Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Lee Bay]
LYNTON AND LYNMOUTH
A PAGEANT OF CLIFF & MOORLAND
BY
JOHN PRESLAND
ILLUSTRATED BY
F. J. WIDGERY
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
MCMXVII
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. DEVONSHIRE
II. SOME LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
III. BARNSTAPLE
IV. LYNTON
V. LYNTON (_continued_), COUNTISBERRY, AND NORTHWARD
VI. PORLOCK AND EXMOOR
VII. IN SOMERSET
VIII. LUNDY
IX. THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF TRADITION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LEE BAY . . . . . . . . . . . . _frontispiece_
BOSSINGTON HILL
DUNKERY BEACON
THE DOONE VALLEY
WOODY BAY AND DUTY POINT, WEST LYNTON
THE SHEPHERD'S COTTAGE: DOONE VALLEY
LYNMOUTH BAY AND FORELAND
THE VALLEY OF ROCKS
HEDDON'S MOUTH, NEAR LYNTON
CASTLE ROCK, LYNTON
DUTY POINT
THE MOORS NEAR BRENDON TWO GATES
HARVEST MOON, EXMOOR
THE DOONE VALLEY IN WINTER
LYNTON: THE DEVIL'S CHEESERING
DUNKERY BEACON FROM HORNER WOODS
LYNTON AND LYNMOUTH
CHAPTER I
DEVONSHIRE
The original Celtic name for Devonshire, the name used by the Britons
whom Caesar found here when he landed, was probably "Dyfnaint," for a
Latinized form of it, "Dumnonia" or "Damnonia," was used by Diodorus
Siculus when writing of the province of Devon and Cornwall in the third
century A.D. So that the name by which the men of Devon call their
country is the name by which those ancient men called it who erected
the stone menhirs on Dartmoor, and built the great earth-camp of
Clovelly Dykes, or the smaller bold stronghold of Countisbury. At
least, conjecturally this is so, and it is pleasant to believe it, for
it links the Devon of our own day, the Devon of rich valleys and windy
moors, the land of streams and orchards, of bleak, magnificent cliff
and rock-guarded bay, of shaded combe and suave, fair villages, in an
unbroken tradition of name and habitation with the men of that silent
and vanished race.
Up and down the length of England, from the Land's End to the
Northumbrian dales, lie the traces of these far-off peoples whose very
names are faint guesses preserved only in the traditions of local
speech. Strangely and suddenly we come upon the evidence of their life
and death: here a circle of stones on a barren moor or bleak hilltop,
there a handful of potsherds or a flint arrowhead; sometimes, indeed,
though rarely, the bones of their very bodies, laid aside in
earth-barrows or stone coffins for this unknown length of years. And
there the most unreflective among us feels a sudden awe and wonder at
the momentary vision of the profound antiquity of this land in which we
live, and for a few moments all desires and aims seem futile in face of
this immemorial past.
Only for a few moments, though, and then we step from the "Druid
Circle," or turn away from the barrow, and the current of our everyday
life takes us up once more.
Myself, I agree with Westcote. Westcote is a charming old gentleman of
King James the First's time, who wrote a book called "A View of
Devonshire in 1630." In Chapter I he discusses the ancient name of
Devonshire much as I have done, but because in the seventeenth century
you must have a Latin or a Greek at your elbow to give you
respectability as a writer, he brings forward a formidable array of
authorities--Ptolemaeus, Solinus Pylyhistor, and Diodorus Siculus.
But, having had them make their bow before the reader, he remarks that
all these gentlemen lived "far remoted" from Devonshire, and were
therefore liable to error in the transmission of names; "for, in my
opinion," says he, "those that declare the first names of strange
countries far remoted are as the poor which wear their garments all
bepatched and pieced, whereof the pieces that are added are much more
in quantity of cloth than the garment before, when it was first made."
As an example of this error he instances the name of Peru. "When the
Spaniards had conquered Mexico, and were purposing to proceed farther,
their commander, in his manner, demanded of one of the natives he met
withal what the country was named, who answered, 'Peru,' by which name
it is known unto this day, which in his language was, 'I know not what
you say.'"
Even more fantastic is the etymological origin of Andaluzia, for the
poor countryman of this story, when addressed by the conquering Moor,
merely remarked surlily to his ass, "gee-up Luzia!" or, in his own
tongue, "Ando Luzia!" which was taken by the Moor in remarkable good
faith, and has ever after been the name of that province.
