The sheep of Exmoor are of a horned variety; we all know what excellent mutton they make from its praises in "Lorna Doone," and John Fry's lyrical outburst over the saddle of mutton "six year old, and without a tooth in mun head," and sure to eat as soft as cream. John Fry was referring to the custom among the farmers of not killing their sheep until the teeth begin to go. Their coats are exceedingly thick, and their wool a very valuable asset to the whole county; it was more particularly so in the Middle Ages, when cloth-making was the staple industry of England. There is a woolpack in the coat-of-arms of Minehead, and the most striking feature of the little mediaeval town of Dunster is the yarn-market in the centre of the main street.

Wolves were plentiful on Exmoor at that time, and doubtless did much damage among the sheep; in hard winters, even, they would have come down into the little villages of Simonsbath and Parracombe, but the last of them was killed in the reign of Elizabeth. In her reign, also, wild-pigs could be hunted here, while the existence of such names as Crane Tor, Lynx Tor, Bear Down, is evidence of an even greater variety of game in Saxon times than now. Yet there is abundance still, hares and foxes, badger and otter; the otter, indeed, makes grievous depredations among the salmon that come up the river to spawn, for, like a dingo among sheep, he slays promiscuously what he does not eat. It is, I suppose, a lingering tradition of our old stern game laws that imposes a severe penalty for poaching when a man picks up a salmon which an otter has killed and left.

Birds abound on Exmoor; snipe and woodcock, partridge and black-game, plover and wild-duck. Nothing could more exactly express the loneliness and wildness of this great open country than, when you are walking solitary, to hear the harsh, melancholy cry of the bittern from the reedy, desolate bogs, or in the falling daylight of a cloudy February afternoon to see the plover rise from the tussocks of brown grass at your feet, and go flying and wailing above you, in that broken-winged, broken-hearted way of theirs, or to watch the duck flying home across the sunset, with their strange honk-honk!

For all that I have said about the barrenness of these great moors, Exmoor is the land of sweet waters. The Exe, the Barle, the Quarine, rising near Dunkery Beacon, the Haddes from the Brendon Hills, the Lyn, the Wear Water, the Badgeworthy (up which little John Ridd fished for loach), the Parley Water, the Horner, which runs into Porlock Bay, the East Water, all these beautiful clear, clean streams abound with fish, and have the freshness and the sparkle of this sparkling upland air. Wherever there is a fold in the ground there is running water—though geographically one should put it in the opposite way, that wherever the water runs there is a fold in the ground—and wherever it runs flowers and ferns and trees grow in beautiful abundance. I have already described the luxuriant green of the wooded gorges of the Lyn, the variety of trees and the luxuriance of ferns and mosses; the Horner Woods, near Porlock, have the same green loveliness, though a sharper air blows through them, as they stand nearer the Exmoor heights and less sheltered by steep rocks than those that overshadowed the Lyn, and on a summer afternoon there is a sharp smell of resin from the sun-warmed pines, and the keen air stirs even in the depths of the wood.

And besides these rivers there are numberless little unnamed streams, everywhere the tinkle and chatter of water, breaking over stones, slipping through the peaty earth, falling in a thin spray down the face of the cliffs, spreading out across the white rocks of an encircled cove, incessant movement and change of colour and light, a ceaseless ripple and gleam of reflected water across the lichened trunk of some old tree, sweet and incessant sound.



CHAPTER VII

IN SOMERSET

"In Somerset," says Miss Celia Fiennes with considerable severity, "they are likewise as careless when they make cider; they press all sorts of Apples together, else they might have as good sider as in any other parts, even as good as the Herriforshire."

This young lady, with her keen criticisms, her spirit of intrepidity, and her variable spelling, betook herself on a tour on horseback through England in the reign of William and Mary, and kept a diary of her travel, noting with equal solemnity the state of agriculture or the quality of pastry which she encounters in her journey. She was the daughter of Colonel Fiennes, a Parliamentary soldier, and being a delicate girl, was recommended fresh air and exercise by her doctor. "My journeys, as they were begun to regain my health by variety and change of air and exercise, so whatever promoted, that was pursued . . .," she says, rather elliptically, in her preface, and admonishes Ladies and Gentlemen to follow her example, and profit by the spectacle of their own country—advice which we of this generation have taken au serieux, and of which the present book and those akin to it are sufficient witness!

Her remarks on Somerset are not all strictures, for it is here, she tells us, that she had the best tarts and "clouted cream" that she ever had in her life; and this although Devon has given its name to this excellent dainty, while Cornwall fiercely asserts that it is a Celtic recipe, and stolen from them by the Saxons of Devon, after they were driven over the Tamar.

With Somerset, however, we are not dealing in the limits of this book, neither with its characteristics of scenery or of speech—which, to the observant eye and ear, make every county in England rich in individuality and infinitely various, so that Hampshire can never be confounded with Sussex, nor Somerset with Dorset—but only with that small strip of it between Porlock and Dunster which lies on the borders of Exmoor, and belongs to it geographically. After leaving Porlock, however, the six miles of road that runs across the moor to Minehead is on a lower level, and (as the aesthetic writers would say), in a lower key than the magnificent barren stretch of uplands from Lynton to Porlock. The way still lies across Exmoor, but the "forest" lands are beginning to lose their wildness; they run down to about five hundred feet above the sea, while the summit of Dunkery Beacon is fifteen hundred, though rising but little above the moors that surround it; for the road between Countisbury and Porlock is over twelve hundred feet above the beach it overhangs. From Porlock the wooded valleys are more frequent and more thickly wooded, and the villages lie nestled more sleekly; the winds are less keen and strong, the sun itself seems more tempered than when it blazes upon Heddon's Mouth; a more suave and temperate beauty begins gradually to take the place of the wild open spaces and grey cliffs.

