From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 14

We had only an hour at Chepstow, but the picturesque river-town was not new to us, and the hour sufficed to revive our memories of its rock-based old castle overhanging the Wye, the castle where Jeremy Taylor was once imprisoned, and its Norman church with deeply recessed doorway. At Chepstow we took train for Newport, crossing the strip of garden-land that lies between the Wye, the Gloucesters.h.i.+re boundary, and its almost parallel stream, the Usk. West Monmouth is Black Country, forming a part of the South Wales coal-field, and we were not surprised to find Newport a busy harbour, grimy with its exports of coal and iron. We heard a strange tongue spoken all about us and realised that Monmouths.h.i.+re, nominally English since the time of Henry VIII, is still largely Welsh in manners and in character. The old Newport is much obscured by the new. The castle, where Simon de Montfort took refuge, is in good part hidden behind a flouris.h.i.+ng brewery, but the Church of St. Woollos, built high upon Stow Hill, still dominates the scene. This church has a history even older than its fine Norman architecture, for it is told that Harold once plundered the town, desecrating the original sanctuary and breaking open the cheeses, which he found filled with blood. Then he was aghast and repented, but a month later, according to the monastic record, "for that wickedness and other crimes" he fell at Hastings.

Our goal was Caerleon, three miles up the Usk, a quiet little village that was once the capital of South Wales, once the Isca Silurum of the Romans, and once, in the misty realm of romance, that Caerleon-upon-Usk where Arthur was crowned and where the ninth of his twelve great battles was fought. Tennyson's Lancelot relates to spellbound listeners in the Castle of Astolat how

"at Caerleon had he helped his lord, When the strong neighings of the wild White Horse Set every gilded parapet shuddering."

But the "Mabinogion," that treasury of fanciful old Welsh tales, gives, by way of contrast, a nave and somewhat gaudy picture of the king enjoying his repose:

"King Arthur was at Caerlleon upon Usk; and one day he sat in his chamber; and with him were Owain the son of Urien, and Kynon the son of Clydno, and Kai the son of Kyner; and Gwenhwyar and her hand-maidens at needlework by the window.... In the center of the chamber, King Arthur sat upon a seat of green rushes, over which was spread a covering of flame-coloured satin; and a cus.h.i.+on of red satin was under his elbow.... And the King went to sleep."

If the ghosts of the Second Augustan Legion could return for an hour to this their frontier station, deep in the British wilds, they would find ranged and labelled in a neat museum shards of their pottery, broken votive tablets, fragments of sculptured figures, among them a Medusa whose stony stare might seem to have taken effect, urns whose ashes were long since scattered, bits of mosaic pavement, coins, lamps, needles, hairpins, waifs and strays of their "unconsidered trifles." But the fainter wraith of King Arthur would discover no more than a weedy mound and hollow in a ragged field, where autumnal dandelions keep the only glints of his golden memory. We met there an old labourer stooping beneath the heavy sack upon his shoulder. He told us that the mound was Arthur's Round Table, but as for the hollow--apparently the site of a Roman open amphitheatre--he could only shake his grey head and confide: "They do say as was a grand palace there long ago and one day it all sunk under,--sunk way down into the ground."

The Usk, which has reflected such lost splendours, empties into the broad estuary of the Severn a little lower down than the Wye which rejoins the greater river at Chepstow. The Severn, which has its rising not two miles from the Wye in the Welsh mountains, makes a wider sweep to the east, crossing Shrops.h.i.+re, Worcester, and Gloucester. Worcester, indeed, mainly consists of the Middle Severn valley, with ranges of low hills on either side. This fertile basin abounds, like the Hereford vale of the Wye, in apple-orchards and pear-orchards, hop-gardens and wheat-fields, but the enterprising little s.h.i.+re has developed, too, a number of manufacturing industries.

On the north it runs up into the Black Country of Staffords.h.i.+re; Dudley, Stourbridge, and Oldbury are murky with the smoke and smudge of factory chimneys. Gla.s.s is a specialty of Stourbridge, carpets of Kidderminster, salt of Droitwich, and needles and fishhooks of Redditch. Nail-making used to be the bread and beer of ten thousand cottages at the foot of the Clent and Lickey Hills.

