THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF TRADITION
Schools, newspapers, and railways have gone far in the past hundred
years to destroy the wealth of oral tradition which once satisfied the
imagination and taxed the memories of the country-dwelling population
of England. And do not let us too greatly deplore this; let us
recognize that it is better for the general welfare of the world that a
man who dwells three hundred miles from London should have some
interest, however slight, in international politics, and some
knowledge, however fragmentary, of natural forces, rather than a
slipshod belief in ghosts, witches, and the omnipotence of "squire."
It is not from such minds that empire is made or deserved, and if with
the increase of cheap schooling, cheap printing, and cheap travelling
much that is beautiful in language or in legend is swept aside and
forgotten, we who have, by the fortune of training, been allowed to see
the beauty of the old things must recognize that what the generation
gains is more for its happiness than what it discards, as a new brass
Birmingham bedstead is cleaner, healthier, and more desirable for a
small crowded cottage than a worm-eaten old wooden four-poster.
This reminder I make to myself more than to any "gentle reader"; for I
have a passionate attachment to antiquity and a curiosity in legend
which leads me into remote paths of speculation and fancy. Some of the
most interesting survivals of ancient tradition are those customs, far
more common all over England than is supposed, which contain some very
ancient religious rite, long ago forgotten by the people, who practise
as a superstition, or sometimes as a pastime, what was once an act of
worship. The Christian Church, indeed, embodies many of these
survivals of paganism, not in its dogma or liturgy, but in its customs.
Such, for instance, is the giving of eggs at Easter, the eating of hot
cross buns on Good Friday, the games of All Hallowe'en, the harvest
festival.
Such customs as "touching with a dead hand" as a cure for sickness,
covering the mirrors in a house where one has just died, watching at
the church door on Midsummer Night to see the souls of all the
worshippers pass in, and those who will not live out the year remain
behind and do not pass out--these are part of the common stock of
beliefs, not confined to Devonshire or Scotland, nor directly traceable
to Celt or Saxon or Latin, but surviving from the remote past of the
human race, when the slowly emerging mind was struggling with its
apprehensions of life and death. But there are other customs,
surviving in the wilder and less accessible parts of our country, in
Scotland, Northumberland, Devon, and Cornwall, which seem to throw a
flash of light on the history of vanished peoples, by their
resemblance--though worn and rubbed by time, like a defaced coin--to
certain rites, well known to us in history, as practised by the Romans,
or the Druid peoples, or the worshippers of Baal.
Of such kind is a ceremony, until a few years ago very common in
Devonshire, where the first armful of corn that is cut is bound into a
little sheaf, called "the nek," and set aside from the rest of the
field. At the end of the first day's reaping the oldest man present
takes the little sheaf and holds it aloft, crying, "We ha' un!" (We
have it!) The cry is repeated three times, and the rest of the
reapers, standing round the old man with their reaping-hooks in their
hands, bow down at each cry. The spokesman then cries out three times,
"Thee Nek!" or, as it is stated by some witnesses of the scene,
"Arnack, Arnack, Arnack!" and the little sheaf is carried off the field
and hung up in the church. I do not know the meaning of the cries, but
the whole ceremony is undoubtedly a dedication of the corn to the
Corn-Spirit, and the little sheaf which is carried home and hung up is
a rough image of the Corn-Maiden, like those plaited straw figures of
Demeter and Persephone the Greek husbandmen used to make, and which the
peasants of Sicily make still. Whether the observance of this rite in
Devonshire is of Roman date, or whether it goes farther back, to a
remoter tradition of preclassical times, it is difficult to say.
So it is, also, of the Devonshire custom of making an offering of wine
and honey to bees on the day of their owner's death, and of reversing
their hives until the corpse has been carried out of the house. The
Greeks poured honey, but not wine, in their rites for the dead, and in
all the ceremonies which had to do with the worship of the earth
deities--the ancient autochthonic gods, older than the Olympians. But
wine was strictly an offering to the gods of the heavens, not to the
gods of the underworld, or of death.
