Chapter VI: Part 6

_“January 13, 1665._--At sunrise I was again in the field. She came in at once, and, as it seemed, with freedom. Inquired if she knew my thoughts, and what I was going to relate? Answered, ‘Nay, we only know what we perceive and hear; we cannot see the heart.’ Then I rehearsed the penitent words of the man she had come up to denounce, and the satisfaction he would perform. Then said she, ‘Peace in our midst.’ I went through the proper forms of dismissal, and fulfilled all as it was set down and written in my memoranda; and then, with certain fixed rites, I did dismiss that troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Neither did she ever afterward appear, but was allayed until she shall come in her second flesh to the valley of Armageddon on the last day.”

These quaint and curious details from the “diurnal” of a simple-hearted clergyman of the seventeenth century appear to betoken his personal persuasion of the truth of what he saw and said, although the statements are strongly tinged with what some may term the superstition, and others the excessive belief, of those times. It is a singular fact, however, that the canon which authorises exorcism under episcopal licence, is still a part of the ecclesiastical law of the Anglican Church, although it might have a singular effect on the nerves of certain of our bishops[115] if their clergy were to resort to them for the faculty which Parson Rudall obtained. The general facts stated in his diary are to this day matters of belief in that neighbourhood; and it has been always accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Parson and the Ghost, that the plague, fatal to so many thousands, did break out in London at the close of that very year. We may well excuse a triumphant entry, on a subsequent page of the “diurnal,” with the date of July 10, 1665: “How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold six months agone, under the exorcisms of a country minister, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasures and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen world!”

FOOTNOTES:

[102] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xvii. pp. 501-504. 1867. The story occurs in C. S. Gilbert’s “Historical Survey of Cornwall,” in Mrs. Bray’s “Trelawny of Trelawn,” and in “Histories of Launceston,” by R. and O. B. Peter.

[103] All this is singularly applicable to Hawker himself.

[104] See p. 45.

[105] John Ruddle, or Rudall, A.M., was instituted Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene, Launceston, on Christmas Day, 1663, on which day he began his ministry. He is entered in the Visitation Book of 1665 as vicar, and in that of 1692 as curate. He became a prebendary of Exeter. On July 15, 1671, he married Mary Bolitho, a widow. He was buried on January 22, 1698. (See Appendix H.)

[106] It is a question whether these documents ever existed outside Hawker’s brain. See note on p. 101.

[107] See Vivian’s “Visitations of Cornwall,” p. 148.

[108] For the pedigree of the family of Bligh, of Botathen, see Vivian’s “Visitations of Cornwall,” p. 38. William Bligh, baptized May 18, 1657, was the son of William, who was baptized June 9, 1633, and was, therefore, only thirty-two in 1665. According to ancestries given by Carew and Gilbert, it is probable that the Earls of Darnley are descended from the Blighs of Botathen. (See App. H.)

[109] This is no doubt a mis-spelling for “Dingley.” A James Dingley was vicar of the parish of South Petherwin, where the ghost appeared, in the same reign, and assisted Parson Rudall in his ministrations at Launceston. The name Dingley exists in that town and district at the present day.

[110] See p. 15.

[111] The pentacle of Solomon. See p. 14.

[112] Compare the lines on Merlin in “The Quest of the Sangraal”--

“He raised his prophet-staff: that runic rod,
The stem of Igdrasil--the crutch of Raun,”

to which Hawker appends the following note: “Igdrasil, the mystic tree, the ash of the Keltic ritual. The Raun, or Rowan, is also the ash of the mountain, another magic wood of the northern nations.”

[113] See Appendix A_b_.

[114] See note on p. 104.

[115] Hawker was quite capable of submitting a poser of this kind to his own bishop, Dr. Phillpotts. It is on record that he once exorcised a rebellious vestry, but whether he obtained the bishop’s licence in this case is not stated.

A RIDE FROM BUDE TO BOSS[116]

BY TWO OXFORD MEN[117]

Dear old Oxford![118] amid the brawl and uproar of the latter days, and with many a frailty in the curtains of the Ark which the weapons of the Philistines have found and pierced, yet _alma mater_, mother mild, like our native England, “with all thy faults I love thee still.” And when I recall my own undergraduate life of thirty years and upwards agone, I feel, notwithstanding modern vaunt, the _laudator temporis acti_ earnest within me yet and strong. Nowadays, as it seems to me, there is but little originality of character in the still famous University; a dread of eccentric reputation appears to pervade College and Hall; every “Oxford man,” to adopt the well-known name, is subdued into sameness within and without, controlled as it were into copyism and mediocrity by the smoothing-iron of the nineteenth century.[119] Whereas in my time, and before it, there were distinguished names, famous in every mouth for original achievements and “deeds of daring-do.” There were giants in those days--men of varied renown--and they arose and won for themselves, in strange fields of fame, record and place. Each became in his day a hero of the “Iliad” or “Odyssey” of Oxford life--a kind of Homeric man. Once and again in the course of every term, the whole University would ring with some fearless and practical jest, conceived and executed with a dash of original genius which betokened future victories in the war of wit and the world of men. How well do I remember a bold travesty of discipline[120] which once set the common-rooms in a roar, and even among “mine ancients,” made it

“merry in hall
Where beards wagged all”!

