Chapter VIII (11)

The old abbey had done good service in its time, as it had given Tavistock the claim of being the second town in England where a printing press was erected, for in 1524 one had been put up in the abbey, and a monk named Rychard had printed a translation of Boethius' _De Consolatione Philosophiæ_, and a Saxon Grammar was also said to have been printed there. The neighbourhood of Tavistock was not without legends, which linger long on the confines of Dartmoor, and, like slander, seemed to have expanded as time went on:

The flying rumours gathered as they rolled,
Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told,
And all who told it added something new,
And all who heard it made enlargement too!
On every ear it spread, on every tongue it grew.

Fitzford was the name of one of the river suburbs of Tavistock, and was once upon a time the residence of the Fitze family. According to some ancient histories of Devon, one of which had the significant title of _The Bloudie Book_, Sir John Fitze was noted as a turbulent, dangerous man, ever ready with his sword on all occasions. Meeting with many of his neighbours at a noontide dinner at Tavistock, he was vaunting his free tenure and boasting that he did not hold a foot of land from any but the "Queene of England," when his neighbour, "Maister Slanning," reminded him of a small piece of land he had of his for which he was liable for rent, but for which no payment had been asked by reason of "courtesie and friendshippe." Upon hearing these words Fitze flew in a furious rage and told Slanning with a great oath that he lied,

and withal gave fuel to his rage and reines of spight in the
unjustness of his anger--offering to stab him. But Maister Slanning,
who was known to be a man of no less courage, and more courtesie,
with a great knife that he had, warded the hazard of such
threatenings.

The quarrel was stopped by the intervention of friends, and Slanning, thinking the matter was at an end, shortly afterwards rode home in company with only one servant.

Long had they not ridden but commanding the man to walk down his
horses in the way, himself the while taking the greene fields for his
more contented walking; he might behold Sir John Fitze, with four
more, galloping amane after him, which sight could not but be a great
amazement to Maister Slanning.

The quarrel was renewed, and Slanning, who was, by the way, a brave man, perceived that Fitze was determined to kill him; but he had no chance against live swords, and when he got to Fitzford gateway he received a blow from behind which staggered him, and Fitze, seizing the opportunity, ran his sword through his body, and poor Slanning fell to the floor a murdered man.

Fitze fled to France, and his friends obtained some kind of a pardon for him; but when he returned they all gave him the cold shoulder; he was avoided by everybody, and to add to his discomfort the children of Slanning sued him in London for compensation.

Meanwhile the guilt in blood weighed heavily upon him, increasing in intensity as years went on, and the shade of Slanning never left him day or night, until finally he could not sleep, for the most horrid dreams awoke him and his screams in the night were awful to hear. Sometimes he dreamt he was being pursued by the police, then by black demons and other hideous monsters, while in the background was always the ghost of the man he had so cruelly murdered.

Late one night a man on horseback, haggard and weary, rode up to the door of the "Anchor Inn" at Kingston-on-Thames and demanded lodgings for the night. The landlord and his family were just retiring to rest, and the landlady, not liking the wild and haggard appearance of their midnight visitor, at first declined to receive him, but at length agreed to find him a room. The family were awakened in the night by the lodger crying in his sleep, and the landlady was greatly alarmed as the noise was continued at intervals all through the night. They had to rise early in the morning, as the landlord had some work to do in his fields, but his wife would not be left in the house with the stranger who had groaned so horribly during the night. Their footsteps seem to have awakened the man, for suddenly they were terrified to see him rush downstairs with a drawn sword in his hand, throw himself upon a man standing in the yard, and kill him instantly. It was thought afterwards that he must have mistaken his victim for a constable; but when he came to his senses and found he had killed the groom to whom he had given orders to meet him early in the morning, he turned his sword against himself and fell--dead! And such was the tragic end of John Fitze.

There is a saying, "Like father, like son," which sometimes justifies itself; but in the case of Fitze it applied not to a son, but to a daughter, who seems to have followed his bad example and to have inherited his wild nature, for it was said that she was married four times--twice before she reached the age of sixteen! She afterwards married Lord Charles Howard, son of the Duke of Suffolk, and after she had disposed of him--for the country people believed she murdered all her husbands--she married Sir Richard Granville, the cruel Governor of Lydford Castle, but preferred to retain the title of Lady Howard. It was said that she died diseased both in mind and body, and that afterwards she had to do penance for her sins. Every night on the stroke of twelve a phantom coach made of bones, drawn by four skeleton horses and ornamented with four grinning skulls, supposed to be those of her four husbands, issued from under Fitzford gateway with the shade of Lady Howard inside. A coal-black hound ran in front as far as Okehampton, and on the return journey carried in its mouth a single blade of grass, which it placed on a stone in the old courtyard of Fitzford; and not until all the grass of Okehampton had been thus transported would Lady Howard's penance end! The death-coach glided noiselessly along the lonely moorland roads, and any person who accepted Lady Howard's invitation to ride therein was never seen again. One good effect this nocturnal journey had was that every one took care to leave the inns at Tavistock in time to reach home before midnight.

