feet above the sea, where church and tower crowned the cliff like a
crest. The scene we looked upon was indeed exhilarating, stately, and
grand. On the right hand, and to the west, arose and stood the craggy
heights of Dundagel, island and main, ennobled by the legends of old
historic time. To the left, a boundless reach of granite-sprinkled
moor, where barrow, logan rock, and cromlech stood, the mute memorials
of Keltic antiquity.[132] Beneath, and afar off, the sea, at that
silent hour, like some boundless lake, “its glad waves murmuring all
around the soul;” near, and at our feet, the jumbled village, crouching
on either side of the steepy road, and clinging to its banks as if the
inhabitants sought to secure access for escape when the earthquake
should rend or the volcano pour. We prepared to return and descend; but
this was by no means an easy feat, from the extreme angle at which the
roadway fell. At the first look on the inclined plane it seemed easier
to sit down and slide; but on the whole we thought it better to walk,
and pause, and creep.
Another and a new feature in the scene now met our gaze. Annexed to
every human abode a small hut had been stuck on to the walls for
the home of the “gentleman” that, in Cornwall as in Ireland, pays
the rent--_Keltice_, the pig. The hovels of these bristly vassals,
like the castles of their lords, were cabined and circumscribed in
the extreme. There was just room enough to breathe, but not to snore
without impediment of tone. A sudden inspiration awoke in our minds.
Surely it would be an act of humanity and kindness to enable these poor
suffocating creatures once in their lives to taste the balmy breath of
a summer morning. It will be to us, we said and thought, a personal
delight to see them emerge from their close and festering abodes and
rush out in the free, soft radiance of the dawn! Action followed close
on thought. Hastily, busily, every rude rough bar was drawn back,
door and substitute for door unclosed; and a general jail-delivery of
imprisoned swine was ruled and accomplished on the spot. Undetected by
a single human witness, without interruption from slumbering master
or lazy hind, the total deed was done. Gradually descending the hill,
and scattering, like ancient heroes and modern patriots, freedom and
deliverance as we went, never did the children of liberty so exult
in their unshackled deliverance as these Boscastle hordes. There was
one result, however, which we had not foreseen, and its perilous
consequences had quite escaped anticipation. The inmates of every
sty, as soon as their opportunities of egress had been ascertained
by marching out of their prison-doors and arriving unchecked at the
roadside--when they looked upward and surveyed the steep and difficult
ascent, and counted mentally the cost of attempting to surmount the
steep, they all, as with one hoof and mind, turned down the hill.
Sire and dam, lean and corpulent, farrow and suckling, all _uno
impetu_, selected and rushed down the _facilis descensus Averni_; and
although, in all likelihood, they had never pondered the contrast of
the Roman poet, yet they spontaneously moved and seconded, and carried
the unanimous resolution that _revocare gradum, his labor, hoc opus
est_. The consequence of this choice of way was too soon apparent.
Just as we had drawn the last bar, and were approaching the bottom of
the steep, we looked back and saw that we were pursued, and should
speedily be surrounded, by a mixed multitude of porcine advocates for
free discussion in the open air, such as might have gladdened the
heart of any critic on the original and cultivated breeds of the west
of England. Prominent among them the old Cornish razor-back asserted
its pre-eminence of height and bone, nor were punchy representatives
of the Berkshire[133] and Suffolk genealogies absent on this festive
occasion. Growing now apprehensive of the consequences of discovery,
if an early rising owner should ascertain the authors of this daring
effort to “deliver their dungeons from the captive,” we hastened to
secure ourselves in the shelter of our hostelry of the Ship, and
fortunately found, on reaching our “little chamber on the wall,” that
the widow and her household were still fast asleep. We fastened the
door and listened for results. The outcries and yells were fearful.
By-and-by human voices began to mingle with the tumult; there were
shouts of inquiry and surprise, then sounds of apparent expostulation
and entreaty, and again a “storm of hate and wrath and wakening fear.”
Many a battle of soldiers must have fought and ended with less uproar.
At last the tumult pierced even the ears of our hostess Joan Treworgy.
