Read Ebook: The Blackmore Country by Snell F J Frederick John

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In the first verse of an old Devonshire harvest-home song, convivial spirits were thus addressed:

"Here's a health to the barley mow, my brave boys; Here's a health to the barley mow! We'll drink it out of the jolly brown bowl; Here's a health to the barley mow!"

In successive verses they were adjured to drink it out of the nipperkin, the quarter-pint, the half-pint, the quart, the pottle, the gallon, the half-anker, the anker, the half-hogshead, the hogshead, the pipe, the well, the river, and, finally, the ocean.

In the direction of Nicolashayne were three large barns in front of which was a broad area of road for the wagons to halt upon. The "Church of Exeter" has proprietary rights in the parish; and a proctor came up from Thorverton to receive tithes on behalf of the Dean and Chapter. Only the small tithes went to the vicar.

In the West country pack-horses are equally associated with moors and lanes. Nowadays a Devonshire lane--love is compared to a Devonshire lane--is regarded as essentially beautiful, with its beds of wild flowers and tracery of briars; but Vancouver's impartial testimony compels one to think that in former days this domain of the pack-horse was not so attractive. He says:

"The height of the hedge-banks, often covered with a rank growth of coppice-wood, uniting and interlocking with each other overhead, completes the idea of exploring a labyrinth rather than that of passing through a much-frequented country. This first impression, however, will be at once removed on the traveller's meeting with, or being overtaken by, a gang of pack-horses. The rapidity with which these animals descend the hills, when not loaded, and the utter impossibility of passing loaded ones, require that the utmost caution should be used in keeping out of the way of the one, and exertion in keeping ahead of the other. A cross-way in the road or gateway is eagerly looked for as a retiring spot to the traveller, until the pursuing squadron, or heavily-loaded brigade, may have passed by.... As there are but few wheel-carriages to pass along them, the channel for the water and the path for the pack-horse are equally in the middle of the way, which is altogether occupied by an assemblage of such large and loose stones only as the force of the descending torrents have not been able to sweep away or remove."

This was certainly not pleasant, although in most other respects Culmstock was then a more interesting place than now. I do not assert that it was more moral. About seventy years ago, a native of the village, one Tom Musgrove, was hanged for sheep-stealing, being the last man, it is said, to experience that fate in the county of Devon. We stand aghast at the barbarity of our forefathers; but if ever the penalty could be made to fit the crime, then it must be owned, Tom deserved the rope. He was a notorious thief, whose depredations were the common talk of the village, and, to make matters worse, his evil deeds were performed under the cloak of religion. Once a couple of ducks were missed, and, whilst every cottage was being searched in the hope of regaining the stolen property, Tom, secure in his pretensions to piety, stood complacently in his doorway, and the party of inquisitors passed on. Just inside were the ducks, feeding out of his platter.

One night a huckster's shop, kept by Betsy Collins, at Millmoor, was feloniously entered and robbed. Next morning, Tom, apprised of the event, ran off in his night-cap to condole with the poor woman in her misfortune, and succeeded so well as to be invited to share her morning repast. "There!" said he, "her've a-gied the old rogue a good breakfast."

As a professor of religion Tom contracted a warm friendship with a baker named Potter, who was an ardent Methodist. Neither friendship nor religion, however, prevented Mr Musgrove from enriching himself at his neighbour's expense. Profiting by an opportunity when Potter was at chapel, and closely engaged with pious exercises, Tom and his one-armed daughter broke into the bakehouse and carried off Potter's bacon, the lady burglar aiding herself with her teeth.

These breaches of morality appear to have been condoned--at any rate, they did not land the culprit in any serious trouble. But at last Tom went a step too far. Down in the hams, or water-meadows, between Culmstock and Uffculme, he seized a large ram, which he slew, brought home, and buried in his garden. The crime was traced to his door, professions and protestations proved unavailing, and Musgrove, tried and convicted at the following Assizes, was publicly executed at Exeter Gaol. It will be remembered that Mrs Tremlett's "dree buys was hanged, back in the time of Jarge the Third, to Exeter Jail for ship-staling"

Smuggling, however, took various forms. Men from Upottery, Clayhidon, and elsewhere would halt a cart on the outskirts of the village, and go round with brandy or gin in bladders, which they carried in the pockets of their greatcoats. One Giles, of Clayhidon, had a donkey and cart with a keg of brandy concealed in a furnace turned upside down. A Culmstock man called Townsend, landlord of the "Three Tuns," is said to have been ruined by a smuggler, who sold him a gallon of brandy and demanded accommodation, as usual. The publican refused it on the ground that the house was already full, upon which the smuggler, stung with resentment, informed the police, and Townsend was fined ?270.

