Lynton and Lynmouth Part 5

In the twelfth century the manors of Lynton and Countisbury were in the possession of Henry de Tracy, Becket's murderer, and by him were given to the Abbey of Ford, in whose right they remained until the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Ford Abbey was a foundation of Cistercian monks, an order which was always engaged in matters of practical value, and under their rule something was done to improve the breed of mountain sheep round this district and produce wool of greater market value; they also attempted some development of agriculture and the fishery of Lynmouth. They had, indeed, extensive rights of fishery by land and sea--a very valuable a.s.set, it must be remembered, in the Middle Ages, when the ma.s.s of the population lived almost exclusively on salt fish, and meat was scarce, except on the tables of the n.o.ble. Their rights extended over Lynmouth, Martinhoe, Countisbury, and the coast of Wales, and the monopoly of deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng along the Severn Sea. This went beyond the old manorial claim, which was "from the sh.o.r.e so far seaward as a horsed knight could, at low water-springs, reach with his spear."

Beyond was the King's, and was free and open to all his subjects, though a claim for deep-sea rights was allowed if it could be proved to be of very ancient usage, as in the case of Ford Abbey. Lynmouth was a noted resort for herrings all through the Middle Ages, and curing-houses stood on the beach for many years until 1607, when nearly all were swept away by a great storm, and never after properly reconstructed. The herrings also at some time in the seventeenth century left these coasts completely--tradition says because of the avarice of a parson of Lynton, a hard man and greedy, who cared rather to fleece his flock than feed them, and who imposed such heavy t.i.thes on his poor paris.h.i.+oners, that, in spite of the prosperity of their fis.h.i.+ng, they were unable to pay them. So the herrings left the district, and the parson could whistle for them, until he mended his ways and reduced his t.i.thes, when they magically returned.

At the dissolution of the monasteries very little difference in the daily routine of their lives can have been felt by the country people round Lynton and Countisbury. John Chidley, who had been bailiff for Ford Abbey, applied to the King for continuation in his office, which was granted to him, and he administered the property for Henry VIII, Edward VI, and, Elizabeth, as he had administered it for the Abbey of Ford.

Nor did the Civil Wars touch it nearly. Barnstaple and Dunster were taken and retaken by the Parliamentarian troops, and armies marched from Dunster west to Bideford across Exmoor and the great commons, but no armed troops came down into Lynton; perhaps hardly even a straggler found his way there. In the tragic rebellion of 1685 a b.l.o.o.d.y little drama was enacted here indeed, but that is connected with the history of the de Wichehalses, the family of chief interest and importance who have lived at Lynton. They did not come to Lynton before the early seventeenth century; their home was a small hamlet called Wych, near Chudleigh in Devons.h.i.+re, though Blackmore invents for them a romantic Dutch pedigree, and a.s.serts that they fled to England to escape from Spanish persecution in the Netherlands; this story, however, has been proved entirely without foundation by the careful researches of Mr. Chanter. In the time of Elizabeth, he says, these de Wichehalses had overflowed all over the country; we find them at Exeter, Chudleigh, Ashcombe, and Powderham. In 1530 one, Nicholas de Wichehalse, settled at Barnstaple and started in the woollen trade; he married into the Salisbury family, who were in the same business; and when he died he decreed by will that his nephew John should marry his stepdaughter, Katherine Salisbury. The next Nicholas de Wichehalse married Lettice Deamond, the daughter of the Mayor of Barnstaple, and it is an inventory of his shop, taken in 1607, that I have quoted in a previous chapter.

His son Hugh married in due course, and continued to live at his family mansion in Crock Street, until, in 1627, the fear of the plague which ravaged Barnstaple and Bideford (it was supposed to have been brought into the towns by an infected mattress which had been thrown overboard by a plague-stricken s.h.i.+p, and was fished out of the river just below Barnstaple by four children who were fis.h.i.+ng) drove the de Wichehalses out of the city.

