started for utilising the buildings. The late Prince Consort visited the
Duchy Estates in 1846, and the question of making use of the old prison
came under his notice. In 1850 began the formation of a Convict
Settlement, and gradually the old buildings have been pulled down so
that now only one small portion, known as the French Prison, remains. As
a convict prison all the prisoners—and the average is about one
thousand—are those who have been sentenced to penal servitude. Many are
sent specially to Dartmoor for the benefit of their health, the climate,
in the early stages of chest complaint, being most efficacious. Medical
officers of the prison and elsewhere have from time to time recorded
their opinion of the great advantages which are derived by phthisical
patients from residence at such an altitude above the sea-level.
Much of the information derived is from Capt. Vernon Harris’ pamphlet,
Rowe’s _Dartmoor_, 3rd Edition, published in 1896, and from the various
references thereto. Some of the statistics are contained in the writer’s
paper on the prison printed in the transactions of the Devonshire
Association, 1901, xxiii. pp. 309–321.
J. D. PRICKMAN.
OTTERY ST. MARY AND ITS
MEMORIES.
BY THE RIGHT HON. LORD COLERIDGE, M.A., K.C.
If the traveller passing down the Vale of Otter by rail looks out to the
East, he will see a great grey church with transeptal towers—a rare
feature—one crowned with a spire, standing on rising ground backed by a
great continuous chine of hill. Around the church nestles a small town,
and a clear, swift river hastens by it to the sea. This is the
Collegiate Church of Ottery St. Mary, mainly the creation of Bishop
Grandisson. Edward the Confessor gave the Manor of Ottery St. Mary in
1061 to the Chapter of the Cathedral Church of Rouen, in Normandy.
Bishop Grandisson bought the Manor in 1335, laid the foundations of the
college for forty secular monks, and amplified the church to suit the
college. Bishop Bronescombe consecrated a church here in 1260. His work
is seen in the nave and transepts of the present building. Bishop
Grandisson built the nave, lady chapel and side chapels, etc., raised
the towers over the transepts, and covered the whole with a
stone-groined roof. The church left his hands a miniature cathedral. A
wealthy lady, Cicely Bonville, wife, first of the Marquis of Dorset, and
then of Henry Lord Stafford, added the north aisle—1503–1523—with its
grand fan-tracery groining, a purely indigenous feature, which may be
seen repeated at Cullompton, and the whole result is a majesty and
variety of external elevation which no building of its size can well
surpass. It was the central figure of a group of buildings.
Chapter-house, library, cloisters, gate-house, all were there. The
houses for the dignitaries stood around. Fragments alone remain. There
still stand the vicar’s house, the warden’s house, the chanter’s house,
and the manor house containing portions of old work. The houses of the
minister, the sacristan, and the canons have disappeared.
From these haunts of ancient peace there was issued, in 1509, Alexander
Barclay’s _Stultifera Navis_, or _Ship of Fools_, a translation, or
rather paraphrase, of the _Narrenschiff_ of Sebastian Brandt, which
originally appeared in the Swabian dialect. Barclay’s book contains much
original work, and breaks the great period of literary silence between
Chaucer and Spenser. When we say, “Man proposes, God disposes,” “skin
deep,” “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” “of two evils choose the least,”
“from pillar to post,” “sticking like burrs,” “over head and ears,” “you
cannot touch pitch and not be defiled,” “making the mouth water,” “out
of sight out of mind,” “the burnt child dreads the fire,” we are
unconsciously using phrases which appear in their first form in
Barclay’s writings.
The town was dominated by the College. The bridge by which you entered
the town from the west was the bridge of the Holy Saviour. In one of its
recesses the sacred light was ever kept burning, inviting those who
passed to pray. We have Pater-noster Row, Jesu Street, Chapel Lane,
Butts (St. Budeaux) Hill, Paradise; names of a flavour ecclesiastical.
In the Flexton, as the open space is called where now the Town Hall and
a Jubilee Memorial Pillar to Queen Victoria stand, the markets and fairs
were held, and in the churchyard may still be seen the ancient stocks.
Great fires, however, in 1604, 1767, and 1866, have destroyed much of
interest in the town.
Henry VI. visited the College in 1451, and Henry VII. in 1497.