The villages indeed are beautiful: Selworthy, Luccombe, and Wootton Courtney, each with its lovely grey church, embowered in trees, its street of whitewashed houses, its angles of light and shadow, and gardens filled with colour. Luccombe, which is said to contain the same Anglo-Saxon word locan, to enclose, as Porlock, lies under one of the spurs of Dunkery on a little stream which falls into the Horner Water, and is, indeed, enclosed in a steep wooded combe. The church stands behind a tall row of cypresses, which, though planted only seventy years ago, have grown as tall as the church-tower, and bear witness to the fertility of the soil and the mildness of the climate; they give the churchyard a foreign and outlandish look, I think, and harmonize less perfectly with the characteristically English architecture of the church than their neighbour, the old yew. The tower is battlemented, and has some individual gargoyle heads around its gutter, and the barrel roof of the interior has richly carved wooden bosses, with the remains of painting upon them.

The church at Selworthy has also a carved and painted wooden roof, though of finer workmanship than Luccombe; the church itself was originally built of red stone, but the tower is the only part remaining, and this has been covered with stucco. The window and tracery of the south aisle is of the lightest and most delicate Perpendicular, but the interior has been a good deal restored. The church is beautifully situated. It lies high above Selworthy, and before it stretch the long flat curves of Exmoor; below, Luccombe Church tower can just be seen above its surrounding trees; to the south-east, beyond the green luxuriance of Horner Woods, rises the outline of Dunkery. From it a path leads down to Selworthy Green, which is rather a famous beauty-spot, lying on the slope of a hill, neatly surrounded by trees—and the woods here are very beautiful by virtue of the great variety of the trees, beech, oak, chestnut and very fine walnut, and of the fair growth and dignity of the individual tree—amid a little circle of seven cottages which form Sir Thomas Acland's almshouses. The cottages are old and whitewashed, and the thatched roofs sink into beautiful curves and hollows where the shadows lie smoothly; in the summer, when visitors from Minehead mostly see them, the windows stand open to the warm air, and in the shade of the porches, sweet-scented with climbing roses, they can be given tea by the old pensioners.

It is beautiful indeed, and yet to me it has lost something of the appeal of those lovely and desolate little villages—of Brendon, or Parracombe, or Oare—more bleak and windswept, more sun-scorched and barren, thrusting each into some cleft or hollow of the high brown lands, with the wide sky over each, and each its small square church to witness to the fear of God. Some quality of freedom and individuality which is their charm is not in Selworthy.

This is a mere question of taste; we are all apt to look at a place with the eye of extraneous opinion. The beauty of Selworthy is not, indeed, except fancifully, affected by its being a landowner's village, a swept-and-garnished village where the roofs are repaired by Sir Thomas Acland's thatcher, for fear they should fall into the evil ways of slate, and spoil the lovely contours of the village. A landlord has as much right to preserve the beauty of his property as he has to the upkeep of his fences, and we are indeed fortunate to live in an age when the mellowed beauty of ancient buildings has become almost a religion. But to me there is a smugness about such a village, which has become the hobby, the by no means selfish or unenlightened hobby, of a single man, which does much to temper my enjoyment. Selworthy, with its thatch and cob, its neat old pensioners, its suavity, its absence of what is unsightly, is an anomaly; it can only be preserved against the growing pressure of the twentieth century by the artificial barriers erected by wealth. Parracombe, smaller, lonelier, with its white farms and outbuildings and cottages, is the natural outcome of a small and scattered population, who are not rich enough to build newer houses, and who live as their forefathers did because their isolation on Exmoor, and the barren land on which they live, has not induced men from other districts to come and "expand."

The little village of Culbone, near Porlock—if one may call half a dozen cottages a village—is not an anomaly; indeed, it is a kind of geographical whim. The cleft in which it lies faces towards the north, and it is so deep and so deeply wooded that for four of the winter months there is no direct ray of sunlight in the gorge, only the sky or the light high up on the summits to remind the score of folk who live there that they are not shut in a green prison. Even at midsummer their sunrise is several hours later than for the rest of the world. Among the darkest part of the green thickets stands the church, which is probably the smallest parish church in England, or shares that distinction with the church of Lullington in Sussex or St. Lawrence's in the Isle of Wight. One or two of the tiny churches in Cornwall are smaller. There is St. Piran's, but that is now a ruin on a beach, with only the low walls of the very early building remaining; and there is the church of St. Enodoc, near Wadebridge, which the saint must have forgotten and the world overlooked, for it got lost among the low sandhills and the sand drifted over, and it is only fifty years since it has been found again, a delight to the few who ever see it, with its squat grey tower barely seen over a tall hedge of tamarisk, and before it the short grass rich with thyme, giving place to the sand-hills which run out to the long level stretch of the beach, and behind it the sand-hills yielding to the clean dry grass of the downs.

But these charming small buildings are mostly of very simple and primitive construction, and St. Culbone has the construction of a perfect parish church within the limits of its thirty-four feet from east window to west door, with a nave, and a tiny chancel thirteen feet long, and a small truncated spire, similar to that of Porlock Church. Its patron saint is the Celtic St. Columban—Culbone is a simple corruption of his name—who lived about the same time that St. Dubricius crowned Arthur at Caerleon, about A.D. 517; of how this tiny church came to be built (for the present fifteenth-century building stands on the site of a pre-Saxon foundation, which was dedicated to the Celtic saint), or what refuge or sanctuary it was, there is no historical record; doubtless a remnant of the British, harassed by Saxon raids on Porlock, hid themselves in this dark gorge, and there built and dedicated a church to their own saint of the dove's name, in the hope that he would save them from the claws of the invaders.

Of Minehead as it is now, no greater contrast can be imagined with Porlock and St. Culbone, except that of Ilfracombe, with the grand desolation of Heddon's Mouth and the solitariness of Trentishoe or Morthoe. For both Ilfracombe and Minehead have become so popular for summer visiting that most of their original character is lost under a flood of new houses, trim streets and shops, which have grown to meet the requirements of a large but fluctuating population. Unduly to deplore this is, I suppose, a form of intellectual snobbery. Both Minehead and Ilfracombe are still undoubtedly beautiful in their setting of sea and moorland, the one upon lofty cliffs, the other among gently rounded and wooded hills; and it is fitting that more people than the favoured and aristocratically-minded few, who elect to stay in cottages and shun their fellow-men, should be given opportunity to enjoy them.

