Part 3

Risdon says, “In an aisle of this church is a tomb, with the statue of a knight cut thereon cross-legged in stone, on whose shield are three lions; as also in that window under which he is interred, are three lions between six cross croslets, by which I conceive it was one of the family of the Prouze.” There is nothing to be seen upon the shield now; and the window has an Ascension in stained glass suggesting that, if hell is paved with good intentions, the floor of heaven is covered with linoleum.

There are only three old coats of arms remaining, and these were not there in Risdon’s time. They are Carew, Kirkham and Southcote, and probably date from 1589. Thomas Southcote married the daughter and heiress of Thomas Kirkham, who married the daughter and heiress of William Carew; and, as William’s grandmother was a sister and co-heiress of lord Dynham, they are not inappropriate in a window near the Dynham effigies. I put them there in 1903. Till then they were at Barnehouse, otherwise Barne Court or Barne, a place that Thomas Southcote got by marrying Grace Barnehouse, his first wife. In talking of the house, a man remarked to me, “That be a proper ancient place--there be rampin’ lions in the kitchen window.” I went up to see, and found they were the lions rampant of the Kirkhams, but had then been put into a cupboard for security. The owner let me have them for the church.

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When I was young, the church bells said Crock, Kettle and Pan. My grandfather told me that this was what they said; and he writes to my father on 10 June 1849:--“When I was a little boy, they told me the Lustleigh bells said Crock, Kettle and Pan.” There are more bells now, and they say something else--all swear-words, I believe.

He writes him on 26 May 1850:--“The farmers set the church bells ringing, when *****’s man left on Friday.” The man had made himself obnoxious, and they were thankful to be rid of him. Church bells were not very ecclesiastical in those days. My father told me that they rang at every church in Exeter, when Latimer was acquitted, 27 March 1848.

Latimer was the proprietor of the _Western Times_, and it called the Bishop a consecrated “perverter of facts.” He was indicted for libel, and tried at the assizes. Cockburn--afterwards Chief Justice--was a friend of his, and came down (without fee) to defend him; and the Bishop had a very bad time in cross-examination. The judge told the jury plainly that, if they acquitted Latimer, they would brand their bishop as a liar. And they branded him.

There was another case of which I heard a good deal from my father--a murder by highwaymen about six miles from here. The facts are noted in his diary. On 16 July 1835:--“Mr Jonathan May murdered at Jacobs Well near Moreton at half past ten in the evening: he dined at my father’s that day.” On 28 July 1836, at Exeter during the assizes:--“Buckingham Joe (Oliver) and Turpin (Galley) tried for the murder of Mr Jonathan May, found guilty and sentenced to be hung.” On 12 August 1836:--“Saw Buckingham Joe hung.”

He doubted if they hanged the right man after all, but felt it did not really matter, as the man should have been hanged for other things, if not for that. I fancy his attention may have wandered from the trial, for after “sentenced to be hung” his diary goes on:--“Bought the models of the Elgin Marbles of Field.” This was W. V. Field, afterwards a Judge and finally a Law Lord; and it was a set of Henning’s models of the frieze of the Parthenon. I have them here.

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Duelling did not quite cease in England until just before my time; and I used to hear the older men lamenting its cessation. They complained of being deprived of their redress for an affront. And that is practically what happened, for these affronts were mostly of the sort for which a jury gives a farthing damages.

My mother used to tell me what a shock it was to her, at the age of ten, when she was told one afternoon that an old friend of the family had been killed that morning in a duel--shot dead at twelve paces. It was a quarrel of two retired officers over facts which they could easily have verified. They had both got the facts wrong, and each was right in disbelieving what the other said; but neither of them would allow his veracity to be impugned, and they settled the matter in this fashion at five o’clock next morning.

Among my papers here I have a memorandum of a better way of settling such disputes:--“London, 4 January 1854. Mr Torr bets Mr Jackson (& Mr J. Mr T. vice versa) that Buttern Down summit is at least 700 feet above Forder, Moreton, a dinner at the White Hart, Moreton, to all the friends the winner chooses to invite.”--It is only 500 feet above.