The College disappeared at the Reformation. Some portion of its funds
were used to found the King’s Grammar School, which took root in what
remained of the collegiate buildings. The fortunes of the school varied
with the capacities of the head masters. It was successful under the
Rev. John Coleridge, 1760–1781, and under his son, the Rev. George
Coleridge, 1794–1808, it became almost the equal of Blundell’s School at
Tiverton. It subsequently slowly declined, the buildings were unsuited
to modern requirements, and it finally disappeared, reviving recently on
another site in another form under a scheme of the Charity Commission.
The town must have sadly suffered for a time from a dissolution of the
College. But as soon as the rule of Philip II. in England was over, and
his fanaticism began to work in the Netherlands, the Flemings flying to
England added a great impetus to our wool trade. Some, I think, must
have come to Ottery St. Mary, for a flourishing woollen industry sprang
up here about this time, and a small outlying portion of the town still
bears the name of Dunkirk. The pastoral character of the Vale of Otter,
and the ample water-power of the river were advantageous to the trade,
which was only killed by the discovery of steam.
The great factory built by Sir George Yonge, the Secretary of State for
War in 1790, a prominent feature to the passer-by, shows the extent to
which the industry once flourished.
In Mill Street there stood a house “beturreted and wearing a monasterial
aspect,” which Sir Walter Ralegh, who was born at Poer’s Hayes, now
Hayesbarton, further down the valley, is said once to have inhabited. A
house built in the quiet, dignified style of the eighteenth century,
called Ralegh House, marks the site.
Our town and vale were not unnoticed by poets. William Browne, the
author of _Britannia’s Pastorals_, full of quaint conceits, but with a
true vein of poetry running through them, alludes to the Naïads who fish
and swim in the clear stream of Otter. And he is believed, on the
authority of Southey, to be the author of two fine inscriptions in the
small south chapel of the church, one on John Sherman and his son, who
died on the same day in 1617, and one on the wife of Gideon Sherman, who
died in the first week of her marriage.
Michael Drayton thus described the broad pastoral character of our
vale:—
Here I’ll unyoke awhile, and turn my steeds to meat,
The land grows large and wide, my team begins to sweat.
At the time of the Great Rebellion, Ottery St. Mary was for a time
occupied by the King’s troops. At the advance of the Parliamentary army,
however, in 1645, they withdrew beyond Exe, and the Roundheads took
their place. The Commander-in-Chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, took up his
quarters at the Chanter’s House, then owned by Robert Collins, a strong
sympathiser. Fairfax was accompanied by Ireton as Commissary, and John
Pickering as Colonel. In the dining-room, which still exists, and was
then called the Great Parlour, he met Lord General Cromwell, and
determined on the plan of campaign against the King’s forces in the
West, which terminated in the capitulation of Sir Ralph Hopton in
Cornwall in March, 1646. This room Polwhele calls “the Convention Room.”
Here also a number of members of Parliament, in the name of both Houses,
presented Fairfax with a fair jewel set with diamonds of great value,
which they tied with blue ribbon and hung about his neck in grateful
recognition of his signal services at Naseby.
Sickness overtook the army during its stay, and they removed to
Tiverton. Local opinion at the Restoration swung round to the Monarchy,
the Stuarts, and the Church of England. Violent strife, political and
ecclesiastical, embittered social life. The Rev. Robert Collins, of the
Chanter’s House, a descendant of the host of Fairfax, was the leader of
the Nonconformists, and Mr. Haydon, of Cadhay, a fine quadrangular Tudor
House in the neighbourhood, upheld the dominant party. Robert Collins
insisted on disobeying the Act of Uniformity, 1662, and the Conventicle
Act, 1664. Haydon resolved to see the law obeyed. There was a constant
besetting of the Chanter’s House to discover the holding of an unlawful
prayer-meeting, and finally persistent persecution drove Robert Collins
and his family to Holland in 1685, where he died, brave and unflinching
to the last, bequeathing money to the building of the Independent Chapel
at Ottery St. Mary.
This chapel, built of old-time furze-burnt bricks in the manner known as
“the Flemish bond,” is one of the oldest in the kingdom, has an air of
Quaker-like seclusion, and is surrounded by a small graveyard occupying
the site of an ancient bowling green. There existed a trap-door in the
floor at the back of the pulpit, through which the minister could fly in
case of danger, into the vaults which still exist below the schoolroom.
The parish workhouse, now converted into cottages, stands near St.
Saviour’s Bridge. Here, on the ground floor, were ranged the chained
lunatics, to whom passers-by would throw scraps of bone and odds and
ends to appease their raving hunger.