We heard her puff and blow, and call for Tim. At last, after waiting
a prudent time, we thought it best to call aloud for shaving-water,
and to inquire with astonishment into the cause of that horrible
disturbance which had roused us from our morning sleep. This brought
the widow in hot haste to our door.
“Why, they do say, Captain,” was her doleful response, “that all the
pegs up-town have a-rebelled, and they’ve a-be, and let one the wother
out, and they be all a-gwain to sea huz-a-muz, bang!”
Although this statement was somewhat obscure in its phraseology, and
the Keltic byword at the close, wherein the “sense is kindred to the
sound,” yet we understood too well that the main facts of the history
were as true as if Macaulay had recorded them; so we pretended to dress
in great haste, and hurried down to see the war. It was indeed an
original scene;
“For chief intent on deeds of strife,
Or bard of martial lay,
’Twere worth ten years of peaceful life,
One glance at their array!”
Here a decently dressed woman made many fruitless endeavours to
coax out of the brawl five or six squealing farrows, the offspring
of a gaunt old dam that, like the felon sow of Rokeby,[134] was “so
distraught with noise” that “her own children she mought clean devour.”
There a stalwart quarryman, finding all other efforts fruitless,
had seized his full-grown porker by the legs and hoisted him on his
shoulders to ride home pickaback uttering all the while yells of fierce
expostulation and defiance. One hot little man, with a red face and
gesticulating hands, had grasped a long pole, and laid about him in mad
fury, promiscuously, until a tall and bristly hog rushed at him from
behind, and carried him off down the hill seated at full charge like a
knight of King Arthur’s Court, with “semblance of a spear,” and tilted
him at last head over heels in the bed of the stream. But some way up
the hill we came suddenly upon a scene which demanded all our sympathy;
help there was none. A panting old woman had singled out her hog and
separated him from the crowd; and a fine fat animal he was--four
hundred-weight at least--and so unfitted for the slightest exertion,
that unless he had resorted to sliding and rolling, it was difficult
to conceive how he had accomplished even his downhill journey from the
sty. But up hill--as his obdurate mistress appeared to propose,--no,
no. There was a look in his eye, as he glanced back at his despairing
owner, that seemed to suggest a grunt in strong German emphasis, _das
geht nicht_. He had thrust his snout and half his nose through the
bars of a gate; and there he stuck, and manifestly meant to stick
fast, while she belaboured him with strokes like a flail. She paused
as we approached the spot, and with an appealing look for our assent,
she piteously exclaimed, “My peg’s surely mazed, maister, or he’s
ill-wished; some ennemie hath a-dond it!” My thought responded to her
charge; it was certainly no enemy of the pig that “dond it,” whatsoever
he might be to his owner.
We left “her alone in her glory,” and returned to the inn, communing
as we went on the store of legend, tale, and history we had laid up
for future generations in thus opening a field of achievement for the
Boscastle swine. What themes of marvel would travel down by the cottage
hearth, there to be rehearsed by wrinkled eld!--the wondrous things
always the more believed as they became more incredible. Doubtless the
local event would very soon be resolved into demoniac agency, because,
ever since the miracle of Gadara, the people have always linked the
association of demons and swine; and they refer to the five small
dark punctures always visible on the hoof of the hog as the points of
entrance and departure for the fiend.[135]
Once in after-life did this fitful freak[136] recur to our minds. We
separated, my companion of this ride and myself--I to a country cure,
and my friend back to Oxford, “to climb the steep where fame’s proud
temple shines afar.” He ascended step by step until he became Dean of
the College[137] to which we both belonged. In course of time, after
the usual interval, I went up to take my M.A. degree. Now the custom
was, and is, that the Dean takes the candidate by the hand, leads him
up to the chair of the Vice-Chancellor, and presents him for his degree
in a Latin speech. We were all assembled in the appointed place, the
Dean, my friend, taking us up in turn one by one. Among the group was
a stout burly man, a gentleman commoner, sleek and fat, and manifestly
well-to-do in life. With him the Dean had trouble; unwieldy and
confused and slow, it was difficult to get him through the crowd and
up to his place in time. They passed me in a kind of struggle,--the
Dean leading and endeavouring to guide, the candidate hanging back and
getting pitched in the throng. Just then I managed to whisper--
“Why, your peg’s surely mazed, maister!”