Culmstock churchyard has indeed swallowed up, not only successive generations of the inhabitants, but a goodly share of the village itself. This is the more regrettable, as the portions absorbed are precisely those which, being redolent of the olden times, one would have liked preserved. The shambles, a covered enclosure for butchers attending the weekly market, has gone the way of all flesh. So also has the stockhouse, which was, rather inconsequently, an open

space where the stocks were kept. Hard by stood an inn, called the "Red Lion," which either failed to draw sufficient custom, or having a handsome porch, was deemed too good for a common inn and metamorphosed into a school. A Mr Kelso arriving with wife and daughters three, accomplished the transformation, and, according to local tradition, he had the honour of instilling the rudiments of learning into the late Archbishop Temple. This, not the National School which was built in the Rev. John Blackmore's time and mainly through his exertions, was the academy of Sergeant Jakes, the position of which is plainly defined in chapter xxxvi.

There was formerly a considerable trade at Culmstock in combing and spinning wool. Thirty hands are now employed at the mill ; once four hundred were busy at home. Soap also throve. It was made on the right shoulder of the hill, and the manufacturer, a Mr Hellings, kept seven pack-horses to transport it to Exeter. Culmstock soap had a great vogue in the cathedral city, and it was a common observation that no one had a chance till Hellings was "sold out." In the neighbouring village of Clayhidon was a silk factory, employing, I believe, a hundred hands, and run by a gentleman of the Methodist persuasion, whose house and chapel adjoined--the three together producing a combination of the earthly and the heavenly which impressed my informant as the acme of convenience. A similar factory in Red Lion Court, Culmstock, met with speedy failure.

These industries are now extinct, and one is somewhat at a loss in seeking for "live" interests, although it is impossible to forget that Hemyock is a famous mart for pigs. The whole district is piggy, and the sleek black animal with the curly tail is as highly respected, in life and in death, as his congener in that porcine paradise, Erin. I was talking to an old fellow at Culmstock, it may have been two years ago, and the conversation turned on swine. Rather to my surprise, he spoke of a certain female of the breed as having been "brought up in house," and with full appreciation of the fun, volunteered a local saw to the effect that "when a sow has had three litters, she is artful enough to open a door."

Thanks to the industry of Mr William Doble, who is, I believe, a descendant of more than one of the local heroes, it is possible to restore the atmosphere which brought about the creation, years afterwards, of Sir Thomas Waldron and Sergeant Jakes. When R. D. Blackmore was a boy, many were still living who could remember the incessant din of the joy-bells on the announcement of the victory--a din continued for several days; and the scene in the Fore-street, the "grateful celebration," when high and low, indiscriminately, turned out to share the feast. Naturally, however, the festivities were dashed with some amount of sorrow and anxiety, as it was not yet known what had been the fortunes of the gallant fellows who had gone forth to fight England's battle. Two stanzas of a song, which an old lady of Culmstock sang as a girl, reflect with simple pathos the dreadful suspense of relations and friends.

"Mother is the battle over? Thousands have been slain they say. Is my father coming? Tell me, Have the English gained the day?

"Is he well, or is he wounded? Mother, is he among the slain? If you know, I pray you tell me, Will my father come again?"

A rough list of the Culmstock warriors comprises the following names:--

Major Octavius Temple, . Dr Ayshford. Sergt. J. Mapledorham. Sergt. W. Doble. Sergt. Gregory. William Berry. William Sheers. Robert Wood. Thomas Scadding. Richard Fry. Abram Lake. William Gillard. John Jordan. Thomas Andrews. John Nethercott. John Tapscott. "Urchard" Penny. James Mapledorham, jun. Betty Milton. Betsy Mapledorham.

Mapledorham, was too much of a mouthful for Culmstock people, so they consulted their own convenience by calling the couple Maldrom. The excellent sergeant already possessed a long record of service when summoned to the final test of Waterloo, and in several campaigns he had been accompanied by his faithful Betsy. Equally adventurous, Betty Milton was full of reminiscences of her hard life in the Peninsula.