At the Vicar’s House was born, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His
father, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar and schoolmaster, was an erudite
Hebrew scholar, and assisted Dr. Kennicott in his literary labours. He
was a pious, simple soul, beloved by his family, whose amusing absence
of mind is described in a diverting anecdote by De Quincey, not quite
fit to be repeated here. One of his scholars was Francis Buller, who sat
for twenty-two years as a puisne judge, through whose influence Samuel
Taylor Coleridge obtained a nomination at Christ’s Hospital.
[Illustration
_From the Portrait_] [_By Peter Vandyck._
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
]
This is not the place to describe at length the career of Ottery St.
Mary’s most gifted son. But we can read in his poems of the profound
influence of early scenes in the home of his boyhood upon the poet’s
imagination. In his sonnet to the river Otter, his “native brook, wild
streamlet of the West,” in after years he calls up the vision of the
crossing plank, the marge with willows grey, the bedded sand, the flung
stone leaping along its breast.
Then with quaint music hymn the parting gleam
By lonely Otter’s sleep-persuading stream.
Or where his wave with loud unquiet song
Dashed o’er the rocky channel froths along,
Or where his silver waters smoothed to rest
The tall tree’s shadow sleeps upon his breast.
The last two lines describe with exquisite felicity the peaceful
passages between the “stickles” of the bickering river.
In the year 1789, he cut his initials, “S. T. C.,” on the rock just
outside Pixie’s Parlour, a small cavern in the sandstone on the left
bank half a mile down stream.
Always keenly sensible to music, the cadence of the old church bells
rang in his ears in later life when far away from home, for he sings:—
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old Church Tower
Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot fair day.
He spoke of them to Charles Lamb, his schoolfellow; for though Charles
Lamb never came to Ottery St. Mary and never heard the bells, he makes
his characters allude to them thus:—
_Marg._: Hark the bells, John! _John_: Those are the Church bells of St.
Mary Ottery— St. Mary Ottery, my native village, In the
sweet shire of Devon, Those are the bells.
A. W. Kinglake, the author of _Eothen_ and the _History of the Crimean
War_, was educated here at Rock House, now Sandrock, under the Rev.
Edward Coleridge, who kept a successful private school. In the year
1849, Thackeray published the novel _Pendennis_. He lived as a youth at
Larkbeare House, and the scene of many of his incidents is laid in the
neighbourhood. We read of the little river running off noisily westward,
of the fair background of sunshiny hills that stretch towards the sea,
of the pattens clacking through the empty streets, of the schoolboys
making a good, cheerful noise, scuffling with their feet as they march
into church and up the organ-loft stair, and blowing their noses a good
deal during the sermon; of the factory, of the single pair of old
posters that earned their scanty livelihood by transporting the gentry
round to the county dinners; of the hollow tree in Escot Park (then a
noble house built by Inigo Jones, since burnt down, and now replaced by
a modern building, the seat of the Right Hon. Sir J. H. Kennaway), in
which the young lovers deposited their letters; and above all of the
great grey towers rising up in purple splendour, of which the sun
illuminates the delicate carving, deepening the shadows of the huge
buttresses and gilding the glittering windows.
The town contributed its share to science. Here, in 1806, in Ralegh
House, was born Edward Davy. In 1836 he sketched out a plan of
telegraphic communication, and in 1837 he laid down a copper wire round
the inner circle at Regent’s Park, and made wonderful experiments in
electricity with it. In March, 1837, he took the first step to patent
his invention by “entering a caveat,” and deposited with Mr. Aikin,
Secretary of the Society of Arts, a sealed description of his invention,
anticipating Cook and Wheatstone by two months. His invention and that
of Cook and Wheatstone were held not to be quite identical. In 1839 he
emigrated to Australia, leaving the field to his rivals.
The inhabitants are remarkable for the love which they bear towards
their birthplace. In London a society of over one hundred members of
townsfolk who have left to seek their fortunes in other scenes meet at
regular intervals to talk over the present local gossip and call up past
associations, and to renew or form a community of feeling based on
common love of home. And when the members take a holiday, the first
object of their pilgrimage, the shrine towards which their footsteps are
directed, is the dear old town of Ottery St. Mary.
COLERIDGE.
“PETER PINDAR”: THE THERSITES
OF KINGSBRIDGE.
BY THE REV. W. T. ADEY.
Thersites only clamoured in the throng,
Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of tongue;
Aw’d by no shame, by no respect controul’d.
In scandal busy, in reproaches bold;
With witty malice studious to defame;
Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim,
But chief he gloried, with licentious style,
To lash the great and monarchs to revile.
