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SMALL TALK
AT WREYLAND
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C. F. CLAY, MANAGER
LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, MADRAS: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
TORONTO: J. M. DENT AND SONS, LTD.
TOKYO: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: LUSTLEIGH CLEAVE FROM THE OVAL LAWN]
SMALL TALK
AT WREYLAND
BY
CECIL TORR
CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1918
_First Edition, June, 1918_
_Reprinted, November, 1918_
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY
J. B. PEACE, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
PREFACE
I wrote this little book for private circulation; and it was actually in
type, and ready for printing, before its publication was suggested. I
feel some diffidence in inviting strangers to read what I intended only
for my personal friends. But it all seems to hang together, and I have
not omitted anything.
In addressing this to strangers, I should explain that Wreyland is land
by the Wrey, a little stream in Devonshire. The Wrey flows into the
Bovey, and the Bovey into the Teign, and the Teign flows out into the
sea at Teignmouth. The land is on the east side of the Wrey, just
opposite the village of Lustleigh. It forms a manor, and gives its name
to a hamlet of six houses, of which this is one.
CECIL TORR.
YONDER WREYLAND,
LUSTLEIGH,
DEVON.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LUSTLEIGH CLEAVE FROM THE OVAL
LAWN _Frontispiece_
IN THE INNER PARLOUR _To face p._ 16
THE WREY AT WREYLAND ” 32
THE PIXEY GARDEN ” 48
MAY DAY ” 64
JOHN TORR, the Author’s Grandfather,
from the portrait by T. Bryant Brown ” 80
IN THE LOWER PARLOUR ” 96
THE HALL HOUSE ” 112
_All the illustrations, except the portrait, are from photographs taken
by the Author._
SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND
Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting
that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they
should have written things down. Fearing that this might soon be said of
me, I got a book last Christmas--1916--and began to write things down. I
meant to keep to local matters, but have gone much further than I meant.
My memory is perhaps a little above the average; but my brother had a
memory that was quite abnormal, and sometimes rather inconvenient. One
day, in talking to a lady of uncertain age, he reminded her of something
she had said at the Great Exhibition of 1851. She hastily
replied:--“Yes, yes, you mean 1862.” But he missed the point of the
reply, and went minutely into details showing that it must have been in
1851.
I can remember the interior of a house that I have not seen since I
attained the age of three. I am quite clear about the drawing-room, its
carpet, chandeliers and mirrors, and a good deal of the furniture; less
clear about the dining-room; but very clear indeed about the outlook
from the windows in the front--a drive, a lawn, and then a road with
houses on the other side. Of course, I can remember many other things
that I saw before I was three; but I cannot be quite certain that my
recollection of them dates from then, as I have seen them since. Here,
however, I am certain. The family left that house at Michaelmas, 1860,
and I was not three until October.
I remember being taken by my father to call upon a very old man, who
gave me an account of the beheading of King Charles the First, as he
heard it from somebody, who heard it from an eye-witness. Unluckily, I
am uncertain of the details, as I cannot separate what he told me then
from what I may have heard or read about it since.
Some years afterwards my father took me to call upon an old Mr Woodin;
and from him I had an account of the Fire of London, as he heard it from
a great-aunt of his; and she heard it from an old lady, who was about
ten years old at the time of the fire. But it was only a child’s
account, dwelling on such things as the quantities of raisins that she
ate, while they were being salved.
My father kept a diary from 1833 to 1878. When he was abroad or at any
place of interest, he kept a diary upon a larger scale, and sent it
round to aunts and other relatives, instead of writing to them
separately; and I have gone through these diaries, and made some
extracts from them. He kept all letters that he thought worth keeping,
and sorted them according to writer, date or subject; and I have made
extracts from the letters that his father wrote to him from here. The
rest of my people seem to have destroyed their letters: at any rate,
there are not many letters of theirs among my papers here.
My mother’s parents died before I was born; but I remember my father’s
parents very well indeed. I used to come down here to stay with them;
and I see that my first visit was in 1861. My grandmother lived from
1781 till 1866, and my grandfather from 1789 till 1870. As a boy, he
used to stay here with his mother’s parents; and he has told me of many
things he did here then, such as helping his grandfather to plant the
great walnut-tree, when he was seven years old--which is now 120 years
ago.
His grandmother, Honor Gribble, died here in 1799; and his grandfather,
Nelson Beveridge Gribble, left the place in 1800. The property passed
from Nelson Beveridge Gribble to his eldest son, John Gribble. After
John’s death in 1837, his widow let the house to my grandfather; and in
this quiet place he dreamed away the last thirty years of his life.
At times he looked as though he were a little weary of it all; and in a
book of his I found this note:--“16 April 1869. My birthday--now 80
years old--and have no wish to see another. My good wishes to all
behind.” In the following March he would persist in sitting out upon the
seat behind the sun-dial, to listen to the black-birds and the thrushes,
although the winds were bleak and cold; and there he caught the chill of
which he died. He did not see another birthday.
In his last illness he was nursed by Mrs *****; and thirty years and
more afterwards she was very fond of discussing with me what had
happened to him--whether he had gone to Heaven or elsewhere. She would
weigh the two sides of the question very carefully, and finish up with
“Well, I _hope_ he be in Heaven.”