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My grandfather writes to my brother, 16 January 1862:--“I enclose a piece of poetry, which was sent to me, on the old Cross Tree at Moreton. The stone cross erected there with a bason on the top to contain holy water, you are aware, is a relic of Popery. There was one at Chagford like it until some three years ago the lord of the manor, old Mr Southmead, destroyed it cross and all, for he had such dislike of Popery. I have known others in town-places, but this at Moreton is the last that I know of remaining; and the old tree is going to decay. I should tell you that some fifty years or more ago Mr Harvey’s house was an inn, and the innkeeper had the interstices of the tree floored over like a room, and people used to go up and drink and smoke, and all holyday times dancing was kept up for many nights together. I have danced there and drank there with good jovial parties: times were different then.” And he goes on to mention other people who used to dance there--people whom I remember in their old age, sedate and solemn, and looking as though they had never danced anything less stately than a minuet.

At the close of the Crimean War he had some peace-rejoicings of his own for the people in this hamlet: thirty-eight all told, men, women and children. He writes to my father, 1 June 1856:--“Well, I gave our villagers roast beef, plum pudding, vegetables, bread, etc., a regular good hot dinner, and plenty of good beer. The dinner was at 1 o’clock, and the tea at 5. For tea plenty of Ashburton cakes and bread with plenty of cream and butter. It was held in the barn [next Pit Lane] as the air was cold and no sun. They had fiddlers, and walked in procession: afterwards returned to the barn to dance, which they kept up merrily until 12 o’clock. We had the Union Jack over the barn, and many arches well decked with flowers.”

There were rejoicings at Lustleigh on the marriage of the Prince of Wales. And on 12 March 1863 he writes:--“Where all the folks came from I can hardly tell, but I am told there were but few that did not belong to Lustleigh or the Tithing. Tho’ they all knew me, there were many I could not recognize until they spoke to me. There are but very few here about that belong to the parish: for instance we have but one in all the village that was born in Lustleigh.”

Here ‘tithing’ means the bits of Hennock and Bovey Tracey parishes that lie in Wreyland manor, and ‘village’ means Wreyland hamlet, Lustleigh village being called the ‘town.’ Thus in old notes here I find:--“All the children in the village and Lustleigh town”--“Sent over to town to buy stamps”--and so on. And again:--“Poor old ***** from yonder town dropt down in the town-place in a seizure.” The yonder town is the group of houses near the Baptist chapel, and the town-place is the open space outside the church-yard--at Moreton it is the King’s-acre outside and God’s-acre within. King’s-acre and town-place are good old names, connoting certain rights; but our Uitlanders want to call these places Squares.

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My grandfather did not always approve of everything his neighbours did, but he kept his comments for his letters to my father. Thus, on 13 August 1843, he writes:--“There was a party of parsons and doctors at *****’s at Gidly last week. They played at wrestling, and ***** of Manaton was thrown with a broken arm in two places. High time to do something with these fellows. How can people go to church and sit under them.”

Writing on 31 March 1860 about a staghound that had been worrying sheep, and had killed above a hundred in a month, he observes:--“The farmer is generally a selfish man, not caring much about his neighbour; and they did not take the thing up in good neighbourly spirit until Thursday last, when all the farmers in the different parishes assembled, some 150, to drive up the country, which was the only way to succeed; and they succeeded in finding him in a coppice not far from Meacombe. A man discharged both barrels at him, and wounded him: then the horsemen went in full chase for some three or four miles, and regularly rode him down and dispatched him.... I often find farmers laughing at the misfortunes of another, but now the loss was so general that there were but few to laugh.”

On 19 January 1840 he has a few words on a neighbour who was too fond of talking politics:--“Old ***** is very cross and tedious--I can hardly bear with him. He is all but a Tory, indeed he likes to associate more with Torys than Liberals: he detests Whigs; and nothing but Chartism, or something like it, will do for him, for he has lived all these years in expectation of a Revolution, and none come, and is afraid he shall die without seeing it.”