—_Pope._
Buried in the vestry vault of the churchyard of St. Paul’s, Covent
Garden, London, so near that their coffins actually touch, are the
mortal remains of two remarkable Englishmen.
The one is a Worcestershire worthy, Samuel Butler, the author of
_Hudibras_, a caricaturist in verse of the times in which he lived. His
chief character, giving name to the book by which he is best known, was
suggested by Sir Samuel Luke, his puritan patron, whilst the book
itself, commenced in 1663 and modelled after the Don Quixote of
Cervantes, is in its faithful exposure of cant and hypocrisy scarcely
inferior to its spirited Spanish prototype.
[Illustration
_From a Painting by Opie._] [_Engraved by C. H. Hodges._
DR. WOLCOT (“PETER PINDAR”).
]
The other distinguished person who found a resting-place so near him,
also a satirist and an accomplished genius with many and varied gifts,
was Dr. John Wolcot, a Devonian, born at Kingsbridge, or, more
accurately, Dodbrooke, who is better known as PETER PINDAR, whose lively
writings were most popular in the time of the later Georges, and who
then enjoyed a large measure of favour with society, whose questionable
manners he so fearlessly portrayed, and for a while at least with the
Court, every one of whom in turn, from the King and Prince Regent down
to the royal kitchen maids and cooks, he mercilessly, cleverly, and
continuously lampooned.
It is with this latter curious and cosmopolitan poet and satirist that
we have to do. We shall be obliged to tread carefully as we follow the
track of his life and his literature, for at the very outset we must
remember that the times in which he lived were coarse and in many ways
objectionable, and that he was, if not a product, at least a reflection
of them.
We may wonder why he took upon himself the name of _Pindar_ with the
added apostolic difference—_Peter_. Was it done playfully or
satirically, as was usual with him? Perhaps it was a joke at the expense
of his neighbours, whose talk was so seldom on literature and art, but
so often on _oves et boves_. Turning to the _Biographia Classica_, which
he very possibly used, we read:—“_Pindar_, the first of the lyric poets
born in Bœotia.... He quitted his native country, which was proverbial
for the stupidity of its inhabitants, and went to Athens, where the
greatest honours were bestowed upon him.... Such was the respect paid to
his memory that when the Lacedemonians took Thebes, they spared his
house, as also did Alexander the Great.” To this historical fact Wolcot
frequently alluded, as, for instance, in the clever poem entitled—
AN ODE TO MY BARN.
By Lacedæmon men attack’d,
When Thebes in days of yore was sack’d,
And naught the fury of the troops could hinder;
What’s true yet marv’lous to rehearse,
So well the common soldiers relish’d verse,
They scorn’d to burn the dwelling-house of Pindar.
With awe did Alexander view
The house of my great cousin too,
And gazing on the building, thus he sigh’d—
“General Parmenio, mark that house before ye!
That lodging tells a melancholy story:
There Pindar liv’d (great Bard!) and there he died.
“The king of Syracuse, all nations know it,
Was celebrated by this lofty poet,
And made immortal by his strains:
Ah! could I find like him, a bard to sing me;
Would any man like him a poet bring me;
I’d give him a good pension for his pains.
“But, ah! Parmenio, ’mongst the sons of men,
This world will never see his like again;
The greatest bard that ever breath’d is dead!
Gen’ral Parmenio, what think you?”
“Indeed ’tis true, my liege, ’tis very true,”
Parmenio cry’d, and, sighing, shook his head.
Then from his pocket took a knife so nice,
With which he chipp’d his cheese and onions,
And from a rafter cut a handsome slice,
To make rare toothpicks for the Macedonians;
Just like the toothpicks which we see
At Stratford, made from Shakespear’s mulb’ry tree.
What pity that the squire and knight
Knew not to prophesy as well as fight;
Then had they known the future men of metre:
Then had the gen’ral and the monarch spy’d
In fate’s fair book, our nation’s equal pride,
That very Pindar’s cousin Peter!
Daughter of thatch, and stone, and mud,
When I, no longer flesh and blood,
Shall join the lyric bards some half a dozen;
Meed of high worth, and, ’midst th’ Elysian plains,
To Horace and Alcæus read my strains,
Anacreon, Sappho, and my great old cousin;
On thee shall rising generations stare,
That come to Kingsbridge and to Dodbrook fair,
For such thy history and mine shall learn;
Like Alexander shall they ev’ry one
Heave a deep sigh, and say, since Peter’s gone,
With rev’rence let us look upon his Barn.