She had no doubts about her own destination, and very often told me that
she needed no parsons to hoist her into Heaven. But she was not in any
hurry to get there. Looking out across her garden on a gorgeous summer
afternoon, she turned to me, and said, “I were just a-wonderin’ if
Heaven be so very much better ’an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t
know as I’d care for the change.”
One thing, however, troubled her--the old belief that people who die
before the prime of life, remain for all eternity at the age at which
they die, whereas people who die in later years, go back to their prime.
And she told me of the difficulties that she foresaw:--“If I went back
to what I were like some forty year agone, how could they as only knowed
me afterward come forth and say ‘Why, here be Mrs *****’, when I came
steppin’ up?”
As for my grandfather, his Works were undeniable; but she had her doubts
about his Faith. He was interested and amused by the controversies that
raged around religion, and thought the kettle might be better than the
pot, yet had no wish for being boiled in either. I doubt if he had any
beliefs beyond a shadowy sort of Theism that was not far removed from
Pantheism. And that made him a very kindly personage, doing all manner
of good.
He writes to my father, 16 September 1861:--“I have attended the sick
rooms of the poor in this neighbourhood on all occasions, typhus or
anything else, and I often say the alwise Governor of the Universe has
protected me, and allowed me to arrive at the age allotted for man; and
I find generally speaking, when people attend the sick from pure
philanthropic motives, they are preserved from infection.” But he did
not concur in similar reasoning by the Rector’s wife. He writes, 30
December 1860:--“Mrs ***** says Never anyone yet took cold in a church,
and I cannot agree with her, for I believe many more colds are taken at
church than elsewhere.”
My grandfather often enjoins my father not to let his letters be seen,
as he writes offhand without consideration. And this is very evident in
many of them. He will begin with some assertion, then qualify it with
‘not but what’ etc., ‘though no doubt’ etc., and so on, till at last he
talks himself quite round, and ends by saying just the opposite of what
he said at first. His sister-in-law, my great-aunt Anne Smale, had her
last illness here; and he writes to my father, 8 January 1865:--“It has
been a dreary week having a corpse in the house. It is seventy years ago
that my grandmother died [really sixty-six years] and there has not been
a death in the house since. Well, she was buried in a vault in the
chancel of Manaton church.” And this leads him on to speak of other
members of the family lying in that vault, and thus to reminiscences of
some of them, ending quite jocosely.
He used to keep a record of the weather here; and in this he sometimes
noted things quite unconnected with the weather, such as, “Mr *****
called: had no wish to see him.” But generally there was some connexion.
Thus, on 25 January 1847, he notes “St Paul’s day, sun shining, and
according to prediction we shall have a plentiful year: may God grant
it.” On 1 September 1847, “Woodpecker called aloud for wet: wish he may
be true, the turnips want it.” On 12 May 1857, “Soft mild rain: what the
old people call butter-and-barley weather.” On St Swithin’s day, 15 July
1867, “Heavy rain: so 40 days of it.”
There are also many notes about the singing of the birds--26 January
1847, “the home-screech singing merrily this morning”--1 May 1850, “the
nut-hatch a cheerful singer”--22 April 1864, “how delightful and
cheering is that old grey-bird”--and so on. I may note that the
home-screech is the mistle-thrush, and the grey-bird is the
song-thrush, sometimes known here as the grey thrush, just as the
black-bird is known as the black thrush. In these parts the field-fare
is the blue-bird.
Their singing was always a pleasure to him; and he writes to my sister,
10 March 1852:--“I have often fancied that the thrushes know that I am
pleased, when I am listening to them, from the cast of their little
sharp eye down on me.” But he liked birds better in the spring, when
they were singing, than in the autumn, when they were eating up his
fruit. Even in the spring he writes to my father, 29 April 1849:--“I
certainly do like to hear them sing, but it is vexing to lose all the
fruit.... I loaded my gun; but, when I came out, one of them struck up
such a merry note that I could not do it--so I suppose the fruit must be
sacrificed to my cowardice, humanity, or what you may call it.” The
crops were sacrificed as well. He writes, 21 June 1846:--“There are two
nests of wood-pigeons here, and they daily visit me. I have taken the
gun twice to shoot them, but my heart failed me.”
He welcomed the prospect of a rookery here, and wrote to my father, 23
March 1861:--“We have one rooks’-nest in a tall elm in the village, a
pleasant look-out from this window to see how busy they are in building.
If this saves itself, there will be more next year.” And on 23 February
1862:--“Rooks plentiful here about the trees, but not building yet.” And
then on 2 December 1863:--“Six large elms blown up in the village to-day
quite across the path, those that the rooks built on, six in a row; so
no rooks’-nests in future.” This row of elms was at the west end of the
Hall House garden. He says they were blown up; and that is the usual
phrase here. Trees are not blown down, nor are rocks blown up. They
say:--“Us put in charges, and bursted ’n abroad.”
Although he noted the barometer in that record every day, he knew by
experience that there were safer guides. And he writes to my father, 28
March 1847:--“Yet at Moreton, if the sign-board of the Punch Bowl
creaked upon its hinges, and the smoke blew down at Treleaven’s corner,
rain was sure to follow, let the quicksilver be high or low.”