A decree had been issued by the “authorities” of a well-known College (it was in the pre-ritual days) that no undergraduate should present himself at morning chapel service with his scarlet hunting-coat underneath his surplice--a costume neither utterly secular nor completely ecclesiastical, and therefore a motley garb which it did not seem unjust or unreasonable to forbid in a sacred place. However, the order was implicitly obeyed at the ensuing matins, with solemn and suspicious exactitude. Alas! it was “the torrent’s smoothness ere it dash below;” for on the third morning, when the College servants arrived to take down the shutters and to light the fires, they discovered that “a change had come over the spirit of their dream.” Every one of the panelled doors throughout the Quadrangle of the Canons, the very seat of hoar and reverend authority, had been artistically painted during the night with the hue of Nimrod, a glowing hunter’s red! The gates were immediately closed and barred, and every member of the College convened before a grand divan of the Dons, to undergo immediate scrutiny on the origin of that which some of the undergraduates irreverently termed this ultra-observance of the rubric (their wit would be obscure to those who are unaware that _rubrica_, the etymon of our Church rules, signifies ruddy or red). The authors of this outrage escaped detection, although every painter in Oxford was summoned for examination, and all the dealers in colours and oils. It was subsequently whispered among the initiated that the artist, with his brushes and materials, had been brought down from London in a post-chaise-and-four, secretly introduced through an unnoted postern, and when his work was done, hospitably feasted and paid, and then sent back at full speed through the night to town.

Another “merrie jest,” but with a lowlier scene and an humbler _dramatis personæ_, raised the laugh of many a common-room and wine-party about the same period of my own undergraduate recollections. There was an ancient woman, blear-eyed and dim-sighted, “worn nature’s mournful monument,”[121] who had the far and wide repute of witchcraft among the College servants and the “baser sort” in the suburbs of the town; but in reality she was a mere “wreck of eld,” a harmless and helpless old creature, who stood at more than one college-gate for alms. Her well-known name was Nanny Heale. Her cottage, or rather decayed old hut, leaned against a steep mound by the castle-wall, and was so hugged in by the ground that, from a path along the ramparts a passer-by might cast a bird’s-eye look down Nanny’s chimney, and watch well her hearth and home. One winter evening certain frolicsome wights, out of College in search of a channel for the exuberant spirits of their age, were pacing, like Hardicanute, the wall east and west, when a glance down the witch’s chimney revealed a quaint and simple scene of humble life. There she crouched, close by the smoking embers, peering into the fire; and before her very nose there hung, just over the fire, a round iron vessel, called in the western counties a crock, filled to the brim with potatoes, and without a cover or lid. This utensil was suspended by its swing-handle to an iron bar, which went from side to side of the chimney-wall. To see and to assail the weak point in a field of battle is evermore the signal of a great captain. The onslaught was instantly planned. A rope, with a hook of iron at the end, was slowly and noiselessly lowered down the chimney, and, unnoted by poor Nanny’s blinking sight, the handle of the iron pot was softly grasped by the crook, and the vessel with its mealy contents began to ascend in silent majesty towards the upper air. Thoroughly roused by this unnatural and ungrateful demeanour of her lifelong companion of the hearth, old Nanny arose from her stool, peered anxiously upward to watch the ascent, and shouted at the top of her voice: “Massy ’pon my sinful soul! art gwain off--taties and all?”[122]

The vessel was quietly grasped, carried down in hot haste, and planted upright outside the cottage-door. A knock, given for the purpose, summoned the inmate, who hurried out and stumbled over, as she afterwards interpreted the event, her penitent crock.

“So then,” was her joyful greeting--“so then! theer’t come back to holt, then! Ay, ’tis a cold out o’ doors.”

Good came out of evil; for her story, which she rehearsed again and again, with all the energy and firm persuasion of truth, at last reached the ears of the parish authorities, and they, on inquiry into the evidence, forthwith decreed the addition of a shilling a-week to poor old Nanny’s allowance, on the plea that her faculties had quite failed her, and that she required greater charity because of her wandering mind. Yet the fact which she testified met the criterion of evidence demanded by Hume, for the event occurred within the experience of the witness herself.

It was by outbreaks of animal spirits such as these that the monotony of collegiate life in those days was relieved, for the University supplied but little excitement of mental kind. The battle-cries of High Church and Low Church--“that bleating of the sheep and that lowing of the oxen” which nowadays we hear--had not yet begun to rouse the Oxford mind;[123] and the only war about vestments that I recollect was our hot fierce struggle after a festive assembly to get first out into the lobby, and to grasp as a spoil the best caps and gowns one by one, until the unhappy freshman who arrived last had to put up with such ragged specimens of University costume as would hardly have satisfied the veriest Puritan for the performance of divine service.