There is another custom, still very common in North Devon and Somerset,
for the young men of the countryside to climb the nearest hill-top to
see the sunrise over the ridge of the Quantocks or the distant Mendips
on Easter morning. They account for their action by saying it is "for
luck"; but this custom, if connected popularly with Christian worship,
has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For,
searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early
and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the
mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at
Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human
sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and at the hour of
sunrise.
Whether the Britons whom Caesar describes as sacrificing human beings
in vast wicker cages were the Druidical peoples who built Stonehenge
and the great stone circles of Dartmoor and Cumberland, or whether with
them the mode of worship was already traditional, preserved by a
priestly oligarchy from a yet remoter age, and connected by I know not
what strange links with the fierce Eastern worship of Baal or Melkarth,
it is impossible to say with certainty at present, though the names by
which the Cumberland men still call the peaks and valleys round the
small Druid circle near Keswick contain the elements of those foreign
Phoenician words.
But at least we may assume that the accurate astronomical arrangements
of these Druid stones connected human sacrifice with the movements of
the sun, and the tradition which sends the young men of the countryside
up Dunkery Beacon on Easter morn is certainly older than the first
Roman galley that beached in our bays.
Dunkery Beacon is the highest peak in the West of England; it rises
above Exmoor black and bold above bog and heather, commanding a view
from the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire on the north to the high lands
of Plymouth on the south-west, two hundred miles distant the one from
the other. The great sweep of the Bristol Channel shines below it on
the west, and beyond that lie the blue hills of Monmouthshire and
Pembrokeshire; eastward the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Dorset lie
under the eyes, and on a clear day it has been computed that no fewer
than fifteen counties can be seen from this one eminence.
[Illustration: Dunkery Beacon, from Horner Woods]
So notable a height might well have been chosen by those Druid peoples
as a fitting stage for the celebration of their worship, and the
tradition which holds it "lucky" to climb the Beacon on a spring
morning is just such a memory and faint superstition as lingers from an
old and forgotten faith. The country-folk round Keswick used to drive
their cattle up to the Druid circle on the hill-top near on the first
of May, light a fire within the circle, and drive their cattle through
the smoke "for luck," unconscious that they were remembering the
worship of the god Moloch, to whom beasts and human beings were
sacrificed at his Asiatic shrines by passing them through the fire.
On Dunkery Beacon, so far as I can ascertain, there are no remains of a
Druid circle, but only two stone platforms arranged for beacon fires.
As a beacon it has been used for many hundred years. In the time of
Alfred the Great it flamed a warning of the coming of the Danes; it was
doubtless lighted at the coming of William the Conqueror into the West;
when the Armada went beating up the Channel; time and again when the
rumour ran that Napoleon had started for these shores; the country-folk
lighted it several times as a warning that the Doones were out on one
of their raids, till one night they climbed the beacon and threw the
watchman on the fire, after which it was left black and silent for all
the evil that the Doones did, until in due course retribution overtook
them and their stronghold was seized. So that I conjecture that the
circle of stones (if there were one) was pulled down to build the
beacon fires.
But the "Hunting of the Earl of Rone" which takes place at Combe Martin
on Ascension Day is probably the most interesting of all ancient
survivals in North Devon. It is a curious ceremony, partaking
something of the nature of a Guy Fawkes mummery, something, I consider,
of a much older and traditional character.