I find little need of a barometer here. If the wind blows down the
valley, the weather is going to be fine. If it blows up the valley,
there is going to be wet. And there is going to be a spell of wet, if
there is damp upon the hearthstones in the Inner Parlour. When I hear
*****’s leg be achin’ dreadful, then I know it will be rainin’ streams.
Sometimes, to make quite sure, I inquire of people who are weather-wise.
After surveying every quarter of the sky, an old man told me:--“No, I
don’t think it _will_ rain, aless it _do_ rain.” I interpreted the
oracle as meaning that there would be heavy rain or none. Another wise
one told me that, “when the weather do change, it do generally change
upon a Friday.”
The moon was usually held responsible for these changes in the weather,
and sometimes for less likely things as well. My grandfather writes to
my father, 13 April 1856:--“A Saturday moon, they say, is too late or
too soon, and there is no other prospect but a wet moon throughout.” On
29 June 1848:--“The old women here say we may expect to see measles in
the growing of the moon: they tell me they never knew a case on the
waning of the moon.” Measles were prevalent just then, and the moon was
new next day; and on 23 July he remarks that the old women had proved
right, so far.
My grandfather had a notion that all ordinary ailments could be cured by
Quiet and Diet, and possibly such homely remedies as Coltsfoot Tea, or,
better still, “a glass of real Cognac--the sovereign remedy, but not to
be obtained down here,” as he writes to my father, 19 July 1869. But, if
he did not recognize an ailment, he got medical advice at once.
A visitor being taken ill here, the local doctor was called in; and my
grandfather writes to my father, 25 July 1847:--“He said it was
occasioned by her imprudently sleeping with her window open one hot
night.... I hope you do not admit the night air into your room, however
hot--a most injurious practice, I am told. I never did it.” My
grandmother writes to him, 15 May 1850:--“I fear you trifle with
yourself in some things, such as dressing mornings with your bed-room
window open. Nothing can be more injurious than that, particularly this
very cold weather--indeed, it is wrong at any season to open it before
you are dressed.”
These opinions are supported by Buchan’s _Domestic Medicine_,
ed. 1788, which was one of the books in use here. It says, page
148:--“Inflammatory fevers and consumptions have often been occasioned
by sitting or standing thinly cloathed near an open window. Nor is
sleeping with open windows less to be dreaded.”
But these old people faced the air outside quite early in the mornings.
My grandfather writes, 29 April 1849:--“I often wonder how anyone can
lie in bed in May, not witnessing the beauty of the crystalled
May-dew.... The barley throws up its blade or leaf about three inches
high, quite erect, and on its tip top is this little spangled dew-drop.
The leaf else is perfectly dry, if real dew--if from frost, the leaf is
wet.” Again, on 7 January 1856:--“This morning the wheat was looking
beautiful, like the barley in May. I stayed some time admiring it, with
its little spangled tops shining like crystals.”
* * * * *
A child was born here on 20 November 1902, and had a rupture. Some while
afterwards I asked the father how the child was getting on, and the
answer was--“Oh, it be a sight better since us put’n through a tree.”
And I found that they had carried out the ancient rite. The father had
split an ash-tree on the hill behind this house, and had wedged the hole
open with two chunks of oak. Then he and his wife took the child up
there at day-break; and, as the sun rose, they passed it three times
through the tree, from east to west. The mother then took the child
home, and the father pulled out the chunks of oak, and bandaged up the
tree. As the tree-trunk healed, so would the rupture heal also.
I asked him why he did it, and he seemed surprised at the question, and
said--“Why, all folk do it.” I then asked him whether he thought it
really did much good, and the reply was--“Well, as much good as sloppin’
water over’n in church.”
Some years ago there was an ash-tree growing in the hedge of a field of
mine at Moreton. The field was let as allotments; and the tree was a
nuisance to the man who had the allotment next it, as its roots spread
out along his ground. He asked me several times to have the tree cut
down; but I liked the look of the tree, and was unwilling to lose it.
And then there came a thunder-storm, and the tree was struck by
lightning and destroyed. I thought it strange, but he explained it
simply:--“I’d prayed ag’in’ that tree.”
He was a very old man; and people of his generation never looked upon
your actions as your own, but as the actions of a Power that directed
you. I am pretty sure he said that the Lord had hardened my heart about
that tree, though I did not actually hear him say it. In a case where I
was able to do a kindness, I got no thanks till some months after; and
then I got them in this form:--“I’ve a-said it to othern, and I don’t
know as I mind a-sayin’ it to you--I do believe as you were sent for
some good purpose.” In another case I heard indirectly how the thanks
were given:--“I were a-sittin’ there, a-wonderin’ whatever I should do,
when I lifted up my eyes, and there were Mr Torr like an Angel o’ God
a-comin’ down the path.” I was all the more flattered by the comparison,
as one of my neighbours had lately been mistaken for the Devil.
My father notes in his diary, 7 April 1844:--“Witch-craft a common
belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the
better-informed classes.” My grandfather writes to him, 21 December
1851:--“I am very curious to know the origin of the Horse Shoe, having
had to walk over and under so many in my time. I believe they have
generally disappeared now, but thirty or forty years ago you could
scarcely go into a house without seeing one nailed over or under the
durns [frame] of the door. They said it was to prevent the Witches
coming in. You have heard me relate the story of the broom that I took
up, when a little boy, in a passage down in the village. It was laid for
a Witch, and I was put down for one, as having taken it up. I was told
no one but a Witch would think of taking it up: so it appears everyone
stepped over it, for fear of being counted a Witch. I believe this has
all passed away.”
