This caused a sharp dispute in 1870 and 1871. A man at Bristol got the Duchy to grant him 280 acres for enclosure, and he began enclosing. People said that this enclosure was on Chagford common. But the Duchy officials said that the Ordnance map was wrong, and the Tithe map was wrong, and all the old inhabitants were wrong, although they had beaten the bounds, since they were young, just where their elders used to beat them. It seemed that nobody outside the Duchy office knew where the boundaries were. Inquiry was made if these officials had received a revelation from above; and then they came to earth with a Perambulation made on 24 July 1240. But that was a well-known document, printed in several books on Devon, and certainly did not prove their case.
Henry the Third granted Dartmoor to his brother the Earl of Cornwall on 10 October 1239, and the Earl had this Perambulation made next year. It is clear that Furnum Regis is King’s Oven at the end of Hurston Ridge, and there is no difficulty about the words next after that, “et inde linealiter usque ad Wallebrokeshede et sic in longum Wallebroke usque cadit in Dertam,” but there certainly is something wrong about the words that go before, “et sic in longum Wallebroke et inde linealiter usque ad Furnum Regis.” How could the boundary run along the Wallabrook before reaching King’s Oven, and afterwards run along the Wallabrook for the whole length of its course from its head to its confluence with the Dart? The officials said there were two Wallabrooks here, and the unknown Wallabrook was the same as Hurston Water. This was really the only basis for their claim. But the Perambulation says ‘Wester Wallebroke’ in speaking of another Wallabrook on the other side of the moor, and would presumably say ‘Norther Wallebroke’ here, or else say ‘Wallebroke’ and then ‘aliam Wallebroke’ just as it says ‘Dertam’ and then ‘aliam Dertam’ on coming to the other Dart. Moreover, the sentence is imperfect as it stands. In all other cases the Perambulation takes the boundary to some fixed point and thence, etc. Either ‘usque ad ...’ has dropped out between ‘Wallebroke’ and ‘et inde,’ or else ‘et sic in longum Wallebroke’ has been put in by mistake. Possibly the scrivener saw the words in the next sentence, and repeated them in the wrong place.
My father joined in the dispute, as the enclosure was threatening our rights of common at Hurston. He looked up the evidence, and wrote a memorandum on it, ending (in red ink) with this—“The farmers will of course pull down the fences, and put the Duchy to the proof of its claims in a court of law.” And of course they pulled them down, and the Duchy dropped its claims. I did not see the demolition done, but have always heard it was an animated scene. Some twenty men went out to do it, and they took a cask of cider with them, to strengthen their conviction in the justice of their cause.
Enclosure is a mania that recurs at intervals; and deluded people think that, if they cut the moor up into fields, they will reap as much as in the valleys 1000 or 1500 feet below. It is noted in Moore’sHistory of Devonshire, vol. 1, page 486—“The speculators in these undertakings were in general but little versed in agriculture; and having inspected the country in a very cursory manner, were altogether mistaken with respect to the soil of Dartmoor, the produce for which it is adapted, and the methods to be pursued for its improvement: scarcely anyone in the neighbourhood had anything to do with these plans.” That was in 1829, and history repeats itself.
The latest of these Dartmoor schemes has been for taking water from the streams to generate electricity. Such schemes answer very well abroad, in mountainous regions where there are large volumes of water at great heights coming down precipitously. But on Dartmoor the heights are relatively small, and the streams are far apart and never very large, shrinking in summer into brooks, so that big reservoirs would be required for maintaining the supply. I fancy the promoters of this scheme were merely copying a thing that enterprising men had done elsewhere, without considering whether such men would do the same thing here. It seems absurd to spend big sums of money on these moorland streams, when there are great tidal estuaries not many miles away. At the mouths of the Exe and the Teign the estuaries run several miles inland and have very narrow entrances: the tide comes in and out; and twice a day the whole of this gigantic power goes to waste.
Dartmoor is often called a Forest and is marked as such on maps; but there are hardly any trees there now, and can never have been many. It was a Forest only in the legal sense; and that was long ago. Coke says in hisInstitutes, iv. 73, page 313, ed. 1798—“If the King, being seized of a Forest, grant the Forest to another in fee, the grantee shall have no Forest.” When the King granted the Forest of Dartmoor to the Earl of Cornwall, 10 October 1239, it ceased to be a Forest and became a Chase. It was granted to the Black Prince as the Chase of Dartmoor, 17 March 1336/7, when he was created Duke of Cornwall; and this is the grant by which the Duchy holds it now.
I ought to pay the Duke of Cornwall five-and-twenty pennies every year; but in these prosaic times my agent sends a postal-order to the Duchy office instead, and usually sends 12s.6d.to settle it for six years at once. I have to pay these pennies as owner of Hurston for certain privileges it has upon the moor; and the payment is called Venvill. One finds “fines villarum” in an Inquiry held at Lydford on 19 June 1382, and “certos annuales redditus vocatosfyn de vile” in an Inquiry held at Chagford on 23 September 1388: so Venvill must mean Fines from Vills. Fine only means a payment that has been definitely fixed, and does not mean a penalty here. Vill is the same word as village, but with a wider meaning, and will take in anything from a township down to what we call a farm.
At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jurors said that these “fines villarum” were payable from time immemorial to the King and his progenitors by the tenants of divers vills near the forest of Dartmoor for profits that they had within the forest. And that looks as if Venvill were a survival from the times when Dartmoor was a royal forest, and had not yet been granted to Dukes or Earls of Cornwall.
The Venvill tenements form a ring outside the commons that surround the moor. According to the ministers’ accounts for Dartmoor in 1505-6 there were forty-five such tenements, and the payments were 20d.for Hurston, 5d.for Willandhead which adjoins it on one side, 4½d.for Venn which adjoins it on the other,8d.and 3d.for Jurston and Higher Jurston which are next beyond Venn, 4d.for Littaford which is next beyond Jurston, and so on. The total is 4l.10s.8d.; and it was 4l.1s.8d.in 1296-7, when these ministers’ accounts begin.
The payments were primarily for pasturing cattle on the moor, and in 1296-7 the 4l.1s.8d.is entered as “de finibus villarum pro pastura averiorum habenda.” The right of pasture was restricted to as many cattle as could be wintered on the Venvill tenements, but there were some other rights as well. At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jury said that the Venvill men could help themselves to “carbones, turbarias, fugeras, jampnos et lapides,” and at an Inquiry at Okehampton on 16 August 1608 the jury made it “turves, vagges, heath, stone, cole,” and “all thinges that maye doe them good, savinge vert and venson,” vert being the greenwood that gave covert to the deer. I take ‘jampnos’ and ‘fugeras’ to be gorse and bracken, not heath and vagges—at any rate ‘vagges’ now means turf—and I presume that ‘carbones’ or ‘cole’ means peat, as the moor does not produce what we call coal.
The peat is mostly in the middle of the moor, too far out for many of the Venvill men to fetch it, and they use turf instead. This is cut about three inches thick, left upside down to dry, and then brought in; and it makes a very good fuel. Peat has naphtha in it; and for some years the Dartmoor peat was tried for this. My father notes in his diary, 5 September 1846—“Saw over the prisons at Princes Town, and the preparations for the Naphtha Manufactory there.” The prisons were built for prisoners-of-war, and were vacant from 1816 until 1850, when they were fitted up for convicts.
