Part 2

I was on the French mail-steamer _Tage_ at anchor in the Dardanelles, a little way below the Narrows, on Friday 30 April 1880. There were many Mohammedans on board; and, when prayer-time came, they unrolled their prayer-rugs, and laid them out on deck, pointing them to Mecca. Just as they began to pray, the current caught the ship, and she began to swing; and, as soon as they looked up, they saw that they had got their bearings wrong. So they slewed round, and put their rugs straight; and then, of course, the same thing happened again. And it went on happening till they had finished their prayers.

They had a procession at Thebes in Bœotia, when I was there, 11 April 1888. They were badly in want of rain, and reckoned on getting some, if they marched solemnly round the place in honour of Elijah. They were of the Greek Church, and had greater faith in him than in the saints of later times.

There is a pleasant procession in Rome on Christmas morning, the True Cradle being carried round S. Maria Maggiore. I saw that done in 1909, and somehow in the clouds of incense I saw the cradle of Romulus and Remus carried in procession through the Forum.

The high-altar at St Peter’s is scrubbed on Maundy Thursday; and, as I was in Rome, 14 April 1892, I went to see it done. This rite comes after Miserere, and therefore in the twilight. St Peter’s is not lighted up, and looks the vast size that it really is, as one cannot see the details that impair it. The dignitaries of the church come down in procession, each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon the altar, and then begin to scrub. I was close by, and noticed how differently they all did it. Some evidently thought it symbolical, and merely waved their mops across the altar, hardly touching it. And others would scrub hard, and then put their heads down and look carefully through their spectacles to see what they had done, and then go on scrubbing again till they were satisfied that they had done their bit.

I was in Rome with my father and my mother in 1876, and Monsignor Stonor arranged that we should be presented to the Pope. There were about a hundred other people to be presented, 22 September, and we were all ranged in groups round one of the big rooms in the Vatican. And then the Pope came in, and went leisurely round the room, saying a few words to each of us. Stonor told him that I had just left Harrow, and was going up to Cambridge: whereupon he beamed, and said he hoped that I should be a good historian. It was an odd remark, for nothing had been said of history, and that was not my line. But some years afterwards I took to writing books on history.

Pius IX was then in his eighty-fifth year, and was altogether a most pleasant person to behold--tall, big and genial, with nothing ecclesiastical about him but his dress. He had a judge’s face, rather than a bishop’s.

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The next time I was here, I was talking to Mrs *****--she was of an earlier generation than the Mrs ***** of whom I spoke just now--and I told her that I had been to Rome and seen the Pope. She asked me eagerly, “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper tiger to fight.” As a thoroughgoing Protestant, she knew no difference between the Devil and the Pope.

Her husband always felt that a great chance had been missed, when the Devil came into Widdicombe church on Sunday 21 October 1638. My grandfather pressed him as to what he would have done; and his reply was, “Dock’n, maister, dock’n--cut the tail of’n off.” I imagine that the Devil’s tail at Widdicombe would have drawn more pilgrims than all the relics of the saints at other places.

I have been told that an ancestor of mine, then living at Torr in the parish of Widdicombe, was one of the people present in the church, when the Devil came in; but I have no documentary proof. In the old rhymed narrative, inscribed upon a tablet in the church, there is no mention of the Devil, but only a broad hint:--“a crack of thunder suddenly, with lightning, hail and fire ... a sulphureous smell ... or _other force, whate’er it was_, which at that time befell.”

Once, for about five minutes, I had the strongest possible belief in the personality of the Devil, or rather of his ancestor Great Pan, for I felt the Panic Terror. I was coming down along the side of Yarner Wood in bracken nearly as high as my head. It was beginning to get dark, and I was just thinking I should be very late for dinner; when suddenly I remembered the story of the Devil taking refuge in that wood, and I felt dead certain he was there. I stepped out very briskly till I reached the road.

