quoting one of 24 March in the preceding year--“Symon Knyghte of the
Cittie of Exceter, marchaunte, hathe graunted unto Richard Wannell of
Moreton Hampsteede, gent, one annuytye or yearly rente of twenty poundes
during the naturall lyef of the said Richard and after his deathe unto
Katheryne, his wief, duringe the terme of fouerscore yeares yf she so
longe lyve.” Knight now lends Wannell £110 on bargain and sale of this
annuity as security for repayment, such bargain and sale to be utterly
frustrated and void, “yf yt shall happen the said Richard Wannell to
contente and paye unto the said Symon Knyghte in the now mansion house
of the said Symon in the citty aforesaid in the xxiiijth daye of Auguste
nexte ensuing the date of these presents betweene the houers of one and
fower of the clock in the afternoone of the said daye thirtie eight
poundes eleven shillings and fouer pence of lawfull Englishe money at
one enteere paymente withoute fraude or delaye and in the firste daye of
Nouember nexte ensuinge in the said house and betweene the said howers
the full some of other thirty eighte poundes eleven shillings and fower
pence and also yf the said Richard Wannell in the seconde daye of
Auguste next ensuinge the date hereof doo delyver or cause to bee
delivred unto the said Symon Knyghte fyfteene hundreds of coyned white
tynne good and marchantable without the letter H every hundred wayinge
sixscore poundes at and accordinge to the Queenes Maiesties beame at
Chagford.”
This letter H is mentioned in a document of 3 April 10 Henry VII (1495)
by which the Duke of Cornwall--Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry
VIII--confirmed a set of by-laws: printed in Rowe’s _Perambulation of
Dartmoor_, appendix XV. “Also that no man from hensforth make no synder
tynne after that it is wartered, be it allayed with oder tynne or not
allaide, or eny oder manner of harde tynne without it be marked with
this letter H as well as with the markes of the owners and blowing
howses.” (Blowing houses were blast furnaces for smelting tin.) “Also
that th’owners of everye blowing howse shal bryng a certen marke of his
blowing howse to the court of the Stayniery within the precinct wher the
said blowing howse is sett, to the entent that al suche markes may be
drawen in a boke.... Also that every owner of tynne that shal bring
tynne into ony blowing howse to be blowen and fyned shal bryng a certen
marke in to the said court, ther to be put in a boke.” (Tin was ‘coined’
by stamping these marks on it, so that the owners and blowers could be
identified.) “And if it shal happen from hensforth ony marchaunt to bye
eny false tynne and so to be disseyved,” the warden shall compel the
owners and the blowers of it “to satisfye the marchaunt of al suche
hurte and damage as he hath take by such false tynne.”
These by-laws had been “enacted and establysshed by the hole body of the
Stayniery in the high court of Crockerntorr” on 11 September. This court
was composed of the Duchy officials for Devon with twenty-four jurors
from each of the four Stannary towns in Devon; and it held its sittings
in the open air on Crockerntor, a Dartmoor hill about midway between the
towns, say, nine miles from Tavistock, ten from Chagford, ten from
Ashburton, and thirteen from Plympton. And besides this high court
(magna curia) there was a court in each of these four towns for its own
quarter of the Stannaries. In his _Survey of Devon_ Risdon says of
Chagford, “This place is priviledged with many immunities which tinners
enjoy, and here is holden one of the courts for Stannery causes”; and he
mentions a catastrophe that happened in his time. The court-house stood
on pillars; and on 6 March 1618 these pillars gave way at a crowded
sitting of the court, the building ‘rent in sunder’ and the walls fell
in, killing ten people and injuring many more.
The old courts and their jurisdiction sank slowly into insignificance as
the amount of tin grew less. Mine after mine was given up, and very
little tin is raised in Devon now--it can be got more easily by mining
in Nevada. But all round Dartmoor there are remains of the old works,
showing what a scene of industry it must have been. There was a blowing
house near here: it was in Lustleigh parish and was known as Caseleigh
blowing house. Caseleigh mine was for micaceous iron, which has only
little bunches of tin ore in it; but tin may have been brought from the
Peck Pits a couple of miles away.