In very dry summers the peat turns into dust some feet in depth. Writing to my father on 4 September 1857, my grandfather says—“This is the hottest summer, I think, since 1826, when Mr Smethurst and I went exploring Dartmoor. We went two years following, and I think it was 1825 and 1826, the latter the hottest by far, for we could not get our horses over the same ground, the peat being so pulverized by the extreme heat; and we had hard work in digging out our horses.”
I used to tramp about the moor in former years, generally going out from here, but sometimes using Hurston as a base. And two or three times every summer I found people straying about, miles away from where they meant to go. They were lodging in the villages or farms, had gone out for a ramble on the moor, and were completely lost.
In the spring of 1915 I lost myself out there. I had driven as far as Natsworthy gate, and then sent the trap down the valley to wait for me at Widdicombe, saying that I would walk along the ridge of Hameldon, which flanks the valley on the west. I walked over to Grimspound and up to Hameldon cross—about 1750 feet above the sea—and then a mist came down and shut out everything over fifty yards away. There is no track there, and I could not see the landmarks by which I knew the way, nor could I make out whereabouts the sun was, as the mist diffused the light. I had not brought a compass with me, but I went steadily on, imagining that I was going straight ahead, until I was confronted by a mass of rocks that I recognized as Hookney Tor. I had been trending to the left all the while and had made a semicircle of two miles—I could not have reached that point in any other way except by going down into a hollow and coming up again, and I had kept upon the top. Having reached a point I knew, I went no further in the mist, but dropped down into the valley below, where I knew there was a road. But this was the valley on the other side of Hameldon, and I was now six miles from Widdicombe and from my lunch.
Nobody need be lost out there for any length of time. As soon as you see running water, you follow that down; and sooner or later it will bring you to a cottage or a mill, and so into a road that leads to somewhere, though it may not lead to where you want to go. But if you stay on the high ground and go on trying to find the place you want, you may be out all night.
In the summer of 1917 I found an old lady who had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. There were parties out in search of her, but they had all kept nearer home, not thinking that she would have wandered off so far. I ought really to have gone off on the search myself, but I had other things to do, and that was how I happened to see her.
Some summers ago two ladies took lodgings at a farm about a mile from here, and they went out after tea on the afternoon of their arrival. They did not come in, and people went out in search of them; and at dawn they were found sitting on the hillside, with their umbrellas up, and five-and-twenty bullocks standing round them in a circle, contemplating them.
Something of the same sort happened to two ladies whom I know, while they were staying in a Riviera town. On the morning of Ash Wednesday they were going to an early service at the English church, and on their way they met a party of revellers returning from some Carnival festivity, attired in costumes and masks. There must have been something about these ladies that filled the revellers with delight: it may have been a certain primness, or possibly it was their prayer-books. Whatever it was, the revellers just glanced at one another, made a circle and joined hands, danced round them in dead silence for a minute or two, and then went upon their way.
Out on Dartmoor the dancers should be pixies, and their footsteps ought to make a circle of fresh verdure on the turf. But a botanist assures me that pixies dance roundAgaricus Oreadis, if they dance round anything at all. This is the plant that makes these circles, the fresh growth being further and further from the parent plant in each succeeding year.
There are other circles on the moor—great granite circles like Stonehenge, but not so big as that—and people say that these dance round, and they can tell you why. Thus, years ago nine maidens went to Belstone on the Beltane day and danced round naked in the noontide sun. (Beltane is May Day now, and we are more demure.) And the Nine Maidens were changed into nine granite pillars standing in a circle there. Every day at noon they try to dance, and some days they go dancing round.
I never saw a circle dance, but I once saw the avenue on Hurston Ridge do something very like it. It was a broiling day after a spell of wet, and a vapour went up from the peaty soil. In the shimmer of this I saw the rows of granite pillars all swaying and bobbing about like people in a country dance, and was quite prepared to see a couple make their bow and go off down the middle and up again.
These avenues and circles have lately been the victims of a theory that used to be applied to churches. Old churches in England usually face eastward, but seldom face due east; and the theory is that they face the point at which the sun rose on the day when the foundation-stone was laid, and this would be the feast-day of the patron-saint.
The avenue on Downtor is said to point to sunrise on April 29, and so also a line drawn through the centre of the circle at Merivale to a menhir about 300 yards away; and other lines are said to point to sunrise on other days about that time of year—Lockyer,Stonehenge, page 481, ed. 1909—the theory being that they pointed to the sunrise on the Beltane day—page 309. I presume the Beltane fires were what we call ‘swayling’ now, that is, burning off old gorse and heather to make way for fresh shoots that will be soft enough for beasts to eat. This swayling is done at any odd times now, and with insufficient care, fires often getting beyond control and burning down plantations of young trees; but in my early days it was done on Maundy Thursday with as much regularity as potato planting on Good Friday. It perhaps was done in former times on some fixed day about May 1, and that was Beltane day; but I fail to see why Beltane day should be picked out for setting up an avenue or circle, or why a circle should be used for marking a straight line.
Many of the Dartmoor avenues can never have faced the sunrise, as they point too much to northward or to southward of the east. And then the theory says—One side of the larger avenue at Merivale faced the rising of the Pleiades in 1400B.C.and the other side faced their rising in 1580B.C., the smaller avenue faced the rising of Arcturus in 1860B.C., the avenue on Shovel Down faced the rising of Alpha Centauri in 2900B.C.and the avenue at Challacombe faced its rising in 3600B.C., and so on with many more—pages 483, 484. The church theory has an intelligible base—the saint’s-day sunrise—though the base is insecure; and the Beltane sunrise is intelligible also, though still more insecure: but this stellar theory has no base at all. You pick out any star you please and get a date accordingly.
Looking out on Dartmoor with its rain and mist and fog, it seems improbable that anyone would trouble much about the stars out there, or take them as a guide in setting up an avenue. The ancient Egyptians may have done such things in their pellucid air, and theorists say they did; but that, I think, is a mistake. The rising of Sirius is recorded in inscriptions of RamesesIIandVIandX—engraved in Lepsius,Denkmaeler aus Aegypten, part 3, plates 170 and 227 to 228 bis—and these inscriptions cover a length of time in which the rising would have varied a good deal, yet the variation is ignored. The entries cannot have been based on observations—otherwise the variation would appear—and this Rising of Sirius must have been as great a fiction as our ecclesiastical Full Moon that gives the date for Easter.
There is a curious circle at Dûris in the Lebanon valley, and I went to see it, 31 March 1882. It has eight upright stones, about twelve feet high and six apart, with others laid on top of them like lintels, as in the outer circle at Stonehenge. So far as a circle can be said to point to anything, this circle points to Mecca, a Roman sarcophagus being set up on end in one of the intervals between the uprights, and thus forming a niche for the mihrâb. The uprights are drums of columns and the lintels are squared stones, evidently taken from a temple or some other building of Greek or Roman times. So the circle is comparatively modern, yet its builders were aiming at the same effect as the builders of Stonehenge.