Strange apparitions may be seen on Dartmoor on a misty day: especially if you have lost your bearings, and come unexpectedly on one of the great groups of rocks with this vapour drifting in and out between them. It is like “seeing faces in the fire,” but on a scale that seems stupendous in the mist.

There is said to be a goblin about a quarter of a mile from here. He sits on Bishop’s Stone--so called because it bears the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369 A.D. I have never seen the goblin; but I have good evidence that men have been scared by something there at night, and that horses have refused to pass there in the day. I fancy they hear the murmur of water running underground.

They tell this story of a place near here:--The master of the house was dead and buried, yet came home every night, and tramped about. As the family felt this was a parson’s job, the parson came one night, and threw a handful of churchyard mould in the face of his deceased parishioner, who thereupon became a black pony. (In these stories the churchyard mould always turns the ghost into a black creature of some sort, but not always as nice a creature as a Dartmoor pony.) They got a halter, and told a boy to run the pony down the side of the valley as hard as ever he could, and jump it across the Wrey. He did as he was told; but, when he jumped, he found he had the halter only, and no pony.--Ghosts cannot cross water; and this ghost of a pony was run down the hill at such a pace that it could not stop itself. It had to attempt the crossing of the water, and vanished in the attempt.

The story used always to be told of Thorn Park, a house that is marked on Donn’s map of Devon in 1765, but has long since been pulled down. Of late years I have heard it told of East Wrey, which is a little further up the Wrey valley, and on the other side of the Moreton road. On venturing to question this, I have been answered rather tartly that it must have been at East Wrey, as it was in that part of the valley, and there is no other house up there. Thorn Park has been forgotten.

Stories often shift about from place to place in this way. Only a few weeks ago a friend of mine told me a story of Hampton Court and Queen Victoria, which was told him by a man who certainly had means of finding out if it was true. According to Bismarck, _Reflections and Reminiscences_, vol. i, pages 246, 247, substantially the same story was told at Petersburg in 1859 about the Summer Garden and the Empress Catherine. I fancy I have seen it also in one of the Byzantine historians--I am not sure which--about Blachernæ and an Empress who lived many centuries before Catherine.

* * * * *

After the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt many of the royal tombs were pillaged, and the priests removed the royal mummies to safer places in the hills near Thebes. The places have now been discovered, and the mummies have been removed to the museum at Cairo. Maspero was supervising one of these removals, with a gang of natives to do the work. The mummies were brought out one by one, and laid down in the shade below a ledge of rock. In the heat of the day the natives rested, and he went on working at his notes. Suddenly he heard a fearful shriek; and, looking up, saw one of the natives pointing at a mummy--the mummy was slowly raising itself with the gesture that Orientals use in uttering a solemn curse. All the natives fled, and he was left alone to face the mummies; but he soon saw what was happening. This mummy was no longer in the shade, as the sun was coming round the ledge of rock; and the heat was causing a contraction of some glutinous substance in the mummy, and thus producing this movement.--He told me this himself at his house in Paris on 25 March 1896.

I also heard in Paris a story of Colonel Picquart, the amateur detective in the Dreyfus case. I heard it from a man who knew him well.--Picquart took nothing on trust: always looked into everything himself. As there was some talk in Paris of spirit-rapping, table-turning, and such things, he went to a séance to see what he could make of it. He suspected some trickery about a hat that they were using, and made them use his own. “And they not only caused my hat to rotate upon the table, but they imparted to it such an impetus of rotation, that it continued to rotate upon my head all the while that I was walking home.”

An old Oxford don once went with me from Athens to Sunium, 2 April 1888, and others laughed irreverently at some notes he made there:--“view from temple: saw several islands: had lunch: saw more islands.” It was also after lunch that a painter, whom I knew, mistook an only child for twins. But at Sunium it was not the luncheon--only the lifting of a haze upon the sea.