Hugh de Wichehalse decided to send his family to the purer air of the old Grange Farm of Lee, near Lynton. One can picture the removal: his wife, his children, his servants, and a whole string of packhorses (carriages were still rare as a means of transport), coming down Boutport Street, and across Pilton Causeway, up the beautiful and fertile valley of the Yeo, to Westland Pound on the edge of Blackmoor, and its inn, where in all probability they slept. The next day they would be on the high barren moors, where the air was too sweet and keen for infection, and so would come across Parracombe Common, Martinhoe Common, Lynton Common, and down the Valley of Rocks to Lee (what is now called Lee Abbey).

The farm stood about a mile and a half or two miles from Lynton, and after the busy life of the town their solitude must have seemed to them excessive, for their near neighbours would live half a dozen miles away, and were inaccessible in winter. There were the Berrys from Cross...o...b.., a branch of the Berrynarbor family into which Hugh's sister had married; the Knights at West Lyn; the Pophams, who came from Porlock.

The family lived there for the next eighty years. Hugh was buried in the parish church at Lynton, and his monument can be seen there; it is he to whom Blackmore refers in "Lorna Doone" as Baron Hugh, who was somewhat too much hand-in-glove with the Doones; but the "young Squire Marwood,"

who rode too frequently past the Ridds' farm and kissed Annie Ridd, is a character of fiction, for Hugh de Wichehalse's son was called John, and not Marwood, there was never one of that name.

John was a strong Parliamentarian, and married into the Venner family; but very soon they were in opposite camps, and there was great distrust and anger between them. Colonel Venner commanded a regiment in Monmouth's haphazard and ill-fated army in 1685. Wade, a renegade lawyer from Holland, with a captain's commission, served in his regiment, and after the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor, Wade and Ferguson (a notorious factious Scotchman, and the father of all plots) escaped to Bridgewater and from thence got pa.s.sage down to Ilfracombe. There they hired a small s.h.i.+p and worked their way up the coast, hoping to rescue other refugees; they were sighted and chased by one of the King's frigates, and were forced to run ash.o.r.e, when Lynton became the scene of one of those grim and terrible rebel hunts which made the West Country tragic and b.l.o.o.d.y during that summer of 1685. Wade was discovered at Brendon by John de Wichehalse; he made a run for it, and was shot by de Wichehalse's servant, John Babb. The Babbs were said never to have prospered afterwards; their crops failed, the fisheries failed, and they became extinct in the second generation. The last of them, Ursula Babb, the grand-daughter of John, was to be seen wandering up and down the little beach of Lynmouth, a half-crazed old crone, cursed with the evil-eye, and babbling disjointed and incoherent stories of the ruin of the de Wichehalses.

Partly because of discord between him and the Venner family, partly because of the strong feeling which was aroused locally by the action of de Wichehalse, who had the body of a rebel who was shot in Bonham Wood quartered and hung on the paled gate opposite Lee, he left Lynton and went to live in London. The simple Devons.h.i.+re estates could not support the expenses of living in London; bit after bit his property was mortgaged and frittered away, and when he died he possessed East Leymouth (now Lynmouth) only, which he left to his daughter Mary. She it was who became the heroine of all the stories of the "last of the de Wichehalses," which, indeed, she was. She met a sudden and unexplained death off Duty Point, and the White Lady of Castle Rock--a phenomenon caused by a small aperture, bearing a slight resemblance to a woman's figure, among the dark ma.s.ses of the rock--is popularly supposed to be connected with her fate. Of her brothers, Charles, the younger, was killed at the Battle of Almanza in 1707, when the English, under Lord Galway, lost 18,000 men and all their transport, and the elder brother, John, died at Port Mahon, in Minorca, in 1721, while on garrison duty, and this branch of the family became extinct.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Duty Point]

And this is positively all the history of Lynton, until, in the time of the French Revolution, when the turbulent state of the Continent made it inadvisable to spend a holiday abroad, its beauty was discovered by those eager to find in England that enjoyment of the picturesque which before they had looked for in Italy and Southern France. We use "picturesque"