His allusions to Pindar the Greater make one fear that he has paid an
ill compliment to his old friends, and that in his choice of a _nom de
plume_ he has allowed, as in many other instances, his merciless satire
to overcome his evenness of judgment. Like his namesake, he turned from
the country to find his laurels in the town, and there the parallel
ends. It is not true that the people of South Devon, who singularly
combine agricultural skill with good seamanship, so that they handle
equally well the plough and the oar, are open to any implication of
special dulness.
There is little in common between the two Pindars, the ancient and the
modern. Peter displayed great skill of a kind in his versification, but
no one can say it was to any extent truly lyrical. We cannot imagine the
people singing his productions. They were popular, readable, pungent,
savoury (too much so by a long way), but certainly not lyrical, for he
had not the singer’s heart or the singer’s sweetness. Beyond the
attraction of “apt alliteration’s artful aid,” we can see no great
reason why he should have gone so far as Thebes in 540 B.C. to
appropriate the name of that ancient singer of triumphal hymns for
classic warriors.
There is a pretty story of the older Pindar that a swarm of bees lighted
on his cradle in his infancy and left honey on his lips; but we fear in
the case of our hero they were wasps that came, and that they left some
of the caustic venom of their stings.
The odes of Pindar the Great have survived and are to be admired “for
sublimity of sentiment, grandeur of expression, energy and magnificence
of style, boldness of metaphors, harmony of numbers, and elegance of
diction.” According to Horace he was inimitable, and all succeeding
writers have agreed in extolling his genius.
_Peter Pindar_ also called his favourite productions odes. We have them
before us in bulky quartos as originally published, and in numerous
volumes of pocket size as collected in 1816 by Walker. They were written
in Cornwall, Devon, the West Indies, Bath and London, and covered a very
wide range of subjects. He approached the realm of poetry as George
Morland did that of pictorial art, refusing no subject on account of its
coarseness, and yet with his fidelity of treatment in describing both
rustic and town life, has often shown a fine appreciation of truth and
of the beautiful.
Like George Morland he was spoiled by moral laxity, and like him always
gives us a sad impression of what he might have been and might have
done, if his clever genius had been kept within bounds by moral
restraint. But, alas! even as an old man, he retained a taste for the
follies which corrupted his youth, and continued to reflect too
faithfully the spirit of those immoral days when the scandalous manners
of the court were injurious alike to the Church and the State. It would
have been better for him to have taken the advice he gives in one of his
odes:—
Build not, alas! your popularity
On that beast’s back ycleped Vulgarity,
A beast that many a booby takes a pride in,
A beast beneath the noble Peter’s riding.
. . . . . .
Envy not such as have surpast ye,
’Tis very, very easy to be nasty.
The name of the classic Pindar has been associated with other writers
than Dr. Wolcot, who probably have better claims to use it than ever he
had.
Thomas Gray (1716–1771), whose monument in Westminster Abbey bears these
lines:
No more the Grecian muse unrivalled reigns,
To Britain let the nations homage pay:
She felt a Homer’s fire in Milton’s strains,
A Pindar’s rapture in the lyre of Gray.
Jean Dorot (1507–1588) and Pouce Denis Debrun (1729–1807), have each
worn the title of French Pindar, whilst Gabriello Cluobrera (1552–1637)
was the acknowledged Italian Pindar. Peter’s work has been translated
into most of the continental tongues, and has been appreciated in
Germany especially but not in France, his Francophobia being all too
evident in many allusions to the French people. His poetry is too full
of the localisms of his native county to be fully appreciated by any but
Devonians, and too full of personal and political references and
allusions to persons about the court and in the London society of that
day to appeal successfully to readers of the present generation.
Our Dr. John Wolcot was the fourth child of Dr. Alexander Wolcot,
himself a surgeon’s son residing at Kingsbridge, on the bank of the
estuary at the foot of the town. The grounds of the family dwelling
extended from the old Dartmouth Road at the back down to the water’s
edge, and the house, though much altered, still retains its name of
Pindar Lodge. His baptismal register, preserved at the Church of St.
Thomas à Becket, Dodbrooke, is dated May 9th, 1738. Of his mother we
have not been able to gather much information beyond her name—Mary
Ryder—and that she belonged to a local family. The Ryders are still
numerously represented in the townships both of Kingsbridge and
Dodbrooke.