Well, for us two--the subjects of this paper--the life of Oxford, with its freaks and its discipline, for a time was over; we had each passed the final examination so graphically named “the Great Go;” and that so as to be, what man so seldom is in this world, satisfied. In high heart, and with spirits running over, my friend and I appointed a tryst in a small watering-place on the north coast of Cornwall as a starting-point for a ride “all down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss.” In due time, and on a glorious summer day, we mounted our “Galloway nags,” and, like the knights of ancient ballad, “we laughed as we rode away.” The start was from Bude, and we made our first halt at a place twelve miles towards the south-west; a scene of general local renown, and which bears the parochial name of Warbstow Barrow. It stands upon a lofty hill that soars and swells upward into a vast circular mound, enthroned, as it were, amid a wild and boundless stretch of heathy and gorsy moorland. It was soothing to the sight to look down and around on the tapestry of purple and gold intermingled in natural woof, and flowing away in free undulation on every side. The view from this mountain-top was of wonderful extent, but wild, desolate, and bare. Beneath, on three sides, spread the moor, dotted here and there with a grey old church, that crouched toward the shadow of its low Saxon battlemented tower, as if it still sought shelter, after so many ages, from the perils of surrounding barbarism. On the fourth side swelled the sea. But the brow of this hill, like that of many others in the west, dropped into the shape of a mighty circular bowl--a kind of hollow valley turfed with grass, and surrounded by a rim; an amphitheatre, however, large enough to hold five thousand people at once.[124] On the flat level floor of this round crater, and in the exact midst, still swells up uninjured the outline of a viking’s grave, unlike other burial-mounds[125] so common in Cornwall and elsewhere,

“Where the brown barrow curves its sullen breast
Above the bones of some dead gentile’s soul,”[126]

and that on every hillside and plain. The shape of the great hillock at Warbstow is neither oval nor round, but survives the exact image of the dragon-ship of northern piracy and war.[127] Moreover, not the shape only, but the size of the ancient vessel of the dead, is perpetuated here. Measured and graduated by scale, this oblong, curved, and narrow grave would yield the dimensions of a boat of fifty tons, which would be about the weight of a Scandinavian serpent of the sea.

We saw that an effort had been made to open this barrow at one of the ends; but an old woman, whom we found at a cottage not far off, assured us “that they that tried it were soon forced to give up their digging and flee, for the thunders came for ’em, and the lightnings also.”

We endeavoured to sound the local mind of our informant as to the history of the place and origin of the grave; but all we could drag out of her, after questions again and again, was “great warriors, supposing, in old times.” Such was the dirge of the mighty dead, and their requiem, at Warbstow Barrow. But the sun had begun to lean, and we were bound for Boscastle, the breviate of Bottreau[128] Castle, and the abode of the earls[129] of that name.

Strange, striking, and utterly unique is the first aspect of this village by the sea. The gorge or valley lies between two vast and precipitous hills, that yawn asunder as though they had been cleft by the spells of some giant warlock[130] of the West, like the Eildon Hill by Michael Scott.[131] As you descend the hill from the north you discover on the opposite side clusters of quaint old-fashioned houses, grotesque and gabled, that appear as though they clung together for mutual support on the slope of that perilous cliff. Between the houses, and sheer down the mountain side, descended, or rather fell, a steep and ugly road; which led, however, to the “safety of the vale,” and landed the traveller at last in a deep cut or gash between the hills, where the creek ebbed and flowed, which was called by strangers in their courtesy, and by the inhabitants, with aboriginal pride, “the Harbour”--_Cornice_ “Hawn.” There “went the ships,” so that they did not exceed sixty tons in freight; and thither arrived, at certain intervals, coals and timber in bulk and quantity, which can be ascertained, no doubt, by the return of imports laid before Parliament by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

We reached in safety our bourn for the night at the bottom of the hill, and discovered the hostelry by the sign which swung above the door. This appeared to us to represent a man’s shoe; but when we had read the legend, we found that it signified the Ship Inn, and was the “actual effigy” of a vessel which belonged to the port. Here we received a smiling welcome from the hostess, a ruddy-visaged widow,--Joan Treworgy was her Keltic name--fubby and interjectional in figure, and manifestly better adapted for her abode at the foot of the hill than at any mansion further up. She was born, as she afterwards related, two doors off: and, except that she had travelled up the hill to Forraburry church to be married there, it appeared that a diameter of five yards would have defined the total circumference of her wandering life.

As soon as we arrived, she called up from some vasty deep underneath her house a grim and shaggy shape, who answered to the name of Tim, but whom we identified as Caliban on the spot, and charged him to take proper care of the Captains’ horses (for by that title all strangers in sound garments and whole hats are saluted in the land of the quarry and the mine), and to be sure that they had plenty of whuts. She then invited us to enter her “parrolar,” a room rather cosy than magnificent; for when our landlady had followed in her two guests, and stood at the door, no one beside could have forced an entrance any more than a cannon-ball could cleave through a feather-bed. We then proceeded to confer about beds for the night, and, not without misgiving, inquired if she could supply a couple of those indispensable places of repose. A demur ensued. All the gentry in the town, she declared, were accustomed to sleep “two in a bed,” and the officers that travelled the country, and stopped at her house, would mostly do the same; but, however, if we commanded two beds for only two people, two we must have; only, although they were both in the same room, we must certainly pay for two, and sixpence a piece was her regular price. We assented, and then went on to entreat that we might dine. She graciously agreed; but to all questions as to our fare her sole response was, “Meat--meat and taties.” “Some call ’em,” she added, in a scornful tone, “‘purtaties,’ but we always say ‘taties’ here.” The specific differences between beef, mutton, veal, etc., seemed to be utterly or artfully ignored, and to every frenzied inquiry her calm inexorable reply was, “Meat--nice wholesome meat and taties.”