He had great skill in bandaging the cuts and wounds that are inevitable
in agricultural work; and he always said some words, while he was doing
this. I do not know if these were magic Words of Power, or only little
objurations at the wincing of the sufferers. But he always saw that
wounds were washed out thoroughly with water and with brandy; and that
was perhaps the cause of his success.
He writes to my father, 12 April 1842:--“Since you left, one of our cows
got very lame, and I discovered she had a shoe-nail in her foot, and I
went with the men about taking it out, when Farmer ***** of ***** came
by, and did it for us. He missed the nail in the straw, and could not
find it, which he appeared very anxious to do. I said it was of no
consequence, the straw should be removed, and I would take care that it
should not get there again. He looked up with such astonishment at my
ignorance, and said he was surprised I did not know no better, for the
cow’s foot would surely rot, if the nail was not found and stuck into
some bacon. However, I said I would run all risks, and desired him to
make his mind easy: so I threw in some brandy, and the remainder I gave
him to drink for his trouble. He went away still saying it would be sure
to rot. She was lame for two days, but now is quite well, bacon or no
bacon.”
* * * * *
Staying at Poitiers, 13 August 1861, my father writes:--“Then went to
the church of S. Radegonde, to whose coffin pilgrims are now (in this
month of August) repairing to get healed of their diseases by touching
the coffin; and numbers of children, lame and diseased, were brought to
touch it, while we were there. The streets leading to the church are
lined with stalls for sale of votive offerings to hang on the coffin. In
a side chapel is a large figure of Christ appearing to S. Radegonde over
a stone on which there is a print-mark like a foot, declared to be
Christ’s footprint in the apparition.”
All this has passed from Poitiers to Lourdes, the apparition being
modernized by putting the Madonna for the Christ and a peasant for a
queen, and altering the date from the Sixth Century to 11 February 1858.
My father and mother stayed a night at Lourdes, 27 August 1861; but
their diaries say nothing of Bernadette or any cures or miracles there.
My father just notes “walking out by the small rocky hill”; and that, I
presume, was the hill where one sees processions of pilgrims now.
I went to Lourdes, 11 September 1894, and it profited me £1. 14_s._
7_d._ or thereabouts. I was going to Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, and found
that the fare to Lourdes was lower than the fare to Pau, though Lourdes
was further off from Paris, and further on towards Gavarnie. Zola’s
_Lourdes_ had come out in the spring; and I took it with me, and read it
in the train, holding it well up at the window. It acted as a
scare-crow, and gave me a compartment to myself. On reaching Lourdes, I
bought the antidote that was on sale there--_Réponse complète au Lourdes
de M. Zola_. But the antidote seemed hardly powerful enough to
counteract the poison.
There were pilgrims there in thousands, not nearly so much in earnest as
pilgrims I have seen in Palestine, but much more so than some I
encountered at Ancona going to Loreto, 20 August 1898. They were certain
of absolution there, and meant to make it cover a multitude of sins.
In the Papal Registers--Avignon, 1 August 1346--there is an entry of an
absolution to Thomas de Courtenay and his wife, to take effect at death,
and therefore covering all sins committed meanwhile. They were the
owners of this place--Wreyland--and probably were scared by the Black
Death. The disease was spreading westward, and its victims died too
suddenly for the priests to shrive them.
In the Middle Ages it was the fashion to bring earth home from the Holy
Land for burial, and there is still a fashion for bringing Jordan water
home for baptism. I was down by the Jordan with my mother and a friend
of mine, 21 March 1882, and she insisted on bringing some water home. So
we filled up some empty soda-water bottles from this uninviting stream.
(The rivers of Damascus _are_ better: there is no doubt about it.) A
year or two afterwards there was a birth in some friend’s family, and
she sent a bottle for the baptism. But the child was not baptized in
Jordan water after all. When the water was uncorked, it sent forth such
an overpowering smell, that it had to be poured down the sink at once.
I was on the French mail-steamer _Tage_ at anchor in the Dardanelles, a
little way below the Narrows, on Friday 30 April 1880. There were many
Mohammedans on board; and, when prayer-time came, they unrolled their
prayer-rugs, and laid them out on deck, pointing them to Mecca. Just as
they began to pray, the current caught the ship, and she began to swing;
and, as soon as they looked up, they saw that they had got their
bearings wrong. So they slewed round, and put their rugs straight; and
then, of course, the same thing happened again. And it went on happening
till they had finished their prayers.
They had a procession at Thebes in Bœotia, when I was there, 11 April
1888. They were badly in want of rain, and reckoned on getting some, if
they marched solemnly round the place in honour of Elijah. They were of
the Greek Church, and had greater faith in him than in the saints of
later times.
There is a pleasant procession in Rome on Christmas morning, the True
Cradle being carried round S. Maria Maggiore. I saw that done in 1909,
and somehow in the clouds of incense I saw the cradle of Romulus and
Remus carried in procession through the Forum.
