with respect, as Cobbett never recommended anything without trying it
himself or having seen it tried. These books of his are shrewd and
sensible, and may be right in what they say of that “degrading curse,”
the “pernicious practice of drinking tea,” _Cottage Economy_, sections
23 to 33. “But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has
attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of
his life without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into
England?” Parson Davy was preaching against tea-drinking here in 1803,
and as early as 1748 Wesley was exhorting his followers to abhor tea as
a deadly poison. (A prophet is without honour in his own chapels.)
Cobbett likewise talks of “the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers”
of tea. “Tea has no useful strength in it: it contains nothing
nutritious.... It is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens
for the moment and deadens afterwards.”
The fault may not be in the tea itself, but in the way of making it and
leaving it to ‘stand’ or ‘draw.’ A cynic said that tea was the salvation
of the people here; it so damaged their digestions that they could not
assimilate the food they ate; and this really was a mercy, as they
over-ate themselves so much. Even in this house, I fear, tea was allowed
to stand too long. I remember my grandmother being chaffed about a
letter she had written, “Jane has drunk tea here. Poor soul, she has
drained the cup of bitterness to the very dregs.”
In my early days here the cottagers all kept pigs; and the sties abutted
on the cottages and drained into the lanes. There were sties on each
side of the lane between Bowhouse and the Tallet; and as the lane is
steep, the drainage made a stream downhill and joined the drainage from
a sty at Souther Wreyland just outside the kitchen door. Then came a
time when pig-sties were prohibited within a certain distance of a
house; and the old granite pig-sties were utilized in other ways--that
Souther Wreyland sty became a coal-cellar, and a double sty at Lower
Wreyland has now become a sitting-room. But in War-time all restrictions
were removed; and pig-sties could be set up close to dwellings, as
before. Restrictions on building also were removed. Some years before
the War I wanted to turn a barn into a house; but this was not allowed,
although the barn had well-built granite walls--few houses have as good.
And now a barn near here, not built so well as that, has just been
turned into a house. If restrictions were necessary, they should not
have been removed: if they were capricious, they should never have been
made.
In those good old pig-sty days there were some powerful smells here, but
they did not carry far, and the air was always fresh; and there were
much worse smells in towns, with no fresh air to counteract them. A
builder writes to my father about a house in London, 12 October 1862, “I
beg to acquaint you that the works are going on, and on opening the
ground I find a large cess-pool in the front area under the steps, a
most improper situation for such a place.” That house was not built till
1820, and older houses usually were worse.
There were no sewers here, at Wreyland or at Lustleigh, until 1892, when
a joint sewer was laid down for the sewage of both places. A joint
water-supply was included in the scheme; but that part of the scheme
fell through, and sewer-gas was thus laid on to every house that had no
water of its own. This state of things continued for ten years, although
there was no practical difficulty about the joint supply. The great
Torquay reservoir is less than two miles off; and the engineers were
ready to lay the water on, just as they had laid it on to other places
between here and Torquay. But water-supply is in the jurisdiction of the
Rural District Council; and the Council appointed Parochial Committees
without experience of anything much bigger than a parish pump. The joint
supply was rejected, as Wreyland is not in Lustleigh parish. A separate
supply was found for Lustleigh; and when that failed, a further supply
was found, as far off as the Torquay reservoir. Being in Bovey parish,
Wreyland was supplied from a Bovey reservoir as far off on the other
side; and this reservoir was a futile thing--intended as storage to
supplement a small supply in drought, needless when a big supply was
brought in from another source, and ineffective now, because the mains
are nearly choked with rust. With their ineffective schemes and
alterations and additions, these two rural parishes incurred a debt of
about £24,000 for water-supply, besides about £8000 for sewage; and
there are special-expenses rates for interest and sinking-fund, and
water rates as well.