He writes on 24 May 1852:--“A greater nuisance there cannot be than a magistrate in a little rural district.... We never before had a magistrate nearer than *****, and if any little paltry squabble happened between parties, their courage invariably cooled down on crossing the water, and almost invariably they returned home without a summons. But now whilst passion is up they have only to go to *****, and a summons is granted, I find, much to the regret of many after cool reflection.”

There is a footpath here that cuts off the corner at Wreyland Cross, and leads down to Wreyford Bridge; and he writes, 20 July 1856:--“The farmer has nailed up and wreathed up Wreyford Park gates, and says (I am told) he will summons anyone who passes that way. I asked his landlord if he had sanctioned it; he said No, but when the farmer applied to him, said he might do as he liked.... I told him I should take down the wreath, and if he chose to summon anyone, I was the best he could summon, for I would prove about sixty years a quiet and unmolested pathway, and my mother about eighty, and others in the village more than fifty.” (He was sixty-seven then, and my great-grandmother was ninety-one.) He writes next day that the farmer is taking the obstruction down.

In a letter of 19 March 1854 he says:--“In my growing up we heard nothing of game preserving hereabout, and game was in abundance; and at certain seasons you could see at times all classes of people out for a day’s sport. They would kill but little; but then it was an amusement, and a day’s holyday, and apparently an unrestricted right to go where they liked unmolested: so they enjoyed a right old English liberty, and came home tired and happy, not caring whether they had game or not. But since the game is preserved, and they are restrained from killing it in the old way, they appear determined to kill it some way or another. Consequently game is not so plenty now as heretofore.”

In a letter of 7 October 1852 he notes another change here:--“The old barn-door or dung-hill cock appears to be extinct, being crossed with China, Minorca, etc. I well remember when a boy you could not go out, particularly up the vale of Lustleigh, but you heard them all crowing in all directions, each on his own dung-hill, challenging each other, and their shrill clarion-like sound echoed through the valley.... The sort they have now are so hoarse and dull in their crowing that there is nothing to attract attention, nothing agreeable in their sound, and not loud enough to be heard by one another, so there is no answering each other. In my boyhood the whole valley would ring with them.”

Again, on 6 March 1854 he writes:--“I am going up again soon, and shall take some feathers from two cocks I saw, a blue and a red, which I consider will do. The real colours are very scarce: people mix up their breeds so, that there are but few of the old sort left.” I presume that he wanted the feathers for making flies for fishing. He always made his own flies, and made them very neatly: so also did my father; but I never made a fly that could even be offered to a fish.

On 21 May 1848 he gives my father a little lecture on his fishing:--“Kneel down on one knee. I have done so many a time, when the water has been clear, and thrown my fly with the greatest precision, and almost sure of a fish, but seldom succeeding in the second throw if failing in the first. That sort of careful fishing is practised by all good fishermen, though no doubt one threshes away and often takes fish--not so with your grandfather or with myself in my early days: we were more particular, and took large catches of fish.”

He writes to him, 24 May 1842:--“I certainly have enjoyed the Teign fishing as much as anyone, for besides the fishing I always so much enjoyed the scenery--particularly on that part above and below Fingle Bridge. In my early days I seldom went on any other part, but used to begin at Whiddon, fish down, and return to Fingle; and home over the woods.” After a day’s fishing there, 12 April 1849, my father notes in his diary:--“My father walked up Fingle Hill without resting or feeling fatigued, although sixty in a few days time.” That was the age at which my father died, and the age that I have now attained; and I cannot walk up that interminable hill without an effort.

My father fished there sometimes, and sometimes in the Dart near Post Bridge, but much more often in the Bovey and the Wrey, as they were so much nearer. He also liked scenery as well as fishing; and there is as good scenery on the Bovey under Lustleigh Cleave as on the Teign at Fingle Bridge.