In due time we sat down in that happy ignorance as to the nature of our viands which a French cook is said to desire; and although we both made a not unsatisfactory meal, it is a wretched truth that by no effort could we ascertain what it was that was roasted for us that day by widow Treworgy, hostess of the Ship, and which we consumed. Was it a piece of Boscastle baby? as I suggested to my companion in the midst of his enjoyment; and the question caused him to arise and rush out to inquire once again, and insist on knowing the whole truth; but he soon came back baffled, and shouting, “Meat and taties!” There was not a vestige of bone nor any outline that could identify the joint, and the not unsavoury taste was something like tender veal. It was not until years afterwards that light was thrown on our mysterious dinner that day by a passage which I accidentally turned up in an ancient history of Cornwall. Therein I read “that the sillie people of Bouscastle and Boussiney do catch in the summer seas divers young soyles [seals], which, doubtful if they be fish or flesh, conynge housewives will nevertheless roast, and do make thereof very savoury meat.” “Ay, ay,” said my friend and fellow-traveller, when I had transcribed and sent him this extract--“Ay! clear as day--meat and taties; how I wish I had old mother Treworgy now by the throat! I would make her walk up that hill every day for a month, and stop her meat and taties till she was the size of other people.” When the hour arrived that should have been the time of rest, we mounted a cabin-ladder, which our hostess assured us was “the stairs.” We found the two beds which had been allotted to us, but, as it was foretold, in one small, hot, stuffy room. As we entered the narrow door, a solitary casement twinkled on one side of the opposite wall, flanked by a glazed cupboard door, paned to match, on the other. This latter, the false light, my friend opened by mistake--he was near-sighted, and our single dip was dim--to sniff, as he said, the evening air; but he shut it up again in quick disgust, declaring that the whole atmosphere of the village was impregnated with onions and cheese. To bed, but not to rest. Every cubic inch of ozone was exhausted long before midnight, and, as the small hours struck on the kitchen clock below, we found that “Boscastle had murdered sleep, and therefore Oxford could sleep no more.” With the first faint glimmer of day we arose and stole gently out into the dawn. Before us stood the one-arched bridge spanning the river bed. Lower down the creek the mast and rigging of a sloop at anchor was visible, like network traced upon the morning sky. But the lowly level had no attraction for our path: there lay the sluggish mist of night, and it seemed to our distempered fancy like the dull heavy breath of the snorers in that village glen; but above and upwards stretched the tall ascending road, like Jacob’s ladder resting on the earth and reaching to the sky. Surely on the brow of that mountain top there must be breath and room. We turned, therefore, to climb, and for once “vaulting ambition did not o’erleap itself.” Slow and difficult was the way, but cooler and more bracing the air every yard that we achieved.

We stood at last on the brow of the vast gorge, and full five hundred feet above the sea, where church and tower crowned the cliff like a crest. The scene we looked upon was indeed exhilarating, stately, and grand. On the right hand, and to the west, arose and stood the craggy heights of Dundagel, island and main, ennobled by the legends of old historic time. To the left, a boundless reach of granite-sprinkled moor, where barrow, logan rock, and cromlech stood, the mute memorials of Keltic antiquity.[132] Beneath, and afar off, the sea, at that silent hour, like some boundless lake, “its glad waves murmuring all around the soul;” near, and at our feet, the jumbled village, crouching on either side of the steepy road, and clinging to its banks as if the inhabitants sought to secure access for escape when the earthquake should rend or the volcano pour. We prepared to return and descend; but this was by no means an easy feat, from the extreme angle at which the roadway fell. At the first look on the inclined plane it seemed easier to sit down and slide; but on the whole we thought it better to walk, and pause, and creep.