now in a slightly derogatory sense, or we use it patronizingly, because it is old-fas.h.i.+oned and belongs to the nineteenth century, and Ruskin and Wordsworth, and even Horace Walpole and his "Gothic" ruin on Strawberry Hill; and we are of the twentieth century, and have discovered the beauty of docks and harbours and tall factory chimneys and railway stations, under the guidance of Whistler and Brangwyn and such folk, and we do not fret at laying a railway through Perths.h.i.+re or the Lake District, because railways are fast becoming almost as romantic and old-fas.h.i.+oned to us as stage-coaches (in these days of aeroplanes and automobiles); but at least let us remember that it is to the nineteenth century that we owe that acute appreciation, not only of the visible beauty of the world, but of the spirit that lies behind it, that personal and intimate character of places which is one of our dear possessions. Mountains and woods, cliff and cove, have become to us a truism of beauty, but let us at least be grateful to the generation which first dared to see more in the boundless Scotch hills and moors than "savage and disgusting country," or to compare the pinnacles of the Alps to human handiwork--greatly to their disadvantage. And the small absurdities, the "ruins" that they loved, the "abbeys" they erected, were only part of that general half-conscious striving to apprehend and express the spirit of romance with which we are still moved in our own day, which Kipling expresses in his own fas.h.i.+on and Conrad in his, down to the small-change of literature which struggles for expression in our magazines and periodicals.

So when Sh.e.l.ley and Coleridge and Wordsworth came to Lynton, and found it beautiful, and nearly decided to live there and be the poets of Devon instead of the poets of the Lake District, it was because they found in it that quality of beauty which they needed; and when, a little later, Lynton was "discovered" by one or more people of wealth--notably by Mr.

Coutts, the banker, who built houses there and hotels, and began to noise its beauty up and down the London world--it was just the outermost ripple of the vast disturbance of the French Revolution which touched the little spot, part of the free new eager spirit which sent men questing for a loveliness they could neither make nor control, and of which they must be humble and pa.s.sive spectators, and part also of vast causes and changes, which drove Englishmen to seek their holidays within their own sh.o.r.es.

Before closing this second chapter on Lynton, I cannot forbear to speak yet further of the beautiful scenery in which it lies. There is Summerhouse Hill, or Lyn Cleave, as it is more charmingly and appropriately called, the great rocky height, a thousand feet above Lynmouth, which looks down on the two villages and which divides the valleys of the East and West Lyn. Lying on the short dry springy turf, in the mellow sunlight of late afternoon, you can look along the velvety wooded valley of the East Lyn, where the stream is hidden by the tufted banks of the trees, and by s.h.i.+fting ever so slightly on your elbows as you lie at ease you can look into the bare brown rocky valley of the West Lyn, and see the gleam of the river foaming over its rocks a thousand feet below. All round is the cawing of rooks, as they sail majestically back to their nests, grave and cheerful with their abundance of food and their security of tenure. England belongs to the rooks, says a friend of mine. We English may live here, we may build houses and farms, we may plough and sow and reap, we may make revolutions or wars, sending our armies marching through the countryside in creeping dusty columns, but we are only illusions on the page of history, shadows flitting across the face of the land; the rooks are perpetual, ineradicable, and possessive.

They feed behind our plough; they flock in our green trees; they build in our valleys and in the shelter of our houses; summer and winter they are seen flying under our English skies; they mate and nest and bicker round our cathedrals and our cottages; they are noisy and turbulent and unrestrained before us, as if we were no more than the hedges we plant and prune; they are irrepressible as street-arabs, and arrogant as monarchs. If all human life were by some unimagined catastrophe swept from the length and breadth of England, the cawing of the rooks would sound as certainly, and they would fly forth to their morning meal and back across the evening sky to their tall green elm-trees as if they had never sailed over the heads of men who looked up and saw in them the symbol of peace, security, and comfort, which they loved to call England.

For a good walker the road that lies between Lynmouth and Porlock is an adventure worth taking, though it gives a taste of the steep and shadeless roads which lead up and down these moors, pitilessly sun-scorched in summer, and pitilessly bleak and windswept in winter, when the rain and sleet comes stinging and driving in your face, and yet somehow, at all times of the year, worth adventuring for the splendid, open, untamed beauty they show you.

If you take carriage (in which case you will walk the greater part of the way!), you will start from Lynmouth, and ascend the steep hill that leads right up the cliff to Countisbury Foreland--I should have said the steepest two miles of carriage road in England, had I not also climbed Porlock Hill, twelve miles northward. The surface of the road is loose, and scoured by winter rains, and on a windy day the dust comes swirling down it like a miniature sandstorm. I have, indeed, seen even a car obliged to draw up to let the blinding red swirl go by; and from Lynton, on the opposite side of the valley, the whole headland has been blurred and obliterated by the dust, as if it were a fog.