I was hardly prepared for the result when I “struck the electric chain
wherewith we are darkly bound.” The association came back; the words
called up the scene among the swine; and when the crowd gave way, there
stood the Dean before the Vice-Chancellor’s chair, greeting him, not
with a Latin form, but in spasms of uncontrollable laughter!
To return to the original scene. We ordered Caliban with our ponies to
be ready at the door, and we in the meanwhile called on our hostess to
produce her bill. She hum’d and ha’d and hesitated, and seemed at a
loss to produce the “little dockyment,” which is usually supposed to
be a matter of very fluent composition at an inn. It was not until we
had again and again explained that we desired her to state in writing
what we had to pay, that she seemed at last to comprehend. A deal of
scuffling about the kitchen ensued. There was a quick passing to and
fro, in and out; there were several muttered discussions of the lower
house; a neighbour, who appeared to be a glazier, was sent for; and
at last the door opened, and our red pursy little hostess bustled in,
bobbed a curtsey, and presented for our perusal her small account,
chalked upon the upper lid of the kitchen bellows, which she gracefully
held towards us by the snout. Poor old Joan Treworgy! how utterly
did thy rough simplicity put to shame the vaunting tariff and the
“establishment charges” of this nineteenth century of Messrs. Brag and
Sham! The bill, which we duly transcribed, and which was then paid and
rubbed out, thus ran:--
CAPTENS.
_s._ _d._
T for 2 0 6
Sleep for 2 1 0
Meat and Taties and Bier 1 6
Bresks 1 6
Four shillings and sixpence for bed and board for two wolfish appetites
for a night and a day, to say nothing of the pantomime performed
gratuitously for our behoof, at a very early hour, by Boscastle
amateurs! Good day, Mrs. Treworgy! good day! “To-morrow to fresh woods
and pastures new.”
FOOTNOTES:
[116] From _Belgravia_, vol. iii. pp. 328-337. 1867.
[117] The author and Rev. Dr. Jeune, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough,
father of Sir Francis Jeune.
[118]
“O type of a far scene! the lovely land,
Where youth wins many a friend, and I had one;
Still do thy bulwarks, dear old Oxford, stand?
Yet, Isis, do thy thoughtful waters run?”
_The Token Stream of ‘Tidna’ Combe._
(See Appendix A.)
[119] Compare Tennyson, “In Memoriam”--
“For, ‘ground in yonder social mill
We rub each other’s angles down,
‘And merge,’ he said, ‘in form and gloss,
The picturesque of man and man.’”
[120] Such things have been known to occur even in these degenerate
days.
[121] A variant of a line in Hawker’s poem, “A Legend of the Hive.”
[122] The Oxford crone speaks with a Cornish accent, and some think
that she hailed from Stratton.
[123] Hawker came in contact, however, with some of the leaders of
the Oxford Movement, as we learn from a letter where he says: “How I
recollect their faces and words--Newman, Pusey, Ward, Marriott; they
used to be all in the common-room every evening, discussing, talking,
reading.” Hawker went up to Oxford in 1822, and won the Newdigate in
1827, when Newman was a Tutor of Oriel and Keble was publishing “The
Christian Year.”
[124] One of the kind so often used by Wesley for his open-air sermons
in Cornwall. See p. 160.
[125] Compare Hawker’s poem,“Trebarrow,” and his footnote thereto.
[126] From the description of Carradon in “The Quest of the Sangraal.”
[127]
“Kings of the main their leaders brave,
Their barks the dragons of the wave.”
_Lay of the Last Minstrel._
[128] Compare Hawker’s well-known ballad, “The Silent Tower of
Bottreaux.”
[129] There were no “earls” of Bottreaux. Knights, or barons, would be
more correct.
[130] Wizard.
[131] See Appendix J.
[132] Compare Tennyson--
“that gray king, whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still.”
[133]
“One breed may rise, another fall;
The Berkshire hog survives them all.”
It was, perhaps, in commemoration of this episode that Hawker when
afterwards curate of North Tamerton, kept a tame Berkshire pig. Another
parson-poet, Robert Herrick, is also said to have had a pet porker.
