.dt The Somerset Coast, by Charles G. Harper--A Project Gutenberg eBook
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The cover image was created by the transcriber and is\
placed in the public domain.CLIFTON BRIDGE
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[Illustration: CLIFTON BRIDGE]
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THE SOMERSET
COAST
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
“Somerset, that pleasant londe which
rennith to the Severn Se.”—Fuller.
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[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
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London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1909
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PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
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CONTENTS
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Chapter| | Page
I | INTRODUCTORY | #1:ch01#
II | THE RIVER AVON—CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE | #6:ch02#
III | ABBOT’S LEIGH TO CLEVEDON | #17:ch03#
IV | CLEVEDON—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: COLERIDGE | #25:ch04#
V | CLEVEDON (continued)—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON | #32:ch05#
VI | YATTON—CONGRESBURY—WICK ST. LAWRENCE | #45:ch06#
VII | WORSPRING PRIORY—KEWSTOKE | #56:ch07#
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VIII | WESTON-SUPER-MARE | #67:ch08#
IX | WORLEBURY—WORLE | #78:ch09#
X | STEEP HOLM—FLAT HOLM—UPHILL—BREAN DOWN | #87:ch10#
XI | BLEADON—BREAN—BRENT KNOLL | #98:ch11#
XII | BURNHAM—HIGHBRIDGE—BAWDRIP—“BATH BRICKS”—THE\
RIVER PARRET | #111:ch12#
XIII | BRIDGWATER—ADMIRAL BLAKE—THE MONMOUTH REBELLION | #126:ch13#
XIV | CANNINGTON—THE QUANTOCKS—NETHER STOWEY, AND THE\
COLERIDGE CIRCLE | #139:ch14#
XV | STEART—STOGURSEY—THE FOLK-SPEECH OF ZUMMERZET—GLATT-HUNTING\
AT KILVE—ST. AUDRIES | #158:ch15#
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XVI | WILLITON—ST. DECUMAN’S AND THE WYNDHAMS—WATCHET | #179:ch16#
XVII | CLEEVE ABBEY—OLD CLEEVE—BLUE ANCHOR | #189:ch17#
XVIII | DUNSTER | #206:ch18#
XIX | MINEHEAD, NEW AND OLD—SELWORTHY—THE HORNER | #227:ch19#
XX | PORLOCK—BOSSINGTON—PORLOCK WEIR | #247:ch20#
XXI | CULBONE AND ITS REVELS—WHORTLEBERRIES | #260:ch21#
XXII | THE “LORNA DOONE COUNTRY” | #270:ch22#
XXIII | OARE—MALMSMEAD—THE BADGWORTHY VALLEY—THE “DOONE\
VALLEY”—GLENTHORNE | #286:ch23#
| Index | #299:idx#
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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| Page
Clifton Bridge | #Frontispiece:frontis#
Map of The Somerset Coast | #1:i001a#
Avonmouth, from Pill | #18:i018#
In Portishead Church | #21:i021#
Coleridge’s Cottage, Clevedon | #28:i028#
Clevedon | #35:i035#
Clevedon Court | #43:i043#
Kingston Seymour | #46:i046#
Yatton Church | #48:i048#
The Rectory, Congresbury | #51:i051#
Woodspring Priory | #58:i058#
Reliquary in Kewstoke Church (Front) | #63:i063#
Reliquary in Kewstoke Church (Back) | #65:i065#
Uphill | #92:i092#
Bleadon Church | #99:i099#
Berrow | #102:i102#
Brent Knoll | #107:i107#
Brent Knoll | #109:i109#
Huntspill | #117:i117#
Birthplace of Admiral Blake | #128:i128#
Bridgwater: St. Mary’s Church, and Corn Exchange | #132:i132#
Westonzoyland | #134:i134#
Cannington | #140:i140#
Nether Stowey; Gazebo at Stowey Court | #143:i143#
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The Coleridge Cottage, Nether Stowey | #153:i153#
Nether Stowey | #155:i155#
The “Mud Horse” | #161:i161#
Stolford | #163:i163#
Stogursey Castle | #165:i165#
Kilve Church | #171:i171#
Kilve: The Chantry | #173:i173#
St. Audries | #176:i176#
Bench-end, Sampford Brett; supposed to allude to the\
Legend of Lady Florence Wyndham | #184:i184#
Watchet; Old Town Hall and Lock-up | #186:i186#
Watchet | #187:i187#
Entrance to Cleeve Abbey | #192:i192#
The Refectory, Cleeve Abbey | #197:i197#
Mysterious Effigy at Old Cleeve | #201:i201#
Blue Anchor | #203:i203#
Coneygore Tower, and Road into Minehead | #207:i207#
Dunster Castle | #210:i210#
Dunster; Castle and Yarn Market | #218:i218#
Dunster Church, from the South, showing old Alcove in\
Churchyard Wall for the Stocks | #221:i221#
Curious Archway, Dunster Church | #223:i223#
The “Nunnery,” or “High House,” Dunster | #225:i225#
Minehead | #228:i228#
Seventeenth-Century Mantel, “Luttrell Arms” Inn | #230:i230#
Quirke’s Almshouses | #236:i236#
Doorway of the Manor Office | #238:i238a#
Minehead Church | #238:i238b#
The Manor Office, Minehead | #239:i239#
Rood-Loft Turret, Minehead | #241:i241#
The Clock Jack, Minehead Church | #243:i243#
Lynch Chapel | #244:i244#
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Packhorse Bridge, Allerford | #245:i245#
Bossington | #250:i250#
Porlock Church | #252:i252#
Inglenook, “Ship” Inn, Porlock | #254:i254a#
“The Ship” Inn, Porlock | #254:i254b#
Porlock Weir | #258:i258#
The Lodge, Ashley Combe | #261:i261#
Culbone Church | #263:i263#
Oare Church | #287:i287#
Near Robber’s Bridge | #288:i288#
Interior of Oare Church | #290:i290#
Malmsmead | #293:i293#
Badgworthy Valley | #295:i295#
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[Illustration: THE SOMERSET COAST]
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[Illustration: the Somerset Coast]
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CHAPTER I||INTRODUCTORY
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On confiding to personal friends, journalistic
paragraphists, and other Doubting Thomases,
professional sceptics, chartered cynics and indifferent
persons, the important and interesting
literary news that a proposal was afloat to write
a book on the Somerset Coast, the author was
assured with an unanimity as remarkable as it was
disconcerting, that there is no coast of Somerset.
.pi
This singular geographical heresy, although
totally unsupported by map-makers, who on all
maps and charts show a very well-defined seaboard,
seems to be widely distributed; but it
is not shared by (among others) the inhabitants
of Clevedon, of Watchet (where furious seas have
twice within the last few years demolished the
harbour), of Weston-super-Mare, Burnham, Minehead,
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or Porlock. The people of all these places
think they live on the coast; and it would be really
quite absurdly difficult to persuade them that
they do not, or that they do not live in Somerset.
This singular illusion, that there is no coast of
Somerset, is, however, but one among a number of
current fallacies, among which may be included
the belief that:
.pm verse-start
Essex is a flat county.
London is dirty.
The virtuous are necessarily happy;
The wicked equally of necessity miserable.
All Irishmen are witty.
Scotsmen cannot see a joke.
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And so forth. Essex is flat, and London grimy,
only comparatively. Natives of Huntingdonshire
(which is an alternative term for flatness)
no doubt think of Essex as a place of hills; and
although London may seem grimy to the eyes
of a villager from Devon or Cornwall, it is as a
City of light and purity to the Sheffielder, the
inhabitants of Newcastle, and the people of other
such places of gloom.
.pi
The coast of Somerset, then, to make a beginning
with it, opens with the great port and city
of Bristol, on the navigable estuary of the river
Avon, and ends at Glenthorne, where the North
Devon boundary is met. The distance between
these two points is sixty miles. Throughout
the entire length of this coastline, that of South
Wales is more or less clearly visible; the Bristol
Channel being but four and a half miles wide at
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Avonmouth; seven and a half miles at Brean
Down, by Weston-super-Mare, and fifteen miles
at Glenthorne.
The foreshore of a great part of this coast
is more or less muddy; the Severn, which you
shall find to be a tea or coffee-coloured river,
even at Shrewsbury a hundred miles or so up
along its course, from the particles of earth
held in suspension, depositing much of this, and
the even more muddy rivers Avon and Parret
contributing a larger proportion. The “Severn
Sea,” as poetical and imaginative writers style
this estuary, known to matter-of-fact geographers
as the “Bristol Channel,” is therefore apt to be
of a grey hue, except under brilliant sunshine.
But it would be most unjust to infer from these
remarks, that mud, and only mud, is the characteristic
of these sixty miles. Indeed, the
Somerset Coast is singularly varied, and has
many elements of beauty. Between the noble
scene of its opening, where the romantic gorge
of the Avon, set with rugged cliffs and delightful
woods, is spanned by the airy Suspension Bridge
of Clifton, and the wood-clad steeps of Glenthorne,
you will find such beautiful places as Portishead
and Weston, whose scenery no crowds of vulgarians
can spoil; and Dunster, Minehead, and
Porlock, which need no advertisement from
this or any other pen. I have purposely omitted
Clevedon from the list above, for it does not
appeal to me.
Mud you have, naked and unashamed, practically
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only at Pill and the outlet of the Avon, and
again at Steart and the estuary of the Parret,
where those surcharged waters precipitate their
unlovely burden. Elsewhere, the purifying sea
completely scavenges it away or kindly disguises
it. Nay, between Weston and Burnham we have
even a long range of sandhills, as pure as the
sand-towans of North Cornwall or as the driven
snow.[#]
.pm fn-start // A
But this depends largely upon the neighbourhood in which it has been driving.
.pm fn-end
And further, if we turn our attention to the
scenery and the churches and castles and ruined
abbeys, or to the associations, of this countryside,
we shall find it an engaging succession of districts,
comparing well with some better-known and
more generally appreciated seaboards.
A specious air of eternal midsummer and
sunshine belongs to the name of Somerset.
Camden, writing in the first years of the seventeenth
century, was not too grave an historian
and antiquary to notice the fact; and we find
him, accordingly, at considerable pains to disabuse
any one likely to be deceived by it. He says,
in his great work “Britannia”: “Some suppose
its name was given it for the mildness and, as it
were, summer temperature of its air.... But
as it may be truly called in summer a summer
country, so it has as good right to be called a
winter one in winter, when it is for the most part
wet, fenny and marshy, to the great inconvenience
of travellers. I am more inclined to think it
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derives from Somerton, anciently the most considerable
town in the whole country.”
True, it did; for Somerton was until the
eighth century the capital of the tribe of Britons
known as Somersætas. Their kingdom and their
capital were finally swept away by the victorious
irresistible advance of the great Saxon kingdom
of Wessex, in A.D. 710. Hence Somerset, although
we occasionally hear of “Somersetshire,” is not
really a shire, in the sense of being a more or
less arbitrarily shorn-off division after the fashion
of the Midland shires—Leicestershire, Northamptonshire,
and many others—but is historically
an individual entity; the ancient kingdom of
the Somersætas, remaining in name, though not
in fact; just as Wiltshire, wrongly so-called, is
the ancient country of the Wilsætas; Devon
the land of the Damnonians, and Cornwall the
home of the Cornu-Welsh.
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CHAPTER II||THE RIVER AVON—CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE
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Bristol, whence one comes most conveniently
to the coast of Somerset, is among the most
fortunate of cities. It has a long and interesting
history, both in the warlike and the commercial
sorts, and its citizens have ever been public-spirited
men, of generous impulses. (It is not
really necessary for the discreet historian to go
into the story of Bristol’s old-time thriving
business of kidnapping and slave-trading, by
which her merchants grew wealthy, and so we
will say nothing about it, nor enlarge upon the
wealth-producing import of Jamaica rum.) It
has many noble and interesting buildings, and a
lovely and striking countryside is at its very
gates, while the river Avon, to which Bristol owes
the possibility of its greatness, flows out to sea,
amid the most romantic river scenery in England,
at Clifton.
.pi
This immense gorge of the Avon was created,
according to tradition, A.D. 33, on the day of the
Crucifixion, in the course of a world-wide earthquake
accompanying that event. Then, according
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to that strictly unreliable story, the hills
were rent asunder, and the ancient British camps
at St. Vincent’s and at Borough Walls and Stoke
Leigh had the newly formed river Avon set between
them. Geologists know better than this,
but in the early years of the nineteenth century,
when Miss Ann Powell sat upon the heights of
Clifton and, contemplating the scene, was filled
with great thoughts, which she eventually poured
forth in the shape of something then thought to
be poetry, the tradition was not considered to be
so absurd as it now is. In her “Clifton, a Poem,”
published in 1821, we learn some things new to
history, especially as to the year A.D. 33. Then,
according to Miss Ann Powell, the Romans were
encamped here, in victorious arrogance, and the
very day of the Crucifixion chanced to be that
which the Roman general had fixed for a reception
of conquered British chiefs:
.pm verse-start
Our humbled kings upon his levee wait,
This day appointed as a day of state.
.pm verse-end
Unfortunately for the poem, the Romans were
not in Britain at the time. They had not been
here for eighty-seven years, since the last departure
of Julius Caesar, in B.C. 54, and were not
to land on these shores again until ten years more
had passed: in A.D. 43. As a description of an
earthquake which did not happen, and an account
of disasters which did not befall people who were
not here, the poem is a somewhat remarkable
production. The authoress herself is so overwrought
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that she mixes past and present tenses.
Let us see how Romans and Britons behaved under
the appalling circumstances:
.pm verse-start
Now darkness fast the distant hills surround;
Beneath their feet, slow trembling, mov’d the ground;
High tempests rose that shook the stately roof,
Nor was the conqu’ror’s heart to this quite proof.
“Sure nature is dissolv’d!” the Roman cry’d.
“Sure nature is dissolv’d!” the guests reply’d.
Now awful thunders with majestic sound,
And vivid lightnings separate the ground;
The crash tremendous fill’d each heart with fear;
The sound of gushing waters strikes the ear.
Ah! now destruction’s hurl’d thro’ earth and sky;
Men seeking safety know not where to fly;
They through the ramparts run to make their way;
The guards lay prostrate there with sore dismay.
The Britons mount their horses—fly in haste:
No time in idle compliments they waste.
.pm verse-end
How delicious that last line! “No time in
idle compliments they waste.” It flings us down
from the heights of a world in pieces to the
inanities of the “How d’ye do’s” of afternoon
teas.
Clifton Suspension Bridge, opened in 1864,
is a bridge with a romantic history. From the
early years of the eighteenth century it had
been proposed to bridge the Avon at or near
this point, by some means, and thus save the
descent from Clifton to Rownham Ferry, with
the uncomfortable and sometimes perilous crossing
of the Avon and the climb up to Abbot’s Leigh.
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The ferry at Rownham had been the property
of the abbots of the Augustinian monastery of
Bristol, from 1148, and was of necessity frequently
crossed by those dignified churchmen, who in
course of time, as the size and trade of Bristol
increased, derived a considerable revenue from
their rights here, which, at the Reformation,
passed to their successors, the Dean and Chapter
of Bristol, who in their turn were succeeded by
the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
At this point was also a ford, practicable at
low water for horsemen, but, as the tide here
rises swiftly and to a height of forty-five feet, it
was generally of a hazardous character, as seems
to be sufficiently shown by the fact that in 1610
one Richard George was drowned in thus crossing,
while on December 27th of the same year the
eldest son of one Baron Snigge, Recorder of
Bristol, met a like fate. On the Bristol side
stands, among other houses on the quay, the
Rownham Tavern, and on the Somerset shore
stood a somewhat imposing hostelry called the
“New Inn.” The building of the last-named
house of entertainment and refreshment remains
to this day, but it is now a species of tea-garden
and picnic place, with arbours in which on summer
days parties may make modestly merry and
listen to the murmur of Bristol’s traffic borne,
like a subdued roar, across the river. In the
rear of the old house, the single-track Bristol
and Portishead branch of the Great Western
Railway runs at the foot of the cliffs and
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presently tunnels under them, below the Suspension
Bridge.
The first person ever to put into shape the old
aspirations of Bristol for a bridge across the
gorge of the Avon at this point was Alderman
Vick, of Bristol. He died in 1753, leaving by
his will a sum of £1,000, to be invested until the
capital sum reached a total of £10,000, a sum
he imagined would be sufficient to build a stone
bridge here. For seventy-seven years this generous
bequest accumulated as he had willed, and
by 1830 had reached £8,000. It was then felt,
as engineering had already made great strides,
and as the suspension principle had been tried
in various places, successfully and economically,
that the bridging of this gulf should no longer
be delayed. It had long been evident that
£10,000 would not nearly suffice to build a bridge
of any kind here, but it was thought that, if an
Act of Parliament were obtained for the undertaking
of the work and a company formed, the
necessary funds could be found to begin the
construction forthwith; the company to be
recouped by charging tolls. The Parliamentary
powers were therefore obtained, the company
formed, capital subscribed, and Telford, the
foremost engineer of the day, invited to prepare
plans and estimates. Telford’s plan provided
for a suspension bridge with two iron towers,
and he estimated the cost at £52,000. Telford
was an engineer first, a practical, matter-of-fact
Scotsman, and not by way of being an artist.
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His fine, but not sufficiently grandiose, scheme
was, therefore, rejected, and that of Brunel, who
was next invited to prepare plans, accepted,
although his estimate was £5,000 higher. Brunel’s
success was undoubtedly due to the picturesque
design he made, and the stress he laid upon the
fact that the romantic scenery of this spot might
easily be ruined by a mere utilitarian structure.
The bridge as we see it completed to-day is in
essentials his design, but the two great towers
from which the roadway is suspended are plain
to severity, instead of being, as he had contemplated,
richly sculptured. The towers, he
explained to the committee of selection, were
on the model of the gateways to the ruins of
Tentyra, in Egypt, and would harmonise well
with the rugged cliffs and hanging woods of
Clifton and Abbot’s Leigh.
In 1831 the foundations of Brunel’s bridge
were laid, amid great local rejoicings. Felicitations
on the occasion were exchanged. Sir Eardley
Wilmot, first imagining an Elizabethan Bristolian
returned to earth, and, coming to Rownham
Ferry, finding the place just the same as he had
left it three hundred years earlier, then congratulated
all and sundry on this reproach being
about to vanish, in the proximate completion
of the works, and all was joy and satisfaction.
But money grew scarce; the works were
more costly than had been anticipated, and the
furious riots of 1831 in Bristol rendered capital
shy and fresh funds difficult to obtain. In 1833
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.pn +1
Brunel was desired to reduce the estimates,
and did reduce them by £4,000, at the cost
of sacrificing much of the ornamental work.
In 1836 another foundation-stone was laid, and
a communication opened in mid-air across the
river, by means of an iron bar stretched across.
Along this the workmen travelled daily, suspended
in a wicker basket; a sight that every day drew
fascinated crowds. A demand to cross in this
manner at once sprang up among people who
wanted a new sensation, and the bridge company
earned an appreciable sum by charging for these
aerial trips. While the novelty was very new,
the fare across was five shillings; it then sank
by degrees to half a crown, two shillings, and
one shilling. The total sum thus netted was
£125.
Delays occurred in 1836 owing to the contractors
going bankrupt, but the company itself
then assumed the work. In 1840 the great
towers were finished, but by 1843 the bridge was
still but half finished, although £45,000 had been
expended. Money was again very scarce and
work was at last stopped, and in 1853 the half of
the ironwork and the flooring that had been
delivered were sold to satisfy creditors.
Work was again resumed in 1860, an opportunity
shortly afterwards arising to cheaply
purchase the ironwork of Hungerford Suspension
Bridge, which, built by Brunel in 1845 across the
Thames, from Hungerford Market, at the foot of
Villiers Street, Strand, to the Lambeth shore, at
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a cost of £100,000, was about to be removed to
make way for the iron lattice-girder bridge of the
South-Eastern Railway, still a feature of that
spot.
Meanwhile, the original Act of Parliament for
the building of Clifton Bridge had expired, and
it was necessary to obtain new powers, to form
a new company, and to raise more funds. All
these things were accomplished, not without
considerable difficulty. The ironwork of Hungerford
Bridge was purchased for £5,000, and the
new Act was obtained in 1861. This, however,
laid an obligation upon the new company to
compensate the owners of Rownham Ferry for
any loss. It declared that “persons having a
right of ferry across the river Avon called Rownham
Ferry may, in some respect, be injured by
the building and using of the Bridge; and it is
fit, in case such Ferry should be injured or deteriorated
thereby, that a fair compensation
should be made.” It is understood that this
compensation to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners,
on behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Bristol, the
old owners of the ferry, was estimated at £200 per
annum.
At length, in spite of a shortness of funds that
always accompanied the progress of the enterprise,
the bridge was opened in September 1864, and
has, in all the time since then, proved to be a great
convenience for traffic making for Clevedon and
adjacent parts of the coast. It has also been a
favourite resort for persons of suicidal tendencies,
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who have, indeed, often come from great distances
for the purpose of putting an end to themselves;
being unable to screw up a sufficiency of desperate
courage elsewhere. Indeed, instances have been
known of apparently sane and contented people,
finding themselves on this height, suspended in
mid-air, being unable to resist a sudden impulse
to fling themselves off, and many others there are
who, afraid of losing command over themselves,
have never yet dared face the crossing.
Mere figures do not suffice to give an idea of
the majesty and sense of vastness conjured up
by Clifton Suspension Bridge, viewed either from
below, or along its lengthy roadway; the picturesqueness
of the situation has also to be taken
into account. But they must needs be given.
The suspended roadway between the two great
towers is 703 feet in length and some 34 feet
wide, and hangs 245 feet above the river Avon.
The towers themselves are 80 feet in height.
The entire weight of the bridge is 1,500 tons.
The toll payable by foot-passengers is the modest
one of one penny each. Motor-cars pay sixpence
for a single journey, or ninepence returning the
same day. A curious privilege was secured by
Sir John Greville Smyth, Bart., of Ashton Court,
who very appreciably helped on the construction
by taking £2,500 shares in the company, and by
a gift of a further £2,500. In consideration of
his generosity, no tolls were payable by him
personally, or any of his horses, carriages, or
servants, or by the owner for the time being of
// 031.png
.pn +1
Ashton Court, for a period of thirty years from
the opening of the bridge.
Engineers and men of science tell us that
suspension bridges and the like structures are
safest when they swing most. There can, therefore,
at any rate, be no doubt of the entire safety
of Clifton Suspension Bridge, which vibrates
sensibly to a vigorous stamp of the foot; alarmingly
to those who have not thoroughly assimilated
that engineering rough formula of stability. That
there can be too much sway or vibration is evident
by the traffic across being strictly limited in speed;
while the theory of a sudden application of heavy
weights being likely to snap the chains and rods
that hold up the roadway is endorsed by companies
of soldiers marching this way being always
bidden to change step. It should, however, be
said that not all engineers support this theory.
The great tower rising massively above the
Somerset bank of the Avon bears an inscription
carved prominently upon its stonework: a Latin
inscription, a belated example of the priggish
classicism, beloved by pedants in the eighteenth
century, which set up, all over the country,
statements wholly unintelligible to ninety-nine
out of every hundred wayfarers. “Suspensa vix
via fit,” says this monumental line—that is to say,
rendered into English, “With difficulty can a
roadway be suspended.” The thing is self-evident
anywhere, and much more so here, when you
gaze from this suspended roadway down upon
the gulf, and on to the tall masts of some sailingvessel
// 032.png
.pn +1
arriving at, or leaving, the port of Bristol.
The various attempts made by passers-by at an
understanding of the Latin sentence are amusing,
but the toll-taker appears to have arrived at the
sense of it, by favour, no doubt, of some one
learned in the dead languages; for he was observed
by the present writer to answer the inquiries of
two ladies in this wise: “Well, you see, it’s a
bit above me; but I’ve always been given to
understand it to mean that this yer bridge was
made with great difficulty.”
// 033.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch03
CHAPTER III||ABBOT’S LEIGH TO CLEVEDON
.sp 2
.ni
It is a hilly road that leads from Clifton Bridge to
Abbot’s Leigh, through the noble Leigh Woods.
Nightingale Valley lies down on the right; a
beautiful seclusion, well-named from those songsters
of early summer. Looking down upon it
is the ancient camp of Borough Walls. An
enterprising Land Company has acquired building
rights here from Sir H. Miles, owner of these woods
and of Leigh Court, and has recently built a
number of charming detached residences, irregularly
disposed among the glades; and far advanced,
in disposition, in planning, and in architectural
style, beyond the methods in vogue when
the suburban villas built nearer the bridge were
erected, from about 1870 to 1890.
.pi
.if h
.il fn=i018.jpg w=600px id=i018
.ca
AVONMOUTH, FROM PILL.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: AVONMOUTH, FROM PILL.]
.sp 2
.if-
Three miles, bearing to the right, bring the
traveller down to the Avon estuary again, at the
hillside and waterside village of Pill; a queer
little place, clinging and huddling closely to the
steep banks, and ending in a short quay, where
pilots and other strange waterside folk lean and
sit on walls and look across to Avonmouth, plainly
visible on the Gloucestershire shore, at the meeting
// 034.png
.pn +1
of the Avon and the Bristol Channel; a
distant congeries of clustered masts, great warehouses,
railway signal-posts, and puffs of smoke
and steam: all signs of the great series of docks
constructed by the somewhat belated enterprise
of Bristol, between 1880 and 1908. The delays
and dangers attending the progress of modern
shipping up and down the Avon, to and from the
docks of Bristol city, have long hindered the
expansion of the port, and have left Bristol behind
in that race for commercial greatness in which
Liverpool and Glasgow have emerged foremost;
and now it remains to be seen what the expenditure
of millions will be able to effect in recovering
tonnage and redressing the balance of missed
opportunities. There is a ferry across to Shirehampton
from Pill and those eager for light on
the subject may readily make the passage into
Gloucestershire and satisfy themselves on the
// 035.png
.pn +1
spot of the likelihood of Avonmouth’s future
prosperity. The rise of Avonmouth, at any rate,
means loss to the pilots of Pill, in the diminished
call there will be for their services in guiding
vessels up and down the muddy meanderings
of the Avon.
A pleasant land opens out before the traveller
who wends from Pill through Easton-in-Gordano
(called for short, “St. George’s”) and Portbury,
to Portishead, where the open coast is first
reached.
Portishead is almost wholly delightful. The
straggling village is surprisingly unspoiled, considering
its nearness to Bristol and the fact that
places further removed have been ruined by
overmuch building in recent times. There are
docks, with an area of some twelve acres, at
Portishead, in the level lands below the great
bluff of Woodhill and Black Nore, and there is a
single-track railway, with a terminus here; but
the brilliant future once prophesied and confidently
expected for Portishead docks has not
yet been realised; and now that the great modern
docks of Avonmouth have been opened, there
is even less prospect of those of Portishead coming
into that predicted success.
Attempts have been made to popularise Portishead,
but as the derelict villas on the wooded
crest of Woodhill sufficiently prove, entirely
without success, and the beautiful underwoods,
traversed in every direction by footpaths, and
commanding fine views over the Channel, are
// 036.png
.pn +1
as yet unspoiled. There is great beauty in this
outlook upon the narrow Channel; great beauty
alike in the outlook and in the spot whence it is
obtained. It is not found in the hue of the water,
which is here coffee-coloured; but rather in the
glimpses across the five-mile-wide estuary to
another land—to Monmouthshire—where the
misty levels of Caldicot are relieved by a gleam
on Goldcliff.
On this side the estuary are the long levels
beyond Avonmouth, in Gloucestershire, ending
in the sudden rise of cliff at Aust, where the Old
Passage across the dangerous Severn was situated
in the old coaching days, before railways and the
Severn Tunnel were thought of.
This boldly projecting hill of Portishead commands
the entire panorama of the shipping that
comes to and from the docks at Gloucester and
Avonmouth; and every wind that blows beats
against it, so that the scrub woods are closely
knitted and compacted together. It is a place of
piercing cold and howling blasts in winter, and in
summer the most invigorating spot on the Somerset
coast. The ivy-clad, storm-tossed dwarf oaks
and gnarled thorns reach down to the low, black,
seaweedy rocks, and here and there are fine houses,
with gardens and conservatories, perched within
reach of the spray.
Woodhill Bay, westward of this windy point,
is as sheltered as the heights of Woodhill are exposed.
Near by is the imposing new Nautical
School, which has replaced the old Formidable
// 037.png
.pn +1
training-ship that for many years was a familiar
sight in the anchorage of King Road.
The rise and fall of the tide at Portishead,
ranging from 33 feet at neaps to 44 feet at spring-tides,
is said to be the greatest, not only in England,
but in Europe.
.if h
.il fn=i021.jpg w=600px id=i021
.ca
IN PORTISHEAD CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: IN PORTISHEAD CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
The old village of Portishead is quite distinct
from the modern Portishead just described. A
broad straggling street, a mile long, connects the
// 038.png
.pn +1
two. Some very charming old-world houses are
clustered around this original inland Portishead,
whose noble pinnacled church-tower, rising in
four stately stages, is one of the finest in these
parts of Somerset. The north aisle has towards
its east end a transverse masonry strainer, built
in the middle of the fifteenth century to prevent
the walls collapsing, owing to a subsidence of
the soil. As in the case of the great stone inverted
arches inserted to support the central tower of
Wells Cathedral, a century earlier, the architects
employed have attempted to mask the merely
utilitarian addition by decorative treatment. The
attempt has here met with a greater degree of
success than was possible at Wells, and although
the broad arch spanning the north aisle has
obviously no ecclesiastical use or purport, save
that of shoring up walls that were in danger of
falling, it is not the offensive blot it might, with
less careful treatment, easily have been made.
At Portishead is the terminus of that quaint
short railway, some twelve miles in length with
the long many-jointed name, like some lengthy
goods-train—the Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead
Light Railway; familiarly (for life is short
and busy) the “W.C. and P.L.R.” This is a
single-track line, of ordinary gauge, originally
planned for a steam-tramway, when the Parliamentary
powers for its construction, as between
Weston and Clevedon, were first obtained in
1887. The Act authorising the extension to
Portishead was obtained in 1898.
// 039.png
.pn +1
The first portion, between Weston and
Clevedon, was opened December 1st, 1897. In
the interval between 1887 and 1897 the Light
Railways Act had been passed, and the methods
of construction were modified in accordance.
This was the first line to be opened under the
Light Railways Act, and has therefore the interest
attaching to a pioneer. The W.C. and P.L.R.
has, in the few years it has been opened, conferred
many benefits upon a district almost
wholly agricultural and hitherto peculiarly inaccessible.
The coast between Portishead and Clevedon
is formed principally by the long steeply shelving
hill-range known for the greater part of its length
as Walton Down, thickly covered with woods.
The road on to Clevedon runs in the valley formed
between the landward dip of these heights and
the rise of other hills yet further inland, dominated
by the camp-crested summit of Cadbury
Hill. In the pleasant vale thus formed, runs
easily the W.C. and P.L.R. aforesaid.
There are two villages along this road, Weston
and Walton, both equipped with the “Gordano”
suffix, lest they should, perhaps, be confounded
with other Westons and Waltons. They are
not remarkable villages, and the church at Walton
has been rebuilt; so that the place holds no
particular interest for the stranger. But the
church of Weston-in-Gordano, a small Perpendicular
building, retains in its porch an unusual
and very interesting feature: a wooden musicgallery
// 040.png
.pn +1
over the doorway, approached by a short
flight of stone steps in the thick side wall of the
porch itself. This gallery appears to have been
used by the church choir in olden times, principally
for the singing of the canticle for Palm
Sunday, “Gloria Laus et Honor,” and for
Christmas hymns; but it has, for centuries past,
remained unused and is now merely an archæological
curiosity.
As the stranger approaches Clevedon, his
attention cannot fail to be attracted by a singular
castle-like group of buildings upon the skyline,
on the right hand. This is the so-called “Walton
Castle,” built in the reign of James the First by
the Paulets, then owners of the surrounding
lands, as a hunting-lodge. Castle-building after
the mediæval style had long been extinct, but
this lodge was designed, for picturesqueness’ sake,
in that old manner. It is a flimsy and fast-decaying
sham.
// 041.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch04
CHAPTER IV||CLEVEDON—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: COLERIDGE
.sp 2
.ni
Clevedon is now entered by the modern suburban
developments of Walton Park. Suburbs
and light railways, and all the things they mean,
do not come into the minds of those who have
merely read of Clevedon and have not been there.
Clevedon to these untravelled folk means Coleridge
and Tennyson and Hallam, a certain “quiet
cot,” a stately Court and a lone church on a
hilltop, overlooking the Severn Sea. These are
essentials; the rest is incidental. But when
you come at last to Clevedon, you discover, with
a pained surprise to which you have no sort of
a right, that the position is altogether reversed:
these literary landmarks and associations are
the incidentals, and the essentials—well, what
are they? It would puzzle even an old-established
resident of Clevedon to say. Nothing matters
very much at Clevedon—except that half the
houses are to let; and that is a matter of moment
only to the owners of them and to the tradesfolk.
How do people make shift to pass the time here?
// 042.png
.pn +1
They don’t care for literature: they don’t stroll
the sands, for there are none; and they don’t
walk, for it is a neighbourhood of atrocious hills,
except on the way to the railway-station, the
dust-destructor, and the gas-works.
.pi
What is it, then, they do? I will tell you.
They sit upon the rocks, waiting for the next
mealtime and refusing (rightly) to support the
miserable creatures who, calling themselves
“pierrots,” infest the front. In the exiguous
public gardens old ladies of both sexes knit
impossible and useless articles or pretend to read
the newspapers, and wonder why they ever came
to the place.
The paradoxical tragedy of Clevedon is that
there is at once too little and too much of it:
too little sea-front, and a great deal too much of
the town in these later times built beside it; but
the place must indeed have been delightful in
1795, at the time when Samuel Taylor Coleridge
brought his bride here from Bristol, where they
had been married, in the church of St. Mary
Redcliffe. He was twenty-three, and a visionary
immersed in German metaphysics and the
Kantean philosophy; and had but recently
been bought out of the 15th Light Dragoons, in
which in a moment of despair and starvation, he
had enlisted. Four months of military duties
untempered with glory, but strongly savoured
with riding-lessons and stable-fatigue, did not
make him a more practical man; and he remained
in all the sixty-two years that made up
// 043.png
.pn +1
his span of life, although the most gifted of all
the clever Coleridge family, an amiable dreamer.
The dreams in which he and Southey and
other friends were at this time immersed were
concerned with a fantastic kind of Socialism they
were pleased to style a “Pantisocracy,” in which
ideal state all property was to be held in common,
and all spare time was to be occupied with literature;
a truly terrible prospect! This ideal
community was to be established in North
America, on the Susquehanna river, there to live
a life of plain living and high thinking, punctuated
with washing up the domestic dishes, weeding
the potato-patch, and propagating a new generation
of prigs. But money was needed for the
starting of this pretty and pedantic scheme, and
because “Pantisocracy” (Heavens! what a name!)
did not appeal, and was never likely to appeal,
to any one who was master of any honest coin
of the realm, it remained a vision. It failed for
want of money; and, human nature being what
it is, it would still have failed disastrously had
funds been provided.
So our Pantisocrats remained in England;
“Myrtle Cottage,” Clevedon, remaining for a
little while the address of the Coleridges, until
they removed to Nether Stowey. We may fairly
suppose that here this wayward genius, a brilliant
talker, a poet of gorgeous ideas and noble language,
but a man constitutionally infirm of
purpose, and made yet more inconstant by deep
reading of mystical German philosophy that led
// 044.png
.pn +1
to mental blind alleys, lived the happiest time
of his life. We obtain an early first glimpse of
him—the second day after arrival—in his letter
to Cottle, the amiable and helpful bookseller of
Bristol, who greatly befriended Coleridge and
Southey when they needed friendship most:
To his “dear Cottle” he wrote, October 6th,
1795: “Pray send me a riddle, slice, a candle-box,
two ventilators, two glasses for the washstand,
one tin dust-pan, one small tin tea-kettle,
one pair of candlesticks, one carpet-brush, one
flour dredge, three tin extinguishers,
two mats, a pair of slippers, a cheese toaster, two
large tin spoons, a Bible, a keg of porter, coffee,
raisins, currants, catsup, nutmegs, allspice, cinnamon,
rice, ginger, and mace.”
.if h
.il fn=i028.jpg w=600px id=i028
.ca
COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON.]
.sp 2
.if-
// 045.png
.pn +1
The imagination readily pictures the essentially
unpractical Samuel Taylor Coleridge, certainly
not well versed in domestic economy, taking
down this list of household small gear from his
“pensive Sara”; prepared, with the receipt of
them, to open his campaign for existence against
an indifferent world.
He sang the praises of that early home in no
uncertain manner:
.pm verse-start
Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose
Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The sea’s faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch
Thick jasmins twined: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The Valley of Seclusion!
.pm verse-end
You might indeed so call it now, if inclined
to poetry, but you would be wholly wrong. The
painful fact must be recorded that “Myrtle
Cottage” stands beside the road, directly on the
busiest route between the railway-station and
the sea-front (such as the sea-front is), and that
flys, “charleybanks,” wagonettes, motor-cars, and
all conceivable traffic come this way. Indeed,
this cottage and its trim fellow are now almost
the only vestiges in the road left of the Clevedon
that Coleridge knew. What little remained of
the rocky bluff at the back is now being actively
blasted and quarried away by the local authority,
// 046.png
.pn +1
in its attempt—highly successful, too—at matching
the place with the London district of Notting
Hill. Property owners have already filled Clevedon
with stuccoed semi-“Italian” villas on the
Ladbroke Grove model, that became discredited
a generation ago; the kind of property that
has dismal semi-underground dungeons called
“breakfast-rooms” (by way of a penitential
beginning of the day), and long flights of stone
steps to the front door, alleged to be ornamental,
and certainly excessively tiring. This is a kind
of property that never, or rarely, lets nowadays;
and Clevedon has many empty villas.
The white-paled, red-tiled trim cottages—Coleridge’s
and another—are among the pleasantest
sights of Clevedon, by reason of their
unconventional, homely style, and the fine trees
that surround and overhang them. Tiles, you
will observe, have replaced the thatch of the
poet’s description; but the jessamine still twines
over the porch. Five pounds a year, the landlord
paying the taxes; that was the rent of this then
idyllic spot.
It should here be added that doubts have
recently been expressed as to the genuine nature
of the tradition that makes “Myrtle Cottage”
the temporary home of Coleridge. And not only
have these doubts been expressed, but very
strongly worded statements have been made, to
the effect that the real Coleridge Cottage was in
the valley at East Clevedon, adjoining Walton-in-Gordano.
But the matter is controversial, and
// 047.png
.pn +1
at any rate the legend—if, indeed, it be but a
legend—that has attached to the cottage popularly
known as Coleridge’s, has had so long a start
that it will be difficult, if not impossible, ever to
demolish it.
// 048.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch05
CHAPTER V||CLEVEDON (continued)—LITERARY\
ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON
.sp 2
.ni
But Clevedon has more prominent literary associations
than that just considered, and has a
place unforgettable in poetry by reason of Tennyson’s
“In Memoriam,” that lengthy poem written
by the future laureate to the memory of his
friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who, born in 1811,
died untimely, at the age of twenty-two, in
September 1833.
.pi
Arthur Hallam, a son of that Henry Hallam
who is generally alluded to as “the historian”—although
it would puzzle most of those airy,
allusive folk to name offhand the historical works
of which he was the author—would appear to
have been in posse an Admirable Crichton. He
composed poetry and wrote philosophical essays
at a tender age, thought great and improving
things, and had already begun to set up as something
of a paragon, when death rendered impossible
the fulfilment of this early promise. There were
at that time some terribly earnest young men,
ready and willing—if not realty able—to set the
world right. Prophets and seers abounded in
// 049.png
.pn +1
that dark first half of the nineteenth century,
when religion was at odds with the comparatively
new era of steam and machinery. Each one had
a panacea for the ills of the age, and each had his
own little band of devoted admirers, devoted on
condition that he should in his turn spare a little
admiration for those who hung upon his words
and doings. Prigs and prodigies stalked the
earth, preaching new gospels. They formed
mutual-admiration societies, wherein each protested
how vastly endowed with all the virtues
and all the intellect possible was the other; and
before they had outgrown their legal definition
of “infants” and had come of age and become
technically men, were ready with criticisms and
appreciations of Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare,
and were laying down the laws of conduct in this
life, with speculations upon what awaits us in
the next. It was a morbid, unhealthy generation;
but at the same time, these sucking philosophers
were not without the tradesman instinct, and
zealously combined to advertise one another.
Thus, the early Tennysonian circle at Cambridge
was a Society of Mutual Encouragement, with its
eyes well fixed on publicity. How valuable were
some of these early friendships may well be
guessed from the one outstanding fact that it
was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton,
one of this circle, who at an early date, when
Tennyson himself was little more than a hopeful
promise as a poet, procured by his influence with
Sir Robert Peel, the then Prime Minister, a pension
// 050.png
.pn +1
of £200 a year for his friend. It fortunately
proved a wise selection; but in the case of Tennyson’s
over-elaborate post-mortem praise of his
friend Hallam, we have foisted upon us a very
high estimate of one who, although engaged to
the poet’s sister, Emily, and thus additionally
endeared to him, had not yet proved himself
beyond this narrow circle. He was, therefore, no
fitting subject for the “rich shrine,” as Tennyson
himself styled it, of “In Memoriam,” but should
have been mourned privately.
The connection of the Hallams with Clevedon
was through the mother of Arthur. She was a
daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, of Clevedon
Court. Arthur Hallam died in Austria, and
his body was brought to Clevedon for burial;
hence the allusion in the poem, in that metre
Tennyson fondly imagined himself had originated:
.pm verse-start
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darkened heart that beat no more:
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills;
The salt sea-water passes by
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
The Wye is hushed nor moved along,
And hushed my deepest grief of all,
When filled with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.
// 051.png
.pn +1
The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.
.pm verse-end
Clevedon church was selected as the resting-place
of Arthur Henry Hallam, “not only from
the connection of kindred, but on account of its
still and sequestered situation on a lone hill that
overhangs the Bristol Channel.”
.if h
.il fn=i035.jpg w=600px id=i035
.ca
CLEVEDON.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: CLEVEDON.]
.sp 2
.if-
Much has been altered at Clevedon since 1833,
when that decision was made. The village has
become a small town, of some six thousand inhabitants,
and although the ancient parish church
is still at the very fringe of modern boarding-house
and lodging-house developments, yet no
one could now have the hardihood to describe
its position as “lone.”
All this, if you do but consider awhile, is
entirely in keeping with the change of sentiment
// 052.png
.pn +1
since that time when the poem was written.
