Part 3

There is a very complete extinguisher here, addressed to a relative of mine, the husband of my mother’s eldest sister. “Stratfield saye Nov. 27 1838 The Duke of Wellington presents his Compliments to Mr. Drummond and has received his Letter. The Duke begs leave to inform Mr. Drummond that he is not the Commander in Chief of the Army or in political office; he has no Patronage Power or Influence, & he has no means whatever at his disposal of forwarding Mr. Drummond’s views in any manner.” It is the old Duke’s writing, not dictated.

I have always envied the Drummonds their pedigree, a thoroughgoing Scottish pedigree, showing their descent from Attila, King of the Huns. But I am still more envious of my Urquhart cousins. They have a pedigree showing their descent from Alcibiades, whose son (being incensed at the Athenians’ unjust treatment of his father) migrated out of Athens into Ireland.

Among my family papers I found a document of 19 June 13 Elizabeth (1571) quoting one of 24 March in the preceding year--“Symon Knyghte of the Cittie of Exceter, marchaunte, hathe graunted unto Richard Wannell of Moreton Hampsteede, gent, one annuytye or yearly rente of twenty poundes during the naturall lyef of the said Richard and after his deathe unto Katheryne, his wief, duringe the terme of fouerscore yeares yf she so longe lyve.” Knight now lends Wannell £110 on bargain and sale of this annuity as security for repayment, such bargain and sale to be utterly frustrated and void, “yf yt shall happen the said Richard Wannell to contente and paye unto the said Symon Knyghte in the now mansion house of the said Symon in the citty aforesaid in the xxiiijth daye of Auguste nexte ensuing the date of these presents betweene the houers of one and fower of the clock in the afternoone of the said daye thirtie eight poundes eleven shillings and fouer pence of lawfull Englishe money at one enteere paymente withoute fraude or delaye and in the firste daye of Nouember nexte ensuinge in the said house and betweene the said howers the full some of other thirty eighte poundes eleven shillings and fower pence and also yf the said Richard Wannell in the seconde daye of Auguste next ensuinge the date hereof doo delyver or cause to bee delivred unto the said Symon Knyghte fyfteene hundreds of coyned white tynne good and marchantable without the letter H every hundred wayinge sixscore poundes at and accordinge to the Queenes Maiesties beame at Chagford.”

This letter H is mentioned in a document of 3 April 10 Henry VII (1495) by which the Duke of Cornwall--Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII--confirmed a set of by-laws: printed in Rowe’s _Perambulation of Dartmoor_, appendix XV. “Also that no man from hensforth make no synder tynne after that it is wartered, be it allayed with oder tynne or not allaide, or eny oder manner of harde tynne without it be marked with this letter H as well as with the markes of the owners and blowing howses.” (Blowing houses were blast furnaces for smelting tin.) “Also that th’owners of everye blowing howse shal bryng a certen marke of his blowing howse to the court of the Stayniery within the precinct wher the said blowing howse is sett, to the entent that al suche markes may be drawen in a boke.... Also that every owner of tynne that shal bring tynne into ony blowing howse to be blowen and fyned shal bryng a certen marke in to the said court, ther to be put in a boke.” (Tin was ‘coined’ by stamping these marks on it, so that the owners and blowers could be identified.) “And if it shal happen from hensforth ony marchaunt to bye eny false tynne and so to be disseyved,” the warden shall compel the owners and the blowers of it “to satisfye the marchaunt of al suche hurte and damage as he hath take by such false tynne.”

These by-laws had been “enacted and establysshed by the hole body of the Stayniery in the high court of Crockerntorr” on 11 September. This court was composed of the Duchy officials for Devon with twenty-four jurors from each of the four Stannary towns in Devon; and it held its sittings in the open air on Crockerntor, a Dartmoor hill about midway between the towns, say, nine miles from Tavistock, ten from Chagford, ten from Ashburton, and thirteen from Plympton. And besides this high court (magna curia) there was a court in each of these four towns for its own quarter of the Stannaries. In his _Survey of Devon_ Risdon says of Chagford, “This place is priviledged with many immunities which tinners enjoy, and here is holden one of the courts for Stannery causes”; and he mentions a catastrophe that happened in his time. The court-house stood on pillars; and on 6 March 1618 these pillars gave way at a crowded sitting of the court, the building ‘rent in sunder’ and the walls fell in, killing ten people and injuring many more.