Moretonhampstead was provided with a sewer in 1905. The main part of the
town is on a hill between two little valleys that converge into the
valley of the Wrey; and a nine-inch sewer-pipe was carried down each
valley to the junction of the two, and a nine-inch sewer-pipe from that
point to the sewage-tanks some way further on, as if one nine-inch pipe
would take the full contents of two of that same size. Moreton is a
great place for thunderstorms--the conformation of the country brings
the clouds that way--and the storm-water comes rushing down the
sewer-pipes and drives the sewage along; and of course the sewer-pipes
were always bursting where these torrents met. Instead of laying a
larger pipe from the junction to the tanks (which would have been a
costly thing) the District Council placed a sort of safety-valve above
the junction; and now, whenever the pressure is sufficient, the sewage
throws up a fountain there. I have gone to see the fountains at
Versailles and Peterhof and other places celebrated for them, but I have
never seen another fountain quite like this. And nobody need go out of
his way to see it, as it splashes out on the high road from Moreton
here.
In going from Moreton to Hurston, I pass a guide-post with an arm that
says, ‘Chagford. 1½ miles.’ Taking that direction, I pass another
guide-post (at Stiniel cross) less than a hundred yards away; and this
has an arm that says, ‘Chagford. 2 miles.’ A foreigner noticed it and
said, “Aha, you advance one hundred metres and you retreat one
half-mile? How shall you arrive?” I said, of course, “We muddle
through,” and he said “You are a wonderful people”; and he said it as if
he meant it as a compliment, but I think he had some reservations in his
mind.
There is a new guide-post at Lustleigh. Instead of getting a larch pole
that might have cost about five shillings, the District Council got an
iron post that cost five pounds; and on that post the sockets for the
arms are at right-angles to each other. One arm is marked ‘Cleave,’ and
points along the road there. The other is marked ‘Station,’ but (being
at right-angles to the first) it points along the path to Wreyland,
which path does not go anywhere near the Station. Hence, many
objurgations from excursionists when they have missed the train. With a
larch pole, the arm could be nailed on to point the proper way; but our
Council would not be satisfied with anything that did not combine
extravagance with inefficiency.
Inefficiency is said to be a sign of honesty in public bodies. When a
public body is corrupt, the members take good care that everything is
managed so efficiently that nobody would like to turn them out--they
take no risks of losing a position that they find so profitable. On this
hypothesis the Local Authorities in Devon cannot possibly be corrupt;
and yet I sometimes feel a passing doubt when I see what schemes they
sanction and what tenders they accept.
Corruption may be beneficial if it implies efficiency. The amount of
money that is misappropriated will seldom be as much as would be muddled
away by honest, inefficient men. We usually have some very able men in
Devon, astute financiers whose abilities are thrown away in the routine
of penal servitude on Dartmoor. We might entrust our Local Government
affairs to them, not quite with a free hand, but with a reasonably
laxity allowed in matters of finance.
Our present system of Local Government has the defects of bureaucracy
without its merits. There are County Councils and District Councils and
Parish Councils. These are elected by the ratepayers; and the people who
are elected have not always got the necessary ability, and those who
have the ability cannot always give the necessary time. The result is
that the clerks and other officials have to do the Councils’ work, if it
is going to be done at all; and they are not invariably the sort of men
to whom such work would be entrusted. Under the bureaucratic system the
Councils would be abolished and their work entrusted to officials of
high standing, who would be qualified men; and they would do their best,
as they would have full credit for successful work and be responsible if
things went wrong. The officials have no such incentive now, as their
acts are nominally the Councils’ acts, and they have neither credit nor
blame.
With such administration it is not surprising that the rates in Bovey
parish have risen to 8_s._ 10_d._ and 9_s._ 5_d._ in the £, or 18_s._
3_d._ for the year--an inordinate sum for any rural parish. And no
drastic reductions can be made now, as £1600 a year is required for
interest and sinking-fund on loans, which will not be completely cleared
till 1952. All the money that is squandered by the Councils is charged
upon the rates; and nobody is ever punished for his blundering.
Take one case as a specimen of what is going on. A retaining-wall was
being built, half a mile from here, under the direction of a District
Council official. There was plenty of granite close at hand, but he was
having stone of an inferior kind brought down there by steam lorries
from a quarry nearly three miles off; and it came in lumps of
insufficient size for a retaining wall. On seeing how the wall was being
built, I wrote to say that it would certainly fall down, and the work
had better be stopped, especially as there was scandalous waste of money
in sending to a distance for inferior stone. But the work was carried
on; and a few days after it was finished, the wall fell down exactly as
I said it would. It was rebuilt in such a way that part of it will
probably fall down again. The ratepayers are paying for the building of
that wall and for its rebuilding, and the official goes scot free.