William Berry, too, was fond of story-telling. He related, with humorous glee, that he had once captured a mule with a sack of doubloons. Unfortunately a wine-shop proved seductive, and whilst he was regaling himself therein, an artful Spaniard made off with the booty. Robert, better known as "Robin," Wood was literary, and published a penny history of his exploits, of which, alas! not a single copy is known to exist. William Sheers, figuratively speaking, turned his spear into a ploughshare, as he took to shopkeeping and became a pronounced Methodist and zealous supporter of the Smallbrook Chapel. I can just remember this bearded veteran, who in his last days was a victim to a severe form of cardiac asthma. Tapscott and "Urchard" Penny were both ex-marines. The former had been present at the Battle of Trafalgar and rejoiced in the nicknames "John Glory" and "Blue my Shirt." As for Penny, he was sometimes called "Tenpenny Dick," the reason being that he would never accept more than tenpence as his day's wage. When his turn came to be buried, the bystanders observed that water had found its way into his last resting-place, so that, it was said, he remained constant to the element in which he had so long served.

The foremost of the group of veterans is claimed to have been Doble, who, after starting in life as a parish apprentice, at the age of seven, took part in seven pitched battles in the Peninsula, and ended his military career at Waterloo. He retired from the service on a pension of twelve shillings a week, and was the proud owner of two medals and nine clasps. As a civilian, he was the trusted foreman of the silk factory in Red Lion Court, which, despite his probity, soon came to grief; and at his funeral his old comrades assembled, some from considerable distances, to pay a last tribute to the brave soldier who had rallied the waverers at Waterloo.

Turning to another matter, Blackmore has idealised the bells, inasmuch as he states that on the front of one of them--the passing bell--was engraven,

"Time is over for one more";

and on the back,

"Soon shall thy own life be o'er."

The Culmstock set is an interesting collection of bells, but not one of them is adorned with mottoes such as those. One bears the inscription "Ave Maria Gracia Plena," and this was cast by Roger Semson, a West-country founder of repute, who was dwelling at Ash Priors, in Somerset, in 1549, and who stamped his initials on the bell. Another of his bells, at Luppitt, is at once more and less explicit on this point, since the inscription runs "nosmes regoremib." To make sense, this must be read backwards. Two modern bells, placed in the Culmstock belfry in 1852 and 1853 respectively, awaken proud or painful memories. The former was cast in memory of the Duke of Wellington, the cost being defrayed by subscription, while the latter was "the free gift of James Collier, of Furzehayes, and John Collier, of Bowhayes." John Collier, who was killed by lightning at Bowhayes, was the sporting yeoman with the otter hounds, to whom Blackmore alludes. The old house, by the way, was reputed to be haunted, and for years no one would live in it.

Blackmore's description of the vicarage is literally correct, save that he calls it "the rectory." A long and rambling house it certainly is, and the dark, narrow passage, like a tunnel, beneath the first-floor rooms, is a feature explained by the higher level of the front of the house "facing southwards upon a grass-plot and a flower-garden, and as pretty as the back was ugly" .

THE HINTERLAND

Although Culmstock and its immediate vicinity is somewhat deficient in what I have ventured to term "live" interests, it must not be inferred that the neighbourhood has nothing further to show; and among the objects that deserve to be scheduled as worthy of attention are the colossal stone quarries at Westleigh, which, whether viewed from the parallel line of railway or from the opposite height on which stands Burlescombe Church, present an imposing spectacle. For ages they have been the principal source of supply for the district, huge quantities of limestone having been drawn from them for building and agricultural purposes. Much of it was formerly conveyed to Tiverton in barges towed along the canal, the terminus of which was fitted with a number of kilns. These, in my boyhood, I have often seen burning, and regarded with no little awe, owing to stories that were circulated of persons having gone to sleep on the margin, fallen over into the glowing furnace, and been consumed to powder. They are now a picturesque ruin. Older men can recall a yet earlier time when pack-horses came to Westleigh from Tiverton and fetched lime in boxes. In front was a man riding a pony, and the horses followed without compulsion.

Not far from the entrance to the Whiteball tunnel, and in the neighbourhood of the great limestone quarries, in a pleasant meadow facing south, are the ruins of Canonsleigh Abbey. To a connoisseur like Mr F. T. Elworthy, these remains tell their own story, and it is thanks to that gentleman's investigations and researches that we are able to furnish a concise account of the ancient nunnery. A gateway yet stands, though unhappily disfigured by the desecrating touch of modern man, and near it is a doorway of red sandstone leading to a staircase doubtless belonging to the porter. In the upper storey, square-headed windows--wrought, we may believe, in the fourteenth century--command the approach in either direction; other features are less easy to determine, since there are modern walls and a modern roof, which have been added for the purpose of turning the place into a shed, and incidentally obscure the older architecture.