He also fished in many of the trout-streams in the Alps and Pyrenees and Ardennes; and in 1858 and other years he went to Muggendorf for fishing in the Wiesent, and to Lambach and Ischl for the Traun. The people used to ask for flies, but very soon found that he owed less to flies than to his way of casting them. My mother fished with him, and got many good fish; but she never thought the sport was worth the journey and the discomfort in the smaller inns. I remember my brother at one of them: he made no comment of his own, but just quoted Shakespeare:--“Now am I in Ardennes: when I was at home, I was in a better place.”

They tried the Wiesent and the Traun again in 1873, but it was no longer what it used to be--ten or a dozen trout about fifteen inches long. There was too much fishing, and few fish were left. I went to Munich, while they were at Muggendorf, but was at Ischl with them. And at Ischl it was curious to see how casually the Emperor Francis Joseph went strolling round the place in shooting-clothes, the Crown Prince Rudolph with him. At first I took them for the squire and his son.

By all accounts there have always been better fish in the Wrey than ever came out of it with rod and fly. At the present time--June 1917--there are two big otters in it close by here, and I presume they have not come for nothing. On 6 May 1844 my grandfather writes to my father:--“I conjecture the poachers have not let this fine weather pass without dipping their nets for some.” And on 10 December 1848 he writes:--“They have been very busy lately in taking all they can, but Mr ***** got foul of some last week, and took their spears from them, and told them, if again caught, he will prosecute them.”

He writes to him on 21 December 1851:--“The fish will soon be up for spawning: the water has been too low for them. I was amused for four days following to see three trout about 8 in. long so busy at work in the meadow. Direct above the bridge under the bushes there is a plain, and just by the bridge it runs out a little stickle with a rubble-stone bottom and very little water, so that when at work the water did not cover their back-fins. Not having seen them for some days, I have no doubt they deposited their spawn. I never saw such before, but the poachers tell me that is the way they do--always deposit it in the stickle and where the bottom is rubbly, and not in the sand beds as I always suspected. And then the poachers go and take them in the act of laying it; and those pieces of broken earthenware that you frequently see are thrown in near the works, so that at night if they see anything over the shord (as they call it) they strike and depend on its being a fish.”

He writes on 12 December 1847:--“They are killing truff [bull-trout] in all directions. I looked in the little stream near Forder, where many fires had been made, and saw three huge fish in work.” Fires were made to attract the fish to points where they could easily be speared.

On 13 December 1841 he writes:--“The poachers are catching the salmon--two have been taken in the meadow going to Lustleigh town, not large, about 10 lbs. each. I hear many truff have been taken also. I believe they go further up, and are mostly taken by the Moreton men.” On 18 March 1844 he writes that Mr Wills of East Wrey is making a leet from the Wrey to irrigate his land. And on 9 April 1853 he writes:--“Mr Wills’ man told me this week that they take up lots of fish on the grass at East Wrey that get out in irrigating the meadows, and that they took up one as big and long as his leg. I should say it was a salmon that went up at Candlemas: what they call Candlemas fish.”

And then on 8 April 1868 he writes:--“No wonder the fish are scarce in our brook, for they have embankments for irrigation, which destroys such numbers of fish in spawning time that truff and white fish [bull-trout and salmon-trout] are rarely seen now. One of the old poachers tells me that he does not know of one being taken for three years past--except those that do succeed in going up are sure to be seen on the grass returning. Since my remembrance they had a free course up to Bughead in Moreton, and the Moreton fellows used to take them with their hands, and plenty left after. But all that is stopped: none to take.”

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From 1866 until his death in 1878 my father had some fishing on the Wandle a little way from Mitcham, which was then a quiet country village with fields of lavender and roses for making scented waters. The level country and the broad and sluggish stream seemed very dreary, when one thought of the little rivers that come tumbling down the valleys here. And the sport was of another kind. Here there was a chance of a dozen or twenty trout, none of them more than a pound in weight. Fish of that size were thrown back in the Wandle, to let them have a chance of growing bigger. There were trout of two and three pounds there, and a few such fish made a good catch. As a matter of fact, the catch depended much more on the landing-net than on the rod and fly. I had to take the landing-net, while my father played his fish; and that cured me of what little love I had for fishing.