Westcote himself inclines to the origin De (or Di) Avon, "the country
of waters," "diu" being the Celtic for God, and "avon" the word for
river (which it certainly is), and the whole name agreeing with the
character of the country, which is a land of many waters, both great
rivers and small streams. But he goes on to observe tolerantly that
each man may think as he chooses, even to deriving the word Devonshire
from Dane-shire, the shire of the Danes, though it is known to have had
its name before ever the first Dane landed in England, and there seems
to be little likelihood, therefore, but only "a sympathie in letters."
He concludes his discussion by the couplet:
"To no man am I so much thrall
To swear he speaketh truth in all."
And with this tolerant and unpedantic frame of mind I am in hearty
accord.
But if Caesar and the Romans, who for several centuries had a station
at Exeter, their great "camp on the Exe," called the wide province of
Devon and Cornwall "Damnonia," what did the Phoenicians call it when
they traded Cornish tin along the Mediterranean, and even, it is said,
into remote Africa, and ran their galleys into the little bay of Combe
Martin, to lade with the silver and lead which can still be mined
there, and which they may have carried to the old buried palaces of
Knossos, to be fashioned into amulets and trinkets by those Cretans who
built the dancing-floor of Ariadne and the maze of the Minotaur? That
is a question that we cannot answer; all the busy speech of all those
peoples is silent; only the old mine-workings remain, and the sacked
and buried palaces of Crete, and a Phoenician ingot-mould fished up in
Plymouth Harbour, and fitting, so 'tis said, an ingot which has been
found in Central Africa.
With the coming of the Romans comes, as always, a little light, for
they were a shrewd and mighty people, who liked their house set in
order, and tabulated and recorded and organized, and have left traces
of their orderliness on the face of the land, and the speech of the
people, and the laws of the nations in three continents. They subdued
Damnonia, and held it from their armed camp at Exeter, where Roman
coins, pottery, brick, and inscriptions are found abundantly. Perhaps
also they held and transformed several of the great earth-camps for
their own uses, such as the Clovelly Dykes or the escarpments at
Ilfracombe, built by the Britons or some earlier people. But the
Romans do not appear to have settled in Devonshire as they did in East
Anglia and the Midlands; I believe there are few traces of their
dwellings, villas, roads, or baths, beyond Exeter in the West.
When their rule weakened and declined in the fifth century, certainly
Damnonia would be one of the first provinces over which their
jurisdiction waned, because of its inaccessibility, its deep wooded
valleys, the wastes of Exmoor and Dartmoor, and the danger of its
coasts; and we may well suppose that the old Celtic traditions and
customs continued here but little modified by the Roman occupation.
Then at some time in the fifth and sixth centuries the Saxons came, but
they seem to have come to Devonshire more peaceably than in their
fierce raids on the south and east coasts; they came as Christians to
the Christian British, and though they conquered them, they did not
drive them out, nor compel them into mountain fastnesses, as the
earlier Saxon conquerors drove the British into Wales. So that in
Devon, though to a lesser degree than in Cornwall, and still less than
in Wales, there is a larger admixture of original Celtic blood than in
Kent, Sussex, Essex, and the counties of the Saxon heptarchy. But,
according to Westcote--who is, for all his discursiveness, no bad
authority--the Britons and the Saxons came to loggerheads; for the
government being Saxon, and the laws and the language, the poor Britons
could neither hear nor make themselves understood, and so took arms
against the settlers, and were by them driven "beyond the river now
called Taw-meer" (_i.e._, Tamar), and so out of Devon into Cornwall.
This was done by King Athelstan, after he had beaten the Welsh at
Hereford and subdued the Picts and Scots.
From this time forth, says Westcote, the Britons began to be called
"Corn-Welshmen or Cornishmen," and he gives an elaborate etymology of
the name, but adds that he need speak no further of Cornwall, "being
eased of that labour by the industrious labours of the right worthy and
worshipful gentleman Richard Carew, who . . . hath very eloquently
described it."
The Saxons, as we know, led a struggling and turbulent existence for
five or six centuries in contest with the Danes. Probably the full
total of the misery inflicted on this country by the Danish raids can
never be reckoned, but that they crippled and exhausted Saxon England
by their frequency and the great duration of time over which they
extended is apparent by the advance made in civilization in the short
period between the breaking of their power and the coming of the
Normans. Devonshire was not spared by them, and the cliffs of
Teignmouth are said to be blood-red since a great slaughter of the
Danes in 970. Certainly the Saxon Chronicle records contests bloody
and pitiless enough, and tradition lingers still in many places where
history has no record. In Devon, for instance, wherever the
dwarf-elder grows folk say that Danish blood has been spilt, and that a
group of these trees marks the site of an old battlefield; indeed, the
dwarf-elder is still called "Danes-elder" in the West Country.
