tower, struck by lightning and thrown
down in 1729. An inscription on it, “John Ginckens, churchwarden, Año
Dom. 1729,” no doubt records the repairs effected on that occasion.
“Ginckens” appears to have been the best local attempt possible at
spelling “Jenkins.”
Although it is sand that now more nearly threatens Brean, the peculiar
dangers of the place formerly arose from water. The ancient banks,
supposed by some to be Roman, that kept the low-lying country from being
flooded by the sea were burst in 1607, and a great stretch of land,
roughly twenty miles by five, was submerged for a long time to a depth
of from ten to twelve feet. A pamphlet published at the time says:
“The parish of Breane is swallowed (for the most part) up by the waters.
In it stood but nine houses, and of those seaven were consumed, and with
them XXVI persons lost their lives.”
Local farmers are busily employed in the making of what is known as
“Caerphilly cheese”; sent across Channel to Cardiff and sold there as a
Welsh product to the South Wales mining population.
[Illustration: BERROW.]
Blown sand, “allus a-shiften and a-blowen,” is the most prominent
feature of the way from this point, all the four miles into Burnham. The
ragwort—“the yallers,” as the countryfolk hereabouts know it—distributes
a rich colour by the wayside, and confers upon what would otherwise be a
somewhat dreary waste a specious cheerfulness. But even this hardy
wilding, content with the minimum of nutriment, grows scarce and
disappears as Berrow comes in sight; Berrow, where the sand-hummocks
broaden out and entirely surround the church that stands there in its
walled churchyard with a solitary cottage for neighbour—as though
defensively laagered against attack in an enemy’s country; as indeed it
is; the enemy, these insidious sands. Berrow, there can be no doubt
whatever, was one of the many islets that anciently were scattered about
Sedgemere, and we have but to glance inland between Brean and Berrow for
this aforetime character of the surrounding country to be abundantly
manifest, and for the eye to be immediately fixed with one of the most
outstanding features of old time; the hill of Brent Knoll.
Travellers to or from the West by the Great Western Railway are
generally much impressed, between Yatton and Bridgwater, by the strange
solitary hill of Brent Knoll that rises abruptly from the plain of
Burnham Level, and looks oddly like some long-extinct volcano with its
cone shorn off or fallen in. Fast trains do not stop at the little
wayside station also called “Brent Knoll,” and while passengers are
still gazing curiously at the hill, they are whirled away in midst of
other interesting scenery.
Brent Knoll stands out prominently by virtue of its height of 457 feet,
as well as by its isolated situation in the great alluvial plain through
which lazily meander the muddy streams of Brue and Axe to their outlets
at Uphill and Highbridge. It is one of those many scattered heights that
are so strangely disposed about the neighbourhood of Sedgemoor, and give
so romantic an appearance to these wide-spreading levels. Of these the
most prominent, geographically and historically, is the famed
Glastonbury Tor, which with its volcanic outline, crested with the tall
tower of the ancient Chapel of St. Michael, is prominent for many a
misty mile, like some Hill of Dream. Then there is the Mump at
Boroughbridge, by the crossing of the Parret into the Isle of Athelney;
Borough Hill, near Wedmore; and many smaller, together with those
scarcely perceptible hillocks amid the marshes that are now the sites of
villages, whose very names of Chedzoy, Middlezoy, Westonzoyland, and
Othery, tell us that these, together with the larger hills, were all,
“once upon a time,” islands in a shallow sea that stagnated over the
whole of what is now called “Sedgemoor,” but is properly “Sedgemere.”
Centuries of draining, of cutting those long, broad and deep dykes
called “rhines,” that cross the moor for many miles, in every direction,
and so carry away the waters, have converted what had become, after the
sea had retired, an almost impassable morass into a fertile plain. The
industry of peat-digging in the heart of the moor shows the nature of
the soil in these parts, and modern discoveries of prehistoric
lake-dwellings at Meare, whose very name contains evidence of the mere,
or lake that once existed, indicate the manner of life these ancient
inhabitants lived. King Arthur seems a dim and distant figure to us, but
long before his time there lived a race of people on the islands of this
inland sea; folk who, although they frescoed themselves liberally with
red ochre, were by no means without a more artistic knowledge of
decoration than implied by that crude form of personal adornment. They
certainly made earthenware pottery of graceful forms, decorated with
ornament of excellent design and execution. Their other habits were
primitive. Largely a fish-eating folk, they often lived, as described
earlier in these pages, in wattled huts built on piles or stakes driven
in the waters. These forms of dwellings were readily adapted for
defence, for shelter for their boats, and for fishing.
In those far-distant days Brent Knoll was an island. William of
Malmesbury, whose chronicle of the English kings was written early in
the twelfth century, and abounds in marvels and prodigies, tells us that
it was originally named “Insula Ranarum,” the Isle of Frogs. It had
been, moreover, he says, in times even then far remote, the home of
three most famous wicked giants, who were put to the sword, after a long
and evil existence, by one Ider, in the marvellous times of King Arthur.
Excellent roads completely encircle Brent Knoll, making the circuit
around the base of it in some four miles, and a very pleasant and
picturesque miniature circular trip it is on a bicycle beneath the great
hill, which is thus seen to be as it were, roughly, one hill
superimposed upon another, with a remarkably distinct ledge or broad
shelf running around it, at half its total height; more noticeable from
the north-west, perhaps, than from any other direction. The great bulk
of Brent Knoll forming this base is composed of has rock; the upper part
being of oolite. On the summit is an ancient earthwork, the centre of it
marked by a flagstaff. No hilltop would be complete without its ancient
fortified camp, but the story of that upon Brent Knoll has never been
told, nor is now ever likely to be. Roman coins, found in almost every
old fortified post, have been found here also, and down below, in the
meadows, the name of “Battleborough” remains, with a tradition of Alfred
the Great having here fought with and defeated the Danes, or been
defeated by them; which, in its vagueness, shows how extremely little is
known of old times here. But the name “Brent”—_i.e._ “Burnt”—Knoll is of
itself evidence of warlike times, when the hilltop flared with
beacon-fires.
There are two villages on Brent Knoll; South and East Brent, both
pleasant places; the first with a noble Perpendicular church and stately
tower; the second with a church less noble, provided with a tall spire
that was formerly used as a landmark for ships making Burnham, and was
kept conspicuously whitewashed, that the mark might not be overlooked.
Since the tall lighthouses of Burnham have arisen, the spire of East
Brent is no longer regularly made white.
[Illustration: BRENT KNOLL.]
In the South Brent church a fine series of carved bench-ends includes
satirical representations of the story of Reynard the Fox, here
especially applied to the grasping conduct of the mitred Abbots of
Glastonbury, who sought to seize the temporalities and emoluments of
South Brent, but were defeated at law. Thus we find here a fox, habited
as an abbot, preaching to a flock of geese and other fowls; the fleece
of a sheep hanging from his crozier sufficiently showing that his
wardenship of flocks does not go unrewarded. Three of his monks, shown
as cowled swine, peer up at him. A lower panel on the same bench-end
discloses a pig being roasted on a spit, which is turned at one end by a
monkey and the fire blown with a bellows by another monkey at the
opposite end.
On another bench-end of this series we see that the geese have revolted
against the fox, who is found sitting upright in a penitential attitude,
his hind legs in fetters. A monkey preaches to, or admonishes, the
geese, in his stead. In the lower panel the fox is seen in the stocks, a
monkey mounting guard with a halberd.
[Illustration: BRENT KNOLL.]
An elaborate mural monument to one “John Somersett,” 1663, and his two
wives, occupies great space on the south side of the nave; John Somerset
himself represented in half-length, with a portrait-bust of a wife on
either side. There are, further, effigies of himself and the two Mrs.
Somerset praying, accompanied by a chrisom child; together with an
alarming effigy starting up in a coffin and praying earnestly to an
angel who, armed with a trumpet like a megaphone, wallows amid clouds,
blowing reassuring messages, which issue from the trumpet visibly in
lengths, not unlike the news from modern tape-machines. An elderly
angel, with an oily smile of smug satisfaction, beams greasily below.
The whole curious composition has been recently very highly coloured, in
reproduction of the original scheme.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII
BURNHAM—HIGHBRIDGE—BAWDRIP—“BATH BRICKS”—THE RIVER PARRET
THE upstart capital of these levels is Burnham, but the supremacy is
disputed by Highbridge. Now Burnham and Highbridge, although but a mile
and a half apart, are places very different, socially and
geographically. The first stands amid sands, by the seashore; the other
is situated about the distance of a mile from the sea, on the muddy,
sludgy banks of the river Brue. Burnham is a pleasure resort, of sorts,
to which all the railways of Somerset and Dorset run frequent cheap
excursions. It is the ideal of the average Sunday School manager,
seeking a suitable place for the school’s annual treat; for here you
have sands—a little muddy perhaps, but eminently safe. It would be
possible to get drowned only after superhuman exertions in finding a
sufficient depth of water; unless indeed one wandered off in the
direction of the Brue estuary in one direction or the lonely shores of
Berrow in the other; where it is easily possible to be drowned in the
swiftest and most effectual manner; as demonstrated every summer by a
few rash and unfortunate bathers, who generally prove, strange to say,
to be local folk, presumably well informed of the risks they run—and
foolishly contemptuous of them.
Highbridge is not a pleasure resort. Not even a Sunday School manager
would fall into that error. It was once (but a time long enough ago) a
place inoffensive enough; a hamlet of no particular character, good or
ill, beside the river Brue, and taking its name from the original
humpbacked bridge that here spanned the stream; built in that manner for
the purpose of allowing masted barges and other craft to pass under.
That was Highbridge. Nowadays, the old bridge is replaced by a modern
flat iron affair, and there are railway sidings and docks, and great
sluice-gates to the river Brue. Here, too, are the engine shops and
works of the Somerset and Dorset Railway, with a large and offensive,
and exceptionally blackguardly, colony of railway men, Radicals and
Socialists to a man, and not content with holding their own views, but
insistent upon imposing them upon their neighbours at election-times,
with threats and violence. There are railwaymen _and_ railwaymen, but
the country in general has, as yet, little comprehension of their
essentially disaffected, selfish, and dangerous character, as a body:
the more dangerous in that they have largely in their power the
communications of the land. We shall hear more of them some day not far
distant, and governments will be obliged to give them a sharp lesson in
social discipline.
But enough of Highbridge and its forlorn, abject houses, and its paltry
modern church with red and black tiled spire, apparently designed by
some infantile architect. Let us return to Burnham, and contemplate the
crowded promenade there.
Weston we have seen to be a children’s paradise; but there they are
largely mingled with “grownups.” Here they predominate, and the vast
sand-flats, that at low tide stretch out more or less oozily and muddily
as you advance, some four miles, are converted for a goodly distance
from the promenade wall into a manufactory of sand-castles and mud-pies.
The Burnham donkeys must feel a blessed relief when the season is over,
for they are in great request for rides, even so far as the
straddle-legged lighthouse that stands on iron posts to the north of the
town; yea, and even unto the sandhills—or “tots,” as the local tongue
hath it—of Berrow.
All the eastern ports of the Somerset coast are severely afflicted by
“trippers,” who descend in their thousands upon Clevedon,
Weston-super-Mare, and Burnham, not to mention the neighbouring
villages. Truth to tell, they are effusively welcomed at these places,
at any rate by the refreshment caterers and the proprietors of
swing-boats, donkeys, sailing and rowing-boats, and by the “pierrots”;
but the rest of the community resent the presence of these hordes of
half-day holiday makers, and act the superior person towards them. Yet,
when you hear, at any of these resorts, visitors, obviously present on
sixteen days’ excursion-trip tickets, speaking disparagingly of
“trippers,” you wonder really what constitutes such an one. What is that
time-limit within which a holiday-maker becomes a mere “tripper,” and
when does he become enlarged as one of the elect, who do not trip, but
make holiday?
The definition of a tripper, in these parts, is a person who comes
across the Bristol Channel from Barry, Cardiff, Swansea, or any other of
the South Wales ports, for half a day, and “brings his nosebag with
him”; or, if it be a family party of trippers, a family handbag with
provisions; including a bottle of beer for mother and father, and milk
for the children. Thousands of these family parties came over by cheap
steamboat excursions on most fine days in summer, and may be observed on
the sea-front at Weston and other favoured resorts, where they are apt
to leave an offensive residuum of their feasts behind them, in the shape
of greasy paper and pieces of fat, as often as not upon the public
seats. Those are the trippers.
The unfortunate person who, clad perhaps in a light summer suit (“Gent’s
West-End lounge suit. This style 25_s._”), has unwittingly sat upon a
piece of ham-fat left behind by one of these gay irresponsibles, hates
the tripper thereafter with a baleful intensity. Can we blame him that
he does so? But this is only one of that half-day excursionist’s deadly
sins, of which the fact that he brings merely his presence and his
nosebag—and little money—into the places he favours is one of the
deadliest. Another is the circumstance that he is a Welshman. The
Somerset folk do not like the Welsh, who are alien from them in every
possible way, and it is quite certain that the South Wales colliers and
dockers are not a favourable or pleasing type. Thus triply—financially,
racially and socially—the trippers from across the Severn Sea are not a
success.
It is all very lively at Burnham, and there is a bandstand, and there
are lodging-houses and boarding-houses innumerable, and teashops, and a
“park” about the area of a moderate-sized private garden. No tramways
have yet appeared at Burnham, but it is possible to travel
expeditiously, if involuntarily and not altogether safely, and quite
freely—on the banana-skins that plentifully bestrew the streets. But
this form of locomotion is not altogether popular.
There is much motor-boating in these latter days off Burnham, and by
favour of such a craft, or by sailing-skiff, or the comparatively
tedious method of rowing, you may visit Steart Island, off the mouths of
the Brue and Parret. But there are no attractions on that flat isle,
swimming in surrounding ooze, except at such times as winter, when the
wild-fowl congregate greatly there, in the mistaken notion that they are
safe from the sportsman.
In midst of the long line of houses that closely front upon the sea,
stands the ancient parish church of Burnham; considerably below the
level of the street. The traveller who has come from Brean and Berrow
will at once perceive that this street and this roadway are founded upon
the blown sand that has placed Brean church in a similar hollow.
Here, at Burnham, the church-tower, of three storeys, leans as many
times, this way and that, and has apparently been long in this
condition, having been left so at the restoration of 1887. In the
chancel remains a portion of a huge white marble altar-piece designed by
Inigo Jones for the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, and subsequently erected in
Westminster Abbey by Sir Christopher Wren. At the coronation of George
IV. it was removed and placed here by Dr. King, Canon of Westminster and
vicar of Burnham; and singularly cumbrous and out of place it looks
still, even though parts of it have been removed, to afford much-needed
room.
Leaving Burnham behind, and then Highbridge, we come to Huntspill Level,
with the square, massive tower of Huntspill church prominent against the
skyline, on the right hand. The road, worn into saucer-shaped holes by
excess of motor-traffic, goes straight and flat across the Level, with
pollard willows and stagnant, duck-weedy ditches on either side, and so
through the wayside hamlet of West Huntspill: a naturally slovenly,
out-at-elbows place, not improved by being nowadays thickly coated with
motor-dust.
[Illustration: HUNTSPILL.]
And so to Pawlett (locally “Pollitt”) consisting of an old church and
half-a-dozen houses on a slight knoll, overlooking miles of flat
pasturelands, said to be the very richest in Somerset. Proceeding in the
direction of Bridgwater, the Sedgemoor Drain, chief of the many cuts,
large and small, that prevent the moor from being inundated, is crossed
at the point where it falls into the river Parret. Here is the level
expanse known as Horsey Slime. It is not a pretty name. Dunball
railway-station stands on the left, and the distance in that direction
is closed by the Polden Hills, crowned by a ready-made ruined castle,
built some sixty years ago, yet looking perfectly romantic and baronial,
so long as this distressing fact of its appalling modernity is not
disclosed. Over those strangers and pilgrims from far lands who, landing
at Plymouth, and travelling to Paddington per Great Western Railway for
the first time, catch a momentary glimpse of this fictitious fortalice,
before the engine dashes with a demoniac yelp into the Dunball Tunnel,
there comes a feeling that they have at last entered a region of
romance. They have indeed, but not in respect of _that_ castle, at any
rate. It is painful to be confronted with the necessity for such a
revelation, but the honest topographer sees his duty plain before
him—and does it, no matter the cost!
In the levels beneath the hills crowned by this sham castle lies
Bawdrip, a village of the very smallest and most retiring agricultural
type, with a little Early English cruciform church, remarkable for the
finely sculptured female heads and headdresses of wimple and coif on the
capitals of the four pillars supporting the central tower. Restoration
has left the building particularly neat and tidy and singularly bare of
monuments. Bawdrip church, however, contains a monumental inscription
which includes a mysterious allusion that has never yet been properly
explained; and probably never will be. The small black marble slab
setting forth this inscription in the ornate Latinity of the seventeenth
century might well escape the scrutiny of the keenest antiquary, for it
is built into the wall in a most unusual situation, behind the altar. It
is a comprehensive epitaph to Edward and Eleanor Lovell and their two
daughters, Eleanor and Mary, erected here to their memory by the husband
of the daughter Eleanor, who, singularly enough, omits his own name.
Done into English, it runs as follows:
“Edward Lovell married Eleanor Bradford, by whom he had two daughters,
Eleanor and Mary. Both parents were sprung from Batcombe, in this County
of Somerset, from a noble family, and reflected no less honour on their
ancestry than they received from it. Eleanor, a most devoted mother, as
well as a most faithful wife, exchanged this life for the heavenly,
April 20, 1666. Mary followed her, a most obedient daughter, and a
maiden of notable promise, May 11, 1675. Edward, the father, M.A. and
Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, also Rector of this Church for
fourteen years, a most praiseworthy man, received the reward of his
learning, September 1, 1671. Lastly Eleanor, the daughter, heiress of
the family honour and estate, died June 14, 1681. Her most sorrowing
husband mourned her, taken away by a sudden and untimely fate at the
very time of the marriage celebration, and to the honour and holy memory
of her parents, her sisters, and his most amiable wife, wished this
monument to be put up.”
Tradition associates the sudden death of the bride with the story of
“The Mistletoe Bough,” made popular many years ago by Haynes Bayley’s
woeful song of that name, worked up by him from ancient legends current
in many parts of the country. The legend he versified was that of the
fair young bride of one “Lovel,” apparently the son of a mediæval Baron,
who, playing hide-and-seek in the revels of her wedding-day, hid in an
ancient chest, and was imprisoned there by a spring lock. That it was at
Christmas-time we are assured by Haynes Bayley’s verses, which tell us
that:
The Baron’s retainers were blithe and gay,
Keeping their Christmas holiday.
Unavailing search was made for the missing bride:
And young Lovel cried, O! where dost thou hide?
I’m lonely without thee, my own dear bride.
The spring lock that lay in ambush in the old chest imprisoned her there
securely, and her body was not discovered in the life of Lovel. To quote
again from Haynes Bayley:
At length an old chest that had long lain hid
Was found in the castle—they raised the lid;
A skeleton form lay mouldering there,
In the bridal wreath of that lady fair.
Oh! sad was her fate! In sportive jest
She hid from her lord in that old oak chest.
It closed with a spring, and her bridal bloom
Lay withering there in a living tomb.
But who was the “Baron” and who “Lovel,” and where they resided, or when
they flourished we are not informed. Curiously enough, however, a
Viscount Lovel disappeared in something the same manner. This was that
Francis, Viscount Lovel, who fought _ex parte_ the impostor, Lambert
Simnel, at Stoke, and disappeared after the defeat of the pretender’s
cause on that day. His fate remained a mystery until 1708, when, in the
course of some works in the ruins of what had been his ancestral mansion
at Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire, a secret underground chamber was
discovered, in which was found the skeleton of a man identified with
him. It was thought that he had taken refuge there, in that locked room,
and was attended to by a retainer who, possibly, betrayed his trust and
left his master to starve; or who, perhaps, was himself slain in some
affray during those troubled times. The repetition of the name of Lovell
is at any rate curious.
Now across the levels rise the distant houses of Bridgwater town, and
the slim spire of its church. The long flat road, of undeviating
directness, points directly towards the place. Hedgerow and other trees
dispose themselves casually, without ordered plan, on either hand, and a
railway crosses the highway, diagonally, on a bridge and embankment. The
scene is absolutely negative and characterless: neither beautiful nor
absolutely ugly: the very realisation, one would say, of the
commonplace. As you proceed, a distant grouping of masts and spars
proclaims the fact of navigable water being near at hand, and then
groups of factory chimneys, smoking vigorously, loom up. These are the
most outstanding marks of Bridgwater’s only prominent manufacture: the
manufacture of “Bath bricks.” Every housewife knows what is meant by
“Bath brick.” With this article of commerce and domestic economy knives
are cleaned, brass fenders and candlesticks and coppers are scoured, and
much other metal-work brought to brightness. But it is not made at Bath.
At only one place in the world—and that Bridgwater—is the so-called
“Bath brick” brought into being: the reason of this monopoly of
manufacture lying in the fact that the material of which it is made is
found only here in the mud of the river Parret. But only in a stretch of
some three miles of that river’s course is found the peculiarly composed
mud of which this aid to domestic cleanliness is compacted. Equally
above and below the town, within those strictly-defined limits, the rise
and fall of the tide amalgamates the river mud, and the seashore sand in
just the right proportions for the scouring properties of “Bath brick.”
At a further distance above the town, the mud that renders the Parret’s
banks so unlovely becomes merely slime; while, as the sea is more nearly
approached, the proportion of sharp sand in it destroys the binding
character of the mud, and would render bricks made of the amalgam there
found very destructive to cutlery and other ware unfortunate enough to
be scoured by it.
Why these “bricks,” made only at Bridgwater, should be given the name of
“Bath,” and not that of the town where they originate, is a mystery at
this lapse of time not likely to be solved. The most plausible
explanation offered is that when these bricks were first made they were
stored and “handled,” as a commercial man might say, at Bath.
The mud from which the bricks are made is collected quite simply, but
ingeniously, in pens carefully constructed along the Parret’s banks.
These “slime-batches,” as they are named, are brick-built enclosures, so
arranged that the mud-charged tide flows into them at every flood, the
mud settling down during the interval of ebb. Thus with every recurring
tide a new deposit is added; the “batches” being filled in the course of
two or three months, according to the time of year. This accumulation,
grown hard in all this time, is dug out, generally in the winter, and
removed to the banks, whence it is taken as required to the pug-mills,
in which it is mixed with water and thus tempered to a putty-like
consistency. Then it is ready for the moulder, that is to say, the
actual brickmaker, who, after the identical fashion followed by the
moulder of ordinary bricks, takes his lumps of material, throws them
into a wooden framework made to the gauge of a brick, scrapes off the
surplus clay from the top and pushes the raw brick aside, as one of a
rapidly growing row. The rapidity with which a moulder does his work is
astonishing to the unaccustomed onlooker. A workman of average
excellence can thus shape four hundred bricks an hour.
The clammy slabs of clay thus formed are then taken by the “bearer-off”
and placed in the “hacks”—that is to say, long stands—with a slight tile
roofing, to dry. The tiled protection is to shield the unbaked bricks
from being partly dissolved by possible rainstorms.
The final operations are the stacking into kilns and the burning,
carried out precisely in the same manner as the burning of bricks to be
used in building.
The river Parret—in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle styled “Pedridan”—is in
other ways a river of considerable importance to North Somerset. Like
the Avon at Bristol, it runs out towards the sea in its last few miles
more like a deep and muddy gutter at low water than in the likeness of a
river; but the Parret mud, as we have already seen, is at least useful,
and a source of wealth to Bridgwater; and shipping of considerable
tonnage, bringing chiefly coals from South Wales, and deals from Norway,
comes up the estuary to Bridgwater’s quays.
The Parret is about thirty miles in length, rising some two miles within
the Dorset border, near South Perrot, which, together with the two
widely sundered small towns, or large villages, of North and South
Petherton, and perhaps the village of Puriton also, takes its name from
the river. In common with several other streams on either side of the
Bristol Channel—with, of course, the river Severn at their head—it is
subject to a tidal wave, known as “the Bore.” This is caused by the very
great ebb and flow of the tide, here so much as thirty-six feet at
springs. The flood tide comes up the deep and narrow estuary from the
outer channel with such swiftness, and is so laterally compressed that a
gradual rise is impossible and the water comes surging up as a great and
formidable wave, like a wall, from five to six feet in height. At such
times when westerly gales or spring tides prevail, the Bore easily rises
to nine feet in height. It is always an impressive spectacle, seen from
the river bank; and viewed from a boat, even when the craft is managed
by a boatman accustomed to this phenomenon, is more than a little
alarming. It sufficiently scared the French prisoners of war, confined
by the riverside in an old factory, known as the “Glass House” and
nowadays a pottery, from any serious attempts at escaping by water.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII
BRIDGWATER—ADMIRAL BLAKE—THE MONMOUTH REBELLION
THE ancient town of Bridgwater can now produce few evidences of its
antiquity. The siege of 1645, various conflagrations, and the very
considerable modern prosperity of the place have all been contributory
causes toward this—to the tourist—somewhat desolating result. The town
straddles on either side of the Parret, the hither side named
appropriately and inevitably “Eastover.” It is the less considerable and
important portion, the chief buildings of the place being on the left
bank of the river. A dull, undistinguished, heavy Georgian appearance
characterised the town until quite recently, but a great deal of
building activity has of late been manifested here, with results perhaps
as yet a little too recent for criticism. At any rate, the old
outstanding features remain; the large parish church, with curiously
squat tower and elongated spire, forming with the Corn Exchange and Town
Hall, the one striking group that alone stands in pictures recognisably
for Bridgwater.
A great deal of argument has been expended upon the name of Bridgwater.