My Lady hath a sable coach,
With horses two and four;
My Lady hath a gaunt bloodhound.
That goeth on before:
My Lady's coach hath nodding plumes,
The driver hath no head;
My Lady is an ashen white
As one that long is dead.

I'd rather walk a hundred miles,
And run by night and day.
Than have that carriage halt for me
And hear my Lady say:
"Now pray step in and make no din,
Step in with me to ride;
There's room, I trow, by me, for you
And all the world beside!"

The church at Tavistock was dedicated to St. Eustachius, for we were now quite near Cornwall, a land of saints with all kinds of queer names. The church had the appearance of having passed through the ordeal of some severe restorations, but we saw many objects of interest therein. There was a tomb with effigies of Judge Granville, his wife, and three sons and four daughters, erected in 1615 by his widow after she had married again--a circumstance that might give rise to some speculations. The children's heads had all been knocked off, and the boys had disappeared altogether; probably, we thought, taken prisoners by some of Cromwell's men to serve as ornaments elsewhere. There was also a monument to the Fitze family, including a figure of Sir John Fitze, the last of the line, who was buried at Twickenham; but whether he was the hero of the legend or not we could not ascertain.

Thomas Larkham, who was vicar from 1649 to 1660, stood out against the Act of Conformity, and was dismissed. But he kept a diary, and a page of it had been preserved which referred to the gifts presented to him after being deprived of his stipend.

1653, _Nov. 30th._--The wife of Will Hodges brought me a fat goose;
Lord, do them good! Edward Cole sent by his daughter a turkey; Lord,
accept it! _Dec. 2nd._--Sara Frowt a dish of butter; accept, Lord!
_Dec. 6th._--Margaret Sitwell would not be paid for 2-1/2 lbs. of
butter; is she not a daughter of Abraham? Father, be pleased to pay
her. Walter Peck sent me, _Dec. 14th_, a partridge, and Mr. Webb the
same day pork and puddings; Lord, forget not! Mrs. Thomasin
Doidge--Lord, look on her in much mercy--_Dec. 19th_, gave me 5s.
_Jan. 25th._--Mrs. Audry sent me a bushel of barley malt for
housekeeping; Lord, smell a sweet savour! Patrick Harris sent me a
shoulder of pork,--he is a poor ignorant man. Lord, pity him!

There was a curious thirteenth-century chest, trapezium in form, and said to be the only one of that shape in the West of England. It was of carved oak, and called a treasure chest, because it had a secret recess at the back where the priest kept a jewel with which he fastened his robes. Another old chest contained some ancient Latin writings, the earliest of which bore the dates 1285, 1325, and 1370, written in old lettering with what was known as "monk's ink," made from vegetables. Some of the documents bore seals with rush rings attached, and there was a black-letter Bible, and a chained book dated 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. We were also shown four pewter flagons for Communion wine, all of the time of Charles I, two churchwardens having each given one in 1633 and two other wardens one each in 1638. Asked why so many were required, we were informed that in those days all the people were compelled to come to church, and it was nothing unusual for quarts of wine to be used at one Communion, at a cost of several pounds! But in those days Holy Communion was only administered four times a year!

Tavistock was one of the four Stannary towns in Devonshire, where Stannary Courts were established to deal with all matters relating to tin and the tinners who produced it. Under a charter of Edward I tin was ordered to be officially weighed and stamped in the towns so appointed. But while the tinners had the privilege of digging for tin on any person's land without payment for rent or damage, they were subject to heavy penalties and impositions in other ways, and especially in the case of adulteration of tin with inferior metal. The forest laws also in those early times were terrible and barbarous. To enforce the authority of the Stannary Courts a prison was constructed in the thirteenth century out of the keep or dungeon of Lydford Castle, about nine miles north of Tavistock; and in the sixteenth century this prison was described as "one of the most annoyous, contagious, and detestable places in the realm." When Sir Richard Granville, who was noted for his extremely cruel disposition, was Governor, prisoners were known to be compelled to swallow spoonfuls of the molten metal they were supposed to have adulterated. William Browne, a poet born at Tavistock in 1590, in one of his pastorals perpetuated the memory of Lydford Castle:

I oft have heard of Lydford law--
How in the morn they hang and draw.
And sit in judgement after.