Between Bideford and Appledore, on this northern coast of Devon, stands
Kenwith Castle--long called Hennaborough or Henry Hill--under whose
walls the great Alfred and his son met the Danes under Hubba, and
defeated them with great slaughter about the year 877. The English
captured the famous standard of the Danes, the Raven, which was
"wrought in needlework by the daughters of Lothbroc," and which had
magical properties--clapping its wings when defeat was at hand. The
remnant of the Danish force, carrying their wounded leader with them,
retreated to their ships, and Hubba died there on the beach, and was
buried by his followers before they fled aboard, under a great rock
called Hubba's Stone, and now in corrupt form Hubblestone, a name which
still clings near the spot, though probably the rock of Hubba is now
swept by the sea. But under this rock he lies, with his weapons and
trophies about him and his crown of gold on his head, until the last
trump shall rouse him.
[Illustration: Bossington Hill from Porlock Hill]
The grave of Hubba lies under the sea, like King Arthur's lost country
of Lyonesse, where the fisher-folk say they can hear the bells ring
from the drowned churches as they sail over them on still summer
mornings; but near Porlock the sea has yielded the strip of land it has
stolen from Bideford, and the Danish long-ships rode what are now the
green fields around Porlock.
That it was so the very name Porlock shows, for Port-locan means an
enclosed place for ships, under which name it is mentioned twice in the
Saxon Chronicle. So the sea has retreated a mile and a half since the
Danish raid of A.D. 918, when they entered the Severn, harried Wales,
and landed at Porlock, only to be beaten back to their ships again by
the Saxons.
Harold, the great English Harold who was slain at the Battle of
Hastings, made a raid from Ireland in 1052. He ran into Porlock with
nine ships, landed and went several miles inland, killing and looting,
and returned in safety. But this filibustering expedition, so greatly
to his discredit, and so unworthy to find a place among all his other
acts, was almost certainly done in anger and dictated by personal
revenge. For Porlock, which was plainly an important harbour and one
of the seats of the Saxon Kings--at least, it is mentioned as having a
"King's house" there--was the property of Algar, the son of Leofric,
Earl of Mercia. But Harold was the son of Godwin, Earl of Kent, and
Kent and Mercia were old and bitter enemies, and it was due to the
intrigues of Mercia that Earl Godwin was banished, and Harold went with
him to Ireland. Then, fourteen years later, William came to an England
weakened by internal strife, and Harold was slain at Hastings and the
Saxon lords dispossessed of their lands and goods, which were given to
the foreigner. Here the Domesday Book, with its plain bare statements,
gives us a grim record of the Conquest. All, or almost all, the Saxon
names of the overlords disappear, and the Norman take their place,
continuing down to our own day. This same Porlock was taken from
Algar, son of Leofric, and given to Baldwin Redvers. Countisbury was
taken from Ailmer, and held by William himself. Lynton was taken from
Ailward Touchstone--it is interesting to find the name of Shakespeare's
fool in Domesday Book--and held by William. Combe Martin (then called
"Comba") was taken from Aluric and held by Jubel. Bideford and
Clovelly were taken from Brihtric and given to Queen Matilda.
There is a curious and romantic story about this Brihtric, son of
Aelfgar. He was one of the most powerful of the Saxon Thanes, and
seems to have owned lands not only in Devon, but in Dorset, Somerset,
and even in Gloucester, though the latter entries in Domesday may refer
to another Brihtric, who was not the son of Aelfgar. When he was a
young man, and before the marriage of Matilda to William of Normandy,
Brihtric was sent by King Edward on a diplomatic mission to the Count
of Flanders, Matilda's father, and there he met Matilda, who fell in
love with him and offered herself in marriage. He refused her, and she
married William; but later, when the cycle of events put her old lover
in the power of her husband, she sued for and obtained the grant of
many of his lands. Brihtric himself was seized at his house at Hanley,
in Worcestershire, on the very day that Wulfstan had hallowed his
chapel, and sent to Winchester, where he died in prison.