Minehead is a place with a history; its position on the Bristol Channel made it a port of considerable value, and throughout the Middle Ages it did a large trade with Ireland, and a foreign trade with France and Spain, only second to that of Bristol from the West of England. In the seventeenth century, like Bristol also, it had an extensive trade with Virginia and the West Indies, and it exported annually forty thousand barrels of herrings to the Mediterranean. But the herrings left these coasts, as I have already had occasion to state in speaking of Lynton, and an Act passed in the reign of Charles II, forbidding the import of Irish cattle, though passed with the intention of protecting the English farmers against Irish competition, had the usual result of such short-sighted policy, and, while it crippled the Irish trade and ruined the prosperity of such ports as Minehead, it ultimately benefited nobody. Any ship smuggling cattle, that was captured, was sold, and a part of the proceeds went to charity and a part to the Crown. The "Cow Charity" is a fund which is still administered in Minehead.

Minehead was a "manor" in Domesday Book, and was given along with Dunster by the Conqueror to William de Mohun, who was one of the first of his nobles to support his English expedition, and who brought to the standard of Duke William fifty-seven knights in his retinue, with their esquires and their men-at-arms. The name Minehead is a corruption of the Norman lord's name with the Anglo-Saxon word heved, a head; it used to be written "Manheved."

The Mohuns held it until the time of Henry IV, when, there being only daughters, it passed out of the direct line, and was sold by Lady Mohun to the Luttrells, who have held it until the present time. It was incorporated by Queen Elizabeth, and governed by a "port-reeve," and later by two constables. The place was then of a size to consist of a Lower, Middle and Upper Town; the Lower Town, now called Quay Town, is the oldest remaining part. It lies under the high hill of Culver Cliff, around the harbour, and has more of the look of a Devon or Cornwall fishing village—the steep, narrow streets, the whitewashed cottages with their large chimney-stacks and leaded windows—than the aspect of modern Minehead would lead one to expect. It was here, indeed, that the sea broke in the great gale of 1860, when the shipping in the harbour tore from its moorings, and was driven literally upon the houses of Quay Town, as the sea-wall gave way under the pounding of the waves, and the Royal Charter, getting clear from Culver Cliff, was driven on to the rocks off Anglesea, and lost with all hands.

Thirty years later, in 1891, the Minehead shipping was again wrecked by one of the fiercest storms that has ever been recorded over England. It began on March 9, and raged for four days, chiefly over Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. Shipping was driven on to the rocks from Land's End to Bristol; at Plymouth the solid iron seats on the Hoe were torn up and hurled about by the force of the wind; the heavy snowdrifts stopped all communication, even by train; some unfortunate people were practically buried in their houses; and along with the tragedies and devastation the strangest and most fantastic adventures happened, such as an old woman, struggling back from market, having her basket of provisions blown bodily out of her hand, and picking it up four days later, with every article in it unharmed, not even a burst packet of tea! Where the roads were not blocked with snowdrifts, they were mostly impassable from fallen trees, for the force of the wind was greater than anything which has been experienced in England, partaking more of the character of a cyclone, with the wind varying from N.E. to S.E. and with very rapid changes, but of greater duration than an average cyclone, for it raged from the 9th to the 13th.

Many fine and historic old trees were lost, and at Edgcumbe Park alone, near Plymouth, it was estimated that at least two thousand were blown down, and the damage was so extensive that it took two years to clear the park; while at Cotehele, near the little town of Calstock, the damage was beyond description. One hundred thousand feet of timber, it was calculated, suffered in this one small district; and Cotehele House, which before had lain behind a screen of trees, was afterwards open to view from the town by this violent deforestation. Here is one of the most interesting descriptions of the storm, written by Mr. Coulter, the steward at Cotehele:

"The wind, having blown a gale the whole day, continued to increase in violence as evening approached, and from seven till nine p.m. accomplished, if not all, the greater part of the devastation to house and woods. The noise of the storm resembled the frantic yells and fiendish laughter of millions of maniacs, broken, at frequent intervals, by what sounded like deafening and rapid volleys of heavy artillery, and, as these died away, louder and louder again rose the appalling screams of the storm, with slight intervals of lull and perfect calm, only to return with tenfold violence, which made the whole house tremble and vibrate. . . . Several of the windows facing east were swept in as easily as a spider's web; lead and glass scattered all over the rooms, leaving only the shattered frames, through which rushed the resistless wind and blinding snow. . . . Through the joints of doors and windows, the cracks and crevices, before unknown to the eye, the drifting snow penetrated and piled up in ridges, so that rooms and passages had to be cleared like the pavement in the streets. . . . On an examination of Cotehele Woods, the scene presented gives one the idea of an earthquake rather than that of a storm. The majority of the trees are from two to three hundred years old, torn up by the roots, and tearing up like so much turf yards of macadamized road and huge blocks of strong stone walls."

The violent storm in the South of England in February, 1916, gives one only a faint idea of this famous blizzard of 1891; for, great though the damage was, it was more local, and the storm was of shorter duration and did not interrupt the train and telegraph services over many scores of miles, as the earlier storm did, travellers in the West being out of touch with their friends for as much as four days or a week, snow-bound in some small village until the railway line was cleared and the postal service re-established.



The fury of such a storm across these always windy Exmoor heights can hardly be imagined; only Conrad could convey in words some adequate idea of the fury and the force, as he has done in "Typhoon." Anyone who was in Exmoor during these three days would have been fortunate to have reached shelter alive, and not to have been lost, as were so many unfortunate sheep and ponies, in the deep snowdrifts. There is a scene in "Lorna Doone," where John Ridd and his servant Fry go out on a bleak stormy morning to rescue their sheep from the snow, which gives a vivid picture of what must have been many times enacted in the Exmoor valleys during those wild March days. Of the loveliness of the scene when the snow had fallen, and after the fury of the wind had abated, when the March sun shone on the smooth upland curves and beautiful rounded hollows of the moors, stainlessly white and wonderful under the clearing sky, Mr. Widgery's picture of Lorna's Bower under snow gives a beautiful impression.