To take another case. Four years ago the District Council laid a
water-main across some private property without complying with the forms
prescribed by law; and as soon as it was laid, the owner told the
Council to take it up, though it had cost about £240 to lay. He was
within his rights; and he frightened the Council into an agreement to
pay him a way-leave if he would allow it to remain, and to take it up if
he gave six months’ notice. He has given notice and then withdrawn it on
condition of the Council’s doing something for him which the Council was
not really bound to do; and, so far as I can see, he may repeat the
process as often as he likes. The ratepayers find the money for it all.
If a District Council needs a loan for carrying out large works, the
plans and specifications and estimates have to be submitted to the
Ministry of Health before the loan is sanctioned. In these matters the
Ministry follows the practice of the old Local Government Board; and
when a loan was needed for the Moreton sewage scheme, the Board sent
down one of its inspectors. He held an inquiry at Moreton, and went over
the ground; and he passed the plans and specifications containing the
outrageous blunder I have mentioned. Hence the sewage fountain on the
road.
In spite of all formalities, works are not always carried out according
to the plans passed by the Ministry or Board. On the plans of the joint
sewer here (Lustleigh and part of Bovey) there is a settling-tank for
the sewage and an effluent to irrigate the fields below; but the tank
has never been built, and raw sewage is run out upon the land. The tank
appears upon the plans that were endorsed on the agreements with the
landowners; and they can compel the Council to build it--at the
ratepayers’ expense. The ratepayers imagined that the tank was there,
and had been paid for from the loan the Board had sanctioned for
carrying out the plans.
Amongst the works for giving Bovey more water (at a cost of upwards of
£11,000) there are three horizontal shafts, or ‘adits,’ driven into
Haytor down; and one of them is more than a quarter of a mile in
length. The work was carried out in lavish style--these shafts remind me
of the entrances to royal tombs that I have seen in Egypt. The water
from the shafts must be quite pure; but water was also taken from an
open stream that runs through Yarner wood, and may have dead rabbits and
other unpleasant things in it; and this water goes into the same main
without filtration. That being so, the shafts were hardly worth their
cost. And although the water from them is so very pure, it is a little
‘sour’ (as moorland water often is) and therefore picks up lead in
passing through lead pipes. As lead pipes have been laid, there is now a
danger of lead-poisoning in Bovey, and so also in Lustleigh with its
moorland water and lead pipes. And in both these places the lead pipes
are in accordance with the plans and specifications passed by the
Ministry of Health.
In the old days here, when drinking-water mostly came from wells, the
population must have swallowed masses of unwholesome stuff. There is a
well (now closed) in Lustleigh town-place just where the ground slopes
downward from the churchyard to the Wrey. Here at Wreyland there is a
well in front of the Hall House, now used for horses drinking at a
trough, but formerly for all mankind. There were two pig-sties five
yards from it and a third within ten yards; and it was on the lowest
ground here, so that things would easily drain in. This house is higher
up, but the well was on the lower side of it; and my grandfather had the
present well sunk in 1839.
His well received great praise, as I am told. “Th’apothecary man come
here and saith as he must anderize the well. And I saith, ‘Well, if you
must, you must.’ And then he come again and saith, ‘I’ve anderized that
well, and if you drink of that, you’ll live for ever.’” That was the
substance of what he said, but not (I believe) the form in which he said
it. People here are apt to put things in the form they would have used
themselves. A lady of great dignity once noticed a donkey here, and
remarked what a fine animal it was; and she was perturbed at hearing
that the villagers were saying she had praised the animal in detail,
ending up “and if there be one part of’n as I admire more than another,
it be his rump.”
From time to time the County Council appoints a ‘rat-week’ for a general
attack on rats. Rats have a good deal of sense: they abandon places
where they are hunted down, and congregate in places where they are left
alone. A rat-week frightens them away from these infested places; and in
the following week there are more rats than can be managed in the places
that were nearly free of them before. So a rat-week is rather a nuisance
to anybody who has always kept rats down.