Those rough stones on Dartmoor show no signs of high antiquity. The avenues might be tracks for driving sheep or cattle, and the circles might be pounds for penning them in; and some may really be no more than that. But the circles often have a grave in the centre, and the avenues sometimes have one at the end; and the graves have urns and implements and weapons as ancient as the Bronze Age or the last half of the Stone Age.
People are much too fond of giving those Ages definite dates, say 1500 or 1000B.C.for the change from Stone to Bronze and 500B.C.for the change from Bronze to Iron. In reality these Ages must have overlapped, surviving in some regions long after theydied out in others; and there may have been people out on Dartmoor using bronze and flint long after Exeter was occupied by Romans.—A friend has given me a fancy portrait of some progenitor of mine out there denouncing their new-fangled notion of living in houses, instead of living in hut-circles as everybody should. I think it was inspired by something that I said about the comfort of having good thick walls and thatch, instead of merely brick and slate, when the weather is either hot or cold.
These hut-circles differ from those other circles in being formed of granite slabs set up on edge and touching one another, whereas those others are formed of pillars standing some way apart and enclosing much more ground. They probably had roofs of poles and thatch, looking like bell tents, but the roofing has all gone. They are common enough in all the Dartmoor district—there must be some thousands of them there—and usually they are in little groups of three or four. Some of the larger groups have ramparts round them; and these are known as Pounds. The grandest is Grimspound, with an area of about four acres containing five-and-twenty huts; but it has rather lost its dignity in these last fifty years, as a good road was carried down the valley in 1874 and comes within three hundred yards of it.
These ancient dwellings are usually on the sheltered slopes of hills; and on the summits of the hills there are great mounds that mark the graves of kings or chiefs. Sometimes, looking at the view and seeing those mounds against the sky, I get the same uncanny feeling that comes over me at places in Egypt and Etruria—the whole living country is dominated by the dead. There are six of these graves within about two miles on the range of hills behind Grimspound; and when one of them was opened in 1872, the chieftain’s dagger was found—a blade of bronze and a pommel of amber with a pattern worked in gold.
On a grave in Moreton churchyard there is a little granite figure of a child with wings. A man from Cornwall was working in a quarry near there; and when his child died, he got a block of granite from the quarry and carved an angel out of that. It is a crude piece of work without any of the mechanical excellence ofother monuments close by, yet it impresses me much more. I fancy that the genius of the place is present there and gazing up towards those solemn hills where the Giant’s Grave stands out against the sky.
In this district there are many granite crosses still remaining, though many have been broken up. Here in Lustleigh parish there is one at South Harton that has been cleft down the middle to make a pair of gate-posts, another one at Sanduck that was built into the porch of the house and came to light again when that was taken down, the top of another in a field near Higher Coombe, and the base for another by the road-side near the railway-station. The base has the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369. This cross, therefore, was ecclesiastical; but some were not. There was an inquiry at Brent on 25 August 1557 as to the boundary between Dartmoor and Brentmoor, and the commissioners certified that they had marked the boundary by setting up stone crosses. They probably thought that people were less likely to tamper with a cross than with a common boundary-stone.
Under cover of the War a great big painted crucifix has been set up in a churchyard about three miles from here. The early Christians never portrayed the crucifixion, and their successors idealized it—a majestic figure in regal robes with outstretched arms, to which the cross just formed a background. Then came the miserable type that we all know—a realistic study of a condemned man suffering the last penalty of what was then the law. There is no semblance of divinity about it; and in the countries where one sees it most, the Trinity that they invoke is Gesu-Maria-Giuseppe or Jésus-Marie-Joseph. The whole thing has become mundane.
The old granite crosses always have short arms, and may belong to a primæval type that had nothing to do with crucifixion. According to Cæsar (De bello Gallico, vi. 18) the Druids said that Dis was the ancestral deity of all the Celtic race; and figures of this deity have come to light. As his attribute he holds up a big sledgehammer; and I suspect his hammer was the prototype of all these crosses—the ancient symbol was retained, but with an altered meaning.
When these northern nations were converted, the new religion was grafted on the old; and the grafting was not always neatly done. The Anglo-Saxon kings all claimed descent from Woden, and he was once a god; but when they took up Christianity, they had to fit him in. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (855) knows better than the Pentateuch what happened in Noah’s Ark. That speaks only of Shem and Ham and Japheth; but Noah’s wife had another baby while she was on board—“se wæs geboren in thære earche Noe”—and this was Woden’s ancestor.
That seems incongruous enough, but it is nothing to the incongruity of an Anglo-Saxon coin with its inscription all in Arabic except two lines of Roman letters, “Offa the King,” which come in upside down between three lines of Arabic, “Mohammed the Prophet of God.” It is a gold coin, a mancus, of the same weight as an Arabic dinar; and it is dated in year 157 of the Hegira, or 773A.D.It was found in Rome, and must be one of those gold mancuses that King Offa undertook to pay Pope Hadrian for Peter’s Pence.
The southernmost part of Italy was known as Bruttium in Latin, but Brettia in Greek, and was said to take its name from Brettos (a son of Hercules) who came over with the first Greek colonists. And this, I suspect, is the only basis for the story that Britain took its name from an imaginary Brutus who brought a colony here. I suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth got the Brettos story at second hand through Stephanos, who quotes it from Antiochos of Syracuse, say 423B.C.And our Geoffrey either got it wrong, or altered it to suit his theme, and thus created Brute the Trojan.
The story of Brute the Trojan is not wilder than the story of Æneas, and the motive is the same—to connect the Britons (like the Romans) with the Homeric heroes and thus with the Olympian gods. (Brute was a great-grandson of Æneas, so Venus was his great-great-grandmother.) I cannot see why the story makes the Trojans land at Totnes, fifteen miles from here, rather than in any other part of Britain. But at Totnes they show you the very stone on which Brute stepped ashore, just as they show you the stone at Brixham on which Dutch William stepped ashore, and the stone at Newton from which he was proclaimed as King.
Nobody takes Brute the Trojan very seriously now; but I cannot understand the people who scoff at Trojans coming to Britain, and then talk solemnly of Phœnicians coming here. In books and pamphlets and essays and articles and by word of mouth, in Devon and in Cornwall and the Scilly isles, one hears everlastingly of these Phœnicians.
All this talk of the Phœnicians is founded on a blunder. Strabo devotes book iii of hisGeographicato what we now call Spain and Portugal. In iii. 5. 11 he says that the Cassiterides islands were off the coast of Spain and Portugal, and that the tin trade with these islands was formerly in the hands of the Phœnicians. In iii. 2. 9 he says that tin was found in Spain and Portugal and in the Cassiterides, and adds parenthetically “and it is brought also from Britain to Marseilles.” Diodoros is more explicit, v. 22, 38, saying that the British tin came from the western part of England, and went to Marseilles overland through France, a journey of thirty days with horses. I suppose people have forgotten Diodoros, and failed to see that Strabo is using a parenthesis; and have then mixed up the whole of what he says in iii. 2. 9 with what he says about the Phœnicians in iii. 5. 11. There is no suggestion in any ancient author that the Phœnicians ever had anything to do with this trade in British tin.
As for the Cassiterides, they must be the Burlings. These are the only noticeable islands on the outer coast of Spain and Portugal; and ancient authors say the Cassiterides were on that coast. Strabo and Diodoros, Mela and Pliny, Ptolemy, Dionysios and Avienus, all agree in putting them there, though they give them various positions from Cape Finisterre and Ferrol down to Cape St Vincent, and call them Hesperides or Œstrymnides as well as Cassiterides.