This story, which would have made a stirring theme for Sir Walter
Scott, is found in the chronicles of Tewkesbury, in the Anglo-Norman
chronicles, and in Wace, the old rhyming historian of the twelfth
century. Here are a few lines of the old French version:
"Laquele jadsi, quant fu pucele,
Ama un conte dangleterre,
Brictrich Mau le oi nomer
Apres le rois ki fu riche ber;
A lui la pucele enuera messager
Pur sa amour a lui procurer;
Meis Brictrich Maude refusa,
Dune ele m'lt se coruca,
Hastivement mer passa
E a Willam bastard se maria.
which we may put into English so:
"Who formerly, as a maiden,
Loved an English count,
Brihtric Maude heard him named;
And who, save the King, than he was richer?
To him the maiden sent a messenger
To obtain his love;
But Brihtric refused Matilda,
Whereat she waxed very angry,
Hastily passed over the sea
And married William the bastard."
But if this is one of the stories which is preserved to us, with its
fierce love, and its fierce hate, and its unsparing revenge, and all
the human hopes and acts and motives of which it gives but a bare
hint--the pride of Brihtric perhaps, or perhaps his love for another
woman, for an alliance with the Count of Flanders might satisfy an
ambitious man--how many tragic dramas, how many stories of cruelty and
oppression and exile and mourning, lie behind the bare short records of
the Domesday Book? All these sunny towns of North Devon and
Somerset--Lynton, Crinton, Porlock, Countisbury, Paracombe,
Challacombe, and north to Dunster, and south to Barnstaple and
Bideford--all these wooded or wind-swept spots, which look as if they
could have had no history, save of market-days and fairs, had their
individual drama in that fierce annexation.
Sometimes, perhaps, they suffered hardly at all. Their Saxon lord
lived elsewhere; he was slain or banished, and they came imperceptibly
under the Norman rule. But more often, I imagine, particularly on the
smaller estates, the lord dwelt in patriarchal intercourse with his
tenants, with that freedom of speech and right of judgment, which, in
"Ivanhoe," Scott draws in the household and retinue of Cedric; and the
eviction was bitter, and the rule of the new lord oppressive and
hateful.
Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, twenty years after the landing of
William, so that a new generation was already growing up, and the old
scars were beginning to heal. Here is a translation of the entry on
Lynton:
"William has a manor called Lintona, which Ailward Touchstone held on
the day on which King Edward was alive and dead, and with this manor
was added formerly another called Incrintona, which Algar held. These
are held by William for one manor, and they rendered geld for one hide.
. . . Lintona is worth four pounds and Incrintona three pounds. When
William received them Lintona was worth 20 shillings and Incrintona 15.
. . ."
It is interesting to note how all property throughout England had
advanced in value since "the day that King Edward was alive and dead";
in the old English, "on pam timan pe Eadward cing was cucu and
dead"--_i.e._, on the fifth of January 1066--which is a clear
intimation that the firm rule of the Conqueror had increased the
material prosperity of the country in one generation.
After the Conquest there was peace in Devonshire for many years, though
Exeter was besieged by Stephen for three months in 1137, when he and
Matilda, the mother of Henry II, rent England with a war of succession;
but the young Henry came to the throne in 1152, and ruled wisely and
strongly for thirty-five years. Under him Devon prospered, as did all
England, and the cloth-making industry, which in Westcote's time, in
the seventeenth century, was so notable a part of the wealth of Devon,
probably had its first considerable beginnings in this reign.
But Henry II is remembered less for his wise laws and far-sighted
government than for the murder of Thomas à Becket, which clouded his
latter years and brought his enemies--his wife and his son among
them--swarming about his ears. This northern coast of Devon is linked
with that dark crypt in Canterbury where Becket fell in the sacerdotal
robes of High Mass; for it was a Tracy who was one of the four knights
who spurred from London to rid Henry "of this turbulent priest," and
the Tracys owned Lynton, Countisbury, and Morthoe. It is to Morthoe
that Tracy is supposed to have come after the murder, with the curse
upon him which descended to his family--that, wherever they went,
"the Tracys
Have always the wind and the rain in their faces"--
and to have lived out the bitter end of his life with the horror of
sacrilege in his heart. There is a monument in the church of Morthoe
of William de Tracy, but it is of early fourteenth-century date, and
belongs to a descendant of King Henry's knight, who was rector of the
parish. A later Tracy was Baron of Barnstaple, and was appointed
Governor of the island of Lundy in the reign of Henry III.