The old courts and their jurisdiction sank slowly into insignificance as the amount of tin grew less. Mine after mine was given up, and very little tin is raised in Devon now--it can be got more easily by mining in Nevada. But all round Dartmoor there are remains of the old works, showing what a scene of industry it must have been. There was a blowing house near here: it was in Lustleigh parish and was known as Caseleigh blowing house. Caseleigh mine was for micaceous iron, which has only little bunches of tin ore in it; but tin may have been brought from the Peck Pits a couple of miles away.

A small Venetian coin was dug up at Lustleigh in the spring of 1922 in a garden about fifty yards west of the church tower; and this may be connected with the trade in tin. It is a silver ‘soldino’ of Leonardo Loredano, whose features are well known in England from Bellini’s portrait of him in the National Gallery. He was Doge from 1501 to 1521, and the moneyer’s initials (P.C. for Piero Cocco) show that the coin was struck between the summer of 1501 and the summer of 1502. At that period a squadron of armed gallies made a voyage from Venice to England almost every year; and they brought merchandise for sale here, and took back other merchandise, including tin. Their usual port was Southampton; but in Sanuto’s Diary, 9 March 1504, there is a note of their going to Falmouth, and they probably went to other ports as well. The coin may have come over in the gallies, and then found its way to Lustleigh in the course of trade.

On the Close Rolls there is an entry of a writ, 26 June 1414, stating that the merchants of Venice who came over in their galleys, used to bring their own money of Venice, called galley halfpence; and directing the Mayor of London to enjoin them not to circulate this money here--they must take it to the Mint to be converted into English coin. There were many prohibitions of these ‘galey halpenys’, from Proclamations in 1399 and 1400 to an Act of Parliament in 1519; and these repeated prohibitions show that there were many such coins about.

Gold moidores from Portugal were afterwards in circulation here at 27_s._ apiece or thereabouts. For a century or so the Courtenay family received a moidore, in addition to the market price, on granting a new lease of any copyhold in Moreton Manor; thus, on 27 October 1739 a new tenant paid £70 “and one moyder of gold.” This manor did not include the whole of Moreton: there were parts of other manors in the parish; and in one of these, “the mannour or lordship of Moretonhampstead and North Bovie,” the custom was pretty much the same. Richard Knight, the lord of the manor, granted a new lease there on 30 September 1689 for £28 “and a broad peece of gould,” and another on 1 June 1693 for £12 “and a gennye of gould.”

My father told me that one day in Exeter he was walking along a street in which a trench was being dug for laying pipes, and a coin of Constantine rolled out from a shovelful of earth that was thrown up as he passed: he gave the workmen sixpence and took the Roman coin. One of his notebooks gives the date, 6 December 1836; and for several years before then Roman coins were dug up almost every day, as gas and water mains were being laid and there was much rebuilding.

In digging for foundations on Bell Hill--the part of South Street between the turnings into Guinea Street and Bear Street--the workmen came upon some tesselated pavement, broken bits of Samian ware, and part of a sistrum of Egyptian green-glazed porcelain. That was in 1833, and the sistrum is now in Exeter Museum. It has the usual head of Hathor (or Isis) on each side, and below that a column of hieroglyphic, reading “neter nefer, neb taui, ...” on one side, and “nesu-bat (Ra ...)” on the other. The lower part was not found. Many Egyptian kings had cartouches beginning with ‘Ra’; but the glazing of the sistrum shows that it was made for one of the kings of Dynasty XXVI somewhere about 600 B.C.