The name is apparently of the most obvious and elementary derivation,
for here is the “water” (largely impregnated, it is true, with mud) in
the river Parret, and here is the bridge, the modern representative of
others of different degrees of antiquity, erected at the lowest place
down the estuary where it was possible to fling a bridge across. It is
evident, then, that it must ever have been impossible to enter or leave
the town in an easterly or westerly direction without crossing a bridge
or ferry at this point. Other place-names in the district, those of
Highbridge and Boroughbridge, for example, prove the word “bridge” to
have been used in the ordinary way, when necessary, as an integral, and
indeed scarcely avoidable, part of a name. Yet the derivation of
“Bridgwater” has nothing to do, explicitly, with water, although
“Brugge,” _i.e._ Bridge, the name of the place at the time of the
Conquest, certainly implies water beneath. The manor was given, after
the Conquest, to one of the Conqueror’s Norman barons, Walter of Douai,
and became therefrom known as “Brugie of Walter” and by degrees, by a
natural elision of letters readily dropped in ordinary speech, what it
is now.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF ADMIRAL BLAKE]
Of the Castle of Bridgwater, once a strong fortress, both by virtue of
its own stout walls, and by reason of the fine position it held at the
crossing of the Parret, nothing is left, except portions of the Water
Gate, on the West Quay, and the cellars of what is now the Custom House.
The last occasion of its appearance in history was the shameful
surrender of it to a besieging army under Fairfax, on July 23rd, 1645,
after a two days’ assault. It had been so generally considered
impregnable that the wealthy Royalists of the countryside, afraid for
the safety of their jewellery and other valuables, had sent them hither
from what they thought to be the insecurity of their own houses. Thus
the taking of the impregnable castle and the surrender of the invincible
garrison resulted in exceptionally heavy spoils, amounting to £100,000
value.
Bridgwater boasts one famous son; Robert Blake, the great Admiral, or
rather, General-at-Sea, of the Commonwealth, who taught foreign nations
in general, and the Dutch in particular, who wanted the lesson badly,
the respect due to England. His birthplace is still standing in this his
native town, in a quiet byway, where tall, staid eighteenth-century
merchants’ residences look down, as it were with a certain
condescension, upon the less imposing house in which the hero was first
introduced to a troubled world, in 1599. It is a comfortable, rather
than a stately, house; but it was built to last. It is the oldest house
now remaining in the town, and was probably built in the early years of
the sixteenth century, the interior disclosing a greater antiquity than
would be suspected from the frontage. Huge, roughly squared oak timbers
frame the walls and cross the ceilings with immense rafters. They had
been all carefully covered up some generations ago, and their existence
hidden by plaster and wall-papering; but recent repairs of the house
have resulted in all this honest construction being again disclosed; and
very noble, in the rugged old way, it looks. During the progress of
these repairs and alterations, the plaster on the walls of an upper room
was found to have been liberally scratched and otherwise drawn upon at a
period contemporary with Admiral Blake. Sketches of ships were prominent
among these rough _sgraffiti_: ships built and rigged in a manner
characteristic of the seventeenth century, and the words “Rex Carolus”
appeared among them. It was necessary, for the repair of the walls, to
cover up most of these sketches, but the best have been carefully
preserved.
Robert Blake’s father was a merchant, with more children (a round dozen
of them) than business. His mother came of an old landed family; the
Williamses of Planesfield. Robert himself was sent to Oxford and was in
residence there, chiefly at Wadham College, fifteen years, wishful of
becoming a Fellow, but finally balked of that ambition for an easeful
life. It is curious to contemplate that old possibility of this stout
man of war having ever become a cloistral butt of futile learning, of
the peculiar brand of futility affected by Oxford.
His father died, leaving but an insignificant sum to be divided among
his many children, and Robert, with strong Republican views, was
returned to Parliament for his native town of Bridgwater. Events were
moving rapidly towards Civil War, and in the outbreak of that momentous
struggle many men found at last their vocation. Among them was Blake,
whose great defence of Taunton town against the Royalist siege in 1645
was one of the most dogged and successful incidents of that time.
Encompassed by ten thousand men and his ammunition all shot away, food
exhausted, and a breach actually made in the walls and the enemy
swarming through it; still he would not yield, and declared he would eat
his boots first. Fortunately the rumour of Fairfax’s relieving army at
that moment spread among the besiegers, and the siege was raised, else
Blake would have had a full and an unappetising meal before him, as any
one who contemplates his statue here, and the great thigh-boots he is
wearing, may judge for himself.
At the establishment of the Commonwealth, Blake was given high command
at sea: a military man afloat as Admiral; a thing in our own highly
specialised times unthinkable. His complete success in that new
environment is a part of our history that need not be recounted here.
After many inconclusive duels with the Dutch, who, under Van Tromp,
disputed the sovereignty of the seas, and after brilliant services
abroad, Blake died while yet in what may be termed the prime of life, of
an intermittent fever, and probably also from an exhaustion induced by
old wounds, on board his flagship, off Plymouth, in 1657. With his death
disappeared one of the few entirely honest Republicans of that time: a
man that England could then ill spare, as the nation was to find but ten
years later, when the Dutch fully revenged themselves for former
reverses by their historic raid up the Medway and destruction of English
ships off Chatham.
After many years, Bridgwater has at last honoured itself and the memory
of this great man with a statue, placed prominently in front of the Corn
Exchange. He is represented in the military costume of the time, with a
short, wind-blown cloak flying from his shoulders, pointing into space.
It is a pose admirably chosen, and every line of this fine bronze figure
expresses the courage, zeal, and bull-dog determination characteristic
of the man. Bronze panels in relief on the plinth represent Blake’s
fleet off Portland, February 1653; the capture of Santa Cruz, April
20th, 1657; and Blake’s body brought into Plymouth Sound, August 7th,
1657. This appropriate couplet from Spenser is added:
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, doth greatly please.
Bridgwater church has its place in history, for it was from the
battlements of this tower that the ill-fated Monmouth looked forth upon
the plain of Sedgemoor, just before the battle that was to decide his
fortunes.
Nothing in the long story of the West so stirs the blood as the
incidents of the disastrous expedition captained by this handsome,
ambitious, and well-liked son of Charles II. It was a generous
enterprise—if at the same time not without its great personal reward, if
successful—to attempt the saving of England from the domination of
Popery that again threatened her; and it deserved a better conclusion
than that recorded by history.
[Illustration: BRIDGWATER: ST. MARY’S CHURCH, AND CORN EXCHANGE.]
It was three weeks after the landing of Monmouth at Lyme Regis, on the
coast of Dorset, that he arrived at Bridgwater. Three thousand men had
flocked to him on his landing, and by the time he had reached Taunton,
the enthusiasm was such that his forces were more than doubled, and
numbered seven thousand. But his was an undisciplined and untrained mob,
rather than an army, and a fiery religious fervour, ready to dare
anything for Protestantism, was an ill equipment with which to contend
against the trained troops of James the Second, hastening down to oppose
their march. This was essentially a popular rebellion, for the
influential gentry of the West, although ill-affected towards the
reactionary rule of King James and willing enough to end his reign,
hesitated to join, and by their cowardice lost the day. While they
timorously waited on events, the peasantry showed a bolder front, and
chiefly through their sturdy conduct, Monmouth’s advance through Dorset
and Somerset had been by no means without incident in the warlike sort.
His rustics, badly armed though they were, and largely with agricultural
implements instead of weapons of offence, gave with their billhooks,
their pikes, and scythes, an excellent account of themselves against the
Royalist regulars commanded by Lord Feversham in the hotly contested
skirmish at Norton St. Philip on June 26th.
It was, perhaps, in some measure the unaccustomed weapons used by
Monmouth’s countrymen that alarmed Feversham’s soldiers and gained that
day for the rebel Duke, for even men trained to arms lose much of their
courage when confronted with strange, even though, it may be, inferior
weapons. But it was still more the valour of the Somerset rustics that
won the day on that occasion for Faith and Freedom.
Had Monmouth followed up his advantage, the wavering sympathies of the
West of England gentry might have thrown fresh levies into the field for
his cause; but he retired upon the then defenceless town of Bridgwater,
and remained inactive.
[Illustration: WESTONZOYLAND.]
Now, there is nothing that more disheartens untrained men than a check
in their forward march. Countermarching to them appears but the
forerunner of defeat, and the flow of ardour in any cause once hindered
is difficult to recover. With regular troops the chances and changes
incidental to campaigning inure them to disappointments, and the retreat
of to-day they know often to be but the prelude of to-morrow’s advance.
But with Monmouth’s men, their leader’s plan once altered, their
fortunes seemed irretrievably clouded. Monmouth himself grew gloomy at
the delay the vacillations of himself and his lieutenants had caused,
and when on the afternoon of Sunday, July 5th, he ascended to this point
to reconnoitre the position his opponents had taken up in the midst of
the moor, his heart sank. He saw the glint of their arms, the colours of
the regiments drawn up beneath the shadow of the tall tower of
Westonzoyland, and he well knew that a conflict between them and his
brave, but untaught, peasants could only prove fatal to his ambitions.
He had, some years before, led those very soldiers to victory. “I know
those men,” said he to his officers, leaning over these parapets of St.
Mary’s; “they will fight!”
By a circuitous route, his army left the town of Bridgwater when night
was come and darkness had shrouded the moor. By narrow and rugged lanes
they went, past Chedzoy, towards the Polden Hills. Here they turned,
and, led by a guide, essayed to thread the maze of deep ditches called,
in the parlance of the West Country, “Rhines.”
It was not until two o’clock in the morning that they had reached within
striking distance of the Royal troops, crossing safely the Black Ditch,
and moving along the outer side of the Langmoor Rhine, in search of a
passage, when a pistol was fired, either by accident or treachery. “A
Dark night,” says one who was present, “and Thick Fogg covering the
Moore.” The darkness and the sudden alarm caused by the pistol-shot
threw Monmouth’s men into confusion, and the Royal forces were at the
same time aroused. The night attack had failed.
James II.’s troops challenged the masses of men they saw dimly advancing
through the mist, and were for a time deceived by the answering cry of
“Albemarle,” the name of the Royalist commander, who was supposed to be
coming to the support of Lord Feversham.
And thus the Monmouth men passed on to the Bussex Rhine, where they were
simultaneously challenged and fired upon by another outpost. Dismayed by
this volley at close quarters, the rebel horse, forming the advance,
broke and dashed wildly back into the stolid ranks of the peasantry. It
says much for the stubborn courage of those ploughmen and hedgers and
ditchers who formed the bulk of the Duke’s ranks, that in this confusion
they stood fast.
Then the fight began in earnest, chiefly hand-to-hand, beside the broad
and stagnant Rhine, in whose noisome mud many a stout fellow met his
death that night. It was not until day dawned across the moor that the
last band of rustic pikemen broke and fled before the King’s battalions,
pouring across the Bussex Rhine.
Hours before, under cover of the night, the rebel Duke had fled the spot
with Lord Grey and thirty horsemen. It had been a better thing had he
halted and been cut to pieces with his brave followers. His had then
been a nobler figure in history.
He had looked with the ill-disguised contempt of an old campaigner upon
his doomed rustics. Urged to make a last effort to support them, he said
bitterly: “All the world cannot stop those fellows; they will run
presently”—and ran himself. The shattered remnants of his raw ranks
poured confusedly into Bridgwater town, soon after daylight was come. At
first the townsfolk thought them but the wounded stragglers from a great
victory, and shouted, with caps flying in air, for “King Monmouth.” Then
the dreadful truth spread abroad from the lips of wounded and dying men,
and those who had cheered for the flying leader hid themselves, or fled
on their own account. Three thousand of the rebels lay slain upon the
field.
Swift and terrible was the punishment meted out to the unhappy victims
of Monmouth’s ill-starred rising. The moorland, the towns and villages
throughout the counties of Somerset and Dorset, were made ghastly with
the bodies and quarters of the rebels executed and hanged in gimmaces,
or fixed on posts by the entrances to the village churches; and the
shocking judicial progress of the infamous Judge Jeffreys, is aptly
commemorated in the popular name of the “Bloody Assize.” The Duke of
Monmouth, captured at Woodyates, was beheaded on Tower Hill, after an
abject appeal for mercy had been refused, on July 15th.
Lost causes always appeal to the imagination more eloquently than those
that have gained their objects, and the Monmouth Rebellion is no
exception. The enthusiasm aroused by the handsome presence and gallant
bearing of this gay and careless son of Charles II. and Lucy Walters,
still finds an echo in the West, in the sympathy felt for his tragic end
and for the temporary eclipse of the Protestant cause. This interest
lends itself to the whole of the level country behind Bridgwater, the
flat, dyke-intersected, alluvial plain of Sedgemoor. The Bussex Rhine,
one of the original dykes, has long since been filled up, and more
modern ditches cut for the better draining of the district; but the spot
where the battle was fought can still be exactly identified. It lies
half a mile to the north of Westonzoyland, whose rugged church tower
overlooks the greater part of the moor, topping the withies, the
poplars, and the apple-orchards of the village with grand effect. In
that stately church five hundred of the rebels were imprisoned before
trial. A little distance from the site of the Bussex Rhine is the
Langmoor Rhine, and, near by, Brentsfield Bridge, where the Duke’s men
crossed. The village people of Chedzoy still show the enquiring stranger
that stone in the church wall on which the pikes were sharpened before
the fight, and the plough even now occasionally turns up rusty
sword-hilts, bullets, and other eloquent memorials of that futile
struggle. But the silken banner, worked by the Fair Maids of Taunton,
where is it, with its proud motto, _Pro Religione et Libertate_? and
where the memorial that should mark this fatal field whereon so many
stalwart West-countrymen laid down their lives for their faith?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV
CANNINGTON—THE QUANTOCKS—NETHER STOWEY, AND THE COLERIDGE CIRCLE
WE leave Bridgwater by St. Mary’s church and the street called
curiously, “Penel Orlieu,” whose name derives from a combination of
Pynel Street and Orlewe Street, two thoroughfares that have long been
conjoined. “Pynel,” or “Penelle,” was the name of a bygone Bridgwater
family.
Up Wembdon Hill, we come out of the town by its only residential suburb.
Motor-cars have absolutely ruined this road out of Bridgwater, and on
through Cannington and Nether Stowey, to Minehead and Porlock. It is a
long succession of holes, interspersed with bumpy patches, and on
typical summer days the air is heavy with the dust raised by passing
cars; dust that has only begun to settle when another comes along,
generally at an illegal speed, and raises some more. The hedges and
wayside trees between Bridgwater and Nether Stowey are nowadays, from
this cause, a curious and woeful sight, and the village of Nether Stowey
itself is, for the same reason, made to wear a shameful draggletailed
appearance. The dust off the limestone road is of the whiteness of
flour, but looks, as it lies heavily on the foliage, singularly like
snow. The effect of a landscape heavily enshrouded in white, under an
intensely blue August sky, is unimaginably weird: as though the
unthinkable—a summer snowstorm—had occurred.
Cannington, whose name seems temptingly like that of
Kennington—Köningtun, the King’s town—in South London, especially as it
was once the property of Alfred the Great, is really the “Cantuctone,”
_i.e._ Quantock town, mentioned in Alfred’s will, in which, _inter
alia_, he gives the manor to his son Eadweard.
[Illustration: CANNINGTON.]
The village stands well above the Parret valley, and is described by
Leland as a “praty uplandische” place. A stream that wanders to this
side and that, and in its incertitude loses its way and distributes
itself in shallow pools and between gravelly banks, over a wide area, is
the traveller’s introduction to Cannington. Here a comparatively modern
bridge carries the dusty highway over the stream, leaving to
contemplative folk the original packhorse bridge by which in olden times
the water was crossed when floods rendered impracticable the usual
practice of fording it. The group formed by the tall red sandstone tower
of the church seen from here, amid the trees, with the long rambling
buildings of the “Anchor” inn below, and the packhorse bridge to the
left, is charming. The present writer said as much to the chauffeur of a
motorcar, halted here by the roadside. It seemed a favourable
opportunity for testing the attitude of such an one towards scenery and
these interesting vestiges of eld.
“Bridge, ain’t it?” he asked, jerking a dirty finger in that direction.
“Yes: that is the old packhorse bridge, in use before wheeled traffic
came much this way.”
“’Ow did they carry their ’eavy machinery, then?”
“Our ancestors had none.”
“Then what about the farm-waggons?”
“They went through the stream.”
“Kerridges too?”
“Yes, such as the carriages of those times were.”
“’Eavens,” said he, summing up; “what ’eathenish times to live in!” And
he proceeded with his work, which turned out, on closer inspection, to
be that of plentifully oiling the fore and aft identification-plates of
his car, to the end that the dust which so thickly covered the roads
should adhere to them and obscure alike the index-letters and the
numbers. He was obviously proposing to travel well up to legal limit.
The church is a noble example of the Perpendicular period, with an
ancient Court House adjoining, the property of the Roman Catholic Lord
Clifford of Chudleigh. It was made the home of a French Benedictine
sisterhood in 1807; and is now a Roman Catholic Industrial School for
boys. The tall, timeworn enclosing walls of its grounds form a prominent
feature of the village.
One of the monuments on the walls of the church, in the course of a
flatulent epitaph upon the virtues of various members of the Rogers
family, of early seventeenth-century date, indulges in a lamentable pun.
The subject under consideration is “Amy, daughter of Henry Rogers.”
“Shee,” we are told, “did Amy-able live.” Deplorable!
Cannington stands at the entrance to the Quantock country, that
delightful rural district of wooded hills and secluded combes which
remains very much the same as it was just over a century ago, when
Coleridge and his friends first made it known. The Quantock Hills run
for some twelve miles in a north-westerly direction, from Taunton to the
sea at West Quantoxhead; the high road from Bridgwater to Minehead
crossing the ridge of them at Quantoxhead. The highest point of this
range is Will’s Neck, midway, rising to 1262 feet. The capital of the
Quantock country, although by no means situated on or near the ridge, is
Nether Stowey. Behind that village rises the camp-crowned hill of
Danesborough, which, although not itself remarkably high, is so situated
that it commands an exceptionally fine panoramic view extending over the
flat lands that border the Parret estuary, and over the semicircular
sweep of Bridgwater Bay.
[Illustration: NETHER STOWEY; GAZEBO AT STOWEY COURT.]
Some wild humorist, surely, that was, who pretended to derive the name
of the Quantocks from a supposititious exclamation by Julius Cæsar, who
is supposed to have exclaimed, standing on the crest of Danesborough,
behind Nether Stowey, “_Quantum ad hoc!_” That is, “How much from here!”
in allusion to the view from that point. Serious persons, however, tell
us that the name is the Celtic “Cantoc” or “Gwantog;” _i.e._ “full of
combes.”
Peculiarly beautiful though the Quantock scenery is, it is probable that
the especially delicate beauty of it would never have attracted outside
attention, had it not been for the association during a brief space at
Nether Stowey of Coleridge and his friends. We will spare some time to
visit Nether Stowey, and see what manner of setting was that in which
the “Ancient Mariner” and other of Coleridge’s poetry was wrought.
The entrance to Stowey from the direction of Bridgwater is particularly
imposing. You come downhill, and then sharply round a bend to the right,
where a group of Scotch firs introduces Stowey Court and the adjoining
parish church: the view up the road towards the village made majestic
and old-world by another grouping of firs beyond the curious early
eighteenth-century gazebo that looks out in stately fashion from the
garden wall of the Court. From this, and from similar summerhouse-like
buildings, our great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers glanced from
their walled gardens upon the coaches and the road-traffic of a bygone
age. The roofs and gables, and the uppermost mullioned windows of the
Court are glimpsed over the tall walls.
Although Stowey Court dated originally from the fifteenth century, when
it was built by Touchet, Lord Audley, and although it formed an outpost
of the Royalists during the struggles of Charles the First with his
Parliament, the building is not nowadays of much interest, and the
church is of less, having been rebuilt in 1851, with the exception of
the tower.
The romantic promise of this prelude to Stowey is scarcely supported by
the appearance of the village street. It is a long street of houses for
the most part of suburban appearance, running along the main road, with
a fork at the further end, along the road to Taunton, where stands a
modern Jubilee clock-tower beside the old village lock-up. The
clock-tower seems to most people a poor exchange for the small but
picturesque old market-house that until comparatively recent years stood
in the middle of the street, with a streamlet running by.
To Leland, writing in the reign of Henry the Eighth, Stowey was “a poore
village. It stondith yn a Botom emong Hilles.” The situation is
correctly described, and no doubt the condition of Stowey was all that
Leland says of it, but no one could nowadays describe it truthfully as
“poor,” although it would be altogether correct to write it down as
desperately commonplace. There is nothing poetic about the village at
this time o’ day, and its position on a much-travelled main road has
brought a constant stream of fast-travelling motor-cars and waggons,
together with a frequent service of Great Western Railway
motor-omnibuses, with the result that a loathsome mingled odour of
petrol and fried lubricating oil and a choking dust pervade the long
street all the summer. The local hatred of motor-cars—a deep-seated and
intense detestation of them and those who drive them and travel in
them—is, perhaps, surprising to a mere passer-by, who may just mention
the subject to a villager; but it is only necessary to stay a day and a
night in Stowey, and then enough will be seen and heard and smelt to
convert the most mild-mannered person to an equal hatred.
They are naturally tolerant people at Stowey, and not disposed to be
censorious. If you do not interfere with their comfort and well-being,
you are welcome to exist on the face of the earth, as far as they are
concerned, and joy go with you. They even tolerate the notorious
Agapemoneites of Spaxton, two miles away, the dwellers in the Abode of
Love; and are prepared, without active resentment, to allow the Rev.
Hugh Smyth-Pigott to style himself Jesus Christ and to cohabit with any
lady—or any number of ladies—he pleases, and to style the resultant
offspring Power, or Glory, or Catawampus, or Fried Fish, or anything
that may seem good to him, with no more than a little mild amusement.
“They doan’ intervere wi’ we, and us woan’ intervere wi’ they,” is the
village consensus of expressed opinion, greatly to the wrath of certain
good Bridgwater folk, who come around, raving that the Agapemoneites
ought to be swept off the fair land of the Quantocks, and when none will
take on the office of broom, denounce all as Laodiceans, neither hot nor
cold, and so fit only to be spewed out. But it surely rests rather with
Spaxton and Charlinch to perform the suggested expulsion; and even then,
anything of the kind would be distinctly illegal, for it is part of the
law of this free and enlightened and Christian country that any man may,
if it pleases him to do so (and he can find others of the opposite sex
to join him), set up a harem, and even proclaim himself the Messiah,
without let or hindrance. The law no more regards him as a fit target
for soot, flour, or antique eggs, or even for tar and feathers, than a
respectable person.
The “Abode of Love,” founded in 1845 by the notorious “Brother Prince,”
a scoundrelly clergyman who appears never to have been unfrocked, is a
mansion maintained in the most luxurious style, but completely secluded
from the highway, upon which it fronts, by substantial walls. In the
time of “Brother Prince,” the flagstaff surmounting the strong,
iron-studded gateway, and supported by the effigy of a rampant lion, was
made to fly a flag bearing the Holy Lamb, but this practice appears to
be now discontinued.
Many inquisitive people nowadays visit Spaxton to view the exterior of
the place where these notorious blasphemers live. None find entrance,
for recent happenings have made the inmates extremely shy of strangers.
It is notorious that a raid was made upon the place one night towards
the close of 1908, and that Pigott, the successor of Brother Prince,
narrowly escaped being tarred and feathered by some adventurous spirits,
who came down from London and, chartering a motor-car, drove up from
Bridgwater to the Abode. Climbing the walls, they “bonneted,” with a
policeman’s helmet filled with tarred feathers, the first man they met.
This, however, proved to be only an elderly disciple, and not Pigott
himself; and the intruders found themselves presently in custody, and
were next day brought before the magistrates at Bridgwater, and both
fined and severely reprimanded. The magistrates were bound to observe
the law and to punish an assault; but the attempted tarring and
feathering aroused a great deal of enthusiasm at Bridgwater, where the
only regret expressed was that it had not been successful.
No one can complain that clerical opinion in that town is not freely
ventilated. Here is an extract from a sermon preached by the vicar of
St. Mary’s:
“Near to our town for some years past, alas, has sprung up one of the
most unhappy and miserable heresies that the world can show. Of course
there have been heresies very brilliant and very beautiful. But here is
a heresy foul, horrible, and bad, and a heresy with not one single
redeeming point in it. A few years ago the head of this movement, now
living in the little village under the shelter of the beautiful
Quantocks, made public proclamation in London that he was the very Lord
Jesus Christ, and that he should judge the world. This man escaped at
the risk of his neck—for however lethargic some people might be, these
Londoners were not—to the quiet of the country. Here the old heresy,
with a new name and with new horrible details, came into prominence
again. It had quietly settled down, and men hoped that it would have
died out, but the events of the past six months have revived it all
again. None can pretend to be ignorant of what has happened, and none
could pretend to be ignorant of the awful and blasphemous claims that
have been made in the name of a wretched child born into a wretched
world.”
But although Nether Stowey is tolerant of all these things, it is not
calm when motor-cars are under discussion. It would raise licences to
£50 per annum, reduce speed to ten miles an hour on the open roads and
three miles in villages and towns, and both heavily fine and award long
terms of imprisonment to any who transgressed these suggested limits.
Also, Nether Stowey suggests the reintroduction of turnpike-gates; or,
to speak by the card, “tarnpayke-geäts.” By all this, it will be
perceived that automobiles have become a nuisance, a terror, and a
source of injury to Nether Stowey; as they have to countless other
villages similarly circumstanced.
_THE MOTOR TERROR_
Upon the pleasant country road
The motor-lorry runs;
Its build is huge and clumsy, and
It weighs some seven tons.
And when its cylinder backfires,
It sounds like gatling-guns!
Hark! down the village street there comes
The motor “charry bong”:
And, gracious heavens! how it hums!
’Tis tall, and broad, and long;
And see its mountain-range of seats,
Filled with a motley throng.
Old Giles, who hobbled down our street,
Now he’s in—Paradise.
A Panhard took him in the rear,
And shattered both his thighs,
They gave the chauffeur “three months’ hard”
When tried at next Assize.
The motor-bus, with skid and lurch
And awkward equipoise,
Now fleets on Sundays past the church,
With hideous whirr and noise.
You cannot hear the parson preach;
It drowns the organ’s voice.
