Part 4

of the work he printed fourteen copies only. The first volume was finished in 1795, three more in 1796, two in 1797 and two in 1798, three in 1799 and three in 1800, two in 1801, but only one in 1802, then two in each of the next four years, 1803 to 1806, and the last volume in 1807, making six-and-twenty volumes altogether. On an average, there must be about 500 pages to the volume, but they are troublesome to count, as the numbering does not always run straight on. When there are not any foot-notes, the page has twenty-six lines of about nine words each; but on some pages the foot-notes rise to forty-one lines of about twelve words each, with only one line of sermon at the top. Additions and corrections are printed on separate slips of paper, and stuck in very neatly at the proper places, like little folding-plates opening up or down the page. Just at first the printing is erratic, but it soon gets better and finally is pretty good. Of course, he had all the credit of the printing; but much of it was done by Mary Hole, a servant in his house. She died in 1808.

His own copy of his _System of Divinity_ is in my library here. The volumes are still in their original boards, and fill a length of 3 ft. 8 in. upon the bookshelves. He pasted his press-notices into vol. i, and added “Strictures on yᵉ preceding Review” and other notes of that sort. And he interleaved the index (in vol. xxvi and part of xxv) and put in references to the additions that he was always making to his work. In 1816 he made a fair copy of the index--which copy is also in my library--“Intended as a Help to a future Edition, with the Additions upon Revisal.” But that future edition never came.

In 1823, when he was eighty years of age, he went to work again, and printed one more volume--_Divinity ... being improved extracts from a System of Divinity_. Of this also there were fourteen copies only; and one of them is in my library. It is uniform with his previous books, and has about 540 pages altogether. It caused some stir, and led to an enlarged edition in two volumes in 1825, and another in three volumes in 1827. But these editions were printed at Exeter in the ordinary way.

He sometimes used his printing-press for other subjects than Divinity; and, when his son did something that he did not like, he printed a pamphlet on the conduct of his son. But the son’s turn came, when he was called upon to write a memoir of his father after his decease. He paid him back in full.

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Davy took the title of his work from Bacon, and planned it while he was at Balliol. And he read widely, making notes and extracts and abstracts and indices, all with a view to writing a systematic treatise on Divinity. But (unconsciously, I think) he departed from his plan, though he retained the title; and in the end his work was not what Bacon meant, nor what anybody wanted. Being in the form of sermons, it was useless as a book of reference; and, being in substance an encyclopædia, it did not make good sermons. One wonders how his country congregations felt, when he preached to them in this wise, vol. i, pages 292-4, “The most ancient Nations, the Egyptians and Phœnicians, did agree with the Grecians that the World did begin etc.... Aristotle himself says etc.... Maximus Tyrius also observes etc.... Josephus and all the Jewish Doctors do abundantly confirm it.” But he also had many shrewd things to say, and often said them very neatly, especially in his foot-notes. And these sayings of his might well be put together in a little volume as _The Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. William Davy_.

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For many years he lived at Lustleigh Rectory, a venerable house that was transformed to something new and strange at the time of the Gothic Revival. But that was after his time; and he speaks of it as “nearly in ruins” in 1808. He quitted it in 1818, and went to live at Wilmead, which his son had lately bought. And the old man used always to come striding down across the fields, and take the path from Wreyland, when he went from Wilmead to the village or the church.

While living at the Rectory, he built a terraced garden that was celebrated in its day, but vanished when the grounds were laid out more ambitiously. And, when he moved to Wilmead, he built himself a garden there, on the knoll of ground behind the house. One can see that this knoll was covered with rocks, and that he cleared some of them away by blasting, and used the fragments for retaining-walls. In this way he formed five terraces, which still remain.

There are stories of his planting the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in his garden up at Wilmead. According to the memoir of him by his son, he actually did plant (in box) some texts of Scripture and his own name and the date. “Into whichever walk any one turned, some divine or moral precept met the eye, as the different letters were nearly six inches long, and being kept regularly trimmed were easily to be read.” In 1838 one could read ‘know thyself,’ ‘act wisely,’ ‘deal fairly,’ ‘live peaceably,’ ‘love one another,’ ‘W Davy 1818.’ There must have been much more, as he called it his “Living body of Divinity” in contrast to his _System_. But, whatever it was that he planted, it has all vanished now.

Box has been put to quite another use in the Pope’s private gardens at the Vatican. They have a gigantic Cardinal’s Hat, with all its cords and tassels, edged with box and filled with brilliant flowers. I have seen it only in the autumn, when the flowers are going off; but in the early summer it must be magnificent.

In this neighbourhood a great deal of box-edging has been destroyed in recent years, the pretext being that it harbours slugs, and they eat up all the flowers in the beds. But slugs seldom eat begonias; and begonias look very gorgeous against the dark green of the box. I have used them most successfully these last fifteen years.