When there is an attack on any kind of creature, there is always an
outcry that every kind of creature has its use, and we shall suffer for
upsetting Nature’s plans; and one naturally gets impatient with the
silly folk who have all cobwebs swept away, and then go grumbling that
their rooms are full of flies. But rats are not indigenous here--England
did very well without them until about 1350, like Australia without
rabbits until about 1850. I am quite sure rats must be killed, and I get
traps and poisons; but when it comes to killing one, my sympathies are
with the rat, and I always have a secret hope that it will get away.
One winter afternoon I went up to my bedroom and found a rat there,
sitting on the rug before the fire. It did not move when I came in, but
looked at me appealingly. I understood, and it saw I understood; and we
had as clear a conversation as if we had expressed ourselves in words.
The rat said, “I must apologize for this unwarranted intrusion; but I am
suffering from some distressing malady, and entertain a hope that it may
be within your power to alleviate my sufferings.” I said, “I regret
exceedingly that this should be entirely beyond my powers. I know too
little of human maladies, and even less of the maladies of rodents; and
were I to adopt the treatment usually prescribed for them, I fear your
sufferings might be aggravated.” And the rat said, “You disappoint me
grievously. But at least, I trust, you will not abuse the confidence I
have reposed in you?” I said, “Nothing could be further from my
thoughts,” and held the door politely open. The rat walked slowly out,
stopped at the top of the stairs, and looked back at me with much more
confidence, “But really isn’t there anything
[Illustration: VIEW ACROSS WREY VALLEY]
at all that you can do for me?” I said, “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m
afraid there isn’t.” And the rat went slowly downstairs, out of doors,
and away along the Pixey Garden.
The rat had come in through an open door; and this is the only way that
a rat should be allowed to come into a house--the walls should be made
rat-proof with cement. No doubt, rats climb up ivy and other creepers on
the walls, and sometimes reach the thatch that way; but I have never
known one come in at a window.
These rats, of course, are brown rats, the black rats being quite
extinct now, although old men have told me they have seen some, years
ago, both in London and down here. In his _History of Devonshire_, I.
129, ed. 1797, Polwhele quotes a man who was born in 1723 and said that,
when he was a lad, there were only black rats until a ship called the
Elizabeth was brought into Plymouth and broken up on the Devonshire side
of the Plym; and this ship’s rats were brown.
We ought really to be grateful to the browns for killing off the blacks,
as the blacks were much worse than the browns for carrying the Plague
about. We have not heard much of the Plague in Western Europe since the
brown rats arrived--the last great outbreak was in 1720 at Marseilles.
The first outbreak in England began with the arrival of some ships at
Weymouth in July or August 1348, and it very soon reached Devon and then
spread over the whole country, killing more than half the population. So
far as we know now, the Plague began in the Crimea. The black rats must
have come down there in hordes, like the hordes of brown rats that were
seen swimming across the Volga in 1727. It was brought by ships from the
Crimea to Constantinople, and thence to Messina and Genoa; and a Genoese
ship brought it to Marseilles about Christmas 1347. It spread all over
France up to the Channel coast; but if it had come here that way, it
would probably have reached Dover first, as Calais was then an English
town with much traffic across the Straits: so I imagine that the ships
at Weymouth had come up from the Mediterranean, and brought black rats
with the pestiferous fleas.
That outbreak of the Plague reduced the population of these islands to
half or perhaps a third of what it was before; and one may speculate
about what might have happened, if the outbreak had been more severe and
swept the population off without a remnant. In the absence of statistics
one may estimate the death-rate from the number of new appointments to
livings in the diocese of Exeter, as set down in bishop Grandisson’s
register of Institutions. During February 1349 there were institutions
to five parishes in the next valley to this: Chudleigh, Trusham, Ashton,
Doddiscombsleigh, Dunsford. Those parishes are all on the left bank of
the Teign; and there are no institutions to parishes on the right bank
until June. If rats could swim the Volga, they could swim the Teign, but
probably would not take the trouble if they were happy where they were;
so I presume the river checked them, and they came up here another way.