The "Earl of Rone," actually, was the son of the Earl of Tyrone, the
"Red Hand of Erin," who, in the reign of James I, fled from Ireland and
landed at Combe Martin, wandered about the countryside with a band of
companions, and was finally pursued and captured in Lady Wood, outside
the village. In the Ascensiontide sports the Earl wears a grotesque
costume: a mask, and a smock padded with straw, and round his neck a
chain of biscuits. He has with him a hobby-horse and buffoon covered
with fantastic trappings, and carrying a small article called a
"mapper" (which is conjectured to be a misreading for "snapper"), and
representing the teeth and jaws of a horse. The Earl has also a
donkey, decorated with flowers and with a necklace of biscuit, and the
hunters wear a sort of fantastic grenadier costume. For a week before
Ascension Day this strange cortege goes in procession round the
neighbourhood. The ceremony on Ascension Day is as follows: The Earl
of Rone hides in Lady Wood, and is there pursued by the soldiers, fired
upon, and captured. He is then placed on the donkey, with his face
towards the tail, and led into the village, accompanied by the fool
with his hobby-horse. They make several halts, at each of which the
Earl is again fired upon and falls wounded from his donkey, mourned by
the fool, but amid the general rejoicing of the spectators. Finally he
is replaced by the fool, and the affair becomes a mere matter of
buffoonery without special significance. Contributions are levied from
the public, and enforced by the "mapper," by which they are seized and
held until they have paid. The fool also has a besom, which he dips in
the gutter, and with which he sprinkles the recalcitrant.
But among much that is mere horseplay, and common to all popular
celebrations which have no religious significance to keep in check a
natural holiday exuberance, we can discover two distinct traditions.
The one is the actual Guy Fawkes celebration of the capture of the
rebel and outlaw Shane O'Neill; the other is much older, going back
into the remote past of unwritten history, and connected with those
strange religious ceremonies which a study of comparative religions has
shown us to be a natural development of the mind of primitive peoples,
struggling out of the darkness of mere barbarism. Over and over again
we find, among the customs of savage tribes, or behind the elaborate
ceremonial of such civilized nations as the Greeks and Romans, or
lingering in strange and now meaningless ceremonies such as the one I
have just described, this primitive idea of the individual who is
harmful to the community. From being baleful he became sacred. They
cast him out of their city, as the Jews did their scapegoat, to wander
in desert places, and as the Greeks did in a city festival which was
older than the Homeric gods among them, and which symbolized, in
classical times, the days when they had literally stoned a man and a
woman from their midst, bound, and with chaplets of flowers on their
heads and necklaces of black figs around their necks. It is recorded,
among the South Sea Islands, that a traveller once witnessed such a
sacrifice as this memorized in the classic Greek festival. Then, by a
queer but common inversion of idea, this baleful but sacred individual
is fetched back into the community, as the outcast, hidden in Lady
Wood, was brought back into Combe Martin, being beaten and reviled, and
yet keeping his sacred character as a being set apart from the rest of
men. His mask and traditional dress, his necklace of biscuit, and the
decking of the donkey with flowers and bread, all point to the
sacrificial character of this ceremony, though long ago forgotten and
become the opportunity for frolic and holiday-making.
The custom of "beating the bounds," which was familiar enough in many
country districts in the last century, is also a remains of primitive
tribal rites; it is a summer festival, falling usually at
Ascensiontide, and is held with greater or less ceremony. Now, indeed,
it has become just a holiday affair for children, who dress up and
parade the town or village with a hobby-horse and a few vague
ceremonies, now become shadowy and meaningless, as in the beating of
the bounds which takes place in the older part of the town of Minehead.
There are many scores of superstitious practices, as distinguished from
these remains of actual ritual of which I have spoken, still in use
among country-folk. In Devonshire they still take a sick child, very
early in the morning, and hold it over a stream which is running east,
with a long thread tied to its finger, so that as the water carries the
thread eastwards away from the child the sickness will also be carried
away. This, which seems to us so incomprehensible a belief, is one of
that very large class of primitive practices which imitate a certain
desired condition, as in the rain-making of certain tribes of red
Indians, when, having danced ceremonially round a large tub of water,
one of the number takes a mouthful and spirts it into the air in
imitation of rain. This is what they call a "charm"; there are charms
for the stanching of blood, for making the cows yield well, for the
cure of toothache, for averting evil from a young child; when a
Devonshire woman is asked to a christening, she still takes with her a
saffron cake, and gives it to the first stranger that she meets on her
way to church. But when the cattle are diseased, they have, or had as
late as 1883, when the ceremony was witnessed and recorded, a rite
which is more than a charm; for a sheep or calf is taken from the herd
and sacrificed, and either burned, or buried in a corner of the field
belonging to the farmer whose cattle are diseased.