This head of Isis being found upon Bell Hill, some rash antiquaries said that Bell was really Bel or Baal. But it is a fact that there are traces of outlandish gods in other parts of England. An inscription has been found at York (_Corp. Inscr. Lat._ VII. 240) recording the dedication of a temple to Serapis by the officer commanding the sixth Legion, which then was stationed there; and two altars have been found at Corbridge with Greek inscriptions (_Inscr. Græc._ XIV. 2553, 4) dedicating one of them to Astartê and the other one to Hercules of Tyre. There is a dedication to this Hercules in the Greek part of a bi-lingual inscription at Malta (_Inscr. Græc._ XIV. 600) and in the Phœenician part he is called Baal Melkarth of Tyre. This is the god at whom Elijah jibed, “he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.” He was the guardian of navigation: in the depth of winter all navigation ceased; and then he went to sleep and made no more journeys till the festival of his Awakening in the early spring.

Coins of Roman Emperors are sometimes dug up in this neighbourhood. In 1837 a little hoard of them was brought to light on Furzeleigh farm, three miles from here, while gravel and stone were being dug out to mend a road; and these were coins of Valerianus, Gallienus, Postumus, Victorinus, and Claudius Gothicus, whose short and stormy reigns began and ended between 253 and 270 A.D. Hoards are buried even now. Countryfolk lose money by bad investments or through the failure of a bank; and then there is a scare, and many of them convert their savings into coin, and hide or bury it. Burying is more secure: if money is merely hidden in the house, the missus may get hold of it and squander it away--at least, an old man told me so. He buried his (somewhere on Dartmoor, I believe) and in 1917 he had a stroke and died without ever telling anybody where it was. And some day somebody will come upon this hoard of three or four hundred gold coins of Queen Victoria and King Edward. The coins at Furzeleigh may have been buried there by such a man some sixteen centuries before; and possibly they represent his savings, or possibly his robberies and thefts.

Apart from coins, there are few relics of the Romans in any part of Devon excepting Exeter; and the coins may only prove that there was plundering or trade. A century before the Romans came, Diodoros was writing (V. 22) of the natives of these parts as kindly, mannerly folk, accustomed to dealing with foreigners over their trade in tin. Such people would make good neighbours, and could be left alone. At the date of the Antonine Itinerary the Roman roads did not come further west than Exeter, and probably were not carried on to Land’s End until the reign of Constantine--his name is on a Roman mile-stone at Saint Hilary, and his colleague’s name, Licinius, is on another at Tintagel. That was more than 250 years after Britain was annexed by Claudius; and the wonder is that the Romans did not make the road before, or that having left it for so long, they should have made it then. Something must have happened just before to give occasion for it; and I would hazard a guess that ‘something’ was the subjugation of Britain by Constantius in 296 A.D. after Carausius and Allectus had held the country for nine years.

The natives here were probably Iberians or Celtiberians, that is, wholly or partly of the old stock that the Celtic immigrants pushed back into the west. Tacitus observes in his _Agricola_, II, that the people in the west of Britain were so like Iberians that anyone would think their ancestors had come from Spain. He wrote this in 98 A.D., and would have heard it from Agricola himself, who was many years in Britain. No doubt, there was a likeness; but there is another explanation of it--the Iberians had once migrated westward like the Celts, and some of them migrated into Britain and others into Spain. That seems more likely than migration here from Spain.

In the Colonies and India there are races quite impervious to our civilization and living in their own ancestral way; and I imagine that these natives lived their own lives here regardless of the way the Romans lived. They were Prehistoric in the sense that they were living like primeval ancestors of theirs whose history is unknown; but they were not Prehistoric in the sense of having lived in that far past themselves, nor are their implements and buildings Prehistoric in that sense. Yet enormous dates B.C. are given to Prehistoric remains here which may not be much earlier than 300 A.D., or even as old as that.