And children from the Sunday School
Hang on behind, before
Our little Billy lost his hold:
Now he’s (alas!) no more!
They rolled him pretty flat. His soul’s
Gone to the Distant Shore.
Racing, toot-tooting, slithering,
The private owner goes;
The dust he raises fills the eyes,
His petrol-reek the nose;
His face he hides behind a mask:
He wears the weirdest clothes.
Now thanks to thee, thou callous fiend,
For the lesson thou hast taught:
Thus hast thou shown us how our lives
And comfort are as naught,
So you may, reckless, go your way
And take your murd’ring sport!
[Illustration: THE COLERIDGE COTTAGE, NETHER STOWEY]
The cottage at Nether Stowey occupied by Coleridge, from 1797 to 1800,
stands at the further end of the village, and is, indeed, the last house
on the Minehead road. It duly bears an ornamental tablet proclaiming the
fact of the poet’s residence here in those critical years. Sentiment,
however, is not a little dashed at finding the house to be an extremely
commonplace one; now, owing to a succession of alterations, enlarged and
made to look like an exceedingly unattractive specimen of a typical
suburban “villa” of the first half of the nineteenth century, when
stucco was rampant and red brick had not come into vogue. A scheme
appears at the present time to be under contemplation by which the house
is to be purchased and presented to the nation, as a memorial of the
poet. It is to become something in the way of a “Coleridge Reading
Room,” or Village Institute; but at the moment of writing, it is a
lodging-house. A few years ago it was the “Coleridge Cottage” inn. Such
have been the varied fortunes of this home, for those short four years,
of “the bright-eyed Mariner,” as Wordsworth calls him. When it is
further said that a storey has been added to the house, and that the
thatch of Coleridge’s time has been replaced by pantiles, it will be
considered, perhaps, that the value of it as a literary landmark can be
but small. Coleridge himself had no love for it, as may be seen in his
later references to Nether Stowey, in which he refers to it as a
“miserable cottage,” and “the old hovel.” But the years he passed in
this place were the most productive of his career. It was while walking
along the hills to Watchet, that he composed “The Ancient Mariner” and
the first part of “Christabel.” Close at hand, at Alfoxden, was
Wordsworth, poetising on primroses and the infinitely trivial; and at
Stowey itself was the amiable Thomas Poole, literary and political
dilettante, friend and host of this circle in general. Southey sometimes
came, and friends with visionary schemes for the regeneration of the
social system, then in some danger of being overturned, following upon
the popular upheaval of the French Revolution, severely exercised the
conventional minds of the local squires and farmers with their
unconventional ways and rash speech.
The habits of these friends, accustomed to discuss and severely
criticise the doings of the Government, often to dress in a peculiar
manner, and to take long, apparently aimless walks in lonely places, no
matter what the weather, when honest country folk were cosily within
doors, or asleep and snoring, presently attracted the notice of the
neighbours, to the extent that whispers of those suspicious doings and
this wild talk were conveyed to the local magistrates, and the
Government eventually thought it worth while to send down an emissary to
keep a watch. The spy chanced to be a person with a long nose. He
readily enough tracked their movements along the hills and dales of
Quantock, and overheard much of their talk: probably because the friends
knew perfectly well that they were under suspicion and were being
watched, and were humorously inclined to make the spy’s eavesdropping as
fruitful as they could of incident. Prominent among their jokes was the
discussion, in his hearing, of Spinosa: that philosopher’s name being
pronounced for the occasion “Spynosa.” This the long-nosed one took to
be an allusion to himself. Coleridge, he reported to his employers to be
“a crack-brained talking fellow; but that Wordsworth is either a
smuggler or a traitor, and means mischief. He never speaks to any one,
haunts lonely places, walks by moonlight, and is always ‘booing’ about
by himself.” The curious notion of the amiable Wordsworth being
mischievous is distinctly entertaining.
[Illustration: NETHER STOWEY.]
The friends were generally gay and light-hearted, in spite of
philosophising upon ways and means of setting the world right by moral
suasion; and picnics punctuated the summer days. One of these, at
Alfoxden, has attained a certain fame. There were present on this
occasion: Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Cottle; the
good-natured, providential Cottle, friend in need of literary babes and
sucklings. The provisions consisted of brandy, bread-and-cheese, and
lettuces. Coleridge, in his clumsy way, broke the precious
brandy-bottle, the salt was spilled, a tramp stole the cheese, and so
all that remained was bread and lettuces.
The “Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth,” the poet’s sister and companion at
Alfoxden and elsewhere, have been published, but it cannot be said that
they add greatly to one’s intellectual appreciation of the society
formed by these friends, nor do they impress the reader with the mental
powers of the lady, or with her knowledge of country life. Here and
there are such passages as “saw a glow-worm,” or “heard the
nightingale;” as though such sights and sounds were things remarkable in
the Quantocks. To have been deaf to the nightingale in his season, or
not to have noticed the glow-worm’s glimmer: those would have been
incidents of an evening’s walk much better worth remarking for their
singularity in these still unspoiled hills.
But let us have a few specimen days from Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary, to
taste her quality. March 1798, for example, will serve:
“28th.—Hung out the linen.”
“29th.—Coleridge dined with us.”
“30th.—Walked I know not where.”
“31st.—Walked.”
And then “April 1st. Walked by moonlight.” What utter drivel and
self-confessed inanity; exasperating in its baldness, when an account of
what Coleridge said on the occasion of his driving with them would have
given us reading the world would now probably be glad enough to possess!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV
STEART—STOGURSEY—THE FOLK-SPEECH OF ZUMMERZET—GLATT-HUNTING AT KILVE—ST.
AUDRIES
TO touch the coast on the left-hand of the Parret estuary is to
adventure into a little-visited land. But although the way is long—the
distance is six miles to Steart Point—the road is sufficiently easy,
being downhill from Cannington to Cannington Park, scene of the battle
of Cynuit, and to Otterhampton; and then flat for the remaining four
miles. At Otterhampton, a village of a few farms and cottages, the
church contains a memorial to a former rector, the Rev. Dr. Jeffery, who
held the living for no fewer than sixty-seven years, from 1804 to 1871.
The river bends abruptly and nears the road at a point a mile and a half
out, where the little waterside hamlet of Combwich—“Cummidge,” as it is
styled locally—stands looking on to muddy creeks and the broad grey
bosom of the Parret itself, with a colour like that of a London fog.
Bridgwater spire is plainly visible, far off to the right, across the
levels: sailing barges are loading the bricks made here from the kilns
close at hand, and carts rattle and rumble along the few narrow alleys
that form the only streets of the place. Away across the river, a
whitewashed house marks the position of a little-used ferry from the
out-of-the-world district of Pawlett Hams to this even more outlandish
peninsula of Steart.
Steart Point thrusts out a long tongue of land over against Burnham,
whose houses and tall white lighthouse seem so near across the levels,
yet are almost two miles distant, over the rivermouth and the mud-flats.
The name of “Steart” has come down to us little altered from Anglo-Saxon
times, an “a” replacing the “o” with which it appears to have originally
been spelled. It is the same name as that of the Start in South Devon,
and signifies a boldly projecting neck of land, “starting” out to sea.
Otherwise there is no likeness between that Devonian promontory of
cruel, black jagged rocks and this flat, muddy and shingly fillet of
land.
The fisher village of Steart is a singular place: a fishing village
without boats! The shrimps, eels and flounders usually caught here are
taken in nets set by the men of Steart going down to the sea at low
water on “mud-horses.” Everything is conditioned here by the deep mud of
the foreshore, which may only be crossed by special appliances, evolved
locally. Chief among these is the “mud-horse,” which, it may at once be
guessed, is no zoological freak. If it is related to anything else on
earth, it may perhaps be set down as a hybrid production: a cross
between a towel-horse and a toboggan sledge.
When the fishermen of Steart prepare to go forth a-fishing, they proceed
to undress themselves to the extent of taking off their trousers and
putting on a cut-down pair, very little larger than bathing-drawers.
Mud-boots clothe their feet. Then they bring down their wooden “horses,”
and, leaning against the upright breast-high framework, give a vigorous
push, and so go slithering along the buttery surface of the flats; the
nearest approach to that fabulous body of cavalry, the “Horse Marines,”
any one is ever likely to see:
There was an old fellow of Steart,
Who went catching eels in the dirt.
When they asked “Any luck?”—
“Up to eyes in the muck!”
Said that rueful old fellow of Steart.
The traveller has to pass the little church and scattered cottages of
Otterhampton on the way to Steart; and on the return, if he wishes to
keep near the coast, he comes through Stockland Bristol, a pretty rustic
village, with prosperous-looking manor-house and an entirely modern
church. Beyond it are Upper Cock and Lower Cock farms, that take their
names from a tumulus down in the levels near the estuary known as
“Ubberlowe.”
“Upper Cock,” in its original form, was “Hubba Cock”; “Cock” signifying
a heap, and comparing with “haycock.” “Ubbalowe” is properly
“Hubbalowe,” _i.e._ “Hubba’s heap,” both names pointing to the
probability that here was buried the chieftain Hubba, who, as we have
already seen, fell at Cynuit.
From this point a succession of winding lanes leads down again to the
curving shore of Bridgwater Bay at Stolford. Here meadows, a farmstead
with well-filled rickyards, and a compound heavily walled and buttressed
against flooding from the salt marshes, border upon a raised beach of
very large blue-grey stones, which replaces the mud that gathers round
the Parret estuary. Here at low spring tides traces may yet be found of
the submarine forest off-shore. A sample of the foreshore taken at
Stolford usually suffices explorers, and fully satisfies their
curiosity; for the clattering loose stones of the heaped-up beach form
an extremely tiring exercise-ground.
[Illustration: THE “MUD HORSE.”]
These level lands of highly productive meadows, lying out of the beaten
track, below the greatly frequented high road that runs out of
Bridgwater to Nether Stowey, and so on along the ridge to Holford and
West Quantoxhead, are much more extensive than a casual glance at the
map would convey. They are at one point over five miles across. The
centre of this district is Stogursey, which is, as it were, a kind of
capital, if a large agricultural village may be thus dignified.
Stogursey is a considerable village, taking the second half of its name
from the de Courcy family, who once owned it, but the thick speech of
Somerset rendered the place-name into “Stogursey” so long ago that even
maps have adopted the debased form; some, however, inserting a small
(Stoke Courcy) in brackets, under the generally accepted form. The
visitor will at the same time notice, in the title of the local parish
magazine, that efforts are being made by the clergy to restore the
original name. The church was built by those old Norman lords, but the
family died out so very long ago, that no memorials of them remain in
it; and the net result of all their ancient state and glory is—a name!
It is a large and fine church, in the Norman and Transitional Norman
styles; consisting of a large and lofty nave without aisles, a central
tower, north and south transepts, and deep chancel. The clustered shafts
supporting the central tower have elaborately sculptured Norman capitals
of a distinctly Byzantine character. A variant of the place-name is seen
on a monument to one Peregrine Palmer, where it appears as “Stoke
Curcy.” The Palmer family is seen, on another monument, revelling in a
pun beneath the Palmer coat of arms: in this wise, “Palma virtuti.”
[Illustration: STOLFORD.]
But the Verney aisle of this beautiful church contains more interesting
memorials than those of Palmers; notably two altar-tombs with effigies
of the Verneys of Fairfield. The earliest is that of Sir Ralph Verney,
1352. The other, that of Sir John Verney, who died in 1461, is of very
beautiful workmanship, and displays, among other shields of arms, the
punning device of the family: three ferns—“verns,” as a rural Somerset
man would say, in that famous “Zummerzet” doric that is not yet wholly
extinct.
No one could justly declare the village of Stogursey to be picturesque.
Nor is it ugly; but at the radiant close of some summer day, when an
afterglow remains in the sky, the village takes a beautiful colouring
that cries aloud for the efforts of some competent watercolourist. It is
an effect, as you look eastward down the long broad village street to
the church, standing in a low situation at the end, of a rich
red-yellow, like that of a ripening cornfield, on houses, cottages, and
church alike, with the lead-sheathed spire gleaming like oxidised silver
against the chilly blue-grey of the eastern sky at evening, spangled
already, before the sun has finally gone to bed, with the cold,
unimpassioned twinkle of the stars. Daylight heavily discounts this
romantic effect, for then you perceive that the lovely hue on the
church-tower at evening was the dying sunset’s transfiguration of the
yellow plaster with which the tower was faced at some time in the
Georgian period.
But Stogursey has a castle, or the remains of one, styled by villagers
“the Bailey.” The stranger looks in vain for it in the village street.
Stogursey Castle stands in a meadow, surrounded by a stream which in the
olden days was made, not only to form the moat, but to turn the wheels
of the Castle mill. The mill-leat still runs on one side of the lane
branching from the main village street; a lane now smelling violently of
tanneries, and lined with cottages of a decrepit “has been” character;
for it should be said that Stogursey is a decaying place. Changes in
method of agriculture; changes in methods of communication, making for
swifter and cheaper import of corn and other products of the soil;
changes, in fact, in everything have all conspired to injuriously affect
the place. The few remaining local shops do not look prosperous, and the
village is full of private houses whose windows clearly show them to
have once been shops, that gave up the pretence of business long ago.
These bay-windowed, many-paned shop-fronts retired from business are
familiar all over rural England. The villagers generally turn them to
account as conservatories for geraniums and other flowers, and a
pleasant sight, treated in this way, they often are. But there is a
future for the Stogursey district; if not for the shopkeepers, certainly
for the farmers. No light railway yet serves it, but the need of such an
enterprise is great; and when it comes it will effect great changes in
local fortunes.
[Illustration: STOGURSEY CASTLE.]
“Stoke,” as it was styled originally, is a place of greater antiquity
than any neighbouring village, as its name would imply; indicating as it
does a stockaded post in a wild and dangerous district innocent of
settled houses.
That post was probably on the site of the castle whose scanty ruins
remain. The de Courcy castle was destroyed as early as the time of King
John, when it passed by the second marriage of Alice de Courcy to one
Fulke de Breauté, who set up here as a robber lord, and issued from this
stronghold from time to time for the purpose of levying involuntary
contributions from all who passed to and fro on the highway yonder, from
Bridgwater to Quantoxhead. His castle can never have been strong, for
its situation forbade strength, but the district was remote and little
known, and people who were plundered on the ridgeway road had little
inducement to plunge down here after this forceful taker of secular
tithes. But de Breauté’s proceedings at length grew so scandalous that a
strong force was sent at the instance of Hubert de Burgh, Chief
Justiciar of the realm, and this thieves’ kitchen was burnt and more or
less levelled with the ground. The subsequent history of the castle is
vague, but it would appear to have been at some time rebuilt, for it was
again, and finally, destroyed in 1455. A glance at the remains will show
that it could never have been seriously defended against any determined
attack. The moat, still in places filled with water, was deep as could
be made, for it was the only external defence. Fragments of curtain-wall
and portions of towers with loop-holes for arrows remain; and the
entrance-towers may yet be traced, although a modern cottage has been
built on to them, in all the incongruousness of red brick and rough-cast
plaster. Such is the modern economical way with the shattered walls of
this old robber’s hold. For the rest, the enclosure is a tangled mass of
undergrowth and ivy-clad ruins of walls, and the meadow without is
uneven with the ancient foundations of outworks that disappeared
centuries ago.
The roads leading back from Stogursey to the coast have a distressing
lack of signposts, and the district is for long distances without
habitations, so that the way to Lilstock may well be missed. That they
are fine roads for the cyclist, with never a motor-car about, is not
sufficient to recompense the explorer who cannot find his way. And
Lilstock—Little Stock originally; that is to say, some ancient small
coastwise stockaded fort—is, perhaps, not worth finding, after all; for
it appears to consist solely of a tin tabernacle, by way of church, and
a lonely cottage amid elms, at the end of everything; a veritable
dead-end. You climb to the lonely beach and have it all to yourself; the
grey sea lazily splashing amid the ooze and scattered boulders, and a
great empty sky above.
It is all the same beside the sea to Kilve, and rough walking too; the
rebuilt church of Kilton prominent inland, on the left; very modern, but
with a relic of a century ago in the shape of a battered old
barrel-organ with a set of mechanical psalm and hymn tunes, that used to
be ground out every Sunday to the long-suffering congregation, who must,
by dint of sheer damnable iteration, have come to loathe this unchanging
psalmody with a peculiar hatred.
We come now into the marches of West Somerset, where the folk-speech
still to some extent remains; but the famous broad “Zummerzet” speech of
these parts nowadays survives in its olden force only in the pages of
dialect novels. The dialect novel is a thing of convention, like the
dramatic stage, and is not necessarily a direct transcript from life. In
novels of rural life, in rustic plays, and in illustrated jokes in which
villagers appear, the countryman still wears a smock-frock and talks as
his great-grandfather was accustomed to talk. Frequently, too, he wears
a beaver hat, with a nap on it as luxuriant as the bristles of a
boot-brush; and he is made to smoke “churchwarden” clay pipes about a
yard long. Real rustics do not do these things nowadays. I only wish
they did; for then exploring in the byways would be much more
interesting. Nowadays, the unaccustomed Londoner can quite easily
understand anything a Somersetshire man, even of the most rustic type,
has to say.
This, however, is not to be taken as an assertion that all the old
characteristic words and phrases have died out, or that the accent is
altogether a thing of the past. The Somerset speech is really part and
parcel of that delightful West of England trick of the tongue which
still grows gradually more noticeable to the stranger as he progresses
westward. You will not notice this in any measure until you have passed
an imaginary line, which may be drawn from Oxford in the north, to
Southampton in the south, passing on the way such places as Wantage,
Newbury, Andover, and Winchester. Westward of this frontier-line, the
West of England, linguistically, commences. Somerset, by some
unexplained accident, was notoriously the home of the broadest speech;
but recent years have witnessed the singular phenomena (singular when
taken in conjunction) of Somerset folk-speech losing much of its
old-time character, and that of Devon, which had also largely fallen
into disuse, returning in almost its olden strength.
Much of this old manner of talking has been preserved in the
publications of the English Dialect Society, in which we find embedded,
among more stolid phrases, amusing scraps of rustic dialogues,
illustrating the local shibboleths. Here we have, for example, a rural
domestic quarrel, rendered in broad “Zummerzet.” It has not been thought
desirable to reproduce the somewhat pedantic inflection-marks given in
the Society’s publications, tending as they do towards the unnecessary
mystification of those who do not happen to be philologists. The
spelling has also been altered here and there, to bring it more into
line with the enunciation usually heard by the ordinary person.
The woman in this first specimen says, “Uneebaudee mud su waul bee u
tooüd uundur u aaruz bee u foauz tu leave saeumz aay bee, laung u dhee.
Tuz skandluz un sheemfeal aew aay bee zaard.”[3]
Footnote 3:
“Anybody might so well be a toad under a harrow as be forced to live
same as I be, long of thee. ’Tis scandalous and shameful how I be
served.”
To this pitiful complaint the husband answers, “U uumunz auvees zaard
wuul neef uur udn aat ubeawt, un dhee aart nuvvur aat ubeawt.”[4]
Footnote 4:
“A woman’s always served well if her isn’t hit about; and thee art
never hit about.”
Here is another example from the collection already quoted from:
“Taumee, haut bee yue aiteen on? Spaat ut aewt turaaklee!”
Perhaps the reader may be left to translate this. But how about the
following, spoken by a waggoner on a hot day? “Mudn maek zu boalz t’ax
vur koop u zaydur, aay spoüz? Aay zuuree aay bee dhaat druy, aay küdn
spaat zik-spuns.”[5]
Footnote 5:
“Mustn’t make so bold as to ask for a cup of cider, I suppose? I
assure you I be that dry, I couldn’t spit sixpence.”
Here again is some time-honoured “Zummerzet.” “Come, soce! Yur’s yur
jolly goed health. Drink ut oop tu onct!”
“Naw; daze muy ole buttonz neef aay due! Aay diddn nuvvur hold wi’
u-swillen of ut deown same uz thaet. Hurry no maen’s cattle tul ye’ve
got’n ass o’ yur aeown! Hurry, hurry; ’tuz this yur hurryen what tarns
everythen arsy-varsy vor me! Muy uymurz! what ood muy oal graanfer saay
tu th’ likes of ut? Wooden dh’oal maen laet aewt!”
[Illustration: KILVE CHURCH.]
Among the curious expressions found in this last speech, that of “soce”
is prominent. The word is a familiar expression in these parts. It is
used between equals, and is equivalent to “my boy,” “old chap,” etc.
Philologists generally consider it to be a survival from monastic times,
when itinerant monkish preachers are supposed to have been styled,
“socii,” _i.e._ “associates,” or “brethren,” or to have themselves used
the expression in addressing their congregations.
“This yur,” that is to say, reduced to ordinary pronunciation, “this
here” is, on the other hand, equivalent to a strong disapproval of the
subject under discussion. It means “this new-fangled,” unfamiliar, or
unpleasant thing.
The village of Kilve lies down along a lane leading to the right from
the road just past Holford, and rambles disjointedly down to the rugged
little church. Church, ruined priory, and a large farmhouse stand
grouped together in the meadows, beside the little brook called Kilve
Pill, a quarter of a mile from the low blue-has cliffs of the muddy and
boulder-strewn lonely shore sung by Wordsworth, as “Kilve’s delightful
shore.”
Kilve church is as rude and rugged as some old fortress, and probably
its tower was originally designed with a view to defence. It is
constructed of very rudely shaped blocks of blue limestone, many of them
of great size, mortared together in rough fashion. For the rest, it is a
small aisleless building, chiefly of Norman date, with a south
transept-chapel of Perpendicular character, and a simple Norman
bowl-font.
Giant, widespreading poplar trees adjoin the Priory farmhouse and the
ruins of the Priory, or Kilve Chantry. This was a foundation by one Sir
Simon de Furneaux, in 1329, to house five priests. The particular
reasons that induced Sir Simon to establish his chantry in this lonely
spot do not appear, for the history of the place is vague; but whatever
they were, they did not appeal to Sir Richard Stury, to whom the
property came, some sixty years later, on his marriage with Alice, the
last of this branch of the Furneaux family. He abolished the
establishment, and the building stood empty for centuries, or was used
as a barn by the neighbouring farmer. Another use, not so much spoken
of, was as a storehouse for smuggled goods. A long succession of farmers
at the Priory farm were, in fact, more smugglers than farmers. The
church-tower was said also to have been used by them. The present
roofless condition of the buildings is due to a fire, many years ago,
supposed to have been caused by a conflagration of these smuggled
spirits.
[Illustration: KILVE; THE CHANTRY.]
In these latter days, now that many townsfolk on holiday seek quiet,
secluded spots, there are few among the rustic cottages of Kilve that do
not house visitors, and nowadays the Priory farm is in summer as much a
boarding-house as farmstead; while amateur geologists may be found at
low water on the “delightful,” if muddy, shore, searching for “St.
Keyna’s serpents”; or, in other words, ammonites, which, with other
fossils, abound in the blue lias clay. They are “St. Keyna’s serpents,”
because the saint, coming to Somerset, transformed all the snakes of
these parts into stone!
Kilve, in common with other villages situated on this part of the
Somerset shore, indulges in a curious kind of sport: that of “hunting
the conger.” It is in the autumn that the unfortunate conger-eel is
taken unawares, through the low tides that then generally prevail. The
conger, known here as the “glatt,” is the big brother of the ordinary
sand-eel, who is dug out of the foreshore, all round our coasts. He
lives in the blue lias mud hereabouts, generally beneath the boulders
that are sprinkled about the shore like currants in a bun; and is clever
enough, in the ordinary way, to have his home well below low-water mark.
But the treacherous spring-tides are the undoing of him; laying bare
perhaps a hundred and sixty feet more of mud than usual. At such times a
large proportion of the rustic population anywhere near the shore
assembles and proceeds to the muddy or sandy flats, accompanied by
fox-terriers and other dogs, and armed with stout six or eight-feet-long
sticks, cut from the hedges and sharpened at one end to a chisel-like
edge. If there be by any chance a belated visitor in those October days
when hunting the glatt is usually in full swing he is apt to imagine the
simple villagers are trying to take a rise out of his ignorance of
country life, when, in answer to his questions, they tell him they are
off hunting conger-eels—and with dogs! But it is simple truth. Hunting
the wild red deer on Exmoor is the aristocratic sport of this
countryside, and hunting the conger is the democratic; and where in a
purely inland district your sporting rustic may keep his lurcher, here
the rural sportsman values his terrier or spaniel in proportion to his
merits as “a good fish dog.”
There is not that smartness among the pursuers of the glatt which is the
mark of the hunting-field in the chase of the fox or the deer, and
renders a fox-hunt or a meet of staghounds so spectacular a sight. Smart
clothes are not the proper equipment of the glatt-hunter, whose hunting
chiefly consists in wading, ankle-deep, through the mud, heaving up huge
boulders, and mud-whacking after the wriggling, writhing congers, while
the dogs rush frantically among the crowd, scraping holes in the mud and
essaying the not very easy task of seizing the slippery fish. In fact,
the oldest clothes are not too bad for this sport; and the spectacle of
a company of such sportsmen as these, properly habited for the occasion,
is rather that of an assemblage of scarecrows than that of a number of
self-respecting members of the community. That this precaution of
wearing the oldest possible garments is not an excess of caution becomes
abundantly evident at the conclusion of a rousing day’s sport, when the
mud has been flying in proportion to the enthusiasm of the chase, and
every one has become abundantly splashed, from top to toe. The congers,
or “glatts,” captured on these occasions scale, as a rule, about four or
five pounds, but occasionally run to twenty pounds.
Over the meadows by church-path from Kilve to East Quantoxhead, is a
pleasant stroll, bringing you into the village by the old watermill and
the village pond. Not, mark you, an ordinary village pond with muddy
margin and half-submerged old superannuated pails and the like discarded
objects long past use, but a crystal-clear lakelet, with stone and turf
parapet, well-stocked with trout—and the fishing preserved too, members
of that branch of the Luttrell family living in the adjoining
manor-house coming down occasionally to cast a fly. This is not angling
in such public circumstances as might be supposed, for the village is
very small and retired, and few strangers find their way hither. Indeed,
things here are so little conventional that you enter the churchyard
through a farmyard.