[134] Compare p. 204.
[135] Compare p. 202.
[136] An escapade with pigs occurs in Tennyson’s poem, “Walking to the
Mail.”
[137] Pembroke.
HOLACOMBE
There is a small outlying hamlet[138] in my parochial charge, about two
miles from my vicarage, with a population of about two hundred souls,
inhabiting a kind of plateau shut in by lofty hills and skirted by the
sea. These rural and simple-hearted people, secluded by their remote
place of abode from the access of the surrounding world, present a
striking picture of old and Celtic England such as it existed two or
three hundred years ago. A notion of their solitude and simplicity may
be gathered from the fact that, whereas they have no village postman
or office, their only mode of intercourse with the outer life of
their kind is accomplished through the weekly or other visit of their
clergyman. He carries their letters, which contain “the short and
simple annals of the poor,” and he receives and returns their weekly
and laborious literary compositions to edify and instruct their distant
and more civilised correspondents. The address on each letter is often
such as to baffle all ordinary curiosity, and unless deciphered
by the skill of the experts of the post-office, must often furnish
hieroglyphics for the study of the Postmaster-General as obscure, if
not so antique, as the legends on a pyramid or Rosetta stone. A visit
to a distant market-town is an achievement to render a man an authority
or an oracle among his brethren; and one who has accomplished that
journey twice or thrice is ever regarded as a daring traveller, and
consulted about foreign countries with a feeling of habitual respect.
They have amongst them no farrier for their cattle, no medical man for
themselves, no beerhouse, no shop; a man who travels for a distant town
supplies them with tea by the ounce, or sugar in smaller quantities
still. Not a newspaper is taken in throughout the hamlet, although they
are occasionally astonished and delighted by the arrival from some
almost forgotten friend in Canada of an ancient copy of the _Toronto
Gazette_. This publication they pore over to weariness, and on Sunday
they will worry the clergyman with questions about Transatlantic places
and names of which he is obliged to confess himself utterly ignorant,
a confession which consciously lowers him in their veneration and
respect. An ancient dame once exhibited her Prayer-book, very nearly
worn out, printed in the reign of George II., and very much thumbed at
the page from which she assiduously prayed for the welfare of Prince
Frederick, without one misgiving that she violated the article of our
Church which forbids prayer for the dead.
Among the singular traits of character which are developed amid
these, whom I may designate in the German phrase as my mossy[139]
parishioners, there is one which I should define, in their extreme
simplicity, as exuberant belief, or rather faith in excess. I do not,
however, intend by this term any kind of religious peculiarity of tenet
or creed, but only a prostration of the intellect before certain old
traditionary and inherited impulses of the human mind. They share and
they embrace those instinctive tendencies of their Celtic nature which
in all ages have led their race to cherish a credence in the existence
and power of witches, fairies, and the force of charms and spells. It
is well known that all such supernatural influences on ordinary life
are singularly congenial to the ancient and the modern Cornish mind. I
do not exaggerate when I affirm at all events my own persuasion, that
two-thirds of the total inhabitants of Tamar-side implicitly believe
in the power of the _Mal Occhio_, as the Italians name it, or the Evil
Eye. Is this incredible in a day when the spasms and raps and bad
spelling of a familiar spirit are received with acquiescent belief in
polished communities, and even in intellectual London? The old notion
that a wizard or a witch so became by a nefarious bargain with the
enemy of man, and by a surrender of his soul to his ultimate grasp,
although still held in many a nook of our western valleys, and by the
crooning dame at her solitary hearth, appears to have been exchanged
in my hamlet of Holacombe (for such is its name) for a persuasion that
these choosers of the slain inherit their faculty from their birth.