Everything is more material. We no longer
examine our souls at frequent intervals, to see
how they are getting on—after the manner of
children with garden plants. The practice is
equally injurious to souls and to plants. Yes,
even in this material age, among those who have
not forgotten or denied their God there is a better
spirit than that which characterises the “In
Memoriam” period. The faith that is demanded
of the Christian—the faith of little children—was
not in these troubled folk. The assurance we
have of Divine infinite goodness and mercy was
not sufficient for them. They must needs enquire
and speculate, and seek to reason out those
things that are beyond research and scholarship.
A great deal of mental arrogance is
wrapped up in these semi-spiritual gropings and
fumblings towards the light. You see the attitude
of the consciously Superior Person therein, and
all these troubles leave you cold and unsympathetic;
and all the more so when it is borne in
upon you that they were carefully pieced together
and prepared for the market during a space of
sixteen years.
The inevitable result of the piecemeal and
laborious methods employed is that the belated
poem lacks cohesion, and although there are
gems of thought and expression embedded in the
mass of verbiage, it must needs be confessed
that “In Memoriam” is a sprawling and unwieldy
tribute. The “rich shrine” erected has indeed
// 053.png
.pn +1
a great deal of uninspired journeyman work, and
is, in fact, not a little ruinous. It is safe to
conclude that portions only of it will survive,
while “Maud,” that line poem of passion, will
endure so long as English verse is read.
To the present writer—if a personal note
may be permitted—the tone and outlook of this
long-sustained effort are alike depressing. This
is not robust poetry, and for the already morbid-minded
it is easily conceivable that it might even
be disastrous.
Tennyson in those early years had what we
cannot but think the great misfortune not to
possess a local knowledge. He made a personal
acquaintance with what was then the little village
of Clevedon only when “In Memoriam” was
completed, and was thus unfortunately unable
to verify some of his most important descriptive
details. He visited Clevedon only belatedly, and
knew so little of the circumstances, although
he publicly mourned his friend so keenly and at
such length, that he was not quite sure where
they had laid him. We observe him trying
twice to place the grave, and failing:
.pm verse-start
’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand
Where he in English earth is laid,
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
.pm verse-end
Or else, he proceeds to say, if not in the churchyard,
then in the chancel:
.pm verse-start
Where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.
.pm verse-end
// 054.png
.pn +1
Leaving aside that shockingly infelicitous
alliterative expression, “the grapes of God,”
intended to convey the meaning of “communion
wine,” we know that neither in the churchyard
nor in the chancel was the body of Arthur Hallam
laid, but in the south transept. But he continues:
.pm verse-start
And in the chancel like a ghost,
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn,
.pm verse-end
making another bad shot. This, however, was
remedied in later editions, in which “dark church”
was substituted for “chancel.” But, since
Clevedon church is not exceptionally dark, why
not the word “transept,” which would be
absolutely correct and certainly more poetic and
less clumsy than “dark church”?
The white marble tablet to the memory of
Arthur Hallam is fixed, with those to his father
and others of the family, on the west wall of the
little transept. Speaking of it, the poet says:
.pm verse-start
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name
And o’er the numbers of thy years.
.pm verse-end
It is the ghastly morbidness of this that at
first arrests the reader’s attention, and a closer
// 055.png
.pn +1
examination does not by any means impress him;
for surely to describe a moonbeam as a “flame,”
moonlight in fact, in appearance, and in the long
history of poetic thought being notoriously cold
and the very negation of heat, is a lapse from
the rightness of things more characteristic of a
poetaster seeking at any cost a rhyme to “name”
than the mark of a great poet.
It has long been the fashion among those
who shout with the biggest crowd to point scornfully
at the critic who, discussing “In Memoriam”
soon after it was published, wrote: “These touching
lines evidently come from the full heart of
the widow of a military man.” This has been
termed “inept.” Now, if we turn to the dictionaries,
we shall find the commonly received definition
of that word to be “unfitting.” But was
it, indeed, unfitting? The opinion of that critic
did not actually fit the facts; but the morbid
tone of the poem, and the singularly feminine
ring of such phrases as “The man I held as
half-divine,” “my Arthur,” and the like, seem
to many a reader to be a perfect justification of
the aptness of the critic’s views; and remind
us that none other than Bulwer Lytton once
referred to Tennyson as “school-miss Alfred.”
.pm verse-start
My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widowed race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me.
.pm verse-end
There is the critic’s ample defence. To a
// 056.png
.pn +1
healthily constituted mind, that verse is more
than ordinarily revolting.
The humble little hilltop church of St. Andrew,
anciently a fisherman’s chapel, has many modern
rivals in suburbanised Clevedon; but in it is
centred all the ecclesiastical interest of the place.
It is chiefly a Transitional-Norman building,
with aisleless nave and chancel, north and south
transepts, and central tower of Perpendicular
date, but plain to severity. The pointed Transitional
arch is the finest and most elaborate part
of the building and is richly moulded. Hagioscopes
command views from either transept into
the chancel. Near the chancel arch is a curious
miniature recumbent effigy, two feet six inches
in length, in the costume of the sixteenth century,
representing a woman, of which no particulars
are known. It is thought to be that of a dwarf.
The Hallam and Elton monumental tablets are
on the walls of the south transept; of plain
white marble, with characteristically bald monumental-mason’s
lettering; the very ne plus ultra
of the commonplace and matter-of-fact, and
very trying indeed to hero-worshipping pilgrims.
For ornament and display of mosaic and gilding
the visitor should turn to the reredos, recently
placed in the chancel. Whether he will delight
in it, after the severity of the tablets, is a matter
for individual prejudices; but he surely will
not feel delighted by being approached by a
caretaker with pencil and notebook and a request
for a gift towards the restoration fund—which
// 057.png
.pn +1
doubtless includes the cost of this theatrical
reredos. It has come to this: that the Tennysonian
association has been made the excuse and
stalking-horse for badgering the visitor for sixpences.
The wise visitor, whether he approves
of elaborate restoration or not, will leave those
who called the tune to pay the piper, and will
further leave to the Elton family of Clevedon
Court, who draw an excellent revenue from
their property here, the duty and the pleasure
of footing the bills that may yet be unsatisfied.
Clevedon Court lies away back on the direct
Bristol road, over a mile distant from the church
and the sea, and removed from the modern developments
of the place, which at one and the
same time have largely enriched its owners, the
Elton family, and have rendered the neighbourhood
less desirable as a residence to them. Ever,
with each succeeding phase of Clevedon’s growth,
the sweetly beautiful valley that runs up hither
from the sea is further encroached upon by
houses, until at the present time a few outlying
blocks are within sight of the Court itself. The
recently opened light railway also bids fair to
be the prelude to further building-operations.
Meanwhile, the grounds of the Court remain
as beautiful as ever, ascending to a long and
lofty ridge, heavily wooded. The Court itself,
of which the interior is not generally shown,
stands prominently facing the park wall and the
road, only a few yards away, and is quite easily
to be seen. It is a long, low mansion, a singular
// 058.png
.pn +1
mass of Gothic gables, chimneys, and terraces,
dating originally from the early years of the
fourteenth century, when it was built by the
De Clyvedons. Court and estates passed with
an heiress by marriage to one Thomas Hogshaw,
thence in the same manner to the Lovell family,
and from them to the Wakes, whose arms and
allusive motto, “Wake and Pray,” are to be
found in parts of the house altered by them about
1570. The Wake family sold their possessions
at Clevedon to Digby, Earl of Bristol; and
finally the executors of the third Earl sold them
to the Elton family in the time of Queen Anne.
Great destruction was caused to the west
front of the Court by the fire that broke out in
November 1882, but the damage has been so
skilfully repaired that, to any save the closest
inspection, the building retains the aspect it had
long presented. The chief feature of the principal
front, of fourteenth-century date, is the entrance-porch,
with portcullis, and room over. Here,
midway along the irregular front, is a very large
square window, filled with curiously diapered
tracery. Thackeray, who often visited here, as
a friend of the Rev. William H. Brookfield and
his wife, Jane Octavia, sister of Sir Charles
Elton, then owner of Clevedon Court, has left a
somewhat striking pencil sketch of the building,
viewed from this point. The house is the original
of “Castlewood,” in his novel, “Esmond.”
.if h
.il fn=i043.jpg w=600px id=i043
.ca
CLEVEDON COURT.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: CLEVEDON COURT.]
.sp 2
.if-
Clevedon Court was largely rearranged in the
time of Queen Elizabeth, in accordance with the
// 059.png
.pn +1
ideas of comfort then prevailing, considerably in
advance of those that ruled when it was originally
built, in the reign of Edward the Second. But it
was left to the remarkable people who ruled when
the nineteenth century was yet young to further
modernise the ancient residence, and they perpetrated
strange things: painting and graining
interior stonework to resemble oak, and the
like atrocities; the highest ambition of builders
and decorators in that era of shame being to
treat honest materials as though they were not
to be shown for what they really were, and to
make them masquerade as something else. No
one ever was deceived by the plaster of that age,
pretending to be stone; and stone that was given
two coats of paint and tickled with a grainer’s
comb, and then finished off with varnish, never
yet made convincing oak, any more than
“marbled” wall-papers looked or felt like real
marble; but those were then conventional treatments,
// 060.png
.pn +1
and were followed and honoured all over
the land.
At the same time, the ancient oak roof of the
hall of Clevedon Court was hidden behind a plaster
ceiling.
But the house is not sought out only for its
antiquity, or for the beauty of its situation, or
even for its Thackeray associations. After all,
does any considerable section of the public really
care for Thackeray landmarks? Writers of
literary gossip, of prefaces to new editions, may
affect to think so, but, in fact, Thackeray does
not command that intimate sympathy which
Dickens enjoys. Sentiment does not attach itself
to the satirist, who, in the odd moments when he,
too, sentimentalises, is apt to be suspected, quite
wrongly, of insincerity. It is for its Tennyson
associations that Clevedon Court is sought by
most tourists.
// 061.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch06
CHAPTER VI||YATTON—CONGRESBURY—WICK ST. LAWRENCE
.sp 2
.ni
The main road from Clevedon to Kingston
Seymour trends sharply inland, passing the little
village of Kenn. Seaward the flat and featureless
lands spread to an oozy shore; Kenn itself, an
insignificant village, standing beside a sluggish
runnel of the same name. From this place
sprang the Ken family, which numbered among
its members the celebrated Bishop of Bath and
Wells, who owed his preferment from a subordinate
position at Winchester to his having,
while there, refused to give up his house for the
accommodation of Nell Gwynne. Charles the
Second was a true sportsman. He respected those
who were true to themselves, whether it were an
unrepentant highwayman, whom he could pardon
and fit out with a telling nickname; or a Church
dignitary whose conscience forbade him to curry
favour by housing a King’s mistress. So, in 1684,
when a choice was to be made of a new Bishop
of Bath and Wells, the King declared that no one
should have it but “the little black fellow that
refused his lodging to poor Nelly.”
.pi
The Ken family finally died out in the seventeenth
// 062.png
.pn +1
century, after having been settled here
over four hundred years. A small mural monument
to Christopher Ken and his family, 1593,
remains in the little church, rebuilt in 1861 and
uninteresting; but with a pretty feature in the
unusual design of the pyramidal stone roof of
its small tower.
Beyond Kenn, in a lonely situation midway
between Yatton and the coast at the point where
the waters of the Yeo estuary glide and creep,
rather than fall, into the sea, stands the village
of Kingston Seymour. The country all round
about is more remarkable for the rich feeding its
flat pastures afford the cows than for its scenic
beauties. If it were not for the luxuriant hedgerows
and the fine hedgerow trees, it would be
possible to say, with the utmost sincerity, that
this corner of Somerset was tame and dull. But
the dairy-farmers who occupy it so largely draw
great prosperity from these flat meadows.
.if h
.il fn=i046.jpg w=600px id=i046
.ca
KINGSTON SEYMOUR.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: KINGSTON SEYMOUR.]
.sp 2
.if-
Within the beautiful and delicately graceful
old church of Kingston Seymour are tablets recording
the floods once possible here, and the
destruction wrought by two such visitations, in
1606 and 1703. An epitaph records the odd
bequest of a certain “J. H.,” in bequeathing
“his remains” to his acquaintance, and their
still more singular joy at the legacy:
.pm verse-start
He was universally beloved in the circle of
His acquaintance; but united
In his death the esteem of all,
Namely, by bequeathing his remains.
.pm verse-end
// 063.png
// 064.png
// 065.png
.pn +1
.ni
The centre of this district is Yatton, which now
draws all surrounding traffic by reason of its
junction station on the Great Western Railway.
Here the traveller changes for Clevedon, or for
Cheddar and Wells, or for Wrington Vale. Yatton
takes its name from the river Yeo, which oozes
near by, and itself hides in that form of spelling
the Celtic word ea, for water, akin to the modern
French eau. Thus Yatton is really, derivatively,
the same as Eton, near Windsor, the water-town
beside the river Thames; Eaton by Chester, on
the river Dee, and many other places throughout
the country with the affix of “ea” or “ay.”
An alternative derivation, as arguable as the first,
makes Yatton derive from the “gate,” or gap, in
the neighbouring hills, through which the Yeo
drains on its way from Wrington. The village
itself stands somewhat high, but overlooks a
very considerable tract of low-lying country,
formerly in the nature of a creek, as proved by
modern discoveries of a Roman boat-house and
similar waterside relics near by.
.pi
The business brought by the junction-station
of the Great Western Railway at Yatton has
effectually abolished the village-like rustic character
of the place. It is more by way of a townlet
of one long street, remarkable for the unpleasing
prominence of blank walls enclosing the grounds
of residents whose desire for privacy appears to
be excessive.
The great feature of Yatton is, however, its
fine church. No traveller can have journeyed
// 066.png
.pn +1
much on the Great Western Railway without
having noticed, as his train approached Yatton,
the singular effect produced by the tall tower of
this fine building, surmounted by a spire that has
lost the last third part of its original height, and
has been finished off with small pinnacles. The
effect is almost uncanny, but by no means unpleasant,
and the proposals that have from time
to time been made to complete the spire are
altogether to be deprecated. No records remain
by which it can with certainty be said that the
spire was ever completed when the church was
at last finished, after building operations that
extended from 1486 to 1500; but the evidence
afforded by the Late Perpendicular cresting and
pinnacles that finish off the incomplete structure,
and are contemporary with it, seems to point
to one or other of two hypotheses: that funds
finally proved insufficient, almost on the eve of
the works being brought to a conclusion; or that
the builders were alarmed by signs of their having
already placed as much weight upon the tower
as it could possibly bear.
.if h
.il fn=i048.jpg w=600px id=i048
.ca
YATTON CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: YATTON CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
It is a noble church, designed in the last
phase of pure Gothic architecture, with some few
remains of Early English and Decorated from a
former building, demolished to make way for
this larger and more splendid place of worship.
Here in the De Wyke chantry is the altar-tomb of
Evelina de Wyke and her husband, c. 1337; and
near by is that of Sir Richard Cradock Newton,
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1448, and
// 067.png
// 068.png
// 069.png
.pn +1
his wife, Emma, or Emmota, Perrott. The recumbent
effigies of the Judge and his lady are
very fine. He wears the robes of his office and
a collar with links of “S.S.,”—mystic letters
generally considered to signify “Souveraigne,”
and to be a badge of Lancastrian loyalty. This
example is considered to be the earliest known.
The “garbs,” or wheatsheaves of the Judge’s
coat-of-arms, may still be traced, as also the arms
of his wife—three pendant golden pears on a red
field, in punning allusion to “Perrott.”
Here also is the tomb of the Judge’s eldest
son, Sir John Newton, and his wife, Isabel Chedder.
All these had, in their time, greatly to do with the
rebuilding and beautifying of Yatton church.
A curious epitaph in the churchyard, to the
memory of a gipsy who died in 1827, reads:
.pm verse-start
Here lies Merrily Joules,
a beauty bright,
Who left Isac Joules, her
heart’s delight.
.pm verse-end
Prominent, close by, is the boldly stepped base of
a churchyard cross, of which the shaft has long
disappeared. Surviving accounts prove it to
have been erected at a cost of £18, in 1499.
Yatton church, as we have seen, has a spire,
an unusual feature with Somerset churches.
Here, however, a small group of spires or spirelets
occurs, including also those of Congresbury,
Kingston Seymour, Kenn, and Worle. Congresbury
spire is the most prominent of all, both
// 070.png
.pn +1
from its own height and from the position it
occupies in the vale below Yatton.
“Coomsbury”—for that is the local shibboleth—is
a considerable village, taking its name traditionally
from “St. Congar,” son of some uncertain
“Emperor of Constantinople.” This really very
autocratic personage endeavoured to marry his
son to a person whom the young man could not
love, and he fled his father’s Court; wandering
in wild and inclement lands, until he came at
last to this then particularly wild and unwholesome
region. We cannot avoid the suspicion
that the lady must have been a terror of the
first water; or, alternatively, that Congar was
not altogether weather-proof in the upper storey.
He is said to have founded a hermitage here,
A.D. 711, and a baptistry at which the heathen
were admitted to the Church; and King Ina, we
are told, became his most powerful patron. At
last he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and
died there; but his body was conveyed back to
Congresbury.
Thus the legend, which has no historical
foundation whatever, and appears to be an ancient,
but entirely idle tale: the name of Congresbury
being really, in its first form, an Anglo-Saxon
Königsburg; or, in modern English, Kingston.
But “St. Congar,” although he finds no place in
learned hagiologies, is still a belief at “Coomsbury,”
and the villagers point to the stump of
an ancient yew-tree as “St. Congar’s walking-stick.”
// 071.png
.pn +1
The church itself is large and fine, but not so
fine as that of Yatton. In the churchyard is the
base of an ancient cross, and in the village itself
a tall shaft of the fifteenth century, with the
cross replaced by a ball.
.if h
.il fn=i051.jpg w=600px id=i051
.ca
THE RECTORY. CONGRESBURY.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE RECTORY. CONGRESBURY.]
.sp 2
.if-
The rectory was until towards the end of
the eighteenth century wholly a fifteenth-century
building; but the clergy of that time, little disposed
towards archæology, and with marked
leanings towards a certain standard of stately
comfort and display, procured the building of the
present large but ugly parsonage, and degraded
the old building into a kitchen and outhouse.
The expansive (and expensive) ideas of that time
have for some generations past proved expensive
indeed to the incumbents of Congresbury, for
the large house and great lofty rooms cost much
// 072.png
.pn +1
to keep in repair, and the ideas of the present-day
clergy are not so nearly as they were like
those of the old-fashioned free-handed country
squires.
In Congresbury churchyard a lengthy epitaph
upon a former inhabitant incidentally tells us
that belated highwaymen still troubled these
parts in 1830, a period when most other regions
had long seen the last of those unknightly
“Knights of the Road”:
.nf c
In Memory of
CHARLES CAPELL HARDWICKE
of this Parish
died
July 2nd 1849
aged
50 years
And was buried at Hutton
His Friends
Erected this Monument
To Record
their admiration of his
Character
and
their regret at his
Loss
A.D. 1871
.nf-
.pm letter-start
He was of such courage that being attacked by a
highwayman on the heath in this parish, Oct. 21st, 1830,
and fearfully wounded by him, he pursued his assailant
and having overtaken him in the centre of this village,
he delivered him up to Justice.
.pm letter-end
The old rectory, happily still standing, was
built about 1446. Its chief interest lies in the
projecting porch; the doorway surmounted with
// 073.png
.pn +1
a sculptured panel enclosing the figure of an odd-looking
angel with a cross growing out of his head,
holding in his hands a scroll inscribed “Laus
Deo.” The archway is pointed in the manner
of an Early English arch, and sculptured with an
imitation of the “dog-tooth” moulding of that
period. Stone shields bear the arms of Bishop
Beckington, and of the Pulteney family.
From Congresbury it is possible to again
approach the coast, coming by level roads that
run through flat alluvial lands to Wick St.
Lawrence, a small and solitary village standing
near the banks of the Yeo estuary.
The writer grows tired of writing, and the
reader doubtless as weary of reading, of the richness
of the land in these parts; but the occasion
for and the necessity of this continued allusion
are at least proofs of the fertility of Somerset
and of the abundance of the good gifts bestowed
upon this fortunate county, whose soil even
oozes plentifully out at its river-mouths and in the
way of muddy deposits conspicuously advertises
this form of wealth. There can be no possible
doubt of the great importance the dairying business
has assumed in these parts. It has already been
noted at Yatton, and here again the traveller
by road, who thus sees the country intimately,
is impressed, not only with the rich pastures, but
with the beautiful stock he sees in them or driven
along the road; and also with the numbers of
carts he observes, with from one to half a dozen
milk-churns, driven smartly across country to
// 074.png
.pn +1
the nearest railway-station, to catch the up
trains for Bristol or London.
The road to Wick St. Lawrence—i.e. St.
Lawrence’s Creek—after crossing the Great
Western Railway midway between Yatton and
Puxton, winds extravagantly between high hedges,
passing only an occasional farmhouse. Rarely
the stranger in these parts meets any other wayfarers
than farming folk, and the children of Wick
St. Lawrence at sight of him stand stock-still,
with fingers in mouths, quaint figures of combined
curiosity and shyness, clad in the old rustic
way in homely clothes and clean “pinners.”
The remains of a many-stepped fifteenth-century
village cross stand opposite the church:
all steps and not much cross, ever since some
village Hampdens in the long ago showed their
hatred of superstition by leaving only about a
foot and a half of the shaft. The church itself,
with tall and rather gaunt tower, is a Late Perpendicular
building, with elaborate stone pulpit.
Here is an epitaph which would seem to have its
warnings for those who might feel disposed to
extend their explorations to the mud-flats of the
Yeo estuary at low tide:
.pm letter-start
To the memory of James Morss, of this parish, yeoman, who
dy’d November ye 25th 1730, aged 38 years.
.pm verse-start
Save me, O God, the mighty waters role
With near Approaches, even to my soul:
Far from dry ground, mistaken in my course,
I stick in mire, brought hither by my horse.
Thus vain I cry’d to God, who only saves:
In death’s cold pit I lay ore whelm’d with waves.
.pm verse-end
.pm letter-end
// 075.png
.pn +1
Beyond the village, the road winds again in
fantastic loops, and is crossed, without the
formality of gates by the W. C. and P.L.R. This
weird concatenation of initials sounds like a
mass-meeting of household sanitary appliances,
but those readers who have diligently persevered
through the earlier pages of this book will understand
that the Weston, Clevedon and Portishead
Light Railway is meant. Thenceforward, after
more windings through a thinly peopled district,
the road wriggles on to Worle; sending off a
branch to the left hand for Woodspring, Swallow
Cliff, and Sand Bay.
// 076.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch07
CHAPTER VII||WORSPRING PRIORY, KEWSTOKE
.sp 2
.ni
The Augustinian Priory of Worspring, or Wospring,
now called “Woodspring,” stands in a very
secluded situation in this little-visited nook of
the coast, projecting abruptly into the Bristol
Channel north-west of Wick, and terminated in
that direction by St. Thomas’s Head: a promontory
which owes its name directly to the Priory
itself, partly dedicated to the Blessed St. Thomas
of Canterbury. The roads of this district are
perhaps better to be termed lanes; and they are
lanes of old Devonian character: narrow, hollow,
with high banks and hedges, stony and winding.
The land is purely agricultural. Thus, except
for a few farmers’ carts and waggons, or for
those more than usually enterprising tourists and
amateurs of ancient architecture and ecclesiastical
ruins who spend their energies in seeking out the
remains of Woodspring Priory, the stranger has
until now been but rarely seen. A new complexion
has, however, been put upon matters by
the coming of what is known locally, “for short,”
as the “W. C. and P.L.R.”; i.e. the Weston,
Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway, already
// 077.png
.pn +1
described; and now learned archæologists, enthusiastic,
but perhaps not always endowed with the
stamina and endurance of explorers, travel hither
in the company of picnic parties, to whom any
ruin in a picturesque setting is a sufficient excuse
for an afternoon afield. “Hither,” however, is
here a generous term, for the railway does not
come within a mile and a half of the spot. But
“every little helps,” as the trite proverb tells us.
.pi
The name of “Woodspring” does not appear
in print before 1791, when it is found in Collinson’s
“History of Somerset.” Before that date it was
always referred to as “Worspring.” The name
has puzzled many, but it is really a simple corruption
of the original term, “Worle-spring,”
indicating the situation of the Priory on a rill
that descended to these levels by the sea from
the neighbourhood of Worle heights.
The Priory was founded in the first instance
by Reginald FitzUrse, as a chapel of expiation of
his share in the murder of Thomas à Becket. It
was in 1210 refounded on a much larger scale by
William de Courtenay, grandson, on the maternal
side, of William Tracy, another of those sacrilegious
knights. Courtenay endowed it as a home
of Austin Canons and triply dedicated the establishment
in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and St. Thomas
à Becket; and it was further enriched by lands
bequeathed by Maud, the daughter, and Alice,
the granddaughter, of the third murderer, le Bret
or Brito: Alice expressing the devout hope that
// 078.png
.pn +1
the intercession of the blessed martyr might
always be available for herself and her children.
The seal of the Priory is curious. In the lower
portion of the usual vesica-shaped device is an
allusion to the dedication to St. Thomas of Canterbury,
in the form of a representation of his
martyrdom: Becket being shown falling by
the altar, on which stands a chalice, at the moment
of his skull being cleft by Richard le Bret’s sword,
which protrudes, immensely large in proportion
to the figure of the Archbishop, from the border.
.if h
.il fn=i058.jpg w=600px id=i058
.ca
WOODSPRING PRIORY.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: WOODSPRING PRIORY.]
.sp 2
.if-
After more than three hundred and twenty
years of an almost unruffled existence, this
obscure religious house was suppressed in common
with others, and its fabric and possessions confiscated.
It was surrendered on September 27th,
1536, and the monks turned adrift upon the
world, perhaps too late in life to set about the
performance of any honest work; but by no
means with that utter indifference as to whether
they were clothed and fed, or went in rags and
starved, that the apologists for monkery and
critics of Henry the Eighth and his Ministers
of State would have us believe. No: unless they
had proved contumacious, the rulers and the
brethren of the disestablished religious houses
were pensioned. The last Prior of Woodspring,
Roger Tormenton, who was appointed in 1525,
received a pension of £12 per annum upon his
surrendering the Priory in 1536—a sum equal
to nearly £100 at present values. The Priory
itself was then leased for twenty-one years to
// 079.png
// 080.png
// 081.png
.pn +1
Edward Fettiplace, of Donington, Berkshire:
one of the formerly numerous family of that
name once settled chiefly in that county and in
Oxfordshire, but now utterly extinct. Passing
through many hands, it is now among the properties
of the Smyth-Pigott family, owners of
much land hereabouts, including the site of
Weston-super-Mare.
There can surely be no farmhouse more
ecclesiastical in appearance than that of Woodspring
Priory. As the traveller approaches it
across the rough occupation-roads of two large
pastures, he sees the noble central tower of what
was the Priory church rising exquisitely from a
characteristically English rural scene of tall elms,
profuse hedgerows, and succulent grass. Rude
wooden field-gates and rutty tracks partly filled
with straw combed off passing heavy-laden
farm-waggons by projecting brambles, conduct
him into a farmyard where porkers grunt from
their sties and cows low from their linhays in
a not unmusical orchestration; the grey and
lichened stonework of the Priory tithe-barn and
the tall tower surrounding them with an unwonted
halo of romantic association. On that
spot where, in the olden days of Woodspring’s
pride, the porter slid back his hatch in the gatehouse,
in answer to the stranger’s knock, the
pigs snuffle in their troughs and thrust pink
snouts through palisades, enquiring curiously
who comes this way. A fantastic thought possibly
occurs to the modern pilgrim that they
// 082.png
.pn +1
might be re-incarnations of those old fat porters
themselves; and a glance into those pig-houses
further discloses fine Berkshires there, as sleek and
well-larded as any greasy mediæval Prior.
The entrance to the farmyard is flanked
with a somewhat noble effect by heavy sculptured
stones bearing shields. That on the right hand
bears the sacred symbols of the five wounds of
our Lord, with a heart in the centre; while on
the left is the heraldic coat of the Dodingtons,
anciently among the benefactors of the Priory;
a chevron between three bugle-horns, stringed,
two and one; a crescent for difference.
Less remains of the Priory church than might
be at first supposed from the majestic bulk of the
tower and the tall buildings that once formed
nave and aisles. The choir has entirely disappeared,
and the nave itself, with the north aisle
of three bays, has been divided into floors for
the purposes of a dwelling-house. It may thus
readily be imagined that the interior is as little
ecclesiastical in appearance as can well be;
although it is true that winding stone staircases
serve instead of ordinary domestic stairs, and
that here and there some ancient carved corbel,
fashioned in the likeness of a human head,
projects from walls otherwise to all appearance
secular; its stony countenance seeming to grin
and gibber in the flickering light of a bedroom
candle. Clustered stone pillars, too, thrusting
through upper floors, and ending in capitals and
sweeping arches, would convince the stranger
// 083.png
.pn +1
that he had found himself in some farmhouse
entirely out of the common order. Even the coalcellar,
which was once a part of the north aisle,
has its features, and the coals repose on incised
slabs and other memorials of the dead. The
cloisters, also, have disappeared; and the monks’
refectory, a detached building on the south side,
is now a waggon-shed, its windows filled in
with bricks. A peep within discloses a fine
open-timbered roof. The only building that yet
retains its ancient use is the Prior’s Barn, still, as
in bygone centuries, the storehouse of grain, straw,
and hay. At the east end of it is a doorway,
now blocked up, formerly leading by nineteen
steps down to the existing pool called the “Holy
Well.” The “Prior’s Pool” is the name of a
pond in the meadows westward, to which an
avenue of elms leads.
Sand Bay, nearly as large as Weston Bay, but
quite lonely, stretches from St. Thomas’s Head
and Swallow Cliff to Anchor Head, Weston-super-Mare.
Shingle and sand continue in an
unbroken semicircular sweep, fringed by pastures,
to the neighbourhood of Kewstoke, a small village
situated on a shelf of rock below the craggy
uplands of Worle Hill, and yet raised above
the meadows. Nowadays Kewstoke is greatly
afflicted in summer by brakes and traps, and
strollers from Weston, for it is but two miles
from the town, and there are the beautiful Kewstoke
woods fringing the road all the way. It
thus forms an easy and popular morning or afternoon
// 084.png
.pn +1
trip, in spite of the fact that a small toll
is payable for the use of it—this being really a
private road cut by a Smyth-Pigott in 1848, and
used by the public only at the pleasure of those
all-pervading landowners of this neighbourhood.
Indeed, were it not for this fine level road through
the dense woods, Kewstoke would scarcely ever
be visited, save by young and energetic people,
prepared to circle round by the rugged old way
through Worle.
There are legends of St. Kew at Kewstoke. On
the rocky crest of Worle Hill, looking down upon
the village, is an ancient excavation of some
twenty feet by twelve, popularly known as “St.
Kew’s Cell”; and the long rude flight of over
two hundred rocky steps towards it is, of course,
“St. Kew’s Steps.” But not the most patient
archæologist has ever traced any genuine association
with St. Kew here. The place-name has,
however, a real connection with that so-called
“cell” on the height, for the excavation was a
part of the elaborate defensive works constructed
by ancient peoples on the summit of the Hill:
a kind of guard-house situated in a difficult
approach, where a small garrison could easily
from behind a palisade or stockade hinder the
advance of many. It is an ascertained fact
that here, at various periods of strife, throughout
many centuries, people of widely sundered eras
have taken up a defensive position. Among the
many curious finds made in or near this pit was
an ancient silver fibula, or ring, coeval with the
// 085.png
.pn +1
Phœnicians who are traditionally said to have
traded to these coasts three thousand years ago;
a Saxon knife; coarse early pottery; remains
of a fifteenth-century spear, and the hilt of a
seventeenth-century sword.
.if h
.il fn=i063.jpg w=250px id=i063
.ca
RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (FRONT).
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (FRONT).]
.sp 2
.if-
Although the sea in those times flowed to the
very base of this hill, just below where the village
church now stands, and submerged the site of the
present broad meadowlands, it seems absolutely
certain that the name of Kewstoke does not,
as so often asserted, derive from the Celtic word
“kewch,” or boat; and does not mean “the
place of boats.” The hilltop guard-house gave
the name, as may clearly be seen in Domesday
Book, that valuable sidelight upon place-names,
as also upon many other things. There we find
“Chiwestock,” the not greatly corrupted version
// 086.png
.pn +1
from the original form. It appears to mean
“the stockade on the ridge.”
The church, dedicated to St. Paul, is a small
building, without aisles. Here is a fine Norman
south door, but the principal features are Late
Perpendicular. The elaborate stone pulpit dates
from about 1500. The old churchwardens’ accounts
abound with curious items, among them that of
1702. “Item: gave unto 7 poor ship carpenters
that had their bones broken at Bristoll, O. I. O.”
Doubtless the benevolent churchwardens gave
this shilling with strict injunctions to the seven
broken-up carpenters not to be so extravagant
as to spend it all at once. But whatever they
did, it is quite certain that the ratepayers of
Kewstoke admonished the churchwardens against
this and other reckless charities, and gave them
to fully understand that any future benevolences
must come out of their own personal pockets.
There are no ancient monumental brasses in
Kewstoke church; a fact perhaps fully accounted
for by the following entry in the accounts:
“1748. Item: paid for casting the ould brasses,
23 at 6d. ... 11. 6.”
So there we perceive the accumulated monuments
of centuries going in one plunge into the
melting-pot.
.if h
.il fn=i065.jpg w=250px id=i065
.ca
RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (BACK)
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (BACK)]
.sp 2
.if-
An interesting discovery was made during
the restoration of Kewstoke church in 1849.
A block of stone sculptured with a half-length
figure, supposed to represent the Virgin Mary,
built firmly into the north wall under the sill of
// 087.png
.pn +1
a window, had long been a curious object of the
interior of the building, and was by some antiquaries
considered to be a heart-shrine. The
greatly defaced figure appeared to be holding a
shield. To satisfy curiosity, the stone was removed,
disclosing a small arched hollowed-out
chamber at the back, in which was a greatly
decayed oak vessel, or cup, partly split open by
warping. At the bottom of this was a dry black
incrustation, pronounced to be congealed human
blood. It was supposed, from the circumstances
of the founding of Woodspring Priory, and from
the fact of a cup, or chalice, forming a part of
the Prior’s seal, that this relic was nothing less
than a precious portion of the martyr’s blood—the
greatest treasure owned by the Priory. It
was further thought that the monks, foreseeing
the troubles of the dissolution of the religious
// 088.png
.pn +1
houses, caused the relic to be secretly removed
and placed here, in Kewstoke church. It is now
in Taunton Museum.
The Kewstoke woods, largely of scrub-oak,
closely woven and interlaced and compacted
together by the winds off the Channel, descend
in tangled thickets to the water’s edge. At
the end of them, a picturesque toll-gate marks
the beginning of the modern pleasure-resort of
Weston-super-Mare. No one need have the remotest
shadow of a doubt that he has arrived,
for the crowds of excursionists here and on that
Walhalla of noisy enjoyment, Birnbeck Pier,
make themselves very fully seen and heard.
// 089.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch08
CHAPTER VIII||WESTON-SUPER-MARE
.sp 2
.ni
Weston-super-Mare has frequently been styled
the “Western Brighton.” It matters little or
nothing to those who invent these impossible
parallels that the places thus compared with
one another have nothing in common; and
certainly Weston (for few there be who give it
the longer name) is as little like Brighton as
any place well can be. Weston fringes the bold
curve of the shallow and sandy Weston or Uphill
Bay, sandy inshore: a mile-broad expanse of mud
at low water. Brighton is built on a straight
coastline, part of the town standing on the clifftops
of Kemp Town, and the narrow beach is
exclusively shingle. At the back of Brighton
run the treeless chalk hills of the South Downs;
behind Weston stretch the levels that extend
further inland as far as Sedgemoor. Brighton
took its rise in the middle Georgian period, about
1780; Weston remained an insignificant village
until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
.pi
While it is certainly a mistaken compliment
to compare the situation of Weston with that
of Brighton, it is, on the other hand, unfair to
// 090.png
.pn +1
Brighton to pretend that, as a town, Weston
approaches it, for size or splendour. But in
every respect the places are so wholly dissimilar
that it would be the worst of mistakes to play
the one off against the other.
One of the very earliest discoverers of Weston
was Mrs. Piozzi, the Mrs. Thrale of earlier years,
friend of Dr. Johnson. Writing hence in 1819,
she mentions the fine qualities of the air: “The
breezes here are most salubrious: no land nearer
than North America when we look down the
Channel; and ’tis said that Sebastian Cabot used
to stand where I now sit, and meditate his future
discoveries of Newfoundland.”
The reference to “no land nearer than North
America,” with the cautious proviso, “when
we look down the Channel,” strikes the modern
observer, who in fine weather distinctly sees the
busy towns of the South Wales coast and the
smoke-wreaths of its factory chimneys, not more
than ten miles distant, as particularly quaint.
The old county historians have little to say of
Weston, and what they have to remark is concerned
only with the descent of the manor.
Even so comparatively recently as 1824—five
years, it will be noted, later than Mrs. Piozzi’s
raptures—Weston remained a very small place,
as shown in an old engraving published at the
time in Rutter’s “Westonian Guide.” It consisted,
it would appear, of the parish church of St.
John, just rebuilt, and some thirty houses. A
few trees, of a distinctly Noah’s Ark type,
// 091.png
.pn +1
looked upon the sands, occupied by two bathing-machines,
a shed, a horse and cart, and twelve
widely distributed people of uncertain but pensive
character. Such was the old inheritance of the
Pigott and Smyth-Pigott family, who have owned
the manor of Weston, with much else in the
neighbourhood, since 1696.
But the evidence afforded by the frontispiece
to “Rutter’s Guide,” which shows Weston like
some sparse settlement on a desolate shore, does
not tally with the statements contained in the
booklet itself, in whose pages we read:
“The fishermen’s huts have almost disappeared
and the town now contains about two hundred
and fifty houses; a large portion of which are
respectable residences,[#] and even some elegant
mansions; but notwithstanding this, its general
appearance is little inviting to the stranger,
especially in gloomy weather, or when the ebb of
the spring tides leaves open large tracts of beach.
But on a fine summer evening, when the tide is
in, nothing can be more beautiful than the scene
which it presents: numerous groups walking
on its smooth and extensive sands, intermingled
with a variety of carriages, horses, fishermen
wading with nets, and the villagers enjoying the
exhilarating breeze after the fatigues of the day.”
.pm fn-start // A
This is good hearing.
.pm fn-end
The seaside was at that time in process of
being discovered. At innumerable spots around
our coasts fisher villages were then being transformed
into elegant resorts, which were saved
// 092.png
.pn +1
from becoming vulgar by the sufficient facts that
the working classes could not afford holidays, and
that, if they could, the means of transport were
lacking. When tedious and expensive coach
journeys were the only methods of being conveyed,
it is obvious that wage-earners could spare
neither the time nor the money for what would
have been to them, under the most favourable
circumstances, an enterprise. But those classes
were quite content to do without the week’s or
fortnight’s holiday at the seaside which appears
nowadays to be regarded as the birthright of most
men, women, and children. They were not then
educated up to holidays, and were content to work
week in and week out through the year, never
questioning the scheme of things that gave to
the few that leisure they themselves could never
enjoy.
It is a little difficult nowadays to realise
the exclusive Weston that was; although, to be
sure, those days when it still posed as exclusive
are not so far distant but that many old people
in the town can recollect them perfectly well.
The beginning of the end of this old-time
attitude of aloofness may be dated from 1841,
when the Bristol and Exeter Railway that was—the
Great Western that is—was opened to Worle,
in continuation of the line from Paddington to
Bristol; being completed the whole way to
Exeter in 1844.
The early history of railways is not yet ancient
history, but it is already old enough to be obscured
// 093.png
.pn +1
and made romantic by legends, some true, others
coloured with that passion for the picturesque
which transfigures history everywhere. Stories
are told, as they are told everywhere, with a
great deal of truth in them, of local objections
to the railway. We hear of the passionate
opposition offered by the Smyth-Pigotts and by
the inhabitants of Weston to a proposal to run
the main line near the town; with the result
that it was constructed no closer than a mile
away inland. The two thousand inhabitants
who then constituted the town of Weston shortsightedly
rejoiced at this victory, which was
very speedily found to be a costly one; the
branch tramway laid down from the main line,
with railway carriages dragged slowly into the
place, to a shed situated in the rear of the present
Town Hall, proving an undignified entrance that
not many visitors cared to experience twice.
But for ten years this remained the way into the
town by rail. A proper branch line was afterwards
built from Worle, but still Weston station
remained a terminus, until the new loop line
was made, in 1884, coming through the town
and rejoining the main at Uphill and Bleadon
station.
Another local railway legend, of some interest,
relates to a forlorn platform that no living person
ever saw put to any manner of use. It stood
some distance to the north side of the existing
station for Uphill and Bleadon, and was popularly
supposed to be a station erected by the
// 094.png
.pn +1
Company in accordance with the letter (certainly
not with the spirit) of an agreement entered
into between the Company and a local landowner
through whose land the railway had been
made, at an extravagant cost, in consequence of
the high price this freeholder had put upon his
holding. He, it appears, finally insisted upon
having a station built for his own personal
convenience, and the Company agreed. But
nothing had been said about trains stopping there,
and so no tickets were ever issued to or from
this freak building, and no trains ever halted
at it.
Nowadays with its twenty-five thousand
inhabitants, Weston welcomes, instead of repelling,
the visitor. Nay, more: it has arrived
at that stage of existence to which most other
seaside towns have come, and lives for and on
visitors, and when the summer season is over
ceases to be its characteristic self; always remembering
that in winter its climate is mild and
inviting to invalids.
It has long been the fashion in many quarters
to depreciate Weston-super-Mare, and to style
it “Weston-super-Mud.” Mud there is in plenty,
far out in this shallow bay, and it is exposed for
a great distance at the ebb, but it never intermingles
with the fine broad yellow sands that
form a paradise for children along the entire
two miles’ sweep of the bay, from Anchor Head
to Uphill, and make a fine track for the donkey
rides that are so great a feature of the children’s
// 095.png
.pn +1
holidays here. The scenery surrounding Weston
is delightful and singularly romantic. Boldly
placed in mid-Channel are those twin, but strongly
dissimilar islets, the Steep Holm and Flat Holm,
the last-named provided with a prominent white
lighthouse, and both in these latter days the
site of massive forts presenting an embattled
front to any possible hostile voyage up the Severn
Sea. These islets are outlying fragments of
the Mendip range of hills, which ends south of
the town in the quarried hills of Bleadon and
Uphill, and in the almost islanded gigantic bulk
of Brean Down. Overhanging the town on the
north is that other outlier of the Mendips, Worle
Hill. In every direction, therefore, we find hills
peaking up with a suddenness and an outline
almost volcanic in appearance. The air, too,
of Weston is brisk and enjoyable; and if there
be indeed nothing of interest in the town itself,
modern creation as it is, the same criticism is
applicable to many another seaside resort. The
stranger, therefore, who has for many years
been familiar with severe and undiscriminating
criticisms of Weston finds it, when at last fate
brings him hither, a very much more likeable
place than he had dared hope.