Another and a new feature in the scene now met our gaze. Annexed to every human abode a small hut had been stuck on to the walls for the home of the “gentleman” that, in Cornwall as in Ireland, pays the rent--_Keltice_, the pig. The hovels of these bristly vassals, like the castles of their lords, were cabined and circumscribed in the extreme. There was just room enough to breathe, but not to snore without impediment of tone. A sudden inspiration awoke in our minds. Surely it would be an act of humanity and kindness to enable these poor suffocating creatures once in their lives to taste the balmy breath of a summer morning. It will be to us, we said and thought, a personal delight to see them emerge from their close and festering abodes and rush out in the free, soft radiance of the dawn! Action followed close on thought. Hastily, busily, every rude rough bar was drawn back, door and substitute for door unclosed; and a general jail-delivery of imprisoned swine was ruled and accomplished on the spot. Undetected by a single human witness, without interruption from slumbering master or lazy hind, the total deed was done. Gradually descending the hill, and scattering, like ancient heroes and modern patriots, freedom and deliverance as we went, never did the children of liberty so exult in their unshackled deliverance as these Boscastle hordes. There was one result, however, which we had not foreseen, and its perilous consequences had quite escaped anticipation. The inmates of every sty, as soon as their opportunities of egress had been ascertained by marching out of their prison-doors and arriving unchecked at the roadside--when they looked upward and surveyed the steep and difficult ascent, and counted mentally the cost of attempting to surmount the steep, they all, as with one hoof and mind, turned down the hill. Sire and dam, lean and corpulent, farrow and suckling, all _uno impetu_, selected and rushed down the _facilis descensus Averni_; and although, in all likelihood, they had never pondered the contrast of the Roman poet, yet they spontaneously moved and seconded, and carried the unanimous resolution that _revocare gradum, his labor, hoc opus est_. The consequence of this choice of way was too soon apparent. Just as we had drawn the last bar, and were approaching the bottom of the steep, we looked back and saw that we were pursued, and should speedily be surrounded, by a mixed multitude of porcine advocates for free discussion in the open air, such as might have gladdened the heart of any critic on the original and cultivated breeds of the west of England. Prominent among them the old Cornish razor-back asserted its pre-eminence of height and bone, nor were punchy representatives of the Berkshire[133] and Suffolk genealogies absent on this festive occasion. Growing now apprehensive of the consequences of discovery, if an early rising owner should ascertain the authors of this daring effort to “deliver their dungeons from the captive,” we hastened to secure ourselves in the shelter of our hostelry of the Ship, and fortunately found, on reaching our “little chamber on the wall,” that the widow and her household were still fast asleep. We fastened the door and listened for results. The outcries and yells were fearful. By-and-by human voices began to mingle with the tumult; there were shouts of inquiry and surprise, then sounds of apparent expostulation and entreaty, and again a “storm of hate and wrath and wakening fear.” Many a battle of soldiers must have fought and ended with less uproar. At last the tumult pierced even the ears of our hostess Joan Treworgy. We heard her puff and blow, and call for Tim. At last, after waiting a prudent time, we thought it best to call aloud for shaving-water, and to inquire with astonishment into the cause of that horrible disturbance which had roused us from our morning sleep. This brought the widow in hot haste to our door.

“Why, they do say, Captain,” was her doleful response, “that all the pegs up-town have a-rebelled, and they’ve a-be, and let one the wother out, and they be all a-gwain to sea huz-a-muz, bang!”

Although this statement was somewhat obscure in its phraseology, and the Keltic byword at the close, wherein the “sense is kindred to the sound,” yet we understood too well that the main facts of the history were as true as if Macaulay had recorded them; so we pretended to dress in great haste, and hurried down to see the war. It was indeed an original scene;

“For chief intent on deeds of strife,
Or bard of martial lay,
’Twere worth ten years of peaceful life,
One glance at their array!”

Here a decently dressed woman made many fruitless endeavours to coax out of the brawl five or six squealing farrows, the offspring of a gaunt old dam that, like the felon sow of Rokeby,[134] was “so distraught with noise” that “her own children she mought clean devour.” There a stalwart quarryman, finding all other efforts fruitless, had seized his full-grown porker by the legs and hoisted him on his shoulders to ride home pickaback uttering all the while yells of fierce expostulation and defiance. One hot little man, with a red face and gesticulating hands, had grasped a long pole, and laid about him in mad fury, promiscuously, until a tall and bristly hog rushed at him from behind, and carried him off down the hill seated at full charge like a knight of King Arthur’s Court, with “semblance of a spear,” and tilted him at last head over heels in the bed of the stream. But some way up the hill we came suddenly upon a scene which demanded all our sympathy; help there was none. A panting old woman had singled out her hog and separated him from the crowd; and a fine fat animal he was--four hundred-weight at least--and so unfitted for the slightest exertion, that unless he had resorted to sliding and rolling, it was difficult to conceive how he had accomplished even his downhill journey from the sty. But up hill--as his obdurate mistress appeared to propose,--no, no. There was a look in his eye, as he glanced back at his despairing owner, that seemed to suggest a grunt in strong German emphasis, _das geht nicht_. He had thrust his snout and half his nose through the bars of a gate; and there he stuck, and manifestly meant to stick fast, while she belaboured him with strokes like a flail. She paused as we approached the spot, and with an appealing look for our assent, she piteously exclaimed, “My peg’s surely mazed, maister, or he’s ill-wished; some ennemie hath a-dond it!” My thought responded to her charge; it was certainly no enemy of the pig that “dond it,” whatsoever he might be to his owner.

We left “her alone in her glory,” and returned to the inn, communing as we went on the store of legend, tale, and history we had laid up for future generations in thus opening a field of achievement for the Boscastle swine. What themes of marvel would travel down by the cottage hearth, there to be rehearsed by wrinkled eld!--the wondrous things always the more believed as they became more incredible. Doubtless the local event would very soon be resolved into demoniac agency, because, ever since the miracle of Gadara, the people have always linked the association of demons and swine; and they refer to the five small dark punctures always visible on the hoof of the hog as the points of entrance and departure for the fiend.[135]

Once in after-life did this fitful freak[136] recur to our minds. We separated, my companion of this ride and myself--I to a country cure, and my friend back to Oxford, “to climb the steep where fame’s proud temple shines afar.” He ascended step by step until he became Dean of the College[137] to which we both belonged. In course of time, after the usual interval, I went up to take my M.A. degree. Now the custom was, and is, that the Dean takes the candidate by the hand, leads him up to the chair of the Vice-Chancellor, and presents him for his degree in a Latin speech. We were all assembled in the appointed place, the Dean, my friend, taking us up in turn one by one. Among the group was a stout burly man, a gentleman commoner, sleek and fat, and manifestly well-to-do in life. With him the Dean had trouble; unwieldy and confused and slow, it was difficult to get him through the crowd and up to his place in time. They passed me in a kind of struggle,--the Dean leading and endeavouring to guide, the candidate hanging back and getting pitched in the throng. Just then I managed to whisper--

“Why, your peg’s surely mazed, maister!”