But intermingled with its thriving crafts and trades is another wealth of historic a.s.sociations and natural beauties. In the dense woods which once covered the county, hostile bands have dodged or sought one another from time immemorial, notably during the Civil Wars of Simon de Montfort and of the Roses. Even so late as the Parliamentary War, there remained forest enough to do good service to a fugitive. It was in an oak of Boscobel Wood, on the Salop border, that after the disastrous battle of Worcester

"the younger Charles abode Till all the paths were dim, And far below the Roundhead rode And hummed a surly hymn."

The points of specific literary interest are not many. Little St.

Kenelm underwent his martyrdom by the Clent Hills; Richard Baxter ministered for twenty-two years to a rough flock in Kidderminster; Samuel Butler was born in Strensham-on-the-Avon; Samuel Johnson went to school in Stourbridge; and the Leasowes, near by, was the home of Shenstone, who made it one of the most attractive estates in England.

But the Malvern Hills keep a great, dim memory, that of the fourteenth-century visionary a.s.sociated with the West Midland allegory of "Piers Plowman." We are not sure of his name, though we speak of him as Langland; the rugged, vigorous old poem in its three versions may yet be proved to be of composite rather than single authors.h.i.+p; we ourselves, though of Long Will's disciples.h.i.+p, had not faith enough in the personal tradition to visit the reputed birthplace at Cleobury Mortimer in Shrops.h.i.+re; but on those breezy slopes still seems to linger the wistful presence of a gaunt, "forwandred" clerk who

"In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne, On a May mornynge on Malverne hulles"

dreamed the Easter dream, still unfulfilled on earth, of human brotherhood.

These gracious heights, standing

"Close as brother leans to brother, When they press beneath the eyes Of some father praying blessings From the gifts of Paradise,"

gave hiding for four years to Sir John Oldcastle, the genial Lollard who made merry with Prince Hal, but would not renounce his faith, and was finally given up by the over-orthodox young king to the bishops.

Henry V himself was present at the martyrdom, peculiarly revolting, but the worst of it all is that Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, endorsed the Roman Catholic caricature and wronged a true and generous spirit in his ineffaceable portrait of Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal's "old lad of the castle." It must be that Raggedstone Hill, which casts a curse on whomsoever its shadow touches, gloomed with peculiar blackness over the hunted knight. Its ominous shade is said to have stolen on Cardinal Wolsey and on those royal fugitives of the Red Rose, Margaret of Anjou and the hapless young Prince Edward.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TEWKESBURY ABBEY]

From the summit of Worcester Beacon and from other of the higher Malvern crests the view ranges, on a clear day, over some fifteen counties and embraces the six momentous battlefields of Shrewsbury, Mortimer's Cross, Edge Hill, Worcester, Evesham and Tewkesbury, and the three cathedrals of Hereford, Worcester, and Gloucester, besides the remnants of six great religious houses of mediaeval England,--Great and Little Malvern, Persh.o.r.e, Evesham, Deerhurst and Tewkesbury. Little Malvern Priory, established in the twelfth century by a band of Benedictine monks from Worcester who sought the wilds that they might emulate the life of hermits, survives only in fragments, but the church of Great Malvern Priory, an earlier outgrowth from Worcester, keeps its Norman interior, with rich treasures of stained gla.s.s and miserere carvings. We had pa.s.sed through the Vale of Evesham toward the close of our long Midland drive and seen the scant relics of its mitred abbey, but we fail to follow the Avon on to Persh.o.r.e, one of the richest and most powerful of the old monastic foundations. Not only were these monasteries planted in the fairest and most fruitful lands of the county, but a large portion of Worcesters.h.i.+re was owned by them and by the neighbouring abbeys of Gloucesters.h.i.+re. In all this horde of priests one has a special claim to literary remembrance,--Layamon, who dwelt in the hamlet of Ernley, near the junction of the Severn and the Stour. He const.i.tutes an important link in the pa.s.sing on of the Arthurian legend, which, first related in Latin prose by that entertaining prelate, Geoffrey of Monmouth, had been already rendered into French verse by Wace, the professional chronicler of the Plantagenets. Layamon retold and amplified the story, using the French poem as his basis, but aided by two other works whose ident.i.ty is doubtful.