Prehistoric remains may often be an obstacle to agriculture when they are in a field; and thousands of them must have been destroyed to make way for the plough. They are common enough on Dartmoor and other open land round here, and probably were just as common on the land that is enclosed. There are the remains of a little hamlet of hut-circles, with a rampart round it, on the open land in Lustleigh Cleave a mile from here; and in a field at Plumleigh, also a mile from here, there were six hut-circles in a group. When the granite boulders in the field were being cleared away, four bronze palstaves were found under one boulder and four under another, all standing up on end. (Two are now in Exeter Museum; and I remember others on a mantelpiece at Plumleigh, but cannot find out what became of them.) They were found in 1836; and the six hut-circles were destroyed soon after, to complete the clearance of the field. This is not an isolated case, but typical of what is always going on.

There is only one cromlech left in Devon--the Spinsters’ Stone. It is on a farm called Shilston, two miles from Drewsteignton, three from Chagford and nine from here. It consists of a flattish piece of granite about two feet thick and ten or twelve across, resting on three upright pieces about six feet high; and altogether it looks rather like a toadstool with three stems instead of one. In 1862 one of the uprights slipped away and let the top slide off, but the owner of Shilston had it set up again; and several people have set up menhirs that had fallen down. In such cases there can be no mistake; but I should not like to see a group of fallen stones set up by anyone who had a theory about Prehistoric things.

There were two rocks in the sea near Dawlish called the Parson and the Clerk; but the Parson perished in a gale. The sea had undermined him, and a big wave threw him down. There was no setting him up again, and the Dawlish people felt the want of him: so they ordained another rock as Parson with another for his Clerk. And if you go to Dawlish and inquire for the Parson and the Clerk, you will be directed to a couple of big rocks that lean up against a cliff; and there are pictures of these two imposters, not only on the post-cards but even in such books as the _Devonshire_ volume of the _Cambridge County Geographies_.

The real Parson and Clerk were in the sea off Holecombe headland, half way from Dawlish to Teignmouth. They were big rocks, more or less of human shape; and the rock nearer to the headland was a good deal taller than the other rock further out. There was some point in calling them the Parson and the Clerk, as the Clerk’s place in churches was in front of the Parson and somewhat lower down; but there is no point in giving the name to these imposters, as they are of equal size and side by side like Siamese Twins. I remember the old Parson very well indeed, and sometimes feel the loss of him as if he were a personal friend. I fear that the old Clerk is doomed. He has lost his head, and now looks more like a mummied cat, as one sees him from the train.

These rocks are ‘new’ red sandstone, and there are others on the coast with grotesque forms of human figures and heads; and such forms may be seen in granite rocks at no great distance from the coast. The best is Bowerman’s Nose, four miles from here and fourteen from the Parson and the Clerk. (I take ‘nose’ to be the same as ‘naze’ or ‘ness,’ as in Hope’s Nose at the entrance to Torbay.) In _Dartmoor_, a poem, Carrington calls Bowerman’s Nose “a granite God, | to whom, in days long flown, the suppliant knee | in trembling homage bow’d.” He there assumes that it was in its present shape when there were tribes here who would worship it; but the shape is due to weathering. In the Dartmoor granite there are fissures which are widened out by frost and wet until large blocks become detached and fall away. And this god was created by the fall of the surrounding granite from four upright fissures. These enclosed a mass a dozen feet thick and forty high; and there are other fissures running across this and giving it somewhat the appearance of a man.

I once took the trouble to go up to Mount Sipylos in Asia Minor to see the figure of Niobê, 20 April 1882. Homer speaks of it (_Iliad_, XXIV. 617) as Niobê herself, turned into stone, and still brooding on the wrongs the gods had done her. But the figure has been worn down by weather to an almost shapeless mass, and it is not big enough to be impressive. Pausanias went there 1700 years before me, and I can say no more for it than he says, I. 21. 3: at a distance you might take it for a human figure, but you must not come too close.

After going to see Niobê, I felt there might be something in what Philo of Byzantium says at the beginning of his book about the Seven Wonders of the World--instead of taking troublesome journeys, people had much better stay at home and read his book. However, I have been to see the remains of two of the Seven, the Pyramids at Memphis and the Temple of Diana at Ephesos, and the sites on which two others stood, the Zeus at Olympia and the Colossos at Rhodes, and the site also of another, the Pharos at Alexandria, if that is to be reckoned in the Seven.