It must, however, be said that Weston is
not select. It is popular, in the sense that
Yarmouth, Blackpool, and Southport (to name
none others) are popular. It caters of necessity
for the crowd, for the crowd is at its very
threshold. Half an hour’s railway journey from
// 096.png
.pn +1
Bristol, and a mere ten miles’ steamer voyage
from Cardiff and other populous Welsh ports,
would render useless any attempts that might
be made to keep Weston as a preserve for the
comparatively few rich, leisured, and cultured
persons who might give its Parade a better tone,
but certainly would not do the shopkeeping
class much good. And to do the people and the
local authorities of Weston the merest justice,
they make no such attempts, foredoomed to
failure as they would be. I do not know what
the motto of Weston-super-Mare may be, nor even
indeed if it has one. If not already furnished in
this respect, it might well be “Let ’em all come.”
And they do already come in very considerable
numbers. But this, it should be said, is not
to pretend that Weston is either so large, or
so besieged with immense crowds of visitors, as
Blackpool and the other popular resorts already
mentioned. Still the streets, the long curving
Parade, and the sands are in July, August, and
September as densely crowded as any lover of
humanity in masses could reasonably desire,
and the place is as fully furnished with strictly
unintellectual amusements as the average lower
middle-class holiday-maker could hope for, outside
Blackpool and Yarmouth. Here is a pier,
the “Grand Pier” it is called, thrusting forth
a long arm from the centre of the Parade into
the shallow waters of the bay, with a huge concert
pavilion midway, and a further lengthy arm
going on and on until it rivals Southend pier
// 097.png
.pn +1
itself, with a total length of 6,600 feet, or something
like a mile and a quarter; the intention
being to enable the excursion steamers to touch
at the pier-head. An electric railway runs the
length of this prodigious affair, which entirely
eclipses the old Birnbeck Pier under Anchor
Head: really a pier-like bridge connecting the
rocky isle of Birnbeck with the mainland. From
the isle itself three pier-arms project in different
directions, and to these the excursion steamers
from Bristol, Cardiff and other ports have hitherto
come. Such dreams of delight await the incoming
visitors on this siren isle that many day-excursionists
to Weston proceed no farther. The
place abounds with every kind of amusement,
except the intellectual variety: water-chutes,
switchback railways, try-your-weight and try-your-strength
machines, and battalions of other
penny-in-the-slot mechanisms; and, above all,
a damned something that may be espied from
the shore, like a huge giant’s-stride pole with
baskets whizzing in dizzy fashion around it; the
said baskets being filled with people who have
paid a penny each for the privilege of being given
a sensation which must be a colourable imitation
of sea-sickness. The channel called the Stepway,
which separates Birnbeck from Anchor Head at
high tide, is readily crossed at low water; but
the place has its hidden dangers, in a very swift
current that sweeps suddenly through when the
tide again begins to flow; as may be seen by
personal observation, and in the evidence offered by
// 098.png
.pn +1
a tablet in Clevedon church, which records
the deaths in 1819 by drowning of Abraham and
Charles Elton, two sons of Sir Abraham Elton,
who at the ages of thirteen and fourteen were
thus cut off: “In crossing from Bearnbeck Isle,
at Weston-super-Mare, the younger became involved
in the tide, when the elder plunged to his
rescue. The flood was stronger than their strength,
though not their love, and as ‘they were lovely
and pleasant in their lives,’ so ‘in their death
they were not divided.’”
Midway between Birnbeck and the Grand
Pier is a projecting rock, once an island called
Knightstone, now connected with the shore and
made the site of the Knightstone Pavilion and
Baths.
Add to these varied delights the presence of
hundreds of itinerant vendors on Parade and
sands, and barrows innumerable in the busy
streets; and throw in a very plentiful supply of
teashops, restaurants, and dining-rooms in the
centre of the town, whose proprietors or their
agents stand on the pavement and shout for
custom, and you will have a very fair notion
of what Weston is like. To these items, however,
must be added Grove Park, with its mansion,
the old manor-house of the Smyth-Pigotts, and,
the Clarence Park, and one other. Finally, conceive
that indispensable feature of a modern
watering-place, an electric tramway, and there
you have Weston-super-Mare.
Everything is very new, and probably the
// 099.png
.pn +1
one ancient object is the chancel of the parish
church, which seems to have escaped rebuilding,
but is not, at any rate, of much interest. In the
church is the following curious epitaph:
.pm verse-start
Of two brothers born together,
Cruel death was so unkind
As to bring the eldest hither,
And the younger leave behind.
May George live long,
Edgar dy’d young,
For born he was
To Master Sam Willan, Rectour
of this place, and Jane his wife,
Sep. 5, 1680, and buryed Feb.
the eleventh, 1686. The 9th
did put an end to all his pain,
And sent him into everlasting gain.
.pm verse-end
// 100.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch09
CHAPTER IX||WORLEBURY—WORLE
.sp 2
.ni
All the ebullient modernity of Weston is looked
down upon by the immemorially old, from that
overhanging vantage-point, Worle Hill, where the
ancient camp and fortress of Worlebury, dwelling-place
and stronghold of many ancient peoples,
shows traces of occupation by a race who flourished
some four thousand years since. Worlebury
passed through many hands, but the last people
who sheltered there died in ruthless battle thirteen
centuries ago.
.pi
Worlebury rises to a height of 357 feet above
Weston, and although modern villas here and
there impinge upon it, and the spire of Holy
Trinity Church and the unlovely backs of houses
are a thought too insistent from these grey
ramparts of prehistoric times, it is in many ways
as remote from the seething crowd beneath as
its height would imply. The camp of twenty
acres is divided into two unequal parts by a
ditch. It is conjectured that the larger portion
was the place of refuge, and the smaller the
actual fortress, of the race who constructed it.
The whole is irregularly enclosed by ramparts of
// 101.png
.pn +1
loose pieces of limestone and rocky banks, roughly
of live successive ranges, but here and there, in
places thought weakest, of as many as seven.
On the side facing the sea, where the limestone
rocks of Worle Hill go precipitously down, and
artificial defence was not required, there are no
ramparts.
This hilltop was until about 1820 a barren
spot, quite innocent of trees, but the plantations
made at that time by the Smyth-Pigott of the
period have by now resulted in a crown of
beautiful woodlands of larch, oak, and other
trees. Amid these woods the extraordinary
ancient ramparts of loose limestone fragments,
the broadest of these defences about a hundred
feet across, glimmer greyly, like petrified rivers.
The flakes and knobs of stone, broken up and
placed here in such immense quantities and with
incredible labour, vary in size from about that
of an ordinary brick to three times those dimensions,
and are as clean and sharp to-day as though
but recently quarried.
It is not an easy matter to climb over these
successive banks and ditches, and it is quite
evident that those who at different periods stormed
these defences and slew those who occupied
them, must have been determined people, little
daunted by the losses they must needs have
suffered in the advance. The early defenders
were men who used the sling for chief weapon
of defence, and great numbers of slingers’ platforms—little
flat spaces contrived in strategical
// 102.png
.pn +1
positions along the sloping sides of the hill—remain,
like so many primitive artillery emplacements;
while quantities of their ammunition—pebble-stones
that are not in the course of nature
found on the crests of limestone hills—may be
picked up.
The first people, it is thought, who seized this
hilltop, were Belgic tribes from over seas, who,
landing in the shallow waters that then spread
where the meadows below Kewstoke are now, or
in the lakelike bay on whose side Weston now
stands, fortified the summit and held it as a base
from which to make further advances. The
natives of these parts, whose lands those ancient
raiders coveted, were chiefly lake-dwellers, living
on the many islets that then studded these marshy
seas and salt-water lagoons, or housed on pile-dwellings
ingeniously constructed in the waters
themselves. Larger communities of them lived
for safety inside stockades, whose fragments
have been discovered of recent years at Meare, in
the neighbourhood of Glastonbury, where evidence
of the conflicts that followed the appearance
of the raiders was found, in charred remains
of wrecked homes. Evidence was not wanting
that this was a conflict in which both sides suffered,
and among the remains of a stockade unearthed
recently was found the trophy of a woman’s
head, which the science of ethnology proved to
have been that of a person belonging to the
raiders’ tribes. Thus it appeared that the lake-dwellers
had seized and murdered one of their
// 103.png
.pn +1
enemies’ women, and had fixed the head upon
a stake of their defences, by way of derision.
Those who first seized Worle Hill, and made
the camp of Worlebury, evidently intended to
stay, for they constructed many well-like dwelling-pits
in the hilltops. Some of these remain. They
are about four feet deep, and had originally a
surrounding wall, about two feet high. A roof
of boughs and twigs, kept in place by flat slabs of
stone, completed a specimen dwelling. We know
so much for a certainty, because in excavating
examples of these houses the original roof has
been found, with the boughs and twigs and the
flat stone slabs that had been especially brought
from the lias strata of Nailsea by these ancient
folk. Plentiful signs remained that at some
period this camp had been rushed and every dwelling
burnt out, for charred barley was found,
together with remains of burnt logs and wattle-work
roofing. Under the remains of these roofs
were pebble-stones, part of the ancient occupants’
sling ammunition; and relics of their last meals,
in the shape of bones of birds and rabbits.
Some flint arrow-heads also were discovered, and,
secreted behind a rocky ledge in one of these
pits, some iron ring-money. So, on some day of
red ruin, at a date no man can give, the first
camp of Worlebury was destroyed.
Centuries passed, and the hilltop apparently
was given over to solitude, and nature buried
these relics of a desperate day under moss and grass.
Whether, as sometimes has been supposed, the
// 104.png
.pn +1
Romans at a later age stormed a British camp
on this height, is at least uncertain. The only
things Roman ever found here were some coins,
and they may well have belonged to the Romanised
Britons who, after the withdrawal of the Roman
garrisons of Britain, fell a prey to the more virile
barbarians from the north of Europe, and retreated
before them, being driven mercilessly
from one fortified post to another, and slain in
many thousands. The last great struggle in
Worlebury took place at this period. Arthur,
the half-legendary King Arthur of so many
romances, the great warrior-king of more than
three hundred years earlier date than Alfred the
Great, had been at length slain, in A.D. 542; and
the Saxon onset, checked by his successes, was
renewed. Ceawlin, the great Bretwalda of the
powerful and rapidly growing kingdom of Wessex,
overthrew the Britons at the bloody battle of
Barbury Hill, near Swindon, in A.D. 556, and
in A.D. 577, with great slaughter, gained the battle
of Dyrham, between Bath and Bristol; all those
parts we now know as Gloucestershire and Wiltshire,
together with parts of Somerset, being
thereby added to the kingdom of Wessex. Soon
after the battle of Dyrham, Ceawlin captured
Worlebury, where the Britons had taken refuge,
and the evidence of what was then wrought here
was still visible in 1851, when archæologists
systematically excavated and examined the turf
that covered the ancient pit-dwellings. In one
pit were found three skeletons, doubled up and
// 105.png
.pn +1
lying across one another, evidently just as they
had been flung there after the fierce onset of the
storming party. The skull of one was cleanly
gashed in two places, as though by a sword;
doubtless in this case the “saexe,” the short sword
the Saxons used, and from which, indeed, their
name derives. Another had a wound in the
thigh and an iron spear-head was found embedded
in the spine. Evidently this was the framework
of a warrior who had been taken in the rear
while engaging in executing a strategical retreat;
or, as we used to say at school, “doing
a bunk.” Unfortunately he had not started
early enough. The third skeleton was that of
a bolder man of war, who had stayed to see it out
and scorned to run, with the result that he received
a huge stone in the skull, and his collarbone
was driven up into his jaw. It was then
too late to leave, and in fact his bones remained
here for close upon thirteen hundred years, with
these evidences of his ill-advised stand, plain to
see. But his soul goes marching on.
Other pit-dwellings contained skeletons, portions
of rusted arms, potsherds of a rude type of
earthenware vessels, and beads; many of them
superimposed upon the infinitely older relics
of the earlier defenders. Many of them are to
be seen in the collections of the Somerset Archæological
Society at Taunton. There is prominently
displayed the skull of a slaughtered warrior
with no fewer than seven gashes in it. He must
have been a bonny fighter, to have attracted all
// 106.png
.pn +1
this hewing and slashing that at last put him out
of action; or else the crowd concentrating their
efforts on him wasted those energies that might
with greater advantage have been distributed
more evenly over the stricken field. We can
know nothing of who he was. No monument
was ever raised to his memory. But, although
it may at first sight seem to be an indignity that
his shattered skull should be exposed here, yet,
when you more closely consider the rights and
the wrongs of it, is this not his best monument—showing
that he fought for all he was worth, and
was only slain by overpowering odds? Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori!
Worle (locally “Wurle”) itself is a detestable
village of vulgar and poverty-stricken shops and
out-at-elbows cottages, a blot on its surroundings.
As Weston rose from insignificance, Worle, which
was anciently its market-town and centre of
supplies, sank into obscurity, and now the sole
interest of the place is its pretty church, containing
some good miserere seats. It was of
old the property of Worspring Priory, and Richard
Spring, one of its later Priors, was at the same
time vicar of Worle. He resigned the Priory in
1525. His initials are found carved on one of
the misereres. A small stone in the churchyard
is inscribed:
.nf c
A Maiden in Mold
60 years old
JOANNA
1644
.nf-
// 107.png
.pn +1
The registers contain some curious items,
among them, under date of 1609, the following
note:
“Edward Bustle cruelly murthered by consent
of his owne wyfe, who, with one Humfry Hawkins,
and one other of theyre associates, were executed
for the same murther, and hanged in Irons at a
place called Shutt Shelfe, neere Axbridge, and
the body of the said Bustle barberously used,
viz., his throte cutt, his legs cutt of, and divers
woundes in his body, and buryed in a stall, was
taken up and buryed in the church yard at
Worle, March Xth. A good president (sic) for
wicked people.”
Apparently the degree of criminality of the
unhappy Edward Bustle’s wife was not great,
for she not only escaped this hanging which,
according to the wording of the above note, she
suffered, but married in the following October a
certain bold man, by name Nicholas Pitman.
A violent, but unexplained, local antipathy
to lawyers was formerly manifested at Worle, by
the contumelious drumming out of any member
of the legal profession who chanced to be discovered
in the village. Some embittered page
of local history is no doubt concerned in this now
obsolete custom, but this is probably almost as
far removed in the annals of the place as those
distant ages when Worle was by way of being a
seaport. Where the flat meadows now spread,
maplike below the village, and where the Great
Western Railway runs, ships in dim bygone æons
// 108.png
.pn +1
rode at anchor. Proof of that forgotten fact was
accidentally discovered of recent years, when, in
digging the foundation of a new brewery, an
ancient anchor was unearthed from the sandy
subsoil.
// 109.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
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.sp 4
.h2 id=ch10
CHAPTER X||STEEP HOLM—FLAT HOLM—UPHILL—BREAN DOWN
.sp 2
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If one might dare so greatly as to make one
prominent comparison to the disadvantage of
Brighton and the advantage of Weston, it would
be this: that the seascape off Brighton beach is
a mere empty waste of waters. What shipping
there is to be occasionally seen is observed going
far away out in the Channel; there so broad that
it might be, for all the evidence there is to the
contrary, the wide ocean itself. Here at Weston,
on the other hand, where the Bristol Channel is so
narrow that the coast of South Wales is easily
to be seen, a constant passage of shipping enlivens
the outlook. Here also are those picturesque
islets, Steep Holm and Flat Holm, that have so
companionable and cheerful a presence.
.pi
The two Holms that stand forth so picturesquely
midway in the Channel deserve some
detailed description, for they not only form
prominent objects in every view from Weston,
but have a curious history. Both are favourite
places for excursions by sailing skiffs or motorboats,
// 110.png
.pn +1
and if there be those persons who cannot
obtain a sufficiency of sea-bathing on Weston
shores, Flat Holm affords plenty. The name,
“Holm” is Norse for “island,” and remains
evidence of the Danish descent upon these coasts
in A.D. 882. The Saxon names for the isles, as
given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were “Stepanreolice”;
and “Bradanreolice”; i.e. “Steep
Reel Island,” and “Broad Reel Island”: the
word “reel” being probably an allusion to their
supposedly reel-like shape; Steep Holm a long
and narrow rock, rising abruptly, with steep and
jagged limestone cliffs, to a height of 256 feet
above the sea; and Flat Holm presenting a broad,
flat, egg-like form.
It was on Steep Holm that Gildas, the bitter
and melancholy monkish Celtic chronicler of the
woes that befel Britain after the death of King
Arthur, wrote his Latin complaint, Liber Querulus
de Excidio Britanniæ, telling how the country was
overrun by the Saxon hordes in the fifth and sixth
centuries.
In later centuries the Saxons themselves fell
upon evil times, and were overcome by stronger
races, or waged inconclusive defensive wars with
other oversea marauders. Thus the isles were
the scene of a hostile descent from Brittany in
A.D. 918. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us,
in doleful language, of the miseries of that
time; how a numerous fleet, commanded by Earls
Ohtor and Rhoald, pillaged either shore from
these fastnesses, and how finally they were defeated
// 111.png
.pn +1
and Earl Rhoald slain, on the mainland; when
“few of them got away, except those alone who
there swam out to the ships. And then they
sat down on the island of Bradanreolice, until
such time as they were quite destitute of food;
and many men died of hunger, because they
could not obtain any food.” At length a famished
remnant at last dispersed to South Wales and
Ireland, and thus ingloriously faded out of history.
Seventy years later, that is to say A.D. 988, the
Danes, ravaging these coasts, made Steep Holm
a base, and in 1066, after the Battle of Hastings,
Gytha, mother of the brave but unfortunate
Harold, took refuge here from the Norman.
Steep Holm, one and a half miles round, is
not an easy place to approach, having only two
landings. It is the nearest of the two from Weston,
being but three miles offshore, while Flat Holm
is five and a half miles distant. The area of Steep
Holm is, roughly, seventy acres. Geographically
it is situated in the parish of Brean. It is the property
of Mr. Kemeys-Tynte, of Cefn Mably, Cardiff,
and is partly leased to the War Office, which
maintains six heavy batteries here; the Gordon,
Rudder Rock, Split Rock, Laboratory, Summit,
and Tombstone forts, mounted with modern heavy
guns, crowning the cliffs. Here also is a Lloyd’s
signalling station, together with an inn, formerly
a residence built by Mr. Kemeys-Tynte, who at
one time resided here.
Steep Holm was formerly known as the home
of the single peony, a wild flower peculiar to the
// 112.png
.pn +1
island; but enthusiastic botanists would appear
to have by this time collected it so extensively
from the wild, ivy-hung cliffs that it is not now
to be found. But wild birds, of aquatic and
other varieties, still abound. Scanty remains of
an obscure fourteenth-century priory, in the
shape of a dilapidated wall with no architectural
features, are left. A ruined inn, roofless, a
melancholy sight to thirsty souls, is left on the
island, relic of the illegitimate enterprise of a
fugitive publican and sinner, who, fleeing to this
sanctuary for debtors, outside the ordinary jurisdiction
of the petty courts, imagined himself,
wrongly as it appeared, also beyond the reach of
the Inland Revenue.
Flat Holm is geographically and politically
in South Wales, is the property of the Marquess of
Bute, and is situated in the parish of St. Mary,
Cardiff. Once a year the vicar and curate of St.
Mary’s visit the island and hold service in the
barracks. Four batteries are situated on the
island: the Castle Rock, Farm, Lighthouse and
Well batteries. The tall white lighthouse that
shows up so prominently from the shore at Weston
is situated on Flat Holm, and rises to a height
of a hundred and fifty-six feet. A singular phenomenon
obscured the light in February 1902,
when a shower of sticky whitish-grey mud fell
and completely covered the lantern. Scientific
men explained this happening as due to a portion
of a dust-shower driving from the Sahara, and
being converted into mud by the Channel mists.
// 113.png
.pn +1
A day’s hard work was necessary before the glass
was properly cleaned.
A light was first shown here in 1737, when it
consisted of a brazier of burning coals; no very
effectual beacon on foggy nights. Nor was it
greatly improved by the early years of the nineteenth
century, for it was then still possible for
such disasters as that of the William and Mary
to happen. This unfortunate ship was wrecked
in 1817, between Flat Holm and Lavernock
Point, which marks the extremity of Brean Down;
and sixty lives were then lost.
The present light, of the occulting variety,
has a power of 50,000 candles, and is visible for
eighteen miles.
The total population of Flat Holm is twenty.
Here is an inn. There are two fresh-water springs
on the island.
There is much charm in the curious islanded
and semi-islanded features of the Weston outlook.
Boldly rising from sea-level to the left of the
long front of the town, are the great hunchbacked
masses of Brean Down and Uphill.
Uphill stands romantically at the mouth of
the Axe, marked from great distances by its
abrupt hill rising to a hundred feet above the
plain, but looking much loftier. It is made
further noticeable by the ruined church that
stands prominently on its barren summit. The
seaward side is scarred by limestone quarries
into the likeness of cliffs, at whose feet the turbid
waters of the Axe crawl sluggishly to the sea,
// 114.png
.pn +1
between deep, muddy banks. This was the site
of a Roman station and port, whence the lead and
other minerals mined by those strenuous ancients
on the Mendip hills were shipped. From Old
Sarum, a distance of fifty-five miles, a Roman
road has been traced, going by Charterhouse-on-Mendip,
and ending here. Antiquaries give the
name of the Roman station as Ad Axium, following
the lead of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who himself
invented the name. Still on the hilltop, near
the church, may be traced the earthworks that
once enclosed the Roman fort, and many coins
of that period have been found here. Down
below is a limestone cavern accidentally discovered
in 1826, when it was found to contain bones of
the hyæna and other animals long extinct in
Britain: long centuries before ever the Romans
came.
.if h
.il fn=i092.jpg w=600px id=i092
.ca
UPHILL.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: UPHILL.]
.sp 2
.if-
In Domesday Book Uphill is found as
“Opopille,” a form which takes the place-name
almost entirely out of the category of names
descriptive of the physical features of the spot,
and places it in that of personal names. For
“Uphill” is, in short, not what it seems, and
does by no means refer, in its true form, to the hill.
It is, reduced to the name first given, “Hubba’s
Pill”; that is to say, Hubba’s Creek, or harbour.
All creeks, and many small streams on either
side of the Bristol Channel, are “pills.” This
particular name was first conferred in A.D. 882,
the year when these Channel coasts in general
were attacked by Danish raiders under the leadership
// 115.png
// 116.png
// 117.png
.pn +1
of one Hubba, who was slain in battle with
Alfred the Great, either near Appledore, on the
North Devon Coast, at a place still known as
“Bloody Corner,” or at Cannington, near the
river Parret, in the neighbourhood of Bridgwater,
supposed to be the “Cynuit” of ancient chronicles
where the “heathenmen” were also utterly
defeated by the great King.
Those sea-rovers were naturally attracted by
the safe harbours afforded by such estuaries as
these of the Parret and Axe, and laid up their
piratical craft here. Probably Hubba’s flotilla
first anchored in the Axe before moving on to final
disaster at Cynuit; and the stay, it might be
supposed, could not have been short, for the
place to have been given his name. Moreover,
between Uphill and Bleadon we have the ferry
known at this day as “Hobbs’s Boat,” this name
itself hiding, in another corrupted form, that of
the ancient chieftain.
Here, then, is good news for the Hobbses
of modern times, writhing perhaps under the
possession of so ungainly and apparently plebeian
a name, and wishing they were Mount joys or
Mauleverers, or something of equally aristocratic
sound. Any Hobbs may, it is clear, derive from
Norse berserkers, and who knows but Biggs and
Triggs also, and their like!
.pm verse-start
Oh! what a chance of high romance
Lies hid in names like Hobbs;
There’s balm therein for all their kin,
And eke for Squibbs and Dobbs.
// 118.png
.pn +1
And Viking blood its daring flood
May pour in veins of Snooks:
Crusaders’ dash with conduct rash
Inflame the frame of Jukes.
Per contra, oft a noble name
Is borne by alien loon,
And Rosenberg is “Rossiter,”
Cohen becomes “Colquhoun.”
Around Park Lane, with might and main,
You hear the rumour wag
That “Gordon” may be Guggenheim,
And “Mervyn,” “Mosenbag.”
Romance we trace in commonplace,
And fact that custom shocks.
Thus we come daily face-to-face,
With cunning paradox.
.pm verse-end
Thus again we have, in the undoubted derivation
of the name of Uphill, another instance of
that eternal truth: “Things are not always what
they seem.” Yet who, looking at this most
notable hill, rising so suddenly from the surrounding
levels, would doubt, without the evidence of
ancient forms, that the name was and could be
nothing else than descriptive of the peculiarly
striking geography of the spot?
The Norman clerks who, travelling from place
to place, compiled Domesday Book from information
received on the spot, very often made a
singular hash of the place-names they heard from
the Saxon, who spoke what was to those newcomers
a difficult language. “Opopille,” the best
those Norman emissaries could make of “Hubba’s
// 119.png
.pn +1
Pill,” sounds very like a sudden and violent
Norman appearance, and the shaking of some
unfortunate Saxon churl, with the rough question
put to him. “Vat is zat which you call zis place
here, hein?” and the reply, “Oh, sir! don’t shus-shake
me like that: ’Ubba-pup-pille, sir.”
The ruined church of St. Nicholas has not
been in that condition so long as might be supposed.
It was in use until April 5th, 1846. From
Norman times it had stood here, and the religious
fervour of many generations had proved easily
equal to this arduous climb to the hilltop, a very
real exercise, alike of piety and of the body. But
hilltop churches must in modern times expect less
faithful attendance, and must be resigned to compete,
on terms disadvantageous to themselves, with
dissenting chapels more fortunately situated in the
levels. Thus, when, in the first half of the nineteenth
century, the roofs of the old church of
Uphill were discovered to be in a highly dilapidated
condition, a long-sought opportunity was
seized to abandon the building, which was otherwise
not in any desperate structural condition. A
new church was accordingly built below, and the
old building unroofed and left to the winds of
heaven and the fowls of the air. Even the old
font was left here to unregarded desecration for
a number of years. The chancel, it will be
observed, has been re-roofed to serve as a mortuary
chapel; for the churchyard still receives the
bodies of parishioners. Stoutly the ancient walls
yet stand, and sharp to this day are the carvings
// 120.png
.pn +1
of the Norman north porch and the grim, uncanny
faces of the uncouth gargoyles that look out over
Weston and the bay.
Brean Down, that huge, almost islanded hill—a
sort of miniature Gibraltar—that rises from the
Axe marshes and the sand-flats opposite Uphill,
to a height of 321 feet, looks from Weston, and
from Uphill itself a place quite easy to arrive
at, but, as sheer matter of fact, no one can reach
it by road under nine miles, by way of Bleadon
and Brean village. In a direct line from Uphill,
across the river Axe, Brean Down is only about
a mile and a half away. The readiest method
of reaching this spot is by the ferry across the
Axe at the end of Weston sands, a threepenny
passage, generally, at low water, the matter of
walking along planks laid in the mud, and a pull
of three or four boat’s lengths. And then you
have the breezy isolation of all Brean Down
before you; and you will have it very much to
yourself. Wild birds and wild flowers are the
only habitants of the Down, once you have left
the farmhouse on the flats behind, but the place
has been the subject of not a few ambitious
schemes. The summit was fortified in 1867, but
suddenly ceased to be so in July 1900, when the
magazine was blown up by a soldier firing his
rifle into it. Whether he did this by accident,
as a novel way of committing suicide, or as an ill-advised
joke, does not appear, because there was
nothing left of him from which to seek an explanation.
// 121.png
.pn +1
A grand scheme was formulated in 1864,
which a fine harbour was to be built under the lee
of the Down, with piers, quays, and all the usual
appurtenances of a steam-packet station, together
with a railway from the Great Western. The
huge sum of £365,000 was expended upon the
pier, but the scheme eventually came to nothing,
and the derelict works were finally destroyed in
the storms of December 1872. So those far-distant
merchants, the pre-Roman Phœnicians,
who are said to have used this spot as a commercial
port, are not immediately likely to have
any successors.
// 122.png
.pn +1
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.h2 id=ch11
CHAPTER XI||BLEADON—BREAN—BRENT KNOLL
.sp 2
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To reach the village of Brean and to come in
touch again with the coast on leaving Weston-super-Mare,
Uphill village is passed, with a choice
of roads then presenting itself: a short road with
a penny toll to pay, or a slightly longer one, free.
Either one of these brings you down into the
flat lands under the scarred and quarried sides of
Bleadon Hill, some 550 feet high. The handsome
Perpendicular tower of Bleadon church
groups beautifully with a fine fifteenth-century
village cross.
.pi
Thenceforward, across the flats, now rich
meadows, through lanes with much fine hedgerow
timber, the way leads to Lympsham, a village
rebuilt by the local squire, who happened to be
also the parson, over half a century ago. Every
cottage is in a more or less domestic Gothic style,
as Gothic was then understood, strongly flavoured
with ecclesiasticism. The manor-house itself is
Gothic, something after the Strawberry Hill manner
of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
date, and really deplorable, were it not that
the beautiful and well-wooded grounds, and the
// 123.png
.pn +1
magnolias that clothe the walls, soften the effect.
The church of St. Christopher, immediately opposite,
and encircled by beautiful elms and oaks,
has a fine tower that noticeably leans to the
west.
.if h
.il fn=i099.jpg w=579px id=i099
.ca
BLEADON CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BLEADON CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
From Lympsham the road turns abruptly
to the coast at Brean, winding and turning
// 124.png
.pn +1
unweariedly this way and that, over the open
marshes; with deep dykes, half-filled with water
and mud, on either side, and willows of every age,
from saplings like walking-sticks to reverend
ancients, hollow and riven with age, lining them.
Thus shall we come at length to Brean, as into
the end of all things; for, truly, the spot is desolate.
Not, let it be said, with an ugly desolation;
for, although as you approach the sea, and the
good alluvial earth becomes more and more admixed
with sand, the surroundings become mere
waste land, these are wastes with their own charm
and beauty to any but a farmer, to whose eyes
nothing can be so beautiful as a ripening field of
good corn when prices are likely to rule high, or
a healthy field of swedes when he has much stock
to feed.
Here a road runs parallel with the coast,
under the lee of the impending sand hills, so that
if you would catch the merest glimpse of the sea,
you must climb to the summits of them and look
down.
Brean church lies considerably below the level
of these surrounding sand-towans, which menace
it in a manner not a little alarming in the view
of a stranger. But the sand here, at any rate,
has done its worst, for although in places across
the narrow road it stands higher than the church
tower, it is largely held down at last by a sparse
growth of coarse grass, and the very height and
massiveness of these sandhills act, under the
circumstances, as a shield against the clouds of
// 125.png
.pn +1
other sand still blowing in during rough weather
from the sea.
The church of St. Bridget is a small blue-grey
limestone building of the Perpendicular period,
of rough character, scarcely distinguishable from
a little distance as a church, and remarkable only
for having its dwarf tower finished off with a
saddlebacked roof. It is, as a matter of fact,
only the remaining portion of the tower, struck
by lightning and thrown down in 1729. An inscription
on it, “John Ginckens, churchwarden,
Año Dom. 1729,” no doubt records the repairs
effected on that occasion. “Ginckens” appears
to have been the best local attempt possible at
spelling “Jenkins.”
Although it is sand that now more nearly
threatens Brean, the peculiar dangers of the
place formerly arose from water. The ancient
banks, supposed by some to be Roman, that
kept the low-lying country from being flooded
by the sea were burst in 1607, and a great stretch
of land, roughly twenty miles by five, was submerged
for a long time to a depth of from ten to
twelve feet. A pamphlet published at the time
says:
“The parish of Breane is swallowed (for the
most part) up by the waters. In it stood but
nine houses, and of those seaven were consumed,
and with them XXVI persons lost their lives.”
Local farmers are busily employed in the
making of what is known as “Caerphilly cheese”;
sent across Channel to Cardiff and sold there as a
// 126.png
.pn +1
Welsh product to the South Wales mining population.
.if h
.il fn=i102.jpg w=600px id=i102
.ca
BERROW.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BERROW.]
.sp 2
.if-
Blown sand, “allus a-shiften and a-blowen,”
is the most prominent feature of the way from
this point, all the four miles into Burnham. The
ragwort—“the yallers,” as the countryfolk hereabouts
know it—distributes a rich colour by the
wayside, and confers upon what would otherwise
be a somewhat dreary waste a specious cheerfulness.
But even this hardy wilding, content with
the minimum of nutriment, grows scarce and
disappears as Berrow comes in sight; Berrow,
where the sand-hummocks broaden out and
entirely surround the church that stands there
in its walled churchyard with a solitary cottage
for neighbour—as though defensively laagered
against attack in an enemy’s country; as indeed
it is; the enemy, these insidious sands. Berrow,
there can be no doubt whatever, was one of the
many islets that anciently were scattered about
Sedgemere, and we have but to glance inland
// 127.png
.pn +1
between Brean and Berrow for this aforetime
character of the surrounding country to be
abundantly manifest, and for the eye to be immediately
fixed with one of the most outstanding
features of old time; the hill of Brent Knoll.
Travellers to or from the West by the Great
Western Railway are generally much impressed,
between Yatton and Bridgwater, by the strange
solitary hill of Brent Knoll that rises abruptly
from the plain of Burnham Level, and looks
oddly like some long-extinct volcano with its
cone shorn off or fallen in. Fast trains do not
stop at the little wayside station also called
“Brent Knoll,” and while passengers are still
gazing curiously at the hill, they are whirled
away in midst of other interesting scenery.
Brent Knoll stands out prominently by virtue
of its height of 457 feet, as well as by its isolated
situation in the great alluvial plain through
which lazily meander the muddy streams of
Brue and Axe to their outlets at Uphill and
Highbridge. It is one of those many scattered
heights that are so strangely disposed about the
neighbourhood of Sedgemoor, and give so romantic
an appearance to these wide-spreading levels.
Of these the most prominent, geographically and
historically, is the famed Glastonbury Tor, which
with its volcanic outline, crested with the tall
tower of the ancient Chapel of St. Michael, is
prominent for many a misty mile, like some
Hill of Dream. Then there is the Mump at
Boroughbridge, by the crossing of the Parret
// 128.png
.pn +1
into the Isle of Athelney; Borough Hill, near
Wedmore; and many smaller, together with
those scarcely perceptible hillocks amid the
marshes that are now the sites of villages, whose
very names of Chedzoy, Middlezoy, Westonzoyland,
and Othery, tell us that these, together with
the larger hills, were all, “once upon a time,”
islands in a shallow sea that stagnated over the
whole of what is now called “Sedgemoor,” but
is properly “Sedgemere.” Centuries of draining,
of cutting those long, broad and deep dykes
called “rhines,” that cross the moor for many
miles, in every direction, and so carry away the
waters, have converted what had become, after
the sea had retired, an almost impassable morass
into a fertile plain. The industry of peat-digging
in the heart of the moor shows the nature of the
soil in these parts, and modern discoveries of
prehistoric lake-dwellings at Meare, whose very
name contains evidence of the mere, or lake that
once existed, indicate the manner of life these
ancient inhabitants lived. King Arthur seems
a dim and distant figure to us, but long before
his time there lived a race of people on the islands
of this inland sea; folk who, although they
frescoed themselves liberally with red ochre, were
by no means without a more artistic knowledge
of decoration than implied by that crude form
of personal adornment. They certainly made
earthenware pottery of graceful forms, decorated
with ornament of excellent design and execution.
Their other habits were primitive. Largely a
// 129.png
.pn +1
fish-eating folk, they often lived, as described
earlier in these pages, in wattled huts built on
piles or stakes driven in the waters. These
forms of dwellings were readily adapted for
defence, for shelter for their boats, and for fishing.
In those far-distant days Brent Knoll was
an island. William of Malmesbury, whose chronicle
of the English kings was written early in
the twelfth century, and abounds in marvels and
prodigies, tells us that it was originally named
“Insula Ranarum,” the Isle of Frogs. It had
been, moreover, he says, in times even then far
remote, the home of three most famous wicked
giants, who were put to the sword, after a long
and evil existence, by one Ider, in the marvellous
times of King Arthur.
Excellent roads completely encircle Brent
Knoll, making the circuit around the base of it in
some four miles, and a very pleasant and picturesque
miniature circular trip it is on a bicycle
beneath the great hill, which is thus seen to be
as it were, roughly, one hill superimposed upon
another, with a remarkably distinct ledge or broad
shelf running around it, at half its total height;
more noticeable from the north-west, perhaps,
than from any other direction. The great bulk
of Brent Knoll forming this base is composed of has
rock; the upper part being of oolite. On the
summit is an ancient earthwork, the centre of
it marked by a flagstaff. No hilltop would be
complete without its ancient fortified camp,
but the story of that upon Brent Knoll has never
// 130.png
.pn +1
been told, nor is now ever likely to be. Roman
coins, found in almost every old fortified post,
have been found here also, and down below, in
the meadows, the name of “Battleborough” remains,
with a tradition of Alfred the Great having
here fought with and defeated the Danes, or been
defeated by them; which, in its vagueness,
shows how extremely little is known of old times
here. But the name “Brent”—i.e. “Burnt”—Knoll
is of itself evidence of warlike times, when
the hilltop flared with beacon-fires.
There are two villages on Brent Knoll; South
and East Brent, both pleasant places; the first
with a noble Perpendicular church and stately
tower; the second with a church less noble,
provided with a tall spire that was formerly used
as a landmark for ships making Burnham, and
was kept conspicuously whitewashed, that the
mark might not be overlooked. Since the tall
lighthouses of Burnham have arisen, the spire
of East Brent is no longer regularly made white.
.if h
.il fn=i107.jpg w=600px id=i107
.ca
BRENT KNOLL.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BRENT KNOLL.]
.sp 2
.if-
In the South Brent church a fine series of
carved bench-ends includes satirical representations
of the story of Reynard the Fox, here
especially applied to the grasping conduct of the
mitred Abbots of Glastonbury, who sought to
seize the temporalities and emoluments of South
Brent, but were defeated at law. Thus we find
here a fox, habited as an abbot, preaching to a
flock of geese and other fowls; the fleece of a
sheep hanging from his crozier sufficiently showing
that his wardenship of flocks does not go
// 131.png
.pn +1
// 132.png
.pn +1
// 133.png
.pn +1
unrewarded. Three of his monks, shown as
cowled swine, peer up at him. A lower panel
on the same bench-end discloses a pig being
roasted on a spit, which is turned at one end by
a monkey and the fire blown with a bellows by
another monkey at the opposite end.
On another bench-end of this series we see
that the geese have revolted against the fox,
who is found sitting upright in a penitential
attitude, his hind legs in fetters. A monkey
preaches to, or admonishes, the geese, in his
stead. In the lower panel the fox is seen in the
stocks, a monkey mounting guard with a halberd.
.if h
.il fn=i109.jpg w=600px id=i109
.ca
BRENT KNOLL.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BRENT KNOLL.]
.sp 2
.if-
An elaborate mural monument to one “John
Somersett,” 1663, and his two wives, occupies
great space on the south side of the nave; John
Somerset himself represented in half-length, with
a portrait-bust of a wife on either side. There
are, further, effigies of himself and the two Mrs.
Somerset praying, accompanied by a chrisom
child; together with an alarming effigy starting
// 134.png
.pn +1
up in a coffin and praying earnestly to an angel
who, armed with a trumpet like a megaphone,
wallows amid clouds, blowing reassuring messages,
which issue from the trumpet visibly in lengths,
not unlike the news from modern tape-machines.
An elderly angel, with an oily smile of smug satisfaction,
beams greasily below. The whole curious
composition has been recently very highly coloured,
in reproduction of the original scheme.
// 135.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch12
CHAPTER XII||BURNHAM—HIGHBRIDGE—BAWDRIP—“BATH BRICKS”—THE RIVER PARRET
.sp 2
.ni
The upstart capital of these levels is Burnham,
but the supremacy is disputed by Highbridge.
Now Burnham and Highbridge, although but a
mile and a half apart, are places very different,
socially and geographically. The first stands
amid sands, by the seashore; the other is situated
about the distance of a mile from the sea,
on the muddy, sludgy banks of the river Brue.
Burnham is a pleasure resort, of sorts, to which
all the railways of Somerset and Dorset run
frequent cheap excursions. It is the ideal of the
average Sunday School manager, seeking a suitable
place for the school’s annual treat; for here
you have sands—a little muddy perhaps, but
eminently safe. It would be possible to get
drowned only after superhuman exertions in
finding a sufficient depth of water; unless indeed
one wandered off in the direction of the
Brue estuary in one direction or the lonely shores
of Berrow in the other; where it is easily possible
to be drowned in the swiftest and most effectual
// 136.png
.pn +1
manner; as demonstrated every summer by
a few rash and unfortunate bathers, who generally
prove, strange to say, to be local folk, presumably
well informed of the risks they run—and
foolishly contemptuous of them.
.pi
Highbridge is not a pleasure resort. Not
even a Sunday School manager would fall into
that error. It was once (but a time long enough
ago) a place inoffensive enough; a hamlet of no
particular character, good or ill, beside the river
Brue, and taking its name from the original
humpbacked bridge that here spanned the stream;
built in that manner for the purpose of allowing
masted barges and other craft to pass under.
That was Highbridge. Nowadays, the old bridge
is replaced by a modern flat iron affair, and there
are railway sidings and docks, and great sluice-gates
to the river Brue. Here, too, are the
engine shops and works of the Somerset and
Dorset Railway, with a large and offensive, and
exceptionally blackguardly, colony of railway
men, Radicals and Socialists to a man, and not
content with holding their own views, but insistent
upon imposing them upon their neighbours
at election-times, with threats and violence.
There are railwaymen and railwaymen, but the
country in general has, as yet, little comprehension
of their essentially disaffected, selfish,
and dangerous character, as a body: the more
dangerous in that they have largely in their
power the communications of the land. We
shall hear more of them some day not far distant,
// 137.png
.pn +1
and governments will be obliged to give them a
sharp lesson in social discipline.
But enough of Highbridge and its forlorn,
abject houses, and its paltry modern church with
red and black tiled spire, apparently designed by
some infantile architect. Let us return to Burnham,
and contemplate the crowded promenade
there.
Weston we have seen to be a children’s paradise;
but there they are largely mingled with “grownups.”
Here they predominate, and the vast
sand-flats, that at low tide stretch out more or
less oozily and muddily as you advance, some
four miles, are converted for a goodly distance
from the promenade wall into a manufactory
of sand-castles and mud-pies. The Burnham
donkeys must feel a blessed relief when the
season is over, for they are in great request for
rides, even so far as the straddle-legged lighthouse
that stands on iron posts to the north of the
town; yea, and even unto the sandhills—or
“tots,” as the local tongue hath it—of Berrow.