In the Scillies it is an article of faith that those islands are the Cassiterides, and this heresy of mine aroused the wrath of good Scillonians. (They never say Scilly Islanders themselves: it is too ambiguous.) Those islands seemed very remote, when I visited them first, in the autumn of 1886. The cable was broken, and the mail-boat did not waste her coal on making the passage in an equinoctial gale. But people told me I could get a pilot-cutter to take me off in any weather for £5. If it failed to make Penzance, it was sure of making Cork or Brest.
My going to the Scillies was indirectly the cause of Walter Besant’s going there and writing his novel ofArmorel of Lyonesse. I was often talking of the islands after I came back, and he went in the spring of 1889. The novel pleased the islanders, and when I went there next (1896) there seemed to be anArmorelin every house. It was a contrast to Tarascon and Alphonse Daudet’s book. I never saw aTartarinanywhere there.
Being at Tarascon, I inquired for the Tarasque—the dragon that was led captive by Saint Martha—and I found it locked up in a stable, 18 March 1891. It is not allowed out in processions now, as it has broken too many people’s bones by the waggings of its tail. Getting inside it, I found a tiller that worked the tail as if it were a rudder, and I made it wag.
The dragon at Tarascon is not unlike the dragon in one of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’sKampf mit dem Drachen, where the knight uses a dummy to accustom his horse and hounds to the look of a dragon in real life. He does this in France, and then goes back to Rhodes and kills the dragon there. The story is told of Dieudonné de Gozon; and he must have seen the dummy at Tarascon, as he was at Avignon from 1324 to 1332. But in one version the knight dressed up a bull to personate the dragon. In a version current at Rhodes it is a dervish, not a knight. He loaded forty donkeys with eighty sacks of lime, and drove them past the dragon’s den. The dragon swallowed them, lime and all, and then went down to drink.
The dragon at Rhodes was killed near Phileremos, the citadel of the ancient town of Ialysos; and Phorbas of Ialysos had killed a dragon there about two thousand years before. The old Greek legend was put into a mediæval dress; and another of those legends has been put into a dress that is completely modern. There are elevated beds of sea-shells in various parts of Rhodes, showing that the island has risen from the sea; and the story of its rising from the sea is told by Pindar in his ode in honour of Diagoras of Ialysos,Olympia, vii. 54-71. Either Thomson or Mallet copied this from Pindar intoRule Britannia, and now it is Britain that at Heaven’s command arose from out the azure main.
Many years ago I wrote a couple of volumes on the history of the island of Rhodes: they were published in 1885 and 1887, and now are obsolete. At first I only thought of writing about the Rhodian colonies in Sicily, but the subject led me on to Rhodes itself, and then to the adventures of the Knights after they had quitted Rhodes; but these were not included in the book.
The Knights were the Hospitallers, or Order of Saint John of Jerusalem; and their first home was at Jerusalem. But the Saracens drove them out of Palestine in 1291, the Turks drove them out of Rhodes in 1522, and the French drove them out of Malta in 1798. Malta was taken by the English in 1800; and by the tenth article of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802, England undertook to give up Malta to the Knights within three months. It is ancient history now that England held on to Malta, and thereby made a precedent for dealing with an inconvenient treaty as a scrap of paper.
In 1814 some of the French members of the Order formed a committee at Paris to see what could be done. But there were scamps among them, and these men admitted new members to the Order and made appointments in it—neither of which things had they any right to do—and pocketed the money that they took for entrance-fees, etc. The climax came in 1823 with an attempt of theirs to borrow money in the name of the Order. The office of Grand Master was vacant then, but the Lieutenant of the Mastery sent them a peremptory letter, 27 March 1824, saying that the committee was merely a self-appointed body without authority, and must forthwith be dissolved. The French Minister for Foreign Affairs also wrote a letter, 29 April 1825, saying that the admissions and appointments made by the committee were altogether illegal and could not in any way be recognized. And when the committee proposed to meet again in May 1826, the meeting was stopped by the Prefect of the Police.
France was now too hot for them, but the rogues found dupes in England. They began admitting new members to the Order and making appointments in it over here; and they appointed the Rev. Dr Peat as Prior. That was the foundation of the present Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in England.
All the English and Irish estates of the Order were confiscated by Act of Parliament in 1540, and the incorporation of the Order was dissolved in England and in Ireland, 32 HenryVIII, cap. 24. There was an attempt, 2 April 1557, to circumvent this Act by Letters Patent under a later Act, 4 & 5 Philip & Mary, cap. 1, but this was defeated by another Act next year, 1 Elizabeth, cap. 24. Of course, these proceedings had no effect outside the realm, and therefore did not touch the Order itself, as that was an international body with headquarters then at Malta. But they cut off revenue and practically closed a good recruiting ground; and there were few Englishmen or Irishmen among the Knights in after years. For administrative purposes the Order had been divided into Languages or Nations, one of which was English and included Ireland. But the members of the Order were simply Knights Hospitallers or Knights of Malta or of Rhodes, not Knights of any separate Nation or Language.
In 1834 Peat took an oath of office as “Prior of the Sixth Language of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in London,” swearing “to keep and obey the ancient statutes of the said Sovereign Order,” and “to govern the said Sixth Language as Prior thereof under the provision of the statute of the 4th and 5th of Philip and Mary in the case made and provided.” By the statutes of the Order (which he promised to keep and obey) he was neither qualified for appointment nor appointed by the proper authority, and there could not be a Prior of a Language—the Languages were governed by Bailiffs, with Priors as their subordinates in the various priories. There is no statute of 4 & 5 Philip & Mary relating to the Order, only Letters Patent; and these make no provision for the government of the Language or the Priory. So he only bound himself to discharge the duties of an impossible office under an imaginary statute.
These people could not even make out mediæval Latin. If a candidate for admission proved his ancestry, he was admitted a knight by right,de justitia. If he could not prove his ancestry, he might be admitted a knight by favour,de gratia. Out of this they have made Knights of Justice and Knights of Grace. ThehospitaleatJerusalem was a place of hospitality where pilgrims were entertained. They mistook it for a hospital, and then went in for ambulance-work, first-aid, etc., on the strength of their mistake. No doubt, they have done much useful work, especially in this War. But you can very well do useful work without pretending to be something that you aren’t. And these non-combatants are posing as successors of the greatest clan of warriors in the age of Chivalry.
They were silly enough to apply for a Charter of Incorporation, and this brought them up against some lawyers with no love for false pretences. Instead of getting a charter as a branch of the real Order, or in some way connected with it, they only got a charter (14 May 1888) as a charitable society of fifty years’ standing.
Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but I doubt its covering lies as well; and their lies were multitudinous. They had a statement printed—“The English, or Sixth, Language of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem: a brief sketch of its history and present position, compiled by a committee appointed for that purpose by the Chapter of the Language.” It can hardly be surpassed in puerility. It talks of proceedings at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and at Paris in 1816, as if there were no such things as theActen des Wiener Congressesand theArchives Parlementairesto show that its statements are untrue in all essential points. It cites the Letters Patent of 2 May 1557 as saying one thing, when they say another, as anyone can see by looking at Dugdale’sMonasticon, where the document is printed. (I had Dugdale collated with the Patent Roll, and there is no mistake.) It says Peat’s oath of office was sworn in the King’s Bench, 24 February 1834, and is on the record. It would certainly be on the record, if it was sworn in the King’s Bench, as 9 GeorgeIV, cap. 17, was then in force. I had the record searched: it was not there.