Though I have been in places, such as Chios and Messina, where there were earthquakes a little while before or after, I have never felt an earthquake in any place but London, 22 April 1884. It was in the morning, and I was going to take a coat down from a rack on which four coats were hanging, when I saw them swing like pendulums, and heard a bell ring. I knew what it was; but, when I asked other people if they had felt the earthquake, they were so impolitely incredulous that I felt embarrassed. I did not recover my character until the afternoon, when the papers issued their sensational posters.

* * * * *

On first seeing this house, a friend of mine began to think there might be ghosts about; but he changed his mind, on looking at some portraits that are hanging here. People of that type would never turn into ghosts that went wandering round a house at midnight: _their_ ghosts would all be sitting round the fire drinking punch. These ghosts might tell me many things that I should like to know; and I hope that, if I meet them here, I shall have the presence of mind of Dante, when he met Adam and forthwith asked him for an ‘interview’ upon primæval language and other forgotten things, _Paradiso_, xxvi. 94-96.

Another friend was puzzled about the Inner Parlour the first time that he came here: he had seen something like it once before, but could not remember where. He told me afterwards that he had thought of it. It was in a Pantomime, and it was called The Kitchen In The Ogre’s Home.

Strangers come here now and then, and ask if they may see the garden and the house. One day some Americans came, and were much taken with it all. One of them said to another:--“I should like to pho-to-graph that house.” But the other answered:--“No. That house ought not to be pho-to-graphed. It ought to be paint-ted in oi-il.”

Two of the sitting-rooms here are called the Tallet and the Shippen. Both names are common in this district; but one of them is Latin, and the other one is Saxon. Tallet is merely a corruption of _tabulatum_, which means an upper floor. Shippen comes from _scipen_, like Ship from _scip_, and means some sort of shed.

The names Beer and Brewer are also common here, both for persons and for places. Beer means a grove of trees, _bearu_ in Saxon. And that is why so many orchards have that name. Brewer means heather, _brueria_ in late Latin, _bruyère_ in modern French. Teign Brewer, not far from here, belonged to Geoffrey de la Bruere; and then a part of it came to his son-in-law, Thomas le Gras, and was named Teign Grace. This fat (_gras_) Thomas was contemporary with the gallant (_preux_) William--William le Pruz, or Prowse--whose effigy rests in the transept of the church at Lustleigh.

Teigncombe, further up the Teign, has given its name to a family that came from there. Their name is written as Tinckcom on the court-roll of Wreyland manor; and I believe that one branch of the family now bears the name of Tinker. The family of Pipard gave its name to Piparden, which now is Pepper Down; and Genesis Down owes its name to the Genista, the broom plant of the Plantagenets.

From a point on Reddiford Down there is a grand view over hill and dale; but in all that wide expanse of country there are

only four dwellings to be seen, and those four dwellings are mentioned in Domesday. In the clumsy Norman spelling Woolley is Vluelei, Pullabrook is Polebroch, Hawkmoor is Hauocmore, and Elsford is Eilauesford. In the Exeter version there are some details that are not in the Exchequer version. These were the dwellings of four thanes, and the thanes were there in the reign of Edward the Confessor.

In many of the parishes between Dartmoor and the sea the village and the church are in a corner of the parish, and generally the corner nearest to the sea. This happens so often, that there must have been a reason for it, though there is no knowing what the reason was. The same thing happened with many of the provinces of ancient Rome. Thus, Lugudunensis extended to the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, but Lugudunum itself, the modern Lyons, was in the corner nearest to the Mediterranean and to Rome. So also Tarraco, the modern Tarragona, was on the Mediterranean coast, but Tarraconensis stretched back to the Bay of Biscay.

Lustleigh church is within seventy yards of the Wrey, which is the parish boundary there. This house is in Bovey Tracey parish, and yet is less than a quarter of a mile from Lustleigh church, and more than two miles and a half from Bovey Tracey church, measuring in a straight line.