Most of the old houses here have groups of box-edged beds with narrow paths between them, making up some pattern as a whole. And these are known as Pixey Gardens. As pixies are twelve inches high, these little paths are pretty much the same to them as Devonshire lanes to human beings. I was taught that one could always tell a pixey from a fairy, as fairies wear clothes, and pixies go without; but I have never seen either sort myself, in a pixey garden or elsewhere.

A very cautious old lady once remarked to me that she had never seen any pixies herself, but she knew so many people who said they had seen pixies, that she would not undertake to say that there were no such things. This puts the pixies in pretty much the same position as the Russian soldiers who passed through England at the beginning of the War.

There was formerly a draw-well in front of the house, and its site is marked by the second of the round beds in the Pixey Garden. I imagine that the garden was not made until the well had been filled in, and that this was not till 1839, when the present well was sunk; but I do not know for certain. The garden was rectangular till 1899; and then I added the semi-circular end, and made a gateway through the orchard hedge, carrying the main path round the semi-circle to the gateway.

In altering the path, a dog’s skeleton was found at the foot of the espalier pear tree. There is a dog in the full-length portrait of my grandfather’s grandfather, and there is the same dog in the picture of the family in 1787; and somebody suggested that this might be the dog, whose grave we had disturbed. The skeleton had crumbled, but the skull was sound; and I showed it to various people, who were fond of dogs, and thought they understood them. Some thought it might be that dog’s skull, while others thought the dog was of another breed. At last, I got an introduction to a high authority at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and I showed him the skull and photographs of both the pictures. I became aware that he was staring at me in amazement, and at last he gasped:--“But it isn’t a dog at all. It’s a badger.”

However, we were not the only people that ever made such a blunder. They had a wonder-working relic in the church at Skifvarp. It was reputed to be the hand of a saint; and, as such, it healed many people of diseases. I saw it in the Museum at Stockholm some years ago, resting from its labours. It is only a seal’s paw.

Down here a man remarked to me one day, as he was gazing across some fields:--“It be a wonder-workin’ thing, that Consecrated Bone.” I began to think we had a relic here. But he spoke of concentrated bone manure.

A party of Italians was being shown round the gardens on the Isola Bella one day when I was being shown round; and the thing that struck them most, was what we call the common laurel. I cannot remember seeing it at any other place in Italy except the monastery on Monte Cavo, and I suspect that it was brought there by the Cardinal of York. (In Italy the common laurel is what we call sweet-bay.) Few people in England know how beautiful our common laurel is when fully grown, for here they are always clipping it and cutting it down as soon as it begins to grow. On the Isola Bella it is almost a forest tree. In this garden and in Parson Davy’s it grows to 25 or 30 feet, and so also the sweet-bay.

There are two young olive trees growing in sheltered places in this garden. The smaller one (below the Oval Lawn) is from an olive that I picked up at Rapallo, 10 January 1910, when the olives were being shaken down. It is nearly four feet high now--September 1917. The larger one (near Dogtrot Hill) came here from Cornwall in a pot, and was planted out in the summer of 1904. It then was six feet high and very slender, and now is nearly fifteen feet high and nine inches in girth. It has not borne olives yet.

Many of the people here had never seen an olive tree before, and were curious about its fruit: so I gave them olives to try. One comment was:--“Well, Mrs *****’d never have christened her daughter Olive, if her’d a-tasted one of they.”

One afternoon all the strawberries on the strawberry tree were picked and eaten by a boy, who was working in the garden; and they held an Indignation Meeting under the Rotunda. I asked him what the matter was, and he replied:--“Please, zir, my inwards be all of a uproar.”

Besides the strawberry tree (_arbutus unedo_) I have the toothache tree (_xanthoxylum planispinum_) growing in the garden. My gardener told me that he had no toothaches for a long while after it was planted, though he often had before: but this immunity wore off. A decoction of the bark is what is needed, and the tree has very little bark as yet. The cork tree also grows here, and this soon developes a thick coat of bark. I expect the bark on mine to yield me cork enough to bung my cider casks; but at present it does not.

During the winter of 1911-12 I planted sixteen acres of new cider-orchards, putting 5½ acres of early trees in Crediford and Blackmore, 5¾ acres of mid-season trees in Middle Parke, and 4¾ acres of late trees in Above Ways. Some such division is usual in new orchards now, as the fruit is handled with less labour, and sheep can go on grazing in the late orchards till the early orchards have been cleared. The early trees were of three sorts in equal numbers--Knotted Kernel, Cherry Pearmain and Cherry Norman: the mid-season trees were of four sorts in the ratio of one Cap of Liberty and one Kingston Black to two each of Eggleton Styre and Strawberry Norman; and the late trees were also of four sorts in the ratio of one Skyrme’s Kernel and one Hagloe Crab to two each of Michelin and Chisel Jersey. These combinations make good blends. But apple trees do not bear uniformly every year: one sort may bear heavily one year, and another sort the next; and that upsets the blend.