Not long after I was called to the Bar, an old Queen’s Counsel said to me as we were coming out of court—“I can’t understand that fellow telling those transparent lies. The whole object of telling a lie is to deceive. If you don’t do that, you don’t attain your object, and you have the bad taste in your mouth the same.”
When the Knights left Malta in 1798, they took their greatest relic with them—the right hand of their patron saint, John Baptist. Having chosen the Czar Paul as Grand Master, they delivered this relic to him at Gatchina on 12 October 1799; and it has remained in Russia ever since. The anniversary is kept, and there is a service for the Translation of the Right Hand in imitation of the old service at Constantinople on the anniversary of its translation there from Antioch. It goes from Petersburg to Gatchina on 11 October and is carried to Saint Paul’s church there on 12 October, returning to Petersburg on 22 October. I saw it in the Winter Palace at Petersburg in 1889, and made some notes about it then—“The Right Hand is sadly dilapidated. The fourth and fifth fingers are gone, so that it can no longer gesticulate in response to inquiries about the harvest. There is a very large hole in the thumb, far too large for the little morsel of the thumb that choked the man-eating dragon at Antioch. And it is all very black indeed. The remaining fingers are long and slender, and the nails are delicately formed. It is the hand of an Egyptian, and a mummy.” It was at Constantinople when Sultan Mohammed took the city in 1453, and Sultan Bajazet gave it to the Knights in 1484.
Rhodes was besieged by Sultan Solyman in 1522, and at the great assault upon the city, 24 September, the garrison believed they saw John Baptist himself standing on the roof of his own church, waving a banner and encouraging them. It really was the prior’s French cook; and when they found this out, they accused him of making signals to the enemy, and nearly murdered him.
At the siege of Rhodes by Mithridates in 88B.C.the garrison saw the goddess Isis standing on her temple and hurling down a mass of flame on the attacking force. And such apparitions have been common, from Castor and Pollux at Lake Regillus down to Saint George at Mons. Saint George, however, had no business there. He suffered martyrdom at Diospolis, twelve miles from Jaffa, where Perseus delivered Andromeda; and the old legend was transferred to him. It must have been a whale that Perseus killed, according to Pliny’s description of the bones; and, if Saint George had known his business, he would have abandoned Mons and gone out spearing submarines.
There is a treatise by Artemidoros on the interpretation of dreams,Oneirocritica, which (I believe) is not much read now, yet really is worth reading, as it shows what people used to dream about in the second centuryA.D.We do not dream now of being beheaded or crucified or becoming gladiators or fighting with wild beasts or being sold as slaves. But apparently these people dreamt oftener of such calamities than of the minor ills of life. Judging by what they dreamt, I should say their minds were not so complex as our own.
In interpreting their dreams Artemidoros tried induction, noting down the things they dreamt and what happened to them afterwards. Thus (iv. 31) Stratonicos dreamt he kicked the Roman Emperor: on going out he trod on something, and found it was a gold coin with the Emperor’s image on it. There were two kinds of dreams. If people dreamt of doing anything that they did habitually, it was nothing but a dream and needed no interpreting; but it became a vision, if they dreamt of doing things they seldom did, or could not do. Thus, it was only a dream, when they dreamt of lighting a lamp from the fire on the hearth; but it was a vision, when they dreamt they lit it from the Moon—after dreaming this a man went blind, v. 11, 34. Most people would be content with saying that the thing could not be done, because the Moon was too far off; but Artemidoros goes on to explain that nothing can be lighted from the Moon, as the Moon itself is not alight and shines only by reflexion.
They often dreamt odd things. Thus (i. 4) somebody dreamt he saw a man playing draughts with Charon, and he helped him to win the game: Charon did not like losing it, and went for him: he bolted off, with Charon after him, and got as far as an inn called the Camel; and he slipped into a shed there and closed the door, and thus dodged Charon, who ran past.—It is an uncomfortable sort of dream that might occur to anybody now, only the setting would not be the same. Instead of Charon, it would be the Devil; and instead of draughts, it would very likely be King Arthur and the Devil playing quoits. They played a game of quoits with Haytor Rocks about three miles from here—the Devil missed King Arthur with one rock, and then King Arthur got the Devil with the other, and sent him down below.
In dreams I have imagined myself in Rhodes, walking up the hill at Ialysos and finding Laon cathedral on the top. Laon stands on the same sort of hill: so this came from mixed memories. I have also imagined myself in Paris, driving to the Opéra and finding Milan cathedral there instead. They are both great staring buildings of about three acres each on similar sites: so this came from mixed memories also. But then I found the Louvre and Tuileries turned right round, with the east front of the Louvre looking westward down the Tuileries gardens; and I cannot think what mental twist did that. When I dream of being in those gardens, I usually see the west front of the Tuileries as it was before the war of 1870, not the ruin afterwards nor the vacant space there now.
I dream almost every night that I am travelling, sometimes on a ship but usually by train. In former years I travelled a good deal, and could ascribe the dreams to that; but since 1914 I have not travelled at all, and yet I dream of travelling just the same. As a rule, some little thing goes wrong—a few mornings ago I woke up very cross at finding that the Penzance dining-car did not go through to Brindisi, whereas the time-bill said it did. And these things usually happen at a station that could not possibly exist, being partly a big terminus and partly a junction and partly a wayside station with one signal-post. I can see a great deal of this station with my mind’s eye when I am awake, only there are misty bits just where the wayside station merges in the junction and where the junction merges in the terminus. But I do not see these misty bits in dreams, as my mind is occupied with one thing at a time and jumps from thing to thing like pictures on a film. This station has remained unaltered in my mind for twenty years at least, as I remember talking of it to a man who died in 1899.
As a rule, I see things with my mind’s eye almost as distinctly as if I were looking at the things themselves; and I thought that everyone could do the same till I read Galton’sInquiries into Human Facultyand found how greatly people varied as to this. I also see some things with my mind’s eye as symbols for other things that cannot be seen at all, e.g. boot-trees for arguments. They are trees for shoes, without handles, and made of polished wood; and they are on a grey felt floor with an open doorway at the further end.When two arguments lead up to a third, the corresponding boot-trees turn their toes in towards the other’s heel; and I have seen as many as eight or ten boot-trees pointing like this to half the number in a line beyond them, these also pointing to others further on, and finally a boot-tree going through the doorway. I find it very convenient—I see more at a single glance than I could put into a page of print.
Galton speaks of numbers being personified, and gives several instances of children doing this. The son of an old friend of mine—an undergraduate now—tells me he did it when a child and sometimes does it still. His views are—“1 and 0 do not count, being inactive. 2, good-natured, always doing its best to please. 3, sometimes kind and condescending, hated by 8 when added, but not when multiplied to make 24: great friend of 9. 4, not very noticeable, but means well: great friend of 8 and 6. 5, much the same as 4, but no special friend except 2: rather meek. 6, inclined to be selfish: no great friend of 3, pals with 4 and 8. 7, unlucky and despised, bad luck in making such numbers as 49 and 63 when multiplied. 8, fat and good-natured, but inclined to be selfish: likes being made up to good round numbers such as 12, 24, 48, &c. 9, friend of 3, disagreeable and a bully, despised for making brutish numbers such as 27, 63, 81, &c.”