Nearly a century later Edward II, flying from the armies of his Queen
and the turbulent barons, took ship for Lundy, but was driven back to
Wales by contrary winds. And of this event a poem was made in the
reign of James I, which is quoted by Westcote as written by a "modern
poet," though he does not give us the name. The verse still retains a
smack of the Elizabethan diction--not the Shakespeare magic, indeed,
but the euphuistic, antithetical, fantastic balance of phrases:
"To Lundy which in Sabrin's mouth doth stand,
Carried with hope (still hoping to find ease),
Imagining it were his native land,
England itself; Severn, the narrow seas;
With this conceit, poor soul, himself doth please.
And sith his rule is over-ruled by men,
On birds and beasts he'll king it once again."
Devon took its unhappy share in the Wars of the Roses, and Perkin
Warbeck besieged Exeter in 1497, but unsuccessfully, like most other
exploits of that unlucky adventurer. Fifty years later the West rose
in arms against Henry VIII, in support of the "old religion," and to
protest against the dissolution of the monasteries; but the rising was
put down, and Henry took and subdued Exeter, and carried through his
bold and often ruthless policy.
But it is in the reign of Elizabeth that Devon takes on the special
glamour with which it is still associated in most minds. For it was
the sixteenth century which gave to England such men as Richard and
John Hawkins, Adrien and Humphrey Gilbert, John Davies--that sailor
friend of Adrien Gilbert's who, inspired by him, made the first dark
voyage into the Polar regions, and traded with the Esquimaux, as told
in Hakluyt's "Voyages"--and Sir Richard Grenville, with his "men of
Bideford in Devon," with whom he fought the _Revenge_ single-handed
against the fifty and three Spanish galleons in that last, greatest
fight of all; and Sir Walter Raleigh, a philosopher among courtiers, a
poet among princes, statesman, dreamer, adventurer, who planned nobly
and executed daringly, and failed more greatly than other men succeed.
Millais has drawn him for us, in his boyhood, sitting on the beach at
Budleigh Salterton, with the wind blowing his hair round his sensitive,
eager face, hugging his knees as he listens to the stories of the
sailor with the bright parrot-feathers in his hat, one of the men,
perhaps, who sailed with Frobisher or terrible John Hawkins, round the
world to the far-off coasts of adventure, the lands of gold and spices.
It is to Raleigh, and to his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, that
we owe the first colony of America, "Virginia," called so by Raleigh
from the Virgin Queen, in the compliment of his day--to them is due the
praise of having seen that "colonization, trade, and the enlargement of
Empire, were all more important for the welfare of England than the
acquisition of gold," and this in an age which was dazzled by the
facilities of wealth lying ready to the greedy hand in that "New World."
And this mind, so daring, so original, so diverse, which could turn a
sonnet or design a battleship (for the _Ark Raleigh_, built after his
plans, was admittedly the best ship of our fleet that met the Armada),
which had experienced the favour and disfavour of princes in the
fullest degree, which had known triumph and discouragement beyond the
ordinary measure of humanity, turned in the last dark years of
imprisonment to a steady contemplation of human activity, and, largely
conceiving here, as in all else, planned a "History of the World." Let
his own noble words be his epitaph:
"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast
persuaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world
have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou
hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride,
cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two
narrow words, 'Hic jacet.'"
And then there was Drake--Drake, whose name perhaps overshadows all
other names in Devon; Drake, who
"was playing a rubber of bowls
When the great Armada came;"
but, being told of the sighting of the fleet, remarked that "they must
wait their turn, good souls," and continued his game; Drake, who, the
year before the sailing of the Armada, "singed the King of Spain's
beard" most mightily, going up and down the coasts of Spain and
Portugal, plundering and burning the ships in their very harbours; who
sailed round the world, with the sun for "fellow traveller," as an
epitaph under his portrait in the Guildhall says of him; who, on the
first independent expedition which he led to America, received a
dangerous wound in his attack on Nombre de Dios, but concealed it from
his men, and led them to the public treasury, telling them "that he had
brought them to the mouth of the treasury of the world," and then
fainted over the great bars of silver and gold, and when they took him
up he was losing "so much blood as filled his very footsteps in the
sand;" Drake, who has become a legend and a myth in Devon, so that the
country-people say that he brought water from Dartmoor to Plymouth, by
compelling a stream to follow his horse's heels all the way into the
town; who, like King Arthur and Barbarossa, is not dead, but will
return again to his country if his people in their need strike on his
drum and call him.