* * * * *

Besides the old church at Bovey Tracey, there is a new church about as far from here. This church now has a district of its own, but formerly was served by the Vicar and his curates. At the old church the service was very plain indeed, and he preached in a black gown; but at the new church it was ornate, and he preached in other things. And people said he preached rank Popery there, though he preached sound doctrine at the old church. I have some reason to believe that the sermons he preached at the new church were the same that he had preached at the old church in the previous year. The black gown covered the Popery, if there was any there.

Writing to my father on 7 November 1852, my grandfather tells him:--“The Lustleigh folks had a bonfire on the 5th, and burnt the Pope in a white surplice: therefore the old women say it was intended for the Rector.” He writes on 15 May 1853:--“Your mother has been to church this morning, and says there were not a score of folks there, and the Rector was looking wretched: which I do not wonder at. His congregation have left him, and now there is a chapel building.”

Lustleigh was upset by his preaching in his surplice. Most of his parishioners thought it meant a change of doctrine; and they called him a High Romish Priest. I do not know his motives; but I know the motives of another country clergyman, who did the same. His old black gown was getting so shabby that his wife was always telling him that he must have a new one. And he shelved the question by preaching in his surplice.

As a rule, a surplice meant a shorter sermon; but my friend preached on, as if he had a new black gown. A dreamy organist once played a great Amen in a slight pause in the sermon; and the choir and congregation sang it very fervently.

That church was restored a few years since; and the Squire took the plate round at the opening service afterwards. But he forgot that the chancel had been raised a step above the nave; and he just tripped enough to shoot the whole collection off the plate. The coins went rolling along the chancel floor, and mostly vanished down the gratings over the hot-water pipes--an inauspicious sight: the ancients made their peace with the Infernal Deities by casting offerings into chasms.

Even at Lustleigh there were mishaps in church; and my grandfather used to note them in his letters to my father. Thus, on Sunday 18 August 1844, “a magpie walked into the church and sat himself on the communion table, to the great annoyance of the congregation; and the sexton had much difficulty in driving him.” Then, on Sunday 15 December 1844, “one of the candles fell from the pulpit into the seat below.” And so on. Once, within my recollection, there was a sermon by a stranger, who enhanced his eloquence by gesture; and with one wide sweep of his arms he brought down candles, glasses, cushion, and everything. The cushion caught the clerk upon the head, just as he was getting to sleep; and I have been told that what he said was just Amen, and nothing more.

I see that I first went to Lustleigh Church on the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of 1862, while I was down here on a visit to my grandfather. In those days the service was mainly a dialogue between the parson and the clerk, the parson in very cultured tones and the clerk in resonant dialect, one saying ‘As for lies, I hate and abhor them’ as if it was superfluous for him to say so, and the other responding ‘Seven times a day do I praise thee’ as if it was a fact and he wished it generally known. The singing was confined to hymns. There was a choir of men and boys in a gallery below the tower, and a harmonium near them. But there used to be a choir of men and women, and an orchestra of bass-viol, violin and flute; and the tuning made a pleasant prelude to the service. There were three men who could play the viol; and it went by rank, not merit. One man farmed his own land, and he had first claim: next came a man who was a tenant farmer; and last a man who had no farm, but played better than the other two.

There were high pews then, and a razed three-decker--parson over clerk, with sounding-board on top, and reading-desk alongside half way up. Nearly all the windows had plain glass, so that one could see the trees and sky; and everything was whitewashed.

The whitewash was removed in 1871, and made way for much worse things--green distemper on the walls, blue paint and gilt stars on the roof, crude stencils on the side walls of the chancel, and on the eastern wall a fresco made in Germany. The trees and sky are hidden by glass that is exasperating in its colour and design. Lavatory tiles replace the granite paving of the chancel, and there is marble of the sort one sees on washstands.--It makes one crave for the French system of scheduling old churches as National Monuments, and putting them under the Ministry of Fine Arts.