"Layamon these books beheld and the leaves he turned. He them with love beheld. Aid him G.o.d the Mighty! Quill he took with his fingers, and wrote on book-skin, and the true words set together, and the three books pressed into one."

We could pay only a flying visit to Malvern this summer, but in other summers have resorted thither again and again for the refreshment of the blithe air and pure water and of walking on those turfy hills where many a grateful sojourner has left path or seat to ease the climber's way.

Worcester, too, was familiar ground, and this time we gave but a few hours to the "Faithful City," which paid so dearly for its steadfast loyalty to Charles I. The unspeakable Parliamentarians proved nearly as destructive as the Danes, who, in the ninth century and again in the eleventh, had sacked it with fire and sword. The militant Presbyterians wreaked their piety most of all upon the Cathedral, leaving it roofless, its splendid gla.s.s all shattered, its bra.s.ses wrenched away, its altars desecrated and torn down. We found the red-brick town upon the Severn brisk and cheerful, with its proud shop-window display of its own products, from the Royal Worcester China to Worcesters.h.i.+re Sauce, with the deeply laden barges that almost hid the river; its lively hop market; and its grunting sows, each with her litter of recalcitrant little pigs, driven in a meandering course through the main street by ruddy boys and girls. The cathedral, whose memories embrace St. Dunstan and St. Wulfstan and that stout-hearted old martyr of Oxford, Bishop Latimer--who had himself once presided at the burning of a friar--uplifted our hearts with its august vista of nave and choir. The crowned tenant of that choir, King John, ought to be troubled in his gilded rest by the proximity of a Prince Arthur, though not the Arthur to whom he did such grievous wrong. The best of the cathedral is, to my thinking, the solemn grace of the crypt, beneath whose light-pillared arches stand about various stone figures of rueful countenance. After their centuries of sunlight, high-niched on the central tower, the Restorer has scornfully dislodged them and dungeoned them down here.

Just below Worcester the Severn is augmented by the Teme, which has valiantly cut its way through the line of western hills to join the court of Sabrina, and at Tewkesbury, on the Gloucester border, it receives its most famous affluent, Shakespeare's Avon. Tewkesbury was new to us, and we lingered there two days, wis.h.i.+ng we might make them twenty. As it was we had to forego the delightful trip on the Severn to Deerhurst, an old monastic town whose pre-Norman church is said to be of extremely curious architecture.

Tewkesbury Abbey, which outranks in size ten of the twenty-eight English cathedrals, is one of the most ill.u.s.trious churches in the United Kingdom. Unlike most of the larger monastic establishments, it was under the control of a succession of great families whose deeds and misdeeds form no small part of the history of England. Fitz-Hamon, kin to the Conqueror, swept away what buildings of the old Saxon abbey he may have found there, and erected the magnificent Norman church which still awes the beholder. The ashes of Fitz-Hamon, who died in 1107, rest near the High Altar. The next lord of Tewkesbury to be buried in the Abbey was Gilbert de Clare, one of the signers of Magna Charta. The name of his father, Richard de Clare, headed the list, and one of the seven copies of the Great Charter was deposited in the Abbey. Every lord of Tewkesbury after Gilbert de Clare was interred in this church, which, for the next two hundred and fifty years, until the lords.h.i.+p of Tewkesbury was absorbed into the Crown, grew ever more splendid with costly monuments. The widow of Gilbert de Clare married the brother of Henry III, Richard, Duke of Cornwall, but although she thus became a countess of many t.i.tles and one of the first ladies of the land, she asked, in dying, to be buried beside the husband of her youth in Tewkesbury. To this her second husband would not agree, but he was magnanimous enough to send her poor, homesick heart back to the Abbey in a silver vase, which was duly placed in Earl Gilbert's marble mausoleum.