Church and manor-house stand side by side, both built of the local
blue-grey limestone. In the chancel of the little aisleless church,
stands a Luttrell altar-tomb of alabaster, inscribed to Hugh Luttrell,
1522, and his son, Andrew, 1538, with shields displaying their arms and
those of the Wyndhams and other families with whom they have
intermarried.
[Illustration: ST. AUDRIES.]
The large, square-shaped manor-house adjoining is the ancient home of
the Luttrells, who were seated here at East Quantoxhead long centuries
before they acquired the greater estates of Dunster and Minehead; being
descended on the distaff side from that Ralph Paganel who held this and
other manors from William the Conqueror.
The tall, ugly masonry retaining-wall that fringes the hollow road for a
long distance as you come uphill from East to West Quantoxhead, is that
of St. Audries, the park of Sir Alexander Acland Hood. Where this ends,
on the hilltop, the lovely park, sloping down to the seashore, is
disclosed, like a dream of beauty. West Quantoxhead and St. Audries are
convertible terms, the parish church being dedicated to St. Etheldreda,
popularly known in mediæval times as “St. Audrey.” The mansion in the
park, the rectory, the post-office, and a few scattered cottages
constitute all the village. The church itself is modern, having been
built by Sir Peregrine Acland Hood in 1857. It is far better,
architecturally, than the mere date of it would suggest; doubtless
because the architect relied more upon the traditional local style than
on his own initiative. Although having stood for over half a century,
the church looks astonishingly new. The mansion itself, a happy
combination of stateliness and domestic comfort, and built of red brick
and stone, is glimpsed romantically between the fine clumps of trees
with which the park is studded; and in a cleft you note the blue sea—for
the Severn Sea is not so muddy and so dun-coloured under sunny
conditions as some would have us suppose. Down on the beach, where a
waterfall plunges boldly over the cliffs of curiously stratified rock,
the Somerset coast proves itself again to be more picturesque than it is
generally allowed to be. The Devon and Somerset staghounds sometimes
meet on the lawn, in front of St. Audries House, as the Quantock pack
were used to do.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVI
WILLITON—ST. DECUMAN’S AND THE WYNDHAMS—WATCHET
LEAVING St. Audries, one also leaves the Quantocks behind, coming
downhill into Williton, a place now by way of being a little town, with
a railway station, a cattle market, a Union Workhouse, resembling the
residence of some more than usually wealthy peer, a Petty Sessions
Court, and a police station.
Yet, with all these adjuncts of an up-to-date civilisation, Williton
does not enjoy the distinction of being a real, original, independent
parish. It stands in the parish of St. Decuman’s, a church yonder on the
hillside, over a mile away, near Watchet: the peculiar humour of the
thing being that St. Decuman’s, save for a few rustic cottages close by,
stands lonely, while Watchet and Williton are populous places. Thus we
observe here the engaging paradox, outraging all the problems of Euclid,
of the larger being contained in the smaller. At the same time, it must
be allowed that the “chapel-of-ease” at Williton, however inferior
ecclesiastically and architecturally to St. Decuman’s, is at any rate of
a respectable antiquity. It originated in a chantry chapel founded by
Robert FitzUrse, brother of that Reginald who bore his share in the
murder of Thomas à Becket. In a district such as this, where churchyard
and wayside crosses, more or less dilapidated, are common-places, it
seems hardly worth while to note that the base of an ancient cross
stands at the east end of Williton church, or that fragments of two
others stand in front of that old white-faced coaching inn, the
“Egremont Hotel,” one of them made to support a gaslamp which itself has
been put out of action by effluxion of time.
St. Decuman’s, the parish church of Watchet, stands fully half a mile
away from the little town, inland, within sight of Williton, on a
conspicuous knoll. St. Decuman, to whom the church is dedicated, was one
of those wonderful West Country saints for whom, as for Napoleon, the
word “impossible” did not exist. He flourished at the close of the
seventh century and the opening of the eighth, and came originally from
South Wales, as a missionary to the heathen of Somerset. Crossing the
sea on a hurdle, or on his cloak, according to the conflicting accounts
given, he established a hermit’s cell on this spot and subsisted chiefly
on berries and the milk of a cow which came from nowhere in particular,
especially for the purpose of sustaining the holy man. The heathen,
however, resented the hermit’s presence, and seized and beheaded him
here, fondly imagining they had thus given him his _quietus_. But they
little knew the virile qualities of this hardy race of missioners who
came from across Channel and wrought marvels all along these coasts of
Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. St. Decuman was beheaded, but that was by
no means the end of him. He took up his head, washed it in a spring that
gushed forth upon the spot (for he was a cleanly person for a hermit),
and placed it again on his shoulders: probably remarking, in the manner
of modern conjurors, “That’s how it’s done!” But of this we have no
record. To convert the ungodly after this exhibition of his powers was
easy. There would appear to have been no reason why so remarkable a man
as this should ever have died, but he passed away at last, in A.D. 706.
A grim little stone figure of him occupies a niche in the tower.
The existing church is a fine and stately building, chiefly of the
Perpendicular period; the exterior remarkable for the extremely hideous
carvings that decorate (if that be quite the word) the dripstones over
the windows of the south aisle. Most of them are grotesque faces, but
one is of a somewhat mysterious character and appears to be the
representation of a little shivering nude human figure, threatened by a
huge bird of the pelican type.
The interior discloses fine cradle-roofs to nave and aisles, with angel
corbels and a deeply undercut frieze of conventionalised vine-leaves.
The third pier from the west, in the north aisle, bears tabernacled
niches filled with small statues of four bishops, and on that behind the
pulpit are figures of an abbot and of St. George and the Dragon. The
Egremont and Wyndham chapels are rich in memorials of the Wyndham
family, formerly of Orchard Wyndham, close by. An old funeral helmet,
painted and gilt, and surmounted with the crest of a lion’s head and
fetterlock, hangs in the south chapel, and two others are suspended in
the chancel and the north aisle.
The Wyndhams, who are represented here so numerously in sepulchral
brasses and marble monuments, derived from the Wyndhams of Felbrigg,
Norfolk, but originally of Wymondham in that county; John, second son of
Sir Thomas Wyndham, having in the reign of Henry VIII. married Elizabeth
Sydenham, of Orchard Sydenham, afterwards known as Orchard Wyndham. The
Norfolk branch of the family in course of time replaced the “y” in their
name by an “i,” but the West of England Wyndhams have generally (by no
means always) adhered to the more picturesque fashion of subscribing
themselves. The last Wyndham here was George, Lord Egremont, who died in
1845, when the title became extinct and the family property here and at
Sampford Brett was sold.
The brasses include those of John Wyndham, of Kentsford, and his wife
Florence, sister and co-heir of Nicholas Wadham of Merrifield, Somerset.
He died in 1572, and she in 1596, many years after the gruesome
adventure she experienced in being nearly buried alive.
The brasses of this worthy pair, half the size of life and most
carefully, if at the same time coarsely, engraved, with a meticulous
care for details of armour and costume, face one another on a huge stone
slab, set against the wall. A smaller brass represents them and a third
figure, intended for Fate, discussing their respective ends, with the
following dialogue:—
MARITUS. When changeless Fate to death did change my life I prayd it to
bee gentle to my wife.
VXOR. But shee who hart and hand to thee did wedd Desired nothing more
then this thie bedd.
FATVM. I brought ye soules that linckt were each in either To rest above
ye Bodies here togeither.
[Illustration: BENCH-END, SAMPFORD BRETT; SUPPOSED TO ALLUDE TO THE
LEGEND OF LADY FLORENCE WYNDHAM.]
It was in 1563, the year following her marriage with John Wyndham, that
Florence Wyndham, in the words of Collinson, the historian of Somerset,
“having in a sickness lost all appearance of life, was placed in her
coffin and mourned as one dead.” Fortunately, as the sexton was about to
close the family vault, he imagined he heard a noise proceeding from the
coffin. Another man might have fled in terror, but there are few
superstitious fears left to sextons who have been long at their work,
and this one approached and listened more carefully. The noise proceeded
from the coffin and was that made by the supposedly dead woman, who had
awakened from what had been merely a trance, and was trying to get out.
Another, and a more scandalous, version tells us that it was the act of
the sexton, repairing secretly to the vault for the purpose of stealing
her rings, and cutting her finger, that restored her to consciousness.
The story is a familiar one in many localities, but as told here, of
Florence Wyndham, is more circumstantial than others. Happily rescued
from this dreadful situation, she soon afterwards became the mother of
Sir John Wyndham, and lived happily for another thirty-three years. The
old manor-house of Kentsford, now a farmhouse, still stands, three
fields away from the church of St. Decuman. Some versions of the story
declare that Florence Wyndham was the mother of twins shortly after the
narrow escape narrated above, and the countryfolk point to one of the
Wyndham monuments on which, amid flaming urns, are two conventional
marble cupids in tears, as proof of the story, but the monument in
question is at least a hundred years later in date than that lady. Three
miles away in the little church of Sampford Brett, formerly on the
Wyndham lands, among the sixteenth-century carved bench-ends, is an
exceptionally notable example, both for its large size and unusual
design, which represents a woman surrounded by conventionalised
Renaissance fruit and flowers: two little cupid-like figures blowing
trumpets below. This is generally thought to be an allusion to this
singular incident in the family history, and the merely decorative
cupids are pointed out as the twins. It should be remarked that the
lady’s brain development, as shown on the carving, appears to be
singularly poor.
The Wyndhams were ever loyal folk, as their monuments in St. Decuman’s
church clearly show, and that they did not always gain by their
allegiance is shown by the querulous epitaph upon one of them, Sir Hugh,
of whom it is written:
Here lies beneath this rugged stone
One more his prince’s than his own,
And in his martyred father’s wars
Lost fortune, blood, gained nought but scars,
And for his sufferings as reward
Had neither countinance or regard;
And earth affording no releif
Has gone to Heaven to ease his grief.
[Illustration: WATCHET; OLD TOWN HALL AND LOCK-UP.]
He was son of the governor of Bridgwater, and one of the six hostages
demanded by Fairfax on the surrender of the town. He died 1671. Let us
sorrow for the unrecompensed services of a Royalist, fighting for
Charles I.; but perhaps we may also spare a little consideration for
Charles II., who, on his restoration, was so beset by claimants for
honours and rewards on account of Cavalier sufferings and losses in “his
martyred father’s wars” that not even the most generous ideas of
compensation would have sufficed to satisfy the hungry crowds.
Watchet, the little town to which this church of St. Decuman belongs, is
a seaport of a stirring history, early and late. Its earliest disaster
was the destruction and plunder wrought by the Danes in A.D. 988; the
latest the violent succession of storms that from September 1903
demolished the harbour, and again demolished it, after expensive repair.
There is much likeability in this little unfortunate port of Watchet, if
only for the fact that it retains, even at this belated time o’ day,
almost every feature of its natural self, and has added few alien ones.
It is a small place, with paper mills and iron-foundries,
railway-sidings that come down to the waterside, and a mineral line
descending from the Brendon Hills. For the convenience of those whose
religion is not of that after all not very robust kind, which will lead
them a mile’s walk, chiefly uphill, to their parish church, a
chapel-of-ease has been provided on the quay, over the old market-house,
which has a kind of glory-hole in the basement, formerly the local
lock-up.
[Illustration: WATCHET.]
Watchet shares with the Italian town of Magenta the honour of giving a
name to a colour; only, while the colour “magenta” is a modern and a
horribly inartistic kind of reddish purple, introduced soon after 1859,
when Louis Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians at Magenta was popular
in France, “watchet” is certainly as old as Chaucer who, in 1383, in his
“Canterbury Pilgrims,” says:
In hoses red he went ful fetishly,
Y-clad he was ful smal and properly
Al in a kirtel of lyght wachet;
the colour “watchet” being a light, or celestial blue, as shown in
“Hakluyt’s Voyages,” in which we read of “mariners attired in watchet,
or skie-coloured clothe.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII
CLEEVE ABBEY—OLD CLEEVE—BLUE ANCHOR
TWO miles inland from Watchet lies the Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary de
Cleeve, or Clive; that is to say, St. Mary of the Cliff—the most notable
ruin in these districts of Somerset. The church, the Abbey itself, has
quite vanished, and its materials centuries ago passed into such
commendably useful purposes as building-stones for neighbouring
farmsteads, cow-bartons and linhays, while the many excellent roads of
the neighbourhood doubtless owe their foundations to the same source.
The very interesting and extensive remains of the establishment are
those of the domestic buildings, which have scarce their equal elsewhere
in England.
This once proud and beautiful Abbey was founded in 1188 by one William
de Romare, of whom we know little else than that he was of the family of
the Earls of Lincoln of that period. It stands, after the manner of all
Cistercian monasteries, in a pleasant fertile vale, watered by a
never-failing stream; for the White Monks were, next to their religious
association, most remarkable for their agricultural and stock-breeding
pursuits. They were not greatly distinguished for their learning, as
were, for example, the Benedictines; but as farmers they were
pre-eminent, growing corn and breeding sheep and horses more
scientifically than any secular agriculturists of their age.
The Cistercians, who derived from Citeaux, in France, were alternatively
styled “Bernadines.” They first established themselves in England in
1128: their first Abbey that of Waverley, near Guildford. They stood,
originally, for simplicity, in life and worship. “They spent their
life,” says Peter of Blois, “on slender food, in rough vesture, in
vigils, confession, discipline, and psalms; in humility, hospitality,
obedience, and charity.” We have also the testimony of St. Bernard’s
words, that “in praying and fast, in study of Holy Writ, and hard manual
labour” they occupied their time.
They were not so dour and solemn as some others of the monastic orders,
and typified the spiritual joy that filled their hearts by the white
habits they adopted; largely, however, as a protest against the
penitential Benedictines. For harmony never did exist between the monks
of different rules, who were jealous of some and despiteful to others,
according to circumstances. Most orders, however, united in despising
and ridiculing the Cistercians, who were in this, as in the simplicity
of their rule, and in the severe, unornamental character of their
original Abbeys, the Plymouth Brethren and the Presbyterians of their
age. The first type of Cistercian house was almost as simple as a
Dissenting Chapel of our own times. In the churches of other orders the
Rood was made as ornate, and of as costly materials, as possible: often
glowing with gold and silver and precious stones. The Cistercian monks,
however, remembering that Our Lord died upon a cross of wood, placed a
crucifix of plain wood in their churches, and throughout the whole of
the establishment conducted themselves as the sanctified farmers they
really were: not even scrupling to absent themselves from Mass at
harvest-time. If it be true—and it is a noble belief—that “to labour is
to pray,” then the early Cistercians prayed well; for with all their
might they brought lands under cultivation, and tended and improved
stock, and helped the world along toward the distant ideal.
But as time went on, and the order grew rich by dint of its own farming
and wool-growing successes, and by a never-failing stream of
benefactions, the Abbots and monks by degrees became arrogant and lazy.
They no longer worked in their fields; leaving the practical farming to
the lay-brothers and the horde of dependents they had accumulated. As
landowners they were even more grasping than secular landlords, and, in
common with other orders, were extremely tenacious of their rights of
market and other monopolies; thus earning for themselves a hatred which
was in course of time to sweep them out of existence. The Cistercians
were not alone—nor perhaps even as prominent as others—in these worldly
ways; but they shared in the growing arrogance and luxury of these
bodies originally vowed to poverty and practising their vows because
they did not own the wherewithal to do otherwise. Their churches and
domestic buildings were rebuilt elaborately and their Abbots travelled
_en grand seigneur_ through the country; persons claiming great
consideration.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO CLEEVE ABBEY.]
Cleeve Abbey derives its name from the swelling hills in the recesses of
this valley of the stream, called the Roadwater, _i.e._ the “Roodwater.”
“Cleeve” indicates, in its old meaning, not only a cliff or cleft, but
any bold hill. The word is found in the place-names of Clevedon, near
by, and at Clieveden, on the Thames. There are no cliffs in this gentle
vale nearer than the not remarkably large cliffs at Watchet. The valley
is, indeed, more noted for its quiet pastoral beauty than for
ruggedness, and was in olden times known as _Vallis Florida_, the “Vale
of Flowers.”
Although only the ground plan of the monastic church remains, showing it
to have been a building 161 feet in length, and of the transitional
period between the Norman and the Early English styles, the domestic
buildings are in very fair preservation, considering their use by so
many generations of farmers as hay, corn, and straw lofts. The
cloister-garth, now a lawn-like expanse, was, until Mr. Luttrell cleared
it out about 1865, a typical farm-yard, rich in muck. At the same
period, the pigsties and various farming outbuildings that had been
added in the course of over three hundred years, were cleared away, and
the place made more accessible to those interested in these relics of
the past. The Luttrells, however, do not allow the place to be seen for
nothing, and have indeed at least an adequate idea of its worth as a
show; a notice confronting the pilgrim to the effect that Cleeve Abbey
is shown on weekdays at one shilling a head: sixpence each for two or
more: “special arrangements for Parties.”
Cleeve Abbey is not shown on Sundays and that traveller who from force
of circumstances comes to it on the Sabbath must be content with a view
of its entrance-gateway only. If he cannot contain his artistic or
antiquarian enthusiasm, but must needs peer and quest about on the edge
of the precincts, then the fury of the people who occupy the farm, and
are at the same time caretakers of and guides to the Abbey ruins, and
without whose unwelcome company you may not see the place at all, at any
time, is let loose over him. Whether this be a respect for the Sabbath,
or for the merely secular rules imposed by the Luttrells, or whether it
is not more likely to be the rage aroused by the prospect of a stranger
seeing for nothing that for which a fee is charged, I will not pretend
to declare. You may come at any time over the ancient two-arched Gothic
bridge from the road, and so through the gatehouse, and through that
into the outer court, which is now a meadow, without being challenged:
arriving at the further end at the farmhouse, beside which is a
wicket-gate admitting into the cloister-garth. “Ring the Bell,” curtly
says a notice-board, with a small “Please” added, in hesitating manner,
for politeness’ sake; probably by some satirical visitor, wishful of
imparting a lesson in manners.
The present explorer was one of those whom circumstances conspire to
bring hither on Sunday, without the prospect of a return in the near
future. He left a bicycle in the gatehouse and came across the meadow,
where the base of the old Abbot’s market-cross stands with a sycamore
growing in the empty socket of its shaft, to the wicket-gate. It being
Sunday, he did not ring, but entered and sat down there in an ancient
archway, in would-be peaceful and holy contemplation. What more
Christian and Sabbath-like spirit than this would you have? Better, I
take it, than the occupation of most of the villagers at that same
moment, reading the Sunday newspapers, filled (after the manner of the
Sunday newspaper) with the raked-together garbage of the last seven
days.
But this holy calm was not to continue. It was entirely owing to that
bicycle. A strategist would have concealed it. Its presence under the
archway of the gatehouse brought the peaceful interlude to an abrupt
conclusion, as shall presently appear.
Within the space of an all too short minute or two there appeared two
little girls through the wicket-gate, coming home to the farmhouse from
a walk, or from Sunday school, evidently excited by the sight of that
machine, and by the very obvious deduction that the owner of it must be
somewhere near. “And very pretty it was,” as Pepys might have put it, to
see them questing about everywhere except in the right place, and not
finding him, sitting there in the grateful shade quite close to them,
and really easily to be seen, you know. And after all, it was the
intruder himself who revealed his own presence, with the remark, “I
suppose you are looking for the owner of that bicycle?” Whereupon they
ran away and there presently entered upon the scene an angry woman, with
inflamed visage and furious words; with offensive epithets about
“trippers,” and the like. Outrageous!
Now, to beat a leisurely and dignified retreat under such circumstances
is difficult. You owe it to yourself not to be ignominiously routed in
disorder, but to draw off your forces from the stricken field calmly and
collectedly, inflicting losses upon the enemy, if possible. And then,
you know, to be styled a “tripper,” and by a fat farmer-woman! Does that
not demand retribution?
Therefore, “Do you presume, woman, to call me a tripper?” seemed the
best retort: effective and injurious, and at the same time restrained
and dignified.
“Woman!” What a deadly offence, what a god-addressing-a-blackbeetle
effect this has! It produces rage of the foaming, abusive, incoherent
order, in midst of which, with a cold-drawn, blighting smile, you
retire, with the consciousness that the thing will rankle for days. But
the incident renders a comparison of old times with new in Somerset
unfavourable to the present age. In the olden days, before every
historic spot or architectural rarity had become a show-place, resorted
to by a constant stream of visitors, the farmer whose farm happened to
be on the site of some ruined abbey would, as a rule, make the visitor
courteously welcome at all times, in his homely fashion, and would
indeed be pleased to see the rare strangers who came his way; but in
these times, now that excursionists are everywhere, and in great
numbers, ruins have acquired a certain commercial value, and must be
hedged about with restrictions.
[Illustration: THE REFECTORY, CLEEVE ABBEY.]
But here we are in the twentieth century, and it were hopeless and
foolish to wish ourselves back in the early years of the nineteenth; for
not the most perfect examples of that old-time courtesy could recompense
for other incidental discomforts.
Here, then, facing the road, across the little Gothic bridge spanning
the Roodwater, stands the Gatehouse. Let us enter—it being
weekday—beneath the ample arch of that mingled Decorated and Late
Perpendicular building. The upper storey, the work of William Dovell,
the last Abbot, bears the hospitable Latin welcome:
Porta patens esto
Nulli claudaris honesto,
metrically rendered:
Gate, open be;
To honest men all free.
but more literally translated, “Gate, be open; and be closed to no
honest man.” It was a favourite threshold invitation with the
Cistercians; but the later corruption, avarice, and sloth that marked
them, in common with other orders, led to a double meaning being
fastened upon it, both in England and in France. The Latin construction
easily admits of a cynical interpretation, figured for us by the
still-surviving French punning proverb: “Faute d’un point Martin perdit
son âne; _i.e._ By the mistake of a full-stop, Martin lost his ass;” the
original Martin of this cryptic saw being the Abbot of Alne, who was so
unscholarly that in setting up the honoured motto, he placed a full-stop
after the word “nulli”; thus making the phrase read scandalously,
Gate opened be to none.
Closed to the honest man.
That unfortunate Abbot’s lack of learning caused the enraged people of
the district, headed by rival churchmen, to demolish his Abbey.
But to return to the sea, at Blue Anchor, by way of Old Cleeve.
Past Washford—_i.e._ “Watchet-ford”—railway station, and down a leafy
lane to the right hand, we come in a mile to the village of Old Cleeve;
its pleasant rustic, vine-grown cottages commanding views of the
beautiful bay between Blue Anchor and the bold promontory of North Hill,
Minehead, from their bedroom windows in the heavily thatched roofs.
There is not much of Old Cleeve, but what there is, bears the impress of
simplicity and innocence, not at all in unison with the scandalous
rhyme:
There was a young fellow of Cleeve
Who said, “It is pleasant to thieve!”
So he spent all his time
In commission of crime—
Now he’s out on a Ticket-of-Leave.
The church of Old Cleeve is of the usual fine Perpendicular character to
which we grow accustomed in these parts; with the curious individual
feature of a floor gradually, but most distinctly, ascending from the
west end of the nave to the chancel. Here is an alms-box, dated 1634,
and inscribed “Tob. 4. Pro. 19. Remember ye poore. Bee mercifvll after
thy power. He that hath pitie vpon ye poore lendeth vnto the Lord.”
In a recess contrived in the wall of the nave and surmounted by a boldly
moulded ogee arch, finished off with a finial in the shape of a human
face wearing a somewhat satanic expression of countenance, is a
recumbent effigy of a civilian of the fifteenth century. This, although
blunted and damaged by time and ill-usage, was evidently a fine work in
the days of its prime. The effigy has not been identified, and whether
it be that of a merchant-prince, or some great local landowner, cannot
be said; but the original was, at all events, if we may judge from the
care evidently taken by the sculptor with the effigy, a person of
importance. A peculiarly charming and dainty—almost a feminine—effect is
given by the decorated fillet that encircles the long hair, and by the
girdle around the waist; but what will most keenly arouse the interest
and the speculation of those who examine the figure is the very striking
little sculptured group, of a cat with one paw resting on a mouse, on
which the feet of the effigy rest. Although the head of the cat is
somewhat worn down, the group is still tolerably perfect, and the cat is
seen to be looking up at the figure, as though seeking her master’s
approval.
The question visitors will naturally ask, “Has this representation of
sculptured cat and mouse any particular meaning here?” at once arises;
but no facts, or legends even, are available. It is curious to note,
however, that Sir Richard Whittington—the famous “Dick Whittington,” the
hero of the “Dick Whittington and his Cat” story—was contemporary, or
very nearly contemporary, with the unknown man represented here. It is
not suggested that the fact is more than a coincidence: but it is a
curious one.
[Illustration: MYSTERIOUS EFFIGY AT OLD CLEEVE.]
In the porch is an ancient, greatly timeworn chest, with three locks and
a slit in the lid, for the reception of “Peter’s Pence” and other
contributions. As the chest is about six feet in length and
proportionably deep, it is evident that the expectations were not
modest. Let us trust the faithful took the hint and contributed
accordingly.
And so by delightful lanes to Blue Anchor, where the railway runs along
the shore and has a station of that name. Blue Anchor station must in
its time have misled many strangers, for where a railway station is,
there one expects a town, or village, also. But here is a void, an
emptiness, a vacuum. Only a solitary bay is disclosed before the
astounded stranger’s gaze. It is a noble bay, it is true, and commands
lovely views of the great North Hill at Minehead, with Dunster nestling
midway; and the sunsets are magnificent. But railway companies don’t
build railway stations merely for the convenience of those few people
who would take a journey especially for sake of a view or a sunset; and
it certainly seems as though the Great Western expected building
developments here, long ago, and was still awaiting them. In short, all
there is of Blue Anchor is an old inn of that name, not remotely
suggesting a past intimately connected with smuggling, together with a
cottage or two.
[Illustration: BLUE ANCHOR.]