But there is another practice in Devon and Cornwall which we may
proclaim a superstition, but to which the tragedies of these wild
coasts give but too grim an earnestness to those who practise it. When
a ship is long overdue, and a woman can bear the suspense no longer,
she goes down to the seashore and calls her husband by name. Over and
over again she calls him, her neighbours standing by, until over the
waters the voice of her drowned husband comes in answer. Then she
turns and goes to her desolate cottage, with hope put out of her heart.
How often these cries of sorrow and bereavement have gone out from
these rocky coasts, calling the drowned men by their simple, homely
names of field and cottage use from under the grey waters, how often
the waiting women have been comforted or strengthened by a despairing
certainty, we cannot know or realize who do not live and die by the sea.
Apart from those customs and practices, which contain the germ of some
very ancient ritual or primitive belief, there is another class of
tradition which is purely fantastic, such as ghosts, witches who change
into rabbits and cats, fairies, dragons, and strange portents. Of such
kind is the story of the Ghost of Porlock Weir, a buccaneer named
Lucott, and no unlikely personage to haunt any of these seaside
hamlets. He was a malicious and obstinate ghost who appeared boldly a
week after his funeral--when the inhabitants might reasonably have
supposed they had at last got rid of the bad old man--and though he was
exorcised by no less than eleven clergymen he refused to be laid. At
last the Vicar of Porlock tamed him with a consecrated wafer, compelled
him to ride with him to Watchet, and there imprisoned him in a small
box, which was straight-way thrown into the sea, and he was seen no
more.
There are elements in this story like that of Anstey's novel, where a
genie is imprisoned in a brass pot, which is fished up out of the sea
and opened, with startling results to a quiet modern community; and it
is to be hoped that nobody will bring Lucott ashore again, along with a
catch of fish.
There is another strange tale, also, concerning one John Strange of
Porlock, who, on August 23 of 1499, was hewing wood, and upon sitting
down to his midday meal on a log at the edge of the clearing, and
cutting a piece of bread, observed blood to flow from the incision. He
went to his neighbours about it, and with them to his parish priest,
and the matter became one of importance, for I find that a Commission
was appointed and recorded in the Register of Wells, to inquire into
this strange occurrence. Witnesses were called and examined, oaths
taken, the learned Commission sat upon it as solemnly as if it had been
a case of heresy. John Strange, summoned from his little cottage at
Porlock, was, we can well imagine, a half-unwilling hero. Nobody seems
to have arrived at any conclusion, and nobody seems to have suggested
that perhaps John Strange had cut his finger!
There is an even stranger and more splendidly fantastic story in
Westcote's "View of Devon," of fiery dragons seen flying about certain
barrows or tumuli near Challacombe, and alighting on them, and how a
certain labouring man, having bought a small plot of waste land near
by, began depleting Broaken Bunow to build himself a house with the
material. And how, digging into the hillock, he came upon "a little
place, as it had been a large oven, fairly, strongly and closely walled
up," and breaking into this he discovered an earthen pot, which, hoping
it might contain some treasure, he stretched out his hand to seize,
when, as he put his hand upon it he heard a noise as of a great
trampling of horses coming towards him. So he rose and looked about
him, but, seeing nothing, knelt again to secure the pot, when the same
thing happened again, and so a third time also. Nevertheless he drew
out the pot and took it home, and found it to contain no treasure, but
only a few ashes and little bones. And a very little time after he
lost his senses both of sight and hearing, and died within three months.
There is another barrow also, near the same place, where I am inclined
to believe that a "mystical sciencer" worked a trick on two worthy
fellows, whom he promised to enrich with silver and gold if they would
dig into the hillock for him and find therein a great brass pan which
contained the treasure. This they did, and came to the brass pan
covered with a large stone, which the strongest of them tried to lift,
and was taken with such a faintness "that he could neither work nor
stand," and therefore called to the other to take his place. This the
man did, and was also taken with faintness; and when they both
recovered, which was in a very short space of time, the "mystical
sciencer" told them that the birds were flown and the nest only left.