All the eastern ports of the Somerset coast
are severely afflicted by “trippers,” who descend
in their thousands upon Clevedon, Weston-super-Mare,
and Burnham, not to mention the neighbouring
villages. Truth to tell, they are effusively
welcomed at these places, at any rate by the
refreshment caterers and the proprietors of swing-boats,
donkeys, sailing and rowing-boats, and
by the “pierrots”; but the rest of the community
resent the presence of these hordes of half-day
// 138.png
.pn +1
holiday makers, and act the superior person
towards them. Yet, when you hear, at any of
these resorts, visitors, obviously present on sixteen
days’ excursion-trip tickets, speaking disparagingly
of “trippers,” you wonder really what
constitutes such an one. What is that time-limit
within which a holiday-maker becomes a mere
“tripper,” and when does he become enlarged
as one of the elect, who do not trip, but make
holiday?
The definition of a tripper, in these parts, is a
person who comes across the Bristol Channel from
Barry, Cardiff, Swansea, or any other of the South
Wales ports, for half a day, and “brings his
nosebag with him”; or, if it be a family party
of trippers, a family handbag with provisions;
including a bottle of beer for mother and father,
and milk for the children. Thousands of these
family parties came over by cheap steamboat excursions
on most fine days in summer, and may be
observed on the sea-front at Weston and other
favoured resorts, where they are apt to leave an
offensive residuum of their feasts behind them,
in the shape of greasy paper and pieces of fat, as
often as not upon the public seats. Those are
the trippers.
The unfortunate person who, clad perhaps in
a light summer suit (“Gent’s West-End lounge
suit. This style 25s.”), has unwittingly sat upon
a piece of ham-fat left behind by one of these
gay irresponsibles, hates the tripper thereafter with
a baleful intensity. Can we blame him that he
// 139.png
.pn +1
does so? But this is only one of that half-day
excursionist’s deadly sins, of which the fact that
he brings merely his presence and his nosebag—and
little money—into the places he favours is one
of the deadliest. Another is the circumstance
that he is a Welshman. The Somerset folk do
not like the Welsh, who are alien from them in
every possible way, and it is quite certain that
the South Wales colliers and dockers are not a
favourable or pleasing type. Thus triply—financially,
racially and socially—the trippers from across
the Severn Sea are not a success.
It is all very lively at Burnham, and there is
a bandstand, and there are lodging-houses and
boarding-houses innumerable, and teashops, and
a “park” about the area of a moderate-sized
private garden. No tramways have yet appeared
at Burnham, but it is possible to travel expeditiously,
if involuntarily and not altogether safely,
and quite freely—on the banana-skins that plentifully
bestrew the streets. But this form of locomotion
is not altogether popular.
There is much motor-boating in these latter
days off Burnham, and by favour of such a craft,
or by sailing-skiff, or the comparatively tedious
method of rowing, you may visit Steart Island,
off the mouths of the Brue and Parret. But
there are no attractions on that flat isle, swimming
in surrounding ooze, except at such times as
winter, when the wild-fowl congregate greatly
there, in the mistaken notion that they are safe
from the sportsman.
// 140.png
.pn +1
In midst of the long line of houses that closely
front upon the sea, stands the ancient parish
church of Burnham; considerably below the level
of the street. The traveller who has come from
Brean and Berrow will at once perceive that this
street and this roadway are founded upon the
blown sand that has placed Brean church in a
similar hollow.
Here, at Burnham, the church-tower, of three
storeys, leans as many times, this way and that,
and has apparently been long in this condition,
having been left so at the restoration of 1887.
In the chancel remains a portion of a huge white
marble altar-piece designed by Inigo Jones for the
Chapel Royal, Whitehall, and subsequently erected
in Westminster Abbey by Sir Christopher Wren.
At the coronation of George IV. it was removed
and placed here by Dr. King, Canon of Westminster
and vicar of Burnham; and singularly cumbrous
and out of place it looks still, even though parts
of it have been removed, to afford much-needed
room.
Leaving Burnham behind, and then Highbridge,
we come to Huntspill Level, with the
square, massive tower of Huntspill church prominent
against the skyline, on the right hand.
The road, worn into saucer-shaped holes by excess
of motor-traffic, goes straight and flat across the
Level, with pollard willows and stagnant, duck-weedy
ditches on either side, and so through the
wayside hamlet of West Huntspill: a naturally
slovenly, out-at-elbows place, not improved by
// 141.png
.pn +1
being nowadays thickly coated with motor-dust.
.if h
.il fn=i117.jpg w=600px id=i117
.ca
HUNTSPILL.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: HUNTSPILL.]
.sp 2
.if-
And so to Pawlett (locally “Pollitt”) consisting
of an old church and half-a-dozen houses on a
slight knoll, overlooking miles of flat pasturelands,
said to be the very richest in Somerset.
Proceeding in the direction of Bridgwater, the
Sedgemoor Drain, chief of the many cuts, large
and small, that prevent the moor from being
inundated, is crossed at the point where it falls
into the river Parret. Here is the level expanse
known as Horsey Slime. It is not a pretty name.
Dunball railway-station stands on the left, and
the distance in that direction is closed by the
Polden Hills, crowned by a ready-made ruined
castle, built some sixty years ago, yet looking
perfectly romantic and baronial, so long as this
distressing fact of its appalling modernity is not
// 142.png
.pn +1
disclosed. Over those strangers and pilgrims from
far lands who, landing at Plymouth, and travelling
to Paddington per Great Western Railway for
the first time, catch a momentary glimpse of this
fictitious fortalice, before the engine dashes with
a demoniac yelp into the Dunball Tunnel, there
comes a feeling that they have at last entered a
region of romance. They have indeed, but not
in respect of that castle, at any rate. It is painful
to be confronted with the necessity for such a
revelation, but the honest topographer sees his
duty plain before him—and does it, no matter
the cost!
In the levels beneath the hills crowned by
this sham castle lies Bawdrip, a village of the
very smallest and most retiring agricultural type,
with a little Early English cruciform church,
remarkable for the finely sculptured female heads
and headdresses of wimple and coif on the capitals
of the four pillars supporting the central tower.
Restoration has left the building particularly
neat and tidy and singularly bare of monuments.
Bawdrip church, however, contains a monumental
inscription which includes a mysterious allusion
that has never yet been properly explained; and
probably never will be. The small black marble
slab setting forth this inscription in the ornate
Latinity of the seventeenth century might well
escape the scrutiny of the keenest antiquary,
for it is built into the wall in a most unusual
situation, behind the altar. It is a comprehensive
epitaph to Edward and Eleanor Lovell and their
// 143.png
.pn +1
two daughters, Eleanor and Mary, erected here
to their memory by the husband of the daughter
Eleanor, who, singularly enough, omits his own
name. Done into English, it runs as follows:
“Edward Lovell married Eleanor Bradford,
by whom he had two daughters, Eleanor and
Mary. Both parents were sprung from Batcombe,
in this County of Somerset, from a noble family,
and reflected no less honour on their ancestry
than they received from it. Eleanor, a most
devoted mother, as well as a most faithful wife,
exchanged this life for the heavenly, April 20, 1666.
Mary followed her, a most obedient daughter, and
a maiden of notable promise, May 11, 1675.
Edward, the father, M.A. and Fellow of Jesus
College, Cambridge, also Rector of this Church
for fourteen years, a most praiseworthy man,
received the reward of his learning, September 1,
1671. Lastly Eleanor, the daughter, heiress of
the family honour and estate, died June 14, 1681.
Her most sorrowing husband mourned her, taken
away by a sudden and untimely fate at the very
time of the marriage celebration, and to the honour
and holy memory of her parents, her sisters, and
his most amiable wife, wished this monument
to be put up.”
Tradition associates the sudden death of the
bride with the story of “The Mistletoe Bough,”
made popular many years ago by Haynes Bayley’s
woeful song of that name, worked up by him from
ancient legends current in many parts of the
country. The legend he versified was that of the
// 144.png
.pn +1
fair young bride of one “Lovel,” apparently the
son of a mediæval Baron, who, playing hide-and-seek
in the revels of her wedding-day, hid in an
ancient chest, and was imprisoned there by a spring
lock. That it was at Christmas-time we are assured
by Haynes Bayley’s verses, which tell us that:
.pm verse-start
The Baron’s retainers were blithe and gay,
Keeping their Christmas holiday.
.pm verse-end
Unavailing search was made for the missing
bride:
.pm verse-start
And young Lovel cried, O! where dost thou hide?
I’m lonely without thee, my own dear bride.
.pm verse-end
The spring lock that lay in ambush in the old
chest imprisoned her there securely, and her
body was not discovered in the life of Lovel.
To quote again from Haynes Bayley:
.pm verse-start
At length an old chest that had long lain hid
Was found in the castle—they raised the lid;
A skeleton form lay mouldering there,
In the bridal wreath of that lady fair.
Oh! sad was her fate! In sportive jest
She hid from her lord in that old oak chest.
It closed with a spring, and her bridal bloom
Lay withering there in a living tomb.
.pm verse-end
But who was the “Baron” and who “Lovel,”
and where they resided, or when they flourished
we are not informed. Curiously enough, however,
a Viscount Lovel disappeared in something the
same manner. This was that Francis, Viscount
Lovel, who fought ex parte the impostor, Lambert
// 145.png
.pn +1
Simnel, at Stoke, and disappeared after the defeat
of the pretender’s cause on that day. His fate
remained a mystery until 1708, when, in the course
of some works in the ruins of what had been his
ancestral mansion at Minster Lovel, in Oxfordshire,
a secret underground chamber was discovered,
in which was found the skeleton of a
man identified with him. It was thought that
he had taken refuge there, in that locked room,
and was attended to by a retainer who, possibly,
betrayed his trust and left his master to starve;
or who, perhaps, was himself slain in some affray
during those troubled times. The repetition of
the name of Lovell is at any rate curious.
Now across the levels rise the distant houses
of Bridgwater town, and the slim spire of its
church. The long flat road, of undeviating directness,
points directly towards the place. Hedgerow
and other trees dispose themselves casually,
without ordered plan, on either hand, and a railway
crosses the highway, diagonally, on a bridge
and embankment. The scene is absolutely negative
and characterless: neither beautiful nor
absolutely ugly: the very realisation, one would
say, of the commonplace. As you proceed, a
distant grouping of masts and spars proclaims
the fact of navigable water being near at hand,
and then groups of factory chimneys, smoking
vigorously, loom up. These are the most outstanding
marks of Bridgwater’s only prominent
manufacture: the manufacture of “Bath bricks.”
Every housewife knows what is meant by “Bath
// 146.png
.pn +1
brick.” With this article of commerce and
domestic economy knives are cleaned, brass
fenders and candlesticks and coppers are scoured,
and much other metal-work brought to brightness.
But it is not made at Bath. At only one place in
the world—and that Bridgwater—is the so-called
“Bath brick” brought into being: the reason
of this monopoly of manufacture lying in the
fact that the material of which it is made is found
only here in the mud of the river Parret. But
only in a stretch of some three miles of that river’s
course is found the peculiarly composed mud of
which this aid to domestic cleanliness is compacted.
Equally above and below the town,
within those strictly-defined limits, the rise and
fall of the tide amalgamates the river mud, and
the seashore sand in just the right proportions for
the scouring properties of “Bath brick.” At a
further distance above the town, the mud that
renders the Parret’s banks so unlovely becomes
merely slime; while, as the sea is more nearly
approached, the proportion of sharp sand in it
destroys the binding character of the mud, and
would render bricks made of the amalgam there
found very destructive to cutlery and other ware
unfortunate enough to be scoured by it.
Why these “bricks,” made only at Bridgwater,
should be given the name of “Bath,” and
not that of the town where they originate, is a
mystery at this lapse of time not likely to be
solved. The most plausible explanation offered
is that when these bricks were first made they
// 147.png
.pn +1
were stored and “handled,” as a commercial
man might say, at Bath.
The mud from which the bricks are made is
collected quite simply, but ingeniously, in pens
carefully constructed along the Parret’s banks.
These “slime-batches,” as they are named, are
brick-built enclosures, so arranged that the mud-charged
tide flows into them at every flood, the
mud settling down during the interval of ebb.
Thus with every recurring tide a new deposit is
added; the “batches” being filled in the course
of two or three months, according to the time
of year. This accumulation, grown hard in all
this time, is dug out, generally in the winter, and
removed to the banks, whence it is taken as
required to the pug-mills, in which it is mixed
with water and thus tempered to a putty-like
consistency. Then it is ready for the moulder,
that is to say, the actual brickmaker, who, after
the identical fashion followed by the moulder of
ordinary bricks, takes his lumps of material,
throws them into a wooden framework made to
the gauge of a brick, scrapes off the surplus clay
from the top and pushes the raw brick aside,
as one of a rapidly growing row. The rapidity
with which a moulder does his work is astonishing
to the unaccustomed onlooker. A workman
of average excellence can thus shape four hundred
bricks an hour.
The clammy slabs of clay thus formed are
then taken by the “bearer-off” and placed in
the “hacks”—that is to say, long stands—with
// 148.png
.pn +1
a slight tile roofing, to dry. The tiled protection
is to shield the unbaked bricks from being
partly dissolved by possible rainstorms.
The final operations are the stacking into
kilns and the burning, carried out precisely in the
same manner as the burning of bricks to be used
in building.
The river Parret—in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
styled “Pedridan”—is in other ways a river
of considerable importance to North Somerset.
Like the Avon at Bristol, it runs out towards the
sea in its last few miles more like a deep and
muddy gutter at low water than in the likeness
of a river; but the Parret mud, as we have
already seen, is at least useful, and a source of
wealth to Bridgwater; and shipping of considerable
tonnage, bringing chiefly coals from
South Wales, and deals from Norway, comes up
the estuary to Bridgwater’s quays.
The Parret is about thirty miles in length,
rising some two miles within the Dorset border,
near South Perrot, which, together with the two
widely sundered small towns, or large villages,
of North and South Petherton, and perhaps the
village of Puriton also, takes its name from the
river. In common with several other streams on
either side of the Bristol Channel—with, of course,
the river Severn at their head—it is subject to
a tidal wave, known as “the Bore.” This is
caused by the very great ebb and flow of the tide,
here so much as thirty-six feet at springs. The
flood tide comes up the deep and narrow estuary
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from the outer channel with such swiftness, and
is so laterally compressed that a gradual rise is
impossible and the water comes surging up as
a great and formidable wave, like a wall, from
five to six feet in height. At such times when
westerly gales or spring tides prevail, the Bore
easily rises to nine feet in height. It is always
an impressive spectacle, seen from the river bank;
and viewed from a boat, even when the craft is
managed by a boatman accustomed to this phenomenon,
is more than a little alarming. It sufficiently
scared the French prisoners of war, confined
by the riverside in an old factory, known
as the “Glass House” and nowadays a pottery,
from any serious attempts at escaping by water.
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CHAPTER XIII||BRIDGWATER—ADMIRAL BLAKE—THE MONMOUTH REBELLION
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The ancient town of Bridgwater can now produce
few evidences of its antiquity. The siege of 1645,
various conflagrations, and the very considerable
modern prosperity of the place have all been
contributory causes toward this—to the tourist—somewhat
desolating result. The town straddles
on either side of the Parret, the hither side
named appropriately and inevitably “Eastover.”
It is the less considerable and important
portion, the chief buildings of the place being on
the left bank of the river. A dull, undistinguished,
heavy Georgian appearance characterised the town
until quite recently, but a great deal of building
activity has of late been manifested here, with
results perhaps as yet a little too recent for
criticism. At any rate, the old outstanding
features remain; the large parish church, with
curiously squat tower and elongated spire, forming
with the Corn Exchange and Town Hall, the
one striking group that alone stands in pictures
recognisably for Bridgwater.
.pi
A great deal of argument has been expended
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upon the name of Bridgwater. The name is
apparently of the most obvious and elementary
derivation, for here is the “water” (largely impregnated,
it is true, with mud) in the river
Parret, and here is the bridge, the modern representative
of others of different degrees of
antiquity, erected at the lowest place down the
estuary where it was possible to fling a bridge
across. It is evident, then, that it must ever
have been impossible to enter or leave the town
in an easterly or westerly direction without
crossing a bridge or ferry at this point. Other
place-names in the district, those of Highbridge
and Boroughbridge, for example, prove the word
“bridge” to have been used in the ordinary way,
when necessary, as an integral, and indeed scarcely
avoidable, part of a name. Yet the derivation
of “Bridgwater” has nothing to do, explicitly,
with water, although “Brugge,” i.e. Bridge, the
name of the place at the time of the Conquest,
certainly implies water beneath. The manor
was given, after the Conquest, to one of the Conqueror’s
Norman barons, Walter of Douai, and
became therefrom known as “Brugie of Walter”
and by degrees, by a natural elision of letters
readily dropped in ordinary speech, what it is
now.
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BIRTHPLACE OF ADMIRAL BLAKE
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[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF ADMIRAL BLAKE]
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Of the Castle of Bridgwater, once a strong
fortress, both by virtue of its own stout walls,
and by reason of the fine position it held at the
crossing of the Parret, nothing is left, except
portions of the Water Gate, on the West Quay,
// 152.png
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and the cellars of what is now the Custom House.
The last occasion of its appearance in history
was the shameful surrender of it to a besieging
army under Fairfax, on July 23rd, 1645, after
a two days’ assault. It had been so generally
considered impregnable that the wealthy Royalists
of the countryside, afraid for the safety of their
jewellery and other valuables, had sent them
hither from what they thought to be the insecurity
of their own houses. Thus the taking of the impregnable
castle and the surrender of the invincible
// 153.png
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garrison resulted in exceptionally heavy
spoils, amounting to £100,000 value.
Bridgwater boasts one famous son; Robert
Blake, the great Admiral, or rather, General-at-Sea,
of the Commonwealth, who taught foreign
nations in general, and the Dutch in particular,
who wanted the lesson badly, the respect due to
England. His birthplace is still standing in this
his native town, in a quiet byway, where tall,
staid eighteenth-century merchants’ residences look
down, as it were with a certain condescension,
upon the less imposing house in which the hero
was first introduced to a troubled world, in 1599.
It is a comfortable, rather than a stately, house;
but it was built to last. It is the oldest house
now remaining in the town, and was probably
built in the early years of the sixteenth century,
the interior disclosing a greater antiquity than
would be suspected from the frontage. Huge,
roughly squared oak timbers frame the walls and
cross the ceilings with immense rafters. They
had been all carefully covered up some generations
ago, and their existence hidden by plaster and
wall-papering; but recent repairs of the house
have resulted in all this honest construction
being again disclosed; and very noble, in the
rugged old way, it looks. During the progress
of these repairs and alterations, the plaster on
the walls of an upper room was found to have
been liberally scratched and otherwise drawn
upon at a period contemporary with Admiral
Blake. Sketches of ships were prominent among
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these rough sgraffiti: ships built and rigged in
a manner characteristic of the seventeenth century,
and the words “Rex Carolus” appeared among
them. It was necessary, for the repair of the
walls, to cover up most of these sketches, but
the best have been carefully preserved.
Robert Blake’s father was a merchant, with
more children (a round dozen of them) than business.
His mother came of an old landed family;
the Williamses of Planesfield. Robert himself
was sent to Oxford and was in residence there,
chiefly at Wadham College, fifteen years, wishful
of becoming a Fellow, but finally balked of that
ambition for an easeful life. It is curious to
contemplate that old possibility of this stout man
of war having ever become a cloistral butt of
futile learning, of the peculiar brand of futility
affected by Oxford.
His father died, leaving but an insignificant
sum to be divided among his many children, and
Robert, with strong Republican views, was returned
to Parliament for his native town of Bridgwater.
Events were moving rapidly towards
Civil War, and in the outbreak of that momentous
struggle many men found at last their vocation.
Among them was Blake, whose great defence of
Taunton town against the Royalist siege in 1645
was one of the most dogged and successful incidents
of that time. Encompassed by ten thousand
men and his ammunition all shot away, food
exhausted, and a breach actually made in the
walls and the enemy swarming through it; still
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he would not yield, and declared he would eat his
boots first. Fortunately the rumour of Fairfax’s
relieving army at that moment spread among
the besiegers, and the siege was raised, else Blake
would have had a full and an unappetising meal
before him, as any one who contemplates his
statue here, and the great thigh-boots he is
wearing, may judge for himself.
At the establishment of the Commonwealth,
Blake was given high command at sea: a military
man afloat as Admiral; a thing in our own highly
specialised times unthinkable. His complete
success in that new environment is a part of our
history that need not be recounted here. After
many inconclusive duels with the Dutch, who,
under Van Tromp, disputed the sovereignty of the
seas, and after brilliant services abroad, Blake
died while yet in what may be termed the prime
of life, of an intermittent fever, and probably
also from an exhaustion induced by old wounds,
on board his flagship, off Plymouth, in 1657. With
his death disappeared one of the few entirely
honest Republicans of that time: a man that
England could then ill spare, as the nation was to
find but ten years later, when the Dutch fully
revenged themselves for former reverses by their
historic raid up the Medway and destruction of
English ships off Chatham.
After many years, Bridgwater has at last
honoured itself and the memory of this great man
with a statue, placed prominently in front of the
Corn Exchange. He is represented in the military
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costume of the time, with a short, wind-blown
cloak flying from his shoulders, pointing into
space. It is a pose admirably chosen, and every
line of this fine bronze figure expresses the courage,
zeal, and bull-dog determination characteristic
of the man. Bronze panels in relief on the plinth
represent Blake’s fleet off Portland, February
1653; the capture of Santa Cruz, April 20th,
1657; and Blake’s body brought into Plymouth
Sound, August 7th, 1657. This appropriate couplet
from Spenser is added:
.pm verse-start
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life, doth greatly please.
.pm verse-end
Bridgwater church has its place in history,
for it was from the battlements of this tower that
the ill-fated Monmouth looked forth upon the
plain of Sedgemoor, just before the battle that
was to decide his fortunes.
Nothing in the long story of the West so stirs
the blood as the incidents of the disastrous expedition
captained by this handsome, ambitious, and
well-liked son of Charles II. It was a generous
enterprise—if at the same time not without its
great personal reward, if successful—to attempt
the saving of England from the domination of
Popery that again threatened her; and it deserved
a better conclusion than that recorded by history.
.if h
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BRIDGWATER: ST. MARY’S CHURCH, AND CORN EXCHANGE.
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[Illustration: BRIDGWATER: ST. MARY’S CHURCH, AND CORN EXCHANGE.]
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It was three weeks after the landing of Monmouth
at Lyme Regis, on the coast of Dorset,
that he arrived at Bridgwater. Three thousand
men had flocked to him on his landing, and by
// 157.png
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// 159.png
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the time he had reached Taunton, the enthusiasm
was such that his forces were more than doubled,
and numbered seven thousand. But his was
an undisciplined and untrained mob, rather than
an army, and a fiery religious fervour, ready to
dare anything for Protestantism, was an ill equipment
with which to contend against the trained
troops of James the Second, hastening down to
oppose their march. This was essentially a
popular rebellion, for the influential gentry of
the West, although ill-affected towards the reactionary
rule of King James and willing enough
to end his reign, hesitated to join, and by their
cowardice lost the day. While they timorously
waited on events, the peasantry showed a bolder
front, and chiefly through their sturdy conduct,
Monmouth’s advance through Dorset and
Somerset had been by no means without incident
in the warlike sort. His rustics, badly armed
though they were, and largely with agricultural
implements instead of weapons of offence, gave
with their billhooks, their pikes, and scythes,
an excellent account of themselves against the
Royalist regulars commanded by Lord Feversham
in the hotly contested skirmish at Norton St.
Philip on June 26th.
It was, perhaps, in some measure the
unaccustomed weapons used by Monmouth’s
countrymen that alarmed Feversham’s soldiers
and gained that day for the rebel Duke, for even
men trained to arms lose much of their courage
when confronted with strange, even though, it
// 160.png
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may be, inferior weapons. But it was still more
the valour of the Somerset rustics that won
the day on that occasion for Faith and Freedom.
Had Monmouth followed up his advantage,
the wavering sympathies of the West of England
gentry might have thrown fresh levies into the
field for his cause; but he retired upon the then
defenceless town of Bridgwater, and remained
inactive.
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WESTONZOYLAND.
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[Illustration: WESTONZOYLAND.]
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Now, there is nothing that more disheartens
untrained men than a check in their forward
march. Countermarching to them appears but
the forerunner of defeat, and the flow of ardour
in any cause once hindered is difficult to recover.
With regular troops the chances and changes
incidental to campaigning inure them to disappointments,
and the retreat of to-day they
know often to be but the prelude of to-morrow’s
advance. But with Monmouth’s men, their leader’s
plan once altered, their fortunes seemed irretrievably
clouded. Monmouth himself grew gloomy
at the delay the vacillations of himself and his
lieutenants had caused, and when on the afternoon
of Sunday, July 5th, he ascended to this point to
reconnoitre the position his opponents had taken
up in the midst of the moor, his heart sank. He
saw the glint of their arms, the colours of the
regiments drawn up beneath the shadow of the
tall tower of Westonzoyland, and he well knew
that a conflict between them and his brave, but
untaught, peasants could only prove fatal to his
ambitions. He had, some years before, led those
// 161.png
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very soldiers to victory. “I know those men,”
said he to his officers, leaning over these parapets
of St. Mary’s; “they will fight!”
By a circuitous route, his army left the town
of Bridgwater when night was come and darkness
had shrouded the moor. By narrow and rugged
lanes they went, past Chedzoy, towards the Polden
Hills. Here they turned, and, led by a guide,
essayed to thread the maze of deep ditches called,
in the parlance of the West Country, “Rhines.”
It was not until two o’clock in the morning
that they had reached within striking distance
of the Royal troops, crossing safely the Black
Ditch, and moving along the outer side of the
Langmoor Rhine, in search of a passage, when a
pistol was fired, either by accident or treachery.
“A Dark night,” says one who was present, “and
Thick Fogg covering the Moore.” The darkness
and the sudden alarm caused by the pistol-shot
threw Monmouth’s men into confusion, and the
Royal forces were at the same time aroused.
The night attack had failed.
James II.’s troops challenged the masses of
men they saw dimly advancing through the mist,
and were for a time deceived by the answering
cry of “Albemarle,” the name of the Royalist
commander, who was supposed to be coming to
the support of Lord Feversham.
And thus the Monmouth men passed on to the
Bussex Rhine, where they were simultaneously
challenged and fired upon by another outpost.
Dismayed by this volley at close quarters, the
// 164.png
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rebel horse, forming the advance, broke and
dashed wildly back into the stolid ranks of the
peasantry. It says much for the stubborn courage
of those ploughmen and hedgers and ditchers
who formed the bulk of the Duke’s ranks, that
in this confusion they stood fast.
Then the fight began in earnest, chiefly hand-to-hand,
beside the broad and stagnant Rhine,
in whose noisome mud many a stout fellow met
his death that night. It was not until day dawned
across the moor that the last band of rustic pikemen
broke and fled before the King’s battalions,
pouring across the Bussex Rhine.
Hours before, under cover of the night, the
rebel Duke had fled the spot with Lord Grey
and thirty horsemen. It had been a better thing
had he halted and been cut to pieces with his
brave followers. His had then been a nobler
figure in history.
He had looked with the ill-disguised contempt
of an old campaigner upon his doomed
rustics. Urged to make a last effort to support
them, he said bitterly: “All the world cannot stop
those fellows; they will run presently”—and
ran himself. The shattered remnants of his raw
ranks poured confusedly into Bridgwater town,
soon after daylight was come. At first the townsfolk
thought them but the wounded stragglers
from a great victory, and shouted, with caps
flying in air, for “King Monmouth.” Then the
dreadful truth spread abroad from the lips of
wounded and dying men, and those who had
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cheered for the flying leader hid themselves, or
fled on their own account. Three thousand of
the rebels lay slain upon the field.
Swift and terrible was the punishment meted
out to the unhappy victims of Monmouth’s ill-starred
rising. The moorland, the towns and
villages throughout the counties of Somerset and
Dorset, were made ghastly with the bodies and
quarters of the rebels executed and hanged in
gimmaces, or fixed on posts by the entrances to
the village churches; and the shocking judicial
progress of the infamous Judge Jeffreys, is aptly
commemorated in the popular name of the
“Bloody Assize.” The Duke of Monmouth, captured
at Woodyates, was beheaded on Tower
Hill, after an abject appeal for mercy had been
refused, on July 15th.
Lost causes always appeal to the imagination
more eloquently than those that have gained
their objects, and the Monmouth Rebellion is
no exception. The enthusiasm aroused by the
handsome presence and gallant bearing of this
gay and careless son of Charles II. and Lucy
Walters, still finds an echo in the West, in the
sympathy felt for his tragic end and for the temporary
eclipse of the Protestant cause. This
interest lends itself to the whole of the level
country behind Bridgwater, the flat, dyke-intersected,
alluvial plain of Sedgemoor. The Bussex
Rhine, one of the original dykes, has long since
been filled up, and more modern ditches cut for
the better draining of the district; but the spot
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where the battle was fought can still be exactly
identified. It lies half a mile to the north of
Westonzoyland, whose rugged church tower overlooks
the greater part of the moor, topping the
withies, the poplars, and the apple-orchards of
the village with grand effect. In that stately
church five hundred of the rebels were imprisoned
before trial. A little distance from the site of
the Bussex Rhine is the Langmoor Rhine, and,
near by, Brentsfield Bridge, where the Duke’s
men crossed. The village people of Chedzoy
still show the enquiring stranger that stone in
the church wall on which the pikes were sharpened
before the fight, and the plough even now occasionally
turns up rusty sword-hilts, bullets, and
other eloquent memorials of that futile struggle.
But the silken banner, worked by the Fair Maids
of Taunton, where is it, with its proud motto,
Pro Religione et Libertate? and where the memorial
that should mark this fatal field whereon
so many stalwart West-countrymen laid down
their lives for their faith?
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CHAPTER XIV||CANNINGTON—THE QUANTOCKS—NETHER STOWEY, AND THE COLERIDGE CIRCLE
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We leave Bridgwater by St. Mary’s church and
the street called curiously, “Penel Orlieu,” whose
name derives from a combination of Pynel Street
and Orlewe Street, two thoroughfares that have
long been conjoined. “Pynel,” or “Penelle,” was
the name of a bygone Bridgwater family.
.pi
Up Wembdon Hill, we come out of the town
by its only residential suburb. Motor-cars have
absolutely ruined this road out of Bridgwater,
and on through Cannington and Nether Stowey,
to Minehead and Porlock. It is a long succession
of holes, interspersed with bumpy patches, and
on typical summer days the air is heavy with
the dust raised by passing cars; dust that has
only begun to settle when another comes along,
generally at an illegal speed, and raises some more.
The hedges and wayside trees between Bridgwater
and Nether Stowey are nowadays, from this
cause, a curious and woeful sight, and the village
of Nether Stowey itself is, for the same reason,
made to wear a shameful draggletailed appearance.
The dust off the limestone road is of the whiteness
// 168.png
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of flour, but looks, as it lies heavily on the foliage,
singularly like snow. The effect of a landscape
heavily enshrouded in white, under an intensely
blue August sky, is unimaginably weird: as though
the unthinkable—a summer snowstorm—had occurred.
Cannington, whose name seems temptingly
like that of Kennington—Köningtun, the King’s
town—in South London, especially as it was once
the property of Alfred the Great, is really the
“Cantuctone,” i.e. Quantock town, mentioned
in Alfred’s will, in which, inter alia, he gives the
manor to his son Eadweard.
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CANNINGTON.
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[Illustration: CANNINGTON.]
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The village stands well above the Parret
valley, and is described by Leland as a “praty
uplandische” place. A stream that wanders to
this side and that, and in its incertitude loses its
way and distributes itself in shallow pools and
between gravelly banks, over a wide area, is the
traveller’s introduction to Cannington. Here a
comparatively modern bridge carries the dusty
highway over the stream, leaving to contemplative
folk the original packhorse bridge by which in
olden times the water was crossed when floods
rendered impracticable the usual practice of
fording it. The group formed by the tall red
sandstone tower of the church seen from here,
amid the trees, with the long rambling buildings
of the “Anchor” inn below, and the packhorse
bridge to the left, is charming. The present
writer said as much to the chauffeur of a motorcar,
halted here by the roadside. It seemed a
// 169.png
// 170.png
// 171.png
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favourable opportunity for testing the attitude of
such an one towards scenery and these interesting
vestiges of eld.
“Bridge, ain’t it?” he asked, jerking a dirty
finger in that direction.
“Yes: that is the old packhorse bridge, in
use before wheeled traffic came much this way.”
“’Ow did they carry their ’eavy machinery,
then?”
“Our ancestors had none.”
“Then what about the farm-waggons?”
“They went through the stream.”
“Kerridges too?”
“Yes, such as the carriages of those times
were.”
“’Eavens,” said he, summing up; “what
’eathenish times to live in!” And he proceeded
with his work, which turned out, on closer
inspection, to be that of plentifully oiling the fore
and aft identification-plates of his car, to the end
that the dust which so thickly covered the roads
should adhere to them and obscure alike the
index-letters and the numbers. He was obviously
proposing to travel well up to legal limit.
The church is a noble example of the Perpendicular
period, with an ancient Court House
adjoining, the property of the Roman Catholic
Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. It was made the home
of a French Benedictine sisterhood in 1807; and
is now a Roman Catholic Industrial School for
boys. The tall, timeworn enclosing walls of its
grounds form a prominent feature of the village.
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One of the monuments on the walls of the
church, in the course of a flatulent epitaph upon
the virtues of various members of the Rogers
family, of early seventeenth-century date, indulges
in a lamentable pun. The subject under
consideration is “Amy, daughter of Henry
Rogers.” “Shee,” we are told, “did Amy-able
live.” Deplorable!
Cannington stands at the entrance to the
Quantock country, that delightful rural district
of wooded hills and secluded combes which remains
very much the same as it was just over a
century ago, when Coleridge and his friends first
made it known. The Quantock Hills run for some
twelve miles in a north-westerly direction, from
Taunton to the sea at West Quantoxhead; the
high road from Bridgwater to Minehead crossing
the ridge of them at Quantoxhead. The highest
point of this range is Will’s Neck, midway, rising
to 1262 feet. The capital of the Quantock
country, although by no means situated on or
near the ridge, is Nether Stowey. Behind that
village rises the camp-crowned hill of Danesborough,
which, although not itself remarkably
high, is so situated that it commands an exceptionally
fine panoramic view extending over the
flat lands that border the Parret estuary, and
over the semicircular sweep of Bridgwater Bay.
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NETHER STOWEY; GAZEBO AT STOWEY COURT.
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[Illustration: NETHER STOWEY; GAZEBO AT STOWEY COURT.]
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Some wild humorist, surely, that was, who
pretended to derive the name of the Quantocks
from a supposititious exclamation by Julius
Cæsar, who is supposed to have exclaimed,
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// 174.png
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// 175.png
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standing on the crest of Danesborough, behind
Nether Stowey, “Quantum ad hoc!” That is,
“How much from here!” in allusion to the view
from that point. Serious persons, however, tell
us that the name is the Celtic “Cantoc” or
“Gwantog;” i.e. “full of combes.”
Peculiarly beautiful though the Quantock
scenery is, it is probable that the especially
delicate beauty of it would never have attracted
outside attention, had it not been for the association
during a brief space at Nether Stowey of
Coleridge and his friends. We will spare some time
to visit Nether Stowey, and see what manner of
setting was that in which the “Ancient Mariner”
and other of Coleridge’s poetry was wrought.
The entrance to Stowey from the direction of
Bridgwater is particularly imposing. You come
downhill, and then sharply round a bend to the
right, where a group of Scotch firs introduces
Stowey Court and the adjoining parish church:
the view up the road towards the village made
majestic and old-world by another grouping of
firs beyond the curious early eighteenth-century
gazebo that looks out in stately fashion from the
garden wall of the Court. From this, and from
similar summerhouse-like buildings, our great-great-grandfathers
and grandmothers glanced
from their walled gardens upon the coaches and
the road-traffic of a bygone age. The roofs and
gables, and the uppermost mullioned windows
of the Court are glimpsed over the tall walls.
Although Stowey Court dated originally from
// 176.png
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the fifteenth century, when it was built by Touchet,
Lord Audley, and although it formed an outpost
of the Royalists during the struggles of Charles
the First with his Parliament, the building is not
nowadays of much interest, and the church is
of less, having been rebuilt in 1851, with the
exception of the tower.
The romantic promise of this prelude to
Stowey is scarcely supported by the appearance
of the village street. It is a long street of houses
for the most part of suburban appearance, running
along the main road, with a fork at the further
end, along the road to Taunton, where stands a
modern Jubilee clock-tower beside the old village
lock-up. The clock-tower seems to most people
a poor exchange for the small but picturesque
old market-house that until comparatively recent
years stood in the middle of the street, with a
streamlet running by.
To Leland, writing in the reign of Henry the
Eighth, Stowey was “a poore village. It stondith
yn a Botom emong Hilles.” The situation is correctly
described, and no doubt the condition of
Stowey was all that Leland says of it, but no one
could nowadays describe it truthfully as “poor,”
although it would be altogether correct to write
it down as desperately commonplace. There is
nothing poetic about the village at this time o’
day, and its position on a much-travelled main
road has brought a constant stream of fast-travelling
motor-cars and waggons, together with
a frequent service of Great Western Railway
// 177.png
.pn +1
motor-omnibuses, with the result that a loathsome
mingled odour of petrol and fried lubricating
oil and a choking dust pervade the long street
all the summer. The local hatred of motor-cars—a
deep-seated and intense detestation of
them and those who drive them and travel in
them—is, perhaps, surprising to a mere passer-by,
who may just mention the subject to a villager;
but it is only necessary to stay a day and a night
in Stowey, and then enough will be seen and heard
and smelt to convert the most mild-mannered
person to an equal hatred.
They are naturally tolerant people at Stowey,
and not disposed to be censorious. If you do
not interfere with their comfort and well-being,
you are welcome to exist on the face of the earth,
as far as they are concerned, and joy go with
you. They even tolerate the notorious Agapemoneites
of Spaxton, two miles away, the dwellers
in the Abode of Love; and are prepared, without
active resentment, to allow the Rev. Hugh Smyth-Pigott
to style himself Jesus Christ and to cohabit
with any lady—or any number of ladies—he
pleases, and to style the resultant offspring
Power, or Glory, or Catawampus, or Fried Fish,
or anything that may seem good to him, with
no more than a little mild amusement. “They
doan’ intervere wi’ we, and us woan’ intervere
wi’ they,” is the village consensus of expressed
opinion, greatly to the wrath of certain good
Bridgwater folk, who come around, raving that
the Agapemoneites ought to be swept off the
// 178.png
.pn +1
fair land of the Quantocks, and when none will
take on the office of broom, denounce all as Laodiceans,
neither hot nor cold, and so fit only to
be spewed out. But it surely rests rather with
Spaxton and Charlinch to perform the suggested
expulsion; and even then, anything of the kind
would be distinctly illegal, for it is part of the
law of this free and enlightened and Christian
country that any man may, if it pleases him to
do so (and he can find others of the opposite sex
to join him), set up a harem, and even proclaim
himself the Messiah, without let or hindrance.
The law no more regards him as a fit target for
soot, flour, or antique eggs, or even for tar and
feathers, than a respectable person.
The “Abode of Love,” founded in 1845 by
the notorious “Brother Prince,” a scoundrelly
clergyman who appears never to have been unfrocked,
is a mansion maintained in the most
luxurious style, but completely secluded from
the highway, upon which it fronts, by substantial
walls. In the time of “Brother Prince,” the
flagstaff surmounting the strong, iron-studded
gateway, and supported by the effigy of a rampant
lion, was made to fly a flag bearing the Holy
Lamb, but this practice appears to be now discontinued.
Many inquisitive people nowadays visit Spaxton
to view the exterior of the place where these
notorious blasphemers live. None find entrance,
for recent happenings have made the inmates
extremely shy of strangers. It is notorious that
// 179.png
.pn +1
a raid was made upon the place one night towards
the close of 1908, and that Pigott, the
successor of Brother Prince, narrowly escaped
being tarred and feathered by some adventurous
spirits, who came down from London and, chartering
a motor-car, drove up from Bridgwater to
the Abode. Climbing the walls, they “bonneted,”
with a policeman’s helmet filled with tarred
feathers, the first man they met. This, however,
proved to be only an elderly disciple, and not
Pigott himself; and the intruders found themselves
presently in custody, and were next day
brought before the magistrates at Bridgwater,
and both fined and severely reprimanded. The
magistrates were bound to observe the law and
to punish an assault; but the attempted tarring
and feathering aroused a great deal of enthusiasm
at Bridgwater, where the only regret expressed
was that it had not been successful.
No one can complain that clerical opinion in
that town is not freely ventilated. Here is an
extract from a sermon preached by the vicar of
St. Mary’s:
“Near to our town for some years past, alas,
has sprung up one of the most unhappy and
miserable heresies that the world can show. Of
course there have been heresies very brilliant
and very beautiful. But here is a heresy foul,
horrible, and bad, and a heresy with not one
single redeeming point in it. A few years ago
the head of this movement, now living in the
little village under the shelter of the beautiful
// 180.png
.pn +1
Quantocks, made public proclamation in London
that he was the very Lord Jesus Christ, and that
he should judge the world. This man escaped
at the risk of his neck—for however lethargic
some people might be, these Londoners were not—to
the quiet of the country. Here the old
heresy, with a new name and with new horrible
details, came into prominence again. It had
quietly settled down, and men hoped that it
would have died out, but the events of the past
six months have revived it all again. None can
pretend to be ignorant of what has happened,
and none could pretend to be ignorant of the
awful and blasphemous claims that have been
made in the name of a wretched child born into
a wretched world.”
But although Nether Stowey is tolerant of
all these things, it is not calm when motor-cars
are under discussion. It would raise licences to
£50 per annum, reduce speed to ten miles an
hour on the open roads and three miles in villages
and towns, and both heavily fine and award
long terms of imprisonment to any who transgressed
these suggested limits. Also, Nether
Stowey suggests the reintroduction of turnpike-gates;
or, to speak by the card, “tarnpayke-geäts.”
By all this, it will be perceived that
automobiles have become a nuisance, a terror,
and a source of injury to Nether Stowey; as they
have to countless other villages similarly circumstanced.
// 181.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.nf c
THE MOTOR TERROR
.nf-
.pm verse-start
Upon the pleasant country road
The motor-lorry runs;
Its build is huge and clumsy, and
It weighs some seven tons.
And when its cylinder backfires,
It sounds like gatling-guns!
Hark! down the village street there comes
The motor “charry bong”:
And, gracious heavens! how it hums!