I now suspect Pythagoras of having done this as a child and then, instead of putting away childish things, making it a basis for much of his philosophy. Thus, amongst other things, he says that 8 is Justice itself, beingisacis isosorbis bina bis—in other words, it is composed of 4 and 4, and each 4 is composed of 2 and 2, so that there is even balance throughout. This reasoning must surely be an afterthought to justify some childish fancy.
Usually, when people think of numbers, they see the Arabic figures with their mind’s eye; and some people can see these figures manœuvring at each stage of a calculation. (I heard this from George Bidder, who was famous as The Calculating Boy a hundred years ago.) Within narrow limits I see this manœuvring myself; but, although they are mere figures, I feel that they are moving like soldiers on parade. And that comes very near personifying them.
I imagine that the people who see things very clearly with their mind’s eye, are the most likely people to see visions when their intellect has lost its balance through hunger or fatigue. In dreams the outward eye is closed, and the mind’s eye must rely on memories that are often mixed. But in visions both sights are at work, though the outward eye is working listlessly for want of physical strength; and I suspect that every vision is based on what the outward eye is seeing at the time.
There is a clump of trees upon the summit of a hill about three miles from here, and it stands out against the sky-line, when one looks up along the valley of the Wrey. It looked like any ordinary clump of trees until the undergrowth was cut a little while ago; but now one sees the sky between the tree-tops and the hill, and the line of tree-tops looks just like a prehistoric monster of the lizard type. I notice that it looks more life-like, when I am tired out; and with want of sleep and food as well, I might have visions of a dragon there.
Some years ago a woman said that she had seen the Devil, when she had only seen the Rural Dean. She lived in a lonely cottage; and, when the Devil went to Widdicombe on 21 October 1638, he called there to inquire the way, and he asked for water—which betrayed him by going off in steam. Now the Rural Dean was dressed in black and mounted on a big black horse; and it was a foggy day, so that he loomed up large. Not knowing the story, he called there to inquire the way to Widdicombe, and asked for water also, but did not get it, as the woman fled. I think she had a vision, merely based on what she saw, and going far beyond that. She said she saw his horns.
People who have seen the Devil, all say he is just like the pictures of him: so I suppose they carry these pictures in their mind, and see them with the mind’s eye, when they are in a fright. Pictures may also be the basis of many of our outlandish dreams. After a long look at a picture of some centaurs, a man here said to me—“Pity there bain’t such critters now: they’d be proper vitty on a farm.” I quite agreed with him, they would. A week afterwards he said to me—“I dreamed as I were one o’ they, and, my word, I did slap in.”
I have not heard of the Devil being seen about here very lately, nor of many witches. Seven or eight years ago two elderly people were complaining that someone had ill-wished them; but their misfortunes could be explained by their own want of foresight, without the intervention of an evil eye. They came from Cornwall. An old friend of mine tells me that his grandmother practised witch-craft there. She could bring down rain or bring in shoals of fish, but would seldom perform the rites until she had been asked repeatedly. In fact, she waited till the weather showed her what was coming.
My grandfather was called an atheist by several people here, because he scoffed at witch-craft, “a thing attested by the Word of God.” If you denied the Witch of Endor, you might as well deny John Baptist or Saint Paul. Witch-craft was as well attested as the miracles. But then they said that miracles had ceased, yet said the Bible showed that there was witch-craft still.
In very early life I felt certain that a woman here must be a witch, because she looked it. She lived in a cottage that had a great big open fireplace, and she sat there cowering over the fire on the hearth, with her walking-stick leant up across her knees. I had no doubts about her flying up the chimney on that stick, and always hoped she would while I was there.
We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” And now I note that alien-espionage has been just as common a belief from 1914 onwards, and especially among those classes. They scent spies and aliens as keenly as the old folk scented witches; but the mania is more expensive now.—Two young men had bought a lonely cottage in a wood, and were living their own life up there. Until the War nobody ever suggested that they were anything but English. Then people said that they were German, and would as readily have said that they were Japanese or Russian, if we had been at war with Russia or Japan. And then a more inventive person said they had a gun-platform of concrete underneath their lawn. In a careless moment the editor of a local paper put that in. It was a costly blunder, and the lawyers profited.
There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name.
In speaking of the politicians who governed France in 1871, Bismarck said that some of them had Jewish names but several more had Jewish noses. People here think only of the alien name, forgetting that the alien blood is just as active in descendants in the female line, though the name has lapsed on marriage. There is the progeny of a Dutchman who settled at Exeter in the reign of William the Third. Nobody bothered about the female line; but descendants in male line were hunted out as Germans by a pack of people who knew too little of language or of history to recognize the name as Dutch.
There is probably more alien blood in England than these people think. They say that so-and-so is tainted by having an alien ancestor some generations back. But in nine cases out of ten they cannot give a complete list of their own great-great-grandparents, or even their great-grandparents; and the completest lists may not be quite conclusive. There was a wonderful old lady on a Dartmoor farm, ostensibly of English ancestry, but born about the time when French prisoners-of-war were out on parole there. I have seen her towering form, with eagle eye and outstretched hand, directing geese into their pond; and I have fancied that I saw a Marshal in Napoleon’s army launching a charge of cuirassiers.
I have heard her say Bo to a goose. Few people say it now, and they never say it properly. If it is said in the right way, the goose turns round and waddles off at once, however much it may have hissed before. It is like Ahi with a horse in Italy. When the driver has flogged and progged in vain, as a last resort he says Ahi, and then the brute moves on.
In my early days my grandfather would often talk of the French prisoners-of-war whom he remembered here a century ago; and I never imagined then that I was going to have prisoners-of-war working for me here, and that these prisoners would be German. They were quartered at Newton Abbot in the workhouse, and came out each day to work, returning for the night. I had nineteen here in the summer of 1918, though never more than six at once. There were six from Bavaria, three from Baden, two from Wurtemberg and one from Saxony; and seven were reckoned as Prussians, but two of these were from the Rhineland, two from Hannover, two from Hamburg and the other one from Silesia. They were the same kind of people that I have always met in rural parts of Germany—good-tempered and good-natured countryfolk, exceedingly unlike the Huns depicted by our Propaganda.
However little we may like it, the Germans are our own kith and kin. Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of them was not exactly like our Devonshire here.
Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say, “No, not in the same battle-field.”
Standing in the wheat field, I was watching two good-looking cheery youths at work there. They were the same sort and evidently liked each other; but one belonged to Lustleigh and the other one to Dueren near Cologne. I felt some doubts about the state of things that had put them into hostile armies, to maim or kill each other if they could.
On an outlying farm the clock went wrong, and struck one at three and two at four and so on. This was a nuisance, as people were unable to remember which was wrong, the striking or the hands. But the farmer settled it by keeping the clock an hour fast; and then, when it pointed to one and struck eleven, everybody knew that it was twelve.