I was hardly prepared for the result when I “struck the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.” The association came back; the words called up the scene among the swine; and when the crowd gave way, there stood the Dean before the Vice-Chancellor’s chair, greeting him, not with a Latin form, but in spasms of uncontrollable laughter!

To return to the original scene. We ordered Caliban with our ponies to be ready at the door, and we in the meanwhile called on our hostess to produce her bill. She hum’d and ha’d and hesitated, and seemed at a loss to produce the “little dockyment,” which is usually supposed to be a matter of very fluent composition at an inn. It was not until we had again and again explained that we desired her to state in writing what we had to pay, that she seemed at last to comprehend. A deal of scuffling about the kitchen ensued. There was a quick passing to and fro, in and out; there were several muttered discussions of the lower house; a neighbour, who appeared to be a glazier, was sent for; and at last the door opened, and our red pursy little hostess bustled in, bobbed a curtsey, and presented for our perusal her small account, chalked upon the upper lid of the kitchen bellows, which she gracefully held towards us by the snout. Poor old Joan Treworgy! how utterly did thy rough simplicity put to shame the vaunting tariff and the “establishment charges” of this nineteenth century of Messrs. Brag and Sham! The bill, which we duly transcribed, and which was then paid and rubbed out, thus ran:--

CAPTENS.

_s._ _d._

T for 2 0 6
Sleep for 2 1 0
Meat and Taties and Bier 1 6
Bresks 1 6

Four shillings and sixpence for bed and board for two wolfish appetites for a night and a day, to say nothing of the pantomime performed gratuitously for our behoof, at a very early hour, by Boscastle amateurs! Good day, Mrs. Treworgy! good day! “To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

FOOTNOTES:

[116] From _Belgravia_, vol. iii. pp. 328-337. 1867.

[117] The author and Rev. Dr. Jeune, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, father of Sir Francis Jeune.

[118]

“O type of a far scene! the lovely land,
Where youth wins many a friend, and I had one;
Still do thy bulwarks, dear old Oxford, stand?
Yet, Isis, do thy thoughtful waters run?”

_The Token Stream of ‘Tidna’ Combe._

(See Appendix A.)

[119] Compare Tennyson, “In Memoriam”--

“For, ‘ground in yonder social mill
We rub each other’s angles down,

‘And merge,’ he said, ‘in form and gloss,
The picturesque of man and man.’”

[120] Such things have been known to occur even in these degenerate days.

[121] A variant of a line in Hawker’s poem, “A Legend of the Hive.”

[122] The Oxford crone speaks with a Cornish accent, and some think that she hailed from Stratton.

[123] Hawker came in contact, however, with some of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, as we learn from a letter where he says: “How I recollect their faces and words--Newman, Pusey, Ward, Marriott; they used to be all in the common-room every evening, discussing, talking, reading.” Hawker went up to Oxford in 1822, and won the Newdigate in 1827, when Newman was a Tutor of Oriel and Keble was publishing “The Christian Year.”

[124] One of the kind so often used by Wesley for his open-air sermons in Cornwall. See p. 160.

[125] Compare Hawker’s poem,“Trebarrow,” and his footnote thereto.

[126] From the description of Carradon in “The Quest of the Sangraal.”

[127]

“Kings of the main their leaders brave,
Their barks the dragons of the wave.”

_Lay of the Last Minstrel._

[128] Compare Hawker’s well-known ballad, “The Silent Tower of Bottreaux.”

[129] There were no “earls” of Bottreaux. Knights, or barons, would be more correct.

[130] Wizard.

[131] See Appendix J.

[132] Compare Tennyson--

“that gray king, whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still.”

[133]

“One breed may rise, another fall;
The Berkshire hog survives them all.”

It was, perhaps, in commemoration of this episode that Hawker when afterwards curate of North Tamerton, kept a tame Berkshire pig. Another parson-poet, Robert Herrick, is also said to have had a pet porker.

[134] Compare p. 204.

[135] Compare p. 202.

[136] An escapade with pigs occurs in Tennyson’s poem, “Walking to the Mail.”

[137] Pembroke.