Apart from its cattle industry and its herrings, Minehead was noted in the seventeenth century for its alabaster mines, "harder than ye Darbishire alabaster," says Thomas Gerard in his "Particular Description of Somerset," written in 1633; "but for variety of mixture and colours it surpasseth any, I dare say, of this kingdom." The mines are said to have been discovered by a Dutchman, but I cannot find that they were much worked, or were very abundant; for there is no record of them a century and a half later. They were not like the Combe Martin silver-mines, which were worked for centuries—some say in the time of the Phoenicians, when the mines of Cornwall furnished tin for half the bronze in Europe—which helped Henry V to pay for his wars in France, and were reopened by Adrien Gilbert in Queen Elizabeth's time, and a great cup and cover, fashioned from the silver, was presented by him to the City of London, and may still be seen among the city plate. The water got into the workings, and they were running poor after so many centuries, and were finally abandoned in the seventeenth century; for which Combe Martin is the more picturesque, according to our modern standards, if less prosperous.

There is another industry of Minehead, or, more properly, a curiosity; for there are no traces of the most enterprising approaching the matter from a commercial standpoint. "There is on the rocks at low-water a species of limpet which contains a liquor very curious for marking fine linen," says our seventeenth-century authority, and he gives directions for breaking the mollusc "with one sharp blow," and taking out "by a bodkin" the little white vein that lies transversely by the head—a somewhat delicate operation. "The letters and figures made with this liquor on linen," he continues, "will appear of a light green colour, and, if placed in the sun, will change into the following colours: if in winter about noon, if in summer an hour or two after sun-rising and so much before setting, for in the heat of the day in summer it will come on so fast that the succession of each colour will scarcely be distinguished.

"Next to the first light green it will appear of a deep green, and in a few minutes change to a full sea-green; after which it will alter to a blue, then to a purplish-red; after which, lying an hour or two (if the sun shines) it will be of a deep purple-red, beyond which the sun does no more. But this last beautiful colour, after washing in scalding soap and water, will, on being laid out to dry, be a fair bright crimson which will abide all future washing."

Is this indeed the "murex," as Browning calls it, of the Tyrian purple, which can be found on the Minehead rocks at low-tide by the holiday-makers of our day?—that "purple dye" for which, the weary Roman usurper said,

"We'll stain the robe again from clasp to hem With blood of friends and kinsmen . . .,"

and yet which is only

"Crushed from a shellfish, that the fisherman Brings up in hundreds, yet rejects as food."

In coming to Dunster we come to the last of the many beautiful places that lie within the compass of this fifty miles of England, places with so varied a loveliness that nowhere else, I think, can you match with them.

There is Barnstaple, suave and clean and sunny, with its well-kept streets and smooth, broad river, and its air of all prosperity and peace, the very type and pattern of a decent English country-town; and almost within stone's throw of it the moors begin, lying widely under the expanse of the sky, with the perpetual running of waters, and the lonely farms, from which the smoke curls up, blue against the brown hillside. There are the sombre and unpretending small villages, Parracombe, Brendon, Bratton-Fleming, each with its history and its little church, and the homesteads from which the young men have gone, in their humble twos and threes, to take their part in this war of millions. There is the grand solitude of Heddon's Mouth and the raven-haunted cliffs to Lynton; there is Lynton itself, drowned in the green woods that surge up the steep hillside; there is the West Lyn Gorge, shadeless and sultry even on a spring day, and the East Lyn Valley, where ferns and lilies of the valley grow, and every green thing that loves moisture and shade; and the Watersmeet, where there is a perpetual rushing of waters which drowns the song of the birds; there is Porlock, between the moors and the marshes, and the drowned forest of Porlock Bay; there is the green magnificence of Horner Woods or Bossington, and the cloud-wreaths that gather and lift on the summit of Dunkery; and here, easternmost of our journey, is Dunster, the castle on its wooded hill rising above the long street of the village, and the edge of Exmoor beyond, dipping now from its bleak heights in gentle wooded undulations to the shores of the Bristol Channel. The Tower on the Hill, that is the meaning of the word "Dunster," and the name fittingly describes it; for it dominates many miles of beautiful and fertile country, and stands feudally above the village, perceptible from every angle of the street, at once a guardian and a menace. It has stood so for a thousand years, for it was a stronghold of the Saxon Kings before William the Conqueror gave it to William de Mohun, and he built his gloomy Norman fortress, with its massive, windowless walls, and squat strong towers, of which nothing now remains save a bowling-green which marks the site of the old keep.

The main part of the present building dates from "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," when her nobles needed rather magnificent country-houses than fortresses for defence; but the gatehouse, with its four flanking towers, was built in the time of Henry V, and the oldest part of the castle is the gateway by the side of the main entrance, which was built by Reginald de Mohun in the time of Henry III, while Henry Luttrell added the south front in the "antique taste" of a hundred years ago. Yet, like so many cathedrals, and not a few of the castles and great houses of England, like Hampton Court or Ely Cathedral, the varying styles of architecture do not give an appearance of patchiness or incongruity, but rather a feeling as of the vitality of the old building, and the continuity of life within it, that century after century adapts and adds to the uses of the present the habitation of their ancestors. The sun and rain mellow all, and the ivy makes all green; stone urn and Roman column grow old and gracious beside steep Elizabethan gables and fantastic chimneys, and the grey pointed arches of the fifteenth-century gateway are as good to ride under to the meet on crisp September mornings as a Renaissance doorway or an eighteenth-century portico. Much of the charm of these old buildings cannot be reproduced by brush or camera; it lies in their intimate association with the scene around them, sunshine and cloud, summer and winter, their hills and their streams; it is the sense of age which they convey, of long-continued tradition and a certain mellow security.

It was in 1376 that the Luttrells bought the castle from the Mohuns; and they hold it still; the old receipt for the purchase-money is still preserved in the castle hall, with various ancient and yellowing title-deeds, and a list of the "muniments" of the castle, made by William Prynne, who was sent there as a prisoner by Cromwell in 1650, after having suffered branding and the loss of his ears at Royalist hands for his "seditious teachings," and who, firebrand and fanatic as he was, beguiled his imprisonment with this curiously peaceable occupation.

