end in ‘ford,’ but only two with names that end in ‘bridge.’ These are
Tanebrige and Talebrige in the Exchequer manuscript, but the Exeter
manuscript has Taignebrige and Talebrua; so the second name seems
dubious. (The first, of course, in Teignbridge.) These terminations give
a notion of the roads then, and sometimes also of the streams. A mile
from here there is a place called Elsford, where there is not any ford
nor anything to be forded. It is an old place, mentioned in Domesday as
Eilauesford and at that time (twenty years after the Conquest) still in
the possession of a Saxon thane. It stands on the edge of the table-land
between the valleys of the Wrey and the Teign; and if there ever was a
ford there, there must have been a little river running off the
table-land and down into the Wrey along a gully in the hill-side, where
there is hardly a trickle now.
There is a place called Yeo close by the Wrey, a Twinyeo at the
confluence of the Wrey and Bovey, and another at the confluence of the
Bovey and Teign; and both Twinyeos are Mesopotamias, being in between
the streams. Yeo here means ‘stream’ or ‘water,’ as in Yeoford. But a
yeoman is not a waterman--he is a land man; and there, I think, the
‘yeo’ is to be linked with ‘gau’ in German, not with ‘eau’ in French.
There are traces of an Anglo-Saxon word like ‘gau’ for ‘place’ or
‘land’; and the _g_ would easily become a _y_, as in ‘year’ and ‘day’
for ‘gear’ and ‘dæg.’
The old printers used a _y_ to represent an obsolete _th_ which was
nearly of that shape, and people followed them in writing it, especially
with ‘ye’ for ‘the.’ Parson Davy always did so; and his spirit, being
summoned to a séance, discredited the medium by pronouncing ‘the’ as
‘ye’--a thing that no one did. We still use a _z_ as an abbreviation in
‘viz’ for ‘videlicet.’ They use it in Dutch catalogues of bulbs, and one
hears gardeners talking of Narcissus Poetz or Poetaz instead of
Poetarum. But it may be better to pronounce the _z_ than misinterpret
it, like the people who made Barum and Sarum out of Bz and Sz, the
abbreviated forms of Barnstaple and Salisbury. The _z_ was also used in
‘lez’ for ‘legitur,’ a very useful term for anyone who had to put things
down in Latin, and did not know the Latin names for them. Thus, on the
Court Roll of Lydford Manor, 21 September 1586, “Humfridus Pitford
queritur de Johanne Thorne et Maria uxore eius de placito
transgressionis super casum. Attachiantur per quinque lez callacowe et
hulland bandes tres lez handkerchefs et unum lez wollen wastecott. Et
quia predicti,” etc.
Among the manuscripts at the House of Lords there are some returns that
have not been used sufficiently in books on local history. In May 1641 a
Protestation against all Popery, etc., was taken by the Lords and
Commons, and in August it was circulated in the country. At the
beginning of the following year returns were required from every parish,
giving the names of those who had taken the Protestation; and many of
these returns are at the House of Lords. I obtained copies of the
returns for this parish and seven adjoining parishes, made an index to
the names, and had my index printed in 1913 for private circulation. The
return for Moreton parish does not say if anyone refused to take the
Protestation, but the returns for the other seven parishes say that
nobody refused: so these returns give a complete list of all the male
inhabitants over eighteen years of age, that being the limit of age for
taking the Protestation.
There were 411 in Moreton, 53 in Lustleigh, 150 in Hennock, 345 in
Bovey, 139 in North Bovey, 77 in Manaton, 179 in Ilsington and 255 in
Widdicombe. None of these people had more than one Christian name, and
many had the same surname. In Widdicombe there were five-and-twenty men
called Hamlin or Hamlyn, and six of them were Richard, four were Thomas
and three were John. In Moreton there were twenty men called Bowdon, and
four of them were John, three were William and three were George. They
could easily have been distinguished by saying where they lived; but in
only three cases was this done. In Hennock one of the two John Potters
is ‘of Kelly,’ and one of the five John Wreafords is ‘of Nepton’; and in
North Bovey one of the three John Nosworthies is ‘de Kindon.’