HOLACOMBE

There is a small outlying hamlet[138] in my parochial charge, about two miles from my vicarage, with a population of about two hundred souls, inhabiting a kind of plateau shut in by lofty hills and skirted by the sea. These rural and simple-hearted people, secluded by their remote place of abode from the access of the surrounding world, present a striking picture of old and Celtic England such as it existed two or three hundred years ago. A notion of their solitude and simplicity may be gathered from the fact that, whereas they have no village postman or office, their only mode of intercourse with the outer life of their kind is accomplished through the weekly or other visit of their clergyman. He carries their letters, which contain “the short and simple annals of the poor,” and he receives and returns their weekly and laborious literary compositions to edify and instruct their distant and more civilised correspondents. The address on each letter is often such as to baffle all ordinary curiosity, and unless deciphered by the skill of the experts of the post-office, must often furnish hieroglyphics for the study of the Postmaster-General as obscure, if not so antique, as the legends on a pyramid or Rosetta stone. A visit to a distant market-town is an achievement to render a man an authority or an oracle among his brethren; and one who has accomplished that journey twice or thrice is ever regarded as a daring traveller, and consulted about foreign countries with a feeling of habitual respect.

They have amongst them no farrier for their cattle, no medical man for themselves, no beerhouse, no shop; a man who travels for a distant town supplies them with tea by the ounce, or sugar in smaller quantities still. Not a newspaper is taken in throughout the hamlet, although they are occasionally astonished and delighted by the arrival from some almost forgotten friend in Canada of an ancient copy of the _Toronto Gazette_. This publication they pore over to weariness, and on Sunday they will worry the clergyman with questions about Transatlantic places and names of which he is obliged to confess himself utterly ignorant, a confession which consciously lowers him in their veneration and respect. An ancient dame once exhibited her Prayer-book, very nearly worn out, printed in the reign of George II., and very much thumbed at the page from which she assiduously prayed for the welfare of Prince Frederick, without one misgiving that she violated the article of our Church which forbids prayer for the dead.

Among the singular traits of character which are developed amid these, whom I may designate in the German phrase as my mossy[139] parishioners, there is one which I should define, in their extreme simplicity, as exuberant belief, or rather faith in excess. I do not, however, intend by this term any kind of religious peculiarity of tenet or creed, but only a prostration of the intellect before certain old traditionary and inherited impulses of the human mind. They share and they embrace those instinctive tendencies of their Celtic nature which in all ages have led their race to cherish a credence in the existence and power of witches, fairies, and the force of charms and spells. It is well known that all such supernatural influences on ordinary life are singularly congenial to the ancient and the modern Cornish mind. I do not exaggerate when I affirm at all events my own persuasion, that two-thirds of the total inhabitants of Tamar-side implicitly believe in the power of the _Mal Occhio_, as the Italians name it, or the Evil Eye. Is this incredible in a day when the spasms and raps and bad spelling of a familiar spirit are received with acquiescent belief in polished communities, and even in intellectual London? The old notion that a wizard or a witch so became by a nefarious bargain with the enemy of man, and by a surrender of his soul to his ultimate grasp, although still held in many a nook of our western valleys, and by the crooning dame at her solitary hearth, appears to have been exchanged in my hamlet of Holacombe (for such is its name) for a persuasion that these choosers of the slain inherit their faculty from their birth. Whispers of forbidden ties between their parents, and of monstrous and unhallowed alliances of which these children are the issue, largely prevail in this village. There it is held that the witch, like the poet, is so born. I have been gravely assured that there are well-known marks which distinguish the ill-wishers from all beside. These are black spots under the tongue; in number five, diagonally placed: “Like those, sir, which are always found in the feet of swine,”[140] and which, according to the belief of my poor people, and which, as a Scriptural authority, I was supposed unable to deny, were first made in the unclean animals by the entrance of the demons into the ancestral herd at Gadara. A peculiar kind of eyeball, sometimes bright and clear, and at others covered with a filmy gauze, like a gipsy’s eye, as it is said, by night; or a double pupil, ringed twice; or a larger eye on the left than on the right side; these are held to be tokens of evil omen, and accounted to indicate demoniac power, and certain it is that a peculiar glare or a glance of the eye does exist in those persons who are pointed out as in possession of the craft of the wizard or witch. But an ancient man, who lived in a lone house in a gorge near the church, once actually disclosed to me in mysterious whispers, and with many a gesture of alarm and dread, a plan which he had heard from his grandfather, and by which a person evilly inclined, and anxious for more power than men ought to possess, might at any time become a master of the Evil Eye.

“Let him go to chancel,” said he, “to sacrament, and let him hide and bring away the bread[141] from the hands of the priest; then, next midnight let him take it and carry it round the church, widdershins--that is, from south to north,[142] crossing by east three times: the third time there will meet him a big, ugly, venomous toad,[143] gaping and gasping with his mouth opened wide, let him put the bread between the lips of the ghastly creature, and as soon as ever it is swallowed down his throat he will breathe three times upon the man, and he will be made a strong witch for evermore.”