All the old stained glass has gone, except some bits of four small figures--the Virgin and Child, and saints Nicholas, Catherine and Martha--and in 1880 these figures were made up, and put into a window. Some say that the old glass was destroyed by the Reformers, others by the Puritans; but such things were done by most unlikely people. There was a window in St Edmond’s church at Salisbury; and the Recorder of Salisbury “was placed in the church in such a seat as that the said window was always in his eye.” Its absurdity annoyed him--it made God “a little old man in a blue and red coat”--and one afternoon in October 1630 he got up and smashed it with his staff. He was fined: _State Trials_, vol. i, pp. 377 ff., ed. 1730.

Tristram Risdon visited Lustleigh church about three hundred years ago, and in his _Survey of Devon_ he says, “Another tomb there is arched over, where some say the lord Dynham and his lady were interred, whose pictures are to be seen very glorious in a glass window, having their armories between them, and likewise on their surcoats escutcheons of arms.” This probably was like the window at Beer Ferrers--Lysons, _Devonshire_, plate 6--with pictures of William de Ferrers and his wife with their armorial bearings. William was contemporary with Robert de Dynham; and probably it was Robert and his wife, not lord Dynham and his lady, who were portrayed in the stained glass that has perished and in the stone effigies that survive.

There was an Inquiry here on 22 December 1276, and William de Torr was on the jury. And the verdict was that Robert’s wife would be entitled to Lustleigh manor when she came of age, and meanwhile he was renting it for £10 a year, to be spent in praying for the soul of John de Mandevill. The wife, Emma de Wydeworth, had just been married at the age of ten: her father and mother were dead, and the mother had been a lunatic. In her effigy she looks as if she might have been a lunatic herself.

She inherited the manor from her father, and he inherited it from William de Wydeworth, an energetic man who kept a gallows of his own at Lustleigh. He had no warrant for a gallows, but gallows were wanted in the reign of Henry III. As the King could not enforce the law, lords of manors had to do the necessary thing.

There was some lawlessness in Lustleigh even after Edward I. John de Moeles, the owner of Wreyland, had a brother Roger, born in 1296 and married in 1316 to Alice le Pruz, who was ten years older than himself. And on 26 July 1317 the King issued a commission:--On complaint by Roger de Moeles it appears that John Daumarle and certain other malefactors and perturbers of the peace have seized Alice, the wife of this same Roger, by force of arms at Lustleigh, and have carried her off together with goods and chattels and certain charters and muniments of his, etc. etc.

Roger was a ward of the King, and the King thus had the right of choosing a wife for him, while he was under age; but the King sold the right to William Inge, who kept what we should call a Matrimonial Agency. Roger chose Alice--or perhaps it was Alice chose Roger--without Inge’s intervention, and Inge got his money back: at any rate, he got orders on the Exchequer, 20 July and 13 December 1316, to refund the money or take it off the price of the next match that he bought. He could not have claimed anything, if he had merely failed to sell what he had bought; so he declared that Roger died before a marriage could be arranged. That was palpably a lie, but such lies might serve. There was a case in Norfolk a few years after this, Folsham v. Houel. The jury gave a verdict for the plaintiff, and then the defendant got a Writ of Attaint against the jurors for giving such a verdict. The plaintiff and his friends entered into a conspiracy to declare that he was dead, as his death would put an end to the proceedings. They announced the death, and had a grand funeral with an empty coffin, and even had masses for his soul. Then the coroner came down, and they put a body in the coffin, and made him believe it was the plaintiff’s; and the Writ was quashed on his report. But on 12 June 1347 the King issued a commission for arresting all the people concerned in the affair, and keeping them in prison until further orders.

Roger’s wife was the daughter of William le Pruz. He died at Holbeton in 1316, and was buried in the church there, instead of Lustleigh church, as directed in his will; and she got a licence from bishop Grandisson, 19 October 1329, to bring her father’s body here. That procession here from Holbeton would make a striking scene, should there ever be a Lustleigh pageant.