The high-altar at St Peter’s is scrubbed on Maundy Thursday; and, as I
was in Rome, 14 April 1892, I went to see it done. This rite comes after
Miserere, and therefore in the twilight. St Peter’s is not lighted up,
and looks the vast size that it really is, as one cannot see the details
that impair it. The dignitaries of the church come down in procession,
each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon
the altar, and then begin to scrub. I was close by, and noticed how
differently they all did it. Some evidently thought it symbolical, and
merely waved their mops across the altar, hardly touching it. And others
would scrub hard, and then put their heads down and look carefully
through their spectacles to see what they had done, and then go on
scrubbing again till they were satisfied that they had done their bit.
I was in Rome with my father and my mother in 1876, and Monsignor Stonor
arranged that we should be presented to the Pope. There were about a
hundred other people to be presented, 22 September, and we were all
ranged in groups round one of the big rooms in the Vatican. And then the
Pope came in, and went leisurely round the room, saying a few words to
each of us. Stonor told him that I had just left Harrow, and was going
up to Cambridge: whereupon he beamed, and said he hoped that I should be
a good historian. It was an odd remark, for nothing had been said of
history, and that was not my line. But some years afterwards I took to
writing books on history.
Pius IX was then in his eighty-fifth year, and was altogether a most
pleasant person to behold--tall, big and genial, with nothing
ecclesiastical about him but his dress. He had a judge’s face, rather
than a bishop’s.
* * * * *
The next time I was here, I was talking to Mrs *****--she was of an
earlier generation than the Mrs ***** of whom I spoke just now--and I
told her that I had been to Rome and seen the Pope. She asked me
eagerly, “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper
tiger to fight.” As a thoroughgoing Protestant, she knew no difference
between the Devil and the Pope.
Her husband always felt that a great chance had been missed, when the
Devil came into Widdicombe church on Sunday 21 October 1638. My
grandfather pressed him as to what he would have done; and his reply
was, “Dock’n, maister, dock’n--cut the tail of’n off.” I imagine that
the Devil’s tail at Widdicombe would have drawn more pilgrims than all
the relics of the saints at other places.
I have been told that an ancestor of mine, then living at Torr in the
parish of Widdicombe, was one of the people present in the church, when
the Devil came in; but I have no documentary proof. In the old rhymed
narrative, inscribed upon a tablet in the church, there is no mention of
the Devil, but only a broad hint:--“a crack of thunder suddenly, with
lightning, hail and fire ... a sulphureous smell ... or _other force,
whate’er it was_, which at that time befell.”
Once, for about five minutes, I had the strongest possible belief in the
personality of the Devil, or rather of his ancestor Great Pan, for I
felt the Panic Terror. I was coming down along the side of Yarner Wood
in bracken nearly as high as my head. It was beginning to get dark, and
I was just thinking I should be very late for dinner; when suddenly I
remembered the story of the Devil taking refuge in that wood, and I felt
dead certain he was there. I stepped out very briskly till I reached the
road.
Strange apparitions may be seen on Dartmoor on a misty day: especially
if you have lost your bearings, and come unexpectedly on one of the
great groups of rocks with this vapour drifting in and out between them.
It is like “seeing faces in the fire,” but on a scale that seems
stupendous in the mist.
There is said to be a goblin about a quarter of a mile from here. He
sits on Bishop’s Stone--so called because it bears the coat-of-arms of
bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369 A.D. I have never seen the
goblin; but I have good evidence that men have been scared by something
there at night, and that horses have refused to pass there in the day. I
fancy they hear the murmur of water running underground.
They tell this story of a place near here:--The master of the house was
dead and buried, yet came home every night, and tramped about. As the
family felt this was a parson’s job, the parson came one night, and
threw a handful of churchyard mould in the face of his deceased
parishioner, who thereupon became a black pony. (In these stories the
churchyard mould always turns the ghost into a black creature of some
sort, but not always as nice a creature as a Dartmoor pony.) They got a
halter, and told a boy to run the pony down the side of the valley as
hard as ever he could, and jump it across the Wrey. He did as he was
told; but, when he jumped, he found he had the halter only, and no
pony.--Ghosts cannot cross water; and this ghost of a pony was run down
the hill at such a pace that it could not stop itself. It had to attempt
the crossing of the water, and vanished in the attempt.
The story used always to be told of Thorn Park, a house that is marked
on Donn’s map of Devon in 1765, but has long since been pulled down. Of
late years I have heard it told of East Wrey, which is a little further
up the Wrey valley, and on the other side of the Moreton road. On
venturing to question this, I have been answered rather tartly that it
must have been at East Wrey, as it was in that part of the valley, and
there is no other house up there. Thorn Park has been forgotten.
Stories often shift about from place to place in this way. Only a few
weeks ago a friend of mine told me a story of Hampton Court and Queen
Victoria, which was told him by a man who certainly had means of finding
out if it was true. According to Bismarck, _Reflections and
Reminiscences_, vol. i, pages 246, 247, substantially the same story was
told at Petersburg in 1859 about the Summer Garden and the Empress
Catherine. I fancy I have seen it also in one of the Byzantine
historians--I am not sure which--about Blachernæ and an Empress who
lived many centuries before Catherine.
