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.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------