’Tis tall, and broad, and long;
And see its mountain-range of seats,
Filled with a motley throng.
Old Giles, who hobbled down our street,
Now he’s in—Paradise.
A Panhard took him in the rear,
And shattered both his thighs,
They gave the chauffeur “three months’ hard”
When tried at next Assize.
The motor-bus, with skid and lurch
And awkward equipoise,
Now fleets on Sundays past the church,
With hideous whirr and noise.
You cannot hear the parson preach;
It drowns the organ’s voice.
And children from the Sunday School
Hang on behind, before
Our little Billy lost his hold:
Now he’s (alas!) no more!
They rolled him pretty flat. His soul’s
Gone to the Distant Shore.
// 182.png
.pn +1
Racing, toot-tooting, slithering,
The private owner goes;
The dust he raises fills the eyes,
His petrol-reek the nose;
His face he hides behind a mask:
He wears the weirdest clothes.
Now thanks to thee, thou callous fiend,
For the lesson thou hast taught:
Thus hast thou shown us how our lives
And comfort are as naught,
So you may, reckless, go your way
And take your murd’ring sport!
.pm verse-end
.if h
.il fn=i153.jpg w=600px id=i153
.ca
THE COLERIDGE COTTAGE, NETHER STOWEY
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE COLERIDGE COTTAGE, NETHER STOWEY]
.sp 2
.if-
The cottage at Nether Stowey occupied by
Coleridge, from 1797 to 1800, stands at the further
end of the village, and is, indeed, the last house
on the Minehead road. It duly bears an ornamental
tablet proclaiming the fact of the poet’s
residence here in those critical years. Sentiment,
however, is not a little dashed at finding the
house to be an extremely commonplace one;
now, owing to a succession of alterations, enlarged
and made to look like an exceedingly unattractive
specimen of a typical suburban “villa” of the
first half of the nineteenth century, when stucco
was rampant and red brick had not come into
vogue. A scheme appears at the present time to
be under contemplation by which the house is to
be purchased and presented to the nation, as a
memorial of the poet. It is to become something
in the way of a “Coleridge Reading Room,” or
Village Institute; but at the moment of writing,
it is a lodging-house. A few years ago it was the
// 183.png
.pn +1
“Coleridge Cottage” inn. Such have been the
varied fortunes of this home, for those short four
years, of “the bright-eyed Mariner,” as Wordsworth
calls him. When it is further said that a
storey has been added to the house, and that the
thatch of Coleridge’s time has been replaced by
pantiles, it will be considered, perhaps, that the
value of it as a literary landmark can be but
small. Coleridge himself had no love for it, as
may be seen in his later references to Nether
Stowey, in which he refers to it as a “miserable
cottage,” and “the old hovel.” But the years
he passed in this place were the most productive
of his career. It was while walking along the
// 184.png
.pn +1
hills to Watchet, that he composed “The Ancient
Mariner” and the first part of “Christabel.”
Close at hand, at Alfoxden, was Wordsworth,
poetising on primroses and the infinitely trivial;
and at Stowey itself was the amiable Thomas
Poole, literary and political dilettante, friend and
host of this circle in general. Southey sometimes
came, and friends with visionary schemes for the
regeneration of the social system, then in some
danger of being overturned, following upon the
popular upheaval of the French Revolution,
severely exercised the conventional minds of the
local squires and farmers with their unconventional
ways and rash speech.
The habits of these friends, accustomed to
discuss and severely criticise the doings of the
Government, often to dress in a peculiar manner,
and to take long, apparently aimless walks in
lonely places, no matter what the weather, when
honest country folk were cosily within doors, or
asleep and snoring, presently attracted the notice
of the neighbours, to the extent that whispers of
those suspicious doings and this wild talk were
conveyed to the local magistrates, and the Government
eventually thought it worth while to
send down an emissary to keep a watch. The
spy chanced to be a person with a long nose.
He readily enough tracked their movements
along the hills and dales of Quantock, and overheard
much of their talk: probably because the
friends knew perfectly well that they were under
suspicion and were being watched, and were
// 185.png
.pn +1
humorously inclined to make the spy’s eavesdropping
as fruitful as they could of incident.
Prominent among their jokes was the discussion,
in his hearing, of Spinosa: that philosopher’s
name being pronounced for the occasion “Spynosa.”
This the long-nosed one took to be an
allusion to himself. Coleridge, he reported to
his employers to be “a crack-brained talking
fellow; but that Wordsworth is either a smuggler
or a traitor, and means mischief. He never
speaks to any one, haunts lonely places, walks
by moonlight, and is always ‘booing’ about by
himself.” The curious notion of the amiable
Wordsworth being mischievous is distinctly entertaining.
.if h
.il fn=i155.jpg w=600px id=i155
.ca
NETHER STOWEY.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: NETHER STOWEY.]
.sp 2
.if-
The friends were generally gay and light-hearted,
in spite of philosophising upon ways and
means of setting the world right by moral suasion;
// 186.png
.pn +1
and picnics punctuated the summer days. One
of these, at Alfoxden, has attained a certain fame.
There were present on this occasion: Coleridge,
William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Cottle;
the good-natured, providential Cottle, friend in
need of literary babes and sucklings. The provisions
consisted of brandy, bread-and-cheese,
and lettuces. Coleridge, in his clumsy way,
broke the precious brandy-bottle, the salt was
spilled, a tramp stole the cheese, and so all that
remained was bread and lettuces.
The “Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth,” the
poet’s sister and companion at Alfoxden and
elsewhere, have been published, but it cannot be
said that they add greatly to one’s intellectual
appreciation of the society formed by these friends,
nor do they impress the reader with the mental
powers of the lady, or with her knowledge of
country life. Here and there are such passages
as “saw a glow-worm,” or “heard the nightingale;”
as though such sights and sounds were
things remarkable in the Quantocks. To have
been deaf to the nightingale in his season, or not
to have noticed the glow-worm’s glimmer: those
would have been incidents of an evening’s walk
much better worth remarking for their singularity
in these still unspoiled hills.
But let us have a few specimen days from
Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary, to taste her quality.
March 1798, for example, will serve:
“28th.—Hung out the linen.”
“29th.—Coleridge dined with us.”
// 187.png
.pn +1
“30th.—Walked I know not where.”
“31st.—Walked.”
And then “April 1st. Walked by moonlight.”
What utter drivel and self-confessed inanity;
exasperating in its baldness, when an account
of what Coleridge said on the occasion of his
driving with them would have given us reading
the world would now probably be glad enough
to possess!
// 188.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch15
CHAPTER XV||STEART—STOGURSEY—THE FOLK-SPEECH OF\
ZUMMERZET—GLATT-HUNTING AT KILVE—ST. AUDRIES
.sp 2
.ni
To touch the coast on the left-hand of the Parret
estuary is to adventure into a little-visited land.
But although the way is long—the distance is
six miles to Steart Point—the road is sufficiently
easy, being downhill from Cannington to Cannington
Park, scene of the battle of Cynuit, and
to Otterhampton; and then flat for the remaining
four miles. At Otterhampton, a village of a few
farms and cottages, the church contains a memorial
to a former rector, the Rev. Dr. Jeffery, who
held the living for no fewer than sixty-seven
years, from 1804 to 1871.
.pi
The river bends abruptly and nears the road
at a point a mile and a half out, where the little
waterside hamlet of Combwich—“Cummidge,”
as it is styled locally—stands looking on to muddy
creeks and the broad grey bosom of the Parret
itself, with a colour like that of a London fog.
Bridgwater spire is plainly visible, far off to the
right, across the levels: sailing barges are loading
the bricks made here from the kilns close at hand,
and carts rattle and rumble along the few narrow
// 189.png
.pn +1
alleys that form the only streets of the place.
Away across the river, a whitewashed house
marks the position of a little-used ferry from the
out-of-the-world district of Pawlett Hams to this
even more outlandish peninsula of Steart.
Steart Point thrusts out a long tongue of land
over against Burnham, whose houses and tall
white lighthouse seem so near across the levels,
yet are almost two miles distant, over the rivermouth
and the mud-flats. The name of “Steart”
has come down to us little altered from Anglo-Saxon
times, an “a” replacing the “o” with
which it appears to have originally been spelled.
It is the same name as that of the Start in South
Devon, and signifies a boldly projecting neck of
land, “starting” out to sea. Otherwise there
is no likeness between that Devonian promontory
of cruel, black jagged rocks and this flat, muddy
and shingly fillet of land.
The fisher village of Steart is a singular place:
a fishing village without boats! The shrimps,
eels and flounders usually caught here are taken
in nets set by the men of Steart going down to
the sea at low water on “mud-horses.” Everything
is conditioned here by the deep mud of the
foreshore, which may only be crossed by special
appliances, evolved locally. Chief among these
is the “mud-horse,” which, it may at once be
guessed, is no zoological freak. If it is related
to anything else on earth, it may perhaps be set
down as a hybrid production: a cross between
a towel-horse and a toboggan sledge.
// 190.png
.pn +1
When the fishermen of Steart prepare to go
forth a-fishing, they proceed to undress themselves
to the extent of taking off their trousers and
putting on a cut-down pair, very little larger than
bathing-drawers. Mud-boots clothe their feet.
Then they bring down their wooden “horses,”
and, leaning against the upright breast-high
framework, give a vigorous push, and so go slithering
along the buttery surface of the flats; the
nearest approach to that fabulous body of cavalry,
the “Horse Marines,” any one is ever likely to see:
.pm verse-start
There was an old fellow of Steart,
Who went catching eels in the dirt.
When they asked “Any luck?”—
“Up to eyes in the muck!”
Said that rueful old fellow of Steart.
.pm verse-end
The traveller has to pass the little church and
scattered cottages of Otterhampton on the way
to Steart; and on the return, if he wishes to keep
near the coast, he comes through Stockland Bristol,
a pretty rustic village, with prosperous-looking
manor-house and an entirely modern church.
Beyond it are Upper Cock and Lower Cock farms,
that take their names from a tumulus down in the
levels near the estuary known as “Ubberlowe.”
“Upper Cock,” in its original form, was
“Hubba Cock”; “Cock” signifying a heap,
and comparing with “haycock.” “Ubbalowe”
is properly “Hubbalowe,” i.e. “Hubba’s heap,”
both names pointing to the probability that here
was buried the chieftain Hubba, who, as we have
already seen, fell at Cynuit.
// 191.png
.pn +1
From this point a succession of winding lanes
leads down again to the curving shore of Bridgwater
Bay at Stolford. Here meadows, a farmstead
with well-filled rickyards, and a compound
heavily walled and buttressed against flooding
from the salt marshes, border upon a raised beach
of very large blue-grey stones, which replaces the
mud that gathers round the Parret estuary.
Here at low spring tides traces may yet be found
of the submarine forest off-shore. A sample
of the foreshore taken at Stolford usually suffices
explorers, and fully satisfies their curiosity; for
the clattering loose stones of the heaped-up beach
form an extremely tiring exercise-ground.
.if h
.il fn=i161.jpg w=600px id=i161
.ca
THE “MUD HORSE.”
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE “MUD HORSE.”]
.sp 2
.if-
These level lands of highly productive
// 192.png
.pn +1
meadows, lying out of the beaten track, below
the greatly frequented high road that runs out of
Bridgwater to Nether Stowey, and so on along
the ridge to Holford and West Quantoxhead,
are much more extensive than a casual glance
at the map would convey. They are at one
point over five miles across. The centre of this
district is Stogursey, which is, as it were, a kind
of capital, if a large agricultural village may be
thus dignified.
Stogursey is a considerable village, taking
the second half of its name from the de Courcy
family, who once owned it, but the thick speech
of Somerset rendered the place-name into
“Stogursey” so long ago that even maps have
adopted the debased form; some, however,
inserting a small (Stoke Courcy) in brackets, under
the generally accepted form. The visitor will
at the same time notice, in the title of the local
parish magazine, that efforts are being made by
the clergy to restore the original name. The
church was built by those old Norman lords,
but the family died out so very long ago, that no
memorials of them remain in it; and the net
result of all their ancient state and glory is—a
name! It is a large and fine church, in the
Norman and Transitional Norman styles; consisting
of a large and lofty nave without aisles,
a central tower, north and south transepts, and
deep chancel. The clustered shafts supporting
the central tower have elaborately sculptured
Norman capitals of a distinctly Byzantine
// 193.png
.pn +1
character. A variant of the place-name is seen
on a monument to one Peregrine Palmer, where
it appears as “Stoke Curcy.” The Palmer family
is seen, on another monument, revelling in a
pun beneath the Palmer coat of arms: in this
wise, “Palma virtuti.”
.if h
.il fn=i163.jpg w=600px id=i163
.ca
STOLFORD.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: STOLFORD.]
.sp 2
.if-
But the Verney aisle of this beautiful church
contains more interesting memorials than those
of Palmers; notably two altar-tombs with effigies
of the Verneys of Fairfield. The earliest is that
of Sir Ralph Verney, 1352. The other, that of
Sir John Verney, who died in 1461, is of very
beautiful workmanship, and displays, among
other shields of arms, the punning device of the
family: three ferns—“verns,” as a rural Somerset
man would say, in that famous “Zummerzet”
doric that is not yet wholly extinct.
No one could justly declare the village of Stogursey
to be picturesque. Nor is it ugly; but at
the radiant close of some summer day, when an
afterglow remains in the sky, the village takes a
beautiful colouring that cries aloud for the efforts
// 194.png
.pn +1
of some competent watercolourist. It is an
effect, as you look eastward down the long broad
village street to the church, standing in a low
situation at the end, of a rich red-yellow, like that
of a ripening cornfield, on houses, cottages, and
church alike, with the lead-sheathed spire gleaming
like oxidised silver against the chilly blue-grey of
the eastern sky at evening, spangled already,
before the sun has finally gone to bed, with the
cold, unimpassioned twinkle of the stars. Daylight
heavily discounts this romantic effect, for
then you perceive that the lovely hue on the
church-tower at evening was the dying sunset’s
transfiguration of the yellow plaster with which the
tower was faced at some time in the Georgian
period.
But Stogursey has a castle, or the remains
of one, styled by villagers “the Bailey.” The
stranger looks in vain for it in the village street.
Stogursey Castle stands in a meadow, surrounded
by a stream which in the olden days was
made, not only to form the moat, but to turn
the wheels of the Castle mill. The mill-leat still
runs on one side of the lane branching from the
main village street; a lane now smelling violently
of tanneries, and lined with cottages of a decrepit
“has been” character; for it should be said that
Stogursey is a decaying place. Changes in method
of agriculture; changes in methods of communication,
making for swifter and cheaper import
of corn and other products of the soil;
changes, in fact, in everything have all conspired
// 195.png
.pn +1
to injuriously affect the place. The few remaining
local shops do not look prosperous, and the village
is full of private houses whose windows clearly
show them to have once been shops, that gave
up the pretence of business long ago. These
bay-windowed, many-paned shop-fronts retired
from business are familiar all over rural England.
The villagers generally turn them to account as
conservatories for geraniums and other flowers,
and a pleasant sight, treated in this way, they
often are. But there is a future for the Stogursey
district; if not for the shopkeepers, certainly for
the farmers. No light railway yet serves it, but
the need of such an enterprise is great; and when
it comes it will effect great changes in local
fortunes.
.if h
.il fn=i165.jpg w=600px id=i165
.ca
STOGURSEY CASTLE.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: STOGURSEY CASTLE.]
.sp 2
.if-
// 196.png
.pn +1
“Stoke,” as it was styled originally, is a
place of greater antiquity than any neighbouring
village, as its name would imply; indicating as
it does a stockaded post in a wild and dangerous
district innocent of settled houses.
That post was probably on the site of the castle
whose scanty ruins remain. The de Courcy
castle was destroyed as early as the time of King
John, when it passed by the second marriage of
Alice de Courcy to one Fulke de Breauté, who set
up here as a robber lord, and issued from this
stronghold from time to time for the purpose of
levying involuntary contributions from all who
passed to and fro on the highway yonder, from
Bridgwater to Quantoxhead. His castle can
never have been strong, for its situation forbade
strength, but the district was remote and little
known, and people who were plundered on the
ridgeway road had little inducement to plunge
down here after this forceful taker of secular
tithes. But de Breauté’s proceedings at length
grew so scandalous that a strong force was sent
at the instance of Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar
of the realm, and this thieves’ kitchen was burnt
and more or less levelled with the ground. The
subsequent history of the castle is vague, but
it would appear to have been at some time rebuilt,
for it was again, and finally, destroyed in 1455.
A glance at the remains will show that it could
never have been seriously defended against any
determined attack. The moat, still in places
filled with water, was deep as could be made,
// 197.png
.pn +1
for it was the only external defence. Fragments
of curtain-wall and portions of towers with loop-holes
for arrows remain; and the entrance-towers
may yet be traced, although a modern
cottage has been built on to them, in all the incongruousness
of red brick and rough-cast plaster.
Such is the modern economical way with the
shattered walls of this old robber’s hold. For
the rest, the enclosure is a tangled mass of undergrowth
and ivy-clad ruins of walls, and the
meadow without is uneven with the ancient
foundations of outworks that disappeared centuries
ago.
The roads leading back from Stogursey to the
coast have a distressing lack of signposts, and the
district is for long distances without habitations,
so that the way to Lilstock may well be missed.
That they are fine roads for the cyclist, with
never a motor-car about, is not sufficient to recompense
the explorer who cannot find his way.
And Lilstock—Little Stock originally; that is to
say, some ancient small coastwise stockaded fort—is,
perhaps, not worth finding, after all; for it
appears to consist solely of a tin tabernacle, by
way of church, and a lonely cottage amid elms,
at the end of everything; a veritable dead-end.
You climb to the lonely beach and have it all to
yourself; the grey sea lazily splashing amid the
ooze and scattered boulders, and a great empty
sky above.
It is all the same beside the sea to Kilve, and
rough walking too; the rebuilt church of Kilton
// 198.png
.pn +1
prominent inland, on the left; very modern,
but with a relic of a century ago in the shape of
a battered old barrel-organ with a set of mechanical
psalm and hymn tunes, that used to be ground
out every Sunday to the long-suffering congregation,
who must, by dint of sheer damnable iteration,
have come to loathe this unchanging psalmody
with a peculiar hatred.
We come now into the marches of West
Somerset, where the folk-speech still to some
extent remains; but the famous broad “Zummerzet”
speech of these parts nowadays survives
in its olden force only in the pages of dialect
novels. The dialect novel is a thing of convention,
like the dramatic stage, and is not necessarily
a direct transcript from life. In novels of rural
life, in rustic plays, and in illustrated jokes
in which villagers appear, the countryman still
wears a smock-frock and talks as his great-grandfather
was accustomed to talk. Frequently,
too, he wears a beaver hat, with a nap on it as
luxuriant as the bristles of a boot-brush; and he
is made to smoke “churchwarden” clay pipes
about a yard long. Real rustics do not do these
things nowadays. I only wish they did; for
then exploring in the byways would be much
more interesting. Nowadays, the unaccustomed
Londoner can quite easily understand anything
a Somersetshire man, even of the most rustic
type, has to say.
This, however, is not to be taken as an assertion
that all the old characteristic words and phrases
// 199.png
.pn +1
have died out, or that the accent is altogether
a thing of the past. The Somerset speech is
really part and parcel of that delightful West of
England trick of the tongue which still grows
gradually more noticeable to the stranger as he
progresses westward. You will not notice this
in any measure until you have passed an imaginary
line, which may be drawn from Oxford in the
north, to Southampton in the south, passing on
the way such places as Wantage, Newbury, Andover,
and Winchester. Westward of this frontier-line,
the West of England, linguistically, commences.
Somerset, by some unexplained accident,
was notoriously the home of the broadest
speech; but recent years have witnessed the
singular phenomena (singular when taken in
conjunction) of Somerset folk-speech losing much
of its old-time character, and that of Devon,
which had also largely fallen into disuse, returning
in almost its olden strength.
Much of this old manner of talking has been
preserved in the publications of the English Dialect
Society, in which we find embedded, among more
stolid phrases, amusing scraps of rustic dialogues,
illustrating the local shibboleths. Here we have,
for example, a rural domestic quarrel, rendered
in broad “Zummerzet.” It has not been thought
desirable to reproduce the somewhat pedantic
inflection-marks given in the Society’s publications,
tending as they do towards the unnecessary
mystification of those who do not happen to be
philologists. The spelling has also been altered
// 200.png
.pn +1
here and there, to bring it more into line with
the enunciation usually heard by the ordinary
person.
The woman in this first specimen says, “Uneebaudee
mud su waul bee u tooüd uundur u aaruz
bee u foauz tu leave saeumz aay bee, laung u
dhee. Tuz skandluz un sheemfeal aew aay bee
zaard.”[#]
.pm fn-start // A
“Anybody might so well be a toad under a harrow as be
forced to live same as I be, long of thee. ’Tis scandalous and
shameful how I be served.”
.pm fn-end
To this pitiful complaint the husband answers,
“U uumunz auvees zaard wuul neef uur udn
aat ubeawt, un dhee aart nuvvur aat ubeawt.”[#]
.pm fn-start // B
“A woman’s always served well if her isn’t hit about; and
thee art never hit about.”
.pm fn-end
Here is another example from the collection
already quoted from:
“Taumee, haut bee yue aiteen on? Spaat
ut aewt turaaklee!”
Perhaps the reader may be left to translate
this. But how about the following, spoken by
a waggoner on a hot day? “Mudn maek zu
boalz t’ax vur koop u zaydur, aay spoüz? Aay
zuuree aay bee dhaat druy, aay küdn spaat zik-spuns.”[#]
.pm fn-start // C
“Mustn’t make so bold as to ask for a cup of cider, I suppose?
I assure you I be that dry, I couldn’t spit sixpence.”
.pm fn-end
Here again is some time-honoured “Zummerzet.”
“Come, soce! Yur’s yur jolly goed
health. Drink ut oop tu onct!”
“Naw; daze muy ole buttonz neef aay due!
Aay diddn nuvvur hold wi’ u-swillen of ut deown
// 201.png
.pn +1
same uz thaet. Hurry no maen’s cattle tul ye’ve
got’n ass o’ yur aeown! Hurry, hurry; ’tuz
this yur hurryen what tarns everythen arsy-varsy
vor me! Muy uymurz! what ood muy oal
graanfer saay tu th’ likes of ut? Wooden dh’oal
maen laet aewt!”
.if h
.il fn=i171.jpg w=600px id=i171
.ca
KILVE CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: KILVE CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
Among the curious expressions found in this
last speech, that of “soce” is prominent. The
word is a familiar expression in these parts. It
is used between equals, and is equivalent to “my
boy,” “old chap,” etc. Philologists generally
consider it to be a survival from monastic times,
when itinerant monkish preachers are supposed
to have been styled, “socii,” i.e. “associates,”
or “brethren,” or to have themselves used the
expression in addressing their congregations.
“This yur,” that is to say, reduced to ordinary
pronunciation, “this here” is, on the other hand,
equivalent to a strong disapproval of the subject
// 202.png
.pn +1
under discussion. It means “this new-fangled,”
unfamiliar, or unpleasant thing.
The village of Kilve lies down along a lane
leading to the right from the road just past Holford,
and rambles disjointedly down to the rugged
little church. Church, ruined priory, and a large
farmhouse stand grouped together in the meadows,
beside the little brook called Kilve Pill, a quarter
of a mile from the low blue-has cliffs of the muddy
and boulder-strewn lonely shore sung by Wordsworth,
as “Kilve’s delightful shore.”
Kilve church is as rude and rugged as some
old fortress, and probably its tower was originally
designed with a view to defence. It is constructed
of very rudely shaped blocks of blue
limestone, many of them of great size, mortared
together in rough fashion. For the rest, it is a
small aisleless building, chiefly of Norman date,
with a south transept-chapel of Perpendicular
character, and a simple Norman bowl-font.
Giant, widespreading poplar trees adjoin the
Priory farmhouse and the ruins of the Priory, or
Kilve Chantry. This was a foundation by one
Sir Simon de Furneaux, in 1329, to house five
priests. The particular reasons that induced Sir
Simon to establish his chantry in this lonely
spot do not appear, for the history of the place
is vague; but whatever they were, they did not
appeal to Sir Richard Stury, to whom the property
came, some sixty years later, on his marriage
with Alice, the last of this branch of the Furneaux
family. He abolished the establishment, and
// 203.png
.pn +1
the building stood empty for centuries, or was
used as a barn by the neighbouring farmer. Another
use, not so much spoken of, was as a storehouse
for smuggled goods. A long succession of
farmers at the Priory farm were, in fact, more
smugglers than farmers. The church-tower was
said also to have been used by them. The present
roofless condition of the buildings is due to a
fire, many years ago, supposed to have been
caused by a conflagration of these smuggled
spirits.
.if h
.il fn=i173.jpg w=600px id=i173
.ca
KILVE; THE CHANTRY.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: KILVE; THE CHANTRY.]
.sp 2
.if-
In these latter days, now that many townsfolk
on holiday seek quiet, secluded spots, there
are few among the rustic cottages of Kilve that
do not house visitors, and nowadays the Priory
farm is in summer as much a boarding-house as
farmstead; while amateur geologists may be
found at low water on the “delightful,” if muddy,
shore, searching for “St. Keyna’s serpents”;
or, in other words, ammonites, which, with other
// 204.png
.pn +1
fossils, abound in the blue lias clay. They are
“St. Keyna’s serpents,” because the saint, coming
to Somerset, transformed all the snakes of these
parts into stone!
Kilve, in common with other villages situated
on this part of the Somerset shore, indulges in a
curious kind of sport: that of “hunting the
conger.” It is in the autumn that the unfortunate
conger-eel is taken unawares, through
the low tides that then generally prevail. The
conger, known here as the “glatt,” is the big
brother of the ordinary sand-eel, who is dug out
of the foreshore, all round our coasts. He lives
in the blue lias mud hereabouts, generally beneath
the boulders that are sprinkled about the shore
like currants in a bun; and is clever enough, in
the ordinary way, to have his home well below
low-water mark. But the treacherous spring-tides
are the undoing of him; laying bare perhaps
a hundred and sixty feet more of mud than usual.
At such times a large proportion of the rustic
population anywhere near the shore assembles
and proceeds to the muddy or sandy flats, accompanied
by fox-terriers and other dogs, and armed
with stout six or eight-feet-long sticks, cut from
the hedges and sharpened at one end to a chisel-like
edge. If there be by any chance a belated
visitor in those October days when hunting the
glatt is usually in full swing he is apt to imagine
the simple villagers are trying to take a rise out
of his ignorance of country life, when, in answer
to his questions, they tell him they are off hunting
// 205.png
.pn +1
conger-eels—and with dogs! But it is simple
truth. Hunting the wild red deer on Exmoor
is the aristocratic sport of this countryside, and
hunting the conger is the democratic; and where
in a purely inland district your sporting rustic
may keep his lurcher, here the rural sportsman
values his terrier or spaniel in proportion to his
merits as “a good fish dog.”
There is not that smartness among the pursuers
of the glatt which is the mark of the hunting-field
in the chase of the fox or the deer, and renders a
fox-hunt or a meet of staghounds so spectacular
a sight. Smart clothes are not the proper equipment
of the glatt-hunter, whose hunting chiefly
consists in wading, ankle-deep, through the mud,
heaving up huge boulders, and mud-whacking
after the wriggling, writhing congers, while the
dogs rush frantically among the crowd, scraping
holes in the mud and essaying the not very easy
task of seizing the slippery fish. In fact, the
oldest clothes are not too bad for this sport; and
the spectacle of a company of such sportsmen
as these, properly habited for the occasion, is
rather that of an assemblage of scarecrows than
that of a number of self-respecting members of
the community. That this precaution of wearing
the oldest possible garments is not an excess of
caution becomes abundantly evident at the conclusion
of a rousing day’s sport, when the mud
has been flying in proportion to the enthusiasm
of the chase, and every one has become abundantly
splashed, from top to toe. The congers,
// 206.png
.pn +1
or “glatts,” captured on these occasions scale,
as a rule, about four or five pounds, but occasionally
run to twenty pounds.
Over the meadows by church-path from Kilve
to East Quantoxhead, is a pleasant stroll, bringing
you into the village by the old watermill and the
village pond. Not, mark you, an ordinary village
pond with muddy margin and half-submerged
old superannuated pails and the like discarded
objects long past use, but a crystal-clear lakelet,
with stone and turf parapet, well-stocked with
trout—and the fishing preserved too, members
of that branch of the Luttrell family living in the
adjoining manor-house coming down occasionally
to cast a fly. This is not angling in such public
circumstances as might be supposed, for the
village is very small and retired, and few strangers
find their way hither. Indeed, things here are
so little conventional that you enter the churchyard
through a farmyard.
Church and manor-house stand side by side,
both built of the local blue-grey limestone. In
the chancel of the little aisleless church, stands a
Luttrell altar-tomb of alabaster, inscribed to
Hugh Luttrell, 1522, and his son, Andrew, 1538,
with shields displaying their arms and those of
the Wyndhams and other families with whom
they have intermarried.
.if h
.il fn=i176.jpg w=600px id=i176
.ca
ST. AUDRIES.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: ST. AUDRIES.]
.sp 2
.if-
The large, square-shaped manor-house adjoining
is the ancient home of the Luttrells, who
were seated here at East Quantoxhead long
centuries before they acquired the greater estates
// 207.png
// 208.png
// 209.png
.pn +1
of Dunster and Minehead; being descended on
the distaff side from that Ralph Paganel who held
this and other manors from William the Conqueror.
The tall, ugly masonry retaining-wall that
fringes the hollow road for a long distance as
you come uphill from East to West Quantoxhead,
is that of St. Audries, the park of Sir Alexander
Acland Hood. Where this ends, on the hilltop,
the lovely park, sloping down to the seashore, is
disclosed, like a dream of beauty. West Quantoxhead
and St. Audries are convertible terms, the
parish church being dedicated to St. Etheldreda,
popularly known in mediæval times as “St.
Audrey.” The mansion in the park, the rectory,
the post-office, and a few scattered cottages constitute
all the village. The church itself is modern,
having been built by Sir Peregrine Acland Hood
in 1857. It is far better, architecturally, than
the mere date of it would suggest; doubtless
because the architect relied more upon the traditional
local style than on his own initiative.
Although having stood for over half a century,
the church looks astonishingly new. The mansion
itself, a happy combination of stateliness and
domestic comfort, and built of red brick and stone,
is glimpsed romantically between the fine clumps
of trees with which the park is studded; and in
a cleft you note the blue sea—for the Severn Sea
is not so muddy and so dun-coloured under sunny
conditions as some would have us suppose. Down
on the beach, where a waterfall plunges boldly
// 210.png
.pn +1
over the cliffs of curiously stratified rock, the
Somerset coast proves itself again to be more
picturesque than it is generally allowed to be.
The Devon and Somerset staghounds sometimes
meet on the lawn, in front of St. Audries House,
as the Quantock pack were used to do.
// 211.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch16
CHAPTER XVI||WILLITON—ST. DECUMAN’S AND THE WYNDHAMS—WATCHET
.sp 2
.ni
Leaving St. Audries, one also leaves the Quantocks
behind, coming downhill into Williton, a
place now by way of being a little town, with a
railway station, a cattle market, a Union Workhouse,
resembling the residence of some more
than usually wealthy peer, a Petty Sessions Court,
and a police station.
.pi
Yet, with all these adjuncts of an up-to-date
civilisation, Williton does not enjoy the distinction
of being a real, original, independent parish. It
stands in the parish of St. Decuman’s, a church
yonder on the hillside, over a mile away, near
Watchet: the peculiar humour of the thing
being that St. Decuman’s, save for a few rustic
cottages close by, stands lonely, while Watchet
and Williton are populous places. Thus we
observe here the engaging paradox, outraging
all the problems of Euclid, of the larger being
contained in the smaller. At the same time, it
must be allowed that the “chapel-of-ease” at
Williton, however inferior ecclesiastically and
architecturally to St. Decuman’s, is at any rate
// 212.png
.pn +1
of a respectable antiquity. It originated in a
chantry chapel founded by Robert FitzUrse,
brother of that Reginald who bore his share in
the murder of Thomas à Becket. In a district
such as this, where churchyard and wayside
crosses, more or less dilapidated, are common-places,
it seems hardly worth while to note that
the base of an ancient cross stands at the east
end of Williton church, or that fragments of two
others stand in front of that old white-faced
coaching inn, the “Egremont Hotel,” one of
them made to support a gaslamp which itself has
been put out of action by effluxion of time.
St. Decuman’s, the parish church of Watchet,
stands fully half a mile away from the little town,
inland, within sight of Williton, on a conspicuous
knoll. St. Decuman, to whom the church is
dedicated, was one of those wonderful West
Country saints for whom, as for Napoleon, the
word “impossible” did not exist. He flourished
at the close of the seventh century and the opening
of the eighth, and came originally from South
Wales, as a missionary to the heathen of Somerset.
Crossing the sea on a hurdle, or on his cloak,
according to the conflicting accounts given, he
established a hermit’s cell on this spot and subsisted
chiefly on berries and the milk of a cow
which came from nowhere in particular, especially
for the purpose of sustaining the holy man. The
heathen, however, resented the hermit’s presence,
and seized and beheaded him here, fondly imagining
they had thus given him his quietus. But
// 213.png
.pn +1
they little knew the virile qualities of this hardy
race of missioners who came from across Channel
and wrought marvels all along these coasts of
Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. St. Decuman
was beheaded, but that was by no means the
end of him. He took up his head, washed it in
a spring that gushed forth upon the spot (for
he was a cleanly person for a hermit), and placed
it again on his shoulders: probably remarking,
in the manner of modern conjurors, “That’s how
it’s done!” But of this we have no record.
To convert the ungodly after this exhibition of
his powers was easy. There would appear to
have been no reason why so remarkable a man
as this should ever have died, but he passed away
at last, in A.D. 706. A grim little stone figure
of him occupies a niche in the tower.
The existing church is a fine and stately building,
chiefly of the Perpendicular period; the
exterior remarkable for the extremely hideous
carvings that decorate (if that be quite the word)
the dripstones over the windows of the south
aisle. Most of them are grotesque faces, but
one is of a somewhat mysterious character and
appears to be the representation of a little shivering
nude human figure, threatened by a huge
bird of the pelican type.
The interior discloses fine cradle-roofs to nave
and aisles, with angel corbels and a deeply undercut
frieze of conventionalised vine-leaves. The
third pier from the west, in the north aisle, bears
tabernacled niches filled with small statues of
// 214.png
.pn +1
four bishops, and on that behind the pulpit are
figures of an abbot and of St. George and the
Dragon. The Egremont and Wyndham chapels
are rich in memorials of the Wyndham family,
formerly of Orchard Wyndham, close by. An
old funeral helmet, painted and gilt, and surmounted
with the crest of a lion’s head and fetterlock,
hangs in the south chapel, and two others
are suspended in the chancel and the north aisle.
The Wyndhams, who are represented here
so numerously in sepulchral brasses and marble
monuments, derived from the Wyndhams of
Felbrigg, Norfolk, but originally of Wymondham
in that county; John, second son of Sir Thomas
Wyndham, having in the reign of Henry VIII.
married Elizabeth Sydenham, of Orchard Sydenham,
afterwards known as Orchard Wyndham.
The Norfolk branch of the family in course of
time replaced the “y” in their name by an “i,”
but the West of England Wyndhams have generally
(by no means always) adhered to the more
picturesque fashion of subscribing themselves.
The last Wyndham here was George, Lord Egremont,
who died in 1845, when the title became
extinct and the family property here and at
Sampford Brett was sold.
The brasses include those of John Wyndham,
of Kentsford, and his wife Florence, sister and
co-heir of Nicholas Wadham of Merrifield, Somerset.
He died in 1572, and she in 1596, many
years after the gruesome adventure she experienced
in being nearly buried alive.
// 215.png
.pn +1
The brasses of this worthy pair, half the size
of life and most carefully, if at the same time
coarsely, engraved, with a meticulous care for
details of armour and costume, face one another
on a huge stone slab, set against the wall. A
smaller brass represents them and a third figure,
intended for Fate, discussing their respective
ends, with the following dialogue:—
.in 10
.ti -10
Maritus. When changeless Fate to death did change my life
I prayd it to bee gentle to my wife.
.ti -10
Vxor. But shee who hart and hand to thee did wedd
Desired nothing more then this thie bedd.
.ti -10
Fatvm. I brought ye soules that linckt were each in either
To rest above ye Bodies here togeither.
.in 0
.if h
.il fn=i184.jpg w=302px id=i184 align=l
.ca
BENCH-END, SAMPFORD BRETT; SUPPOSED\
TO ALLUDE TO THE LEGEND OF LADY\
FLORENCE WYNDHAM.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BENCH-END, SAMPFORD BRETT; SUPPOSED
TO ALLUDE TO THE LEGEND OF LADY
FLORENCE WYNDHAM.]
.sp 2
.if-
It was in 1563, the year following her marriage
with John Wyndham, that Florence Wyndham,
in the words of Collinson, the historian of Somerset,
“having in a sickness lost all appearance of
life, was placed in her coffin and mourned as one
dead.” Fortunately, as the sexton was about
to close the family vault, he imagined he heard
a noise proceeding from the coffin. Another man
might have fled in terror, but there are few superstitious
fears left to sextons who have been long
at their work, and this one approached and listened
more carefully. The noise proceeded from
the coffin and was that made by the supposedly
dead woman, who had awakened from what had
been merely a trance, and was trying to get out.
Another, and a more scandalous, version tells
us that it was the act of the sexton, repairing
secretly to the vault for the purpose of stealing
// 216.png
.pn +1
her rings, and
cutting her finger,
that restored her
to consciousness.
The story is a
familiar one in
many localities,
but as told here,
of Florence
Wyndham, is
more circumstantial
than
others. Happily
rescued from this
dreadful situation,
she soon
afterwards became
the mother
of Sir John
Wyndham, and
lived happily for
another thirty-three
years. The
old manor-house
of Kentsford,
now a farmhouse,
still stands, three
fields away from
the church of St.
Decuman. Some
versions of the
story declare that Florence Wyndham was the
// 217.png
.pn +1
mother of twins shortly after the narrow escape
narrated above, and the countryfolk point to
one of the Wyndham monuments on which,
amid flaming urns, are two conventional marble
cupids in tears, as proof of the story, but the
monument in question is at least a hundred
years later in date than that lady. Three miles
away in the little church of Sampford Brett,
formerly on the Wyndham lands, among the
sixteenth-century carved bench-ends, is an exceptionally
notable example, both for its large
size and unusual design, which represents a woman
surrounded by conventionalised Renaissance fruit
and flowers: two little cupid-like figures blowing
trumpets below. This is generally thought to be
an allusion to this singular incident in the family
history, and the merely decorative cupids are
pointed out as the twins. It should be remarked
that the lady’s brain development, as shown on
the carving, appears to be singularly poor.
The Wyndhams were ever loyal folk, as their
monuments in St. Decuman’s church clearly
show, and that they did not always gain by their
allegiance is shown by the querulous epitaph upon
one of them, Sir Hugh, of whom it is written:
.pm verse-start
Here lies beneath this rugged stone
One more his prince’s than his own,
And in his martyred father’s wars
Lost fortune, blood, gained nought but scars,
And for his sufferings as reward
Had neither countinance or regard;
And earth affording no releif
Has gone to Heaven to ease his grief.
.pm verse-end
// 218.png
.pn +1
.if h
.il fn=i186.jpg w=600px id=i186
.ca
WATCHET; OLD TOWN HALL AND LOCK-UP.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: WATCHET; OLD TOWN HALL AND LOCK-UP.]
.sp 2
.if-
He was son of the governor of Bridgwater,
and one of the six hostages demanded by Fairfax
on the surrender of the town. He died 1671.
Let us sorrow for the unrecompensed services of
a Royalist, fighting for Charles I.; but perhaps
we may also spare a little consideration for
Charles II., who, on his restoration, was so beset
by claimants for honours and rewards on account
of Cavalier sufferings and losses in “his martyred
father’s wars” that not even the most generous
ideas of compensation would have sufficed to
satisfy the hungry crowds.
Watchet, the little town to which this church
of St. Decuman belongs, is a seaport of a stirring
history, early and late. Its earliest disaster was
the destruction and plunder wrought by the
Danes in A.D. 988; the latest the violent succession
// 219.png
.pn +1
of storms that from September 1903 demolished
the harbour, and again demolished it, after expensive
repair. There is much likeability in this
little unfortunate port of Watchet, if only for the
fact that it retains, even at this belated time o’
day, almost every feature of its natural self, and
has added few alien ones. It is a small place,
with paper mills and iron-foundries, railway-sidings
that come down to the waterside, and a
mineral line descending from the Brendon Hills.
For the convenience of those whose religion is
not of that after all not very robust kind, which
will lead them a mile’s walk, chiefly uphill, to their
parish church, a chapel-of-ease has been provided
on the quay, over the old market-house, which
has a kind of glory-hole in the basement, formerly
the local lock-up.
.if h
.il fn=i187.jpg w=600px id=i187
.ca
WATCHET.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: WATCHET.]
.sp 2
.if-
Watchet shares with the Italian town of
Magenta the honour of giving a name to a colour;
only, while the colour “magenta” is a modern
// 220.png
.pn +1
and a horribly inartistic kind of reddish purple,
introduced soon after 1859, when Louis Napoleon’s
victory over the Austrians at Magenta was popular
in France, “watchet” is certainly as old as
Chaucer who, in 1383, in his “Canterbury
Pilgrims,” says:
.pm verse-start
In hoses red he went ful fetishly,
Y-clad he was ful smal and properly
Al in a kirtel of lyght wachet;
.pm verse-end
.ni
the colour “watchet” being a light, or celestial
blue, as shown in “Hakluyt’s Voyages,” in which
we read of “mariners attired in watchet, or skie-coloured
clothe.”
.pi
// 221.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch17
CHAPTER XVII||CLEEVE ABBEY—OLD CLEEVE—BLUE ANCHOR
.sp 2
.ni
Two miles inland from Watchet lies the Cistercian
Abbey of St. Mary de Cleeve, or Clive; that is
to say, St. Mary of the Cliff—the most notable
ruin in these districts of Somerset. The church,
the Abbey itself, has quite vanished, and its
materials centuries ago passed into such commendably
useful purposes as building-stones for
neighbouring farmsteads, cow-bartons and linhays,
while the many excellent roads of the neighbourhood
doubtless owe their foundations to the same
source. The very interesting and extensive remains
of the establishment are those of the
domestic buildings, which have scarce their equal
elsewhere in England.
.pi
This once proud and beautiful Abbey was
founded in 1188 by one William de Romare, of
whom we know little else than that he was of the
family of the Earls of Lincoln of that period. It
stands, after the manner of all Cistercian monasteries,
in a pleasant fertile vale, watered by a
never-failing stream; for the White Monks were,
next to their religious association, most remarkable
for their agricultural and stock-breeding
// 222.png
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pursuits. They were not greatly distinguished
for their learning, as were, for example, the Benedictines;
but as farmers they were pre-eminent,
growing corn and breeding sheep and horses more
scientifically than any secular agriculturists of
their age.