There is much the same confusion now on every farm that has adopted Summer Time. Farm work must be regulated by the sun—some things cannot be done until the dew is off the ground, others cannot be done until the noon-tide heat has passed, and so on with other things all through the day; and the times for doing them have been fixed accordingly. It would be disastrous to do the things an hour earlier: so the times for doing them are all moved on. The clock says five instead of four, but what was timed for five is timed for six.
For many years past the Board of Agriculture has called for a return on 4 June in every year with the acreage of the crops and the quantity of live-stock on each farm, including horses but not including asses. In 1920 the War Office called for a return of horses and asses on 4 June. So (I suppose) asses must be useless in agriculture, but of some use in war. Just at that time the War Office was suspected of planning an expedition into southern Russia; and I wondered if a man of genius had been reading in Herodotos how a Persian army made an expedition there, and frightened the enemy clean away by the braying of the asses in its train.
Although the War Office and the Board of Agriculture were calling for returns on the same day, 4 June, the War Office did not apply for them direct, or through the Board of Agriculture, but through the Board of Trade. And these authorities differed over mules. The War Office had asked for a return of horses and asses, and said that ‘horse’ included ‘mule’; but the Board of Trade changed this into a return of horses, mules and asses. Seeing that the Board of Trade was acting under an Army Council Regulation made under section 114 of the Army Act, I doubted its having any right whatever to distinguish horse and mule.
In this part of Devon we all received a notice in the autumn of 1917, headed “Increased Food Production for 1918,” and informing us—“The area of corn and potatoes allotted to the Southern Division of Devon for 1918 is 86,000 acres. In order to get this quantity it is necessary for all farms to have 30 per cent. of their total acreage into corn and potatoes. This percentage has been adopted by the Executive Committee for the Division, who have power to enforce it. You are expected to have [number inserted] acres into corn and potatoes in 1918.” I suppose the fools imagined that an average of 30 per cent. on all the farms together was the same thing as 30 per cent. on every single farm. But they had the power, and they used it with disastrous results. They ploughed their 30 per cent. on dairy farms, destroying pasture that will not mature again for years; and on other farms with 60 per cent. quite fit for ploughing, they ploughed no more than 30. On some moorland farms they only got their 30 by ploughing such sterile ground that the crop was of less value than the seed that was put in.
There was a story of a successful advocate who was troubled on his death-bed by the thought of having got innocent men convicted, but at last found comfort in the thought of having also got guilty men acquitted, so that, upon the whole, he had got justice done. And this Committee will perhaps find comfort in the thought of having got the specified amount of ploughing done.
In some flat parts of England people might believe that all land was alike and one acre as good as another; but I cannot understand how anyone could think so here, in a district that runs up from sea-level to about 2000 feet above, with all sorts of soils and climates. The fools may say they had no time to make a survey of each farm; but that is no excuse. They had the figures at hand, and did not use them.
Under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 a map was made of every parish in England, and every field was numbered on the map; and the corresponding number on the Tithe Apportionment gave the acreage of the field and its state of cultivation. It is waste of seed and labour to put corn or potatoes into fields that were notarable then, for they were grown wherever it was possible to grow them, as they were paying crops—Potato Disease did not appear till 1845, and the Corn Laws were not repealed till 1846. The fools could easily have seen what fields were arable then, and based their regulations upon that. They had the figures in every parish, at Exeter for the whole of Devon, and in London for the whole of England, for the apportionments and maps were made in triplicate—one for the parson of the parish, one for the bishop of the diocese, and one for the Tithe Commissioners themselves, which last is at the office of the Board of Agriculture.
In the autumn of 1918 we had a notice that 35 per cent. of every holding must be ploughed, and “substitution of quota (from one holding to another) will not be allowed under any circumstances.” Suppose arrangements had been made for ploughing an acre of productive land on one holding instead of an acre of unproductive land upon another. It was forbidden by these fools, in the name of Food Production.
Farmers often blundered, and have been ridiculed for that; but after all they only blundered here and there and now and then. As things are, they have to blunder on a bigger scale, and may be prosecuted if they fail to blunder as prescribed.
As for the people who prescribe these blunders, it is charitable to think that they are merely fools: they may be something worse. The law assumes that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts, and might very well assume that they intended doing all they could to damage agriculture, without increasing the supply of food. Such things have been done before. Thus, the London County Council wanted an excuse for running steamers on the Thames, and therefore made it impossible for the steamboat companies to carry on. It then ran steamers at a loss, using money from the rates, and finally came to grief with them.
These public bodies come to grief in the most foolish ways. I am one of the trustees of a property in London, and the County Council scheduled part of it for “betterment.” We could not comprehend how houses in one street would be bettered by the Council’s widening another street that ran parallel with it some hundred yards away. But the Council then decided on making a new street at right angles to the street that it had widened, and demolished these houses to make way for the new street. It wanted now to buy them at their market value, but we made it buy them at their “bettered” value—we could not, as trustees, sell property to the Council for less than the Council’s own valuation of it. So the Council paid us (with the ratepayers’ money) for a “betterment” that never existed except in some cranks’ brains.
Lawyers abbreviate trustees into trēēs, and a careless copyist will sometimes write trustees for trees, if the crossing of thetis rather long. On looking into a deed, I found a power to cut down and sell trustees by public auction or by private treaty, etc., etc., and I was one of the trustees there. In another trust there were two sums of Consols in the joint names of myself and co-trustee. They were entered in the usual way as A and B accounts, and it happened that our B account went on long after our A account was closed. My co-trustee was a knight, belonging to various orders, and ‘B act.’ came next the groups of letters following his name. After a time this was altered into ‘Bart.’—an excusable mistake, as there was no ‘A act.’ and he was ‘Sir.’ Having thus become a baronet here, he was entered as ‘Bart.’ in other stocks standing in his name.
A friend of mine was being shown into a stockbroker’s room just as a shabby old man was coming out; and the old man turned back and said something which showed that he was speculating heavily. My friend remonstrated with the stockbroker for letting the man risk money that he manifestly could not afford to lose. But the answer was—“Don’t make yourself uneasy over him. He’s very fond of speculating, but he always keeps a hundred thousand in Consols, so that he may never be reduced to actual want.”
I doubt if many people understand the happiness of misers. It must be like the happiness of feeling thoroughly fit. There is a joy in knowing you can jump clean over any gate you see; and I think the miser has this joy in knowing he can pay for anything he likes. But he does not go buying things, any more than you go jumping over gates.
The air is often very buoyant here, especially upon the hill tops; and one morning on the top of Easton Down a friend of mine turned round to me and said—“Well, you know, I don’t think the Ascension was very much of a miracle after all.” And certainly one felt there was no saying where one wouldn’t go to, if one just gave a jump.
A man here said to me, “Her went up ’xactly like an angel,” as if he often saw them go, and thought I must have seen them too. (He was speaking of the finish of a play he saw in town.) Another person here was very certain of what angels did or did not do. A stranger came to the back-door one Sunday morning, and asked for a drink of cider to help him on his way. He was denied it by the maid who was in charge there, and thereupon he said to her—“You know not what you do. You might be entertaining angels unawares.” To which she answered—“Get thee’ long. Angels don’t go drinkin’ cider church-times.”