On the Court Rolls of Wreyland Manor one John Wills is distinguished
from another as ‘of Eastawray’ in 1710 and ‘de Eastawray’ in 1714. In
1718 Jane Clampitt of Yeo is called Jane Yeo; and, going a long way
back, a man is twice called John atte Yeo and three times called John
Yeo at the same sitting of the Court, 30 April 1438. In course of time
the ‘atte’ or ‘de’ dropped out, and a man was known by the name of the
place where he was living, or the place whence he had come. That
explains why these returns have so many surnames that are names of
places not far off, or corruptions of such names. The surname Bunckum
(in Bovey) is a corruption of Boncombe or Buncombe, the parent hamlet of
that home of eloquence, Bunkum, in North Carolina.
Among the Christian names there is Hanniball in Ilsington and Bovey, and
Methusalem in Moreton; but most of them are commonplace. Out of these
1609 men 342 are John--that is, roughly, two men out of every
nine--while 173 are William, 152 are Richard and 147 are Thomas; so that
half the total number had one of these four names. It must have been
confusing; and, having only one name each, they could not be
distinguished by combinations of initials, as is usual now when people
have two Christian names or more. Second names were not quite unknown
then--there was Henry Frederick Thynne, a Royalist in the Civil War--but
the new fashion had not yet extended to these rustic parishes.
These returns do not support the view that parents had a habit of naming
children after the patron saint of the parish. The patron saint is
Andrew at Moreton, and Pancras at Widdicombe; but Moreton has only
twelve Andrews, whereas Widdicombe has eighteen Andrews and only one
Pancras. Pancras is a pleasant name that parents might use oftener: it
drops so nicely into Panny, like Pontius into Ponty. But parents are
strange folk. Pontius is equivalent to Quintus, and I urged a friend of
mine to call his fifth son Pontius; but he went and chose a less
historic name. A great-great-uncle of mine gave one of his sons the name
of Ghibelline, which is historic but not often given at the font. I
imagine he was feeling very anti-Guelph just then.
A child named Flood was christened Noah; and in after years his house
was known to everyone in Bovey as the Ark. Quite recently a Wreyland
child was christened Cesca. I asked the mother where she got the name,
and she said she got it off the washing. She took in washing, and one of
her families had a daughter named Francesca, who was usually called
‘Cesca and had her linen marked that way. And really you cannot object
to Cesca unless you also object to Betty and other shortened names.
The Protestation of 1642 was soon followed by the Civil War, and at
Christmas 1645 there was a Royalist force at Bovey and a Parliamentary
force at Tiverton. Fairfax marched from Tiverton to Moreton, while
Cromwell marched from Tiverton to Bovey by another road, and surprised
and beat the Royalists there, 9 January. They lost 12 men killed and 60
taken prisoners besides about 350 horses. “It was almost supper time
with them when our men entered the town, most of them at that instant
were playing at cards, but our souldiers took up the stakes for many of
their principal officers, who (being together in one room) threw their
stakes of mony out at the window, which whilst our souldiers were
scrambling for, they escaped out at a back-door over the river, and
saved their best stakes.” That is what Sprigge says in his _Anglia
Rediviva or England’s Recovery_, published in 1647. The story has been
doubted, as it is told of other places; but it probably is true of
Bovey. Sprigge was chaplain to Fairfax during this campaign, and thus
could get at facts; and the story is also in a letter to Edmund
Prideaux, M.P., written on 11 January, and printed and published on 15
January by order of the House of Commons, that is, within a week of the
event. The letter says that the money thrown out of window was about £10
of silver.
Next day, 10 January, “the weather still extream bitter cold,” the
forces at Moreton and Bovey “had a rendezvouz near Bovey,” and went on
to Ashburton, whither the Royalists had retired. That is what Sprigge
says; but one wonders why the rendezvous should be ‘near’ Bovey and not
at Bovey itself, Bovey being on the road to Ashburton. It would not be
between Moreton and Bovey, as there is no cross-road between, and one
force or the other would have to go back the way it came. If it was the
other side of Bovey, the Moreton force would merely follow the Bovey
force along the road, and join it later on instead of joining it at
Bovey. In that weather, “much snow upon the ground,” the open country
would be barred: so I imagine that Fairfax and his troops came down the
valley by the usual road to Bovey, passing through the end of Wreyland
Manor at Kelly.