The De Clares of Tewkesbury, Earls of Gloucester and Hereford, were a warrior race. The second Gilbert, called the Red Earl, fought both with Simon de Montfort, and against him, and the third Gilbert, his son, fell at Bannockburn. By his early death the lords.h.i.+p of Tewkesbury pa.s.sed from the De Clares, who had held it for nearly a century, to the young earl's brother-in-law, Hugh le Despencer. This new Earl of Gloucester had succeeded Piers Gaveston in the perilous favour of Edward II. When Roger de Mortimer, by the unhallowed aid of Queen Isabel, triumphed over the king, the elder Despencer, a man of ninety, was hanged at Bristol, and his son, Hugh le Despencer, crowned with nettles, was swung from the gallows fifty feet high, in a hubbub of mockeries and rejoicings, at Hereford. His widow collected the scattered quarters of his body, exposed in various towns, and interred them in the Abbey under a richly carved and coloured monument. The Despencers, though no longer Earls of Gloucester, held the lords.h.i.+p of Tewkesbury for wellnigh another hundred years, cheris.h.i.+ng and beautifying the fabric of the church and adding lavishly to its memorials of bronze and marble and to its treasure of chalices, copes, and jewels.

Early in the fifteenth century the male line of the Despencers became extinct, and the Lady Isabel, sister of the last Lord Despencer, succeeded to the ecclesiastical honours of the family. Married in the Abbey at the age of eleven to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Worcester, she was widowed ten years later and found her solace in building an exquisite chapel, known as the Warwick Chantry, in her husband's memory. Her second husband, cousin to the first, was Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, whom she commemorated in the still more elaborate Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick; but she herself chose to lie at Tewkesbury. Her daughter married Warwick the King-maker and became the mother of two fair girls of most pathetic story. The elder, Isabel, was wedded to George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward III,--"false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,"--who is supposed to have been murdered in the Tower through the agency of his brother Richard--drowned, the whisper went, in a b.u.t.t of Malmsey wine. A fortnight earlier his wife and an infant child had died, probably of poison. A son and daughter survived, who, for the royal blood that flowed in their veins, were regarded with uneasiness by the Tudor kings and ultimately sent to the block. The daughter, Margaret Plantagenet, superintended the education of the Princess Mary, and was once described by Henry VIII himself as "the most saintly woman in England." But she was the mother of Cardinal Pole, who had angered the tyrant and was on the Continent out of his reach; so this reverend and gracious lady, at the age of sixty-eight, had her stately head clumsily hacked off by a prentice executioner on Tower Hill, where her innocent brother had perished forty-two years before. The second daughter of the Countess Isabel had an even more pitiful life than her sister's, for her first husband was Prince Edward, the last Lancastrian, and then, after he had been foully slain, she strangely accepted the hand of one of his murderers, Richard of Gloucester, the worst of the Yorkists, by whom she was soon, it would appear, coolly put out of the world. A favourite saying of the county, probably having reference to the extraordinary number and wealth of its religious houses, runs: "As sure as G.o.d is in Gloucesters.h.i.+re," but one can hardly read these tragedies of Tewkesbury without feeling that the Devil has been no infrequent sojourner there.

The lamentable Wars of the Roses, which had drenched England with blood, threw up their last red spray against the Abbey. The resolute Queen Margaret and her son had attempted, with an army raised by the Duke of Somerset, to get possession of Gloucester, but they found it already held by the Yorkists and hastened on to Tewkesbury. Still weary from their forced march, they were attacked by Edward at break of a summer dawn (1471) while the monks were chanting matins in the Abbey, and sustained a signal defeat. The place of slaughter is still known as b.l.o.o.d.y Meadow. The Duke of Somerset, with a few knights and squires, took refuge within the sacred walls, but Edward and his followers, hot for vengeance, rushed in to slay them even there. The abbot, who had just been celebrating ma.s.s, came from the altar and, holding the consecrated host high in his hands, stood between the furious Yorkists and their prey. The war-wrath was for the moment stayed, and Edward gave his word to respect the peace of the sanctuary. But after a service of thanksgiving, the blood-anointed king and his fierce n.o.bles withdrew to a house hard by, where that unhappy younger Edward, the legitimate heir to the throne, was brought a defenceless prisoner into their presence, insulted, a.s.sailed, and slain. The rumour went that the king himself had with his gauntleted hand struck the royal youth across the mouth, and in an instant the others, like wild beasts, were upon him, Richard of Gloucester in the front. It is believed that the mangled, boyish body was buried in the Abbey under the central tower.