Unfortunately for the lover of an unspoiled seashore, a formal sea-wall
has recently been built, to protect the marshes that here fringe the bay
from being drowned. The Somerset County Council built it, at a cost of
some £30,000. Let us hope the Luttrells are properly grateful for this
public work that so efficiently protects their lands.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII
DUNSTER
THE approach to Dunster from Blue Anchor, and through the village of
Carhampton, is a progress of pleasure. Turner has left a picture of
Dunster from Blue Anchor, but it is not one of his successes, and the
reality is far more romantic than his representation. You see before you
the Castle of Dunster, on its hill, the eighteenth-century tower of
Coneygore, on its own particular eminence, and the great Grabbist Hill,
disposing themselves in new groupings as you advance, and realise that
England has not much finer to give.
Dunster, with much else in these districts, from Kilve to Minehead,
belongs to the Luttrells, whose heraldic shield of a bend sable on a
golden field, between six martlets—a “martlet” being a heraldic bird of
the swallow species, without feet, unknown to ornithologists—is in
consequence frequently to be noticed here. The Luttrell motto is
_Quaesita marte tuenda arte_; that is to say, “What has been gained by
force of war should by skill be guarded.” We may here perhaps detect the
glimmerings of one of those puns of which the old heralds were so fond,
in the similarity in sound between “marte” and “martlet”; but it is not
a favourable example.
[Illustration: CONEYGORE TOWER, AND ROAD INTO MINEHEAD.]
By what feat of arms, then, the traveller naturally enquires, did the
Luttrells obtain these lands? By none at all, for, as a matter of fact,
they came to the family by purchase, and when the heirs of the vendor
sought to prove the sale illegal, it was by an action in a court of law,
rather than by gage of battle, that they retained what they had bought.
But it is well known that the family now owning the Luttrell lands are
only Luttrells on the female side, and bear the name merely by adoption;
Henry Fownes having in 1746 married Margaret Luttrell, heiress-general
of these manors.
The history of Dunster begins with an entry in Domesday Book. There we
learn that “Torre,” as it is styled, was owned by a certain Aluric.
Perhaps it were best to style that Saxon landowner uncertain Aluric, for
that is all we hear of him. A mere mention by name in Domesday Book is,
after all, no great thing. Thereafter it became chief among the
properties of William de Mohun, from Moyun in Normandy, one of the
Conqueror’s liegemen in the red field of Hastings. The author of the
“Roman de Rou” speaks of him as:
Le viel Guillaume de Moion
Ont avec li maint compagnon.
He was not, however, so elderly a warrior, but is thus described in
order to distinguish him from his son. He became a very landed man in
the West, with sixty-seven other far-flung manors in Somerset, Dorset,
Wiltshire, and Devonshire, including that of Tor Mohun, Torquay. But he
established his headquarters here, and here he built the first castle of
Torre, which soon afterwards is found referred to for the first time as
“Dunestora,” in the deed by which he, in 1100, gave the advowson of St.
George’s, Dunster, the fisheries of Dunster and Carhampton, the village
of Alcombe, and the tenth part of his vineyards, ploughlands, markets,
and flocks to the monks of St. Peter’s Abbey at Bath.
William de Mohun the Second, son of this well-rewarded henchman of the
Conqueror, played a turbulent part in the troubles that beset England
during the war between Stephen and Queen Maud. He fought on behalf of
Queen Maud; and the _Gesta Stephani_, which gives an account of these
things from the point of view of King Stephen’s adherents, does not fail
to draw a highly unflattering portrait of him, in which he appears
established, like some robber baron, at Dunster Castle, with a strong
force of horse and foot; issuing therefrom to devastate the surrounding
country; “sweeping it as with a whirlwind.” The historian of these
things proceeds to tell us that he was cruel and violent, firing the
homes and pillaging the goods of the community indiscriminately. He
appears, indeed, to have been one of those restless men of war, not
uncommon in that era, who wanted trouble for its own sake, and when it
came, cared little whether it was the property of friends or foes that
he destroyed. “He changed a realm of peace and quiet, of joy and
merriment, into a scene of strife, rebellion weeping, and lamentation,”
says the chronicler.
Queen Maud, on whose behalf he wrought so busily and with such
devastation, created him—or he styled himself—“Earl of Somerset.”
The historian continues:
“When these things were after a time reported to the King, he
collected his adherents in great numbers and proceeded by forced
marches, in order to check the ferocity of William. But when he
halted before the entrance to the Castle, and saw the
impregnable defences of the place, inaccessible on one side
where it was washed by the sea, and very strongly fortified on
the other by towers and walls, by a ditch, and outworks, he
altogether despaired of pressing on the siege, and, taking wiser
counsel, he surrounded the Castle in full sight of the enemy, so
that he might the better restrain them, and occupy the
neighbouring country in security. He also gave orders to Henry
de Tracy, a man skilled in war, and approved in the events of
many different fights, that, acting in his stead, as he himself
was summoned to other business, he should with all speed and
vigour bestir himself against the enemy.”
Henry accordingly, sallying forth from his own town of Barnstaple, so
wrought with William de Mohun and his garrison that, if indeed he could
not storm the castle, he could at any rate, coop within it that bold and
fiery spirit, and so protect the neighbouring country. Tracy, in fact,
did more. He captured a hundred and four horsemen in a single encounter,
during one of those sallies from the castle by which de Mohun thought to
break the force of the leaguer against him.
[Illustration: DUNSTER CASTLE.]
And so the claws of this tiger were cut, and himself rendered harmless
until that time when the factious, assured at last that they were too
well matched ever to bring the struggle to a decisive issue, made peace,
and thus sent the unruly and restless back to an undesired state of
order.
We read incidentally, in those old accounts, of Dunster Castle being
washed on one side by the sea. That passage places in a yet more
picturesque setting the picturesque scene even now presented to the
traveller; for where the road now goes past the level meadows on the way
from Carhampton to Minehead, the sea then ebbed and flowed in a shallow
bay, whose shores reached to the foot of the commanding hill on whose
crest the castle turrets still loom up, majestically. Yet, beautiful in
its wild original way though it may have been in those days, when the
castle was a sea-fortress and the little town of Dunster something in
the nature of a port, Dunster Castle in our own times, and on some
evening of late summer, when the sun sets gloriously over the hills and
irradiates the burnt-up grass to a golden tinge, affords a picture of
surpassing beauty, viewed from the road to Minehead, across those level
pastures.
The de Mohuns who succeeded the turbulent William of King Stephen’s time
make little show in the history of the place, and even that
mid-fourteenth century John, Lord Mohun of Dunster, who was one of the
original Knights of the Garter, is more notable to us for the doings of
his wife, than for any action of his own. He married in 1350 Joan,
daughter of Sir Bartholomew de Burghershe. This lady it was who,
according to a legend, declared by serious antiquaries to have no real
foundation, obtained from her husband the grant of as much common-land
for the poor of the town as she could walk barefoot: after the fashion
of that Lady Tichborne who, although an invalid, crawled on hands and
knees over an amazing acreage in one day.
With this Lord Mohun, the de Mohuns of Dunster came to an end, and the
West of England presently witnessed the entire extinction of the family,
root and branch; or its gradual decline into obscurity through the
growing poverty of landless collaterals who became absorbed by the
middle-class, and survive here and there to this day as shopkeepers, and
even as agricultural labourers, under the plebeian name of “Moon.” As
more peaceful and commercial times succeeded the era in which arms
decided the fate of noble families, the fortunes of those who by any
chance had lost their lands grew desperate. In the altered
circumstances, when law and order had replaced brute force, the sharp
sword was no longer a match for sharp wits. Hence the great rise in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the trading class, to wealth,
power, and honours.
But it was not precisely in this manner that the de Mohuns became
alienated from the land. That John Lord Mohun of Dunster, who in 1350
married Joan Burghershe, had three daughters, but no sons. A courtier
during the greater part of his career, he fell into the extravagant ways
of those with whom he associated, and lived and died heavily in debt,
and his widow, doubtless in want of ready money, sold Dunster to Lady
Elizabeth Luttrell, _née_ Courtenay, widow of Sir Andrew Luttrell, of
Chilton, Devon, for the sum of five hundred marks, equal to £3333 6_s._
8_d._, present value. The receipt given for this purchase-money is still
a curious and cherished possession of the Luttrells of to-day. The low
price at which Lady Mohun disposed of the property is accounted for by
the fact that the purchaser was not to come into possession until after
the vendor’s death, which did not occur until 1404, thirty years after
the date of this transaction. Lady Joan retired from the West when this
sale was completed, and was much at Court, and in Kent and Sussex in
those thirty years. The curious may find her tomb in the undercroft of
Canterbury Cathedral, and may with some difficulty read there the
invocation to the piety of the beholder: “Pour Dieu priez por l’ame
Johane Burwasche qe fut Dame de Mohun.”
Two of her daughters survived her: Elizabeth Countess of Salisbury, and
Philippa, married thirdly to Edward Plantagenet, Duke of York. To her
daughter Elizabeth she left a cross, which she had promised to the one
she loved best, and a copy of the _Legenda Sanctorum_. Philippa had
merely her blessing, and some choice red wine; but her husband, the Duke
of York, became the happy recipient, by bequest of his mother-in-law, of
some improving literature, in the shape of a copy of the _Legenda_, and
an illuminated book.
Lady Elizabeth Luttrell, the purchaser of Dunster, did not live to enjoy
the property. She predeceased Lady Mohun, and the reversion went to her
son, Sir Hugh Luttrell, a distinguished soldier, Lieutenant of Calais,
Governor of Harfleur, Seneschal of Normandy, and, holder of many other
distinguished posts, much abroad on the King’s service all his life. It
was one thing to become legal owner of Dunster, and quite another to
obtain actual possession, for the daughters of Lady Joan refused to give
up the property, on the ground that Lady Mohun had no right to dispose
of it; and law-suits resulted, in which Sir Hugh was at length
victorious. It was during his lifetime that the castle, by now grown
ancient, was rebuilt under the supervision of his son, John, who
occupied Dunster during his father’s long residence abroad.
The Luttrells took the Lancastrian side in the quarrels of Red Rose and
White, and suffered severely for that partisanship; Sir James, who had
been knighted for valour at the bloody battle of Wakefield, being
mortally wounded at the battle of Barnet, 1471, and his property
forfeited to the victorious Yorkists, who granted the Luttrell acres to
the Earls of Pembroke. After the battle of Bosworth, however, fourteen
years later, they obtained their own again, and held it uneventfully
until the beginning of hostilities between Cavaliers and Roundheads, in
1642. Mr. George Luttrell, the then owner, garrisoned Dunster Castle for
the Parliamentary party, and held it for a time successfully against the
Marquess of Hertford, the Royalist commander in these parts, established
at Minehead, who was satisfied, in view of the formidable front made by
this hilltop stronghold, in merely keeping a watch upon it, and
preventing any offensive movement on the part of the garrison: thus—to
use a modern military expression—“containing” the enemy. Luttrell, for
his part, was satisfied at keeping the Royalists thus inactive and
useless for offence elsewhere; each side thus “containing” the other: a
not very stirring method of warfare. In the following year, in
consequence of the sequence of Royalist successes in the West, Mr.
Luttrell surrendered the castle, which was then held for three years for
the King by Colonel Francis Windham. It was at this period that Prince
Charles, afterwards Charles the Second, stayed here. The bedroom he then
occupied is still known as “Prince Charles’s.” In those years the
fortunes of the King declined, and rapidly grew desperate; until at last
Dunster Castle became the sole outpost of the cause in Somerset.
Finally, in 1645, it was resolved to reduce this remnant, and in
November of that year a force was despatched from Taunton to besiege the
Castle. The investing force was commanded by Blake, great on sea and on
land, and by Sydenham, and a lengthy and stirring siege began. Both
sides worked vigorously. Attack and defence proceeded on engineering
lines; Blake’s men advancing cautiously by trenches, mines, and
batteries; the defenders pushing forth to meet them by the same
mole-like methods. On February 5th, 1646, in midst of these laborious
operations, when the garrison had come near to being starved out, a
column under Lord Hopton relieved them, and Blake’s men were forced to
retire from beneath the walls. He kept watch, however, upon Dunster, and
in the meanwhile received reinforcements. At length, on April 19th, the
sturdy Windham, convinced that, the King having lost everywhere else in
the West, it would be futile to hold this one remaining post,
surrendered. The victorious Parliament, careful to destroy those places
that had held out against it, duly ordered the Castle of Dunster to be
“slighted,” otherwise to be blown up; but the order was not enforced,
probably for the sufficient reason that the Luttrells, as we have seen,
were themselves partisans of the popular party. The Parliament found
Dunster, thus preserved, a place useful enough; for here during twelve
months, from June 1650, was imprisoned that dauntless reformer and
pamphleteer of those troubled times, William Prynne, who proved himself
a scourge to foes and friends. He began, absurdly enough, as it seems to
us in these days, by attacking “love-locks” and long hair worn by men,
and short hair affected by women, with an excursus upon chin-wags and
lip-whiskers; and proceeding by easy stages to a denunciation of
stage-plays, religious controversy, and political bludgeoning. He was,
in short, a born controversialist: the Universal Provider, so to say, of
red-hot pamphlets, and generally left his opponents dead, figuratively
speaking. A very grim person was William Prynne. No one, it is quite
safe to say, ever called him “Willie,” and as for “Bill,” that would
have been an impossible familiarity with the stern-faced Puritan, even
supposing that vulgar diminutive to have at that time been invented. By
the way, have the vulgarian who originated “Bill,” and the period of its
origination, ever been traced? His opponents were not skilled in wordy
warfare, but what they lacked in repartee and argument they fully made
up for with the pillory, the whip, and the branding-irons, and they
inflicted some particularly cutting rejoinders when they caused his ears
to be shorn off. Thus deprived of his face-flaps, many a man would have
rested from his pamphleteering, but Prynne persisted, and earned thereby
the particular attention of Laud, the High Church Archbishop of
Canterbury, who procured his branding on the cheeks with the letters,
“S. L.” for “seditious libeller.” With that iron humour that was all his
own, Prynne referred to this horrible facial disfigurement as “Stigmata
Laudis.”
The loss of his aural attachments, together with the addition of this
undecorative poker-work, and a fine of £5,000, so embittered Prynne that
he for ever after pursued Laud with an undying hatred, and had a
prominent hand in hounding the Archbishop to public trial and execution,
in those days when his fellow-Puritans had obtained the upper hand. Can
we honestly blame that intense malevolence he directed at the insidious
Romaniser, who would have imprisoned men’s consciences again, and who
did not hesitate, in procuring these savage mutilations of his
opponents, thus to disfigure the image of God!
The fearless Prynne, imprisoned here awhile, passed the time of his
captivity in looking over and arranging the Luttrell family papers. He
was himself a Somerset man, and his detention in this castle could not
have been very unpleasant, for it was then as much residence as
fortress.
The fortress built here by the first of the de Mohuns ceased to exist
when the castle was rebuilt about 1417 by Sir Hugh, the first of the
Dunster Luttrells. The keep of that Norman place of strength was
situated on the crest of the hill, now clear of buildings and used as a
bowling green. The spot was once known as St. Stephen’s, from an Early
English chapel dedicated to the martyr having stood here.
Nothing earlier exists in the buildings of Dunster Castle than the great
inner gatehouse, half-way up to the hilltop, now covered, together with
the massive curtain-walls, with a thick growth of ivy. This was the work
of Reginald Mohun, who died in 1257. The fine outer gateway, built
during the enlargement under Sir Hugh, bears sculptured shields with the
arms of Luttrell and Courtenay, Sir James Luttrell having, like his
great-grandfather Andrew, married into that family.
[Illustration: DUNSTER: CASTLE AND YARN MARKET.]
The military works of Sir Hugh were in their turn remodelled, for the
purpose of converting the castle into a residence, rather than a
fortress, by George Luttrell, in the first years of the seventeenth
century. Much of the Renaissance decorative plaster-work, particularly
that of the Hall, belongs to this period. The havoc wrought by the siege
of 1646 was fully repaired, and the Castle yet again remodelled as a
residence, by Francis Luttrell. The grand staircase, elaborately and
beautifully carved in oak with representations of hunting scenes, is of
this period.
Curiously painted ancient leather hangings, ancient furniture, and old
paintings that have been in the Luttrell family for many generations,
abound in the castle, which is, it may be added, the “Stancy Castle” of
Thomas Hardy’s “A Laodicean,” although it should be still further added
that it is by no means well characterised in those pages.
Additions were again made in 1764; but a general overhauling and
rebuilding under the direction of Salvin was undertaken by Mr. George
Fownes Luttrell in 1854.
This beautiful and interesting old place is generally to be seen by
visitors on Saturdays, but not without a good many restrictions readily
to be understood in an historic castle which is at the same time a
residence. Thus, you are not entitled, by the purchase of a sixpenny
ticket at the confectioner’s in the High Street, to wander at will
through the beautifully wooded grounds. A guide meets strangers at the
lodge-gates, and conducts them. It is not the ideal way, and one would
fain linger awhile on the south terrace, by that fine lemon-tree which
climbs the wall and brings its lavish crop of fruit to perfect ripeness
in this soft climate; or would if possible dwell long upon the views in
one direction and another; down upon the growing town of Minehead, or
across to Blue Anchor and the Holms, set in mid-Channel, with fleeting
glimpses of the Welsh mountains.
The great church of Dunster, whose choir was in ruins until Mr. Luttrell
undertook its restoration, about 1856, contains tombs of the Luttrells
and others, and a very fine rood-screen. It is quite in character with
the legendary and often muddled character of local history in England
that the altar-tomb and alabaster effigies of Sir Hugh Luttrell and his
wife, 1428, the first Luttrells of Dunster, were until recent times
always shown as those of Sir John and Lady Mohun.
A curious example of architectural adaptation is to be seen here, in a
fifteenth-century enlargement of an Early English doorway, by which the
jambs were cut back for some two-thirds of its height, leaving the upper
part as before. This “shouldered” arch, as architects would technically
style it, forms a striking object.
One of the finest views of Dunster church is that in which, looking from
the south, you get the great tower rearing majestically above the
churchyard, and in the foreground the ancient alcove in the churchyard
wall, formerly the home of the stocks.
Some sweet chimes play from the old tower, at one, five and nine p.m.,
daily; with a change of tune for every day of the week. Sunday, “O, Rest
in the Lord”; Monday, “Drink to Me only with Thine Eyes”; Tuesday,
“Home, Sweet Home”; Wednesday, “Disposer Supreme”; Thursday, “The Blue
Bells of Scotland”; Friday, “The old 113th Psalm”; and Saturday, “Hark,
hark! my Soul.”
[Illustration: DUNSTER CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTH, SHOWING OLD ALCOVE IN
CHURCHYARD WALL FOR THE STOCKS.]
Not many visitors climb to the belfry chamber of Dunster church: the
wealth of interest in Dunster makes too great a demand upon their
energies for every corner to be explored; and as a rule, the interior of
one belfry is very like that of another. There are the usual pendant
bell-ropes, a few chairs, two or three oil lamps with tin reflectors,
and various notice-boards of the Incorporated Society of Bell-Ringers,
setting forth the appalling number of “grandsire triples” and
“bob-majors” rung by those misguided persons who are so deaf to music
that they consider bell-ringing to be harmonious. Education cannot be
yet very far advanced while the barbarism of ringing church-bells for an
hour at a stretch can be permitted these few fanatics, to the discomfort
of the many; and justice and consistency are outraged at the ringing of
the perambulating muffin-man’s tinkling bell being held an illegal
nuisance, while tons of heavy metal are permitted to be set in motion in
church-towers, to the misery of villagers and townsfolk, who have,
apparently, no legal remedy.
The bell-ringers take themselves with an absurd seriousness, which has
not nowadays the least excuse. The exercise may have been accounted a
useful and a pious one when bell-ringing was supposed to exorcise
devils, or at the very least of it, to remind the faithful that the hour
of prayer was come; but now that clerical advanced critics of the
Scriptures themselves deny the existence of the Devil himself and all
his imps, and impugn the inspired character of the Bible, and now that
every one can afford a watch and ascertain the hour for himself, the
greater part of the church bells in this country could be broken up and
sold for old metal, to the profit of the church, and the joy of the
laity.
[Illustration: CURIOUS ARCHWAY, DUNSTER CHURCH.]
A battered, and now in parts barely legible, old board hangs in the
belfry of Dunster church, showing how very seriously these ringers have
always taken themselves. Somewhat similar versified rules may be
occasionally found in various places throughout the country:
You that in Ringing take delight
Be pleased to draw near;
These Articles you must observe
If you mean to ring here.
And first, if any Overturn
A Bell, as that he may,
He Forthwith for that only Fault
In Beer shall Sixpence pay
If anyone shall Curse or Swear
When come Within the door,
He then shall Forfit for that Fault
As mentioned before.
If anyone shall wear his Hat
When he is Ringing here,
He straightway then shall Sixpence pay
In Cyder or in Beer.
If anyone these Articles
Refuseth to Obey,
Let him have nine strokes of the Rope,
And so depart away.
It will be observed that the fines inflicted were applied to the
purchase of beer and cider, and no doubt the misdemeanours were invented
for the purpose of providing a constant supply of drink to the thirsty
ringers. We may, perhaps, dimly envisage the wrath of the rest when one
of their number, having offended, refused to pay his sixpence. “Nine
strokes of the rope” were not too bad for him who refused to contribute
towards quenching their thirst; and they were probably laid on with a
will!
Prominent in the picturesque street of the quiet old townlet is the Yarn
Market, a stout, oak-framed building, quaintly roofed, whose name
recalls the time when Dunster was a cloth-weaving town, producing
kerseymeres and goods named after the place of origin, “Dunsters.” It
was built in 1609, by George Luttrell. The initials of another George
Luttrell, his nephew, and the date 1647 are to be seen on the
weather-vane; evidence of the repairs effected after the siege of 1646.
[Illustration: THE “NUNNERY,” OR “HIGH HOUSE,” DUNSTER.]
The “Luttrell Arms,” a famous hostelry, noted alike for its good cheer
and for its interesting architectural details, stands opposite the Yarn
Market. Legends, all too often, but by no means always, picturesque
lies, have it that this noble fifteenth-century building was originally
a “town house” of the Abbots of Cleeve; and they may in this case well
tell us truly, for the massive carved-oak windows of the kitchen,
looking on to the little courtyard, have a distinctly ecclesiastical
feeling. But whoever it was owned the place, he was at pains to make the
entrance-porch defensible, as may yet be seen in the arrow-slits
contrived in the stonework on either side.
The so-called “Oak Room” is perhaps less clerical in effect, but is
nobly timbered, with oak hammer-beam roof in three bays. A curious early
seventeenth-century mantelpiece in plaster-work, with hideous figures on
either side, displays as central feature a medallion relief representing
the classic story of Actæon torn to pieces by his dogs, or, this being a
hunting country, shall we say his hounds? It is a very small and thin
Actæon, and they are very large hounds that have got him down and are
urgently seeking some meat on him.
Dunster, as already hinted, is a place not readily exhausted, nor
lightly to be hurried through. Curious old houses, notably the so-called
“High House,” await inspection, and below the Castle, not always found
by hurrying visitors, is the rustic old Castle Mill, with an overshot
and an undershot waterwheel, side by side, tucked away from casual
observation beneath tall trees.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIX
MINEHEAD, NEW AND OLD—SELWORTHY—THE HORNER
Scarce two miles distant from Dunster is Minehead, the hamlet of Alcombe
lying between the two. Minehead, a group of three so-called “towns,”
Quay Town, Lower Town, and Upper Town, occupies a position on the gently
curving flat shore sheltered on the West by the bold, abrupt headland of
North Hill, rising to a height of 843 feet. North Hill is so striking a
feature in all views of the town, that one comes unconsciously to regard
it as the only typical outstanding feature of the place. It is, so far
as pictures go, Minehead. A noble hill it is, with the old quayside
houses of the original fisher-village and ancient little port nestling
beneath it. Immemorially a swelling green hillside, seamed and lined
irregularly with hedgerows roughly into a chessboard pattern, it is
distressing nowadays to find it being studded with villas and scarred
with roads.
For to this complexion has Minehead come at last; development into a
seaside resort. But a few years since, and here you had a scattered,
unspoiled village. To-day, by favour of the Luttrells, who own the land,
and because the railway is handy, the terminus station being, in fact,
on the beach, the builder is walking, splay-footed, all over it, and
hotels have arisen on the front, and there is a bandstand, there are
seaside “entertainers,” and there are pickpockets among the crowds thus
being “entertained”; with the result that numerous visitors have to
remain in pawn at their lodgings until such time as they receive fresh
supplies. This it is to be up-to-date! Among other up-to-date doings is
the covering of the roads with asphalte, so that visitant motor-cars
shall not stir up the dust; the result being that the roads so treated
have an evilly dirty appearance and a worse stink. They look, and
probably are, dangerous to health.
The old scattered Quay Town, Lower Town, and Upper Town, with their
time-honoured cob-walled, whitewashed cottages, are being surely
enmeshed together in an upstart network of new roads and
uncharacteristic villas that might be in suburban London, rather than in
Somerset; and the queer old Custom House, built in like manner on the
Quay, and a little larger than a tool-shed, has been wantonly destroyed
to make an approach to a pleasure pier, built in an impossible
situation, so that visitors are pleased not to go upon it. So much—and
more than enough too—of modern Minehead.
[Illustration: MINEHEAD.]
History-books tell us of strange doings in the old town. Thus in 1265,
on a Sunday, the wild Welsh, under one William of Berkeley, came across
Channel very numerously and pillaged the surrounding country before a
force could be despatched to deal with them. The reckoning was perhaps
not a ready one, but it seems to have been complete; the Constable of
Dunster, one Adam of Gurdon, meeting and defeating them and driving them
and their captain into the sea, wherein those who had not perished by
the sword were drowned.
In olden times this was the seat of a not inconsiderable trade. Woollens
were exported hence, and a large business was done in herrings sent to
Mediterranean ports, which bought annually some 4,000 barrels. Hence the
ancient armorial bearings of Minehead; a sailing ship and a woolpack.