Wreyland never was disturbed. One sitting of the Manor Court is in the
first year of Edward V and the next in the first year of Richard III:
another is in the second year of Richard III and the next in the first
year of Henry VII. The business of the Court goes quietly on, regardless
of the murders in the Tower or the carnage upon Bosworth Field. John
Merdon is amerced a penny under Richard III because he has not yet
repaired his buildings that are tumbling down, and he is again amerced a
penny under Henry VII because he has not yet repaired, etc.
However, Bosworth Field had its effect at Wreycombe, three miles further
up the valley, the Manor of Wreycombe being restored to Robert Cary, son
and heir of Sir William Cary, who had forfeited it on attainder for high
treason twenty years before, 1 July 1465. He had quitted England to join
Queen Margaret in waging war on Edward IV, and he was killed at the
battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. The same thing had happened to Wreycombe
once before. Sir John Cary was one of the judges who were attainted of
high treason for declaring the Commission of Regency to be unlawful, and
he forfeited his property, 1 August 1387. He died in 1395, and next year
Wreycombe and other lands were granted to his widow. She was one of the
Holways of Holway, and this was Holway property that she had brought to
him on marriage.
Wreyland was once the property of John de Moelis; and he died in 1337,
leaving two daughters and no son. Muriel was fifteen and Isabella was
thirteen or more; and they became wards of the King, as their father
held his lands ‘in chief,’ that is to say, at first hand from the King.
The two girls married at once--not bad matches, but without the King’s
consent; and then there was the usual fuss. On partition of their
father’s lands, Wreyland was part of Muriel’s share; but there was a
Fine of 200 marks to pay for marrying without the King’s consent. It was
paid on 27 August 1337, and the King passed on the money to his son,
Edward the Black Prince, who was then a boy of seven.
Things happened here in Wreyland Manor which seem trivial now that we
have only the bare facts, as set down on the record of the Manor Court;
but in real life the facts may have aroused such animosities that they
would seem momentous then.--John More and Thomas Sachet have been
cutting down trees on the Lustleigh side of the Wrey, thereby choking
the stream so that it is overflowing on the Wreyland side and doing
damage here. Henry atte Slade has been catching pheasants and partridges
inside the Manor bounds. (Slade is just outside.) Ralf Golde’s pigs have
been eating Ralf Wilcokes’ apples from the Feast of saint Christina unto
the Feast of the Nativity of the blessed Mary. (From 24 July to 8
September.) Thomas Wollecote’s pig has been eating Thomas Ollesbrome’s
apples, and Ollesbrome has killed the pig, though Wollecote has offered
him twenty bushels of apples as compensation. In this case two issues
were set down for trial: the offer of the apples, and the killing of the
pig. Wollecote failed on the first issue, and did not proceed on the
second--it may be that Ollesbrome had brought the pig into Court, as his
defence was that he had not killed it.
That was the Fifteenth Century, and the Twentieth is not unlike it. In
this present Century there were two men living in Lustleigh parish who
have now gone away--men of assured position and independent means. One
man lived in a valley, and the other on a hill-side just above; and one
man had a garden, and the other had a dog. When the dog got busy with
bones, it went off to the garden and carried out its burials and
exhumations there. At least, that is what the owner of the garden said,
and what the owner of the dog denied; and the contention was so sharp
between them that one of them summoned the other before the magistrates
at Newton to be bound over to keep the peace.
In a humbler state of life there were two old ladies who kept chicken;
and whenever one of them fed her chicken, her neighbour’s chicken came
over in a mass and scrambled for the food. It was a thing that chicken
would naturally do; but she felt certain that her neighbour egged them
on. One day she seemed to be in heavenly happiness, and she explained
to me, “I be a-thinkin’ of that woman there, when I shall see her in the
torments.” I asked where she was going to see that, and she answered
with asperity, “Where be I a-goin’? Why, Abram’s bosom, o’ course.” Her
thoughts were on the parable of Lazarus and Dives. People of her
generation did not consider eternal life worth having without eternal
punishment for everybody they disliked.
In country places little things seem big, as there is nothing big to
dwarf them. I have seen a man throw down his work and come rushing
across the valley, uttering imprecations all the way--as someone said of
him, “could hear’n comin’ up a-buzzin’ like an aireyplain”--and it was
only because he saw a trespasser, not a murder or a fire or anything
else commensurate. In big towns they have newspapers coming out in fresh
editions all day long, and placards of the news, and boys to shout it
out; and they cannot quite ignore the ‘mysteries’ and ‘allegations’ and
the ‘startling revelations.’ These may be trumpery enough and quite
untrue, but at all events they do not set good neighbours quarrelling.