The village is as beautiful as the castle; in the long, irregular street every house is three to four hundred years old. The projecting upper stories are supported on great timber balks, often with the ends grotesquely carved. Under the projecting eaves the swallows build, and twitter about the diamond-paned windows which reflect so richly the sunset light. In the steep roofs there are dormer-windows, and the old tiles have mellowed to a deep rose-red, stained yellow with lichen, and sink into irregular planes and angles of beautiful, varied colour. There are tall brick chimneys and steep gables, and all manner of odd delicious scraps and jags of architecture, where one building has crowded upon its neighbour in its growth, like trees in a forest. There are old gardens also, long sunny walls with old fruit-trees that look like hoary serpents writhing up them, until the spring comes and the delicate, exquisite forms of plum or peach blossom break out of the gnarled boughs; there are wallflowers and lavender and rosemary, for the sweet scent and the "remembrance" of them, and tall hollyhocks to nod over high brick walls; creepers, green or flowering, to grow over the whitewashed spaces, and great trees for shade on summer afternoons.

In the centre of the long main street is the yarn-market, a beautiful wooden building of the seventeenth century, built by Sir George Luttrell when Dunster was still a centre of the wool industry. It is built with wide overhanging caves, pierced by eight little dormer-windows, with a lantern at the apex of the roof, and is a unique little building whose characteristic features have been sketched and photographed many scores of times, and is comparable, perhaps, only with the butter-market at Bingley in Yorkshire. Opposite is the Luttrell Arms, a quiet, comfortable, harmonious stone building of the eighteenth century, but with part of the older building still preserved inside—a wall that overlooks a paved court, with windows set in frames of beautiful carved oak, and a gabled roof, a moulded plaster over-mantle also, and yet with that general air of disregard for these treasures, amid a hurrying to and fro with plates and bottles, which, to me, is one of the special charms of these long-established country inns.

To anyone who loves England, and that beauty which is so characteristically English, where the life of the present day is visibly linked with the life of the past through long centuries of security, where age has ripened all, the great old trees, the colours of old oak and weather-beaten tiles and warm brick, has gently undulated straight lines, and softened all sharp angles, where the very sunlight has the mellowness of old wine, to a mind perceptive of this peculiar and intimate charm of England, Dunster makes a special call, set amid the suave curves of its rich country, crowned by its ancient castle, dignified by its old, beautiful church (grown, like the castle, through Norman and Early English and Perpendicular styles of architecture), yet intimate and familiar, and beautiful most of all because of the use and wont of daily life within its walls.



CHAPTER VIII

LUNDY

It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a railroad runs across "darkest Africa," and the great ice-wall of the Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite, against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute human heart—it is curious to come across small corners of the world where the law of nations seemingly does not run, and the current of the modern world sweeps by, leaving them in a backwater, strangely aloof and undisturbed.

Such is the island of Herm, in the Channel Isles; such are one or two volcanic rocks in the Greek Archipelago, which you may purchase for a song, and live on if you can, though their barren waterlessness under the midsummer suns will compel you to put out to sea again for all the dangers of swift currents and black crags; such, too, I imagine, are some of those enchanted small islands in the South Seas of which Conrad writes: "It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had left that crumb of its surface alone in space"; such, too, is Lundy.

But Lundy is only fourteen miles from the English coast, this populous and organized England, and in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, in the direct track of all the shipping of the West—sighted, it is estimated, by at least a million vessels a year in their business up and down the world—and yet, to within the last generation, it was almost as inaccessible as in the days when the de Mariscos built their castle there and defied the King and all his armies.

Even now, though in the summer pleasure steamers run from Ilfracombe and Minehead, and land their noisy crowds on the south-eastern corner of the island, the narrow peninsula of Lametor, it is during barely three months of the year; they have ceased before the coming of the October gales, and the island goes back to its solitude, and the wild clamour of its innumerable sea-birds, while its few inhabitants wait their bi-weekly post, and the coming of the Trinity boat on the 1st and 15th of the month, for news of the outside world.

For Lundy is a great rock, about three and a half miles long, and averaging half a mile in depth, cutting the strong tidal stream which runs round the south coast of Wales and up the Bristol Channel, with steep cliffs and outlying crags and peaks of rock over which the surf is flung ceaselessly, even on still summer days, and with a dangerous tidal race at its northern end and the south-west and south-east angles. It stands, too, in the highway of the winds as well as of the waters, and is so scored and buffeted by gales that hardly any trees, except the stunted dwarf-elder, can survive the winter fury on its open slopes. When a westerly gale is blowing, many ships run in under its lee-shore for shelter; but its only landing-place is at the south-east angle by Rat Island, and that becomes dangerous in an easterly wind, so that boats have to be beached on the south or west side, though with difficulty and some danger. Add to this that the road from the landing-stage is so narrow and steep that it could be held by two men, and its suitability as a robber stronghold becomes clear.

It is a land of romance, singular in every aspect: in the formation of its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate, and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, principally in towers and churches, proving that quarries must have been worked on Lundy at some time during the Middle Ages, and before the fifteenth century; for there is comparatively little building of churches after that date. A company was formed in 1863 to work the Lundy granite-quarries, and it was intended to use this stone in the building of the Thames Embankment; but the difficulty of shipment from so inaccessible a spot proving insuperable, the enterprise was abandoned.

But apart from the height and boldness of these granite cliffs, rising in places almost sheer to a height of more than seven hundred feet, with outlying reefs and insular rocks bristling black and jagged through the foaming waters, with gully, creek, and cave, worn by the action of rain and sea, there is a further wildness given to the island by a great series of clefts or fissures, running for a considerable distance in a line irregularly parallel to the cliff, sometimes from ten to twenty feet across, and as much as eighty feet deep, where they can be measured; at other places too narrow for sounding, but seeming to strike right down into the bowels of the earth. Locally this phenomenon is called the "earthquake," and the popular tradition of the island ascribes its appearance to the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755; but it is certainly older than that date. However, the shock of that great disturbance may have further rent the granite and displaced the mighty boulders. It extends for about two miles from the southern coast, running in a northerly direction, and where the slate formation meets the granite it is fractured in the same sharp manner. Some upheaval of the earth's crust in far-off prehistoric times must have cracked the granite and made these mighty chasms; the wildness and singularity of their appearance, and the confined locality in which they occur—for there is no trace of such disturbance elsewhere in the island—make one wonder if it were no imprisoned demon or angry god, chained in the blackness under Lundy, who, stretching his mighty sinews to be free, so contorted and rent the solid granite above him. The absence of legend or ancient tradition (for the tradition of the Lisbon earthquake is comparatively recent) about so arresting a spectacle I ascribe to the condition of Lundy's history; there has been no continued habitation of the simple people of the land to pass on, from generation to generation, the ancient names and the ancient stories of their dwelling-place, untouched by the changes of rule and ownership which go over them.