Without spending more time here, let us pass to a quadrangular building of massive construction, and supported at two of its angles by solid buttresses. Situated at the east end of the convent, this is considered to have been a great flanking tower communicating, by means of strong walls , at the angles opposite to the buttresses, with the residential portions. The outer or enclosing wall of the abbey precincts started from the middle of the east wall of the tower; and under the middle of the tower flowed a stream, which issued through a covered exit and continued its course outside the boundary wall, washing its base. The reason for this somewhat peculiar arrangement was a good one--the supply of the abbey stews; but its effect was to throw the tower out of line with the walls and the other buildings.

Inside the walls were two spaces, irregular in shape, and clearly open courtyards, from one of which a doorway led into the tower. The chief entrances seem to have been from the two or more floors of the domestic quarters. On the side next the convent, approached by a massive doorway, is a narrow chamber, conjectured to have been a "guard-room" for refractory nuns. Over this, but running the entire length of the building, and not, like the lower floor, divided by wall and doorway, is a floor supported by beams.

This tower, with the plaster clinging to its walls--how can we explain its survival when the rest of the once stately abbey has vanished? Probably the reason lies partly in its strength and partly in its plainness and the absence of wrought stone tempting human greed. As has been well said, "it still stands a picturesque and sturdy relic of an age of good lime-burners and honest masons." The wrought stone of one or two windows in the adjacent walls has been removed, but what indications remain suggest the close of the twelfth century as that virtuous age.

The Priory of Leigh was founded, Dr Oliver says, in the latter half of the twelfth century, and Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph opines, before 1173. In its infant days, it seems to have been a dependency of Plympton Priory--at any rate, in the estimation of the latter monastery, whose head claimed the right to appoint the superior of Leigh. This demand was resisted, and in 1219 the then Bishop of Exeter composed the quarrel by deciding, as a sort of compromise, that the Prior of Plympton might, if he chose, be present at the election.

In the second half of the thirteenth century there were scandals at Leigh calling for episcopal cognisance and visitation; and these disorders proving incurable, Bishop Quivil went the length of ejecting the prior and canons, and transferring the monastery, with all its belongings, to a body of canonesses of the same rule of St Augustine. And Matilda de Tablere became the first Prioress of Leigh. Next year, Matilda de Clare, Countess of Gloucester and Hertford, presented the convent with the great sum of six hundred marks, in acknowledgment of which Bishop Quivil erected the priory into an abbey, and appointed the countess its abbess.

The indignant canons did not take their extrusion meekly. They appealed to the archbishop, and, through him, to the king, against the usurpation of the "little women," but they appealed in vain.

The abbey was suppressed in February 1538, and at the end of the same year the king granted a lease of the site and precincts, with the tithes of sheaf and the rectories of Oakford and Burlescombe, to Thomas de Soulemont, of London. The inmates, however, were not turned adrift on the charity of the cold world. Each received a pension, and this, in the case of the abbess, Elisabeth Fowell, was considerable. There were eighteen sisters in all, and some of them, as is proved by their names--Fortescue, Coplestone, Sydenham, Carew, Pomeroy--were of good West-country extraction.

In course of time the property passed through various hands, and out of the spoils of the abbey a certain owner appears to have built a mansion, which was demolished in 1821.

Amidst so much that is bare the ivied ruins of Dunkeswell Abbey, nearer Hemyock than Dunkeswell village, and lending its name to a very respectable hamlet, assuredly deserve remark. Situated in a charmingly secluded spot, they consist merely of parts of the gatehouse and fragments of walls. The latter have a blackened appearance as if the destruction of the buildings had been accelerated by fire; more probably, however, this is due to the mould of age. In its heyday the abbey boasted an imposing range of buildings, the outlines of which may still be traced in the grass, when, in the drought of summer, it withers, more rapidly than elsewhere, over the foundations.

The history of the abbey is almost as scanty as its remains. It was founded in 1201 by William Lord Briwere or Bruere, on land that had previously belonged to William Fitzwilliam, who, having borrowed from one Amadio, a Jew, was compelled to mortgage his manor of Dunkeswell. According to one version, Briwere redeemed the land from the Hebrew, but a charter of King John shows the vendor to have been Henry de la Pomeroy. There is clearly a tangle. Possibly Pomeroy bought Dunkeswell from the mortgagee and resold it to Briwere, who, in any case, bestowed it on the Cistercians of Ford.