I did not fail to express the horror and disgust with which I had listened to this grandsire’s tale, and to assure him that any man capable of performing such an atrocious ceremony for such a purpose, must be by his very nature fit for every evil desire, and prepared, of his own mere impulse, to form the most unhallowed wishes for the harm of his fellow-creatures, such as a demon only could delight to fulfil. But the feats which are supposed to be achieved by the witch--for the question proposed by the sapient King Jamie has been solved by the Cornish people, whether the Devil doth not oftener dally with ancient women than men--are invariably deeds of loss and harm: Some felon sow, like her of Rokeby,[144] becomes the grunting mother of a large family of farrows; all at once, like Medea,[145] she hates her own offspring with a fiendish hatred, and spurns them all away from her milk. They pine and squeal, and at last sit upright on their hinder parts like pleading children, put their little paws together in piteous fashion, and die one by one. All this would never have come to pass had not the dame, the day before, refused a bottle of milk to one who “should have been a woman,” “but that her beard forbade them to interpret that such she were.” What graphic tales of “things ill-wished” have I not heard around and within this wild and lonely hamlet! All at once a flock or herd would begin to pine away with some strange and nameless disease, the shepherd’s ewes yeaned dead lambs, and were found standing over their lost offspring aghast. Or his cows, “the milky mothers of the herd,” would rush from field to field, “quite mad,” with their tails erect towards the sky, like the bare poles of a ship in distress scudding before the gale; or the brown mare would refuse to be harnessed, and signify her intention to remain in the stall on a busy day, to her master’s infinite disgust. In the more civilised part of my parish the well-to-do farmer would have a remedy. He would mount his horse one break of day on some secret expedition, and be absent for another day or two. Then he returns armed with a packet of white powders, which he scatters carefully, one at every gate on his farm, and his men hear him as he goes muttering in solemn fashion some strange set words, which turn out, when the scroll is submitted to the schoolmaster afterwards, to contain the blessings of the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, copied in writing for his use. He has paid a visit, it appears, to a distant town, and been closeted with a well-known public character of the west, popularly called the White Witch, and it is he who has not only exposed the name and arts of the parish practitioner of evil, but has supplied an antidote in the shape of baffling powders and “charms of might.”

Some years agone a violent thunderstorm passed over the hamlet of Holacombe, and wrought great damage in its course. Trees were rooted up, cattle killed, and a rick or two set on fire. It so befell that I visited, the day after, one of the chief agricultural inhabitants of the village, and I found the farmer and his men standing by a ditch wherein lay, heels upward, a fine young horse quite dead. “Here sir,” he shouted, as I came on, “only please to look! is not this a sight to see?” I looked at the poor animal, and uttered my sympathy and regret at the loss.

“One of the fearful results,” I happened to say, “of the storm and lightning yesterday.” “There, Jem,” said he to one of his men, triumphantly, “didn’t I say the parson would find it out? Yes, sir,” he said, “it is as you say: it is all that wretched old Cherry[146] Parnell’s doing, with her vengeance and her noise!” I stared with astonishment at this unlooked-for interpretation which he had put into my mouth, and waited for him to explain. “You see, sir,” he went on to say, “the case was this: old Cherry came up to my place, tottering along and mumbling that she wanted a fagot of wood. I said to her, ‘Cherry,’ says I, ‘I gave you one only two days agone, and another two days before that, and I must say that I didn’t make up my woodrick altogether for you.’ So she turned away, looking very grany, and muttering something about ‘Hotter for me hereafter.’ Well, sir, last night I was in bed, I and my wife, and all to once there bursted a thunderbolt, and shaked the very room and house. Up we started, and my wife says, ‘O father, old Cherry’s up! I wish I had gone after her with that there fagot.’ I confess I thought in my mind I wish she had; but it was too late then, and I would try to hope for the best. But now, sir, you see with your own eyes what that revengeful old woman hath been and done. And I do think, sir,” he went on to say, changing his tone to a kind of indignant growl--“I _do_ think that when I call to mind how I’ve paid tithe and rates faithfully all these years, and kept my place in church before your reverence every Sabbath-day, and always voted in the vestries that what hath a be ought to be, and so on, I do think that such ones as old Cherry Parnell never ought to be allowed to meddle with such things as thunder and lightning.” What could I--what could any man in his senses--say to this?

The great charmer of charms[147] in this strange corner of the world is a seventh son born in direct succession from one father and one mother. Find such a person, and you have “the sayer of good words” always at your command. He is called in our folk-lore the doctor of the district. There is such an old man in my hamlet, popularly called Uncle Tony Cleverdon. He was baptised Anthony; but this has been changed by kindly village parlance and the usage of the West. For with us the pet name is generally the short name, and any one venerable from age and amiable in nature is termed, without relationship, but merely for endearment, “uncle” and “aunt.”[148] Uncle Tony has inherited this endowment in a family of thirteen children, he being the seventh born. He often says that his lucky birth has been as good as “a fortin” to him all his life; for although he is forbidden by usage and tradition to take money for the exercise of his functions, nothing has hindered that he should always be invited to sit as an honoured guest at the table furnished with good things in the houses of his votaries. Uncle Tony allowed me, as a vast favour, to take down from his lips some of his formularies: they had never been committed to writing before, he said; not, as I believe, for more than three centuries, for they smack of the Middle Ages. He very much questioned whether their virtue would not be utterly destroyed when he was gone, by their being “put into ink.”

Uncle Tony was like an ancient augur in the science of birds. “Whenever you see one magpie alone by himself,” said he, with a look of inimitable sagacity, “that bird is upon no good: spit over your right shoulder three times, and say--

“Clean birds by sevens,
Unclean by twos,
The dove in the heavens
Is the one I choose!”