In this district the older orchards have mostly been neglected, losses being made good with any kind of apple tree that came to hand. No doubt, the kinds were chosen carefully at first, but not (so far as one can see) in such proportions as to give a definite blend. With all kinds of apples mixed up indiscriminately, no two casks of cider are the same in flavour or in strength.

Cider used always to be made of apples, but I fear that it is very often made of other things now. However, the name does not imply that it is made of apples, but only means that it is strong. And in that sense Wyclif has “wyn and sydir” in Luke, i. 15, where later versions say “strong drink.” Non-alcoholic cider is a contradiction in terms.

Men can easily get drunk on cider; but they do not suffer for it next day, if they have had pure cider of fermented apple-juice and nothing else. Unhappily, this wholesome drink has given way to other drinks that are less wholesome. A shrewd observer said to me:--“When each man had three pints of cider every day, there was not half this bickering and quarrelling that goes on now.” And that, I think, is true. They were always in the genial stage of drunkenness, and seldom had the means of going beyond that. A few, however, very often went beyond; and they have been described to me as “never proper drunk, nor proper sober neither, but always a-muddled and a-mazed.”

This failing was not confined to Devonshire. My father notes in his diary, 7 August 1847, at Dinan in Brittany:--“The apples thick beyond conception, and the priests already praying to avert the evil consequences they apprehend from the plenty and cheapness of cider.” He writes to my grandmother from Dinan, 15 August 1847:--“The apples are so abundant this year that the country will almost be drowned in cider. How they will consume it all, is a wonder, for they export none. The lower orders are drunk, it seems, a great deal of their time. The priests always pray for a bad apple crop as the only hope of saving the people from perpetual drunkenness.”

A former rector of Lustleigh was remonstrating with a man one afternoon for reeling through the village very drunk. But the man had his reply:--“Ay, ’tbe all very fine for you to talk, but you goes home to dinner late, and us doesn’t see you after.”

On the whole, less harm is done by cider than by tea; but cider gets more blame, as its ill effects are visible at once, whereas tea works its mischief slowly. Nobody says anything against tea-drinking now; but Parson Davy in his _System of Divinity_, vol. xix, page 235, which he printed at Lustleigh in 1803, spoke with indignation of “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” And in his _Letter to a Friend concerning Tea_, published in 1748, John Wesley spoke of tea-drinking as tea-drinkers speak of drinking alcohol now:--“wasteful, unhealthy self-indulgence”--“no other than a slow poison”--“abhor it as a deadly poison, and renounce it from this very hour.”

My grandfather had a new cider-press in 1842, and I had a new one in 1901. He set up his in what is now the potting-shed, and I set up mine in what is now the donkey’s house, but shifted it in 1904 to its present place in what had hitherto been the stables. The cider-press of 1901 is quite unlike the cider-press of 1842, and is practically the same as the wine-presses that are used in France. With three men at work, it will turn 800 lbs. of apples into 60 gallons of cider in about two hours. The old press was not so quick or clean, but was more picturesque.

Cider-making is not a very pleasant sight; and I have known people say that they would never touch cider again, having once seen how it was made. A crushed apple is not a pretty thing at any time, and is none the prettier for being in company with several thousand others. However, cider-making is not quite as bad as wine-making in Southern Italy and Sicily. There they tread the grapes: if the vat is small, they get the cramp; and I have seen men jump out of the vat, take a sharp run up and down a very un-swept road, and jump straight in again.

The _Asti_ wine of Northern Italy is curiously like the wine that we make out of rhubarb here; and one might suspect the Asti of being rhubarb wine, only rhubarb costs much more than grapes down there. Our wine is not pure rhubarb: sugar and other things are used as well. And one year it was an utter failure. The sugar had been given to a certain damsel to put in, “and ’stead of tendin’ her duty, her were a-talkin’ to that Jarge, and atween’m they put pretty nigh all the sugar in one of they barryels and scarce any in t’other.”

Another liquor might be made here, as this soil grows the fungus that is used for Vodka. That liquor is in bad repute just now; but I must say that I found it very comforting on a long and dreary journey from Moscow down to Warsaw in the autumn of 1889.

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My grandfather writes to my father on 3 December 1857:--“A glass of good mellow full-bodied cider is far superior to your Rhenish wine: there is no body in that.” And if Devonshire cider is to be compared with any class of wines, the Rhine wines certainly come closest to it. He thought the very best cider was wasted on the country-folk, and he writes on 18 September 1868:--“They do not much care what it is, so as its cider.” But they cared very much for that. He writes on 16 March 1845:--“The old workmen here think we shall have cider plenty: they think more about that than the crops in the fields.” And again on 17 July 1856:--“As you know, the men here are passionately fond of cider.”