For this reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, passes barely remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring of fresh water. This is called the Virgin's Well, and I can discover no story or legend with which it is connected, though the name may possibly contain some earlier myth, not based upon Christian worship.



The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary names—the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic and imaginative quality. Such is the difference between Heddon's Mouth, "the Giant's Mouth," or Dunster, "the Tower on the Hill," and such names as I have quoted above. The very name of Lundy itself, which is "Lund-ei," the island of Lund, as Caldy is "Cald-ei," the island of Cald, show a Teutonic origin, perhaps Scandinavian, but not named so by the Celts of Britain or Ireland.

But "there were great men before Agamemnon"; certainly there were great men on this island before the adventurer Lund landed upon it and gave it his name.

In 1850, in digging foundations near a farmhouse in the southern part of the island, a great grave, or series of graves, was discovered. There were two stone coffins, made of hewn blocks of granite, just deep enough to contain a body, and with the covers sloped and cut each from a single block. One was ten feet in length, and contained the huge skeleton of a man, over eight feet high; the other was eight feet long, and contained a skeleton well over six feet, which "was imagined to be that of a woman," but on what grounds I cannot discover, as it does not seem to have been carefully examined, and is therefore probably mere conjecture, based upon its juxtaposition to the larger coffin. In the account of the excavation a "macabre" incident is recorded. One of the workmen, seizing the shin-bone of the giant, placed it against his own leg, and found that it reached halfway up his thigh; whereupon, taking up the lower jawbone, he fitted it easily over his own lower jaw, though he was a burly man and bearded.

"To what base uses a man may return, Horatio! . . ."

"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw."

For that these were the bones of a man mighty in his day the workmanship of his coffin goes to prove. For he lay with a stone rest for his head and feet, made each of a cubic block of fine granite, and a deep depression hollowed in his pillow to take his head, resting sideways towards his shoulder. As these great blocks were cut and squared and hollowed with stone tools, the labour which they betoken may be imagined; and none, I suppose, but an imperious Caesar could have exacted it. The skeleton was covered and surrounded by a mass of limpet-shells. There were seven other skeletons buried in a line with these two, but without coffins, and they were not of the race of giants; and then, at a little distance, there was a great pit, filled with the bones of men, women, and children, as if a slaughtered multitude had been flung into a common grave. In this pit were found some beads, light blue in colour, some sherds of red glazed pottery, and a few fragments of bronze. Over all was scattered a vast heap of limpet-shells.

Here is one of the fascinating problems of archaeology, which comes with the touch of romance to the dry study of minutiae: When were these burials made? Are they of two different dates? The giant of the stone coffin perhaps belonged to the far-off Stone Age, already grown dim and legendary to these later peoples, who knew of the working of metal and the making of glass. And were they sacrificed to him, as a dark hero or demi-god of the past, to propitiate him against plague or conquest? And what is the magical significance of the limpet-shells, which cover them and him alike? These questions, and many others, will, I am convinced, be answered by the patient research of archaeology within comparatively few years. The suggestion that this interment is Danish, and is the remnant of the force defeated by Alfred the Great outside Kenwith Castle, is, I think, untenable; the bones of women and children being found with those of men alone disproves it, apart from the inaccessibility of Lundy and the very great antiquity of the stone coffins.

But whoever they may be who left their bones here, it is certain the story of their lying there is a tragedy, of bloody sacrifice or more bloody massacre, like all the histories of wild animals and of primitive peoples.

Not far from the Giant's Grave, as this site is locally called, is another relic of hoary antiquity, in the shape of a tumulus, which, when opened, laid bare a kistvaen, or sepulchral chamber, formed of a great block of granite, weighing nearly five tons, resting on two upright granite slabs, and enclosing a space about six feet square. This method of burial is well known throughout the old world; such burial chambers have been found in Greece, and in considerable numbers in Ireland, where they are primitive Celtic. In the Lundy kistvaen no skeleton was found, nor anything, indeed, save a small fragment of pottery, though "there was a rank odour in the cavity, very different from that of newly turned earth."

There is a logan-stone on the eastern side of the island, which, within the memory of Mr. Heaven, the last owner of the island, was a true logan-stone, and could be rocked with the hands, but has now slipped from its socket. But the whole question of these logan-stones is controversial, some claiming them as relics of antiquity of whose use and meaning we are ignorant, and others as the chance product of the natural forces of rain and weather.

The same also may be said of the "rock-basins," of which a very perfect example may be found in the Punchbowl Valley, being a granite basin of four feet in diameter, with a uniform thickness of six inches, with both the concave and convex surfaces segments of a perfect sphere. Later opinion inclines to a human, and not a chance, origin for these interesting phenomena.

But, leaving the dim and still conjectural paths of archaeology, let us turn to the history of Lundy. Here again we are confronted with facts which a conscientious historian would hesitate to assert, save as legend. For this singular land, where the King's writ does not run, which is not assimilated even yet to municipal government, was for centuries, even down to the eighteenth century, a robber stronghold, from which, as from those castles on the Rhine, and still earlier and more powerful castles of the Aegean lords, built athwart the peninsulas of the trade-routes, the garrison swooped maraudering upon the peaceful occupations of unprotected folk.