If you are not driving, you may go up the East Lyn Valley, past the Watersmeet, till you strike the path for Brendon, a more sheltered way on a hot morning, but steep also, for the hills are not to be avoided, and you have somehow to climb 1,300 feet from the sea to Countisbury.

Countisbury itself is a tiny, bare, white-washed hamlet, with a small bare white inn with the sign of the Blue Ball; it stands on the borders of Devon and Somerset, and hence some have supposed the name to mean the "county's boundary"--but this, I think, is a case of false a.n.a.logy, and the Celtic origin of the "camp on the headland" is far more likely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Moors near Brendon Two Gates]

The Foreland is a great bold promontory looking towards the Welsh coast, which hangs on the horizon like a low silver cloud above the faint haze of the summer sea. Below lie Sillery Sands, and the caves of the beach; beyond, the opening heights of Exmoor, in long flat curves, featureless, s.p.a.cious, and beautiful, purple and sombre under the wrack of rain-clouds, grey and arid in the fierce blaze of the midsummer sun, most lovely of all on crisp September mornings, when the heather is abloom in miles on miles of changing purples and the air has a keen, clean edge, as if it were blown off the top of the world. The air of Exmoor has always this sharp sweetness, however much the sun may blaze, as John Ridd knew; and looking over the wide-stretching countryside, one sees many a farm that might have been his, a st.u.r.dy, whitewashed affair, flanked generously with out-buildings, and standing high, but sheltered, in a hollow of the ground, cut off from its neighbours by the rising hills, and even more isolated in winter by the deep ruts of the roads, muddy and impa.s.sable, that wind from valley to valley.

A mile beyond County Gate is the village of Oare, where John Kidd and Lorna were married; and as we follow the Porlock road across the moors we see on our right the dip of the Doone Valley, where Lorna's bower was, and a few scattered remains of stone huts show the habitations of the outlaws. It is a scene of wildness and grandeur; on the left lies the blue sea, on the right the dun-coloured moors. There are no trees, save for a few writhen and stunted alders, covered with lichen till they are the colour of stone, and look like petrified remains of an earlier age; they are grown all to one side under the stress of the prevailing wind.

The only signs of life are the scattered sheep, their grey backs scarcely visible among the heather and close furze, a great buzzard hawk poised far up in the blue, and, when his shadow has pa.s.sed, sailing slowly over the shadeless ground, the sweet, monotonous song of mounting larks.

CHAPTER VI

PORLOCK AND EXMOOR

The road now lies in Somerset; we pa.s.s Glenthorne, lying five hundred feet below, among its beautiful green woods and stretches of vivid green turf, and separated by some five miles of barren brown moors from the village of Porlock. The road that leads from Exmoor down to Porlock is incredibly steep, the steepest coach-road in England. It twists dangerously in sharp right-angle turns, the surface is loose and stony, worn by the dragging of brakes and the scouring of winter rains, and on a summer afternoon it is so hot, so dusty and glaring, and so steep, that it seems impossible for man or beast to climb. As soon as you are at the top, however, the fresh air of Exmoor fills your lungs and freshens your face, so let n.o.body be dissuaded from it.

Porlock itself was a port in Saxon times and in the reign of William the Conqueror (I have told elsewhere how not only the Danes, but Saxon Earl Harold, drove his s.h.i.+ps into the harbour on a fierce raiding expedition), but it is now an inland village, and between it and the sea lie two miles of flat land of the most wonderful luxuriance. _De gustibus_ indeed, and to me Porlock is one of the most beautiful spots in all England. It lies in a green bay--what was a bay eight centuries ago--between two towering headlands. On three sides of it rise the heights of Exmoor, barren, beautiful, and windswept; before it stretch the lands over which the Danes sailed, running out to a thin strip of marshland, and then a silvery flat beach, and then the tremulous silver curve of the sea, not like the line of wave that breaks at the foot of cliffs, but a true marshland sea, seeming to come from nowhere, infinitely smooth and faint and distant from the level sh.o.r.e to the dim horizon.