He writes to him on 18 June 1851:--“People say that Ashburton Fair is past, and the apples are safe.” People still say that, meaning that all frosts have ceased by the first Thursday in June. But many of these sayings are of earlier date than 1752: the calendar was altered then by cutting out eleven days; and the seasons did not alter with the calendar. Father Christmas should arrive in snow, but seldom has it now: the snow comes with Old Christmas Day in January.

Writing on 2 February 1851, my grandfather says:--“Not a flake of snow fell on the Forest of Dartmoor in the month of January: not the oldest man living on the Moor recollects the like before.” On 2 March 1862:--“Well, the old people say there never was a February without snow. There has not been any this year, unless it came Friday night before twelve o’clock. A man that was out about sheep says that it did fall before twelve but after eleven: so they still adhere to the old saying. But the others that did not stay up, say that the snow came with March.”

Like many other people of his time, my grandfather was certain that the climate had improved, and he thought he saw the cause. He writes to my father on 22 December 1850:--“I attribute the mildness of the winters and the warmth of the summers to the better state of cultivation of the land draining off the cold stagnant waters that lay about in all directions in my youthful days.” He writes on 23 November 1851:--“The old plan was to have the wheat up in grass at Christmas, as the farmers used to say ‘high enough to cover a crow,’ but they find now from the altered winters that to till in this month and the next is sufficiently early, and better crops.”

My grandfather tried farming here; and I gather from his accounts that he sank about £20 per acre in the first three years. That meant draining the ground, and getting it into good condition; and after that he made it pay, except in the years of the potato famine. He writes to my father on 8 March 1846:--“I should say a diligent clever man, farming his own estate, can make more money now than he could in war time [that is, before 1815] for the system of farming is quite changed, and the land is made to produce nearly double what it did then.”

His knowledge of farming was derived from books; and he did things that were not customary here, sometimes with failure, but often with success. Thus, he writes to my father, 2 April 1854:--“I tilled some barley yesterday.... It was another such March fifteen years ago, when I tilled this same field to barley. I then hired horses and gave it a good working; and the weather was so tempting that I tilled it in March to the amusement of my neighbours. The storms in April made it look blue, which amused them still further. But they all acknowledged they could not produce its equal to harvest.”

He writes on 25 April 1843:--“Folks are waiting to see what spade husbandry will produce. I tell them its not new to me, for I adopted it elsewhere some twelve or fourteen years ago, and was fully compensated for my trouble. But that will not do: they must see themselves. The field is turned up with the spade, all the spine put under, a foot deep; and I have taken out nearly stones enough to build a wall through the field. The cost in turning is 4_d._ [per rod] with a quart of cider to a shilling, so with cleaning and bringing it fit for the potato the cost is £4 per acre, about double the old system, which would leave all the stones, and the field not half worked.

“Our farmers are loth to believe that any other method but the old one is beneficial. They fancy all manure is in dung and the like. I tell them the quantity of carbon, etc., etc.... But all will not do: they must see to believe. I have tried 1 cwt. of nitrate of soda on an acre of grass, and it is astonishing the effect it has had.”

On 13 January 1851 he writes:--“I am trying an experiment, that is, I am fetching every day some of the refuse from the kilns at the Pottery. It is principally burnt clay. I have often looked at it on passing, and fancied it might turn to use--old Cobbett speaks well of burnt clay. My neighbours say they will try it also.”

In a letter of 11 February 1850 my grandfather suggests a sliding scale for agricultural rents, based on the average price of corn. He did not wish to fix a rent-charge once for all, as with the commutation of the tithe, but merely to provide for variations during the period of a lease. In practice the landlord makes remissions of rent in bad years; but I have not yet heard of a farmer giving his landlord a War-bonus on these good years.

The old copyhold system was better than the leasehold for agricultural land. Here in Wreyland manor a man took a tenement for the term of his life; and that included “his wife’s widowhood therein.” If he wished to give it up, there was always someone ready to take it on. The new tenant paid him for his life interest and his wife’s, and bought the reversion from the lord; and at the next sitting of the court the old tenant surrendered the tenement, and the new tenant was admitted in his stead. If he wished to keep the tenement in his family, he bought the reversion for his son. The tenants were answerable to the manor court, if they allowed their buildings to fall into decay, or let down the gates and hedges against their neighbour’s tenements. But in this manor the court could not take cognizance of bad cultivation, which so often accompanies security of tenure.

These copyhold tenements have developed into freeholds, and the manor has decayed. This is a district of small estates. In districts where estates are large, it is usually the other way. Manorial rights have grown, until at last the manor has unrestricted freehold, and the former copyholds are let as farms.