And sure enough they found this true: the empty brass pan, with the
bottom bright and clean, as if a treasure had lain there, and all the
rest of it cankered with rust. Whether this sciencer was some obscure
Roger Bacon, and had discovered the use of a volatile anaesthetic
centuries ago, or whether he was enjoying a solitary practical joke at
the expense of two simpletons, is impossible to say. "It is at your
choice to believe either or neither," as Westcote says of the two
foregoing stories. "I have offered them to the shrine of your
judgment, and what truth soever there is in them, they are not unfit
tales for winter nights, when you roast crabs by the fire, whereof this
parish yields none, the climate is too cold, only the fine dainty
fruits of whortles and blackberries."
One of the pleasantest of tales for winter nights is given by Westcote
himself in his introductory chapters, where he speaks of the air of
Devon as "very healthy, temperate, sweet, and pure," and giving long
life to the inhabitants, more particularly in the good old times, when
men were content to live temperately and frugally, and did not weaken
themselves with delicacies, but subsisted on the bare sustenance
afforded by the earth. Indeed, in the most ancient times they lived on
bark and roots, and on a certain "confection," of which if they took a
small quantity no larger than a bean they neither hungered nor thirsted
for a long while afterwards--so, at least, Diodorus Siculus and Dio
Nicaeus have affirmed, and we can therefore only suppose, in the face
of such authority, that the recipe is long since lost, and that the
habits of Devonshire men have certainly changed since the days when
they lived a hundred and twenty years.
But that must have been before the Phoenicians came to Britain, for
they are certainly reputed to have brought the secret of clotted (or
clouted) cream with them, and to have landed in Cornwall and Devon with
their scald-pans with them, so that the degeneration of the Damnonii in
the matter of delicacies is of very ancient date.
I cannot pass from an account of the wonders of Devon without repeating
Miss Celia Fiennes's description of a "ffowle" (as she calls it) which
lives on the island of Lundy, and which was formerly the property of
her grandfather, Lord Saye and Sele, and "yt lives partly in the water
and partly out, and soe may be called an amphibious Creature." She
does not claim to have seen it herself, for all her wanderings up and
down England a-horseback--which was, by the way, sufficient of an
adventure for a young lady in the seventeenth century--but she is none
the less detailed in her description. This queer bird has one foot
like a turkey, and one like a goose, and its habit of laying its eggs
is "in a place the sun shines on, and sets it soe exactly upright on
the small end, and there it remains until taken up, and all the art and
skill of persons cannot set it up soe again to abide."
She does not give the name of this strange "ffowle," but Lundy is no
unfitting habitat for an amphibious creature which is at least as rare
as the Dodo.
Stories of Henry de Tracy, who murdered Thomas à Becket, are numerous
up and down the coast; for the Tracys owned a considerable amount of
property here--Lynton, Crinton, Countisbury, and Parracombe--and, in
spite of historical evidence of the family's continued prosperity,
tradition asserts that the curse brought down by sacrilege was
fulfilled, and that Henry de Tracy wanders up and down these desolate
coves, condemned to weave ropes of sand that can never draw his
wretched soul out of torment till the last trump shall sound. He has
become, indeed, a figure of legend, merged with such strange persons as
the Wandering Jew and all those restless and unreleased spirits who,
like Sisyphus of Greek legend or Tregeagle of Cornish, for ever toil at
a for ever unaccomplished task.