A small Venetian coin was dug up at Lustleigh in the spring of 1922 in a
garden about fifty yards west of the church tower; and this may be
connected with the trade in tin. It is a silver ‘soldino’ of Leonardo
Loredano, whose features are well known in England from Bellini’s
portrait of him in the National Gallery. He was Doge from 1501 to 1521,
and the moneyer’s initials (P.C. for Piero Cocco) show that the coin was
struck between the summer of 1501 and the summer of 1502. At that period
a squadron of armed gallies made a voyage from Venice to England almost
every year; and they brought merchandise for sale here, and took back
other merchandise, including tin. Their usual port was Southampton; but
in Sanuto’s Diary, 9 March 1504, there is a note of their going to
Falmouth, and they probably went to other ports as well. The coin may
have come over in the gallies, and then found its way to Lustleigh in
the course of trade.
On the Close Rolls there is an entry of a writ, 26 June 1414, stating
that the merchants of Venice who came over in their galleys, used to
bring their own money of Venice, called galley halfpence; and directing
the Mayor of London to enjoin them not to circulate this money
here--they must take it to the Mint to be converted into English coin.
There were many prohibitions of these ‘galey halpenys’, from
Proclamations in 1399 and 1400 to an Act of Parliament in 1519; and
these repeated prohibitions show that there were many such coins about.
Gold moidores from Portugal were afterwards in circulation here at
27_s._ apiece or thereabouts. For a century or so the Courtenay family
received a moidore, in addition to the market price, on granting a new
lease of any copyhold in Moreton Manor; thus, on 27 October 1739 a new
tenant paid £70 “and one moyder of gold.” This manor did not include the
whole of Moreton: there were parts of other manors in the parish; and in
one of these, “the mannour or lordship of Moretonhampstead and North
Bovie,” the custom was pretty much the same. Richard Knight, the lord of
the manor, granted a new lease there on 30 September 1689 for £28 “and a
broad peece of gould,” and another on 1 June 1693 for £12 “and a gennye
of gould.”
My father told me that one day in Exeter he was walking along a street
in which a trench was being dug for laying pipes, and a coin of
Constantine rolled out from a shovelful of earth that was thrown up as
he passed: he gave the workmen sixpence and took the Roman coin. One of
his notebooks gives the date, 6 December 1836; and for several years
before then Roman coins were dug up almost every day, as gas and water
mains were being laid and there was much rebuilding.
In digging for foundations on Bell Hill--the part of South Street
between the turnings into Guinea Street and Bear Street--the workmen
came upon some tesselated pavement, broken bits of Samian ware, and part
of a sistrum of Egyptian green-glazed porcelain. That was in 1833, and
the sistrum is now in Exeter Museum. It has the usual head of Hathor (or
Isis) on each side, and below that a column of hieroglyphic, reading
“neter nefer, neb taui, ...” on one side, and “nesu-bat (Ra ...)” on the
other. The lower part was not found. Many Egyptian kings had cartouches
beginning with ‘Ra’; but the glazing of the sistrum shows that it was
made for one of the kings of Dynasty XXVI somewhere about 600 B.C.
This head of Isis being found upon Bell Hill, some rash antiquaries said
that Bell was really Bel or Baal. But it is a fact that there are traces
of outlandish gods in other parts of England. An inscription has been
found at York (_Corp. Inscr. Lat._ VII. 240) recording the dedication of
a temple to Serapis by the officer commanding the sixth Legion, which
then was stationed there; and two altars have been found at Corbridge
with Greek inscriptions (_Inscr. Græc._ XIV. 2553, 4) dedicating one of
them to Astartê and the other one to Hercules of Tyre. There is a
dedication to this Hercules in the Greek part of a bi-lingual
inscription at Malta (_Inscr. Græc._ XIV. 600) and in the Phœenician
part he is called Baal Melkarth of Tyre. This is the god at whom Elijah
jibed, “he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be
awaked.” He was the guardian of navigation: in the depth of winter all
navigation ceased; and then he went to sleep and made no more journeys
till the festival of his Awakening in the early spring.
Coins of Roman Emperors are sometimes dug up in this neighbourhood. In
1837 a little hoard of them was brought to light on Furzeleigh farm,
three miles from here, while gravel and stone were being dug out to mend
a road; and these were coins of Valerianus, Gallienus, Postumus,
Victorinus, and Claudius Gothicus, whose short and stormy reigns began
and ended between 253 and 270 A.D. Hoards are buried even now.
Countryfolk lose money by bad investments or through the failure of a
bank; and then there is a scare, and many of them convert their savings
into coin, and hide or bury it. Burying is more secure: if money is
merely hidden in the house, the missus may get hold of it and squander
it away--at least, an old man told me so. He buried his (somewhere on
Dartmoor, I believe) and in 1917 he had a stroke and died without ever
telling anybody where it was. And some day somebody will come upon this
hoard of three or four hundred gold coins of Queen Victoria and King
Edward. The coins at Furzeleigh may have been buried there by such a man
some sixteen centuries before; and possibly they represent his savings,
or possibly his robberies and thefts.
