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.
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