There are many kinds of beauty in the world: beauty of hot suns and delicate mists, of sea and sh.o.r.e, mountain and lake and city; there is the beauty of barren moors and of green orchards, and of flat fertile marshlands where streams run amid a luxuriance of tangled growth, kingcups and meadowsweet and loose-strife and forget-me-nots, and feathery willows and rushes where the reed-warblers sing. And at Porlock there is such a gathering up of these different beauties that it is difficult to describe the pleasure that one has in it. I have told you how it is fenced by Exmoor, and lies within sight of Dunkery Beacon, the highest point of the moors; but it is impossible to convey adequately the peculiar beauty of those great smooth dipping curves, the satisfying breadth and harmony of their line, the way the sunlight lies upon them, and the rich deep shadows that slide into their folds.

And below, round Porlock, lie the orchards. I came there once in the spring, and as we turned the last angle of the stony road I saw before me such a sweep of blossom, such a foam of cherry and pear, white above the luxuriant gra.s.s, and of that delicate flushed rose of the apple-blossom, so exquisite a range of green, the hazy green of willows and the bright clear green of hawthorn, that it seemed impossible it should lie just under those miles on miles of moor where nothing bloomed but furze and heather.

The green fields that stretched away to the sea were just such fields as in the "Romaunt of the Rose" or the poems of the troubadours, fields verdantly green, and starred with daisies and golden with b.u.t.tercups--the "enamelled meads" of Chaucer and the little illumined pictures of the fourteenth-century ma.n.u.scripts; and the hedges were just such hedges, incredibly green, with here and there a break for the misty silver of the blackthorn. Wherever flowers could bloom they bloomed, in the gardens, in the hedges, by the roadside, in the crannies of the walls.

Porlock village itself is a quiet, charming spot which, in spite of the temptation of visitors who come here in considerable numbers in the autumn, when stag-hunting on Exmoor is in season, keeps most of its old-world simplicity, and has not much "modernized" itself. It is rambling, calm, and whitewashed; the bank itself is a long, low, cream building with a thatched roof, and a lovely note of colour from a climbing j.a.ponica. The s.h.i.+p Inn also is a pleasant old building, with a dark, cool coffee-room and heavy, timbered roof. "Southey's corner,"

where he is said to have written his poem, "Porlock, thy verdant vale . . .," on being detained at the s.h.i.+p by the heavy moorland rain, is by an old open fireplace, and has been cut off from a larger room by thin part.i.tioning walls. It is a pleasant homely place, with its sound of horses from the stable-yard, and the clink of its old pewter pots from the bar, with its low raftered ceiling and brick floor, and the sunlight seen from its open doors.

Porlock Church has a square tower, with a heavy, octagonal, truncated spire, which gives the little church an over-weighted appearance, but very distinctive in this country, of tall Perpendicular towers. It is dedicated to St. Dubricius, who is a Celtic saint of the sixth century, who crowned and anointed Arthur of the Round Table; in the twelfth century he became a very famous saint once more, after having been nearly forgotten for several hundred years. Many miracles were worked at his tomb, and churches were dedicated to him. The present church at Porlock was built about the thirteenth century by Sir Simon Fitz-Roges, who was a crusader, but I am inclined to think that the dedication to St. Dubric belonged to the early simple church (probably a thatched and whitewashed barn) which was there at the time of the Conquest, and which, like the neighbouring churches of St. Culbone and St. Brendon, harks back to Celtic Christianity of pre-Saxon times. The church was altered in the fifteenth century, and the Harington Chantry, which now contains the tomb of Baron Harington and his wife, was added, and the present spire, in place of the old one, which was blown down in a gale.

It is a little, quiet, grey English church, set peacefully in its green churchyard, shaded by a huge ancient yew, perhaps as old as itself. In the winter rain and wind beat round its solid grey walls, in spring the daffodils bloom in the churchyard, and on summer days the bees are busy among the clover and daisies over the graves. There are thousands of such small, sober, beautiful churches in England; they are the monument on which a fragment of the history of the race is inscribed; they are the nucleus of the village life; the beginning and the end of its activities have their sanction within its walls; they are rich with the continued service of men's lives, generation from generation taking up the duty and its privilege; they rise above the cl.u.s.tering roofs of the village, tower or spire, as the visible landmark of faith--not of a creed that can change and ebb and flow, but of a faith in the spiritual core that lies at the heart of material life, like the village church among the homes of its village.