But beyond and behind all these great names, which ring in our ears
like martial music, are the nameless crowd of Devon men who sailed with
them, and fought with them, and worked with them, and loved them. Men
from Bideford and Appledore and Barnstaple, from Teignmouth and
Budleigh and Dartmouth, from every little harbour along the bold north
coast, from every creek and bay of the south, from the sheltered
villages among their trees, from the wind-swept, hilly little towns,
from the busy quayside or the lonely farm, came the men whose courage
and whose will, whose love of profit and greater love of adventure,
gave a lustre to England in the "golden days of Elizabeth."
Those days passed, and were followed presently by the unhappy years of
the great Civil Wars. It was perhaps not unfitting that a
Grenville--Sir Bevil Grenville--led an army against the Parliamentarian
troops in the Battle of Lansdown Hill, though it was an army of
Cornishmen he led, and not of Devonshire men, for the Grenvilles were
then living at their Cornish home of Stowe. Sir Bevil was killed in
battle, but Anthony Payne, his servant, a great giant of a man, and a
true friend to his master, set Sir Bevil's young son upon his father's
horse, and bade him lead his father's men to victory, as, had he lived,
his father would have done. Afterwards Anthony Payne brought Sir
Bevil's body back to Stowe, and he wrote to Lady Grenville a letter
which deserves to be recorded for its true and simple dignity:
"HONOURED MADAM,--
"Ill news flieth apace: the heavy tidings hath no doubt already
travelled to Stowe that we have lost our blessed master by the enemies'
advantage. You must not, dear lady, grieve too much for your noble
spouse. You know, as we all believe, that his soul was in heaven
before his bones were cold. He fell, as he did often tell us he wished
to die, for the good Stewart cause, for his country and his King. He
delivered to me his last commands, and with such tender words for you
and for his children as are not to be set down with my poor pen, but
must come to your ears upon my best heart's breath. . . . I am coming
down with the mournfullest burden that ever a poor servant did bear, to
bring the great heart that is cold to Kilkhampton vault. Oh, my lady,
how shall I ever brook your weeping face? . . ."
This perhaps, is Cornish history and not Devonshire, except that the
name of Grenville is so inseparably linked in our minds with Devon.
During the Royalist wars from 1642-1650 Exeter was twice besieged by
the Parliamentarians; Ilfracombe twice changed hands, in 1644 being
taken by Doddington for the Royalists, and two years later falling to
Fairfax after his capture of Barnstaple; Tiverton also was besieged by
the Royalists, though it seems to have held within itself the two
irreconcilable factions. But it was not in Devon that the fiercest
battles of that time were fought, nor the greatest and bitterest
disunion prevailed. Of the subsequent history of Devon I shall say
little. The unhappy expedition of the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme
Regis, just on the borders of Dorset and Devon, and he himself was
joyfully received in Exeter; but it was in Somerset that the battle of
Sedgemoor was lost, and Somerset that suffered chiefly from the Bloody
Assizes.
Let us rather turn to the Devon of to-day, realizing with thankfulness
that the traditions of Drake and Frobisher, of Grenville and Hawkins,
still hold; that the heirs of the men who put out in their frail ships
for the New World, now buffet round our wild coasts in minesweeper or
trawler, destroyer or old cargo tubs, on a far more grim adventure.
Without the hope of gain, without the spur of glory, from every port
and harbour, from every creek and bay and inlet of our coasts comes the
patient, silent, heroic service of the men of the sea.
And on many a hasty grave, in the shot-riddled mud of Flanders, or on
the barren beaches of Gallipoli or the ruined lands of Babylon, might
that poem of Sir Henry Newbolt's which he calls "April on Waggon Hill"
be set up as a fitting epitaph:
"Lad, and can you rest now,
There beneath your hill?
Your hands are on your breast now,
But is your heart so still?
'Twas the right death to die, lad,
A gift without regret,
But unless truth's a lie, lad,
You dream of Devon yet.
"Ay, ay, the year's awaking,
The fire's among the ling,
The beechen hedge is breaking,
The curlew's on the wing;
Primroses are out, lad,
On the high banks of Lee,
And the sun stirs the trout, lad,
From Brendon to the sea.
"I know what's in your heart, lad--
The mare he used to hunt,
And her blue market-cart, lad,
With posies tied in front.
We miss them from the moor road,
They're getting old to roam,
The road they're on's a sure road
And nearer, lad, to home.
"Your name, the name they cherish?
'Twill fade, lad, 'tis true:
But stone and all may perish
With little loss to you.
While fame's fame you're Devon, lad,
The Glory of the West;
Till the roll's called in heaven, lad,
You may well take your rest."