But while the lords of Tewkesbury stormed through their brief careers, coming one after another to lie, battle-bruised, stabbed, headless, quartered, even with the halter-mark about the neck, within the holy hush of the great church, its Benedictine monks went on a quiet way, tilling the soil, writing glosses, copying service-books, chanting prayers, exercising a large hospitality and a larger charity. At the Dissolution, the townspeople, who had from time immemorial used the nave as their parochial church, bought the choir and chapels from Henry VIII, so that this n.o.ble structure, so significant in English story, escaped the fate of Furness, Tintern, and the many more.

We had ourselves a little difficulty in getting beyond the nave. We had gone in an hour before service on a Sunday evening, hoping to be allowed to walk around the choir, but we incurred scathing rebuke from a red-haired verger, who had practised like eloquence on Sunday automobile parties until his flow of denunciation was Hebraic. We gave way at once, expressed due contrition, and meekly sat down to wait for evensong. Whereupon, after furtively scrutinising us from behind one pillar after another, he cautiously approached and with searching little blue eyes severely inquired if we really intended to stay for the service,--"all through the sermon, ye understand; not just for the music." Our reply so raised us in his opinion that he actually took us on the rounds, proving an intelligent and even jocose conductor, and we, for our part, heard the sermon to the very end, not daring to stir from our places until the last note of "Milton's organ" had died away.

Many visitors come to this attractive old town, with its timbered houses and pleasant river-walks, for the sake of "John Halifax, Gentleman." The scenes of Mrs. Craik's tender romance, Abel Fletcher's dwelling, the mill on the Avon, the tannery, the remains of the famous hedge, the garden where the two lads talked, are pointed out as soberly and simply as that ancient house in Church Street whose floor is said still to keep the stain of princely blood, or the cross where the Duke of Somerset and his companions, dragged from the shelter of the Abbey in violation of the king's own promise, were beheaded.

But the Severn, with ever-broadening flow, a tidal river now that fills and shallows twice a day, bears onward to the sea. Her course lies for a while through orchards and wheat-fields. The Cotswolds, separating the Severn valley from the basin of the Thames and const.i.tuting the bulk of Gloucesters.h.i.+re, rise in billowy outlines on the east and, presently, Dean Forest, one of the few remaining patches of England's formerly abundant woods, uplifts its "broad and burly top" on the west. The earth beneath those oaks and beeches has h.o.a.rds of mineral wealth, and furnaces are scattered through the forest glades. At Gloucester the Severn divides, that

"with the more delight She might behold the towne of which she's wondrous proud."

And a fine old town it is, still keeping, in its four right-angled streets, the original Roman plan. Large vessels can make their way up the Severn as far as Gloucester, which Elizabeth, to Bristol's neighbourly disgust, chartered as a seaport, though the Berkeley Ca.n.a.l, opened in 1827, is now the regular channel. The cathedral stands upon ground hallowed since the seventh century. This building, for all the solemn grandeur of its Norman nave, is of most interest, from an architectural point of view, because of its gradual development of the Perpendicular style, gloriously manifest in choir and cloister. Its masons seem to have been particularly ingenious, for the building abounds in original and fanciful features of which the Whispering Gallery is only an example. Its martyr is John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. One of Mary's earliest victims, he was sent from London back to Gloucester, where he was greatly beloved, to be burned before the eyes of his own flock. Many royal prayers have been murmured beneath these vaulted roofs, and many royal feasts of Severn salmon and lamprey-pie held in the grey city. The Saxon kings were much at Gloucester; William the Conqueror spent his Yule-tides here whenever he could, and here, in the chapter house, he ordered the compilation of Domesday Book; Rufus, Henry I, Henry II, and John often visited the town, and Henry III, as a boy of ten, was crowned in the cathedral. Parliaments were held in Gloucester by Edward I, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, and from Gloucester Richard III, with whom murder had grown to be a habit, is supposed to have sent secret orders to the Tower for the smothering of his little nephews. In a side-chapel is the tomb of Robert, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the conqueror. The effigy, of Irish oak, is so instinct with force and vigour in its only half rec.u.mbent posture that the iron screen seems really necessary to hold the Norman down. But the royal burial that made the fortunes of the cathedral was that of the wretched Edward II, whose canopied tomb in the choir became a favourite shrine of pilgrimage.