We who pa.s.s casually, and pause, and step in and look, with a curious and antiquarian eye, for a bit of old bra.s.swork or carved screen, miss the intimate beauty of these churches as much, perhaps, as if we read them in a catalogue: "St. Dubric; 12th cent.; fine marble monument of 15th cent. . . ., and so on." The plainest and simplest holds within its whitewashed walls the beauty of continuous tradition; you must see it in all its aspects of daylight and evening light, summer and winter, the rainy, tumultuous November afternoons and the long, golden, mellow evenings of June, to realize what it offers, of peace and order, tenderness and calm.

Inside Porlock Church, which is light and white and simple, there is a beautiful canopied tomb of the fifteenth century, with the rec.u.mbent figures of Baron Harington and his wife Elizabeth Courteny, carved in alabaster. Whoever made these marble figures was an artist; not only is the detail of the dress intricately and beautifully carved, the foliated wreath of his helmet, the elaborate decoration of her girdle, and the curved "horns" of her head-dress rolled either side of her face, but the whole pose and outline of the figures is firm and gracious.

I find that this tomb is quite famous among virtuosi, though I was unaware of it when I came upon the monument in the quiet of a workaday afternoon; but its beauty at once claimed my eye, presenting something so different from the average mediaeval tomb, of interest chiefly for its age. These figures are slightly defaced, the sharp edges worn smooth by time, and scores of initials have been scratched roughly on the surface of his armour or her mantle; but there is a certainty of line, a sharpness, and at the same time a suavity of angle, a way of disposing the head and hands and body, all within the stiff convention of rigid tomb carving, that to any lover of sculpture reveals the sure hand of a master, whether he were a nameless stonemason, working in a secluded village, or a renowned man, invited from far.

Standing by this beautiful tomb I can see the sunlight through the open door, with a black splash across the gold, of the great yews beyond; I hear the crowing of c.o.c.ks and the voice of children, the creak of a pa.s.sing cart and the song of birds, all the simple, jolly sounds of that everyday life which is the plain fabric on which all history, of nations and empires and monarchs, is (if you like) the embroidery.

From Porlock to the little port of Porlock Weir is a walk of two miles along a narrow lane between high green hedges. The road leads nowhere else but there and back; it is a kind of enchanted road which goes to an enchanted village, a village at the world's end, beyond the circle of mere reality. Every cottage in Porlock Weir is just such a little cottage as J. M. Barrie's fairies might build, low-browed under a steep thatch, with great tall chimneys, in which are cut just such little windows as would frame a fairy's head, looking out and laughing and nodding at you; whitewashed, half-timbered cottages, grouped together in a jumble of delicious curves and angles, with dusky, deep oak doorways, and stone steps hollowed by the feet that have gone in and out, and long leaded windows, softly yellow with lamplight in the mellow twilight of summer evenings, and gardens--oh, gardens that are small, and walled with stone, and running over with colour and bloom as no other gardens in the world could ever be! Hydrangeas, geranium, larkspur and evening primrose, columbine, forget-me-not, roses--and, indeed, the roses have gone wild with freedom, and threaten to overflow and drown the village, trailing over the wall, running up the tall chimneys, thrusting in at the open windows--nor are there names for all the flowers that bloom here, for all the mellow gold and crimson and blue and yellow and purple that glow in the sunlight, and fade gently into shadows of themselves as night falls. Beyond is the sea, all round the flowering meadows of the marsh, behind the moors; to anyone who has had the fortune to see Porlock Weir on such a day in May as this I recall, when this England of ours seems, to our fancy, to gather up all beauties of colour and sound and scent and sunlight of which the long winter and the chill, reluctant spring have starved us, and offer them all at once in immeasurable bounty, this village will seem to them to have the loveliness of magic.