The Cistercians, who derived from Citeaux,
in France, were alternatively styled “Bernadines.”
They first established themselves in England
in 1128: their first Abbey that of Waverley,
near Guildford. They stood, originally, for simplicity,
in life and worship. “They spent their
life,” says Peter of Blois, “on slender food, in
rough vesture, in vigils, confession, discipline, and
psalms; in humility, hospitality, obedience, and
charity.” We have also the testimony of St.
Bernard’s words, that “in praying and fast, in
study of Holy Writ, and hard manual labour”
they occupied their time.
They were not so dour and solemn as some
others of the monastic orders, and typified the
spiritual joy that filled their hearts by the white
habits they adopted; largely, however, as a
protest against the penitential Benedictines. For
harmony never did exist between the monks of
different rules, who were jealous of some and
despiteful to others, according to circumstances.
Most orders, however, united in despising and
ridiculing the Cistercians, who were in this, as in
the simplicity of their rule, and in the severe,
unornamental character of their original Abbeys,
the Plymouth Brethren and the Presbyterians of
// 223.png
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their age. The first type of Cistercian house
was almost as simple as a Dissenting Chapel of
our own times. In the churches of other orders
the Rood was made as ornate, and of as costly
materials, as possible: often glowing with gold
and silver and precious stones. The Cistercian
monks, however, remembering that Our Lord
died upon a cross of wood, placed a crucifix of
plain wood in their churches, and throughout the
whole of the establishment conducted themselves
as the sanctified farmers they really were: not
even scrupling to absent themselves from Mass at
harvest-time. If it be true—and it is a noble
belief—that “to labour is to pray,” then the early
Cistercians prayed well; for with all their might
they brought lands under cultivation, and tended
and improved stock, and helped the world along
toward the distant ideal.
But as time went on, and the order grew rich
by dint of its own farming and wool-growing
successes, and by a never-failing stream of benefactions,
the Abbots and monks by degrees became
arrogant and lazy. They no longer worked
in their fields; leaving the practical farming to
the lay-brothers and the horde of dependents
they had accumulated. As landowners they were
even more grasping than secular landlords, and,
in common with other orders, were extremely
tenacious of their rights of market and other
monopolies; thus earning for themselves a hatred
which was in course of time to sweep them out of
existence. The Cistercians were not alone—nor
// 224.png
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perhaps even as prominent as others—in these
worldly ways; but they shared in the growing
arrogance and luxury of these bodies originally
vowed to poverty and practising their vows
because they did not own the wherewithal to do
otherwise. Their churches and domestic buildings
were rebuilt elaborately and their Abbots travelled
en grand seigneur through the country; persons
claiming great consideration.
.if h
.il fn=i192.jpg w=600px id=i192
.ca
ENTRANCE TO CLEEVE ABBEY.
.ca-
.if-
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.sp 2
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO CLEEVE ABBEY.]
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.if-
Cleeve Abbey derives its name from the
swelling hills in the recesses of this valley of the
stream, called the Roadwater, i.e. the “Roodwater.”
“Cleeve” indicates, in its old meaning,
not only a cliff or cleft, but any bold hill. The
word is found in the place-names of Clevedon,
// 225.png
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near by, and at Clieveden, on the Thames. There
are no cliffs in this gentle vale nearer than the
not remarkably large cliffs at Watchet. The
valley is, indeed, more noted for its quiet pastoral
beauty than for ruggedness, and was in olden
times known as Vallis Florida, the “Vale of
Flowers.”
Although only the ground plan of the monastic
church remains, showing it to have been a building
161 feet in length, and of the transitional
period between the Norman and the Early English
styles, the domestic buildings are in very fair
preservation, considering their use by so many
generations of farmers as hay, corn, and straw
lofts. The cloister-garth, now a lawn-like expanse,
was, until Mr. Luttrell cleared it out about
1865, a typical farm-yard, rich in muck. At the
same period, the pigsties and various farming
outbuildings that had been added in the course
of over three hundred years, were cleared away,
and the place made more accessible to those
interested in these relics of the past. The
Luttrells, however, do not allow the place to be
seen for nothing, and have indeed at least an
adequate idea of its worth as a show; a notice
confronting the pilgrim to the effect that Cleeve
Abbey is shown on weekdays at one shilling a
head: sixpence each for two or more: “special
arrangements for Parties.”
Cleeve Abbey is not shown on Sundays and
that traveller who from force of circumstances
comes to it on the Sabbath must be content
// 226.png
.pn +1
with a view of its entrance-gateway only. If
he cannot contain his artistic or antiquarian
enthusiasm, but must needs peer and quest about
on the edge of the precincts, then the fury of the
people who occupy the farm, and are at the
same time caretakers of and guides to the Abbey
ruins, and without whose unwelcome company
you may not see the place at all, at any time,
is let loose over him. Whether this be a respect
for the Sabbath, or for the merely secular rules
imposed by the Luttrells, or whether it is not
more likely to be the rage aroused by the prospect
of a stranger seeing for nothing that for which
a fee is charged, I will not pretend to declare.
You may come at any time over the ancient
two-arched Gothic bridge from the road, and so
through the gatehouse, and through that into
the outer court, which is now a meadow, without
being challenged: arriving at the further end
at the farmhouse, beside which is a wicket-gate
admitting into the cloister-garth. “Ring the
Bell,” curtly says a notice-board, with a small
“Please” added, in hesitating manner, for politeness’
sake; probably by some satirical visitor,
wishful of imparting a lesson in manners.
The present explorer was one of those whom
circumstances conspire to bring hither on Sunday,
without the prospect of a return in the near future.
He left a bicycle in the gatehouse and came across
the meadow, where the base of the old Abbot’s
market-cross stands with a sycamore growing in
the empty socket of its shaft, to the wicket-gate.
// 227.png
.pn +1
It being Sunday, he did not ring, but entered and
sat down there in an ancient archway, in would-be
peaceful and holy contemplation. What more
Christian and Sabbath-like spirit than this would
you have? Better, I take it, than the occupation
of most of the villagers at that same moment,
reading the Sunday newspapers, filled (after the
manner of the Sunday newspaper) with the raked-together
garbage of the last seven days.
But this holy calm was not to continue. It
was entirely owing to that bicycle. A strategist
would have concealed it. Its presence under the
archway of the gatehouse brought the peaceful
interlude to an abrupt conclusion, as shall presently
appear.
Within the space of an all too short minute or
two there appeared two little girls through the
wicket-gate, coming home to the farmhouse
from a walk, or from Sunday school, evidently
excited by the sight of that machine, and by the
very obvious deduction that the owner of it must
be somewhere near. “And very pretty it was,”
as Pepys might have put it, to see them questing
about everywhere except in the right place, and
not finding him, sitting there in the grateful shade
quite close to them, and really easily to be seen,
you know. And after all, it was the intruder
himself who revealed his own presence, with the
remark, “I suppose you are looking for the owner
of that bicycle?” Whereupon they ran away
and there presently entered upon the scene an
angry woman, with inflamed visage and furious
// 228.png
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words; with offensive epithets about “trippers,”
and the like. Outrageous!
Now, to beat a leisurely and dignified retreat
under such circumstances is difficult. You owe
it to yourself not to be ignominiously routed in
disorder, but to draw off your forces from the
stricken field calmly and collectedly, inflicting
losses upon the enemy, if possible. And then, you
know, to be styled a “tripper,” and by a fat
farmer-woman! Does that not demand retribution?
Therefore, “Do you presume, woman, to call
me a tripper?” seemed the best retort: effective
and injurious, and at the same time restrained
and dignified.
“Woman!” What a deadly offence, what a
god-addressing-a-blackbeetle effect this has! It
produces rage of the foaming, abusive, incoherent
order, in midst of which, with a cold-drawn,
blighting smile, you retire, with the consciousness
that the thing will rankle for days. But the
incident renders a comparison of old times with
new in Somerset unfavourable to the present
age. In the olden days, before every historic spot
or architectural rarity had become a show-place,
resorted to by a constant stream of visitors, the
farmer whose farm happened to be on the site of
some ruined abbey would, as a rule, make the
visitor courteously welcome at all times, in his
homely fashion, and would indeed be pleased to
see the rare strangers who came his way; but in
these times, now that excursionists are everywhere,
// 229.png
.pn +1
and in great numbers, ruins have acquired
a certain commercial value, and must be hedged
about with restrictions.
.if h
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.ca
THE REFECTORY, CLEEVE ABBEY.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE REFECTORY, CLEEVE ABBEY.]
.sp 2
.if-
But here we are in the twentieth century,
and it were hopeless and foolish to wish ourselves
back in the early years of the nineteenth; for
not the most perfect examples of that old-time
courtesy could recompense for other incidental
discomforts.
Here, then, facing the road, across the little
Gothic bridge spanning the Roodwater, stands
the Gatehouse. Let us enter—it being weekday—beneath
the ample arch of that mingled
Decorated and Late Perpendicular building.
The upper storey, the work of William Dovell,
// 230.png
.pn +1
the last Abbot, bears the hospitable Latin
welcome:
.pm verse-start
Porta patens esto
Nulli claudaris honesto,
.pm verse-end
.ni
metrically rendered:
.pi
.pm verse-start
Gate, open be;
To honest men all free.
.pm verse-end
.ni
but more literally translated, “Gate, be open;
and be closed to no honest man.” It was a
favourite threshold invitation with the Cistercians;
but the later corruption, avarice, and sloth that
marked them, in common with other orders, led
to a double meaning being fastened upon it, both
in England and in France. The Latin construction
easily admits of a cynical interpretation,
figured for us by the still-surviving French
punning proverb: “Faute d’un point Martin
perdit son âne; i.e. By the mistake of a full-stop,
Martin lost his ass;” the original Martin of this
cryptic saw being the Abbot of Alne, who was
so unscholarly that in setting up the honoured
motto, he placed a full-stop after the word “nulli”;
thus making the phrase read scandalously,
.pm verse-start
Gate opened be to none.
Closed to the honest man.
.pm verse-end
That unfortunate Abbot’s lack of learning caused
the enraged people of the district, headed by
rival churchmen, to demolish his Abbey.
.pi
But to return to the sea, at Blue Anchor, by
way of Old Cleeve.
// 231.png
.pn +1
Past Washford—i.e. “Watchet-ford”—railway
station, and down a leafy lane to the right
hand, we come in a mile to the village of Old
Cleeve; its pleasant rustic, vine-grown cottages
commanding views of the beautiful bay between
Blue Anchor and the bold promontory of North
Hill, Minehead, from their bedroom windows in
the heavily thatched roofs.
There is not much of Old Cleeve, but what
there is, bears the impress of simplicity and innocence,
not at all in unison with the scandalous
rhyme:
.pm verse-start
There was a young fellow of Cleeve
Who said, “It is pleasant to thieve!”
So he spent all his time
In commission of crime—
Now he’s out on a Ticket-of-Leave.
.pm verse-end
The church of Old Cleeve is of the usual fine
Perpendicular character to which we grow accustomed
in these parts; with the curious individual
feature of a floor gradually, but most distinctly,
ascending from the west end of the nave to the
chancel. Here is an alms-box, dated 1634, and
inscribed “Tob. 4. Pro. 19. Remember ye
poore. Bee mercifvll after thy power. He that
hath pitie vpon ye poore lendeth vnto the
Lord.”
In a recess contrived in the wall of the nave
and surmounted by a boldly moulded ogee arch,
finished off with a finial in the shape of a human
face wearing a somewhat satanic expression of
// 232.png
.pn +1
countenance, is a recumbent effigy of a civilian
of the fifteenth century. This, although blunted
and damaged by time and ill-usage, was evidently
a fine work in the days of its prime. The effigy
has not been identified, and whether it be that
of a merchant-prince, or some great local landowner,
cannot be said; but the original was, at
all events, if we may judge from the care evidently
taken by the sculptor with the effigy, a
person of importance. A peculiarly charming
and dainty—almost a feminine—effect is given
by the decorated fillet that encircles the long
hair, and by the girdle around the waist; but
what will most keenly arouse the interest and the
speculation of those who examine the figure is
the very striking little sculptured group, of a
cat with one paw resting on a mouse, on which
the feet of the effigy rest. Although the head of
the cat is somewhat worn down, the group is still
tolerably perfect, and the cat is seen to be looking
up at the figure, as though seeking her master’s
approval.
The question visitors will naturally ask,
“Has this representation of sculptured cat
and mouse any particular meaning here?” at
once arises; but no facts, or legends even, are
available. It is curious to note, however, that
Sir Richard Whittington—the famous “Dick
Whittington,” the hero of the “Dick Whittington
and his Cat” story—was contemporary, or very
nearly contemporary, with the unknown man
represented here. It is not suggested that the
// 233.png
.pn +1
fact is more than a coincidence: but it is a
curious one.
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MYSTERIOUS EFFIGY AT OLD CLEEVE.
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.sp 2
[Illustration: MYSTERIOUS EFFIGY AT OLD CLEEVE.]
.sp 2
.if-
In the porch is an ancient, greatly timeworn
// 234.png
.pn +1
chest, with three locks and a slit in the lid, for
the reception of “Peter’s Pence” and other contributions.
As the chest is about six feet in
length and proportionably deep, it is evident
that the expectations were not modest. Let us
trust the faithful took the hint and contributed
accordingly.
And so by delightful lanes to Blue Anchor,
where the railway runs along the shore and has
a station of that name. Blue Anchor station
must in its time have misled many strangers, for
where a railway station is, there one expects a
town, or village, also. But here is a void, an
emptiness, a vacuum. Only a solitary bay is
disclosed before the astounded stranger’s gaze.
It is a noble bay, it is true, and commands lovely
views of the great North Hill at Minehead, with
Dunster nestling midway; and the sunsets are
magnificent. But railway companies don’t build
railway stations merely for the convenience of
those few people who would take a journey especially
for sake of a view or a sunset; and it
certainly seems as though the Great Western
expected building developments here, long ago,
and was still awaiting them. In short, all there
is of Blue Anchor is an old inn of that name,
not remotely suggesting a past intimately connected
with smuggling, together with a cottage
or two.
.if h
.il fn=i203.jpg w=600px id=i203
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BLUE ANCHOR.
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.sp 2
[Illustration: BLUE ANCHOR.]
.sp 2
.if-
Unfortunately for the lover of an unspoiled
seashore, a formal sea-wall has recently been
built, to protect the marshes that here fringe
// 235.png
.pn +1
// 236.png
.pn +1
// 237.png
.pn +1
the bay from being drowned. The Somerset
County Council built it, at a cost of some £30,000.
Let us hope the Luttrells are properly grateful
for this public work that so efficiently protects
their lands.
// 238.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch18
CHAPTER XVIII||DUNSTER
.sp 2
.ni
The approach to Dunster from Blue Anchor, and
through the village of Carhampton, is a progress
of pleasure. Turner has left a picture of Dunster
from Blue Anchor, but it is not one of his successes,
and the reality is far more romantic than
his representation. You see before you the
Castle of Dunster, on its hill, the eighteenth-century
tower of Coneygore, on its own particular
eminence, and the great Grabbist Hill, disposing
themselves in new groupings as you advance, and
realise that England has not much finer to give.
.pi
Dunster, with much else in these districts,
from Kilve to Minehead, belongs to the Luttrells,
whose heraldic shield of a bend sable on a golden
field, between six martlets—a “martlet” being a
heraldic bird of the swallow species, without feet,
unknown to ornithologists—is in consequence
frequently to be noticed here. The Luttrell motto
is Quaesita marte tuenda arte; that is to say, “What
has been gained by force of war should by skill
be guarded.” We may here perhaps detect the
glimmerings of one of those puns of which the
old heralds were so fond, in the similarity in sound
// 239.png
.pn +1
between “marte” and “martlet”; but it is
not a favourable example.
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CONEYGORE TOWER, AND ROAD INTO MINEHEAD.
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.sp 2
[Illustration: CONEYGORE TOWER, AND ROAD INTO MINEHEAD.]
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.if-
By what feat of arms, then, the traveller
naturally enquires, did the Luttrells obtain these
lands? By none at all, for, as a matter of fact,
they came to the family by purchase, and when
the heirs of the vendor sought to prove the sale
illegal, it was by an action in a court of law, rather
than by gage of battle, that they retained what
they had bought. But it is well known that the
family now owning the Luttrell lands are only
Luttrells on the female side, and bear the name
merely by adoption; Henry Fownes having in
// 240.png
.pn +1
1746 married Margaret Luttrell, heiress-general of
these manors.
The history of Dunster begins with an entry
in Domesday Book. There we learn that “Torre,”
as it is styled, was owned by a certain Aluric.
Perhaps it were best to style that Saxon landowner
uncertain Aluric, for that is all we hear
of him. A mere mention by name in Domesday
Book is, after all, no great thing. Thereafter it
became chief among the properties of William de
Mohun, from Moyun in Normandy, one of the
Conqueror’s liegemen in the red field of Hastings.
The author of the “Roman de Rou” speaks of
him as:
.pm verse-start
Le viel Guillaume de Moion
Ont avec li maint compagnon.
.pm verse-end
He was not, however, so elderly a warrior,
but is thus described in order to distinguish him
from his son. He became a very landed man in
the West, with sixty-seven other far-flung manors
in Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, and Devonshire,
including that of Tor Mohun, Torquay. But he
established his headquarters here, and here he
built the first castle of Torre, which soon afterwards
is found referred to for the first time as
“Dunestora,” in the deed by which he, in 1100,
gave the advowson of St. George’s, Dunster, the
fisheries of Dunster and Carhampton, the village
of Alcombe, and the tenth part of his vineyards,
ploughlands, markets, and flocks to the monks of
St. Peter’s Abbey at Bath.
// 241.png
.pn +1
William de Mohun the Second, son of this
well-rewarded henchman of the Conqueror, played
a turbulent part in the troubles that beset England
during the war between Stephen and Queen Maud.
He fought on behalf of Queen Maud; and the
Gesta Stephani, which gives an account of these
things from the point of view of King Stephen’s
adherents, does not fail to draw a highly unflattering
portrait of him, in which he appears
established, like some robber baron, at Dunster
Castle, with a strong force of horse and foot;
issuing therefrom to devastate the surrounding
country; “sweeping it as with a whirlwind.”
The historian of these things proceeds to tell us
that he was cruel and violent, firing the homes
and pillaging the goods of the community indiscriminately.
He appears, indeed, to have been
one of those restless men of war, not uncommon
in that era, who wanted trouble for its own sake,
and when it came, cared little whether it was the
property of friends or foes that he destroyed.
“He changed a realm of peace and quiet, of joy
and merriment, into a scene of strife, rebellion
weeping, and lamentation,” says the chronicler.
Queen Maud, on whose behalf he wrought so
busily and with such devastation, created him—or
he styled himself—“Earl of Somerset.”
The historian continues:
.pm letter-start
“When these things were after a time reported
to the King, he collected his adherents in great
numbers and proceeded by forced marches, in
order to check the ferocity of William. But
// 242.png
.pn +1
when he halted before the entrance to the Castle,
and saw the impregnable defences of the place,
inaccessible on one side where it was washed by
the sea, and very strongly fortified on the other
by towers and walls, by a ditch, and outworks,
he altogether despaired of pressing on the siege,
and, taking wiser counsel, he surrounded the
Castle in full sight of the enemy, so that he might
the better restrain them, and occupy the neighbouring
country in security. He also gave orders
to Henry de Tracy, a man skilled in war, and
approved in the events of many different fights,
that, acting in his stead, as he himself was summoned
to other business, he should with all speed
and vigour bestir himself against the enemy.”
.pm letter-end
Henry accordingly, sallying forth from his
own town of Barnstaple, so wrought with William
de Mohun and his garrison that, if indeed he could
not storm the castle, he could at any rate, coop
within it that bold and fiery spirit, and so protect
the neighbouring country. Tracy, in fact, did
more. He captured a hundred and four horsemen
in a single encounter, during one of those
sallies from the castle by which de Mohun thought
to break the force of the leaguer against him.
.if h
.il fn=i210.jpg w=600px id=i210
.ca
DUNSTER CASTLE.
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.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: DUNSTER CASTLE.]
.sp 2
.if-
And so the claws of this tiger were cut, and
himself rendered harmless until that time when
the factious, assured at last that they were too
well matched ever to bring the struggle to a
decisive issue, made peace, and thus sent the
unruly and restless back to an undesired state
of order.
// 243.png
// 244.png
// 245.png
.pn +1
We read incidentally, in those old accounts, of
Dunster Castle being washed on one side by the
sea. That passage places in a yet more picturesque
setting the picturesque scene even now presented
to the traveller; for where the road now goes
past the level meadows on the way from Carhampton
to Minehead, the sea then ebbed and
flowed in a shallow bay, whose shores reached to
the foot of the commanding hill on whose crest
the castle turrets still loom up, majestically.
Yet, beautiful in its wild original way though it
may have been in those days, when the castle was
a sea-fortress and the little town of Dunster something
in the nature of a port, Dunster Castle in
our own times, and on some evening of late summer,
when the sun sets gloriously over the hills and
irradiates the burnt-up grass to a golden tinge,
affords a picture of surpassing beauty, viewed
from the road to Minehead, across those level
pastures.
The de Mohuns who succeeded the turbulent
William of King Stephen’s time make little show
in the history of the place, and even that mid-fourteenth
century John, Lord Mohun of Dunster,
who was one of the original Knights of the Garter,
is more notable to us for the doings of his wife,
than for any action of his own. He married in
1350 Joan, daughter of Sir Bartholomew de
Burghershe. This lady it was who, according to
a legend, declared by serious antiquaries to have
no real foundation, obtained from her husband
the grant of as much common-land for the poor
// 246.png
.pn +1
of the town as she could walk barefoot: after the
fashion of that Lady Tichborne who, although
an invalid, crawled on hands and knees over an
amazing acreage in one day.
With this Lord Mohun, the de Mohuns of
Dunster came to an end, and the West of England
presently witnessed the entire extinction of the
family, root and branch; or its gradual decline
into obscurity through the growing poverty of
landless collaterals who became absorbed by the
middle-class, and survive here and there to this
day as shopkeepers, and even as agricultural
labourers, under the plebeian name of “Moon.”
As more peaceful and commercial times succeeded
the era in which arms decided the fate of noble
families, the fortunes of those who by any chance
had lost their lands grew desperate. In the
altered circumstances, when law and order had
replaced brute force, the sharp sword was no
longer a match for sharp wits. Hence the great
rise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the
trading class, to wealth, power, and honours.
But it was not precisely in this manner that
the de Mohuns became alienated from the land.
That John Lord Mohun of Dunster, who in 1350
married Joan Burghershe, had three daughters,
but no sons. A courtier during the greater part
of his career, he fell into the extravagant ways of
those with whom he associated, and lived and
died heavily in debt, and his widow, doubtless in
want of ready money, sold Dunster to Lady Elizabeth
Luttrell, née Courtenay, widow of Sir Andrew
// 247.png
.pn +1
Luttrell, of Chilton, Devon, for the sum of five
hundred marks, equal to £3333 6s. 8d., present
value. The receipt given for this purchase-money
is still a curious and cherished possession
of the Luttrells of to-day. The low price at
which Lady Mohun disposed of the property is
accounted for by the fact that the purchaser was
not to come into possession until after the vendor’s
death, which did not occur until 1404, thirty
years after the date of this transaction. Lady
Joan retired from the West when this sale was
completed, and was much at Court, and in Kent
and Sussex in those thirty years. The curious
may find her tomb in the undercroft of Canterbury
Cathedral, and may with some difficulty read
there the invocation to the piety of the beholder:
“Pour Dieu priez por l’ame Johane Burwasche
qe fut Dame de Mohun.”
Two of her daughters survived her: Elizabeth
Countess of Salisbury, and Philippa, married
thirdly to Edward Plantagenet, Duke of York.
To her daughter Elizabeth she left a cross, which
she had promised to the one she loved best, and
a copy of the Legenda Sanctorum. Philippa had
merely her blessing, and some choice red wine;
but her husband, the Duke of York, became the
happy recipient, by bequest of his mother-in-law,
of some improving literature, in the shape of a
copy of the Legenda, and an illuminated book.
Lady Elizabeth Luttrell, the purchaser of
Dunster, did not live to enjoy the property. She
predeceased Lady Mohun, and the reversion
// 248.png
.pn +1
went to her son, Sir Hugh Luttrell, a distinguished
soldier, Lieutenant of Calais, Governor of Harfleur,
Seneschal of Normandy, and, holder of many other
distinguished posts, much abroad on the King’s
service all his life. It was one thing to become
legal owner of Dunster, and quite another to
obtain actual possession, for the daughters of
Lady Joan refused to give up the property, on
the ground that Lady Mohun had no right to
dispose of it; and law-suits resulted, in which
Sir Hugh was at length victorious. It was during
his lifetime that the castle, by now grown ancient,
was rebuilt under the supervision of his son, John,
who occupied Dunster during his father’s long
residence abroad.
The Luttrells took the Lancastrian side in the
quarrels of Red Rose and White, and suffered
severely for that partisanship; Sir James, who
had been knighted for valour at the bloody battle
of Wakefield, being mortally wounded at the battle
of Barnet, 1471, and his property forfeited to the
victorious Yorkists, who granted the Luttrell
acres to the Earls of Pembroke. After the battle
of Bosworth, however, fourteen years later, they
obtained their own again, and held it uneventfully
until the beginning of hostilities between Cavaliers
and Roundheads, in 1642. Mr. George Luttrell,
the then owner, garrisoned Dunster Castle for the
Parliamentary party, and held it for a time successfully
against the Marquess of Hertford, the
Royalist commander in these parts, established
at Minehead, who was satisfied, in view of the
// 249.png
.pn +1
formidable front made by this hilltop stronghold,
in merely keeping a watch upon it, and preventing
any offensive movement on the part of the
garrison: thus—to use a modern military expression—“containing”
the enemy. Luttrell, for
his part, was satisfied at keeping the Royalists
thus inactive and useless for offence elsewhere;
each side thus “containing” the other: a not
very stirring method of warfare. In the following
year, in consequence of the sequence of Royalist
successes in the West, Mr. Luttrell surrendered
the castle, which was then held for three years for
the King by Colonel Francis Windham. It was
at this period that Prince Charles, afterwards
Charles the Second, stayed here. The bedroom
he then occupied is still known as “Prince
Charles’s.” In those years the fortunes of the
King declined, and rapidly grew desperate; until
at last Dunster Castle became the sole outpost of
the cause in Somerset. Finally, in 1645, it was
resolved to reduce this remnant, and in November
of that year a force was despatched from Taunton
to besiege the Castle. The investing force was
commanded by Blake, great on sea and on land,
and by Sydenham, and a lengthy and stirring
siege began. Both sides worked vigorously.
Attack and defence proceeded on engineering
lines; Blake’s men advancing cautiously by
trenches, mines, and batteries; the defenders
pushing forth to meet them by the same mole-like
methods. On February 5th, 1646, in midst
of these laborious operations, when the garrison
// 250.png
.pn +1
had come near to being starved out, a column
under Lord Hopton relieved them, and Blake’s
men were forced to retire from beneath the walls.
He kept watch, however, upon Dunster, and
in the meanwhile received reinforcements. At
length, on April 19th, the sturdy Windham, convinced
that, the King having lost everywhere
else in the West, it would be futile to hold this
one remaining post, surrendered. The victorious
Parliament, careful to destroy those places that
had held out against it, duly ordered the Castle
of Dunster to be “slighted,” otherwise to be
blown up; but the order was not enforced, probably
for the sufficient reason that the Luttrells,
as we have seen, were themselves partisans of
the popular party. The Parliament found Dunster,
thus preserved, a place useful enough; for here
during twelve months, from June 1650, was
imprisoned that dauntless reformer and pamphleteer
of those troubled times, William Prynne,
who proved himself a scourge to foes and friends.
He began, absurdly enough, as it seems to us
in these days, by attacking “love-locks” and
long hair worn by men, and short hair affected by
women, with an excursus upon chin-wags and
lip-whiskers; and proceeding by easy stages to
a denunciation of stage-plays, religious controversy,
and political bludgeoning. He was, in
short, a born controversialist: the Universal
Provider, so to say, of red-hot pamphlets, and
generally left his opponents dead, figuratively
speaking. A very grim person was William Prynne.
// 251.png
.pn +1
No one, it is quite safe to say, ever called him
“Willie,” and as for “Bill,” that would have
been an impossible familiarity with the stern-faced
Puritan, even supposing that vulgar diminutive
to have at that time been invented. By
the way, have the vulgarian who originated “Bill,”
and the period of its origination, ever been traced?
His opponents were not skilled in wordy warfare,
but what they lacked in repartee and argument
they fully made up for with the pillory, the
whip, and the branding-irons, and they inflicted
some particularly cutting rejoinders when they
caused his ears to be shorn off. Thus deprived of
his face-flaps, many a man would have rested
from his pamphleteering, but Prynne persisted,
and earned thereby the particular attention of
Laud, the High Church Archbishop of Canterbury,
who procured his branding on the cheeks with
the letters, “S. L.” for “seditious libeller.” With
that iron humour that was all his own, Prynne
referred to this horrible facial disfigurement as
“Stigmata Laudis.”
The loss of his aural attachments, together
with the addition of this undecorative poker-work,
and a fine of £5,000, so embittered Prynne
that he for ever after pursued Laud with an undying
hatred, and had a prominent hand in
hounding the Archbishop to public trial and
execution, in those days when his fellow-Puritans
had obtained the upper hand. Can we honestly
blame that intense malevolence he directed at the
insidious Romaniser, who would have imprisoned
// 252.png
.pn +1
men’s consciences again, and who did not hesitate,
in procuring these savage mutilations of his
opponents, thus to disfigure the image of God!
The fearless Prynne, imprisoned here awhile,
passed the time of his captivity in looking over
and arranging the Luttrell family papers. He
was himself a Somerset man, and his detention in
this castle could not have been very unpleasant,
for it was then as much residence as fortress.
The fortress built here by the first of the de
Mohuns ceased to exist when the castle was rebuilt
about 1417 by Sir Hugh, the first of the
Dunster Luttrells. The keep of that Norman
place of strength was situated on the crest of the
hill, now clear of buildings and used as a bowling
green. The spot was once known as St. Stephen’s,
from an Early English chapel dedicated to the
martyr having stood here.
Nothing earlier exists in the buildings of
Dunster Castle than the great inner gatehouse,
half-way up to the hilltop, now covered, together
with the massive curtain-walls, with a thick
growth of ivy. This was the work of Reginald
Mohun, who died in 1257. The fine outer gateway,
built during the enlargement under Sir Hugh,
bears sculptured shields with the arms of Luttrell
and Courtenay, Sir James Luttrell having, like
his great-grandfather Andrew, married into that
family.
.if h
.il fn=i218.jpg w=600px id=i218
.ca
DUNSTER: CASTLE AND YARN MARKET.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: DUNSTER: CASTLE AND YARN MARKET.]
.sp 2
.if-
The military works of Sir Hugh were in their
turn remodelled, for the purpose of converting
the castle into a residence, rather than a fortress,
// 253.png
// 254.png
// 255.png
.pn +1
by George Luttrell, in the first years of the seventeenth
century. Much of the Renaissance decorative
plaster-work, particularly that of the Hall,
belongs to this period. The havoc wrought by the
siege of 1646 was fully repaired, and the Castle
yet again remodelled as a residence, by Francis
Luttrell. The grand staircase, elaborately and
beautifully carved in oak with representations
of hunting scenes, is of this period.
Curiously painted ancient leather hangings,
ancient furniture, and old paintings that have
been in the Luttrell family for many generations,
abound in the castle, which is, it may be added,
the “Stancy Castle” of Thomas Hardy’s “A
Laodicean,” although it should be still further
added that it is by no means well characterised
in those pages.
Additions were again made in 1764; but a
general overhauling and rebuilding under the
direction of Salvin was undertaken by Mr. George
Fownes Luttrell in 1854.
This beautiful and interesting old place is
generally to be seen by visitors on Saturdays,
but not without a good many restrictions readily
to be understood in an historic castle which is at
the same time a residence. Thus, you are not
entitled, by the purchase of a sixpenny ticket
at the confectioner’s in the High Street, to wander
at will through the beautifully wooded grounds.
A guide meets strangers at the lodge-gates, and
conducts them. It is not the ideal way, and one
would fain linger awhile on the south terrace,
// 256.png
.pn +1
by that fine lemon-tree which climbs the wall and
brings its lavish crop of fruit to perfect ripeness
in this soft climate; or would if possible dwell
long upon the views in one direction and another;
down upon the growing town of Minehead, or
across to Blue Anchor and the Holms, set in
mid-Channel, with fleeting glimpses of the Welsh
mountains.
The great church of Dunster, whose choir was
in ruins until Mr. Luttrell undertook its restoration,
about 1856, contains tombs of the Luttrells
and others, and a very fine rood-screen. It is
quite in character with the legendary and often
muddled character of local history in England
that the altar-tomb and alabaster effigies of Sir
Hugh Luttrell and his wife, 1428, the first Luttrells
of Dunster, were until recent times always
shown as those of Sir John and Lady Mohun.
A curious example of architectural adaptation
is to be seen here, in a fifteenth-century enlargement
of an Early English doorway, by which the
jambs were cut back for some two-thirds of its
height, leaving the upper part as before. This
“shouldered” arch, as architects would technically
style it, forms a striking object.
One of the finest views of Dunster church is
that in which, looking from the south, you get the
great tower rearing majestically above the churchyard,
and in the foreground the ancient alcove
in the churchyard wall, formerly the home of the
stocks.
Some sweet chimes play from the old tower,
// 257.png
.pn +1
at one, five and nine p.m., daily; with a change
of tune for every day of the week. Sunday, “O,
Rest in the Lord”; Monday, “Drink to Me only
with Thine Eyes”; Tuesday, “Home, Sweet
Home”; Wednesday, “Disposer Supreme”;
Thursday, “The Blue Bells of Scotland”; Friday,
“The old 113th Psalm”; and Saturday, “Hark,
hark! my Soul.”
.if h
.il fn=i221.jpg w=600px id=i221
.ca
DUNSTER CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTH, SHOWING OLD ALCOVE IN
CHURCHYARD WALL FOR THE STOCKS.
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.sp 2
[Illustration: DUNSTER CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTH, SHOWING OLD ALCOVE IN
CHURCHYARD WALL FOR THE STOCKS.]
.sp 2
.if-
// 258.png
.pn +1
Not many visitors climb to the belfry chamber
of Dunster church: the wealth of interest in
Dunster makes too great a demand upon their
energies for every corner to be explored; and as
a rule, the interior of one belfry is very like that
of another. There are the usual pendant bell-ropes,
a few chairs, two or three oil lamps with
tin reflectors, and various notice-boards of the
Incorporated Society of Bell-Ringers, setting forth
the appalling number of “grandsire triples”
and “bob-majors” rung by those misguided
persons who are so deaf to music that they consider
bell-ringing to be harmonious. Education cannot
be yet very far advanced while the barbarism of
ringing church-bells for an hour at a stretch can
be permitted these few fanatics, to the discomfort
of the many; and justice and consistency are outraged
at the ringing of the perambulating muffin-man’s
tinkling bell being held an illegal nuisance,
while tons of heavy metal are permitted to be
set in motion in church-towers, to the misery of
villagers and townsfolk, who have, apparently,
no legal remedy.
The bell-ringers take themselves with an
absurd seriousness, which has not nowadays the
least excuse. The exercise may have been accounted
a useful and a pious one when bell-ringing
was supposed to exorcise devils, or at the very
least of it, to remind the faithful that the hour
of prayer was come; but now that clerical advanced
critics of the Scriptures themselves deny
the existence of the Devil himself and all his
// 259.png
.pn +1
imps, and impugn the inspired character of the
Bible, and now that every one can afford a watch
and ascertain the hour for himself, the greater part
of the church bells in this country could be broken
up and sold for old metal, to the profit of the
church, and the joy of the laity.
.if h
.il fn=i223.jpg w=468px id=i223
.ca
CURIOUS ARCHWAY, DUNSTER CHURCH.
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.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: CURIOUS ARCHWAY, DUNSTER CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
A battered, and now in parts barely legible,
// 260.png
.pn +1
old board hangs in the belfry of Dunster church,
showing how very seriously these ringers have
always taken themselves. Somewhat similar
versified rules may be occasionally found in various
places throughout the country:
.pm verse-start
You that in Ringing take delight
Be pleased to draw near;
These Articles you must observe
If you mean to ring here.
And first, if any Overturn
A Bell, as that he may,
He Forthwith for that only Fault
In Beer shall Sixpence pay
If anyone shall Curse or Swear
When come Within the door,
He then shall Forfit for that Fault
As mentioned before.
If anyone shall wear his Hat
When he is Ringing here,
He straightway then shall Sixpence pay
In Cyder or in Beer.
If anyone these Articles
Refuseth to Obey,
Let him have nine strokes of the Rope,
And so depart away.
.pm verse-end
It will be observed that the fines inflicted were
applied to the purchase of beer and cider, and no
doubt the misdemeanours were invented for the
purpose of providing a constant supply of drink
to the thirsty ringers. We may, perhaps, dimly
envisage the wrath of the rest when one of their
number, having offended, refused to pay his
// 261.png
.pn +1
sixpence. “Nine strokes of the rope” were not
too bad for him who refused to contribute towards
quenching their thirst; and they were
probably laid on with a will!
Prominent in the picturesque street of the
quiet old townlet is the Yarn Market, a stout,
oak-framed building, quaintly roofed, whose name
recalls the time when Dunster was a cloth-weaving
town, producing kerseymeres and goods named
after the place of origin, “Dunsters.” It was
built in 1609, by George Luttrell. The initials of
another George Luttrell, his nephew, and the date
1647 are to be seen on the weather-vane; evidence
of the repairs effected after the siege of 1646.
.if h
.il fn=i225.jpg w=600px id=i225
.ca
THE “NUNNERY,” OR “HIGH HOUSE,” DUNSTER.
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.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE “NUNNERY,” OR “HIGH HOUSE,” DUNSTER.]
.sp 2
.if-
The “Luttrell Arms,” a famous hostelry,
noted alike for its good cheer and for its interesting
architectural details, stands opposite the Yarn
// 262.png
.pn +1
Market. Legends, all too often, but by no means
always, picturesque lies, have it that this noble
fifteenth-century building was originally a “town
house” of the Abbots of Cleeve; and they may
in this case well tell us truly, for the massive
carved-oak windows of the kitchen, looking on to
the little courtyard, have a distinctly ecclesiastical
feeling. But whoever it was owned the place,
he was at pains to make the entrance-porch defensible,
as may yet be seen in the arrow-slits
contrived in the stonework on either side.
The so-called “Oak Room” is perhaps less
clerical in effect, but is nobly timbered, with oak
hammer-beam roof in three bays. A curious
early seventeenth-century mantelpiece in plaster-work,
with hideous figures on either side, displays
as central feature a medallion relief representing
the classic story of Actæon torn to pieces by his
dogs, or, this being a hunting country, shall we
say his hounds? It is a very small and thin
Actæon, and they are very large hounds that have
got him down and are urgently seeking some
meat on him.
Dunster, as already hinted, is a place not
readily exhausted, nor lightly to be hurried
through. Curious old houses, notably the so-called
“High House,” await inspection, and
below the Castle, not always found by hurrying
visitors, is the rustic old Castle Mill, with an
overshot and an undershot waterwheel, side by
side, tucked away from casual observation
beneath tall trees.
// 263.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch19
CHAPTER XIX||MINEHEAD, NEW AND OLD—SELWORTHY—THE HORNER
.sp 2
.ni
Scarce two miles distant from Dunster is Minehead,
the hamlet of Alcombe lying between the
two. Minehead, a group of three so-called
“towns,” Quay Town, Lower Town, and Upper
Town, occupies a position on the gently curving
flat shore sheltered on the West by the bold,
abrupt headland of North Hill, rising to a height
of 843 feet. North Hill is so striking a feature
in all views of the town, that one comes unconsciously
to regard it as the only typical outstanding
feature of the place. It is, so far as pictures go,
Minehead. A noble hill it is, with the old quayside
houses of the original fisher-village and ancient
little port nestling beneath it. Immemorially a
swelling green hillside, seamed and lined irregularly
with hedgerows roughly into a chessboard
pattern, it is distressing nowadays to find it being
studded with villas and scarred with roads.
.pi
For to this complexion has Minehead come
at last; development into a seaside resort. But
a few years since, and here you had a scattered,
unspoiled village. To-day, by favour of the
// 264.png
.pn +1
Luttrells, who own the land, and because the
railway is handy, the terminus station being, in
fact, on the beach, the builder is walking, splay-footed,
all over it, and hotels have arisen on the
front, and there is a bandstand, there are seaside
“entertainers,” and there are pickpockets among
the crowds thus being “entertained”; with the
result that numerous visitors have to remain
in pawn at their lodgings until such time as they
receive fresh supplies. This it is to be up-to-date!
Among other up-to-date doings is the
covering of the roads with asphalte, so that visitant
motor-cars shall not stir up the dust; the
result being that the roads so treated have an
evilly dirty appearance and a worse stink. They
look, and probably are, dangerous to health.
The old scattered Quay Town, Lower Town,
and Upper Town, with their time-honoured cob-walled,
whitewashed cottages, are being surely
enmeshed together in an upstart network of
new roads and uncharacteristic villas that might
be in suburban London, rather than in Somerset;
and the queer old Custom House, built in like
manner on the Quay, and a little larger than a
tool-shed, has been wantonly destroyed to make
an approach to a pleasure pier, built in an impossible
situation, so that visitors are pleased
not to go upon it. So much—and more than
enough too—of modern Minehead.
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.ca
MINEHEAD.
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.sp 2
[Illustration: MINEHEAD.]
.sp 2
.if-
History-books tell us of strange doings in the
old town. Thus in 1265, on a Sunday, the wild
Welsh, under one William of Berkeley, came
// 265.png
// 266.png
// 267.png
.pn +1
across Channel very numerously and pillaged the
surrounding country before a force could be
despatched to deal with them. The reckoning
was perhaps not a ready one, but it seems to have
been complete; the Constable of Dunster, one
Adam of Gurdon, meeting and defeating them
and driving them and their captain into the sea,
wherein those who had not perished by the sword
were drowned.
In olden times this was the seat of a not
inconsiderable trade. Woollens were exported
hence, and a large business was done in herrings
sent to Mediterranean ports, which bought annually
some 4,000 barrels. Hence the ancient
armorial bearings of Minehead; a sailing ship
and a woolpack.
.if h
.il fn=i230.jpg w=449px id=i230
.ca
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MANTEL, “LUTTRELL ARMS” INN.