* * * * *
After the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt many of the royal tombs were
pillaged, and the priests removed the royal mummies to safer places in
the hills near Thebes. The places have now been discovered, and the
mummies have been removed to the museum at Cairo. Maspero was
supervising one of these removals, with a gang of natives to do the
work. The mummies were brought out one by one, and laid down in the
shade below a ledge of rock. In the heat of the day the natives rested,
and he went on working at his notes. Suddenly he heard a fearful shriek;
and, looking up, saw one of the natives pointing at a mummy--the mummy
was slowly raising itself with the gesture that Orientals use in
uttering a solemn curse. All the natives fled, and he was left alone to
face the mummies; but he soon saw what was happening. This mummy was no
longer in the shade, as the sun was coming round the ledge of rock; and
the heat was causing a contraction of some glutinous substance in the
mummy, and thus producing this movement.--He told me this himself at his
house in Paris on 25 March 1896.
I also heard in Paris a story of Colonel Picquart, the amateur detective
in the Dreyfus case. I heard it from a man who knew him well.--Picquart
took nothing on trust: always looked into everything himself. As there
was some talk in Paris of spirit-rapping, table-turning, and such
things, he went to a séance to see what he could make of it. He
suspected some trickery about a hat that they were using, and made them
use his own. “And they not only caused my hat to rotate upon the table,
but they imparted to it such an impetus of rotation, that it continued
to rotate upon my head all the while that I was walking home.”
An old Oxford don once went with me from Athens to Sunium, 2 April 1888,
and others laughed irreverently at some notes he made there:--“view from
temple: saw several islands: had lunch: saw more islands.” It was also
after lunch that a painter, whom I knew, mistook an only child for
twins. But at Sunium it was not the luncheon--only the lifting of a haze
upon the sea.
Though I have been in places, such as Chios and Messina, where there
were earthquakes a little while before or after, I have never felt an
earthquake in any place but London, 22 April 1884. It was in the
morning, and I was going to take a coat down from a rack on which four
coats were hanging, when I saw them swing like pendulums, and heard a
bell ring. I knew what it was; but, when I asked other people if they
had felt the earthquake, they were so impolitely incredulous that I felt
embarrassed. I did not recover my character until the afternoon, when
the papers issued their sensational posters.
* * * * *
On first seeing this house, a friend of mine began to think there might
be ghosts about; but he changed his mind, on looking at some portraits
that are hanging here. People of that type would never turn into ghosts
that went wandering round a house at midnight: _their_ ghosts would all
be sitting round the fire drinking punch. These ghosts might tell me
many things that I should like to know; and I hope that, if I meet them
here, I shall have the presence of mind of Dante, when he met Adam and
forthwith asked him for an ‘interview’ upon primæval language and other
forgotten things, _Paradiso_, xxvi. 94-96.
Another friend was puzzled about the Inner Parlour the first time that
he came here: he had seen something like it once before, but could not
remember where. He told me afterwards that he had thought of it. It was
in a Pantomime, and it was called The Kitchen In The Ogre’s Home.
Strangers come here now and then, and ask if they may see the garden and
the house. One day some Americans came, and were much taken with it all.
One of them said to another:--“I should like to pho-to-graph that
house.” But the other answered:--“No. That house ought not to be
pho-to-graphed. It ought to be paint-ted in oi-il.”
Two of the sitting-rooms here are called the Tallet and the Shippen.
Both names are common in this district; but one of them is Latin, and
the other one is Saxon. Tallet is merely a corruption of _tabulatum_,
which means an upper floor. Shippen comes from _scipen_, like Ship from
_scip_, and means some sort of shed.
The names Beer and Brewer are also common here, both for persons and for
places. Beer means a grove of trees, _bearu_ in Saxon. And that is why
so many orchards have that name. Brewer means heather, _brueria_ in late
Latin, _bruyère_ in modern French. Teign Brewer, not far from here,
belonged to Geoffrey de la Bruere; and then a part of it came to his
son-in-law, Thomas le Gras, and was named Teign Grace. This fat (_gras_)
Thomas was contemporary with the gallant (_preux_) William--William le
Pruz, or Prowse--whose effigy rests in the transept of the church at
Lustleigh.
Teigncombe, further up the Teign, has given its name to a family that
came from there. Their name is written as Tinckcom on the court-roll of
Wreyland manor; and I believe that one branch of the family now bears
the name of Tinker. The family of Pipard gave its name to Piparden,
which now is Pepper Down; and Genesis Down owes its name to the Genista,
the broom plant of the Plantagenets.
From a point on Reddiford Down there is a grand view over hill and dale;
but in all that wide expanse of country there are
[Illustration: IN THE INNER PARLOUR (_p. 16_)]
only four dwellings to be seen, and those four dwellings are mentioned
in Domesday. In the clumsy Norman spelling Woolley is Vluelei,
Pullabrook is Polebroch, Hawkmoor is Hauocmore, and Elsford is
Eilauesford. In the Exeter version there are some details that are not
in the Exchequer version. These were the dwellings of four thanes, and
the thanes were there in the reign of Edward the Confessor.
In many of the parishes between Dartmoor and the sea the village and the
church are in a corner of the parish, and generally the corner nearest
to the sea. This happens so often, that there must have been a reason
for it, though there is no knowing what the reason was. The same thing
happened with many of the provinces of ancient Rome. Thus, Lugudunensis
extended to the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, but Lugudunum
itself, the modern Lyons, was in the corner nearest to the Mediterranean
and to Rome. So also Tarraco, the modern Tarragona, was on the
Mediterranean coast, but Tarraconensis stretched back to the Bay of
Biscay.