The beauty of Exmoor is a stranger beauty and more remote than that of these lovely villages. It is the beauty of s.p.a.ce, I suppose, and the great open arch of the sky; it is the clouds and cloud shadows, the changing light from dawn to evening through the blazing colourless hours of midsummer noon to the tender light of the falling day, when the land lies in long, suave, misty curves; it is the swirl of mist down its hillsides, and the solemn banking of great heavy rain-clouds, purple and black, above it, that gives it so rich and varied a beauty: for it is like a great open canvas, on which an artist's hand makes wonderful pictures of a myriad changes of sun and shadow. Anyone who has seen Exmoor, as Mr. Widgery has seen and loved and painted it, on a still September night, under the mellow splendour of the harvest moon, high above the infinite shadowy blue of the horizon and the misty moor, has seen a rare loveliness he must travel far to match.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Harvest Moon, Exmoor]

The "forest" of Exmoor is about thirty-five miles in extent from east to west, and twenty from north to south, running from the valley of Crowcombe, near the Quantocks, to Hangman Point, near Combe Martin. It is a stretch of country which makes its appeal to the sportsman, the antiquarian, the artist, and the mere idle, happy walker; it is a little country within a country, having many peculiarities of scenery and structure, plant life and animal life, history and custom, peculiar to itself.

And, firstly, though from Saxon times until 1818 it ranked as a "royal forest," it is not a forest at all. Trees will hardly live on Exmoor, not even the black fir, the hardiest tree of all; only here and there a few twisted and stunted alders planted along the shelter of a wall, and degenerated into "scrub." As soon as you descend from the heights, indeed, the country becomes luxuriantly wooded, as at Glenthorne and Lynton and Horner Woods; but the great expanse of Exmoor is bare brown land, covered with short tussocky gra.s.s and grey furze. Why, then, was it called a "forest" in Saxon times? Did "forest" mean also moorland, wild and unarable land? This opinion has been held by many authorities, but there is the contrary one put forward, that Exmoor was at some time a forest, and that all the land from Crowcombe to Combe Martin was clothed with oak and beech. We know, indeed, that in early times, certainly, England was much more densely wooded than now; the rocky foundation on which Exmoor lies is covered with a peaty deposit which is formed of decayed vegetable substance--the myriad leaves, perhaps, of many hundred autumns--and near the Chains, which are a series of dangerous bogs near Dunkery Beacon, stumps and roots of bog-oak have been pulled out of the ground. This last fact does not seem to me in any way conclusive, for Exmoor may have had wooded thickets, without being a forest covering half a county, like the New Forest.

And, if it were, what causes led to its deforestation? The climate of Britain was not, we know, more sheltered and temperate in old days than now, so it seems necessary to suppose human agency to account for so great a change. There is one theory, ingenious but fantastic, which a.s.serts that the whole forest was felled to provide timber props for the mine-workings of Devon and Cornwall. Whether this took place in Celtic times, when the trade with Phoenicia was at its height, or subsequently--in which case it is strange there is no historical record of so remarkable a fact--or whether those prehistoric peoples who built huge camps and erected mighty monoliths were yet capable of so stupendous a feat as felling the timber of sixty thousand acres, and carting it over roadless country, is at least open to question. There is another theory, that the Romans in their struggle to subdue the Britons, who took refuge in these wooded fastnesses, fired the forest, and burned them out, as they are supposed to have done with Hatfield Moor in Yorks.h.i.+re, which, now a peaty moor, was 12,000 acres of forest land until Ostorius, having slain many Britons, drove the remnant into the forest and destroyed it. An ingenious gentleman, in support of this theory, instances Cow Castle (or Cae Castle), near Simonsbath, which is a large British camp in the centre of Exmoor, and juxtaposes with it Showlsborough Castle, a few miles away, just beyond the limits of Exmoor, which is held to be a Roman camp, and where certainly two Roman swords have been found within recent years, advancing this as proof that a serious campaign between Romans and Britons was fought across Exmoor.

All these are interesting speculations; one hesitates to dismiss a theory because of its apparent unlikeliness, until it has been proved wrong, for in this unrecorded past of ours so many things are possible; nevertheless, it seems to me difficult to believe that the Romans would have or could have burnt forty to sixty thousand acres of woodland--above all, in a climate so humid and a country so well watered as ours.

Exmoor is not generally heather-covered, but its tors and hillsides are clothed with a wiry colourless gra.s.s and the hardy, p.r.i.c.kly furze.