Apart from coins, there are few relics of the Romans in any part of
Devon excepting Exeter; and the coins may only prove that there was
plundering or trade. A century before the Romans came, Diodoros was
writing (V. 22) of the natives of these parts as kindly, mannerly folk,
accustomed to dealing with foreigners over their trade in tin. Such
people would make good neighbours, and could be left alone. At the date
of the Antonine Itinerary the Roman roads did not come further west than
Exeter, and probably were not carried on to Land’s End until the reign
of Constantine--his name is on a Roman mile-stone at Saint Hilary, and
his colleague’s name, Licinius, is on another at Tintagel. That was more
than 250 years after Britain was annexed by Claudius; and the wonder is
that the Romans did not make the road before, or that having left it for
so long, they should have made it then. Something must have happened
just before to give occasion for it; and I would hazard a guess that
‘something’ was the subjugation of Britain by Constantius in 296 A.D.
after Carausius and Allectus had held the country for nine years.
The natives here were probably Iberians or Celtiberians, that is, wholly
or partly of the old stock that the Celtic immigrants pushed back into
the west. Tacitus observes in his _Agricola_, II, that the people in the
west of Britain were so like Iberians that anyone would think their
ancestors had come from Spain. He wrote this in 98 A.D., and would have
heard it from Agricola himself, who was many years in Britain. No doubt,
there was a likeness; but there is another explanation of it--the
Iberians had once migrated westward like the Celts, and some of them
migrated into Britain and others into Spain. That seems more likely than
migration here from Spain.
In the Colonies and India there are races quite impervious to our
civilization and living in their own ancestral way; and I imagine that
these natives lived their own lives here regardless of the way the
Romans lived. They were Prehistoric in the sense that they were living
like primeval ancestors of theirs whose history is unknown; but they
were not Prehistoric in the sense of having lived in that far past
themselves, nor are their implements and buildings Prehistoric in that
sense. Yet enormous dates B.C. are given to Prehistoric remains here
which may not be much earlier than 300 A.D., or even as old as that.
Prehistoric remains may often be an obstacle to agriculture when they
are in a field; and thousands of them must have been destroyed to make
way for the plough. They are common enough on Dartmoor and other open
land round here, and probably were just as common on the land that is
enclosed. There are the remains of a little hamlet of hut-circles, with
a rampart round it, on the open land in Lustleigh Cleave a mile from
here; and in a field at Plumleigh, also a mile from here, there were six
hut-circles in a group. When the granite boulders in the field were
being cleared away, four bronze palstaves were found under one boulder
and four under another, all standing up on end. (Two are now in Exeter
Museum; and I remember others on a mantelpiece at Plumleigh, but cannot
find out what became of them.) They were found in 1836; and the six
hut-circles were destroyed soon after, to complete the clearance of the
field. This is not an isolated case, but typical of what is always going
on.
There is only one cromlech left in Devon--the Spinsters’ Stone. It is on
a farm called Shilston, two miles from Drewsteignton, three from
Chagford and nine from here. It consists of a flattish piece of granite
about two feet thick and ten or twelve across, resting on three upright
pieces about six feet high; and altogether it looks rather like a
toadstool with three stems instead of one. In 1862 one of the uprights
slipped away and let the top slide off, but the owner of Shilston had it
set up again; and several people have set up menhirs that had fallen
down. In such cases there can be no mistake; but I should not like to
see a group of fallen stones set up by anyone who had a theory about
Prehistoric things.
There were two rocks in the sea near Dawlish called the Parson and the
Clerk; but the Parson perished in a gale. The sea had undermined him,
and a big wave threw him down. There was no setting him up again, and
the Dawlish people felt the want of him: so they ordained another rock
as Parson with another for his Clerk. And if you go to Dawlish and
inquire for the Parson and the Clerk, you will be directed to a couple
of big rocks that lean up against a cliff; and there are pictures of
these two imposters, not only on the post-cards but even in such books
as the _Devonshire_ volume of the _Cambridge County Geographies_.
The real Parson and Clerk were in the sea off Holecombe headland, half
way from Dawlish to Teignmouth. They were big rocks, more or less of
human shape; and the rock nearer to the headland was a good deal taller
than the other rock further out. There was some point in calling them
the Parson and the Clerk, as the Clerk’s place in churches was in front
of the Parson and somewhat lower down; but there is no point in giving
the name to these imposters, as they are of equal size and side by side
like Siamese Twins. I remember the old Parson very well indeed, and
sometimes feel the loss of him as if he were a personal friend. I fear
that the old Clerk is doomed. He has lost his head, and now looks more
like a mummied cat, as one sees him from the train.