Lustleigh church is within seventy yards of the Wrey, which is the
parish boundary there. This house is in Bovey Tracey parish, and yet is
less than a quarter of a mile from Lustleigh church, and more than two
miles and a half from Bovey Tracey church, measuring in a straight line.
* * * * *
Besides the old church at Bovey Tracey, there is a new church about as
far from here. This church now has a district of its own, but formerly
was served by the Vicar and his curates. At the old church the service
was very plain indeed, and he preached in a black gown; but at the new
church it was ornate, and he preached in other things. And people said
he preached rank Popery there, though he preached sound doctrine at the
old church. I have some reason to believe that the sermons he preached
at the new church were the same that he had preached at the old church
in the previous year. The black gown covered the Popery, if there was
any there.
Writing to my father on 7 November 1852, my grandfather tells him:--“The
Lustleigh folks had a bonfire on the 5th, and burnt the Pope in a white
surplice: therefore the old women say it was intended for the Rector.”
He writes on 15 May 1853:--“Your mother has been to church this morning,
and says there were not a score of folks there, and the Rector was
looking wretched: which I do not wonder at. His congregation have left
him, and now there is a chapel building.”
Lustleigh was upset by his preaching in his surplice. Most of his
parishioners thought it meant a change of doctrine; and they called him
a High Romish Priest. I do not know his motives; but I know the motives
of another country clergyman, who did the same. His old black gown was
getting so shabby that his wife was always telling him that he must have
a new one. And he shelved the question by preaching in his surplice.
As a rule, a surplice meant a shorter sermon; but my friend preached on,
as if he had a new black gown. A dreamy organist once played a great
Amen in a slight pause in the sermon; and the choir and congregation
sang it very fervently.
That church was restored a few years since; and the Squire took the
plate round at the opening service afterwards. But he forgot that the
chancel had been raised a step above the nave; and he just tripped
enough to shoot the whole collection off the plate. The coins went
rolling along the chancel floor, and mostly vanished down the gratings
over the hot-water pipes--an inauspicious sight: the ancients made their
peace with the Infernal Deities by casting offerings into chasms.
Even at Lustleigh there were mishaps in church; and my grandfather used
to note them in his letters to my father. Thus, on Sunday 18 August
1844, “a magpie walked into the church and sat himself on the communion
table, to the great annoyance of the congregation; and the sexton had
much difficulty in driving him.” Then, on Sunday 15 December 1844, “one
of the candles fell from the pulpit into the seat below.” And so on.
Once, within my recollection, there was a sermon by a stranger, who
enhanced his eloquence by gesture; and with one wide sweep of his arms
he brought down candles, glasses, cushion, and everything. The cushion
caught the clerk upon the head, just as he was getting to sleep; and I
have been told that what he said was just Amen, and nothing more.
I see that I first went to Lustleigh Church on the Good Friday and
Easter Sunday of 1862, while I was down here on a visit to my
grandfather. In those days the service was mainly a dialogue between the
parson and the clerk, the parson in very cultured tones and the clerk in
resonant dialect, one saying ‘As for lies, I hate and abhor them’ as if
it was superfluous for him to say so, and the other responding ‘Seven
times a day do I praise thee’ as if it was a fact and he wished it
generally known. The singing was confined to hymns. There was a choir of
men and boys in a gallery below the tower, and a harmonium near them.
But there used to be a choir of men and women, and an orchestra of
bass-viol, violin and flute; and the tuning made a pleasant prelude to
the service. There were three men who could play the viol; and it went
by rank, not merit. One man farmed his own land, and he had first claim:
next came a man who was a tenant farmer; and last a man who had no farm,
but played better than the other two.
There were high pews then, and a razed three-decker--parson over clerk,
with sounding-board on top, and reading-desk alongside half way up.
Nearly all the windows had plain glass, so that one could see the trees
and sky; and everything was whitewashed.
The whitewash was removed in 1871, and made way for much worse
things--green distemper on the walls, blue paint and gilt stars on the
roof, crude stencils on the side walls of the chancel, and on the
eastern wall a fresco made in Germany. The trees and sky are hidden by
glass that is exasperating in its colour and design. Lavatory tiles
replace the granite paving of the chancel, and there is marble of the
sort one sees on washstands.--It makes one crave for the French system
of scheduling old churches as National Monuments, and putting them under
the Ministry of Fine Arts.
All the old stained glass has gone, except some bits of four small
figures--the Virgin and Child, and saints Nicholas, Catherine and
Martha--and in 1880 these figures were made up, and put into a window.
Some say that the old glass was destroyed by the Reformers, others by
the Puritans; but such things were done by most unlikely people. There
was a window in St Edmond’s church at Salisbury; and the Recorder of
Salisbury “was placed in the church in such a seat as that the said
window was always in his eye.” Its absurdity annoyed him--it made God “a
little old man in a blue and red coat”--and one afternoon in October
1630 he got up and smashed it with his staff. He was fined: _State
Trials_, vol. i, pp. 377 ff., ed. 1730.