People sometimes ask me for advice on matters of which I am no judge, and a girl once asked me this:—She had been engaged to a young man for several years, but the engagement had just been broken off. She used to suffer dreadfully from toothache; and in the early days of his affection he sent her to the dentist, and paid for putting in a plate of teeth. Was that plate of teeth a present that ought to be returned? Rightly or wrongly, I said that it was not; and I see she has it still.
When teeth are drawn, young people here think nothing of the pain, but often speak with pride of the resistance of their teeth—“he scarce could stir’n,” or “he had a proper job to get’n.” In a letter to my father, 20 January 1860, my grandfather says—“I saw a man spitting out blood, and asked him the matter, when he said he had had a tooth drawn, and the doctor had torn the jaw.... I gave him brandy on lint, which soon stopped the flow of blood.... The old dentists or tooth-drawers used to apply salt and water, which was not bad, though a little brandy would have been better: but the fact is their charge was only sixpence, so they could not afford the brandy. But now, I hear, those new fashioned ones charge as much as five shillings: therefore there is no excuse.”
A man here who was born in 1852, tells me that he had whooping-cough when he was four years old, and that he was treated for it (if not cured of it) by being laid on a sheep’s forme. A forme is the imprint that a sheep makes on the grass by lying in one place all night; and when the sheep gets up in the morning, a sort of vapour rises from the warm ground underneath into the cold morning air. He was taken out into a meadow in the early morning, and was told to lie face-downwards on a forme and breathe this vapour in, not merely through the nostrils but with open mouth. He breathed it in until the ground was cold and there was no more vapour to be breathed (a matter of about five minutes) and then he was taken home to bed.
People now-a-days laugh at cures like that, but they laughed at Jenner when he first said that there was something about a cow that kept small-pox away. There may be something about a sheep that cures the whooping-cough; but there may be people who would rather have the whooping-cough than cure it in this way. I remember about fifty years ago a claret was being advertised as an antidote to gout; and the old three-bottle men who tried it, all said that they would rather have the gout.
I started drinking port when I was less than two years old. An injudicious friend remonstrated with my mother—if I had port when I was well, what could I take if I were ill and needed strengthening? She answered that it would prevent my ever being ill. I never was ill enough to spend a day in bed till I was fifty-five, and might never have been ill at all, if I had gone on drinking port proportionately; but I degenerated with the times and only drank two glasses, not two bottles, as I should. There is an entry in Dyott’s Diary, 10 November 1787—“There were just twenty dined, and we drank sixty-three bottles of wine.” I heard of a man going to a physician because he could not drink three bottles, as his father did before him. The physician said, “Perhaps itwasport that your father drank.” Even in my time it has become a different wine. If I can trust my tongue, the vintages of 1900 and 1904 are quite unlike the vintages of 1847 and 1858 at similar ages. Phylloxera attacked the Douro vineyards after 1878, and most of them have been replanted with a stronger sort of vine.
My grandfather was a little disturbed about my starting port so early in my life. He writes to my father on 22 November 1858, “My views are different from yours respecting the treatment of young children: however, I hope all will go right with him,” and again on 30 January 1859, “I hope he gets on well—but not too much port wine, mind.” All went right with me, and I got on as he hoped; and he writes on 25 December 1859 that a neighbour said I had “limbs strong enough for a wrestler.”
Wrestling was formerly as great a sport in Devon as in Cornwall; but it died out in this district about fifty years ago. My brother writes to my father, 2 August 1866—“I went to see the wrestling, but it was a rough and clumsy business.” This was at a festival at Lustleigh in honour of the opening of the railway. My grandfather writes to my father, 28 May 1858—“There was a grand wrestling match at Moreton on Saturday, set on foot by Mr*****, who said he would see one match more before he left the world.” A few years earlier there was wrestling at Moreton every summer. My grandfather notes, 22 June 1841, “Moreton Wrestling today,” 14 June 1842, “Wrestling at Moreton today and tomorrow,” and so on, and usually with a further note that so-and-so or so-and-so had gone off there instead of sticking to work.
Writing to my father on 10 November 1861, my grandfather says, “Football was a game much played in my youth, but cricket was my favourite game.” He was born in 1789; and the cricket and football of a century ago were very different from cricket and football now.
The chimney-pot hat used to be worn in playing cricket; and I have seen it worn in matches on village-greens and even at Lord’s. The distinction between Gentlemen and Players was much sharper then than now; and the Gentlemen wore chimney-pots, while the Players wore caps. Policemen also wore chimney-pots, a London fashion adopted in Milan and retained by policemen there. And the Channel Pilots wore chimney-pots. I remember them on liners starting from the Thames. The pilots were dropped off Dover or the Isle of Wight, and kept their hats on even when going down the ship’s side to the pilot cutter, and came on board in the same style on voyages home.
My father told me how he once got a lesson in the Continental way of taking off your hat to anyone. He met Louis Philippe strolling in the Tuileries gardens, and raised his hat to him as he would have raised it to Prince Albert or anyone like that in England. And in reply the King not merely raised his hat, but swung it right down to the level of his knees and up again.
He notes in his diary on 17 September 1840 that he was at Versailles that afternoon, and “there were no cheers or any sign of respect” when Louis Philippe drove out from the Trianon. He also notes on 15 September that “the Palais de Justice is strongly guarded, as young Bonaparte is imprisoned there.” Some years afterwards he saw ‘young Bonaparte’ in the Tuileries gardens and Louis Philippe at Kew.—Napoleon the Third had landed in France on 6 August 1840, and was sentenced on 6 October to imprisonment for life, not escaping until 1846.
After a visit to the Palais de Justice, 16 October 1839, he notes down in his diary—“An advocate on the right bench was addressing the judges as I entered. He used an immense deal of action and gesture, quite unknown at the English bar. Then the advocate on the other side replied. His action was much more violent, even when reading from documents.” He liked things quietly done. In his diary, 24 March 1838, he speaks of Lord Denman as “a judge more to my liking than any one I ever saw: quite a contrast to some of them, especially in his exclusive attention to the case in hand, instead of officiously meddling with every thing and body in the court.”
Some twenty years ago a very astute old man in Paris got into litigation in the English courts about a group of companies that he controlled; and he asked me confidentially how much I thought he ought to give the judge in order to secure the right decision. I felt it would be waste of time to tell him that we did not do this here: so I told him what huge salaries our judges got, and what big fortunes most of them had made while they were at the Bar. He saw their price would be prohibitive, and gave the notion up. He really had a very strong case that was bound to win upon its merits; but from what he said, I gathered that merits were not always the decisive point in France in litigation or in anything else.
I once saw a trial for brigandage in Sicily. (I think it must have been at Girgenti in 1885, but am not quite sure.) This band of brigands never made mistakes. They never tried to rob a man unless he happened to be carrying a good amount of money: they never held a man to ransom unless he was worth ransoming; and they never fixed his ransom at a higher sum than his people could just manage to pay. They evidently had good information; and there were comparatively few people from whom the various bits of information could have come. And now the police had not only got the band of brigands, but had got the members of the syndicate that ran the band. I saw the prisoners in court—they were all inside a great big iron cage like one of the aviaries at the Zoo—and I have never seen more respectable and pious looking people than some of the members of that syndicate.