Still the Severn, now with a burden of heavily freighted barges, a mighty flood that has left more than one hundred miles behind the tiny pool, three inches deep, in which it rose, sweeps on, past the stern walls of Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was cruelly done to death, toward the Somerset boundary. Here it receives the waters of the lower Avon, on which the great port of Bristol stands, and so the proud Sabrina leads her retinue of streams into the Bristol Channel,

"Supposing then herself a sea-G.o.d by her traine."

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Leland.

[8] "Gregory's Chronicle." In "Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century." Camden Society: 1876.

SOMERSET AND DEVONs.h.i.+RE

The three southwestern counties of England, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, reach out, like the hearts of their sons, into the wild Atlantic. Many a Westward Ho adventure was sped from Bristol, Bideford, Plymouth, Dartmouth, and even from Topsham, which long served as the port of Exeter. The far-sea Elizabethan sailors and their dauntless commanders, those "Admirals All" whose praises a living poet of these parts, Henry Newbolt, has sung, came largely from this corner of England. The father of Sir Francis Drake was a Tavistock tar. That dreamer of illimitable dreams, Sir Walter Raleigh, was born in the little Devon village of East Budleigh. Another Devon village, familiar to Raleigh's boyhood, Ottery St. Mary, is the native place of Coleridge, whose immortal sea-ballad came into being just over the Somerset border, in those radiant days when he and Wordsworth, two young poets in the fulness of their friends.h.i.+p and the freshness of their inspiration, would go wandering together, from their homes in Nether Stowey, off on the Quantock Hills,--days commemorated by Wordsworth in "The Prelude."

"Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved, Unchecked we loitered 'mid her sylvan courts; Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart, Didst chant the vision of that Ancient Man, The bright-eyed Mariner."

My first view of the Quantocks was had, some years ago, from Exmoor.

Coming through North Devon, we had been walking for hours, knee-deep in heather, over that high, rolling moorland where the red deer still run wild. The pollen rose in clouds about our heads. Black-faced sheep and white-tailed rabbits and startled, flurrying heath-c.o.c.ks shared, but did not break, the rapture of that solitude. Bell-heather and rose-heather and white heather mingled their hues, at a little distance, in a rippling sea of purple. We lay down in it, and the fragrant sprays closed warm about us, while the soft sky seemed almost to touch our faces. We were supremely happy and we hoped that we were lost. We had long been out of sight of human habitation, but our compa.s.s served us better than we wished, and when, with a covert sense of disappointment, though the sun was red on the horizon, we came at last upon a woman and child gathering whortleberries in a dimple of the moor, we learned that we were, as we should have been, in the heart of the Lorna Doone country.

All lovers of Blackmore's delectable romance remember that its modest hero, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, was a Somerset man.

"Zummerzett thou bee'st, Jan Ridd, and Zummerzett thou shalt be." But the Doone glen, which actually was, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the hold of a marauding band of outlaws, lies on Badgeworthy Water, a part of the Devon boundary. We ate our handful of whortleberries in Devon, but soon, following directions, found ourselves on the brow of a steep incline, peering over upon a farmhouse, known as Lorna's Bower, in the valley below. Scrambling down the declivity as best we might, we crossed the Badgeworthy by means of a log and a hand-rail, climbed a fence inhospitably placed at the end of this rude bridge, and thus made unceremonious entrance into Somerset. They were gruff of speech at Lorna's Bower, but kind of heart, and treated the belated wanderers well, feasting us on the inevitable ham and eggs, with a last taste of Devons.h.i.+re cream, and giving us the warm corner of the settle by the great, peat-burning fireplace. A sheepskin waistcoat, with the wool yet on, lay across the rheumatic knees of our host, and hams and sides of bacon dangled from the rafters overhead.