[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MANTEL, “LUTTRELL ARMS” INN.]
A curious incident in the annals of Minehead in days of old is that of
the furious onslaught of the Church upon an unfortunate lad, a native of
the place, who, sailing in a ship afterwards captured by Turkish
pirates, was taken prisoner, and his life spared on condition that he
embraced the Mohammedan religion. The desirability of life, and the
practical certainty of this youthful sailor that one religion was as
good as another, when a choice was offered between death and the
acceptance of a new creed, may perhaps be readily understood. But the
youth’s refusal to add himself to the noble army of martyrs outraged the
susceptibilities of the flatulent divines of the period, who, when he at
last returned home and told his story, made so great an affair of it
that nothing would properly serve the occasion but a public recantation
of error. We may, therefore, vividly picture to ourselves that scene in
Minehead church on Sunday, March 16th, 1627, when the more or less
penitent, but certainly very frightened and astonished, lad was had in
front of the pulpit, before the whole congregation, and, standing there
in the Turkish breeches in which he had returned home, made to listen to
the windy discourse of the Reverend Mr. Edward Kellet, who preached the
sermon afterwards printed under the title of _A Return from Argier_. We
may presume “Algiers” to be meant; but early seventeenth-century folk
were more than a little uncertain in these matters. The central,
harrowing fact of this occasion was, however, the length of that homily,
which fills seventy-eight closely printed pages, and must therefore have
occupied considerably over an hour in delivery. This is the manner of
it, as set forth by the printer and published and sold in Paternoster
Row for the edification of the godly:
“A Return from Argier: A Sermon preached at Minhead, in the County of
Somerset, the 16th of March, 1627, the re-admission of a Relapsed
Christian into our Church. By Edward Kellet, Doctor of Divinity.”
For the benefit of purchasers in London and elsewhere, who were not
acquainted with the circumstances, the following explanation was made to
preface the sermon:—
“A Countryman of ours goinge from the _Port_ of Mynhead in
Somersetshire, bound for the streights, was taken by Turkish Pyrats, and
made a slave at Argier, and liuing there in slauerie, by frailty and
weaknesse, forsooke the Christian Religion, and turned Turke, and liued
so some yeares; and in that time seruing in a Turkish ship, which was
taken by an Englishman of warre, was brought backe againe to Mynhead,
where being made to vnderstand the grieuousnesse of his Apostacy, was
very penitent for the same, and desired to be reconciled to the Church,
into which he was admitted by the authority of the Lord Bishop of that
Dioces, with aduise of some great and learned Prelates of this Kingdome
and was enioyned pennance for his Apostacy: and at his admission, and
performance thereof, these two Sermons were Preached the third Sunday in
Lent, Anno 1627, one the Forenoone, the other in the afternoone.”
Jeremy 3. 22. “Return, ye backsliding Children, and I will heal your
backslidings. Behold, we come unto thee, for thou art the Lord our God.”
The amount of pedantic verbiage in the Reverend Mr. Kellet’s hour-long
discourse is really appalling. That his congregation comprehended even
the half of it is not to be supposed, and that the “penitent” himself
but dimly understood what all the trouble was about may easily be
imagined. But there can, at any rate, be no manner of doubt that the
Doctor of Divinity enjoyed himself very much on this occasion:
thundering forth denunciations barbed with quotations from musty
theological works and fortified by apposite texts, which he must most
laboriously have raked together; for those were the days before Cruden’s
and other Concordances to the Scriptures had come into being. I will be
more merciful to my readers than was Kellet to his congregation, and
pretermit the most part of his sententious phrases and his excerpts from
the patriarchs. But let the following stand as a taste of his quality.
“You,” said he, pointing a scornful finger at the baggy-breeched
penitent standing there, “you whom God suffered to fall, and yet of His
infinite mercy vouchsafed graciously to bring home, not only to your
country and kindred, but to the profession of your first faith and to
the Church of Sacraments again; let me say to you (but in a better hour)
as sometime Joshua to Achan: ‘Give glory to God, sing praises to Him who
hath delivered your soul from the nethermost hell.’ When I think upon
your Turkish attire, that embleme of apostacy and witness of your wofull
fall, I do remember Adam and his figge-leave breeches; they could
neither conceal his shame, nor cover his nakedness. I do think vpon
David clad in Saul’s armour and his helmet of brasse. ‘I cannot goe with
these,’ saith David. How could you hope in this unsanctified habit to
attain Heaven? How could you clad in this vnchristian weede; how could
you, but with horror and astonishment thinke on the white robe of the
innocent Martyrs which you had lost? How could you goe in these rewards
of iniquity and guerdons of apostacie? and with what face could you
behold your selfe and others? I know you were young. So was Daniel and
the three Children: so were Dioscurus the Confessor, and Ponticus, the
Martyr: adde (if you please) English Mekins, who all at fifteen yeares
of age enured manfully whatsoever the furie of the persecutors pleased
to inflict vpon them.”
The preacher then proceeded to remark:
“We are bound without failing to resist unto the death. You who
go down to the sea in ships, and occupy your business in great
waters, are reckoned by Pittacus as neither amongst the dead nor
the living. The grave is always open before your face, and only
the thickness of an inch exists between you and eternity.”
Altogether, the lot of the seafaring community was revealed to this
Minehead congregation in an entirely new light. They had never heard of
Pittacus before, and had really, you know, fancied themselves alive, and
not in the dreadful _tertium quid_ pictured by that classical
philosopher.
Time was also when Minehead possessed a ghost, but that was long ago. It
is now going on for nearly three hundred years since this malignant
spectre was finally discredited, and the up-to-date circumstances of the
place scarce admit the possibility of a successor. Sir Walter Scott, in
his notes to “Rokeby,” tells us about this apparition, which was (or was
reputed to be) that of a Mrs. Leakey, an amiable old widow lady of the
little seaport, who died in 1634. She had an only son, a shipowner and
seafaring man of the place, who drove a considerable trade with
Waterford and other ports of the South of Ireland. She was in life of
such a cheery and friendly disposition, and so acceptable a companion to
her friends that they were accustomed to say to her and to each other
what a pity it was so amiable and good-natured a woman must, in the
usual course nature, be at last lost to an admiring circle in
particular, and in general to a world in which her like was seldom met.
To these flattering remarks she used to reply that, whatever pleasure
they might now find in her company, they would not greatly like to see
her, and to converse with her, after death.
After her inevitable demise, she began to appear to various persons,
both by day and night: sometimes in her house and at others in the
fields and lanes. She even haunted the sea. The cause of this postmortem
restlessness appears to have been a small matter of a necklace which had
fallen into hands she had not intended; and her dissatisfaction with
this state of affairs entirely changed her once suave disposition. One
of her favourite ghostly fancies was to appear upon the quay and call
for a boat, much to the terror of the waterside folk. Her son, however,
was the principal mark of her vengeance, for her chief delight was to
whistle up a wind whenever the unfortunate son’s ships drew near to
port. He suffered, in consequence, so greatly from shipwreck that he
soon became a ruined man. So apparently credible a person as the curate
of Minehead saw the spook, and believed, as also did her
daughter-in-law, a servant, and numerous others. In fact, Minehead in
general placed entire confidence in the supernatural nature of “the
Whistling Ghost”; and it was not altogether reassured by the finding of
a commission that sat to enquire upon the matter, presided over by the
Bishop of Bath and Wells. The finding was “Wee are yet of opinion and
doe believe that there never was any such apparition at all, but that it
is an imposture, devise, and fraud for some particular ends, but what
they are wee know not.”
[Illustration: QUIRKE’S ALMSHOUSES.]
There are still some quaint objects, and odd nooks and corners in
Minehead. Among these an alabaster statue of Queen Anne (deceased some
time since) is prominent in the principal street: but the local experts
in the art of how not to do anything properly have just enshrined it in
a clumsy stone alcove affair that not only serves the intended office of
shielding the statue from the weather, but also most efficiently
obscures it. This figure was the work of Bird, author of the original
statue of Queen Anne in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and was presented
by Sir Jacob Banks to the town in 1719, as some sort of recognition of
the honour he had for sixteen years enjoyed of representing Minehead in
nine successive Parliaments, by favour of the powerful local Luttrell
interest, he having in 1696 married the widow of Colonel Francis
Luttrell. The statue was originally placed in the church, and the
churchwardens’ accounts tell us, in this wise, how it was received:
s. d.
Ringing when the Queen’s effigies was 7 6
brought to the Church
Paid for beer for the men that brought 2 6
in the Queen’s effigies into the
Church
The Quirke almshouses, in Market House Lane, form a pretty nook. Their
origin is sufficiently told on the little engraved brass plate that is
fixed over the central door:
Robert Qvirck, sonne of James Qvirck
bvilt this howse ano: 1630 and
doth give it to the vse of the poore
of this parish for ever and for better
maintenance I doe give my two
inner sellers at the Inner End of the key
and cvrssed bee that man that shall
convert it to any other vse then to
the vse of the poore 1630.
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF THE MANOR OFFICE.]
Then follow the representation of a three-masted, full-rigged ship of
the period, and the concluding lines:
God’s providence
Is my Inheritance
R Q
E
[Illustration: MINEHEAD CHURCH.]
The shaft of an ancient cross stands at one end of this row of cottages.
[Illustration: THE MANOR OFFICE, MINEHEAD.]
In midst of Minehead, now overshadowed by tall business premises,
painfully like those to be seen any day in London, stands a charming old
building, long past used as the Manor Office. The original use of the
building, which appears to be of the fifteenth century, is unknown, and
perhaps hardly even to be guessed at. The walls, of red sandstone, are
immensely thick and stoutly buttressed, with oak-framed windows of
semi-ecclesiastical design, still displaying traces of rich carving.
Old customs survive at Minehead, in a half-hearted way, and not perhaps
from any natural spontaneous joyousness, but because there is something
to be made out of them. This does not, however, apply to the burning of
the ashen faggot on the domestic hearth on Christmas Eve, and but
partially to the “worslers”—_i.e._ “wassailers”—who every January 17th
visit neighbouring orchards, and with song and dance invoke a good crop
of apples in the forthcoming season. But weddings at the old parish
church still form an excuse for levying tribute, and those who have
attended generally discover their return barred until they have rendered
the wherewithal for drinks round.
Chief among the town celebrations is that of the Hobby Horse, surviving
from a remote antiquity. It takes place annually, on the first three
days of May, and assumes the shape of a gaudily caparisoned What-is-It,
escorted by fishermen and fisher-lads, playing on drum and concertina,
with an obbligato of money-box rattling. We have styled the Hobby Horse
as above for the sufficient reason that it is not only utterly unlike
anything equine, but with an equal conclusiveness unlike anything else
on earth; being just a draped framework, hung with gaily coloured
ribbons, from the midst of which rises a something intended for a capped
head. The human mechanism that actuates this affair may be guessed at
from the great boots that ever and again are to be seen protruding from
it.
[Illustration: ROOD-LOFT TURRET, MINEHEAD.]
This is a survival of more simple times, and seems a little out of the
picture in the sophisticated streets of modern Minehead. Rural customs,
outside the radius of the town, wear a more natural appearance.
The ancient church of Minehead, the parish church of St. Michael, stands
as do most churches dedicated to that saint, on a hilly site. It is in
Upper Town, half way up North Hill, and quite remote, thanks be, from
the recent developments down below. Here the ancient white-faced
cottages remain, and the steep steps that form the road, and here you
feel that you are come again into the Somerset of pre-railway times. The
church is chiefly of the Perpendicular period. On the tower, rather too
high for their details to be easily made out without the aid of glasses,
are sculptured panels representing St. Michael weighing souls, with the
Virgin Mary on one side and the Devil on the other contending for
possession, by pressing down the beam of the scales; and a group of God
the Father, holding a crucified Christ. A rich projecting bay filled
with windows forms an unusual feature of the south side of the church.
It is the staircase turret of the rood screen, and was designed in this
fashion and filled with windows, it is said, for the purpose of showing
a light at night-time for fishermen making the harbour. No beacon is
shown now, but it is stated that fishermen still speak of “picking up
the church lights” as they make their way home. At the same time, it is
only right to say that, from personal observation, it seems impossible
that the windows or the turret could ever have been visible from the
sea. They look out rather in a landward direction, if anything, towards
Dunster. But on the opposite side of the church there remains an
inscription in Old English characters, somewhat decayed, by which it is
evident that the well-being of the neighbourhood was near the hearts of
these church folk:
We . prey . to . John . and M(ary)
send . our . neyburs . safte.
[Illustration: THE CLOCK JACK, MINEHEAD CHURCH.]
The interior of the church is very fine, with the usual rich rood-screen
we come to expect in these parts. It is possible to ascend the
staircase-turret and walk along the site of the rood-loft, which was
indeed until 1886, when the church was restored, occupied during service
by school-children. Here is preserved a queer little clock-jack figure,
removed from the tower. The entrance to the chapel of St. Lawrence from
the chancel is by an archway curiously framed in wood, instead of stone.
Various relics, in the shape of old books and Bibles, a carved-oak late
fifteenth-century chest, and some brasses of the Quirke family (among
whom one notices the oddly named “Izott,” wife of John Quirke, mariner,
1724) reward the visitor.
This way, uphill, past the old church, is the pleasantest exit from
Minehead, on the way to Porlock, but it is by no means the usual or the
easiest one, as the stranger will perceive when he is reduced to
enquiring the proper choice among several roads that presently confront
him.
[Illustration: LYNCH CHAPEL.]
“Y’ant coom up yur to get to Parlock?” asked an old rustic cottage woman
of the present writer, with some astonishment. Being reassured that one
really knew this to be a very indirect route, she abandoned the sarcasm
she was prepared with, and was reduced to satire on visitors in general.
“_Some_ on ’em doan’ niver think of asking the way. They jest goos arn,
an’ then they goos wrong. I often larfs in me sleeve at ’em, I do.”
Saucy puss!
Yes. I suspect the simple countryfolk enjoy many a sly laugh at
visitors, quite unsuspected.
To Selworthy, over North Hill, is a rugged way, of narrow woodland
lanes. Selworthy, as its name sufficiently indicates, is a village amid
the woods; woods around it, above and below; the woodlands belonging to
the Aclands of Holnicote—_i.e._ “Hollen-cot,” or holly-cot,—that seat
lying down beside the main road to Porlock. Here are ancient oaks and
other trees, and more recent plantations that have now matured and
clothed the hillsides with fir and larch. These were planted by that Sir
Thomas Acland who died, aged 89, in 1898. A wild region is that of
Selworthy Beacon, rising to a height of 933 feet, above the village.
[Illustration: PACKHORSE BRIDGE, ALLERFORD.]
The village itself is a small and scattered one, with a large and
handsome church, neighboured by a monastic tithe-barn. A “Peter’s Pence”
chest, hinting, by its size and iron bands and triple locks, great
expectations, is one of the objects of interest here. But tourists from
Minehead and Porlock do not come chiefly to see the church, beautifully
restored with the aid of Acland gold though it be. It is rather the fame
of the pretty thatched cottages bordering a village green that attracts
them. These owe their origin to the late Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, who
built them as homes for servants grown old in his employ, and pensioned
off by him.
The road down from Selworthy to Porlock passes the little river Horner
and commands views on the left hand up to the purple hills of Exmoor, up
to Cloutsham, where the wild red deer couch, and the great heights of
Dunkery, Easter Hill, and Robinow. To the left lies the hamlet of
Horner, so-called from the river, “Hwrnr,” = “the Snorer,” snoring, as
the Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have fancifully likened the sound of
its hoarse purring, over the boulders and amid the gravel-stones that
strew its shallow woodland course. Here, amid the woods, you may find,
not far from a comparatively modern road-bridge, an ancient packhorse
bridge flung steeply across the stream. At Allerford is another
packhorse bridge.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XX
PORLOCK—BOSSINGTON—PORLOCK WEIR
A SUDDEN drop into the vale of Porlock tilts the traveller neck and crop
into the village street. You realise, when come to the village, that it
stands in a flat, low-lying space giving upon a distant bay; a bay
distant just upon one mile. Once upon a time—a time so distant that
history places no certain date against it—the village immediately faced
the sea, and indeed took its name, which means “the enclosed port,” from
the fact of the harbour running up to this point, deeply embayed between
the enfolding hills. Rich meadows now spread out where the sea once
rolled; but the waves might surge there even now were it not for the
continued existence of that great rampart of stones flung up in the long
ago by the sea, which thus by its own action shut itself out from its
ancient realm.
Porlock has for “ever so long” been a show place, and, like any other
originally modest beauty, has at last become a little spoiled by praise,
and more than a little sophisticated. We do not greatly esteem the
self-conscious beauty, especially when she paints.
The charm of Porlock has been, and is being, still more sadly smirched
by expansion and by that increasing intercourse with the world which has
taken the accent off the tongues of the villagers, replaced the weirdly
cut provincial clothes of an earlier era with garments of a more modish
style, and brought buildings of a distinctly suburban type into the once
purely rustic street. But these newer buildings, although sufficiently
odious, do not by any means touch the depths of abomination plumbed by
the local Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, built in the ’30’s, and fully as
bad, in its grey stuccoed, would-be classicism, as that date would
imply.
The coming of the motor-car has been nothing less than a disaster to
Porlock. Not only private cars, growing ever larger and more productive
of dust, noise, and stink, rush through the once sweet-scented street,
regardless of the comfort and convenience of villagers or visitors, but
“public service” vehicles and chars-à-bancs as big as houses slam
through the place, raising a stifling dust that penetrates everywhere.
Few sights are more distressing, to those who knew Porlock as it was,
than that of the clustered roses and jessamines that mantle so many of
the houses, thickly covered with dust. It is a standing wonder that the
inhabitants of pretty villages plagued almost beyond endurance by
motorists do not arise and compel County Councils and other authorities
to take action. Possibly they know only too well that the majority of
members of those Councils is formed by owners of cars, who are
themselves among the worst offenders.
But, in any case, the simple old days of Porlock are done. To have seen
Porlock with Southey, how great that privilege! Great, not only in the
literary way, but in a glimpse of it in its unspoiled, unconscious
beauty, before ever it had become notable as a show-place.
Local connoisseurs of the picturesque prefer Bossington, now that
Porlock is worn a little threadbare and grown so dusty. They are of
opinion that Bossington is the quainter of the two. But to come to
judgment in this frame is not wholly in order, for the places are of
such different types, and cannot fairly be compared. Porlock is a
considerable village, with numerous shops; and Bossington is but a
hamlet, without a church, and apparently with no shops at all. It is a
very sequestered place, standing on the Horner, about a mile distant,
north-eastward, from Porlock. The great recommendations of Bossington in
these latter days are that motor-cars never or rarely get there, and
that it is by consequence quiet and dustless. Porlock is on the main
road—on the way to that Somewhere Else which is ever your typical
motorist’s quest: a quest he relinquishes at night, only to resume it
the next morning. Bossington stands in the way to Nowhere in Particular,
and the roads that lead to it are less roads than lanes. That they may
long continue their narrow, rough, and winding character is the wish of
those who wish Bossington well.
[Illustration: BOSSINGTON.]
For the rest, it is pre-eminently a hamlet of chimneys. The chimneys of
Porlock are themselves a remarkable feature of that place, but at
Bossington they are _the_ feature. They are all of a remarkable height.
There are coroneted chimneys; round chimneys, with pots and without;
chimneys square, and chimneys finished off with slates set up (as
wind-breakers) at an angle, something like a simple problem in Euclid.
The next great feature of Bossington is its immense walnut-tree, whose
trunk measures sixteen feet in circumference. This is the chieftain of
all the many walnut-trees that flourish in the neighbourhood.
The modern Wesleyan Chapel of Bossington puts its stuccoed brother at
Porlock to shame. It is a pretty building, designed in good taste, built
of stone banded with blue brick, and is finished off with a quaintly
louvred turret. Not even the neighbouring restored chapel of Lynch,
rescued from desecration by the late Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, looks more
worshipful.
Bossington street, irregularly fringed with rustic cottages, and with
the Horner on one side fleeting amid its pebbles to the sea, is as
unconventional as a farmyard, and ends at last on the great shingle-bank
of Porlock Bay, where two or three ruined old houses stand against the
skyline and look as if they had known stirring incidents of shipwreck
and smuggling, as indeed they probably have, in abundance.
Smuggling was the chief occupation of Porlock and its surroundings in
Southey’s time. The lonely beach of huge pebbles that stretches between
Porlock Weir and Bossington, with low-lying, marshy meadows giving upon
it, was most frequently the scene of goods being landed secretly and
thence dispersed into the surrounding country. The Revenue officials
knew so well that smuggling was carried on largely that it behoved the
“free-traders” to be at especial pains to baffle them. Some of their
ingeniously constructed hiding-holes have not been unearthed until
comparatively recent years. Thus, in so unlikely a situation as the
middle of a field, a smugglers’ store-chamber was found in course of
ploughing, between Porlock and Bossington. Again, it was left to modern
times for a smugglers’ hiding-hole in the picturesque farmhouse of
Higher Doverhay to be discovered. This ingenious place of concealment
for contraband goods had been constructed by the simple process of
building a false outer wall parallel with the real wall of the
farmhouse, leaving a narrow space between. When discovered the shelves
with which this recess was fitted, for the reception of spirit-kegs,
were still there; but the spirits themselves had departed.
The church of Porlock, dedicated to St. Dubritius, is generally regarded
by visitors as an architectural joke. It is the curiously truncated
shingled broach spire that produces this derogatory view. It is
understood that the local clergy, seriously exercised in their minds
about this attitude of unseemly mirth, would greatly like to rebuild
tower and spire. But guidebooks and visitors alike, placing such stress
upon this alleged grotesqueness, are quite wrong. The spire, as it is,
has that all-too-rare thing, character, and it is a joy to the artist,
and something on which visitors can exercise their wits. In short,
Porlock would be a good deal less than its old self were it abolished.
With the huge and dilapidated churchyard yew, and the tall neighbouring
cross, the old church, as a whole, forms a striking _motif_ for a
sketch.
[Illustration: PORLOCK CHURCH.]
The most notable feature of the interior is the noble altar-tomb of the
fourth Baron Harington of Aldingham, and his wife, Elizabeth Courtenay,
daughter of the Earl of Devon, who died respectively in 1417 and 1472.
She married, secondly, Lord Bonvile, of Chewton, but chose to lie here;
and here, in finely sculptured effigies, they are represented, the noble
helmeted and in complete armour, and his lady with tall mitre headdress
and coronet.
Guide-books tell of the “curious epitaphs” at Porlock, but they are not
so curious as might thus be supposed; certainly not more so than those
of the average country churchyard. The chief feature of these is their
ungrammatical character, as where we read of Henry Pulsford and Richard
Bale, “who was both drownd” at “Lymouth,” in 1784. Poetry—or rather,
verse—that changed, in arbitrary fashion, from first person to third,
was still possible in 1860, as witness these unpleasant lines upon one
Thomas Fry:
For many weeks my friends did see
Approaching death attending me.
No favour could his body find,
Till in the earth it was confined,
and so forth.
The “Ship” inn is almost, if not even quite, as well known a feature of
Porlock as the church, and is unaltered since Southey sheltered here
considerably over a hundred years ago—
By the unwelcome summer rain confined.
The thatch has, of course, been renewed from time to time, but always in
the old traditional style, and the white walls are obviously what they
were a couple of centuries or more ago. The oldest part of the inn is
probably a curious little trefoiled-headed wooden window, of
semi-ecclesiastical design, under the eaves.
[Illustration: INGLENOOK, “SHIP” INN, PORLOCK.]
Southey sat in the little parlour still existing, and, by the inglenook
that has fortunately been preserved, wrote the oft-quoted lines:
Porlock, thy verdant vale, so fair to sight,
Thy lofty hills, which fern and furze embrown,
Thy waters, that roll musically down
Thy woody glens, the traveller with delight
Recalls to memory, and the channel grey
Circling it, surging in thy level bay.
[Illustration: “THE SHIP” INN, PORLOCK.]
A small window in this chimney-corner commands a view up the road, just
as of old, where the famed “Porlock Hill” begins that steep and
long-continued rise which has made it known, far and near, as “the worst
hill in the West of England.” This is a mile-long rise from Porlock Vale
to the wild, exposed tableland that stretches, for seven miles, to
Countisbury, where it descends steeply to Lynmouth. The rise of Porlock
Hill is one thousand feet, but the tableland beyond it rises yet another
378 feet by Culbone Hill. The gradient of Porlock Hill is in parts as
steep as one in six, and the surface is always, at all seasons of the
year, bad in the extreme. A sharp bend to the right appears, a little
way uphill. In summer a mass of red dust six or eight inches deep, and
plentifully mixed with large stones, it is in winter a pudding-like
mixture of a clayey nature. The spectacle of heavy-laden coaches toiling
up this fearsome so-called “road” is a distressing one for those who
love horses, and grieve to see them overtaxed. No cyclist could, of
course, hope to ride up, while none but a madman would attempt to ride
down.
A private road, however, engineered some forty years ago by Colonel
Blathwayt through his domain of Whitestone Park, ascends the hillsides
by a long series of zigzags, and thus admits of easy gradients. The
distance is twice as long, but the ruling gradient is only one in ten,
and the surface is good. The scenery also—the “New Road,” as it is
called, running through woodlands for the most part—is much preferable
to that of the old road. In order to provide funds for keeping this “New
Road” in repair, certain tolls are payable: a penny for a cycle or a
saddle-horse; fourpence for carriages, etc., with one horse, and
threepence for every additional horse; and a shilling for motor-cars.
But, before leaving Porlock behind, it will be well to visit Porlock
Weir. Porlock Weir, or Quay, as some style it, is the port of Porlock.
It is not, commercially speaking, much of a port, for the basin is
neither large nor deep, and only the smallest of sailing-vessels may
enter it.