Heather grows abundantly on its boundaries, and above all on the common lands, such as Brendon Common, Lynton, and Parracombe Common, which surround it, and which are distinguished from the moorland proper.

Native agriculturists say, I believe, that the heather grows to its finest on land which has been turned up by man's labour--like nettles, which grow so wildly in deserted gardens and ruined villages--and that this common land on the edge of the moor bears evidence of having once been cultivated. With the break-up of the feudal system, certainly, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, much land in England went out of cultivation with the abolition of forced labour, and became pasturage or mere rough common. The people around here say that, if you turn up a strip of land on Exmoor, where nothing grows but gra.s.s and furze, and leave it, in a year or so the heather will come. But that heather, unlike nettles, does not grow only where the land has been turned by the plough is proved enough by the heather which grows on steep hillsides, such as the Scotch mountains or Dunkery Beacon, which can never have been brought under cultivation.

To all who live in the West Country, who says Exmoor says "the red deer." This is the last corner in England where the red deer, an ancient and native inhabitant of these islands, lives in his natural state, and where he can be hunted with the freedom, and yet with the traditional pomps and usages, with which our Saxon and Norman n.o.bles hunted him. The hunting pa.s.sion of the Norman Kings is familiar to us in our history; how William the Conqueror "loved the tall red deer as his father," and how he laid waste hamlets and villages in Hamps.h.i.+re, and the little crops of the toiling villagers, to plant the New Forest for his pleasure in the deer; and how his son William Rufus met his death there, while hunting, by an untraced arrow piercing his eye, and retribution for William's act was made plain to all men. The Saxon Kings, doubtless, hunted with less pomp, but with an equal pa.s.sion.

There was a Saxon palace at Porlock, and also at Dulverton, from which they might hunt on Exmoor, and it may very well be that Alfred the Great came to Porlock for rest and refreshment among the labours of his life, his lawgiving and his translating of Latin books into the Anglo-Saxon tongue for his people's good, and his bitter and incessant struggle with the Danes.

The laws by which the Kings protected their sport were among the most cruel and oppressive ever made in England. They were not, so far as I can find, imposed by the Saxon Kings upon their countrymen, but by the conquering Norman and Plantagenets. Canute, the Danish King, is said first to have made death or mutilation the penalties for poaching; but throughout the Middle Ages the game laws were intricate, rigid, and of incredible cruelty. To cut off a man's thumbs so that he could not hold his tools, to lame him, to hang him, for snaring a hare or shooting a deer in a land abounding with game, while he tilled another man's ground and went hungry on his salt fish and coa.r.s.e bread, while all around him bred and ran the flesh food his stomach craved, and the King who owned it lived far away, and neither hunted it nor ate it from spring to winter--this seems one of the stupid and anomalous cruelties of which the human race is so amazingly capable. It was a concession, granted by Henry II, for men to be allowed to keep dogs at all, even for the guarding of their homes and their small flocks; but even so the animals had to be brought before some magistrate every three years, and maimed, by cutting off the three claws of the fore-feet, to prevent them from pursuing or seizing game.

There is a description of stag-hunting in Chaucer's "Book of the d.u.c.h.ess," which dates somewhere from the end of the fourteenth century, which is substantially the same, I suppose, as a modern hunt on Exmoor; a few of the terms are different. The stag is "embossed," meaning "hidden in a thicket," and Chaucer says he is "rechased" when he means he is headed back, while the note which the huntsman sounds to recall the hounds when the stag is lost is a "forloyn." But stag-hunting elsewhere than on Exmoor is virtually an archaic imitation of a sport.

The beast is carted to the meet, loosed, chased, and when brought to bay is recaptured and carted back to captivity. Here it is a natural affair, and rendered necessary by the depredations which the deer commit on the farmers' crops; it also contains an element of danger to the hunters, and calls for coolness, decision, and endurance: for the pace is killing, the going rough, the hills tremendously steep, there are rocky combes down which the rider has to plunge, streams to ford, bogs which make the going unsafe, if not actually dangerous--and a rider, unfamiliar with Exmoor, who finds himself caught in an October mist had better jog quietly home before worse befall him--and, at the last, the chance of losing the stag, or having him, as happens occasionally, plunge desperately off the rocks into the sea.