Friends of my father’s came down now and then to fish with him; and amongst them Robert Romer, who was afterwards a Lord Justice. He had been Senior Wrangler; so my father led him on to giving me a little good advice, when I was going up to Cambridge. He began:--“Whatever you do, never work more than five hours a day.” I noted the expression on my father’s face--that was not the sort of advice that he wanted anyone to give me. But the advice was really good. Romer held that nobody could work at high pressure for more than five hours in the day; and it was better to put on high pressure for the five than low pressure for eight or ten or twelve. It gave more time for other things.

In those days George Bidder lived in a large house near Mitcham. He was then a very eminent civil-engineer, but in his early days he was The Calculating Boy. He was born at Moreton in 1806, and was well known to my grandfather. There is a book here, dated 1820, giving calculations that he made, always correctly, and generally in less than a minute. They include such things as finding the cube root of 304, 821, 217--answered instantly--of 67, 667, 921, 875--answered in ¼ minute--and of 897, 339, 273, 974, 002, 153--answered in 2½ minutes. I had the cheek to ask him how he did it. And he told me that he used his mind’s eye, and could see the figures manœuvring in front of him.

I found it was unwise to talk at random in his presence: there were snubs at hand. When I was about ten years old, I was talking about the well at Grenelle, which I had lately seen. The well is 1800 feet deep, and the water rises 150 feet above ground level: temperature 80° Fahrenheit. I said I could not make out what sent it up like that. Between two puffs of his cheroot Bidder grunted:--“Steam.”

Parson Davy was always asking Bidder questions, when he was still The Calculating Boy. But the Parson always got the worst of it, although he had some gifts that way himself, and might have been more eminent as an engineer than as a theologian.

Davy was born in 1743 near Tavistock, but passed his early years near here at Chudleigh and at Knighton, went to the Grammar School at Exeter and thence to Balliol College at Oxford, was then ordained, and held the curacies of Moreton, Drewsteignton and Lustleigh, remaining in the last from 1786 until about six months before his death in 1826. For that space of nearly forty years he was practically the parson of the parish, the rector being a pluralist and rarely visiting the place.

In his sermons at Drewsteignton “he denounced the vices of his congregation in such terms that the people fled from the church and complained to the bishop.” But he set the bishop’s mind at rest by showing him twelve volumes of manuscript, containing the sermons he had preached. I have those twelve volumes in my library here. They have an expensive binding of that period, and the penmanship is good, but antiquated, _e.g._ vol. xi, p. 333, “& carry yʳ youthful Vices wᵗʰ yᵐ to yᵉ Grave.” The dates are 1777 in the first volume, 1779 in the next five, and 1781 in the remaining six. The first four volumes (of six sermons each) are “on yᵉ Attributes of God,” the fifth and sixth (of seven sermons each) are “on some of yᵉ most-important Articles of yᵉ Xⁿ Religion,” and the last six (of fourteen sermons each) are “on yᵉ several Virtues & Vices of Mankind.” These were the sermons that upset the people at Drewsteignton. But clearly he was making a general survey, and no more charged them with all the vices than he credited them with all the virtues.

In 1786 he got these sermons published by subscription in six volumes, duodecimo. And then he went on writing till he had five hundred sermons of such scope that he felt justified in calling them _A System of Divinity_. He failed to get this published by subscription; and it would have cost about £2000 to print. So he set to work, and did it all himself with a printing-press of his own make.

He began his printing in 1795, and in five months he turned out forty copies of the first 328 pages of vol. i, with title, preface, etc.; and he sent round twenty-six of these as specimens, to see if he could get support. There was practically no response: so he went on with the fourteen copies that remained, and of the rest