As you come along the mile and a half of pretty country road that leads
from Porlock to Porlock Weir, passing many remarkably picturesque
cob-walled and thatch-roofed cottages on the way, you catch glimpses of
the kind of place this port is. Porlock Bay lies open to the view, and
is revealed as a two-and-a-quarter mile semicircular sweep of naked
pebble-ridge between Hurlstone Point and Gore Point. Under the
last-named wooded bluff, which forms the buttress, so to speak, on which
rests the romantic domain of Ashley Combe, the village and harbour of
Porlock Weir are snugly placed. “Weir” stands, in the minds of most
people, for a foaming waterfall on a river; but there is no stream
whatever at this place, and the harbour that has been given the name is
just a natural basin formed by a long-continued action of the tides in
heaping up a great impervious outer bank of pebbles under this
protecting bluff, where the bay finds its western termination. Left to
itself, the trench-like inlet thus formed would fill automatically with
every flood-tide, and empty again with the ebb; but the mouth of it was
closed, perhaps three centuries ago, by a wall and sluice-gates, by
which the water could, at ebb, be kept in the harbour so easily
constructed. That is Porlock Weir, upon whose primitive quays look a few
picturesquely dilapidated waterside buildings. The spot is quiet and
delightfully unconventional, and is frequented in summer by visitors who
appreciate those qualities and the sea-fishing that is to be had off the
beach. The old “Ship” inn is a counterpart of that hostelry of the same
name at Porlock, and is generally old-fashioned and delightful. You
catch a glimpse of copper warming-pans as you pass, and are in receipt
of an impression of that kind of comfort which was the last thing in
innkeeping life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The “Anchor Hotel” is a gabled building, obviously built about 1885,
when architects found salvation in gables, red-brick, rough-cast
plaster, and a general Queen Annean attitude. Besides these, there
stands an _omnium gatherum_ shop that will supply you at one end of the
scale with a ton of coals and any reasonable requirement in fodder and
corn-chandlery, or with a pennyworth of acid-drops at the other. The
romantic-looking old cottages that face the road and have quaintly
peaked combs to their thatches, display luxuriant gardens in front, and
the sea on occasion clamours for entrance at the back; for it can be
very rough here at times, as the pebble-ridge heaped up against the
stout sea-wall protecting the road sufficiently witnesses.
The little harbour, although apparently so derelict, is not altogether a
thing of the past, for Porlock is some seven miles distant from any
railway, and it still remains cheaper to bring coals into the place by
sea than by any other method. And this, it would seem, must always be
the case, for coal comes to Porlock direct from the quays of the South
Wales coalfields. But, except for this class of goods, and for a few
other miscellaneous and casual items, the harbour of Porlock Weir is
nowadays practically deserted. It forms a curious spectacle. Old vessels
lie rotting in the ooze, with no one to clear away their discredited
carcases; the _Caerleon_ of Bridgwater, lying at the quay awaiting a
discharge of her cargo of coals, the only craft obviously in commission.
[Illustration: PORLOCK WEIR.]
Life certainly does not run with a strong current at Porlock Weir.
Overnight you may see jerseyed seafaring men sitting in a row on a
waterside bench, their backs supported by a convenient wall. They are
engaged in contemplating nothing in particular. Vacuity of mind is set
upon their countenances, and expresses itself in their very attitudes,
hands drooping listlessly over knees, heads sunk upon chests. There they
have sat, with intervals for refreshment, all day, and there they are
sitting as twilight fades away into darkness. When the visitor comes
down to breakfast at the “Anchor” or the “Ship” opposite, they are
discovered in the selfsame place and in the same attitudes as before.
They seem to hold constant session, but rarely speak; not because they
hold silence to be golden, but for the simple reason that all subjects
are exhausted.
This silent companionship is not often broken, the chief occasions of
the break-up being those exciting times when some terrified, panting,
hunted stag comes fleeting down out of the woods with the yelping hounds
at his heels. The sea is the harried creature’s last resort, and in it
he is generally lassoed and dragged to shore, where the hounds tear the
unfortunate beast to pieces, amid interested crowds of onlookers. Such
is “sport.”
But this death of the stag on Porlock beach is now very much a thing of
the past, since the strong line of fencing that runs through the woods
of Ashley Combe and Culbone, as far as Glenthorne, has come into
existence, preventing the fugitive stags from taking this last desperate
refuge. Nowadays, more commonly, they take to the water at the eastern
end of the beach, coming down through the Horner valley to Bossington.
Here, then, the hunt often ends, and spectators are treated to the
extraordinary sight of huntsmen in scarlet clambering about the rocks of
Orestone Point, or wading in hunting boots in the sea.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXI
CULBONE AND ITS REVELS—WHORTLEBERRIES
THE way parallel with the shore to Culbone lies at the back of the
“Ship” inn at Porlock Weir, steeply up the wooded hillside that looks
along down to the sea. The recluse situation of Culbone is shadowed
forth, in company with those of two other lonely parishes of this
neighbourhood, by the old local rhyme, often quoted:
To Culbone, Oare, and Stoke Pero,
Parishes three, no parson will go.
The reason for this old-time clerical distaste is found partly in these
circumstances of solitude in which the opportunities for doing good must
needs be small; but chiefly, perhaps, in the fact that the pay was not
sufficient. The living of Culbone is stated by Crockford to be £41 net
per annum; that of Oare, £93; Stoke Pero, £75. Culbone and Oare are,
nowadays, held in conjunction by one parson, who thus enjoys an income
of £134—if a person may correctly be said to “enjoy” these less than
clerk’s wages.
The population of Culbone is thirty-four, and the spiritual care of them
thus costs £1 4_s._ 1_d._ and an infinitesimal fraction of a farthing,
per annum per head; but the spiritual shepherding of Stoke Pero, whose
population is thirty-eight, comes to nearly £2 per head.
[Illustration: THE LODGE, ASHLEY COMBE.]
The only way to Culbone lies past the entrance-lodge of the beautiful
estate of Ashley Combe, the property of the Earl of Lovelace, but
formerly that of Lord Chancellor King. The clock-tower of the house, in
the likeness of an Italian campanile, is seen peering up from amid the
massed woodlands. Ashley Combe is a place beautifully situated and
finely appointed, and is splendidly situated for stag-hunting with the
Devon and Somerset hounds. Until recently, and for a number of years
past, it was rented, chiefly for hunting purposes, by the Baroness de
Tainteignes.
A narrow wooden gateway in an arch of the entrance-lodge to Ashley Combe
leads into the footpath through the woods that forms the sole means of
reaching Culbone church. Here is nothing to vulgarise the way, and only
an occasional felled tree is evidence of some human being having
recently been in these wilds.
A silence that is not that of emptiness and desolation, but rather of
restfulness and content, fills the lovely underwoods that clothe the
hillsides of Culbone. “Sur-r-r-r,” sighs the summer breeze in the
grey-green alders, the dwarf oaks, and slim ashes. It is like the peace
of God.
Deep down on the right—so deep that you do but occasionally hear the
wash of the waves—is the dun-coloured Severn Sea, glimpsed more or less
indistinctly through the massed stems. The path winds for a mile through
these solitudes, mounting and descending steeply, and clothed in a few
places with slippery pine-needles that render walking uphill almost
impossible, and the corresponding descents something in the likeness of
glissades.
Culbone church is suddenly disclosed in an opening of the woods,
standing on a little plateau amid the hills, with but two houses in
sight, and those the cottages of what the country folk call “kippurs”:
that is to say, keepers. St. Francis preached to the birds, and the
casual visitor to Culbone is apt to think the vicar of Culbone’s only
congregation must be the birds and beasts of this wild spot. But a visit
paid on some summer Sunday would prove that, however few the
parishioners, the visitors from Porlock, drawn by curiosity to take part
in the service in what is supposed to be the “smallest church in
England,” are many. The attendance is then, in fact, often more than the
little building can accommodate, and service is frequently held in the
churchyard.
[Illustration: CULBONE CHURCH.]
It is a singular little building thus suddenly disclosed to the
stranger’s gaze: a white-walled structure of few architectural
pretensions, but exhibiting examples of rude Early English and
Perpendicular work. A shingled “extinguisher” spirelet rises direct from
the west end of the roof: own brother (but a very infant brother) to the
bulgeous, truncated spire of Porlock. The length of Culbone church is
but thirty-three feet, and the breadth twelve feet, but it is quite
complete within these limits. The nave roof, internally, is of the usual
West of England “cradle” type, of Perpendicular date. It is, of course,
an aisleless nave; but here will be found a tiny chancel and a
chancel-screen, with a font to serve those rare occasions when a baptism
takes place, and a family-pew for the Lovelace family on those rare
occasions when the Earl is not earning an honest addition to his income
by letting Ashley Combe.
A few tombstones, with the usual false rhymes “wept,” “bereft,” are
disposed about. On one of them you read the strange Christian name of
“Ilott,” for a woman. By the south porch stands the base of a
fourteenth- or fifteenth-century cross, stained with lichens.
Culbone is found in Domesday Book under the name of “Chetenore,” and
appears in old records as “Kitenore,” “Kytenore,” and “Kitnore”: “ore”
standing in the Anglo-Saxon for “seashore.” The present name derives
from the dedication of the church to “St. Culbone,” a corruption of
“Columban.”
St. Columban, or Columbanus, was an Irish saint, born A.D. 543, in
Leinster. The author of the “Lives of the Saints” says he “seems to have
been of a respectable family”; which was an advantage not commonly
enjoyed by saints, as the histories of these holy men show us. The
greater therefore, the credit due them for qualifying for saintship.
Columban, as a student, came very near disaster. He was a good-looking
young Irishman, and, as such, very attractive to the dark-eyed colleens
of his native land, who interrupted his studies in grammar, rhetoric,
and divinity so seriously with their winning ways that he fled at last,
on the advice of a mystic old woman, to Lough Erne. Thence he repaired
to Bangor, in Carrickfergus, and placed himself under the rule of Abbot
Congall. At length, leaving this seclusion, he set out upon a life of
itinerant preaching on the Continent, chiefly in Burgundy, whence he was
expelled for his too plain speech, criticising the conduct of the Court.
His last years were spent in meditation; and in peace and quiet he died
at length, on November 21st, A.D. 615, aged seventy-two.
Solitary places were especially affected by St. Columban, who liked
nothing better than the sole companionship of nature. There is thus a
peculiar fitness in the church of so retired a place as this being
dedicated to him.
But, quiet though it may now always be, Culbone was, in the eighteenth
century, the scene of an annual fair that, for merriment and
devil-me-care jollity, seems to have been fully abreast with other
country romps and revels.
The Reverend Richard Warner, coming to Culbone in 1799, in his “Walk
through the Western Counties,” says:
“Quiet and sequestered as this romantic spot at present is, it has
heretofore borne an honourable name in the annals of rustic revelry. Its
rocks have echoed to the shouts of multitudinous mirth, and its woods
rung with the symphonious music of all the neighbouring bands: in plain
English, a revel, or fair, was wont to be held here in times of yore.”
In still plainer English, there used formerly to be a fair held in
Culbone churchyard.
Entering upon the meditations of the Reverend Richard Warner, striving
to write plain English, and failing in the attempt, came an old
reminiscent, ruminating blacksmith, with an artless tale, recounted,
apparently, by the Reverend Richard as a moral anecdote.
“About forty-five years agone, sir,” said the blacksmith, “I was at a
noble revel in this spot; three hundred people at least were collected
together, and rare fun, to be sure, was going forward. A little warmed
with dancing, and somewhat flustered with ale (for certainly Dame
Mathews did sell stinging good stuff!) I determined to have a touch at
skittles, and sport away a sixpence or shilling, which I could do
without much danger, as I had a golden half-guinea in my pocket. To
play, therefore, I went; but, the liquor getting into my head, I could
not throw the bowl straight, and quickly lost the game, and two
shillings and ninepence to boot. Not liking to get rid of so much money
in so foolish a manner, and not thinking the fault was in myself—for too
much ale, you know, sir, is apt to make one over-wise—I resolved to win
back the two and ninepence, and then leave off; and accordingly set to
play a second time. The same ill-luck followed me, and in an hour and a
half I had not only lost the remainder of my money but about sixteen
shillings more out of a guinea I borrowed of a friend. This terrible
stroke quite sobered me. I could not help thinking what a wicked
scoundrel I must be, to go and run into ruin, and deprive my wife and
child of food, merely to indulge myself in a game, which, instead of
being an amusement had put me in a terrible passion, and made me curse
and swear more than ever I did in my life. Desperately vexed at my
folly, I went into the wood hard by, and sat down by the side of the
waterfall to reflect on the situation. I could plainly hear the singing
and laughing of the revel, but it was now gall and wormwood to me, and I
had almost resolved to escape from my own reproaches and the distress of
my wife by throwing myself down the cliff, upon the shore, when
Providence was so good as to preserve me from this additional
wickedness, and to put a thought into my head which saved me from the
consequences of despair. Cool and sober, for I had washed myself in the
stream and drank pretty largely of it, it struck me that if I went back
to the skittle-ground and ventured the remaining five shillings, I
should have a good chance of winning back my money from those who had
beaten me before, as _I_ was now fresh, and _they_ all overcome with
ale. Accordingly I returned to the churchyard and took up the bowl,
though pretty much jeered at by the lads who had been winners. The case,
however, was altered. I had now the advantage; could throw the bowl
straight; took every time a good aim, and more than once knocked down
all _nine_ pins. To make short my story, sir, it was only night that put
an end to my good luck; and when I left off play, I found I had got back
my own half-guinea, the guinea I had borrowed, and fifteen shillings in
good silver.” The blacksmith’s cleverness at getting back his own, and
incidentally a proportion of other people’s money is amusing enough; and
so is the attitude of the Reverend Richard Warner, amiably finding a
moral in it. There is an obvious enough lesson here, but not an
improving one, of the blameless copybook kind.
The neighbourhood of Porlock and Culbone, and, in fact, all the district
on to Lynmouth, is noted for its whortleberries; “urts,” as the country
people call them. Up the Horner valley, and on the wild widespread
commons that stretch away—a glorious expanse of furze, bracken, and
gorse—to Countisbury, the whortleberry bushes grow in profusion. But
“Bushes” is a term that, without explanation, is apt to be misleading,
for here the whortleberry plant grows only to a height of from six to
nine inches. The whortleberry, in other parts of the country called
bilberry, whinberry, and blueberry, is a familiar many-branched little
plant with small ovate leaves that range in colour from a light
yellow-green to that of burnished copper. Its fruit is perfectly round,
about the size of a large pea, and of a dark-blue colour, with a
slightly lighter bloom upon it, resembling the bloom on a plum. The
berries ripen in July and August, and are sweet, with a sub-acid
flavour. They form a very favourite dish in these parts, stewed, or made
into tarts and puddings, and in such cases strongly resemble
black-currants. Whortleberries generally command eightpence a quart in
the shops; but they are also largely picked for the use of dyers, who
use them for the production of a purple dye. It is understood that large
quantities of them are thus sent to Liverpool. The whortleberry harvest
being in full swing during the schools’ summer holidays, the boys and
girls of Porlock and round about are generally to be found on the
commons and the moors, busily engaged, with all the baskets they can
manage to commandeer, in the picking. Four or five quarts can readily be
gathered by one of these experts in the course of a day.
To this prime habitat of the whortleberry we come, by old road or new,
passing one or other of the coaches that in summer ply a busy trade in
carrying pleasure-seekers through a district innocent of railways. At
the crest of the moorland, where a weatherworn, wizened signpost says
simply “To Oare,” we enter upon a much-discussed district.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXII
THE “LORNA DOONE COUNTRY”
WE have here come into the very centre of what has in these later years
become known as the “Lorna Doone Country”; the neighbourhood of Oare and
the so-called “Doone Valley.” Oare lies in a profound valley, giving
upon Exmoor, on the left hand, and to it we must needs go, for to write
upon these parts of Somerset, where they march with Devon, and not to
enter upon the subject of the Doones, would in these times be
impossible, if the resultant book is to be at all representative.
No one who travels through North Devon and Somerset can escape “Lorna
Doone.” Nor, indeed, should they greatly wish to do so, for it is a
stirring romance. Since 1871, when the story first became popularised,
it has pervaded the whole countryside, much to the combined profit and
astonishment of the natives, who accept the good gifts it has brought,
chiefly in the shape of greatly increased numbers of tourists, but at
the same time they do not profess to understand it all, and have not
been generally at pains to inform themselves as to whom all these
developments are due.
“A Lunnon gennelman—I doan’t rightly knaw th’ name of ’en—wrote all
about thesyer Doones there is so much tark of, an’ put’n into a book,
yurs since. Read it? Not I, but my darter, she hev, an’ she do say that
Lorna Doone was a proper fine gell; not that I b’lieve much on’t;
although, mark you, it’s my idea that if so be them ‘Doone’ houses they
do let on so much about wer’ tarned auver an’ dug up, ther’d be a deal
o’ gold found there. There was some mighty queer folk lived up to
Badgery in wold times.” Such are the somewhat contradictory opinions to
be heard between Oare and Malmsmead.
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, author of the novel, “Lorna Doone,” came of
a North Devon and Exmoor ancestry, and so was, as it were, the
predestined author for these regions. He was born in 1825 and educated
largely at Blundell’s school, Tiverton, where Jan Ridd, hero of the
novel, got his schooling. Blackmore afterwards went up to Oxford, and
imbibed there a certain fondness for classical studies and a love of
literature that never left him; although a great part of his life, from
1858, was devoted to the cultivation of choice fruit at his residence at
Teddington, beside the Thames. The public, however, that knew of
Blackmore the novelist never heard of Blackmore the grower of choice
pears and plums for the London market, on his eleven Middlesex acres.
His first book was “Poems by Melanter,” published in 1835 and heard of
no more. In 1855 the Crimean War stirred him to authorship again, with
“The Bugle on the Black Sea,” and 1864 saw his first novel, “Clara
Vaughan,” published anonymously. It was not a success, nor was “Cradock
Nowell,” in 1866, more fortunate.
In March 1869 was published “Lorna Doone,” with the same dispiriting
want of success. The first edition was still hanging on hand in 1871,
and seemed likely to go the unhonoured way of all completely
unsuccessful books, when a strange reversal of fortune befel it. In the
preface to the twentieth edition, years afterwards, Blackmore tells us
vividly of this. One clearly perceives, in the manner of apostrophe to a
personified “Lorna” he adopts, that he was, at the time of writing this
preface, still entirely amazed at the abounding success that had at last
come, but in a wholly mistaken fashion. He says:
“What a lucky maid you are, my Lorna! When first you came from the
Western moors nobody cared to look at you; the ‘leaders of the public
taste’ led none of it to make test of you. Having struggled to the light
of day through obstruction and repulses, for a year and a half you
shivered in a cold corner without a sunray. Your native land disdained
your voice, and America answered, ‘No child of mine!’ Still, a certain
brave man, your publisher, felt convinced that there was good in you,
and standing by his convictions—as the English manner used to be—‘She
shall have another chance,’ he said; ‘we have lost a lot of money by
her; I don’t care if we lose some more.’ Accordingly, forth you came,
poor Lorna, in a simple, pretty dress, small in compass, small in
figure, smaller still in hope of life. But, oh—let none of her many
fairer ones who fail despond—a certain auspicious event occurred just
then, and gave you golden wings. The literary public found your name
akin to one which filled the air, and, as graciously as royalty itself,
endowed you with imaginary virtues. So grand is the luck of time and
name—failing which more solid beings melt into oblivion’s depth.” In
short, the dear, dunderheaded add-two-together-and-make-them-five
British public came to the wholly erroneous conclusion that “Lorna
Doone” was in some way connected with the marriage of Queen Victoria’s
fourth daughter the Princess Louise with the Marquess of Lorne; an event
which took place in 1871. The times were remarkable for the strong wave
of anti-monarchical feeling then rising, in consequence of the recluse
life led by the Queen in her widowhood; and there can be no doubt that
“Lorna Doone” was, in the first instance, purchased so freely because it
was suspected of being one of the many scandalous satires then issued in
plenty and bought eagerly.
Books have strange fortunes. Their careers hang upon a hair. Many
nowadays live but a season: others may be said never to have lived at
all. Others yet enjoy a furious, but short, vogue, and then die as
utterly as those that never enjoyed real life. The public originally
purchased “Lorna Doone” under a misapprehension that was, perhaps, not
very creditable, and then read the book and continued to buy it for its
own merits. And so it continues to run ever into new editions, and has
made the fortune of the Exmoor and North Devon districts, and the
adjoining parts of Somerset. Here it should be noted that, although the
public persists in regarding “Lorna Doone” as essentially a Devonshire
book, it is really chiefly concerned with Somerset.
Written in the first person singular, as the memoirs and experiences of
John Ridd, a seventeenth-century yeoman of Oare, the book, it will be
seen, is cast in a fashion not easy to make convincing reading, but it
successfully surmounts the difficulties of armchair expressions, and the
strong story carries the reader over many a passage otherwise
dangerously weak. But it is not great art. It does not compare with
Stevenson’s novels in the same manner, written nearly twenty years
later.
Still, such as it is, it is Blackmore’s best, and although he wrote many
other novels, he never again approached “Lorna Doone,” either in sheer
writing, or in commercial success. Booksellers stocked, and the public
bought, or borrowed from the libraries, his later works, because they
were by the author of “Lorna Doone,” and not for their intrinsic merits.
For Blackmore always just failed to convince, and never quite dispelled
an unreal kind of atmosphere that took his novels quite out of the
experiences of actual life, and made his characters so many
jumping-jacks, obviously actuated by strings.
The origin of “Lorna Doone” demands some notice. Blackmore freely
acknowledged that he was led to contemplate a romance on the subject of
the legendary wild squatters of these parts by reading a story published
in the _Leisure Hour_ during 1863, entitled “The Doones of Exmoor,” a
very poor piece of work, loosely strung together from recollections of
the Wichehalse and Doone legends that had long been floating about the
West Country. He rightly conceived he could do better, and set to work
upon his own early recollections of those legends, and, moreover,
revisited Porlock and Oare and other places, for the purpose of
acquiring more local colour, before beginning to write.
The question, Had the Doones ever a real existence? was debated somewhat
half-heartedly in the lifetime of Blackmore, but has since his death
been more and more keenly continued; until the literature written around
the subject, for and against the credibility of such a band of outlaws
having really made Exmoor their home, has assumed considerable
dimensions.
An examination of the evidence available appears to conclusively
establish the fact that no unassailably genuine documents have ever been
produced by which the existence of the Doones can be proved. No one has
ever traced legal documents, baptismal or other registers, or even
records of sessional proceedings in which the name Doone appears in
Somerset or Devon. Outlaws such as these, illiterate and half-savage,
would not, on the face of it, be likely to find a place in church
registers; but they would, on the other hand, it is fairly arguable,
easily have found mention in the records of punishments, great or small,
inflicted upon criminals or petty evil-doers. The inference that they,
as Doones, never existed here, is therefore well-nigh irresistible.
But the legendary belief in them in all this countryside is strong, and
dates far back beyond the appearance of Blackmore upon the scene with
his “Lorna Doone.” Aged people who lived at Porlock, and in all the
districts affected by legends of these robbers, and whose memories
carried them back to the early years of the nineteenth century, have
given testimony, not only to their having heard abundantly of “Doones”
on Exmoor, but to their having received the legends from their parents.
The long-lived fishermen of Porlock Weir, confronted with pamphlets
written and published, elaborately arguing against the existence of
those people, indignantly declared that one might as well pretend there
were never Aclands of Holnicote. They were not in the least concerned
with Blackmore’s story; for they had never read it, and did not carry
the author’s name in their minds. A curious thing is that so few people
of these districts have ever read “Lorna Doone.” But the fishermen, in
common with others, knew the usual run of the stories; although, to be
sure, they believed that the Doones were almost extinguished by the Reds
of Culbone, and knew little or nothing of the Ridds of Oare.
We are met with several theories as to the origin of these floating
legends, and the name of Doone. A favourite theory is that which
dismisses these stories by contending that the name is a corruption of
“Danes,” and that these more or less mysterious outcasts were really
belated memories of those Danish sea-rovers who made such fierce havoc
along all these shores in the ninth and tenth centuries.
A second belief, strangely supported by the undoubted existence in South
Wales of a family, or band, of Dwns (the pronunciation is exactly that
of “Doone”) in the time of Queen Elizabeth, is that a number of Welsh
outlaws, fleeing from justice, came across the Channel from
Carmarthenshire and became the Exmoor Doones. These Dwns were very
objectionable people in their own country, and were largely
intermarried, strange to say, with Ryds.
A third guess at the origin of the Doones is found in the belief,
sometimes held, that they were originally fugitives from Sedgemoor
fight, hiding from the retribution of the Government in what were then
the fastnesses of the moor; but the obvious criticism of this view is
that all danger would have been past after the revolution of 1688, and
they would then no longer have needed to hide.
The fourth theory, and one stated to have been shared by Blackmore
himself (although he was not necessarily a prime expert in the matter)
is that the Doones were Scottish exiles. We have but to spell the name
“Doune” for it to be at once recognised as Scottish. Certainly it is no
West of England patronymic. At what period this view of the puzzle holds
those supposititious Dounes to have come from Scotland does not appear.
Scottish history may, if necessary, be made to afford many likely
junctures at which various people would find it advisable to seek a
sanctuary abroad. Of recent years an odd claim to relationship with the
Doones, involving an attempt to connect them with Scottish exiles, has
been made by the owner of a curiosity-shop at Hunstanton, Norfolk. This
person, Beeton by name, and his niece, one Ida M. Browne, who has
adopted the pseudonym “Audrie Doon” for literary purposes, have since
1901 produced what purport to be old family portraits, relics, and
documents, taking their history back to the seventeenth century and
connecting them and the Doones with the Earl of Moray of the early years
of that century. According to this story, a brother of the Earl of Moray
assumed the name of Doune, and after much persecution in the course of
family disputes over property, was obliged in 1620 to leave Scotland.
This “Sir Ensor Doune” as the claim has it, settled in this
neighbourhood, where he and his “were more or less hated and feared by
the countryside until their return to Perthshire in 1699.”
Thus Miss Ida M. Browne.
From this Sir Ensor Doune was descended (always according to this
showing) long lines of Dounes, or Doones.
