(Vol. iii., pp. 152. 310.)
I observe, in p. 310. of the present volume, that two correspondents, P.
and K., have contributed conjectures as to the meaning and origin of the
term _venville_, noticed and explained _ante_, p. 152. The _origin_ of the
word is of course to some extent open to conjecture; but they may rest
assured that the _meaning_ of it is not, nor ever has been, within the
domain of mere conjecture with those who have had any opportunities of
inquiry in the proper quarter. The term has not the slightest reference to
the ceremony of delivering possession, which P. has evidently witnessed in
the case of his father, and which lawyers call livery of seisin; nor is
there on Dartmoor any such word as _ven_ signifying peat, or as _fail_,
signifying turf. No doubt a fen on the moor would probably contain "black
earth or peat," like most other mountain bogs; and if (as K. says) _fail_
means a "turf or flat clod" in Scotland, I think it probable that a
Scotchman on Dartmoor might now and then so far forget himself as to call
peat or turf by a name which would certainly not be understood by an
aboriginal Devonian. The local name of the peat or other turf cut for fuel
is _vaggs_, and this has perhaps been confounded in the recollection of
K.'s informant with _ven_. At all events, I can assure both P. and K. (who,
I presume, are not familiar with the district) that the tenants of venville
lands have no functions to perform, as such, in any degree connected with
either turf-cutting, or "fenging fields," and that they do not necessarily,
or generally, occupy peat districts, or rejoice in
"All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats," &c.;
but, on the contrary, they are the owners of some of the most valuable,
salubrious, and picturesque purlieus of the forest. With regard to the name
"fengfield," although I am pretty familiar with the records of the forest
extant for the last five hundred years past, I do not remember that it is
ever so named or spelt in the muniments of the manor or forest. It is so
written by Risdon, and in some few other documents entitled to little
weight, and from which no safe inference can be drawn. Whatever be the
etymological origin of the term, it should be assumed as indisputable by
any one who may hereafter exercise his ingenuity or his fancy upon it, that
the four most prominent {356} incidents to the tenure are--1. payment of
fines; 2. situation in an ancient vill; 3. attendance on the lord's court;
4. enjoyment of certain rights of common. It may be that neither the _fine_
nor the _vill_ forms a component part of the name; but K. need have no
scruple in believing that an abbreviated Latin or "legal term" (invented,
of course, by the stewards or bailiffs of the lord) may have become
naturalised among those of the inhabitants of the Moor whom it concerns.
The tenants or retainers of a manor have no alternative but to submit to
any generic name by which the steward may please to distinguish them. Thus
the "priors" and "censors" of Dartmoor forest are content to be called by
those names, because they were designated as "prehurdarii" and "censarii"
in the court rolls some hundred years ago. The tenants of a certain
lordship in Cornwall know and convey their tenements by the name of
_landams_ to this day, merely because the stewards two hundred years ago,
when the court rolls were in Latin, well knowing that _landa_ was the Latin
for _land_, and that transitive verbs in that language require an
accusative case, recorded each tenant as having taken of the lord "unam
landam, vocatam Tregollup," &c. Indeed so easily does a clipt exotic take
root and become acclimated among the peasantry of the Moor, whose powers of
appropriation are so much disparaged by the sceptical doubts of K., that
since the establishment of local courts the terms _fifa_ and _casa_ have
become familiar to them as household words and the name and uses of that
article of abbreviated Latinity called a '_bus_ are, as I am credibly
informed, not unknown to them.