These rocks are ‘new’ red sandstone, and there are others on the coast
with grotesque forms of human figures and heads; and such forms may be
seen in granite rocks at no great distance from the coast. The best is
Bowerman’s Nose, four miles from here and fourteen from the Parson and
the Clerk. (I take ‘nose’ to be the same as ‘naze’ or ‘ness,’ as in
Hope’s Nose at the entrance to Torbay.) In _Dartmoor_, a poem,
Carrington calls Bowerman’s Nose “a granite God, | to whom, in days long
flown, the suppliant knee | in trembling homage bow’d.” He there assumes
that it was in its present shape when there were tribes here who would
worship it; but the shape is due to weathering. In the Dartmoor granite
there are fissures which are widened out by frost and wet until large
blocks become detached and fall away. And this god was created by the
fall of the surrounding granite from four upright fissures. These
enclosed a mass a dozen feet thick and forty high; and there are other
fissures running across this and giving it somewhat the appearance of a
man.
I once took the trouble to go up to Mount Sipylos in Asia Minor to see
the figure of Niobê, 20 April 1882. Homer speaks of it (_Iliad_, XXIV.
617) as Niobê herself, turned into stone, and still brooding on the
wrongs the gods had done her. But the figure has been worn down by
weather to an almost shapeless mass, and it is not big enough to be
impressive. Pausanias went there 1700 years before me, and I can say no
more for it than he says, I. 21. 3: at a distance you might take it for
a human figure, but you must not come too close.
After going to see Niobê, I felt there might be something in what Philo
of Byzantium says at the beginning of his book about the Seven Wonders
of the World--instead of taking troublesome journeys, people had much
better stay at home and read his book. However, I have been to see the
remains of two of the Seven, the Pyramids at Memphis and the Temple of
Diana at Ephesos, and the sites on which two others stood, the Zeus at
Olympia and the Colossos at Rhodes, and the site also of another, the
Pharos at Alexandria, if that is to be reckoned in the Seven.
One wet day when I had visitors here, we happened to be speaking of how
things ran in sevens--the seven planets, the seven liberal arts, the
seven deadly sins, and so on. There were seven of us in the house and we
drew lots, to fill up time until the rain would let us out. When I drew
Gluttony, they said it was appropriate; and we had all said it was
appropriate when a lady with blue stockings drew Astronomy, and again
when she drew Chastity; but it was a little embarrassing when she drew
Lust as well.
The seven planets were Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury
and the Moon; and Pythagoras said these seven and the Firmament of Stars
and our Earth and the other Earth (Antichthon) were all revolving round
a Central Fire. I thought that I had met a follower of his a little
while ago. I said something about the sunlight, and was told that I was
wrong--light did not come from the Sun. I hoped to hear him say that
light came from the Central Fire and was reflected from the Sun, for he
seemed to think that something came from there, as he was sitting in the
shade. But he referred me to the Bible, where it is distinctly said that
Light was created on the first day but the Sun was not created till the
fourth.
Pythagoras fancied that there must be simple ratios for the distances
between the heavenly bodies and the Central Fire, and that the motion of
these bodies would therefore cause harmonious sounds, just as octaves
and fifths and fourths arise from lengths of string with ratios of 1 to
2 and 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. There were two answers to the question why no
one ever heard this Music of the Spheres. Aristotle (_De Cælo_, II. 9)
makes the Pythagoreans say that we all hear it from the moment we are
born, only we never notice it, as it is always going on. (If so, they
must have thought it was a chord and not a tune.) The other answer,
Aristotle’s own, was that there was not anything to hear.
There are many versions of the Music of the Spheres; but judging by what
Ptolemy says (_Harmonica_, III. 16, and _Excerpta Neapolitana_, 2, 24) I
think Pythagoras put the Firmament at 36, Saturn at 32, Jupiter at 24,
Mars at 21⅓, the Sun at 18, Venus at 16, Mercury at 12, the Moon at 9,
the Earth at 8, and (probably) the Antichthon at 6, with the Central
Fire at 0. Thus, if the Firmament gave forth the sound of _f_, the Sun
gave _f_ an octave higher up and the Moon gave _f_ an octave higher
still. Saturn, Venus and the Earth gave _g_ in these three octaves, and
Jupiter, Mercury and the Antichthon gave _c_ in these three octaves
also, while Mars gave _d_ in the lowest octave by itself. And if that is
what these orbs are ‘quiring to the young-eyed cherubins,’ I do not much
regret ‘this muddy vesture of decay’ that hinders me from hearing it.