Lundy is supposed, not upon very certain authority, to have been called "Herculea" in Roman times; and there is no record, nor even tradition, of how it came by its present name, only a vague conjecture of a Scandinavian origin, of which I have already spoken. But there are evidences of a much earlier occupation than the Roman—indeed, so far as I know, there have been no Roman remains found yet upon the island—and it is no unlikely supposition that the great skeleton of the Giant's Grave was some such feared and piratical chieftain as the first recorded lord of the island, the fierce de Marisco. These Mariscos were a branch of the great family of Montmorency, and they were ever a thorn in the side of their liege-lord, whether in England, Ireland, or Lundy. They must have owned Lundy since the days of the Norman Conquest, if they had not seized it before; for the great castle Marisco, built upon the extreme verge of the cliffs, commanding the bay and the landing-place, and overlooking in a wide sweep all the southern coast of the island, was already built in the eleventh century. From this impregnable fortress, with its massive walls nine feet in thickness, its squat, strong Norman turrets, its encircling fosse, and the perpendicular cliffs by which its seaward wall was made unscalable, Sir Jordan de Marisco used to sally with his retainers, making war on all alike, levying toll—blackmail, if ever there was, in the true meaning of the word—disobeying the laws of the land, and outraging the dictates of common humanity. So that, though he had married a Plantagenet, a blood relation of the King's, Henry II declared his estate of Lundy forfeited, and granted it to the Knights-Templars. Whether peace was made between Sir Jordan and Henry, or whether Henry was not strong enough to enforce his edict (though he was a powerful and determined monarch), I do not know; but in 1199, in the reign of King John, Sir Jordan's son William following in his father's evil ways, the grant of Lundy was confirmed to the Templars.

But this fortress was a hard nut to crack. The only approach is from the south-eastern corner, by a steep and narrow path commanded by the castle, and held by Marisco's men, and it was no light undertaking for the invaders to beach their boats and effect a landing against wind, weather, and attack. So that, although a tax was levied upon Devon and Cornwall to support an undertaking for the siege of Lundy, it does not appear to have been taken; for it was granted to Henry de Tracy (of the famous family of Tracy, cursed since the murder of Becket), and a few years later to one Robert Walerand. Then for some years de Marisco seems to have found even its mighty walls and granite cliffs too insecure, for he is found fighting among the French, and in 1217 was taken prisoner in a sea-fight, when Eustace the Monk, the pilot of the French fleet, was slain. Yet a few months later, in November of the same year, he was reinstated in possession of Lundy, and his wife, his sons and daughters, who had been seized by Henry III as hostages, were restored to him. Now favoured, now disgraced, but turbulent to the last, he died in possession of Lundy, but in the very year of his death having paid ransom to Henry of 300 marks.

His grandson, also William de Marisco, filled up the tale of violence and ill-doing, and forfeited at length the family inheritance, by his share in the attempted murder of the King at Woodstock. This is Westcote's account of the plot, given in his "View of Devonshire": . . . "Only Matthew Paris speaketh of one William de Marisco who, conspiring the death of Henry III, persuaded a Knight sometime of his Court to murder him, and with that intent got at night by a window into the King's bedchamber; but He, in whose protection the lives of princes are, disappointed him, for the King lay elsewhere. He seeking from chamber to chamber with a naked weapon in his hand, Mrs. Byset, one of the Queen's women, sitting late up at her devotions, shrieking at the fearful sight of him, awakened the King's guard, who presently took him."

The unhappy and probably demented youth was put to death, and de Marisco fled to his island, which he further fortified, and there, attaching to himself a band of outlaws and malefactors, lived by piracy. Retribution came in its due course, for, having made himself detested by all decent men, many knights and nobles joined against him, and contrived to take him by strategem. He was brought to London, tried, and condemned to death with sixteen accomplices, dragged from Westminster to the Tower, and there hanged. "When he had there breathed out his wretched soul," he was drawn and quartered—a literal account of which, as given in Matthew Paris, I forbear to set down—and the quarters of his body sent to the four principal cities of England. His father, Geoffrey, fled to France, and the island came under the government of Henry de Tracy for the Crown.

Yet in the reign of Edward I, one of the Irish branch of the Marisco family was reinstated in possession for a few years, though Edward II gave it to his favourite and his worst enemy, Hugh Spencer. It was there also, be it remembered, that he purposed taking refuge from his Barons, but was driven to Wales by contrary winds. In the time of Edward III the island came to the Luttrells, the great family that owned Dunster, Minehead, and many manors on the North Somerset coast; in the time of Westcote, in the reign of James I, it was in the possession of the Grenvilles.

It is difficult, and perhaps tedious, to attempt to follow in detail the many families who had, or laid claim to, possession of Lundy throughout the course of history; it is clear that it was a stronghold of importance, from the frequent references to it in our records. It was claimed and loaned and bought and held in fee from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. It was the scene of a wild and fantastic adventure in the reign of Charles I, when three Turkish pirate-ships swooped upon it, and made slave-raids into Devon and Cornwall, taking sixty men out of a church one Sunday morning, and carrying them away prisoner. "Egypt was never more infested with caterpillars," wrote the captain of a ship of war in 1630, "than the Channel with Biscayers."

The Turks sailed south with their human booty, but the Channel and the Devon coast became the prey of an English buccaneer, the famous Admiral Nutt, who was more boldly and splendidly piratical even than the buccaneers of "Treasure Isle," and who faced the King's navy and got clear to his stronghold of Lundy, though they dropped thirty great shot among his fleet, of which Nutt received ten through his own ship. What became of the Admiral I do not know; he was not captured and hanged, and so may have sailed away to the Barbadoes or the Mediterranean, and there have met his death and scuttled his ship in a last fight against odds, or perhaps been marooned by a mutinous crew, or set adrift in an open boat to die of hunger and thirst, or been stabbed in a drunken scuffle over a bottle of rum.

He passes away from the history of Lundy, but now a French man-o'-war and now a Spanish made raids up the Bristol Channel and upon Lundy, until Thomas Bushel held it for Charles I and established some measure of order. It was claimed from Bushel by Lord Say and Sele as his "inheritance," and he wrote to the King for permission to deliver it up, but proposing:

". . . If your Majesty shall require my longer stay here, be confident, sir, I shall sacrifice both life and fortune before the loyalty of

"Your obedient humble servant, "THOMAS BUSHEL."