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.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MANTEL, “LUTTRELL ARMS” INN.]
.sp 2
.if-
A curious incident in the annals of Minehead
in days of old is that of the furious onslaught of
the Church upon an unfortunate lad, a native of
the place, who, sailing in a ship afterwards captured
by Turkish pirates, was taken prisoner, and
his life spared on condition that he embraced
the Mohammedan religion. The desirability of
life, and the practical certainty of this youthful
sailor that one religion was as good as another,
when a choice was offered between death and the
acceptance of a new creed, may perhaps be readily
understood. But the youth’s refusal to add
himself to the noble army of martyrs outraged
the susceptibilities of the flatulent divines of the
period, who, when he at last returned home and
told his story, made so great an affair of it that
// 268.png
.pn +1
nothing would properly serve the occasion but
a public recantation of error. We may, therefore,
// 269.png
.pn +1
vividly picture to ourselves that scene in Minehead
church on Sunday, March 16th, 1627, when
the more or less penitent, but certainly very
frightened and astonished, lad was had in front
of the pulpit, before the whole congregation, and,
standing there in the Turkish breeches in which
he had returned home, made to listen to the
windy discourse of the Reverend Mr. Edward
Kellet, who preached the sermon afterwards
printed under the title of A Return from Argier.
We may presume “Algiers” to be meant; but
early seventeenth-century folk were more than a
little uncertain in these matters. The central,
harrowing fact of this occasion was, however, the
length of that homily, which fills seventy-eight
closely printed pages, and must therefore have
occupied considerably over an hour in delivery.
This is the manner of it, as set forth by the printer
and published and sold in Paternoster Row for
the edification of the godly:
“A Return from Argier: A Sermon preached
at Minhead, in the County of Somerset, the 16th
of March, 1627, the re-admission of a Relapsed
Christian into our Church. By Edward Kellet,
Doctor of Divinity.”
For the benefit of purchasers in London and
elsewhere, who were not acquainted with the
circumstances, the following explanation was made
to preface the sermon:—
“A Countryman of ours goinge from the
Port of Mynhead in Somersetshire, bound for
the streights, was taken by Turkish Pyrats, and
// 270.png
.pn +1
made a slave at Argier, and liuing there in slauerie,
by frailty and weaknesse, forsooke the Christian
Religion, and turned Turke, and liued so some
yeares; and in that time seruing in a Turkish
ship, which was taken by an Englishman of warre,
was brought backe againe to Mynhead, where
being made to vnderstand the grieuousnesse of
his Apostacy, was very penitent for the same,
and desired to be reconciled to the Church, into
which he was admitted by the authority of the
Lord Bishop of that Dioces, with aduise of some
great and learned Prelates of this Kingdome and
was enioyned pennance for his Apostacy: and
at his admission, and performance thereof, these
two Sermons were Preached the third Sunday
in Lent, Anno 1627, one the Forenoone, the
other in the afternoone.”
Jeremy 3. 22. “Return, ye backsliding Children,
and I will heal your backslidings. Behold,
we come unto thee, for thou art the Lord our
God.”
The amount of pedantic verbiage in the Reverend
Mr. Kellet’s hour-long discourse is really
appalling. That his congregation comprehended
even the half of it is not to be supposed, and that
the “penitent” himself but dimly understood
what all the trouble was about may easily be
imagined. But there can, at any rate, be no
manner of doubt that the Doctor of Divinity
enjoyed himself very much on this occasion:
thundering forth denunciations barbed with quotations
from musty theological works and fortified
// 271.png
.pn +1
by apposite texts, which he must most laboriously
have raked together; for those were the days
before Cruden’s and other Concordances to the
Scriptures had come into being. I will be more
merciful to my readers than was Kellet to his
congregation, and pretermit the most part of his
sententious phrases and his excerpts from the
patriarchs. But let the following stand as a taste
of his quality.
“You,” said he, pointing a scornful finger
at the baggy-breeched penitent standing there,
“you whom God suffered to fall, and yet of His
infinite mercy vouchsafed graciously to bring
home, not only to your country and kindred,
but to the profession of your first faith and to
the Church of Sacraments again; let me say
to you (but in a better hour) as sometime Joshua
to Achan: ‘Give glory to God, sing praises to
Him who hath delivered your soul from the nethermost
hell.’ When I think upon your Turkish
attire, that embleme of apostacy and witness of
your wofull fall, I do remember Adam and his
figge-leave breeches; they could neither conceal
his shame, nor cover his nakedness. I do think
vpon David clad in Saul’s armour and his helmet
of brasse. ‘I cannot goe with these,’ saith David.
How could you hope in this unsanctified habit to
attain Heaven? How could you clad in this
vnchristian weede; how could you, but with
horror and astonishment thinke on the white
robe of the innocent Martyrs which you had lost?
How could you goe in these rewards of iniquity
// 272.png
.pn +1
and guerdons of apostacie? and with what face
could you behold your selfe and others? I know
you were young. So was Daniel and the three
Children: so were Dioscurus the Confessor, and
Ponticus, the Martyr: adde (if you please)
English Mekins, who all at fifteen yeares of age
enured manfully whatsoever the furie of the
persecutors pleased to inflict vpon them.”
The preacher then proceeded to remark:
.pm letter-start
“We are bound without failing to resist unto
the death. You who go down to the sea in ships,
and occupy your business in great waters, are
reckoned by Pittacus as neither amongst the
dead nor the living. The grave is always open
before your face, and only the thickness of an
inch exists between you and eternity.”
.pm letter-end
Altogether, the lot of the seafaring community
was revealed to this Minehead congregation
in an entirely new light. They had never
heard of Pittacus before, and had really, you
know, fancied themselves alive, and not in the
dreadful tertium quid pictured by that classical
philosopher.
Time was also when Minehead possessed a
ghost, but that was long ago. It is now going on
for nearly three hundred years since this malignant
spectre was finally discredited, and the up-to-date
circumstances of the place scarce admit
the possibility of a successor. Sir Walter Scott,
in his notes to “Rokeby,” tells us about this apparition,
which was (or was reputed to be) that of a
Mrs. Leakey, an amiable old widow lady of the
// 273.png
.pn +1
little seaport, who died in 1634. She had an
only son, a shipowner and seafaring man of the
place, who drove a considerable trade with Waterford
and other ports of the South of Ireland. She
was in life of such a cheery and friendly disposition,
and so acceptable a companion to her friends
that they were accustomed to say to her and to
each other what a pity it was so amiable and
good-natured a woman must, in the usual course
nature, be at last lost to an admiring circle
in particular, and in general to a world in
which her like was seldom met. To these flattering
remarks she used to reply that, whatever
pleasure they might now find in her company,
they would not greatly like to see her, and to
converse with her, after death.
After her inevitable demise, she began to
appear to various persons, both by day and night:
sometimes in her house and at others in the fields
and lanes. She even haunted the sea. The
cause of this postmortem restlessness appears to
have been a small matter of a necklace which
had fallen into hands she had not intended;
and her dissatisfaction with this state of affairs
entirely changed her once suave disposition.
One of her favourite ghostly fancies was to appear
upon the quay and call for a boat, much to the
terror of the waterside folk. Her son, however,
was the principal mark of her vengeance, for her
chief delight was to whistle up a wind whenever
the unfortunate son’s ships drew near to port.
He suffered, in consequence, so greatly from
// 274.png
.pn +1
shipwreck that he soon became a ruined man.
So apparently credible a person as the curate of
Minehead saw the spook, and believed, as also
did her daughter-in-law, a servant, and numerous
others. In fact, Minehead in general placed entire
confidence in the supernatural nature of “the
Whistling Ghost”; and it was not altogether
reassured by the finding of a commission that
sat to enquire upon the matter, presided over by
the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The finding was
“Wee are yet of opinion and doe believe that
there never was any such apparition at all, but
that it is an imposture, devise, and fraud for
some particular ends, but what they are wee
know not.”
.if h
.il fn=i236.jpg w=600px id=i236
.ca
QUIRKE’S ALMSHOUSES.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: QUIRKE’S ALMSHOUSES.]
.sp 2
.if-
There are still some quaint objects, and odd
// 275.png
.pn +1
nooks and corners in Minehead. Among these
an alabaster statue of Queen Anne (deceased some
time since) is prominent in the principal street:
but the local experts in the art of how not to do
anything properly have just enshrined it in a
clumsy stone alcove affair that not only serves
the intended office of shielding the statue from
the weather, but also most efficiently obscures it.
This figure was the work of Bird, author of
the original statue of Queen Anne in front of
St. Paul’s Cathedral, and was presented by Sir
Jacob Banks to the town in 1719, as some sort of
recognition of the honour he had for sixteen
years enjoyed of representing Minehead in nine
successive Parliaments, by favour of the powerful
local Luttrell interest, he having in 1696 married
the widow of Colonel Francis Luttrell. The
statue was originally placed in the church, and
the churchwardens’ accounts tell us, in this wise,
how it was received:
.dv class=font80
.ta h:40 r:5
| s. d.
Ringing when the Queen’s effigies was brought to the Church | 7 6
Paid for beer for the men that brought in the Queen’s effigies into the Church | 2 6
.ta-
.dv-
The Quirke almshouses, in Market House
Lane, form a pretty nook. Their origin is sufficiently
told on the little engraved brass plate
that is fixed over the central door:
.pm verse-start
Robert Qvirck, sonne of James Qvirck
bvilt this howse ano: 1630 and
doth give it to the vse of the poore
// 276.png
.pn +1
of this parish for ever and for better
maintenance I doe give my two
inner sellers at the Inner End of the key
and cvrssed bee that man that shall
convert it to any other vse then to
the vse of the poore 1630.
.pm verse-end
.if h
.il fn=i238a.jpg w=509px id=i238a
.ca
DOORWAY OF THE MANOR OFFICE.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: DOORWAY OF THE MANOR OFFICE.]
.sp 2
.if-
Then follow the representation of a three-masted,
full-rigged ship of the period, and the
concluding lines:
.pm verse-start
God’s providence
Is my Inheritance
R Q
E
.pm verse-end
.if h
.il fn=i238b.jpg w=600px id=i238b
.ca
MINEHEAD CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: MINEHEAD CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
// 277.png
// 278.png
// 279.png
.pn +1
The shaft of an ancient cross stands at one end of
this row of cottages.
.if h
.il fn=i239.jpg w=600px id=i239
.ca
THE MANOR OFFICE, MINEHEAD.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE MANOR OFFICE, MINEHEAD.]
.sp 2
.if-
In midst of Minehead, now overshadowed by
tall business premises, painfully like those to be
seen any day in London, stands a charming old
building, long past used as the Manor Office.
The original use of the building, which appears
to be of the fifteenth century, is unknown, and
perhaps hardly even to be guessed at. The
walls, of red sandstone, are immensely thick and
stoutly buttressed, with oak-framed windows of
semi-ecclesiastical design, still displaying traces
of rich carving.
// 280.png
.pn +1
Old customs survive at Minehead, in a half-hearted
way, and not perhaps from any natural
spontaneous joyousness, but because there is
something to be made out of them. This does not,
however, apply to the burning of the ashen faggot
on the domestic hearth on Christmas Eve, and
but partially to the “worslers”—i.e. “wassailers”—who
every January 17th visit neighbouring
orchards, and with song and dance invoke a good
crop of apples in the forthcoming season. But
weddings at the old parish church still form an
excuse for levying tribute, and those who have
attended generally discover their return barred
until they have rendered the wherewithal for
drinks round.
Chief among the town celebrations is that of
the Hobby Horse, surviving from a remote antiquity.
It takes place annually, on the first three
days of May, and assumes the shape of a gaudily
caparisoned What-is-It, escorted by fishermen
and fisher-lads, playing on drum and concertina,
with an obbligato of money-box rattling. We
have styled the Hobby Horse as above for the
sufficient reason that it is not only utterly unlike
anything equine, but with an equal conclusiveness
unlike anything else on earth; being just a
draped framework, hung with gaily coloured
ribbons, from the midst of which rises a something
intended for a capped head. The human
mechanism that actuates this affair may be guessed
at from the great boots that ever and again are
to be seen protruding from it.
// 281.png
.pn +1
.if h
.il fn=i241.jpg w=554px id=i241
.ca
ROOD-LOFT TURRET, MINEHEAD.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: ROOD-LOFT TURRET, MINEHEAD.]
.sp 2
.if-
This is a survival of more simple times, and
seems a little out of the picture in the sophisticated
streets of modern Minehead. Rural customs,
outside the radius of the town, wear a more natural
appearance.
The ancient church of Minehead, the parish
church of St. Michael, stands as do most churches
// 282.png
.pn +1
dedicated to that saint, on a hilly site. It is in
Upper Town, half way up North Hill, and quite
remote, thanks be, from the recent developments
down below. Here the ancient white-faced
cottages remain, and the steep steps that form
the road, and here you feel that you are come
again into the Somerset of pre-railway times.
The church is chiefly of the Perpendicular period.
On the tower, rather too high for their details to
be easily made out without the aid of glasses, are
sculptured panels representing St. Michael weighing
souls, with the Virgin Mary on one side and
the Devil on the other contending for possession,
by pressing down the beam of the scales; and a
group of God the Father, holding a crucified
Christ. A rich projecting bay filled with windows
forms an unusual feature of the south side of the
church. It is the staircase turret of the rood
screen, and was designed in this fashion and filled
with windows, it is said, for the purpose of showing
a light at night-time for fishermen making the
harbour. No beacon is shown now, but it is
stated that fishermen still speak of “picking
up the church lights” as they make their way
home. At the same time, it is only right to say
that, from personal observation, it seems impossible
that the windows or the turret could ever
have been visible from the sea. They look out
rather in a landward direction, if anything, towards
Dunster. But on the opposite side of the
church there remains an inscription in Old
English characters, somewhat decayed, by which
// 283.png
.pn +1
it is evident that the well-being of the neighbourhood
was near the hearts of these church folk:
.pm verse-start
We . prey . to . John . and M(ary)
send . our . neyburs . safte.
.pm verse-end
.if h
.il fn=i243.jpg w=250px id=i243 align=r
.ca
THE CLOCK JACK, MINEHEAD CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE CLOCK JACK, MINEHEAD CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
The interior of the church is very fine, with
the usual rich rood-screen we come to expect
in these parts. It is possible
to ascend the staircase-turret
and walk along
the site of the rood-loft,
which was indeed until
1886, when the church was
restored, occupied during
service by school-children.
Here is preserved a queer
little clock-jack figure, removed
from the tower. The
entrance to the chapel of
St. Lawrence from the
chancel is by an archway
curiously framed in wood,
instead of stone. Various
relics, in the shape of old
books and Bibles, a carved-oak late fifteenth-century
chest, and some brasses of the Quirke
family (among whom one notices the oddly
named “Izott,” wife of John Quirke, mariner,
1724) reward the visitor.
This way, uphill, past the old church, is the
pleasantest exit from Minehead, on the way to
Porlock, but it is by no means the usual or the
// 284.png
.pn +1
easiest one, as the stranger will perceive when he
is reduced to enquiring the proper choice among
several roads that presently confront him.
.if h
.il fn=i244.jpg w=600px id=i244
.ca
LYNCH CHAPEL.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: LYNCH CHAPEL.]
.sp 2
.if-
“Y’ant coom up yur to get to Parlock?”
asked an old rustic cottage woman of the present
writer, with some astonishment. Being reassured
that one really knew this to be a very indirect
route, she abandoned the sarcasm she was prepared
with, and was reduced to satire on visitors in
general. “Some on ’em doan’ niver think of
asking the way. They jest goos arn, an’ then
they goos wrong. I often larfs in me sleeve at
’em, I do.”
Saucy puss!
Yes. I suspect the simple countryfolk enjoy
many a sly laugh at visitors, quite unsuspected.
To Selworthy, over North Hill, is a rugged
way, of narrow woodland lanes. Selworthy, as
its name sufficiently indicates, is a village amid
// 285.png
.pn +1
the woods; woods around it, above and below;
the woodlands belonging to the Aclands of Holnicote—i.e.
“Hollen-cot,” or holly-cot,—that seat
lying down beside the main road to Porlock. Here
are ancient oaks and other trees, and more recent
plantations that have now matured and clothed
the hillsides with fir and larch. These were
planted by that Sir Thomas Acland who died,
aged 89, in 1898. A wild region is that of Selworthy
Beacon, rising to a height of 933 feet,
above the village.
.if h
.il fn=i245.jpg w=600px id=i245
.ca
PACKHORSE BRIDGE, ALLERFORD.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: PACKHORSE BRIDGE, ALLERFORD.]
.sp 2
.if-
The village itself is a small and scattered one,
with a large and handsome church, neighboured
by a monastic tithe-barn. A “Peter’s Pence”
chest, hinting, by its size and iron bands and triple
locks, great expectations, is one of the objects of
interest here. But tourists from Minehead and
Porlock do not come chiefly to see the church,
beautifully restored with the aid of Acland gold
though it be. It is rather the fame of the pretty
thatched cottages bordering a village green that
// 286.png
.pn +1
attracts them. These owe their origin to the late
Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, who built them as
homes for servants grown old in his employ, and
pensioned off by him.
The road down from Selworthy to Porlock
passes the little river Horner and commands
views on the left hand up to the purple hills of
Exmoor, up to Cloutsham, where the wild red
deer couch, and the great heights of Dunkery,
Easter Hill, and Robinow. To the left lies
the hamlet of Horner, so-called from the river,
“Hwrnr,” = “the Snorer,” snoring, as the Anglo-Saxons
are supposed to have fancifully likened
the sound of its hoarse purring, over the boulders
and amid the gravel-stones that strew its shallow
woodland course. Here, amid the woods, you
may find, not far from a comparatively modern
road-bridge, an ancient packhorse bridge flung
steeply across the stream. At Allerford is another
packhorse bridge.
// 287.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch20
CHAPTER XX||PORLOCK—BOSSINGTON—PORLOCK WEIR
.sp 2
.ni
A sudden drop into the vale of Porlock tilts the
traveller neck and crop into the village street.
You realise, when come to the village, that it
stands in a flat, low-lying space giving upon a
distant bay; a bay distant just upon one mile.
Once upon a time—a time so distant that history
places no certain date against it—the village
immediately faced the sea, and indeed took its
name, which means “the enclosed port,” from
the fact of the harbour running up to this point,
deeply embayed between the enfolding hills.
Rich meadows now spread out where the sea once
rolled; but the waves might surge there even now
were it not for the continued existence of that
great rampart of stones flung up in the long
ago by the sea, which thus by its own action shut
itself out from its ancient realm.
.pi
Porlock has for “ever so long” been a show
place, and, like any other originally modest beauty,
has at last become a little spoiled by praise, and
more than a little sophisticated. We do not
// 288.png
.pn +1
greatly esteem the self-conscious beauty, especially
when she paints.
The charm of Porlock has been, and is being,
still more sadly smirched by expansion and by that
increasing intercourse with the world which has
taken the accent off the tongues of the villagers,
replaced the weirdly cut provincial clothes of an
earlier era with garments of a more modish style,
and brought buildings of a distinctly suburban
type into the once purely rustic street. But
these newer buildings, although sufficiently odious,
do not by any means touch the depths of abomination
plumbed by the local Wesleyan Methodist
Chapel, built in the ’30’s, and fully as bad, in its
grey stuccoed, would-be classicism, as that date
would imply.
The coming of the motor-car has been nothing
less than a disaster to Porlock. Not only private
cars, growing ever larger and more productive
of dust, noise, and stink, rush through the once
sweet-scented street, regardless of the comfort and
convenience of villagers or visitors, but “public
service” vehicles and chars-à-bancs as big as
houses slam through the place, raising a stifling
dust that penetrates everywhere. Few sights are
more distressing, to those who knew Porlock as it
was, than that of the clustered roses and jessamines
that mantle so many of the houses, thickly
covered with dust. It is a standing wonder that
the inhabitants of pretty villages plagued almost
beyond endurance by motorists do not arise and
compel County Councils and other authorities to
// 289.png
.pn +1
take action. Possibly they know only too well
that the majority of members of those Councils is
formed by owners of cars, who are themselves
among the worst offenders.
But, in any case, the simple old days of Porlock
are done. To have seen Porlock with Southey,
how great that privilege! Great, not only in the
literary way, but in a glimpse of it in its unspoiled,
unconscious beauty, before ever it had become
notable as a show-place.
Local connoisseurs of the picturesque prefer
Bossington, now that Porlock is worn a little
threadbare and grown so dusty. They are of
opinion that Bossington is the quainter of the
two. But to come to judgment in this frame is
not wholly in order, for the places are of such
different types, and cannot fairly be compared.
Porlock is a considerable village, with numerous
shops; and Bossington is but a hamlet, without
a church, and apparently with no shops at all.
It is a very sequestered place, standing on the
Horner, about a mile distant, north-eastward, from
Porlock. The great recommendations of Bossington
in these latter days are that motor-cars never
or rarely get there, and that it is by consequence
quiet and dustless. Porlock is on the main road—on
the way to that Somewhere Else which is
ever your typical motorist’s quest: a quest he
relinquishes at night, only to resume it the next
morning. Bossington stands in the way to
Nowhere in Particular, and the roads that lead
to it are less roads than lanes. That they may
// 290.png
.pn +1
long continue their narrow, rough, and winding
character is the wish of those who wish Bossington
well.
.if h
.il fn=i250.jpg w=600px id=i250
.ca
BOSSINGTON.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BOSSINGTON.]
.sp 2
.if-
For the rest, it is pre-eminently a hamlet of
chimneys. The chimneys of Porlock are themselves
a remarkable feature of that place, but
at Bossington they are the feature. They are
all of a remarkable height. There are coroneted
chimneys; round chimneys, with pots and without;
chimneys square, and chimneys finished
off with slates set up (as wind-breakers) at an
angle, something like a simple problem in Euclid.
The next great feature of Bossington is its immense
walnut-tree, whose trunk measures sixteen
feet in circumference. This is the chieftain of
all the many walnut-trees that flourish in the
neighbourhood.
// 291.png
.pn +1
The modern Wesleyan Chapel of Bossington
puts its stuccoed brother at Porlock to shame.
It is a pretty building, designed in good taste,
built of stone banded with blue brick, and is
finished off with a quaintly louvred turret. Not
even the neighbouring restored chapel of Lynch,
rescued from desecration by the late Sir Thomas
Dyke Acland, looks more worshipful.
Bossington street, irregularly fringed with
rustic cottages, and with the Horner on one side
fleeting amid its pebbles to the sea, is as unconventional
as a farmyard, and ends at last on the
great shingle-bank of Porlock Bay, where two
or three ruined old houses stand against the
skyline and look as if they had known stirring
incidents of shipwreck and smuggling, as indeed
they probably have, in abundance.
Smuggling was the chief occupation of Porlock
and its surroundings in Southey’s time. The
lonely beach of huge pebbles that stretches between
Porlock Weir and Bossington, with low-lying,
marshy meadows giving upon it, was most
frequently the scene of goods being landed secretly
and thence dispersed into the surrounding country.
The Revenue officials knew so well that smuggling
was carried on largely that it behoved the “free-traders”
to be at especial pains to baffle them.
Some of their ingeniously constructed hiding-holes
have not been unearthed until comparatively
recent years. Thus, in so unlikely a
situation as the middle of a field, a smugglers’
store-chamber was found in course of ploughing,
// 292.png
.pn +1
between Porlock and Bossington. Again, it was
left to modern times for a smugglers’ hiding-hole
in the picturesque farmhouse of Higher Doverhay
to be discovered. This ingenious place of
concealment for contraband goods had been
constructed by the simple process of building
a false outer wall parallel with the real wall of
the farmhouse, leaving a narrow space between.
When discovered the shelves with which this
recess was fitted, for the reception of spirit-kegs,
were still there; but the spirits themselves had
departed.
The church of Porlock, dedicated to St. Dubritius,
is generally regarded by visitors as an
architectural joke. It is the curiously truncated
shingled broach spire that produces this derogatory
view. It is understood that the local
clergy, seriously exercised in their minds about
this attitude of unseemly mirth, would greatly
like to rebuild tower and spire. But guidebooks
and visitors alike, placing such stress
upon this alleged grotesqueness, are quite wrong.
The spire, as it is, has that all-too-rare thing,
character, and it is a joy to the artist, and something
on which visitors can exercise their wits.
In short, Porlock would be a good deal less than
its old self were it abolished. With the huge and
dilapidated churchyard yew, and the tall neighbouring
cross, the old church, as a whole, forms
a striking motif for a sketch.
.if h
.il fn=i252.jpg w=600px id=i252
.ca
PORLOCK CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: PORLOCK CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
The most notable feature of the interior is
the noble altar-tomb of the fourth Baron Harington
// 293.png
// 294.png
// 295.png
.pn +1
of Aldingham, and his wife, Elizabeth Courtenay,
daughter of the Earl of Devon, who died
respectively in 1417 and 1472. She married,
secondly, Lord Bonvile, of Chewton, but chose to
lie here; and here, in finely sculptured effigies,
they are represented, the noble helmeted and in
complete armour, and his lady with tall mitre
headdress and coronet.
Guide-books tell of the “curious epitaphs”
at Porlock, but they are not so curious as might
thus be supposed; certainly not more so than
those of the average country churchyard. The
chief feature of these is their ungrammatical
character, as where we read of Henry Pulsford
and Richard Bale, “who was both drownd” at
“Lymouth,” in 1784. Poetry—or rather, verse—that
changed, in arbitrary fashion, from first
person to third, was still possible in 1860, as witness
these unpleasant lines upon one Thomas Fry:
.pm verse-start
For many weeks my friends did see
Approaching death attending me.
No favour could his body find,
Till in the earth it was confined,
.pm verse-end
.ni
and so forth.
.pi
The “Ship” inn is almost, if not even quite,
as well known a feature of Porlock as the church,
and is unaltered since Southey sheltered here
considerably over a hundred years ago—
.pm verse-start
By the unwelcome summer rain confined.
.pm verse-end
The thatch has, of course, been renewed from
time to time, but always in the old traditional
// 296.png
.pn +1
style, and the white walls are obviously what
they were a couple of centuries or more ago.
The oldest part of the inn is probably a curious
little trefoiled-headed wooden window, of semi-ecclesiastical
design, under the eaves.
.if h
.il fn=i254a.jpg w=600px id=i254a
.ca
INGLENOOK, “SHIP” INN, PORLOCK.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: INGLENOOK, “SHIP” INN, PORLOCK.]
.sp 2
.if-
Southey sat in the little parlour still existing,
and, by the inglenook that has fortunately been
preserved, wrote the oft-quoted lines:
.pm verse-start
Porlock, thy verdant vale, so fair to sight,
Thy lofty hills, which fern and furze embrown,
Thy waters, that roll musically down
Thy woody glens, the traveller with delight
Recalls to memory, and the channel grey
Circling it, surging in thy level bay.
.pm verse-end
// 297.png
// 298.png
// 299.png
.pn +1
.if h
.il fn=i254b.jpg w=600px id=i254b
.ca
“THE SHIP” INN, PORLOCK.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: “THE SHIP” INN, PORLOCK.]
.sp 2
.if-
A small window in this chimney-corner commands
a view up the road, just as of old, where
the famed “Porlock Hill” begins that steep and
long-continued rise which has made it known,
far and near, as “the worst hill in the West of
England.” This is a mile-long rise from Porlock
Vale to the wild, exposed tableland that stretches,
for seven miles, to Countisbury, where it descends
steeply to Lynmouth. The rise of Porlock Hill
is one thousand feet, but the tableland beyond it
rises yet another 378 feet by Culbone Hill. The
gradient of Porlock Hill is in parts as steep as one
in six, and the surface is always, at all seasons
of the year, bad in the extreme. A sharp bend
to the right appears, a little way uphill. In
summer a mass of red dust six or eight inches
deep, and plentifully mixed with large stones, it
is in winter a pudding-like mixture of a clayey
nature. The spectacle of heavy-laden coaches
toiling up this fearsome so-called “road” is a
distressing one for those who love horses, and
grieve to see them overtaxed. No cyclist could,
of course, hope to ride up, while none but a madman
would attempt to ride down.
A private road, however, engineered some
forty years ago by Colonel Blathwayt through
his domain of Whitestone Park, ascends the
hillsides by a long series of zigzags, and thus
admits of easy gradients. The distance is twice
as long, but the ruling gradient is only one in ten,
and the surface is good. The scenery also—the
“New Road,” as it is called, running through
// 300.png
.pn +1
woodlands for the most part—is much preferable
to that of the old road. In order to provide
funds for keeping this “New Road” in repair,
certain tolls are payable: a penny for a cycle or
a saddle-horse; fourpence for carriages, etc.,
with one horse, and threepence for every additional
horse; and a shilling for motor-cars.
But, before leaving Porlock behind, it will
be well to visit Porlock Weir. Porlock Weir, or
Quay, as some style it, is the port of Porlock.
It is not, commercially speaking, much of a port,
for the basin is neither large nor deep, and only
the smallest of sailing-vessels may enter it.
As you come along the mile and a half of
pretty country road that leads from Porlock to
Porlock Weir, passing many remarkably picturesque
cob-walled and thatch-roofed cottages
on the way, you catch glimpses of the kind of
place this port is. Porlock Bay lies open to the
view, and is revealed as a two-and-a-quarter mile
semicircular sweep of naked pebble-ridge between
Hurlstone Point and Gore Point. Under
the last-named wooded bluff, which forms the
buttress, so to speak, on which rests the romantic
domain of Ashley Combe, the village and harbour
of Porlock Weir are snugly placed. “Weir”
stands, in the minds of most people, for a foaming
waterfall on a river; but there is no stream whatever
at this place, and the harbour that has been
given the name is just a natural basin formed
by a long-continued action of the tides in heaping
up a great impervious outer bank of pebbles under
// 301.png
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this protecting bluff, where the bay finds its
western termination. Left to itself, the trench-like
inlet thus formed would fill automatically
with every flood-tide, and empty again with the
ebb; but the mouth of it was closed, perhaps
three centuries ago, by a wall and sluice-gates, by
which the water could, at ebb, be kept in the
harbour so easily constructed. That is Porlock
Weir, upon whose primitive quays look a few
picturesquely dilapidated waterside buildings. The
spot is quiet and delightfully unconventional, and
is frequented in summer by visitors who appreciate
those qualities and the sea-fishing that
is to be had off the beach. The old “Ship” inn
is a counterpart of that hostelry of the same
name at Porlock, and is generally old-fashioned
and delightful. You catch a glimpse of copper
warming-pans as you pass, and are in receipt
of an impression of that kind of comfort which
was the last thing in innkeeping life of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The “Anchor Hotel” is a gabled building,
obviously built about 1885, when architects found
salvation in gables, red-brick, rough-cast plaster,
and a general Queen Annean attitude. Besides
these, there stands an omnium gatherum shop
that will supply you at one end of the scale with
a ton of coals and any reasonable requirement
in fodder and corn-chandlery, or with a pennyworth
of acid-drops at the other. The romantic-looking
old cottages that face the road and have
quaintly peaked combs to their thatches, display
// 302.png
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luxuriant gardens in front, and the sea on occasion
clamours for entrance at the back; for it can be
very rough here at times, as the pebble-ridge
heaped up against the stout sea-wall protecting
the road sufficiently witnesses.
The little harbour, although apparently so
derelict, is not altogether a thing of the past, for
Porlock is some seven miles distant from any
railway, and it still remains cheaper to bring
coals into the place by sea than by any other
method. And this, it would seem, must always
be the case, for coal comes to Porlock direct from
the quays of the South Wales coalfields. But,
except for this class of goods, and for a few other
miscellaneous and casual items, the harbour of
Porlock Weir is nowadays practically deserted.
It forms a curious spectacle. Old vessels lie
rotting in the ooze, with no one to clear away
their discredited carcases; the Caerleon of Bridgwater,
lying at the quay awaiting a discharge
of her cargo of coals, the only craft obviously
in commission.
.if h
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PORLOCK WEIR.
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.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: PORLOCK WEIR.]
.sp 2
.if-
Life certainly does not run with a strong
current at Porlock Weir. Overnight you may
see jerseyed seafaring men sitting in a row on a
waterside bench, their backs supported by a
convenient wall. They are engaged in contemplating
nothing in particular. Vacuity of mind is
set upon their countenances, and expresses itself
in their very attitudes, hands drooping listlessly
over knees, heads sunk upon chests. There they
have sat, with intervals for refreshment, all day,
// 303.png
// 304.png
// 305.png
.pn +1
and there they are sitting as twilight fades away
into darkness. When the visitor comes down
to breakfast at the “Anchor” or the “Ship”
opposite, they are discovered in the selfsame
place and in the same attitudes as before. They
seem to hold constant session, but rarely speak;
not because they hold silence to be golden, but for
the simple reason that all subjects are exhausted.
This silent companionship is not often broken,
the chief occasions of the break-up being those
exciting times when some terrified, panting, hunted
stag comes fleeting down out of the woods with
the yelping hounds at his heels. The sea is the
harried creature’s last resort, and in it he is
generally lassoed and dragged to shore, where the
hounds tear the unfortunate beast to pieces, amid
interested crowds of onlookers. Such is “sport.”
But this death of the stag on Porlock beach
is now very much a thing of the past, since the
strong line of fencing that runs through the woods
of Ashley Combe and Culbone, as far as Glenthorne,
has come into existence, preventing the
fugitive stags from taking this last desperate
refuge. Nowadays, more commonly, they take
to the water at the eastern end of the beach,
coming down through the Horner valley to
Bossington. Here, then, the hunt often ends,
and spectators are treated to the extraordinary
sight of huntsmen in scarlet clambering about
the rocks of Orestone Point, or wading in hunting
boots in the sea.
// 306.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch21
CHAPTER XXI||CULBONE AND ITS REVELS—WHORTLEBERRIES
.sp 2
.ni
The way parallel with the shore to Culbone lies
at the back of the “Ship” inn at Porlock Weir,
steeply up the wooded hillside that looks along
down to the sea. The recluse situation of Culbone
is shadowed forth, in company with those
of two other lonely parishes of this neighbourhood,
by the old local rhyme, often quoted:
.pi
.pm verse-start
To Culbone, Oare, and Stoke Pero,
Parishes three, no parson will go.
.pm verse-end
The reason for this old-time clerical distaste
is found partly in these circumstances of solitude
in which the opportunities for doing good must
needs be small; but chiefly, perhaps, in the fact
that the pay was not sufficient. The living of
Culbone is stated by Crockford to be £41 net
per annum; that of Oare, £93; Stoke Pero, £75.
Culbone and Oare are, nowadays, held in conjunction
by one parson, who thus enjoys an income
of £134—if a person may correctly be said
to “enjoy” these less than clerk’s wages.
The population of Culbone is thirty-four,
and the spiritual care of them thus costs £1 4s. 1d.
// 307.png
.pn +1
and an infinitesimal fraction of a farthing, per
annum per head; but the spiritual shepherding
of Stoke Pero, whose population is thirty-eight,
comes to nearly £2 per head.
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.ca
THE LODGE, ASHLEY COMBE.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: THE LODGE, ASHLEY COMBE.]
.sp 2
.if-
The only way to Culbone lies past the
entrance-lodge of the beautiful estate of Ashley
Combe, the property of the Earl of Lovelace,
but formerly that of Lord Chancellor King. The
clock-tower of the house, in the likeness of an
Italian campanile, is seen peering up from amid
the massed woodlands. Ashley Combe is a place
beautifully situated and finely appointed, and is
splendidly situated for stag-hunting with the
Devon and Somerset hounds. Until recently,
and for a number of years past, it was rented,
// 308.png
.pn +1
chiefly for hunting purposes, by the Baroness de
Tainteignes.
A narrow wooden gateway in an arch of the
entrance-lodge to Ashley Combe leads into the
footpath through the woods that forms the sole
means of reaching Culbone church. Here is
nothing to vulgarise the way, and only an occasional
felled tree is evidence of some human being
having recently been in these wilds.
A silence that is not that of emptiness and
desolation, but rather of restfulness and content,
fills the lovely underwoods that clothe the hillsides
of Culbone. “Sur-r-r-r,” sighs the summer
breeze in the grey-green alders, the dwarf oaks,
and slim ashes. It is like the peace of God.
Deep down on the right—so deep that you do
but occasionally hear the wash of the waves—is
the dun-coloured Severn Sea, glimpsed more or
less indistinctly through the massed stems. The
path winds for a mile through these solitudes,
mounting and descending steeply, and clothed in
a few places with slippery pine-needles that render
walking uphill almost impossible, and the corresponding
descents something in the likeness of
glissades.
Culbone church is suddenly disclosed in an
opening of the woods, standing on a little plateau
amid the hills, with but two houses in sight, and
those the cottages of what the country folk call
“kippurs”: that is to say, keepers. St. Francis
preached to the birds, and the casual visitor to
Culbone is apt to think the vicar of Culbone’s
// 309.png
.pn +1
only congregation must be the birds and beasts
of this wild spot. But a visit paid on some summer
Sunday would prove that, however few the
parishioners, the visitors from Porlock, drawn by
curiosity to take part in the service in what is
supposed to be the “smallest church in England,”
are many. The attendance is then, in fact, often
more than the little building can accommodate,
and service is frequently held in the churchyard.
.if h
.il fn=i263.jpg w=600px id=i263
.ca
CULBONE CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: CULBONE CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
It is a singular little building thus suddenly
disclosed to the stranger’s gaze: a white-walled
structure of few architectural pretensions, but
exhibiting examples of rude Early English and
// 310.png
.pn +1
Perpendicular work. A shingled “extinguisher”
spirelet rises direct from the west end of the roof:
own brother (but a very infant brother) to the
bulgeous, truncated spire of Porlock. The length
of Culbone church is but thirty-three feet, and the
breadth twelve feet, but it is quite complete
within these limits. The nave roof, internally,
is of the usual West of England “cradle” type,
of Perpendicular date. It is, of course, an aisleless
nave; but here will be found a tiny chancel and
a chancel-screen, with a font to serve those rare
occasions when a baptism takes place, and a
family-pew for the Lovelace family on those rare
occasions when the Earl is not earning an honest
addition to his income by letting Ashley Combe.
A few tombstones, with the usual false rhymes
“wept,” “bereft,” are disposed about. On one
of them you read the strange Christian name of
“Ilott,” for a woman. By the south porch
stands the base of a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century
cross, stained with lichens.
Culbone is found in Domesday Book under
the name of “Chetenore,” and appears in old
records as “Kitenore,” “Kytenore,” and
“Kitnore”: “ore” standing in the Anglo-Saxon
for “seashore.” The present name derives from
the dedication of the church to “St. Culbone,” a
corruption of “Columban.”
St. Columban, or Columbanus, was an Irish
saint, born A.D. 543, in Leinster. The author of
the “Lives of the Saints” says he “seems to have
been of a respectable family”; which was an
// 311.png
.pn +1
advantage not commonly enjoyed by saints, as
the histories of these holy men show us. The
greater therefore, the credit due them for qualifying
for saintship.
Columban, as a student, came very near
disaster. He was a good-looking young Irishman,
and, as such, very attractive to the dark-eyed
colleens of his native land, who interrupted his
studies in grammar, rhetoric, and divinity so
seriously with their winning ways that he fled at
last, on the advice of a mystic old woman, to
Lough Erne. Thence he repaired to Bangor, in
Carrickfergus, and placed himself under the rule
of Abbot Congall. At length, leaving this seclusion,
he set out upon a life of itinerant preaching
on the Continent, chiefly in Burgundy, whence he
was expelled for his too plain speech, criticising
the conduct of the Court. His last years were
spent in meditation; and in peace and quiet he
died at length, on November 21st, A.D. 615, aged
seventy-two.
Solitary places were especially affected by
St. Columban, who liked nothing better than the
sole companionship of nature. There is thus a
peculiar fitness in the church of so retired a place
as this being dedicated to him.
But, quiet though it may now always be,
Culbone was, in the eighteenth century, the scene
of an annual fair that, for merriment and devil-me-care
jollity, seems to have been fully abreast
with other country romps and revels.
The Reverend Richard Warner, coming to
// 312.png
.pn +1
Culbone in 1799, in his “Walk through the Western
Counties,” says:
“Quiet and sequestered as this romantic spot
at present is, it has heretofore borne an honourable
name in the annals of rustic revelry. Its rocks
have echoed to the shouts of multitudinous mirth,
and its woods rung with the symphonious music
of all the neighbouring bands: in plain English,
a revel, or fair, was wont to be held here in times
of yore.” In still plainer English, there used
formerly to be a fair held in Culbone churchyard.
Entering upon the meditations of the Reverend
Richard Warner, striving to write plain English,
and failing in the attempt, came an old reminiscent,
ruminating blacksmith, with an artless tale,
recounted, apparently, by the Reverend Richard
as a moral anecdote.
“About forty-five years agone, sir,” said
the blacksmith, “I was at a noble revel in this
spot; three hundred people at least were collected
together, and rare fun, to be sure, was going forward.
A little warmed with dancing, and somewhat
flustered with ale (for certainly Dame
Mathews did sell stinging good stuff!) I determined
to have a touch at skittles, and sport away
a sixpence or shilling, which I could do without
much danger, as I had a golden half-guinea in
my pocket. To play, therefore, I went; but, the
liquor getting into my head, I could not throw
the bowl straight, and quickly lost the game,
and two shillings and ninepence to boot. Not
liking to get rid of so much money in so foolish
// 313.png
.pn +1
a manner, and not thinking the fault was in myself—for
too much ale, you know, sir, is apt to
make one over-wise—I resolved to win back the
two and ninepence, and then leave off; and
accordingly set to play a second time. The same
ill-luck followed me, and in an hour and a half
I had not only lost the remainder of my money
but about sixteen shillings more out of a guinea
I borrowed of a friend. This terrible stroke
quite sobered me. I could not help thinking
what a wicked scoundrel I must be, to go and
run into ruin, and deprive my wife and child of
food, merely to indulge myself in a game, which,
instead of being an amusement had put me in a
terrible passion, and made me curse and swear
more than ever I did in my life. Desperately
vexed at my folly, I went into the wood hard by,
and sat down by the side of the waterfall to
reflect on the situation. I could plainly hear the
singing and laughing of the revel, but it was now
gall and wormwood to me, and I had almost
resolved to escape from my own reproaches and
the distress of my wife by throwing myself down
the cliff, upon the shore, when Providence was
so good as to preserve me from this additional
wickedness, and to put a thought into my head
which saved me from the consequences of despair.