About the time of the Armistice I was going out to Hurston one morning,
and overtook a rural postman on the way. He told me that the Crown
Prince had been killed; and when I said I doubted it, he said he had
seen it in two newspapers, and that was good enough for him. And he
announced the news at every farm-house on his round. Ten days afterwards
I went out there again, and overtook him as before. I mentioned the
Crown Prince, but that bit of news had passed out of his mind, and he
had other news (of course, quite true) which he was taking round with
him that day. News of this sort does no harm. In such places there are
people who have time to think, and they can see that news is not
invariably true. An old man said to me, “They tell and tell, and I don’t
hearken to no word of it, only what my son says as he’s see’d hisself,
and he says the Bulgarians has landed at Ostend.” I suggested Kustendje,
but he stuck firmly to Ostend.
On the morning of the Armistice I went down to Bovey; and the first
things I saw were two flags flying at half-mast. I felt uneasy till I
got there and learned the reason why. It was a very long while since the
flags had been up higher than half-mast, and now they wouldn’t go any
higher until the gear was eased; and somebody would be going up to see
to that a little later on. In the streets I found the children waving
every flag that they could get, German or Austrian as much as French or
English; and later on I saw a great display of Russian flags at
Lustleigh. On asking why, I found that someone had laid in a stock of
Allied flags quite early in the War; but there had been a slump in
Russians, and this was the unsold remnant of the stock.
Flags generally are ugly things, crude in colour and clumsy in design,
and quite unsuitable for decorations. It is a glorious thing, especially
in foreign ports, to see the White Ensign on a British man-of-war. The
flag means something there; but it does not mean much anywhere else, and
means nothing in mere decorations with national flags and signal flags
all mixed together. Ships are dressed with flags because they have the
flags on board, and nothing else so handy for display; but there is no
sense in copying ships in towns, and hanging flags from what are called
Venetian masts. In fact the celebrated masts at Venice look rather
foolish now. They meant something when they carried the banners of the
three Venetian states, Cyprus, Crete, and the Morea. Now they all three
carry the Italian flag, and one would be enough for that. If it is flown
on more than one, it might as well be flown on ten or twelve or twenty
as on three.
Instead of putting up masts and flags in towns, people might take down
the advertisements, just for a day, to celebrate some great event. That
might make the streets look nice. But if they really must put something
up, they might as least choose something that would be less dismal than
a show of flags on a wet day. They might try wreaths and flowers in
enamelled iron. I have seen daffodils like that, highly recommended for
back gardens in large towns, where real plants will not grow. The
leaves look green and fresh all through the year, and you bring the
flowers out whenever you please, as the iron stalks are hollow and fit
on to long pins between the leaves.
That kind of gardening tempts me. Such plants would never run wild or
wither away or die, or do any of the other annoying things that real
plants often do. I also find the automatic peacock very tempting. The
real bird screeches, and gets up upon thatched roofs and digs itself in.
But this is a stuffed bird with clock-work in it that puts its tail up
for seven minutes every quarter-hour. No doubt, the topiary peacock is
more restful to the eye; but it is slow of growth and needs much careful
clipping.
If box and yew are clipped into the shape of kerb-stones and stone
walls, such trees may just as well be clipped into the shape of domes
and pyramids and other architectural things; but not, I think, into the
shape of birds and beasts that might fly off or walk away. It is only a
bad joke to make a plant look like an animal, and even good jokes pall
when they take twenty years to make and go on for a century. I like
these things in other people’s gardens where I see them only now and
then, but do not want them in my own where I should see them every day.
In the Hall House garden I established two grass walks, crossing one
another at right-angles, with hedges ten feet high and four feet thick
made of clipped cypress and looking as solid as walls. I not only like
the look of them, but find them very convenient--in one or other of
those walks I can always be out of the sun or out of the wind, if either
is too strong. The cypress is Cupressus Macrocarpa, which grows very
quickly here; and if anybody wants to make a hedge of it, I should
advise him to keep his hedge a little narrower at the top than at the
base. With a very slight slope of the sides the rain runs down to the
lowest twigs; but if the sides are bolt upright, the lowest twigs dry up
and wither away, leaving an ugly hollow underneath.