Just outside the north wall of the modern church may be seen a stone coffin, with depressions for the head and heels. It is one of two that were discovered some thirty years ago covered with plain Purbeck slabs, and containing skeletons--a man's and a woman's; in all likelihood, those of the powerful Lord Briwere and his good lady. The body of the founder, it is known, was laid to rest in 1227 in the choir of the abbey church; and it is only natural to suppose, though there is no evidence to prove it, that husband and wife shared a common tomb. The bones, placed together in one of the coffins, were reinterred, while the other coffin, as I said, has been suffered to remain above-ground, a gazing-stock for posterity.

The abbey was richly endowed by its founder with lands and tenements, including the manor of Uffculme and the mill there; and his munificence was supplemented by liberal gifts from the monks of Ford and others. At the date of its surrender, February 14, 1539, the annual value of the property amounted to ?300--a large income in those days.

It is possible that a distorted version of this affair yet lingers in Culmstock tradition. I have heard from a Methuselah of the place that, according to an old tale, a band of freebooters named Sylvester made an eyry of Hackpen, whence they descended to the more fertile regions below, raiding the farms, and carrying off the fleecy spoil to their hold on the hill.

In writing of these distant ages, I have often felt how remote they are in another sense. Such a term as "Dumnonian," for instance, though we know its geographical significance as referring to the inhabitants of south-west Britain--how little it conveys, and perhaps can be made to convey, to us of the life that people lived, even if we are sure that beneath their breasts beat human hearts like our own, with interests and affections strong and manifold! Much gratitude, therefore, is due to the late Rev. William Barnes, author of the classic Dorset poems, for his bold attempt to reconstruct for us the mode of existence and surroundings of those ancient Britons, of whom all have heard from their childhood. This also may be poetry, but it is worth perusing only as such. The picture he describes is that of a little pastoral settlement occupying a valley, and finding refuge in time of war in a great camp that crowns a neighbouring hill; and the season is the end of summer, after the reaping of oats and rye and the mowing of lawns and meadows round the homesteads.

"The cattle are on the downs, or in the hollows of the hills. Here and there are wide beds of fern, or breadths of gorse and patches of wild raspberry, with gleaming sheets of flowers. The swine are roaming in the woods and shady oak-glades, the nuts are studding the brown-leaved bushes. On the sunny side of some cluster of trees is the herdsman's round wicker-house, with its brown conical roof and blue wreaths of smoke. In the meadows and basins of the sluggish streams stand clusters of tall elms waving with the nests of herons; the bittern, coot, and water-rail are busy among the rushes and flags of the reedy meres. Birds are 'charming' in the wood-girt clearings, wolves and foxes slinking to their covers, knots of maidens laughing at the water-spring, beating the white linen or flannel with their washing bats; the children play before the doors of the round straw-thatched houses of the homestead, the peaceful abode of the sons of the oaky vale. On the ridges of the downs rise the sharp cones of the barrows, some glistening in white chalk, or red, the mould of a new burial, and others green with the grass of long years."

Close to Hembury Fort is a house built by Admiral Samuel Graves, whose best title to fame is that he invented the lifeboat. The fort is in the parish of Payhembury. The adjacent parish of Broadhembury, a picturesque village among the hills, could vaunt in ancient days a cell of Cluniac monks belonging to Montacute Priory, Somerset; and from 1768 to 1775 the incumbent was none other than Augustus Toplady, author of "Rock of Ages." The Grange, a fine old Jacobean manor house, long the residence of the Drewes, was built in 1610 by an ancestor of theirs, who was sergeant-at-law to Queen Elizabeth--Edward Drewe. It was modernised about the middle of the last century.

At one time the Blackdowns must have presented a very different appearance from that which they do now, and the cause of the transformation may be found in a measure passed in the thirty-ninth year of His Majesty King George the Third, up to which time the commons of Church Staunton, Clayhidon, and Dunkeswell produced little but heath, fern, dwarf-furze, and very coarse, tough and wiry herbage. At the beginning of the last century these lands were taken in hand with a view to cultivation or planting.

The Napoleon of the reclamation was General Simcoe, an officer who, having greatly distinguished himself in the American War, afterwards settled down on the Blackdowns. Altogether he enclosed about twelve thousand acres, and part of his design was to build two or three farmhouses, assigning to each of them about three hundred acres. The remaining allotments he portioned out to adjacent farms belonging to him, or converted into plantations. At Wolford Lodge--the name of his residence--he carried out some interesting experiments in arboriculture.

One practice adopted at Wolford, and apparently with success, was that of pruning the young oak, the stem being left clean to a height of twenty feet, and a proportionate top being allowed. The wounds soon healed and became covered with bark, and the result is said to have been a notable increase in the strength and substance of the stock.

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