According to the saying "It always rains on Exmoor," the next morning broke in storm, and we made slow progress under the rain and over the mud along the Badgeworthy. All our path was a Waterslide, yet we came at last to the Doone valley, where tumbled heaps of stone mark the site of the felons' houses. Foxglove and bracken and heather would have whispered us the gossip of the place, but a sudden spurt of especially violent rain drove us on to a shepherd's hut for refuge.

Two sportsmen, booted and spurred, with their horses saddled in the shed, all ready to mount and ride if the Exmoor hunt should sweep that way, were there before us. One of them told us that his own house had the dints of the Doones' terrible blows on one of its oak doors. As the weather had gone from bad to worse, we abandoned our walking trip, bestowed ourselves in a creakity cart, the only vehicle there obtainable, and drove past the little Oare church, where John and Lorna were so tragically wedded, over "Robbers' Bridge," and on to the top of Oare Hill. Here we paused for a memorable view of the rain-silvered landscape, with Dunkery Beacon glimmering above. On through blurred pictures of beautiful scenery we went, into the village of Porlock, sweet with roses, and plunging down Porlock Hill, we held on our gusty way to Minehead. The hostelries of this favourite watering-place being full, we pushed on by an evening train to Taunton, a fair town of heroic history. In the stormy times of Charles I, it was twice gallantly defended by Admiral Blake, himself a son of Somerset, against the cavalier forces. Forty years later, when the unpopular James II had succeeded to his brother's throne, Taunton frankly embraced the perilous cause of the Duke of Monmouth, welcoming him with joyous ceremonies. In Taunton market-place he was proclaimed king, and from Taunton he issued his royal proclamations. The Duke was utterly defeated at Sedgemoor, three miles to the east of Bridgewater, in what Macaulay designates as "the last fight deserving the name of a battle that has been fought on English ground." The simple Somerset folk who had followed the banners of Monmouth were punished with pitiless severity. The brutal officers made a jest of the executions.

A range of gibbets, with their ghastly burdens, crossed the moor, but Taunton was the especial victim of the royal vengeance. A hundred prisoners were put to death there by Kirke and his "lambs," and wellnigh another hundred hanged by such process of law as was embodied in Jeffrey's "b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.size."

But we would not linger in Taunton,--no, not even for the sake of its gentle Elizabethan poet, Samuel Daniel, nor would we stay our journey for trips to the places of varied interest on either side. A little to the southwest is Wellington, which gave The Iron Duke his t.i.tle. Going north from there one would come soon to Milverton, the birthplace of Dr. Thomas Young, that ingenious linguist who first began to read the riddle of the Sphinx; for he had deciphered some half dozen of the Egyptian hieroglyphics in advance of Champollion's great announcement.

A few miles further to the north is Combe Flory, the pleasant parsonage which Sidney Smith made so gay, even binding his books, and theological books at that, in brightest colours. To get a tropical effect, and to hoax his guests, he hung oranges from his garden shrubs, and to gratify a lady who hinted that deer would ornament the little park, he fitted out his two donkeys--who doubtless had their opinion of him and of his doings--with branching antlers, and stationed them before the windows for a pastoral effect. Well away to the east of Taunton is Ilchester, the birthplace of that ill.u.s.trious thirteenth-century friar, Roger Bacon, a necromancer to his own generation, and a pioneer in scientific method to ours; and near by Ilchester is Odcombe, where Tom Coryatt, stoutest-soled of travellers, was born. He claimed to have walked, between May and October of 1608, no less than nineteen hundred and seventy-five miles over the continent of Europe, and had just achieved a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and a call on the Great Mogul when, under the eastern stars, he died.

England profited by his travels in the entertaining volume commonly known as Coryatt's "Crudities," as well as in that foreign elegance of table-forks which he is said to have introduced.