A formal garden may be made to look as ugly as anything in Holland when
the tulips are in bloom--five hundred tulips in a bed, all at the same
distance from each other, and all of the same colour and size. Enamelled
iron would be better than real flowers there, as it would give the full
effect at which those gardeners aim. If formality demands entire beds of
flowers of one kind, these might at least be flowers of varied colour
and irregular growth. I use begonias for my box-edged beds here--double,
single, frilled, all mixed together, scarlet, crimson, coral, salmon,
orange, yellow, white--and (in my eyes) the beds have unity enough
without too much formality. But all begonias are ungainly things; and ‘a
blaze of colour’ generally means a mass of flowers that have few merits
of their own. There are plenty of flowers worth growing for their
grandeur or their grace; but people fill their gardens up with other
sorts, just as they fill their houses with the books ‘without which no
gentleman’s library would be complete.’ They merely grow these plants
because most people grow them.
If there is to be a ‘formal’ garden, it should be next the house, as the
house itself is all right-angles and straight lines that harmonize with
walls of yew or cypress and kerb-stones of box. Conversely, the ‘wild’
garden should be far away; and the usual notion is that ‘landscape’
gardening covers the transition from the ‘formal’ to the ‘wild.’ I have
a notion of my own that landscape gardening is like sitting between two
stools. No doubt, a landscape painter may improve a landscape by
omitting things that spoil the view or putting them in where they look
right; and a landscape gardener can really cut things down or root them
up and plant them somewhere else. He may thereby improve a garden that
was naturally wild; but when he plans a ‘landscape’ garden, he usually
gives it too much formality for nature and not enough for art.
In looking at landscapes by great painters, such as Claude Lorraine, you
sometimes get an uncomfortable feeling of something being wrong, and
then it dawns upon you that the hills and dales and rocks and streams
defy the laws of Nature. In his _Observations on Modern Gardening_,
which first came out in 1770, Whately treats real landscape in the same
capricious way; and the question is, how far such licence is allowable.
There is an engraving of Turner’s picture of the Temeraire, with some of
the mistakes corrected. The sun is still setting in the east, but the
tug’s mast is forward of the funnel, not abaft of it, and the
Temeraire’s foremast looks taller than her mainmast, as it really would,
seen from that point of view. But these corrections spoil the
composition, with its series of ascending heights from the tug’s funnel
to her mast and the foremast and the mainmast of the Temeraire. Turner
understood ships very well, and knew what he was doing. But the Claudes
and Whatelys did not understand geology, and blundered in an aimless
way.
Whately declares that every ‘landskip’ is composed of ground, wood,
water, rocks and buildings. In a garden “every species of architecture
may be admitted, from the Grecian down to the Chinese”; but in a wider
prospect there should be “no Grecian temples, no Turkish mosques, no
Egyptian obelisks or pyramids,” though there may be “the semblance of an
ancient British monument,” pp. 119, 120, ed. 1770. As for its
construction, “the materials might be brick, or even timber plaistered
over, if stone could not easily be procured: whatever they were, the
fallacy would not be discernible.” It tempts me to construct a
lath-and-plaster Stonehenge here.
On one point I agree with him, p. 159, “a chearful look-out from the
windows is all that the proprietor desires: he is more sensible to the
charms of the greater prospects, if he sees them only occasionally, and
they do not become insipid by being familiar.” Nor is it prudent to rely
too much upon a distant view. In a flat country you plant a belt of
trees around your house and don’t care what your neighbours do: you are
monarch of all you survey. But in a hilly country, such as this, you are
at your neighbours’ mercy, unless you have a very large estate. Some
neighbour may quite spoil your view by starting building or cutting
timber or opening a mine a mile or two away. And you cannot plant him
out. If you plant a tree to hide an eyesore, it hides it only from one
point of view, and from other points it hides things you may wish to
see.
Clipped hedges of yew and cypress look well almost anywhere, but best
near dark green trees, cedar, pine, or fir. Evergreens are always better
by themselves away from trees that shed their leaves, unless such trees
are masked. I think the younger Pliny was right in growing ivy on his
plane trees, and letting it run out along the branches and reach across
from tree to tree, _Epistolæ_, V. 6. 32. He liked the dark green of the
ivy with his bay trees and his clipped box bushes below, although he
knew the ivy would ultimately kill the planes.