One wet day when I had visitors here, we happened to be speaking of how things ran in sevens--the seven planets, the seven liberal arts, the seven deadly sins, and so on. There were seven of us in the house and we drew lots, to fill up time until the rain would let us out. When I drew Gluttony, they said it was appropriate; and we had all said it was appropriate when a lady with blue stockings drew Astronomy, and again when she drew Chastity; but it was a little embarrassing when she drew Lust as well.

The seven planets were Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon; and Pythagoras said these seven and the Firmament of Stars and our Earth and the other Earth (Antichthon) were all revolving round a Central Fire. I thought that I had met a follower of his a little while ago. I said something about the sunlight, and was told that I was wrong--light did not come from the Sun. I hoped to hear him say that light came from the Central Fire and was reflected from the Sun, for he seemed to think that something came from there, as he was sitting in the shade. But he referred me to the Bible, where it is distinctly said that Light was created on the first day but the Sun was not created till the fourth.

Pythagoras fancied that there must be simple ratios for the distances between the heavenly bodies and the Central Fire, and that the motion of these bodies would therefore cause harmonious sounds, just as octaves and fifths and fourths arise from lengths of string with ratios of 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. There were two answers to the question why no one ever heard this Music of the Spheres. Aristotle (_De Cælo_, II. 9) makes the Pythagoreans say that we all hear it from the moment we are born, only we never notice it, as it is always going on. (If so, they must have thought it was a chord and not a tune.) The other answer, Aristotle’s own, was that there was not anything to hear.

There are many versions of the Music of the Spheres; but judging by what Ptolemy says (_Harmonica_, III. 16, and _Excerpta Neapolitana_, 2, 24) I think Pythagoras put the Firmament at 36, Saturn at 32, Jupiter at 24, Mars at 21⅓, the Sun at 18, Venus at 16, Mercury at 12, the Moon at 9, the Earth at 8, and (probably) the Antichthon at 6, with the Central Fire at 0. Thus, if the Firmament gave forth the sound of _f_, the Sun gave _f_ an octave higher up and the Moon gave _f_ an octave higher still. Saturn, Venus and the Earth gave _g_ in these three octaves, and Jupiter, Mercury and the Antichthon gave _c_ in these three octaves also, while Mars gave _d_ in the lowest octave by itself. And if that is what these orbs are ‘quiring to the young-eyed cherubins,’ I do not much regret ‘this muddy vesture of decay’ that hinders me from hearing it.

If the heavenly bodies went round in circles, their notes would never vary, as the distances would always be the same; but if they go round in ellipses, their notes will rise and fall with every variation in the distances. And as soon as Kepler had discovered that the Earth and other planets make ellipses round the Sun, he set to work to ascertain how far their notes run up and down the scale; and he published his results in 1619 in his _Harmonice Mundi_, V. 4-9. According to this, Saturn’s note went up and down a major third, and Jupiter’s went up and down a minor third; and Jupiter’s note at its lowest was an octave above Saturn’s at its highest. Similarly, the rise and fall was a fifth for Mars, a semitone for the Earth, and practically nothing for Venus, as its ellipse is nearly circular, whereas the long ellipse of Mercury produced a rise and fall of an octave plus a minor third; and between these rising and falling notes there were clear intervals of a major sixth from Mercury to Venus, a minor sixth from Venus to the Earth, a fifth from the Earth to Mars, and two octaves plus a minor third from Mars to Jupiter. And of course the trebles played their scales much faster than the basses, as they go round the Sun in much less time.

Kepler took all this quite seriously, and was convinced that some such ratios must exist, as the Creator was a neat hand at geometry, “Deus nihil sine geometrica pulchritudine constituerit,” V. 4. It was the irony of Fate that in pursuing this absurdity he discovered a great truth--the Third Law of Motion.