Cool and sober, for I had washed myself in the
stream and drank pretty largely of it, it struck
me that if I went back to the skittle-ground and
ventured the remaining five shillings, I should
have a good chance of winning back my money
// 314.png
.pn +1
from those who had beaten me before, as I was
now fresh, and they all overcome with ale. Accordingly
I returned to the churchyard and took
up the bowl, though pretty much jeered at by
the lads who had been winners. The case,
however, was altered. I had now the advantage;
could throw the bowl straight; took every time
a good aim, and more than once knocked down
all nine pins. To make short my story, sir, it
was only night that put an end to my good luck;
and when I left off play, I found I had got back
my own half-guinea, the guinea I had borrowed,
and fifteen shillings in good silver.” The blacksmith’s
cleverness at getting back his own, and
incidentally a proportion of other people’s money
is amusing enough; and so is the attitude of the
Reverend Richard Warner, amiably finding a
moral in it. There is an obvious enough lesson
here, but not an improving one, of the blameless
copybook kind.
The neighbourhood of Porlock and Culbone,
and, in fact, all the district on to Lynmouth, is
noted for its whortleberries; “urts,” as the country
people call them. Up the Horner valley, and on
the wild widespread commons that stretch away—a
glorious expanse of furze, bracken, and gorse—to
Countisbury, the whortleberry bushes grow in
profusion. But “Bushes” is a term that, without
explanation, is apt to be misleading, for here
the whortleberry plant grows only to a height of
from six to nine inches. The whortleberry, in
other parts of the country called bilberry, whinberry,
// 315.png
.pn +1
and blueberry, is a familiar many-branched
little plant with small ovate leaves that
range in colour from a light yellow-green to that
of burnished copper. Its fruit is perfectly round,
about the size of a large pea, and of a dark-blue
colour, with a slightly lighter bloom upon it,
resembling the bloom on a plum. The berries
ripen in July and August, and are sweet, with a
sub-acid flavour. They form a very favourite
dish in these parts, stewed, or made into tarts
and puddings, and in such cases strongly resemble
black-currants. Whortleberries generally command
eightpence a quart in the shops; but they
are also largely picked for the use of dyers, who
use them for the production of a purple dye.
It is understood that large quantities of them
are thus sent to Liverpool. The whortleberry
harvest being in full swing during the schools’
summer holidays, the boys and girls of Porlock
and round about are generally to be found on the
commons and the moors, busily engaged, with all
the baskets they can manage to commandeer, in the
picking. Four or five quarts can readily be gathered
by one of these experts in the course of a day.
To this prime habitat of the whortleberry we
come, by old road or new, passing one or other of
the coaches that in summer ply a busy trade in
carrying pleasure-seekers through a district innocent
of railways. At the crest of the moorland,
where a weatherworn, wizened signpost says
simply “To Oare,” we enter upon a much-discussed
district.
// 316.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
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.h2 id=ch22
CHAPTER XXII||THE “LORNA DOONE COUNTRY”
.sp 2
.ni
We have here come into the very centre of what
has in these later years become known as the
“Lorna Doone Country”; the neighbourhood of
Oare and the so-called “Doone Valley.” Oare
lies in a profound valley, giving upon Exmoor, on
the left hand, and to it we must needs go, for to
write upon these parts of Somerset, where they
march with Devon, and not to enter upon the
subject of the Doones, would in these times be
impossible, if the resultant book is to be at all
representative.
.pi
No one who travels through North Devon and
Somerset can escape “Lorna Doone.” Nor, indeed,
should they greatly wish to do so, for it is a stirring
romance. Since 1871, when the story first became
popularised, it has pervaded the whole
countryside, much to the combined profit and
astonishment of the natives, who accept the
good gifts it has brought, chiefly in the shape
of greatly increased numbers of tourists, but at
the same time they do not profess to understand
it all, and have not been generally at pains to
// 317.png
.pn +1
inform themselves as to whom all these developments
are due.
“A Lunnon gennelman—I doan’t rightly
knaw th’ name of ’en—wrote all about thesyer
Doones there is so much tark of, an’ put’n into
a book, yurs since. Read it? Not I, but my
darter, she hev, an’ she do say that Lorna Doone
was a proper fine gell; not that I b’lieve much
on’t; although, mark you, it’s my idea that if so
be them ‘Doone’ houses they do let on so much
about wer’ tarned auver an’ dug up, ther’d be a
deal o’ gold found there. There was some mighty
queer folk lived up to Badgery in wold times.”
Such are the somewhat contradictory opinions
to be heard between Oare and Malmsmead.
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, author of the
novel, “Lorna Doone,” came of a North Devon and
Exmoor ancestry, and so was, as it were, the predestined
author for these regions. He was born
in 1825 and educated largely at Blundell’s school,
Tiverton, where Jan Ridd, hero of the novel, got
his schooling. Blackmore afterwards went up to
Oxford, and imbibed there a certain fondness for
classical studies and a love of literature that never
left him; although a great part of his life, from
1858, was devoted to the cultivation of choice fruit
at his residence at Teddington, beside the Thames.
The public, however, that knew of Blackmore
the novelist never heard of Blackmore the grower
of choice pears and plums for the London market,
on his eleven Middlesex acres.
His first book was “Poems by Melanter,” published
// 318.png
.pn +1
in 1835 and heard of no more. In 1855
the Crimean War stirred him to authorship again,
with “The Bugle on the Black Sea,” and 1864
saw his first novel, “Clara Vaughan,” published
anonymously. It was not a success, nor was
“Cradock Nowell,” in 1866, more fortunate.
In March 1869 was published “Lorna Doone,”
with the same dispiriting want of success. The
first edition was still hanging on hand in 1871,
and seemed likely to go the unhonoured way of
all completely unsuccessful books, when a strange
reversal of fortune befel it. In the preface to the
twentieth edition, years afterwards, Blackmore
tells us vividly of this. One clearly perceives, in
the manner of apostrophe to a personified “Lorna”
he adopts, that he was, at the time of writing this
preface, still entirely amazed at the abounding
success that had at last come, but in a wholly
mistaken fashion. He says:
“What a lucky maid you are, my Lorna!
When first you came from the Western moors
nobody cared to look at you; the ‘leaders of the
public taste’ led none of it to make test of you.
Having struggled to the light of day through
obstruction and repulses, for a year and a half
you shivered in a cold corner without a sunray.
Your native land disdained your voice, and
America answered, ‘No child of mine!’ Still,
a certain brave man, your publisher, felt convinced
that there was good in you, and standing
by his convictions—as the English manner used
to be—‘She shall have another chance,’ he said;
// 319.png
.pn +1
‘we have lost a lot of money by her; I don’t
care if we lose some more.’ Accordingly, forth
you came, poor Lorna, in a simple, pretty dress,
small in compass, small in figure, smaller still
in hope of life. But, oh—let none of her many
fairer ones who fail despond—a certain auspicious
event occurred just then, and gave you golden
wings. The literary public found your name akin
to one which filled the air, and, as graciously as
royalty itself, endowed you with imaginary virtues.
So grand is the luck of time and name—failing
which more solid beings melt into oblivion’s
depth.” In short, the dear, dunderheaded add-two-together-and-make-them-five
British public
came to the wholly erroneous conclusion that
“Lorna Doone” was in some way connected with
the marriage of Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter
the Princess Louise with the Marquess of Lorne;
an event which took place in 1871. The times
were remarkable for the strong wave of anti-monarchical
feeling then rising, in consequence of
the recluse life led by the Queen in her widowhood;
and there can be no doubt that “Lorna
Doone” was, in the first instance, purchased so
freely because it was suspected of being one of
the many scandalous satires then issued in plenty
and bought eagerly.
Books have strange fortunes. Their careers
hang upon a hair. Many nowadays live but a
season: others may be said never to have lived
at all. Others yet enjoy a furious, but short,
vogue, and then die as utterly as those that never
// 320.png
.pn +1
enjoyed real life. The public originally purchased
“Lorna Doone” under a misapprehension that
was, perhaps, not very creditable, and then read the
book and continued to buy it for its own merits.
And so it continues to run ever into new editions,
and has made the fortune of the Exmoor and
North Devon districts, and the adjoining parts
of Somerset. Here it should be noted that,
although the public persists in regarding “Lorna
Doone” as essentially a Devonshire book, it is
really chiefly concerned with Somerset.
Written in the first person singular, as the
memoirs and experiences of John Ridd, a seventeenth-century
yeoman of Oare, the book, it will
be seen, is cast in a fashion not easy to make convincing
reading, but it successfully surmounts
the difficulties of armchair expressions, and the
strong story carries the reader over many a passage
otherwise dangerously weak. But it is not great
art. It does not compare with Stevenson’s novels
in the same manner, written nearly twenty years
later.
Still, such as it is, it is Blackmore’s best, and
although he wrote many other novels, he never
again approached “Lorna Doone,” either in sheer
writing, or in commercial success. Booksellers
stocked, and the public bought, or borrowed from
the libraries, his later works, because they were
by the author of “Lorna Doone,” and not for their
intrinsic merits. For Blackmore always just
failed to convince, and never quite dispelled an
unreal kind of atmosphere that took his novels
// 321.png
.pn +1
quite out of the experiences of actual life, and
made his characters so many jumping-jacks,
obviously actuated by strings.
The origin of “Lorna Doone” demands some
notice. Blackmore freely acknowledged that he
was led to contemplate a romance on the subject
of the legendary wild squatters of these parts by
reading a story published in the Leisure Hour
during 1863, entitled “The Doones of Exmoor,” a
very poor piece of work, loosely strung together
from recollections of the Wichehalse and Doone
legends that had long been floating about the
West Country. He rightly conceived he could
do better, and set to work upon his own early
recollections of those legends, and, moreover,
revisited Porlock and Oare and other places, for
the purpose of acquiring more local colour, before
beginning to write.
The question, Had the Doones ever a real
existence? was debated somewhat half-heartedly
in the lifetime of Blackmore, but has since his
death been more and more keenly continued;
until the literature written around the subject,
for and against the credibility of such a band of
outlaws having really made Exmoor their home,
has assumed considerable dimensions.
An examination of the evidence available
appears to conclusively establish the fact that
no unassailably genuine documents have ever
been produced by which the existence of the
Doones can be proved. No one has ever traced
legal documents, baptismal or other registers,
// 322.png
.pn +1
or even records of sessional proceedings in which
the name Doone appears in Somerset or Devon.
Outlaws such as these, illiterate and half-savage,
would not, on the face of it, be likely to find a
place in church registers; but they would, on the
other hand, it is fairly arguable, easily have found
mention in the records of punishments, great or
small, inflicted upon criminals or petty evil-doers.
The inference that they, as Doones, never existed
here, is therefore well-nigh irresistible.
But the legendary belief in them in all this
countryside is strong, and dates far back beyond
the appearance of Blackmore upon the scene with
his “Lorna Doone.” Aged people who lived at
Porlock, and in all the districts affected by legends
of these robbers, and whose memories carried
them back to the early years of the nineteenth
century, have given testimony, not only to their
having heard abundantly of “Doones” on Exmoor,
but to their having received the legends
from their parents. The long-lived fishermen of
Porlock Weir, confronted with pamphlets written
and published, elaborately arguing against the
existence of those people, indignantly declared
that one might as well pretend there were never
Aclands of Holnicote. They were not in the
least concerned with Blackmore’s story; for they
had never read it, and did not carry the author’s
name in their minds. A curious thing is that so
few people of these districts have ever read “Lorna
Doone.” But the fishermen, in common with
others, knew the usual run of the stories; although,
// 323.png
.pn +1
to be sure, they believed that the Doones
were almost extinguished by the Reds of Culbone,
and knew little or nothing of the Ridds of Oare.
We are met with several theories as to the
origin of these floating legends, and the name of
Doone. A favourite theory is that which dismisses
these stories by contending that the name
is a corruption of “Danes,” and that these more
or less mysterious outcasts were really belated
memories of those Danish sea-rovers who made
such fierce havoc along all these shores in the
ninth and tenth centuries.
A second belief, strangely supported by the
undoubted existence in South Wales of a family,
or band, of Dwns (the pronunciation is exactly
that of “Doone”) in the time of Queen Elizabeth,
is that a number of Welsh outlaws, fleeing from
justice, came across the Channel from Carmarthenshire
and became the Exmoor Doones. These
Dwns were very objectionable people in their own
country, and were largely intermarried, strange
to say, with Ryds.
A third guess at the origin of the Doones is
found in the belief, sometimes held, that they
were originally fugitives from Sedgemoor fight,
hiding from the retribution of the Government
in what were then the fastnesses of the moor;
but the obvious criticism of this view is that all
danger would have been past after the revolution
of 1688, and they would then no longer have
needed to hide.
The fourth theory, and one stated to have
// 324.png
.pn +1
been shared by Blackmore himself (although he
was not necessarily a prime expert in the matter)
is that the Doones were Scottish exiles. We
have but to spell the name “Doune” for it to be
at once recognised as Scottish. Certainly it is no
West of England patronymic. At what period
this view of the puzzle holds those supposititious
Dounes to have come from Scotland does not
appear. Scottish history may, if necessary, be
made to afford many likely junctures at which
various people would find it advisable to seek a
sanctuary abroad. Of recent years an odd claim
to relationship with the Doones, involving an
attempt to connect them with Scottish exiles,
has been made by the owner of a curiosity-shop
at Hunstanton, Norfolk. This person, Beeton
by name, and his niece, one Ida M. Browne, who
has adopted the pseudonym “Audrie Doon”
for literary purposes, have since 1901 produced
what purport to be old family portraits, relics,
and documents, taking their history back to the
seventeenth century and connecting them and
the Doones with the Earl of Moray of the early
years of that century. According to this story,
a brother of the Earl of Moray assumed the name
of Doune, and after much persecution in the
course of family disputes over property, was
obliged in 1620 to leave Scotland. This “Sir
Ensor Doune” as the claim has it, settled in this
neighbourhood, where he and his “were more
or less hated and feared by the countryside until
their return to Perthshire in 1699.”
// 325.png
.pn +1
Thus Miss Ida M. Browne.
From this Sir Ensor Doune was descended
(always according to this showing) long lines of
Dounes, or Doones.
Among the “family relics” is an old oil-painting,
inscribed “Sir Ensor Doune, 1679”;
an ill-drawn daub representing an elderly man
with small crumb-brush whiskers, and an expression
which leaves the beholder in doubt as
to whether he is half-drunk or half-mad: both
Doone characteristics, if we have followed the
legends at all attentively. Another item is an
old flint-lock pistol inscribed on the barrel “C.
Doone, 1681, Porlok,” and furnished further with
a representation of skull and cross-bones. These,
with a genealogy drawn up by one “Charles
Doone of Braemar,” bringing the family down
from 1561 to 1804, are the evidences adduced;
together with what is put forward as the diary
of a “Rupert Doune,” stated to have been a
fugitive from Scotland after the rebellion of 1745.
He, it appears, found his way at last to North
Devon and Somerset; to the districts in which
his seventeenth-century forbears had settled.
Here are extracts from his journal:
“Sept. 3rd, 1747.—Went to Barum on my
way to the place they call Oare, where our
people came after their cruel treatment at the
hands of Earl Moray.”
“September 3rd, 1747.—Got to Oare and then
to the valley of the Lyn; the scenery very bonny,
like our own land, but the part extremely wild
// 326.png
.pn +1
and lonely. Wandered about and thought of
the doings of the family when here, which I gather
were not peaceable.”
How very precious is that last phrase—and
how entirely unconvincing! It would, in short,
were any claim to material things attached to
these pretensions, be impossible to establish it
on such slight foundations.
The first printed collection of Doone legends
is that to be found in Cooper’s “Guide to Lynton,”
published in 1853. It is derived from local folklore
and from a manuscript collection of stories
made for the Reverend J. R. Chanter in 1839.
Among these legends, besides those of the Doones,
we have the wild tales of Tom Faggus, the North
Devon and Somerset highwayman, and his “enchanted
strawberry horse,” and the fantastic
and particularly stupid “legend of the de
Wichehalse family,[#] utterly without foundation.”
.pm fn-start // A
See The North Devon Coast, pp. 25-33 for a complete exposure
of the lying “de Wichehalse” legend, which contains no
particle of truth.
.pm fn-end
Caution is therefore evidently to be exercised
before accepting anything in the way of these
folk-tales, which tell of a fierce and utterly lawless
band of Doones who dwelt up the Badgworthy
Valley, from about the time of the Commonwealth,
in a collection of some eleven rude stone-built
huts, and lived by raiding the houses and stockyards
of the neighbouring farmers. One of these
stories tells us how the band was at length exterminated
by the long-suffering countryside. One
// 327.png
.pn +1
winter’s night, it appears, when snow was lying
upon the ground, they made a raid upon Yenworthy
Farm, a lonely farmstead which still
stands, although since those times rebuilt, in a
deep valley between the high-road near County
Gate and Culbone. Here they were received with
an unexpectedly bold front. Arma virumque cano;
only in this instance it is of arms and the woman
one must sing. It was, in short, the farmer’s
wife who stood at an open window and opened
fire upon them with a long duck-gun that is to
this day preserved in the house. This scattering
discharge appears to have severely wounded one,
or several, of the raiders, for blood-tracks were
traced in the snow, leading in the direction of
Badgworthy. That same night the same party
(or perhaps really another part of the numerous
band) appeared at Exford, in midst of Exmoor,
and attacked a farmhouse, in which were only a
servant girl and a child. The servant hid in
the oven, leaving the child in the kitchen. The
robbers, the legend goes on to declare, killed
the infant, and went off, with the mocking
lines,
.pm verse-start
If any one asks who ’twas killed thee,
Tell ’em—the Doones of Badgery.
.pm verse-end
This outrage formed the breaking-point of
the rustic endurance of the Doones, who were
tracked to their lair by large bodies of countryfolk
and slain, and their stone huts demolished.
The incident of the killing of the infant is told,
// 328.png
.pn +1
with variations, by Blackmore, in “Lorna Doone”;
a footnote declaring the author’s belief in the
truthfulness of the legends regarding the raid,
but holding that the Doones did not wilfully kill
the child, which was fatally injured by being
tossed playfully to the ceiling, and accidentally
let fall.
Variations of the final ending of the Doones
place the scene at Robber’s Bridge, on the Weir
Water, and tell how the Ridds were chiefly instrumental
in bringing on the fight.
Yenworthy Farm, formerly the property of
the Snow family, was sold to the late Reverend
W. S. Halliday of Glenthorne, by the late Mr.
Nicholas Snow. Mr. Halliday also purchased the
duck-gun traditionally said to have wounded the
Doones. It is to remain always here, as a relic
of the lawless old times.
We may perhaps find in the name of Snow a
significant clue to the evolutionary processes of
these old stories told in past generations around
local firesides on winter’s nights in those times
when few could read, and when, if they owned
that accomplishment, literature of any sort was
scarce and dear. In tales repeated from mouth
to mouth, all kinds of accretions are to be expected;
and it will already have been noted
how many are the variants of these Doone and
other stories. The patient and contemplative
seeker after truth may easily find in the name of
Snow the origin of the snowy night on which the
Doones attacked Yenworthy Farm, the owner of
// 329.png
.pn +1
the property being gradually brought into the
tale by the mishearings incidental to repetition.
The last two surviving Doones are said, in
legends current some years ago, and related by
the Rev. W. H. Thornton, many years since
curate at Countisbury, within the North Devon
border, near Lynmouth, to have perished about
the year 1800. They were an old man and his
granddaughter, who for a long time had been used
to roam the country, singing carols at Christmas-tide.
They were said to have been found together
in the snow, frozen to death, on the road between
Simonsbath and Challacombe.
The conclusion of the whole matter appears
to be that there was really a band of semi-savage
hut-dwellers established on Exmoor in the middle
of the seventeenth century, and that they continued
to be a nuisance to the neighbourhood, in
the sheep-stealing and petty-pilfering way, until
perhaps the first few years of the next era. But
that they were ever the terrible marauders of
legend is not for a moment to be credited. They
were probably, like the old type of gipsy, only
too glad to be able to sneak necessaries covertly,
and then to make off, and to be let alone; and
were never bold enough to make raids. The
duck-gun at Yenworthy was not used necessarily
against a Doone: for lonely farmhouses were
of old, all over the country, not unlikely to be the
objects of attack. For a striking instance of this
truth reference may be made to Tangley Farm,
or “Lone Farm,” as it is often called, in the
// 330.png
.pn +1
neighbourhood of Burford, Oxfordshire, which
was attacked boldly by the “Dunsdon Gang”
one night about 1784.[#]
.pm fn-start // A
See The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road, Vol. I., pp. 248-252.
.pm fn-end
It may here be not altogether out of place to
remark that anything with which the late Rev.
W. S. Halliday was associated is to be examined
closely and suspiciously, for he was a person of a
saturnine turn of humour, delighting to send
antiquaries and others upon false scents. His
ancient habit of burying Roman coins in the
neighbourhood of his residence at Glenthorne,
with the singular object of deluding future generations
of archæologists into the belief that they
have come upon plentiful evidence of Roman
civilisation in these parts, is well known; and
being well known (doubtless to the distress of his
tricksy spirit) is not now likely to deceive any one.
It must remain an open question as to how
the outlaws of Badgworthy, in whom, with the
reservations made above, we are prepared to
believe, came by the name of Doone. The probabilities
and theories have already been given,
and the matter must rest there.
The undoubted existence of old of other
Devonshire semi-savage bands is itself a strong
presumption of a like tribe here. The Gubbins
band, in the neighbourhood of Lydford, “living
in holes, like swine,” was well known in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and is made
the subject of a reference by so serious a writer as
// 331.png
.pn +1
Thomas Fuller, 1660. “Their wealth,” he says,
“consisteth in other men’s goods: they live by
stealing the sheep on the moors. Such is their
fleetness, they will outrun many horses: vivaciousness,
they outlive most men. They hold together
like bees: offend one, and all will revenge his
quarrell.”
The Gubbins also have found their way into
fiction, in “Westward Ho!” The Cheritons, on the
other hand, who also lived on the borders of
Dartmoor, at Nymet Rowland, have not found
their apotheosis in literature.
// 332.png
.pn +1
.sp 2
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=ch23
CHAPTER XXIII||OARE—MALMSMEAD—THE BADGWORTHY\
VALLEY—THE “DOONE VALLEY”—GLENTHORNE
.sp 2
.ni
And now, after having fully considered the evidence
for and against the much-debated existence
of these old reprobates and masterless men, let
us advance into their country, and into that of
the romantic Lorna, who was, of course, an adopted
Doone merely.
.pi
.if h
.il fn=i287.jpg w=600px id=i287
.ca
OARE CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: OARE CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
The way to Oare, branching off to the left,
plunges immediately down into the profound
valley of the Oare Water. “Hookway Hill” is
the name of this abominable road, bad enough
in its own native vileness, but rendered worse by
the strange humour of the local road-repairing
authority, always at pains to deposit cartloads
of stones on it in the summer, so that there shall
be plenty of opportunity for the tourist traffic
to roll this loose material in by the autumn. Thus
the literary pilgrim to the scenes of “Lorna Doone”
is made to earn that title, eloquent as it is of
suffering and difficulties encountered, wrestled
with, and overcome. Long is the way and steep
and winding, and he who, cycling, would seek
to avoid the prodigious stones by tracking to the
// 333.png
.pn +1
side, must make his account with the yard-long
projecting blackberry brambles, armed with monstrous
thorns, that curry-comb the face, clutch
off the cap, or take one by the arm in a confidential
grip, like some old friend who would bid
you “wait a bit.” Later on in the year, possibly,
hedgers will be at work with their “riphooks,”
slashing off these terrors of the way, and then
woe to the cyclist’s tyres! It is a nice point,
where and when the blackberry bramble is most
offensive; when it is in a position to scarify the
// 334.png
.pn +1
traveller’s person, or when, shorn off and lying
in the road, its thorns play havoc with india-rubber.
.if h
.il fn=i288.jpg w=600px id=i288
.ca
NEAR ROBBER’S BRIDGE.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: NEAR ROBBER’S BRIDGE.]
.sp 2
.if-
At the foot of Hookway Hill, the peaty little
Oare, or Weir, water, rushing over a pebbly bed
is crossed by Robber’s Bridge, and thenceforward
the road runs level, past Oareford, and then as
an exceedingly narrow lane, to Oare; passing
two or three solitary farms that in these latter
days provide for summer visitors whose humour
is for a fortnight or a month in the wilds. One
of these is identified, more or less accurately,
with the “Plovers Barrows’ Farm” of the novel.
Presently Oare church appears, on the left
hand, almost wholly hidden in a circle of tall,
spindly trees, and neighboured only by one farm.
// 335.png
.pn +1
It is a grey, sad-toned building, this centre of
interest in Lorna’s tragedy. Chiefly in the
Perpendicular style, it consists of an embattled
western tower and a nave without aisles. The
chancel is a modern addition. All day and every
day in the summer an old man sits in the little
north porch, with the key of the church on a
bench beside him, and if, not seeing the key, you
try the door, and, finding it locked, ask him,
he will give it you, and leave you to let yourself
in: mutely remaining there, a living hint for a
tip. “Lorna Doone” has done this. “Parish clerk,
he be, an’ used to be saxon,” remarked an old
road-mender. “He do mek’ a dale o’ money,”
is the rustic opinion; but what amount may be
represented by “a deal of money” in this estimate
does not appear. Also, “Dree an’ saxpunz
a wik,” he gets from the parish: so there is no
old age pension for him; and unless the parish
of Oare, in a fit of wild extravagance, springs
another eighteenpence, he will be a loser.
The interior of Oare church is, truth to tell,
lamentably uninteresting, and architecturally
deplorable. A something wooden, that does duty
for chancel screen, divides nave from sanctuary,
and a few characterless marble and slate tablets
are affixed to the walls: one of them to the
memory of a Nicholas Snow, 1791. A tablet to
various members of the Spurryer family exhibits
a curious uncertainty as to how the name should
be spelled. “Spurre” and “Spurry” are the two
other versions given. The name of “Peter
// 336.png
.pn +1
Spurryer, Warden, 1717,” appears under one of a
couple of fearsome paintings in the tower, representing
Moses and Aaron; the work of one “Mervine
Cooke, Painter.”
.if h
.il fn=i290.jpg w=600px id=i290
.ca
INTERIOR OF OARE CHURCH.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF OARE CHURCH.]
.sp 2
.if-
Under a deplorable representation of the
triple Prince of Wales’ feathers, placed on the
wall near the pulpit, to commemorate a visit of
the Prince of Wales in 1863 will be found the only
interesting object in the church: a rudely carved
stone bracket supporting what was once a piscina.
Shaped in the form of a head, the expressionless
face is flanked by two hands. Very few visitors
can have any notion of the meaning of this grotesque
// 337.png
.pn +1
object, and most people set it down as a
mere fantasy; but the thing is symbolical, and
really typifies the Divine gift of speech. Other
examples are found throughout England: notably
in the churches of Bere Regis, in Dorsetshire,
and Gotham, Nottinghamshire.[#] This carving is
by far the oldest thing in Oare church, and is
probably a relic from some earlier building.
.pm fn-start // A
See The Manchester and Glasgow Road, Vol. I., pp. 265-6;
and The Hardy Country, p. 143.
.pm fn-end
From Oare we come directly to Malmsmead
where the Badgworthy Water divides Somerset
and Devon, and is spanned by a grey, timeworn,
two-arched bridge.
The scene is sweet and idyllic. Here the
bridge, grown thickly with ferns and moss, and
stained red, brown, and orange with lichens,
spans the water in hump-backed fashion, and
on the opposite—that is to say, the Devonshire—shore,
the three farmsteads of Malmsmead, Lorna
Doone, and Badgworthy Farms stand side by
side in seeming content, sheltered beneath swelling
hills. Day by day in summer a long succession
of brakes and flys bring visitors from Lynton and
Lynmouth and set them down here for an afternoon’s
exploration of the Badgworthy Valley, or
drive them on to Oare.
To see one of these brake-drivers take the
steep rise of the narrow bridge of Malmsmead at
full speed, and so continue his reckless way along
the narrow lanes, is to realise that death possibly
awaits the cyclist who descends hills and rounds
// 338.png
.pn +1
the sharp corners of these lanes at high speed at
such times when these vehicles are about.
For the comfort and refreshment of these
“Lorna Doone” pilgrims, the three farms, that
were nothing but humble farmsteads in the days
before Blackmore wrote that popular romance, have
now become rustic restaurants, doing a very thriving
and remunerative business, at prices which,
calculated on the basis of their charge of twopence
for a small glass of milk, must be rapidly earning a
more than modest competence for these simple
folk. Simple, did I say? Well, that, perhaps, is
hardly the word. Nor is the content that seems
to be pictured here, in every circumstance of
running water, moss-grown bridge, and bird-haunted
trees, more than a hollow mockery. Come
with me over the bridge, into Devon, and I shall
show you evidence of keen commercial rivalry,
in the notice-board displayed from the hedge of
Malmsmead Farm, which says “No connection
with Lorna Doone and Badgworthy Farm.”
Now it is a curious fact that the names of these
rival rustic refreshment-providers are the same—French—but
that does not by any means explain
the hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness that
are displayed between these neighbours; for few
must be the pilgrims in these parts who acquire
such trivial facts. The stranger coming from the
direction of Oare and halting awhile on the bridge,
to admire the beauty of the scene, will soon find
himself invited, by one or other of these people,
to patronise his establishment, and will thereby
// 339.png
.pn +1
learn something not to the advantage of the rival.
Hearing the tale of one, you are shocked at the
depth of infamy with which the other is charged,
but the people of the neighbourhood take it all
philosophically enough. “I ’xpec’ they do saay
’most as bad o’ he,” is the general remark.
.if h
.il fn=i293.jpg w=600px id=i293
.ca
MALMSMEAD.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: MALMSMEAD.]
.sp 2
.if-
On a busy day, as many as twenty-seven
waggonettes and other vehicles may be found at
Malmsmead, drawn up empty, awaiting the
return of the “Lorna Doone” sightseers from the
Badgworthy Valley and the Doone Valley, or
Oare. Constant repetition of the trip, day by day
in the season, for many years, has rendered the
drivers indifferent. Some you may observe
asleep, others playing cards, and all those who
// 340.png
.pn +1
are awake swearing. Meanwhile, the pilgrims in
search of the Doone Valley and the homes of those
entirely fabulous people have tailed away along
the footpaths beside the Badgworthy Water,
in search of literary landmarks. Few, however,
get as far as the so-called “Doone Valley,” for
it is a very considerable walk; and most people
have by this time sadly realised that Blackmore’s
fervid descriptions of places are, as a rule, remarkable
for their shameless exaggeration. In sober
truth, the Badgworthy Valley, that opens out of
Malmsmead, forms a much more striking scene
than the supposed stronghold of the Doones.
It is a typical moorland vale, with the Badgworthy
Water—or the “Badgery” as they style it in
these parts—pouring down out of the sullen
Exmoor hills, gliding with an oily smoothness over
waterslides, foaming over stickles, or splashing
like very miniature Niagaras over great moss-grown
boulders.
The valley is not nowadays so lonely as Blackmoor
pictures it: in fact, the terrible “Badgery
Valley,” as described by him, never existed, and
almost the entire thing is a delusion and a snare.
Plantations of fir and larch partly clothe the
rounded hills on the left hand, and a farmhouse
(since the publication of “Lorna Doone” named
“Lorna’s Bower,” in big letters that, painted on
its whitewashed garden-wall, stare across the
stream) is perched comfortably half-way up the
hillside.
The footpath that winds ribbon-like beside
// 341.png
.pn +1
the stream comes presently to Badgworthy Wood,
a wood of stunted oaks, whose limbs are bearded
with a grey-green moss that tells sufficiently of
the humid atmosphere and the mists that drift
from Exmoor. Parson Jack Russell believed
Badgworthy Wood to have been a Druid’s grave;
but we may, perhaps, with safety decline to
accept him as an authority on the subject. Now,
had he expressed an opinion on horse-coping and
sharp practice generally in horsey matters, his
views would carry all the weight due to such an
acknowledged authority.
.if h
.il fn=i295.jpg w=600px id=i295
.ca
BADGWORTHY VALLEY.
.ca-
.if-
.if t
.sp 2
[Illustration: BADGWORTHY VALLEY.]
.sp 2
.if-
Here the foxglove grows in the shade, and
hart’s-tongue ferns come to an unusual size. The
whortleberry plant, too, flourishes in this moist
spot to a height prodigious for whortleberries.
Some of them must run up to eighteen inches; but
the berries have not the sweetness of those that
// 342.png
.pn +1
grow on the dwarfed plants of the sun-scorched,
rain-furrowed, and wind-lashed downs.
Save for the passing of groups of “Lorna
Doone” pilgrims, the place is very solitary. The
hills that look down upon the valley here rise
higher, and draw closer in, swooping down in
naked round outlines in the foreground, and filling
in the distance with dense blue-black plantations of
larch. The bald outlines of those near at hand
are sharply accented by a wind-swept lone thorn-tree
that stands out curiously against the sky.
Below it, stretching down the hillside is an ancient
earthwork, in shape roughly like the letter Y; and
down below this again, the Badgworthy Water
foams and slides amidst its boulders.
Quietly walking through the little wood, and
then silently along the grassy paths through the
almost breast-high bracken beyond, I started
a fox from his summer afternoon sleep on a
sun-warmed boulder; a fine, but gaunt fellow of
crimson hue, and with a magnificent brush. Not
one of your full-fed Midland foxes, plump with a
long career of raids on poultry-runs, but one
accustomed to picking up a mere living by sheer
hard work in these wilds. He loped leisurely
away into the woods, with an easy swinging gait
that looked deceptively slow. Up along there,
where he disappeared amid the tangled branches,
a monstrous square mass of rock stands half-revealed,
remarkably like some ancient stone-built
house; a veritable Mockbeggar Hall, that,
on a near approach, is found to be no habitation
// 343.png
.pn +1
of man, but a crannied, cliff-like place, partly
draped with ivy; the home of jackdaws, and
tunnelled about the base of it with the runs of
hares and rabbits.
And thus, at length one comes to the terrible
“Doone Valley,” or, as it is better, and correctly
known, Lankcombe; a pretty vale branching to
the right, not in the least terrible, you know, and
in fact rather dull and commonplace, after the
beauties of Badgworthy. Perhaps the enthusiastic
Lorna Dooneite, if he would keep his
enthusiasm, had better not adventure thus far;
for though he may indeed see some problematic
ruins and doubtful foundations of houses, he will
assuredly be keenly disappointed. A commonplace
shepherd’s hut looks down upon the scene,
young plantations mantle the quite unremarkable
hills, and romance fails to keep the expected
tryst.
But if so be the pilgrim resents being cheated
of scenic delights, let him then retrace his steps,
cross Malmsmead Bridge into Devon, and so
proceed a distance of some six miles down the
enchanting gorge of the Lyn, to Lynmouth. No
novelist has flung the spells of romance upon that
delightful scenery, which is indeed sufficient in
itself to enchant the stranger, without such
extraneous aid. Or, if it be desired to return to
Porlock, let the stranger proceed to Brendon, and
then descend the hill at Combe Park, coming thus
again to the ridge of moorland that runs between
Porlock and Lynmouth. Here turning eastward
// 344.png
.pn +1
he will come to Glenthorne, where the wooded
cliffs plunge daringly to the sea, and where the
boundary line passes that divides Devon and
Somerset. The name of Glenthorne clearly invites
irresponsible and foolish rhyme, and so,
responding to so obvious an invitation, these
pages shall conclude with such:
.pm verse-start
There was an old man of Glenthorne,
Who played “tootle-oo” on the horn.
He blew night and day
To his neighbours, till they
Said, “Stop it! you giddy old prawn:[#]
Oh! why don’t you place it in pawn?
You tootle all night,
You malicious old sprite.
We wish you had never been born.”
.pm verse-end
.pm fn-start // A
“No class” people, these neighbours, obviously.
.pm fn-end
.sp 2
// 345.png
.pn +1
.pb
.sp 4
.h2 id=idx
INDEX
.sp 2
.ix
Abbot’s Leigh, #8#, #11#, #17#
“Abode of Love,” #147#–#150#
Ad Axium (Uphill), #92#
Agapemone, The, #147#–#150#
Allerford, #246#
Anchor Head, #61#, #72#
Ashley Combe, #256#, #259#
Avon, River, #2#, #4#, #6#–#19#, #124#
Avonmouth, #3#, #17#–#19#, #20#
Axe, River, #91#–#3#, #96#
Badgworthy Valley, #280#, #281#, #291#–#297#
—— Water, #291#, #294#
“Bath Bricks,” #121#–#124#
Bawdrip, #118#–#121#
Berrow, #102#, #111#, #113#, #116#
Blackmore, Richard Doddridge #271#–#278#
Blake, Admiral, #128#–#132#, #215#
Bleadon, #71#, #73#, #93#, #98#
Blue Anchor, #198#, #199#, #202#–#206#
Bossington, #249#–#251#, #259#
Brean, #89#, #98#–#102#, #116#
—— Down, #3#, #73#, #91#, #96#
Brent Knoll, #103#–#110#
Brentsfield Bridge, #138#
Bridgwater, #93#, #117#, #121#, #126#–#139#, #142#, #150#, #186#
Bristol, #2#, #6#, #18#
—— Channel, #2#, #3#, #18#, #56#, #87#, #92#, #124#
Brue, River, #111#
Burnham, #1#, #4#, #102#, #111#, #113#–#116#, #159#
Bussex Rhine, #135#, #136#, #138#
Cannington, #93#, #139#–#142#, #158#
Charlinch, #148#
Chedzoy, #135#
Cleeve Abbey, #189#–#198#
Clevedon, #1#, #13#, #22#, #23#, #24#–#45#, #76#, #113#, #192#
—— Court, #34#, #41#–#44#
Clifton, #6#–#8#
—— Suspension Bridge, #3#, #8#–#17#
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, #26#–#31#, #142#, #152#–#157#
Combwich, #158#
Congresbury, #49#–#53#
County Gate, #281#
Culbone, #260#–#268#, #281#
Cynuit, Battle of, #93#, #158#, #160#
Danesborough, #142#
Doones, The, #270#–#298#
“Doone Valley,” #270#, #293#, #297#
Dunball, #117#
Dunster, #3#, #177#, #202#, #206#–#227#
East Brent, #106#
East Quantoxhead, #176#
Easton-in-Gordano (St. George’s), #19#
Exford, #281#
Flat Holm, #73#, #87#–#91#
Folk-speech of Somerset, #168#–#172#
Glatt-hunting, #174#–#176#
Glenthorne, #2#, #3#, #259#, #282#, #298#
// 346.png
.pn +1
Gore Point, #256#
Hallam, Arthur Henry, #25#, #32#–#40#
Highbridge, #111#–#113#
Hobbs’s Boat, #93#
Holnicote, #245#, #276#
Hookway Hill, #286#, #288#
Horner, The, #246#, #251#, #259#
Horsey Slime, #117#
Hubba Cock, #160#
—— Lowe, #160#
—— Pill, #92#
Huntspill, #116#
Hurlstone Point, #256#
In Memoriam, #32#, #34#–#40#
Kenn, #45#, #49#
Kentsford, #184#
Kewstoke, #61#–#66#
Kilton, #167#
Kilve, #167#, #171#–#176#
Kingston Seymour, #45#, #49#
Langmoor Rhine, #135#, #138#
Lankcombe, #297#
Lavernock Point, #91#
Lilstock, #167#
“Lorna Doone,” #270#–#298#
Luttrell family, #176#, #194#, #205#, #206#–#208#, #212#–#216#, #218#–#220#, #225#, #228#, #237#
Lympsham, #98#
Lynch Chapel, #244#, #251#
Malmsmead, #291#–#294#, #297#
Minehead, #1#, #3#, #139#, #142#, #177#, #199#, #202#, #227#
Mohun family, #208#–#243#
Monmouth Rebellion, #132#–#138#
“Mud-horse,” The, #159#
Nailsea, #81#
Nether Stowey, #27#, #139#, #142#–#154#
Oare, #260#, #269#, #277#, #279#, #286#–#293#
Oare Water, #286#, #288#
Oareford, #288#
Old Cleeve, #198#–#202#
Orestone Point, #259#
Otterhampton, #158#, #160#
Parret, River, #4#, #93#, #103#, #117#, #122#–#125#, #126#, #127#, #140#, #142#, #161#
Pawlett, #117#, #159#
Pill, #4#, #17#–#19#
Polden Hills, #117#, #135#
Porlock, #2#, #3#, #139#, #244#, #246#, #247#–#256#, #263#, #268#, #297#
—— Weir, #256#–#261#, #276#
Portbury, #19#
Portishead, #3#, #19#–#23#
Prynne, William, #216#–#218#
Puxton, #54#
Quantock Hills, The, #142#–#145#, #154#–#157#, #179#
Roadwater (Roodwater), The, #192#, #197#
Robber’s Bridge, #282#, #288#
Rownham Ferry, #8#, #9#, #11#, #13#
St. Audries (West Quantoxhead), #142#, #177#–#179#
St. Decuman’s, #179#–#186#
St. George’s (Easton-in-Gordano), #19#
St. Thomas’s Head, #56#, #61#
Sampford Brett, #185#
Sand Bay, #55#, #61#
Sedgemoor (“Sedgemere”), #102#–#105#, #117#, #132#, #135#–#137#, #277#
Selworthy, #244#
South Brent, #106#–#110#
Spaxton, #147#–#150#
Steart, #4#, #158#–#160#
Steep Holm, #73#, #87#–#90#
Stogursey, #162#–#167#
Stoke Pero, #260#
Stolford, #161#
Swallow Cliff, #55#, #61#
Tennyson, Lord, #25#, #32#–#40#
// 347.png
.pn +1
Ubbalowe, #160#
Uphill, #71#, #72#, #73#, #91#–#96#
Walton-in-Gordano, #23#, #30#
Washford, #199#
Watchet, #1#, #154#, #179#, #186#–#188#
Wembdon, #139#
West Huntspill, #116#
—— Quantoxhead, #142#, #177#–#179#
Weston Bay, #61#
Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway, #22#, #55#
Weston-in-Gordano, #23#
Weston-super-Mare, #1#, #3#, #59#, #61#, #66#–#78#, #113#
Westonzoyland, #134#, #138#
Wick St. Lawrence, #53#, #54#
Williton, #179#
Woodspring (or Worspring) Priory, #55#, #56#–#61#, #84#
Wordsworth, William, #153#–#157#
Worle, #49#, #55#, #71#, #84#–#86#
—— Hill, #61#, #62#, #73#, #78#–#84#
Worlebury, #78#–#84#
Wyndham (or Windham) family, #182#–#186#, #215#
—— Lady Florence, #183#–#185#
Yatton, #46#–#50#, #53#, #54#
Yenworthy, #281#–#283#
Yeo, River, #46#, #47#, #53#, #54#
.ix-
.sp 2
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.nf c
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
.nf-
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.dv class=tnbox // TN box start
.ul
.it Transcriber’s Notes:
.ul indent=1
.it Index entries showing abbreviated page ranges were written\
out in full. For example: “206-8” was changed to “206-208.”
.it Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
.it Typographical errors were silently corrected.
.it Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a\
predominant form was found in this book.
.if t
.it Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
.if-
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\_