Tristram Risdon visited Lustleigh church about three hundred years ago,
and in his _Survey of Devon_ he says, “Another tomb there is arched
over, where some say the lord Dynham and his lady were interred, whose
pictures are to be seen very glorious in a glass window, having their
armories between them, and likewise on their surcoats escutcheons of
arms.” This probably was like the window at Beer Ferrers--Lysons,
_Devonshire_, plate 6--with pictures of William de Ferrers and his wife
with their armorial bearings. William was contemporary with Robert de
Dynham; and probably it was Robert and his wife, not lord Dynham and his
lady, who were portrayed in the stained glass that has perished and in
the stone effigies that survive.
There was an Inquiry here on 22 December 1276, and William de Torr was
on the jury. And the verdict was that Robert’s wife would be entitled to
Lustleigh manor when she came of age, and meanwhile he was renting it
for £10 a year, to be spent in praying for the soul of John de
Mandevill. The wife, Emma de Wydeworth, had just been married at the age
of ten: her father and mother were dead, and the mother had been a
lunatic. In her effigy she looks as if she might have been a lunatic
herself.
She inherited the manor from her father, and he inherited it from
William de Wydeworth, an energetic man who kept a gallows of his own at
Lustleigh. He had no warrant for a gallows, but gallows were wanted in
the reign of Henry III. As the King could not enforce the law, lords of
manors had to do the necessary thing.
There was some lawlessness in Lustleigh even after Edward I. John de
Moeles, the owner of Wreyland, had a brother Roger, born in 1296 and
married in 1316 to Alice le Pruz, who was ten years older than himself.
And on 26 July 1317 the King issued a commission:--On complaint by Roger
de Moeles it appears that John Daumarle and certain other malefactors
and perturbers of the peace have seized Alice, the wife of this same
Roger, by force of arms at Lustleigh, and have carried her off together
with goods and chattels and certain charters and muniments of his, etc.
etc.
Roger was a ward of the King, and the King thus had the right of
choosing a wife for him, while he was under age; but the King sold the
right to William Inge, who kept what we should call a Matrimonial
Agency. Roger chose Alice--or perhaps it was Alice chose Roger--without
Inge’s intervention, and Inge got his money back: at any rate, he got
orders on the Exchequer, 20 July and 13 December 1316, to refund the
money or take it off the price of the next match that he bought. He
could not have claimed anything, if he had merely failed to sell what he
had bought; so he declared that Roger died before a marriage could be
arranged. That was palpably a lie, but such lies might serve. There was
a case in Norfolk a few years after this, Folsham v. Houel. The jury
gave a verdict for the plaintiff, and then the defendant got a Writ of
Attaint against the jurors for giving such a verdict. The plaintiff and
his friends entered into a conspiracy to declare that he was dead, as
his death would put an end to the proceedings. They announced the death,
and had a grand funeral with an empty coffin, and even had masses for
his soul. Then the coroner came down, and they put a body in the coffin,
and made him believe it was the plaintiff’s; and the Writ was quashed on
his report. But on 12 June 1347 the King issued a commission for
arresting all the people concerned in the affair, and keeping them in
prison until further orders.
Roger’s wife was the daughter of William le Pruz. He died at Holbeton in
1316, and was buried in the church there, instead of Lustleigh church,
as directed in his will; and she got a licence from bishop Grandisson,
19 October 1329, to bring her father’s body here. That procession here
from Holbeton would make a striking scene, should there ever be a
Lustleigh pageant.
Risdon says, “In an aisle of this church is a tomb, with the statue of a
knight cut thereon cross-legged in stone, on whose shield are three
lions; as also in that window under which he is interred, are three
lions between six cross croslets, by which I conceive it was one of the
family of the Prouze.” There is nothing to be seen upon the shield now;
and the window has an Ascension in stained glass suggesting that, if
hell is paved with good intentions, the floor of heaven is covered with
linoleum.
There are only three old coats of arms remaining, and these were not
there in Risdon’s time. They are Carew, Kirkham and Southcote, and
probably date from 1589. Thomas Southcote married the daughter and
heiress of Thomas Kirkham, who married the daughter and heiress of
William Carew; and, as William’s grandmother was a sister and co-heiress
of lord Dynham, they are not inappropriate in a window near the Dynham
effigies. I put them there in 1903. Till then they were at Barnehouse,
otherwise Barne Court or Barne, a place that Thomas Southcote got by
marrying Grace Barnehouse, his first wife. In talking of the house, a
man remarked to me, “That be a proper ancient place--there be rampin’
lions in the kitchen window.” I went up to see, and found they were the
lions rampant of the Kirkhams, but had then been put into a cupboard for
security. The owner let me have them for the church.
* * * * *
When I was young, the church bells said Crock, Kettle and Pan. My
grandfather told me that this was what they said; and he writes to my
father on 10 June 1849:--“When I was a little boy, they told me the
Lustleigh bells said Crock, Kettle and Pan.” There are more bells now,
and they say something else--all swear-words, I believe.
He writes him on 26 May 1850:--“The farmers set the church bells
ringing, when *****’s man left on Friday.” The man had made himself
obnoxious, and they were thankful to be rid of him. Church bells were
not very ecclesiastical in those days. My father told me that they rang
at every church in Exeter, when Latimer was acquitted, 27 March 1848.