If the heavenly bodies went round in circles, their notes would never
vary, as the distances would always be the same; but if they go round in
ellipses, their notes will rise and fall with every variation in the
distances. And as soon as Kepler had discovered that the Earth and other
planets make ellipses round the Sun, he set to work to ascertain how far
their notes run up and down the scale; and he published his results in
1619 in his _Harmonice Mundi_, V. 4-9. According to this, Saturn’s note
went up and down a major third, and Jupiter’s went up and down a minor
third; and Jupiter’s note at its lowest was an octave above Saturn’s at
its highest. Similarly, the rise and fall was a fifth for Mars, a
semitone for the Earth, and practically nothing for Venus, as its
ellipse is nearly circular, whereas the long ellipse of Mercury produced
a rise and fall of an octave plus a minor third; and between these
rising and falling notes there were clear intervals of a major sixth
from Mercury to Venus, a minor sixth from Venus to the Earth, a fifth
from the Earth to Mars, and two octaves plus a minor third from Mars to
Jupiter. And of course the trebles played their scales much faster than
the basses, as they go round the Sun in much less time.
Kepler took all this quite seriously, and was convinced that some such
ratios must exist, as the Creator was a neat hand at geometry, “Deus
nihil sine geometrica pulchritudine constituerit,” V. 4. It was the
irony of Fate that in pursuing this absurdity he discovered a great
truth--the Third Law of Motion.
These great Laws are not always put before young minds with due
simplicity: we obscure them by our jargon. All children know that if
they spread a pat of butter on a slice of bread, the bigger the slice
is, the thinner the butter will be. We express this by saying that the
thickness of the butter varies inversely as the surface of the slice.
They can see that the same thing would happen if they had to butter the
outside of a roll or dumpling that was as round as a Dutch cheese. We
say, as before, that the thickness of the butter varies inversely as the
surface of this globe of bread; and as the surface of a globe varies
directly as the square of the distance between the surface and the
centre, we end by saying that the thickness of the butter varies
inversely as the square of the distance. Young minds understand the
butter. Put ‘the force of attraction’ for ‘the thickness of the butter,’
and they will understand the Law of Universal Gravitation, as discovered
by Sir Isaac Newton with the assistance of an apple.
Unluckily this easy way of learning things is like all aids to memory:
more easily picked up than dropped again, when it has served its
purpose. A friend of mine tells me that, out of all his Latin and Greek,
the things that he remembers best are silly little rhymes that he was
taught at school, “Common are to either sex, _Artifex_ and _Opifex_,”
and other stuff like that. When I first went up to Cambridge, I
confounded the Circle at Infinity with the Circular Points at Infinity
till some one drew a circle for me and put two circular points in it
like two eyes in a very fat face, and then added the Line at Infinity
just where the mouth would come. And now I cannot go to Infinity without
seeing this round face grinning at me as the Cheshire Cat grinned at
Alice when she was in Wonderland.
In those days there were old Dons at Cambridge who rampaged like mad
bulls, if you just waved red rags at them. If the Don was Mathematical,
you waved the Method of Projections: if he was Classical, you waved
Archæology. With the Method of Projections a short proof was substituted
for a long proof, and the short proof was exact; but the old men had
always used the long proof, and were indignant that the same results
should
[Illustration: THE HALL HOUSE]
be obtained so easily; and they had influence enough to get the easy
proof prohibited in the Mathematical Tripos. The old Classical men were
just as cross with Archæology. They had learned to understand the
Ancient World by years of patient study of its literature; and here were
upstarts who could understand the Ancient World (perhaps better than
they did) by merely looking at its statues, vases, coins and gems.
I remember two old Mathematicians dining with us; and after dinner they
talked shop, and my father went to sleep in the middle of their talk.
Recovering himself, he said, “I beg pardon, Mr X, I fear I dropped
asleep while you were speaking.” Mr X replied, “Not at all, Mr Torr, not
at all: it was Mr Y who was speaking when you went to sleep.”
At a railway-station Mr X was discoursing to some people on the
mechanism of the locomotive-engine, continuing his discourse till the
train was out of sight; and then he found it was the train he meant to
take. He turned upon a porter for not telling him so; and when the
porter said, “How was I to know where you were going to?”, he
overwhelmed the porter by calling him “You Oaf.”