Whispers of forbidden ties between their parents, and of monstrous and
unhallowed alliances of which these children are the issue, largely
prevail in this village. There it is held that the witch, like the
poet, is so born. I have been gravely assured that there are well-known
marks which distinguish the ill-wishers from all beside. These are
black spots under the tongue; in number five, diagonally placed: “Like
those, sir, which are always found in the feet of swine,”[140] and
which, according to the belief of my poor people, and which, as a
Scriptural authority, I was supposed unable to deny, were first made in
the unclean animals by the entrance of the demons into the ancestral
herd at Gadara. A peculiar kind of eyeball, sometimes bright and clear,
and at others covered with a filmy gauze, like a gipsy’s eye, as it is
said, by night; or a double pupil, ringed twice; or a larger eye on
the left than on the right side; these are held to be tokens of evil
omen, and accounted to indicate demoniac power, and certain it is that
a peculiar glare or a glance of the eye does exist in those persons
who are pointed out as in possession of the craft of the wizard or
witch. But an ancient man, who lived in a lone house in a gorge near
the church, once actually disclosed to me in mysterious whispers, and
with many a gesture of alarm and dread, a plan which he had heard from
his grandfather, and by which a person evilly inclined, and anxious for
more power than men ought to possess, might at any time become a master
of the Evil Eye.
“Let him go to chancel,” said he, “to sacrament, and let him hide
and bring away the bread[141] from the hands of the priest; then,
next midnight let him take it and carry it round the church,
widdershins--that is, from south to north,[142] crossing by east
three times: the third time there will meet him a big, ugly, venomous
toad,[143] gaping and gasping with his mouth opened wide, let him put
the bread between the lips of the ghastly creature, and as soon as ever
it is swallowed down his throat he will breathe three times upon the
man, and he will be made a strong witch for evermore.”
I did not fail to express the horror and disgust with which I had
listened to this grandsire’s tale, and to assure him that any man
capable of performing such an atrocious ceremony for such a purpose,
must be by his very nature fit for every evil desire, and prepared, of
his own mere impulse, to form the most unhallowed wishes for the harm
of his fellow-creatures, such as a demon only could delight to fulfil.
But the feats which are supposed to be achieved by the witch--for the
question proposed by the sapient King Jamie has been solved by the
Cornish people, whether the Devil doth not oftener dally with ancient
women than men--are invariably deeds of loss and harm: Some felon sow,
like her of Rokeby,[144] becomes the grunting mother of a large family
of farrows; all at once, like Medea,[145] she hates her own offspring
with a fiendish hatred, and spurns them all away from her milk. They
pine and squeal, and at last sit upright on their hinder parts like
pleading children, put their little paws together in piteous fashion,
and die one by one. All this would never have come to pass had not the
dame, the day before, refused a bottle of milk to one who “should
have been a woman,” “but that her beard forbade them to interpret
that such she were.” What graphic tales of “things ill-wished” have
I not heard around and within this wild and lonely hamlet! All at
once a flock or herd would begin to pine away with some strange and
nameless disease, the shepherd’s ewes yeaned dead lambs, and were found
standing over their lost offspring aghast. Or his cows, “the milky
mothers of the herd,” would rush from field to field, “quite mad,”
with their tails erect towards the sky, like the bare poles of a ship
in distress scudding before the gale; or the brown mare would refuse
to be harnessed, and signify her intention to remain in the stall on
a busy day, to her master’s infinite disgust. In the more civilised
part of my parish the well-to-do farmer would have a remedy. He would
mount his horse one break of day on some secret expedition, and be
absent for another day or two. Then he returns armed with a packet of
white powders, which he scatters carefully, one at every gate on his
farm, and his men hear him as he goes muttering in solemn fashion some
strange set words, which turn out, when the scroll is submitted to the
schoolmaster afterwards, to contain the blessings of the twenty-eighth
chapter of Deuteronomy, copied in writing for his use. He has paid
a visit, it appears, to a distant town, and been closeted with a
well-known public character of the west, popularly called the White
Witch, and it is he who has not only exposed the name and arts of the
parish practitioner of evil, but has supplied an antidote in the shape
of baffling powders and “charms of might.”
Some years agone a violent thunderstorm passed over the hamlet of
Holacombe, and wrought great damage in its course. Trees were rooted
up, cattle killed, and a rick or two set on fire. It so befell that I
visited, the day after, one of the chief agricultural inhabitants of
the village, and I found the farmer and his men standing by a ditch
wherein lay, heels upward, a fine young horse quite dead. “Here sir,”
he shouted, as I came on, “only please to look! is not this a sight to
see?” I looked at the poor animal, and uttered my sympathy and regret
at the loss.