During March and April there were institutions to Lustleigh, Bovey,
North Bovey, Manaton, Ilsington, Widdicombe: six parishes forming a
solid block of sixty-four square miles. In the first six months of 1349
there were altogether 269 institutions, and 394 in the whole year. Even
in 1348 there had been only 52, and the average number was 37 in the
seven previous years, 1341 to 1347. There were not priests enough to
fill up all the vacancies in 1349; and on 20 September bishop Grandisson
obtained two Faculties from the Pope, one for ordaining a hundred young
men who had not yet attained the age of twenty-three, and the other for
ordaining fifty men who were born out of wedlock and therefore were
ineligible without a Dispensation.
This kind of evidence needs more careful handling than Cardinal Gasquet
has given it in his book on _The Black Death of 1348 and 1349_. Amongst
other things he says there, page 102, “An examination of the
institutions of the diocese, in relation to the time when the plague
visited the various parts of it, appears to show that it commenced
almost simultaneously in north and south. In North Devon it is found at
both Northam and Alverdiscott on the 7th of November, at Fremington in
the same district on the 8th, and at Barnstaple on December 23rd.... The
early outbreak in the coast villages at the mouth of the estuary leading
to Barnstaple points to the conclusion that the infection was brought by
a ship passing up the Bristol Channel.” He assumes here that the Plague
will be ‘found’ at a place on the very day on which a new incumbent has
been instituted; and this assumption is quite unfounded unless he also
assumes that the previous incumbent must have died of Plague there. But
in two of these four places the previous incumbents could not possibly
have died of Plague, as they had not died of anything at all: the
register says distinctly that these vacancies were caused by
resignation, not by death.
In a letter of 30 October 1348 bishop Grandisson cites a letter from the
prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, written after the Archbishop’s death,
and giving his instructions for processions and other rites to stay the
Plague. According to the Prior’s letter (28 September) England was
exhausted and impoverished by the War, “guerrarum discriminibus, que
ipsius regni diviciarum substanciam exhaurunt et consumunt ... regnum
Anglie desolatum extitit et afflictum.” That was the opinion of a man
living at the time: yet there are books on history assuring us that
England had never been so prosperous before, the country being then
enriched with all the spoils of France.
In that letter of 30 October bishop Grandisson ordered solemn public
processions in his diocese every Wednesday and Friday up to Christmas.
He was living at Chudleigh Manor all the time, about six miles from
here; so I imagine that there were processions all around. He also
ordered masses, psalms and prayers. These were then the proper weapons
for combatting the Plague: nobody smelled Rats. So also at Rhodes in
October 1498 the Grand Master of the Knights ordered fasting and prayer,
and the people all sang Alleluia. Columbus had brought a new disease
from the New World, and it had just reached Rhodes; but these good
people had not yet found out how it was propagated. The local poet,
Emmanuel Georgillas, wrote a poem on it in medieval Greek, _Thanaticon
tês Rhodou_. He says that the disease claimed victims from amongst them
all, old men and matrons, boys and unwedded girls, the Knights
themselves, and even the Archbishop. At last John Baptist triumphed over
Charon--that is what the poet says--but the Grand Master of the Knights
had not relied exclusively upon their patron saint: he had locked the
ladies up.
Providence helps those who help themselves, and leaves whole generations
to their fate unless they take the trouble to find out how diseases come
and how they can be kept away. Plague is carried by rats’ fleas, just as
typhus is carried by lice and malaria by mosquitos; the rats themselves
are victims. Trichinosis is caused by pigs, and leprosy by fish; but the
rats invade us of their own free will, and it is no fault of the pigs or
fish that people sometimes eat them ‘cured,’ not cooked.
When the chieftains of the Delta of the Nile went to King Pianchi to
tender their submission to him, about 750 B.C., he would not let them
come inside the palace, as they were people who ate fish--see lines 149
to 151 of his inscription--and Jews were just as hard on people who ate
pigs. Had the Jews abstained from eating fish, they might have been
immune from leprosy, which is a worse disease than any they could have
caught by eating pigs; and with proper cooking they might have eaten
both. All those ancient prohibitions were too wide, like this modern
prohibition of strong drink on the mere chance that it may make men
drunk.