The legends which have sprung up round the name of Coppinger have been
of quick growth, for "Cruel Coppinger" was a Danish sea-captain who was
wrecked off Hartland at the end of the eighteenth century. He came
naked ashore, the only survivor from the ship, having swum through the
stormy waves. He staggered up the beach, seized the red cloak from an
old woman's shoulders, wrapped himself in it, and leapt on the horse of
a young girl who stood by, urged the horse into a gallop, and
disappeared from the beach. That was a sufficiently striking entrance
to the stage of Devon, and he filled his part adequately. The young
girl with whom he had ridden off was Dinah Hamlyn; he was taken by her
to her father's farm, where he was fed and clothed. He married Dinah,
and after her father's death, within a year, he ill-treated shamefully
her and her mother, though it was to them that he practically owed his
life, ship-wrecked strangers in the eighteenth century being apt to
disappear among an inhospitable people. Coppinger lived by smuggling
and wrecking; he was brave, violent, and of great physical strength,
and he terrorized the population of these little villages by acts of
savagery and cruelty. A ganger who had had the boldness to interfere
with him he seized, and beheaded on the gunnel of his own boat, and
even for this no one dared to bring him to justice. He played violent
practical jokes, by inviting to dinner with him unfortunate people who
dared not refuse, and serving them up cats or offal for their meal.
He was in every way a scoundrel and a blackguard, and became such a
pest that at last he earned retribution; and after many local attempts
to convict him of smuggling or wrecking, the revenue officers came out
from Bude to the Bristol Channel to hunt him down. He was seen last on
the Gull Rock, off Hartland Point, signalling one evening to a ship
which lay in the offing. He was taken off by a boat, but almost
immediately a storm came up, the ship was blotted out from the sight of
those watching from the cliffs, and when the squall passed she had
totally disappeared. No one ever knew whether she had foundered with
all hands, or had run out of sight behind Lundy, or whether she had
become, by reason of the wicked wretch aboard her, a second _Flying
Dutchman_, shaping an endless course through stormy seas.
There is a verse of rough doggerel which the children in these parts
still repeat, and which embodies the story of this tyrant:
"Will you hear of cruel Coppinger?
He came from a foreign land;
He was brought to us by the salt water,
He was carried away by the wind."
Probably Coppinger's wild and picturesque rush from the beach, like a
Centaur in a scarlet cloak, was an actual measure of prudence; for in
those cruel times of wreckers and smugglers the survivors who landed
from a wreck were often murdered by the people they were thrown
amongst, because "dead men tell no tales," and the unfortunate seamen
might otherwise give evidence of false lights which had seemed to
promise safety and refuge, and had drawn them on to the rocks. Such
was the case of a French ship which was drawn ashore at Hele by
wreckers, and the only survivor was taken to Champernownesheyes (the
old gabled farmhouse which was formerly the home of the well-known
Devonshire family of Champernowne), and there murdered. There is a
curious ghost-story told in connection with this: The farm in due time
passed into other hands, and all memory of the wreck or the
disappearance of the one unfortunate survivor was lost. But one
evening, while the farmer who was then living at Champernownesheyes was
smoking his pipe in the garden, he fell to idly counting the windows,
and, having done this several times, he discovered that there was one
window unaccounted for. He called his wife, and then the servants,
and, having made sure of this, they located the position of the strange
window, and, going upstairs, they broke down the wall which they judged
to be opposite, and found, indeed, that the window lighted a small
room, furnished in sixteenth-century style, and containing a bed, hung
with mouldering tapestry, on which lay a skeleton--the bones of the
shipwrecked survivor who had been murdered. As they broke into the
room, and went to fling open the long-closed window, they heard a great
rushing noise, and cries and groans, and they declared that the garden
was filled with evil spirits, rustling and whispering, mopping and
mowing, for upwards of an hour afterwards.
There are, of course, many more tales, legends, and traditions, than I
have been able to deal with in the space of one chapter; every village
has them, every cove and creek, dark wooded hollow, or twisted and
fantastic rock, and to collect and collate, to sift and inquire into
all the wealth of folk-lore that our country still holds would be an
attractive but a life-long work. All I have attempted to give in these
few pages is some general idea of the intimate life of these
country-folk, what beliefs and customs, inherited often from the days
before Christianity, what charms and legends and lore, go to the
fashioning of their minds, just as I have tried to give a general idea
of the beauty and wildness, the peculiar and intimate quality, of the
country in which they live.