Bushel received the following letter from Charles, which I transcribe because of the light which it throws on the King's character, a letter written in answer to a faithful and disinterested servant in a mood of petulant self-pity. ". . . Now, since the place is inconsiderable in itself, and yet may be of great advantages to you in respect of your mines, we do hereby give you leave to use your discretion in it, with this caution, that you do take example from ourselves, and be not over-credulous of vain promises, which hath made us great only in our sufferings and will not discharge our debts." This letter, more than any single document I know, shows the hopeless weakness of the Stuart character, and the unhappiness of serving the Stuart cause; this letter might have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, or by James II, or by the Old Pretender, or by the Young Pretender; in all alike we find what this letter shows, a certain gracious melancholy, a lack of moral courage, a great self-pity, and a great selfishness.

Thomas Bushel gave up the island into the hands of Colonel Fiennes, a Parliamentarian soldier, and the father of the intrepid young lady, Celia Fiennes, who, a few years later, travelled through the length and breadth of England on horseback, and wrote an account of her journeyings. Lord Say and Sele, who claimed the island, was her grandfather on the mother's side.

After the Restoration, and under the corrupt administration of Charles, the Dutch ravaged the shipping of the Channel, as the French did in the reign of William and Mary and Queen Anne, and as pirates did at all times, whenever a body of desperate men could establish themselves on Lundy, and from there make raids on the coastal traffic. The last and worst pirate of all, the most inhuman, as the meanest, a trafficker in human misery for the sake of gold, false even to the partners in his base contract, was Benson, a rich man by inheritance, and belonging to one of the oldest Bideford families, the leading citizen of Bideford and Appledore, and a member of Parliament for Barnstaple.

In 1747 he entered into a contract with the Government for the exportation of convicts, and gave bond to the Sheriff to transport them to Virginia or Maryland, which was the horrible method of treating criminals then in common use. But in 1748 he leased Lundy Island from Lord Gower, and, transporting the convicts there, began building walls and cultivating the island with this slave-labour. The great wall, called the Quarter Wall, on Lundy was built by these unhappy convicts. After a few years, however, Benson was discovered in smuggling, and a large quantity of tobacco and other goods was found in caves and chambers cut out of the rock. For this he was fined 5,000 pounds; but when his importation of convicts was discovered, and he was taxed with it, he excused himself by declaring that to send them to Lundy was the same as sending them to America, so long as they were transported anywhere out of England. The termination of his villainous career in England was owing to a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, a vulgar and inglorious crime without the element of danger and adventure which in some slight degree may be said to have invested the exploits of the other pirates who have infested Lundy.

Benson, having laded a vessel called the Nightingale with a valuable cargo of pewter, linen, and salt, insured her heavily before she sailed, ostensibly, for Maryland. But he had arranged with her master, Lancey, to put back at night and land the cargo at Lundy, and then to burn and scuttle the Nightingale. This was accordingly done, and the crew took to the boats and were picked up by a homeward-bound ship; but, as usual in these circumstances, one of the crew, animated by some personal pique, "blew the gaff," in the parlance of roguery. Lancey was taken, tried, and hanged, and Benson escaped to Portugal.

Little more remains to be said of the history of Lundy. In 1834 it was purchased by Mr. Heaven, and remained the property of his family for over sixty years, till 1906, when it once again came on the market, and was bid for by Germans, but was withdrawn from sale, and remains in English possession.

But I cannot close this short account of the island without a brief reference to the wild life which abounds on the pinnacles of its inaccessible rocks, on the fern-covered, steep slopes, and in its numberless sea-washed caves, which are haunted by seals, or were until within the last few years; for the brutality and selfish carelessness of chance visitors allowed to land by the courtesy of the owner have driven away much of the timid wild life which had taken refuge against the advancing tide of civilization. Seals used to be observed in fair numbers, particularly at the southern end in a great cave called Seal Cave, and walruses were occasional visitors. But lobsters and crabs are still caught in very great numbers, and, together with the innumerable conies which breed on the island, form the staple industry of the island.

Lundy is also the last stronghold of the original old English "black rat," which has been invaded and destroyed throughout England and Scotland by the common Scandinavian brown rat; Rat Island, at the south-eastern corner by the landing-stage, commemorates in its name this last fortress of a dying race.

But it is for its birds that Lundy is perhaps most notable. To those who first approach its mighty cliffs it might appear to be the haunt of all the birds in creation. There are gulls of many varieties, falcons, kestrels, ravens, crows, cormorants, kittiwakes, puffins; there is the razor-billed auk, and that now extinct bird, the Great Auk, was seen on the island no later than the last century.

But, indeed, it was no surprise to me to hear of this extinct species lingering on Lundy; the strangeness and wildness of the place might lead one to expect it to be the haunt of the Dodo, or that monstrous and fabulous bird of the "Arabian Nights," the Giant Roc.

The hoopoe, the pretty little Southern bird which haunts the gardens of Greece, sings its "tio, tio, tio, tio, tix" of Aristophanes' comedy on this wind-swept Northern isle; the rose-coloured starling, that rare and beautiful bird of a warmer clime, has been seen here in the spring; the eagle and the golden eagle hover above its crags; the sparrow-hawk and the great gyrfalcon prey upon the small birds and little rodents; even the wild and shy osprey was known to build its eyrie upon Lundy to within the last half-century.

Many of these birds are visitors only, and do not breed here; for in the spring and the autumn, when the great tides of migration set north and south, Lundy lies in the track of their going, and here the birds alight, in their hundreds of thousands, to rest the wings tired with the going and coming from Africa or Asia across the miles of water.

But whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, any bold walker who ventures round the cliffs and coves of Lundy will find himself surrounded with such a crowd of screaming sea-fowl, diving, swooping, poising, or darting, in such myriads as if the foot of man had never yet scared them from their breeding-places, as the sea-fowl swooped and screamed from their inviolate heights when the first Norsemen ran their beaked ship on to the desert beaches of Iceland.



CHAPTER IX

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.



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."