Among the “family relics” is an old oil-painting, inscribed “Sir Ensor
Doune, 1679”; an ill-drawn daub representing an elderly man with small
crumb-brush whiskers, and an expression which leaves the beholder in
doubt as to whether he is half-drunk or half-mad: both Doone
characteristics, if we have followed the legends at all attentively.
Another item is an old flint-lock pistol inscribed on the barrel “C.
Doone, 1681, Porlok,” and furnished further with a representation of
skull and cross-bones. These, with a genealogy drawn up by one “Charles
Doone of Braemar,” bringing the family down from 1561 to 1804, are the
evidences adduced; together with what is put forward as the diary of a
“Rupert Doune,” stated to have been a fugitive from Scotland after the
rebellion of 1745. He, it appears, found his way at last to North Devon
and Somerset; to the districts in which his seventeenth-century forbears
had settled. Here are extracts from his journal:
“Sept. 3rd, 1747.—Went to Barum on my way to the place they call Oare,
where our people came after their cruel treatment at the hands of Earl
Moray.”
“September 3rd, 1747.—Got to Oare and then to the valley of the Lyn; the
scenery very bonny, like our own land, but the part extremely wild and
lonely. Wandered about and thought of the doings of the family when
here, which I gather were not peaceable.”
How very precious is that last phrase—and how entirely unconvincing! It
would, in short, were any claim to material things attached to these
pretensions, be impossible to establish it on such slight foundations.
The first printed collection of Doone legends is that to be found in
Cooper’s “Guide to Lynton,” published in 1853. It is derived from local
folklore and from a manuscript collection of stories made for the
Reverend J. R. Chanter in 1839. Among these legends, besides those of
the Doones, we have the wild tales of Tom Faggus, the North Devon and
Somerset highwayman, and his “enchanted strawberry horse,” and the
fantastic and particularly stupid “legend of the de Wichehalse
family,[6] utterly without foundation.”
Footnote 6:
See _The North Devon Coast_, pp. 25-33 for a complete exposure of the
lying “de Wichehalse” legend, which contains no particle of truth.
Caution is therefore evidently to be exercised before accepting anything
in the way of these folk-tales, which tell of a fierce and utterly
lawless band of Doones who dwelt up the Badgworthy Valley, from about
the time of the Commonwealth, in a collection of some eleven rude
stone-built huts, and lived by raiding the houses and stockyards of the
neighbouring farmers. One of these stories tells us how the band was at
length exterminated by the long-suffering countryside. One winter’s
night, it appears, when snow was lying upon the ground, they made a raid
upon Yenworthy Farm, a lonely farmstead which still stands, although
since those times rebuilt, in a deep valley between the high-road near
County Gate and Culbone. Here they were received with an unexpectedly
bold front. _Arma virumque cano_; only in this instance it is of arms
and the woman one must sing. It was, in short, the farmer’s wife who
stood at an open window and opened fire upon them with a long duck-gun
that is to this day preserved in the house. This scattering discharge
appears to have severely wounded one, or several, of the raiders, for
blood-tracks were traced in the snow, leading in the direction of
Badgworthy. That same night the same party (or perhaps really another
part of the numerous band) appeared at Exford, in midst of Exmoor, and
attacked a farmhouse, in which were only a servant girl and a child. The
servant hid in the oven, leaving the child in the kitchen. The robbers,
the legend goes on to declare, killed the infant, and went off, with the
mocking lines,
If any one asks who ’twas killed thee,
Tell ’em—the Doones of Badgery.
This outrage formed the breaking-point of the rustic endurance of the
Doones, who were tracked to their lair by large bodies of countryfolk
and slain, and their stone huts demolished. The incident of the killing
of the infant is told, with variations, by Blackmore, in “Lorna Doone”;
a footnote declaring the author’s belief in the truthfulness of the
legends regarding the raid, but holding that the Doones did not wilfully
kill the child, which was fatally injured by being tossed playfully to
the ceiling, and accidentally let fall.
Variations of the final ending of the Doones place the scene at Robber’s
Bridge, on the Weir Water, and tell how the Ridds were chiefly
instrumental in bringing on the fight.
Yenworthy Farm, formerly the property of the Snow family, was sold to
the late Reverend W. S. Halliday of Glenthorne, by the late Mr. Nicholas
Snow. Mr. Halliday also purchased the duck-gun traditionally said to
have wounded the Doones. It is to remain always here, as a relic of the
lawless old times.
We may perhaps find in the name of Snow a significant clue to the
evolutionary processes of these old stories told in past generations
around local firesides on winter’s nights in those times when few could
read, and when, if they owned that accomplishment, literature of any
sort was scarce and dear. In tales repeated from mouth to mouth, all
kinds of accretions are to be expected; and it will already have been
noted how many are the variants of these Doone and other stories. The
patient and contemplative seeker after truth may easily find in the name
of Snow the origin of the snowy night on which the Doones attacked
Yenworthy Farm, the owner of the property being gradually brought into
the tale by the mishearings incidental to repetition.
The last two surviving Doones are said, in legends current some years
ago, and related by the Rev. W. H. Thornton, many years since curate at
Countisbury, within the North Devon border, near Lynmouth, to have
perished about the year 1800. They were an old man and his
granddaughter, who for a long time had been used to roam the country,
singing carols at Christmas-tide. They were said to have been found
together in the snow, frozen to death, on the road between Simonsbath
and Challacombe.
The conclusion of the whole matter appears to be that there was really a
band of semi-savage hut-dwellers established on Exmoor in the middle of
the seventeenth century, and that they continued to be a nuisance to the
neighbourhood, in the sheep-stealing and petty-pilfering way, until
perhaps the first few years of the next era. But that they were ever the
terrible marauders of legend is not for a moment to be credited. They
were probably, like the old type of gipsy, only too glad to be able to
sneak necessaries covertly, and then to make off, and to be let alone;
and were never bold enough to make raids. The duck-gun at Yenworthy was
not used necessarily against a Doone: for lonely farmhouses were of old,
all over the country, not unlikely to be the objects of attack. For a
striking instance of this truth reference may be made to Tangley Farm,
or “Lone Farm,” as it is often called, in the neighbourhood of Burford,
Oxfordshire, which was attacked boldly by the “Dunsdon Gang” one night
about 1784.[7]
Footnote 7:
See _The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road_, Vol. I., pp.
248-252.
It may here be not altogether out of place to remark that anything with
which the late Rev. W. S. Halliday was associated is to be examined
closely and suspiciously, for he was a person of a saturnine turn of
humour, delighting to send antiquaries and others upon false scents. His
ancient habit of burying Roman coins in the neighbourhood of his
residence at Glenthorne, with the singular object of deluding future
generations of archæologists into the belief that they have come upon
plentiful evidence of Roman civilisation in these parts, is well known;
and being well known (doubtless to the distress of his tricksy spirit)
is not now likely to deceive any one.
It must remain an open question as to how the outlaws of Badgworthy, in
whom, with the reservations made above, we are prepared to believe, came
by the name of Doone. The probabilities and theories have already been
given, and the matter must rest there.
The undoubted existence of old of other Devonshire semi-savage bands is
itself a strong presumption of a like tribe here. The Gubbins band, in
the neighbourhood of Lydford, “living in holes, like swine,” was well
known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is made the
subject of a reference by so serious a writer as Thomas Fuller, 1660.
“Their wealth,” he says, “consisteth in other men’s goods: they live by
stealing the sheep on the moors. Such is their fleetness, they will
outrun many horses: vivaciousness, they outlive most men. They hold
together like bees: offend one, and all will revenge his quarrell.”
The Gubbins also have found their way into fiction, in “Westward Ho!”
The Cheritons, on the other hand, who also lived on the borders of
Dartmoor, at Nymet Rowland, have not found their apotheosis in
literature.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXIII
OARE—MALMSMEAD—THE BADGWORTHY VALLEY—THE “DOONE VALLEY”—GLENTHORNE
AND now, after having fully considered the evidence for and against the
much-debated existence of these old reprobates and masterless men, let
us advance into their country, and into that of the romantic Lorna, who
was, of course, an adopted Doone merely.
[Illustration: OARE CHURCH.]
The way to Oare, branching off to the left, plunges immediately down
into the profound valley of the Oare Water. “Hookway Hill” is the name
of this abominable road, bad enough in its own native vileness, but
rendered worse by the strange humour of the local road-repairing
authority, always at pains to deposit cartloads of stones on it in the
summer, so that there shall be plenty of opportunity for the tourist
traffic to roll this loose material in by the autumn. Thus the literary
pilgrim to the scenes of “Lorna Doone” is made to earn that title,
eloquent as it is of suffering and difficulties encountered, wrestled
with, and overcome. Long is the way and steep and winding, and he who,
cycling, would seek to avoid the prodigious stones by tracking to the
side, must make his account with the yard-long projecting blackberry
brambles, armed with monstrous thorns, that curry-comb the face, clutch
off the cap, or take one by the arm in a confidential grip, like some
old friend who would bid you “wait a bit.” Later on in the year,
possibly, hedgers will be at work with their “riphooks,” slashing off
these terrors of the way, and then woe to the cyclist’s tyres! It is a
nice point, where and when the blackberry bramble is most offensive;
when it is in a position to scarify the traveller’s person, or when,
shorn off and lying in the road, its thorns play havoc with
india-rubber.
[Illustration: NEAR ROBBER’S BRIDGE.]
At the foot of Hookway Hill, the peaty little Oare, or Weir, water,
rushing over a pebbly bed is crossed by Robber’s Bridge, and
thenceforward the road runs level, past Oareford, and then as an
exceedingly narrow lane, to Oare; passing two or three solitary farms
that in these latter days provide for summer visitors whose humour is
for a fortnight or a month in the wilds. One of these is identified,
more or less accurately, with the “Plovers Barrows’ Farm” of the novel.
Presently Oare church appears, on the left hand, almost wholly hidden in
a circle of tall, spindly trees, and neighboured only by one farm. It is
a grey, sad-toned building, this centre of interest in Lorna’s tragedy.
Chiefly in the Perpendicular style, it consists of an embattled western
tower and a nave without aisles. The chancel is a modern addition. All
day and every day in the summer an old man sits in the little north
porch, with the key of the church on a bench beside him, and if, not
seeing the key, you try the door, and, finding it locked, ask him, he
will give it you, and leave you to let yourself in: mutely remaining
there, a living hint for a tip. “Lorna Doone” has done this. “Parish
clerk, he be, an’ used to be saxon,” remarked an old road-mender. “He do
mek’ a dale o’ money,” is the rustic opinion; but what amount may be
represented by “a deal of money” in this estimate does not appear. Also,
“Dree an’ saxpunz a wik,” he gets from the parish: so there is no old
age pension for him; and unless the parish of Oare, in a fit of wild
extravagance, springs another eighteenpence, he will be a loser.
The interior of Oare church is, truth to tell, lamentably uninteresting,
and architecturally deplorable. A something wooden, that does duty for
chancel screen, divides nave from sanctuary, and a few characterless
marble and slate tablets are affixed to the walls: one of them to the
memory of a Nicholas Snow, 1791. A tablet to various members of the
Spurryer family exhibits a curious uncertainty as to how the name should
be spelled. “Spurre” and “Spurry” are the two other versions given. The
name of “Peter Spurryer, Warden, 1717,” appears under one of a couple of
fearsome paintings in the tower, representing Moses and Aaron; the work
of one “Mervine Cooke, Painter.”
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF OARE CHURCH.]
Under a deplorable representation of the triple Prince of Wales’
feathers, placed on the wall near the pulpit, to commemorate a visit of
the Prince of Wales in 1863 will be found the only interesting object in
the church: a rudely carved stone bracket supporting what was once a
piscina. Shaped in the form of a head, the expressionless face is
flanked by two hands. Very few visitors can have any notion of the
meaning of this grotesque object, and most people set it down as a mere
fantasy; but the thing is symbolical, and really typifies the Divine
gift of speech. Other examples are found throughout England: notably in
the churches of Bere Regis, in Dorsetshire, and Gotham,
Nottinghamshire.[8] This carving is by far the oldest thing in Oare
church, and is probably a relic from some earlier building.
Footnote 8:
See _The Manchester and Glasgow Road_, Vol. I., pp. 265-6; and _The
Hardy Country_, p. 143.
From Oare we come directly to Malmsmead where the Badgworthy Water
divides Somerset and Devon, and is spanned by a grey, timeworn,
two-arched bridge.
The scene is sweet and idyllic. Here the bridge, grown thickly with
ferns and moss, and stained red, brown, and orange with lichens, spans
the water in hump-backed fashion, and on the opposite—that is to say,
the Devonshire—shore, the three farmsteads of Malmsmead, Lorna Doone,
and Badgworthy Farms stand side by side in seeming content, sheltered
beneath swelling hills. Day by day in summer a long succession of brakes
and flys bring visitors from Lynton and Lynmouth and set them down here
for an afternoon’s exploration of the Badgworthy Valley, or drive them
on to Oare.
To see one of these brake-drivers take the steep rise of the narrow
bridge of Malmsmead at full speed, and so continue his reckless way
along the narrow lanes, is to realise that death possibly awaits the
cyclist who descends hills and rounds the sharp corners of these lanes
at high speed at such times when these vehicles are about.
For the comfort and refreshment of these “Lorna Doone” pilgrims, the
three farms, that were nothing but humble farmsteads in the days before
Blackmore wrote that popular romance, have now become rustic
restaurants, doing a very thriving and remunerative business, at prices
which, calculated on the basis of their charge of twopence for a small
glass of milk, must be rapidly earning a more than modest competence for
these simple folk. Simple, did I say? Well, that, perhaps, is hardly the
word. Nor is the content that seems to be pictured here, in every
circumstance of running water, moss-grown bridge, and bird-haunted
trees, more than a hollow mockery. Come with me over the bridge, into
Devon, and I shall show you evidence of keen commercial rivalry, in the
notice-board displayed from the hedge of Malmsmead Farm, which says “No
connection with Lorna Doone and Badgworthy Farm.” Now it is a curious
fact that the names of these rival rustic refreshment-providers are the
same—French—but that does not by any means explain the hatred, malice,
and all uncharitableness that are displayed between these neighbours;
for few must be the pilgrims in these parts who acquire such trivial
facts. The stranger coming from the direction of Oare and halting awhile
on the bridge, to admire the beauty of the scene, will soon find himself
invited, by one or other of these people, to patronise his
establishment, and will thereby learn something not to the advantage of
the rival. Hearing the tale of one, you are shocked at the depth of
infamy with which the other is charged, but the people of the
neighbourhood take it all philosophically enough. “I ’xpec’ they do saay
’most as bad o’ he,” is the general remark.
[Illustration: MALMSMEAD.]
On a busy day, as many as twenty-seven waggonettes and other vehicles
may be found at Malmsmead, drawn up empty, awaiting the return of the
“Lorna Doone” sightseers from the Badgworthy Valley and the Doone
Valley, or Oare. Constant repetition of the trip, day by day in the
season, for many years, has rendered the drivers indifferent. Some you
may observe asleep, others playing cards, and all those who are awake
swearing. Meanwhile, the pilgrims in search of the Doone Valley and the
homes of those entirely fabulous people have tailed away along the
footpaths beside the Badgworthy Water, in search of literary landmarks.
Few, however, get as far as the so-called “Doone Valley,” for it is a
very considerable walk; and most people have by this time sadly realised
that Blackmore’s fervid descriptions of places are, as a rule,
remarkable for their shameless exaggeration. In sober truth, the
Badgworthy Valley, that opens out of Malmsmead, forms a much more
striking scene than the supposed stronghold of the Doones. It is a
typical moorland vale, with the Badgworthy Water—or the “Badgery” as
they style it in these parts—pouring down out of the sullen Exmoor
hills, gliding with an oily smoothness over waterslides, foaming over
stickles, or splashing like very miniature Niagaras over great
moss-grown boulders.
The valley is not nowadays so lonely as Blackmoor pictures it: in fact,
the terrible “Badgery Valley,” as described by him, never existed, and
almost the entire thing is a delusion and a snare. Plantations of fir
and larch partly clothe the rounded hills on the left hand, and a
farmhouse (since the publication of “Lorna Doone” named “Lorna’s Bower,”
in big letters that, painted on its whitewashed garden-wall, stare
across the stream) is perched comfortably half-way up the hillside.
The footpath that winds ribbon-like beside the stream comes presently to
Badgworthy Wood, a wood of stunted oaks, whose limbs are bearded with a
grey-green moss that tells sufficiently of the humid atmosphere and the
mists that drift from Exmoor. Parson Jack Russell believed Badgworthy
Wood to have been a Druid’s grave; but we may, perhaps, with safety
decline to accept him as an authority on the subject. Now, had he
expressed an opinion on horse-coping and sharp practice generally in
horsey matters, his views would carry all the weight due to such an
acknowledged authority.
[Illustration: BADGWORTHY VALLEY.]
Here the foxglove grows in the shade, and hart’s-tongue ferns come to an
unusual size. The whortleberry plant, too, flourishes in this moist spot
to a height prodigious for whortleberries. Some of them must run up to
eighteen inches; but the berries have not the sweetness of those that
grow on the dwarfed plants of the sun-scorched, rain-furrowed, and
wind-lashed downs.
Save for the passing of groups of “Lorna Doone” pilgrims, the place is
very solitary. The hills that look down upon the valley here rise
higher, and draw closer in, swooping down in naked round outlines in the
foreground, and filling in the distance with dense blue-black
plantations of larch. The bald outlines of those near at hand are
sharply accented by a wind-swept lone thorn-tree that stands out
curiously against the sky. Below it, stretching down the hillside is an
ancient earthwork, in shape roughly like the letter Y; and down below
this again, the Badgworthy Water foams and slides amidst its boulders.
Quietly walking through the little wood, and then silently along the
grassy paths through the almost breast-high bracken beyond, I started a
fox from his summer afternoon sleep on a sun-warmed boulder; a fine, but
gaunt fellow of crimson hue, and with a magnificent brush. Not one of
your full-fed Midland foxes, plump with a long career of raids on
poultry-runs, but one accustomed to picking up a mere living by sheer
hard work in these wilds. He loped leisurely away into the woods, with
an easy swinging gait that looked deceptively slow. Up along there,
where he disappeared amid the tangled branches, a monstrous square mass
of rock stands half-revealed, remarkably like some ancient stone-built
house; a veritable Mockbeggar Hall, that, on a near approach, is found
to be no habitation of man, but a crannied, cliff-like place, partly
draped with ivy; the home of jackdaws, and tunnelled about the base of
it with the runs of hares and rabbits.
And thus, at length one comes to the terrible “Doone Valley,” or, as it
is better, and correctly known, Lankcombe; a pretty vale branching to
the right, not in the least terrible, you know, and in fact rather dull
and commonplace, after the beauties of Badgworthy. Perhaps the
enthusiastic Lorna Dooneite, if he would keep his enthusiasm, had better
not adventure thus far; for though he may indeed see some problematic
ruins and doubtful foundations of houses, he will assuredly be keenly
disappointed. A commonplace shepherd’s hut looks down upon the scene,
young plantations mantle the quite unremarkable hills, and romance fails
to keep the expected tryst.
But if so be the pilgrim resents being cheated of scenic delights, let
him then retrace his steps, cross Malmsmead Bridge into Devon, and so
proceed a distance of some six miles down the enchanting gorge of the
Lyn, to Lynmouth. No novelist has flung the spells of romance upon that
delightful scenery, which is indeed sufficient in itself to enchant the
stranger, without such extraneous aid. Or, if it be desired to return to
Porlock, let the stranger proceed to Brendon, and then descend the hill
at Combe Park, coming thus again to the ridge of moorland that runs
between Porlock and Lynmouth. Here turning eastward he will come to
Glenthorne, where the wooded cliffs plunge daringly to the sea, and
where the boundary line passes that divides Devon and Somerset. The name
of Glenthorne clearly invites irresponsible and foolish rhyme, and so,
responding to so obvious an invitation, these pages shall conclude with
such:
There was an old man of Glenthorne,
Who played “tootle-oo” on the horn.
He blew night and day
To his neighbours, till they
Said, “Stop it! you giddy old prawn:[9]
Oh! why don’t you place it in pawn?
You tootle all night,
You malicious old sprite.
We wish you had never been born.”
Footnote 9:
“No class” people, these neighbours, obviously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX
ABBOT’S LEIGH, 8, 11, 17
“Abode of Love,” 147–150
_Ad Axium_ (Uphill), 92
Agapemone, The, 147–150
Allerford, 246
Anchor Head, 61, 72
Ashley Combe, 256, 259
Avon, River, 2, 4, 6–19, 124
Avonmouth, 3, 17–19, 20
Axe, River, 91–3, 96
BADGWORTHY VALLEY, 280, 281, 291–297
—— Water, 291, 294
“Bath Bricks,” 121–124
Bawdrip, 118–121
Berrow, 102, 111, 113, 116
Blackmore, Richard Doddridge 271–278
Blake, Admiral, 128–132, 215
Bleadon, 71, 73, 93, 98
Blue Anchor, 198, 199, 202–206
Bossington, 249–251, 259
Brean, 89, 98–102, 116
—— Down, 3, 73, 91, 96
Brent Knoll, 103–110
Brentsfield Bridge, 138
Bridgwater, 93, 117, 121, 126–139, 142, 150, 186
Bristol, 2, 6, 18
—— Channel, 2, 3, 18, 56, 87, 92, 124
Brue, River, 111
Burnham, 1, 4, 102, 111, 113–116, 159
Bussex Rhine, 135, 136, 138
CANNINGTON, 93, 139–142, 158
Charlinch, 148
Chedzoy, 135
Cleeve Abbey, 189–198
Clevedon, 1, 13, 22, 23, 24–45, 76, 113, 192
—— Court, 34, 41–44
Clifton, 6–8
—— Suspension Bridge, 3, 8–17
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 26–31, 142, 152–157
Combwich, 158
Congresbury, 49–53
County Gate, 281
Culbone, 260–268, 281
Cynuit, Battle of, 93, 158, 160
DANESBOROUGH, 142
Doones, The, 270–298
“Doone Valley,” 270, 293, 297
Dunball, 117
Dunster, 3, 177, 202, 206–227
EAST BRENT, 106
East Quantoxhead, 176
Easton-in-Gordano (St. George’s), 19
Exford, 281
FLAT HOLM, 73, 87–91
Folk-speech of Somerset, 168–172
GLATT-HUNTING, 174–176
Glenthorne, 2, 3, 259, 282, 298
Gore Point, 256
HALLAM, ARTHUR HENRY, 25, 32–40
Highbridge, 111–113
Hobbs’s Boat, 93
Holnicote, 245, 276
Hookway Hill, 286, 288
Horner, The, 246, 251, 259
Horsey Slime, 117
Hubba Cock, 160
—— Lowe, 160
—— Pill, 92
Huntspill, 116
Hurlstone Point, 256
_In Memoriam_, 32, 34–40
KENN, 45, 49
Kentsford, 184
Kewstoke, 61–66
Kilton, 167
Kilve, 167, 171–176
Kingston Seymour, 45, 49
LANGMOOR RHINE, 135, 138
Lankcombe, 297
Lavernock Point, 91
Lilstock, 167
“Lorna Doone,” 270–298
Luttrell family, 176, 194, 205, 206–208, 212–216, 218–220, 225, 228,
237
Lympsham, 98
Lynch Chapel, 244, 251
MALMSMEAD, 291–294, 297
Minehead, 1, 3, 139, 142, 177, 199, 202, 227
Mohun family, 208–243
Monmouth Rebellion, 132–138
“Mud-horse,” The, 159
NAILSEA, 81
Nether Stowey, 27, 139, 142–154
OARE, 260, 269, 277, 279, 286–293
Oare Water, 286, 288
Oareford, 288
Old Cleeve, 198–202
Orestone Point, 259
Otterhampton, 158, 160
PARRET, RIVER, 4, 93, 103, 117, 122–125, 126, 127, 140, 142, 161
Pawlett, 117, 159
Pill, 4, 17–19
Polden Hills, 117, 135
Porlock, 2, 3, 139, 244, 246, 247–256, 263, 268, 297
—— Weir, 256–261, 276
Portbury, 19
Portishead, 3, 19–23
Prynne, William, 216–218
Puxton, 54
QUANTOCK HILLS, The, 142–145, 154–157, 179
ROADWATER (ROODWATER), The, 192, 197
Robber’s Bridge, 282, 288
Rownham Ferry, 8, 9, 11, 13
ST. AUDRIES (WEST QUANTOXHEAD), 142, 177–179
St. Decuman’s, 179–186
St. George’s (Easton-in-Gordano), 19
St. Thomas’s Head, 56, 61
Sampford Brett, 185
Sand Bay, 55, 61
Sedgemoor (“Sedgemere”), 102–105, 117, 132, 135–137, 277
Selworthy, 244
South Brent, 106–110
Spaxton, 147–150
Steart, 4, 158–160
Steep Holm, 73, 87–90
Stogursey, 162–167
Stoke Pero, 260
Stolford, 161
Swallow Cliff, 55, 61
TENNYSON, LORD, 25, 32–40
UBBALOWE, 160
Uphill, 71, 72, 73, 91–96
WALTON-IN-GORDANO, 23, 30
Washford, 199
Watchet, 1, 154, 179, 186–188
Wembdon, 139
West Huntspill, 116
—— Quantoxhead, 142, 177–179
Weston Bay, 61
Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway, 22, 55
Weston-in-Gordano, 23
Weston-super-Mare, 1, 3, 59, 61, 66–78, 113
Westonzoyland, 134, 138
Wick St. Lawrence, 53, 54
Williton, 179
Woodspring (or Worspring) Priory, 55, 56–61, 84
Wordsworth, William, 153–157
Worle, 49, 55, 71, 84–86
—— Hill, 61, 62, 73, 78–84
Worlebury, 78–84
Wyndham (or Windham) family, 182–186, 215
—— Lady Florence, 183–185
YATTON, 46–50, 53, 54
Yenworthy, 281–283
Yeo, River, 46, 47, 53, 54
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Index entries showing abbreviated page ranges were written out in
full. For example: “206-8” was changed to “206-208.”
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
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