We had now to return towards the coast-line from which we had diverged after leaving Plymouth, and we decided to walk from Tavistock to Liskeard and stay there for the night. The country was rather hilly, and in about three miles we crossed the River Tamar, at the same point passing from Devon into Cornwall, for the river here divided the two counties. It had made for itself in the course of ages a deep passage through the hills, which for the pedestrian involved a deep descent and a sharp ascent on the other side to and from the river. Our way now crossed the Hingston Downs, where we came to one of the chief landmarks of Cornwall, named the Kit Hill, at an elevation of 1,067 feet above sea-level, standing quite near our road. This hill marked the site of a desperate battle in 835, between King Edgar of Wessex on the one side and the Danes combined with the men of Cornwall on the other. The Saxons lost heavily, but they won the battle, and the neighbouring barrows, or tumuli, were supposed to have covered the remains of those who fell on that occasion. We were now amongst the tin mines, of which there were quite a number, used and disused, in sight, some right on the top of the hills; and from these highlands we could see the two Channels, the English on one side and the Irish on the other. It was supposed that the Irish had originally inhabited the whole of Cornwall, but the old Cornishmen were in reality Celts of a different tribe. One of the miners told us that on his return from South Africa he could see Kit Hill distinctly from a long distance out at sea. Some of the tin miners, it seemed, were emigrating to South Africa, while others were going to America. Soon afterwards we reached the fair-sized village or town of Callington, which under the old franchise returned two Members to Parliament, one of whom had been Horace Walpole, the son of the famous Robert Walpole. We looked through the church, where we saw a rather fine monument to Lord Willoughby de Broke erected in 1503. He was represented as wearing armour and the insignia of the Garter, and at his feet were two curious figures of monks, said to be unique, for the figures in that position were invariably those of lions or other animals. A lady from the vicarage told us that his lordship was the steward of the Duchy of Cornwall, and an important person, but there was some doubt about his being buried there. There was another church in the neighbourhood, and as both the villages belonged to him, he had a tomb made in each, so that he could be buried in whichever part of his property he happened to be in when he died, or, as he explained to his friends, "where you drop, there you may be buried."

There were more temperance hotels, or houses, in Cornwall than in most other counties we had passed through, almost invariably clean and good, and it was to one of these that we adjourned at Callington for tea. We found it quite up to the mark, and we had a splendid feed there both as regarded quantity and quality, Devonshire cream being evidently not confined to its own county. It would have been a grand place in which to stay the night, but, though the weather was threatening, we must place our average mileage in a safe position, especially as we were now nearing the end of our long walk. It was nearly dark when we left Callington, and, on our inquiring the way to Liskeard, a man we saw at the end of the village said he could put vis in a nearer way than going along the high road, which would save us a good half-mile in the journey. Going with us to the entrance of a narrow lane, he gave us very careful and voluminous instructions about the way we must follow. Thanking him, we left him, and proceeded along the lane in search of a farmhouse, or rather a gate at the end of the road leading towards it, for he had told us we should not be able to see the house itself in the dark, but should be sure to see the gate, as it was a large one, painted white, and after passing this we were to make one or two turns which he described. The sky was overcast and the night very dark, and although there was a new moon, it was only three days old--too young to be of any service to us. But we could not find either the gate or the farm, or any turns in the road, nor could either of us remember distinctly the latter part of the instructions given to us by the man, one thinking we had to turn to the right and the other to the left. The fact was, we had calculated upon meeting some one on the road from whom, we could inquire further. We had been walking slowly for some time, stopping occasionally to listen for the footsteps of some person from whom we could inquire, but not a sound could we hear until we almost stumbled against a gate that barred our further progress, for it reached right across our road, and beyond this we could hear the sound of rushing water.

I knew now that we had come to a full-stop, as my brother would never go beyond that gate after he had heard the roar of the stream, which must have been quite near us. He had often rowed a boat on dangerous rivers and on the sea; had been nearly lost one dark night in a high spring-tide on the sandbanks of the River Mersey; had been washed out to sea through the failure of an oar at Barmouth; had narrowly escaped being swamped with his boat off the East Coast; and a few years before had a hair-breadth escape from drowning by being drawn under the wooden framework protecting the piles for a future famous bridge over the River Thames near the heart of London; but, owing to a narrow escape from drowning when he was almost a child, he had the greatest horror of having his head under water and of being drowned, and even now he was afraid of the sound of rushing water in the dark, for he could not swim a yard; but he was a brave man nevertheless!

So there we stood on a pitch-dark night, leaning over a gate in an unknown country, and on a by-road, listening to the rush of the water beyond, wishing that some one might come that way to direct us; but it was hopeless. When we struck a match and lit a piece of paper, we discovered that there was no road beyond the gate, the lane having made an abrupt turning towards the left upon reaching it. We walked along carefully, striking a match occasionally, and at length came to a finger-post, green with age; we could not, however, distinguish the lettering on the arms at the top, so I knew that my turn had now come, as when there was any climbing to be done during our journey, I had to do it. I "swarmed up" the post to the arms at the top, while my brother lighted a piece of newspaper below; but it was of no use, as the names were partly obscured. Still I could see that Liskeard was not one of them, so I dropped down again, nearly knocking my brother over, as the ground was not level at the foot of the post and the light had gone out. We had to stop a minute or two, for the glare of the light from the burning paper had made the darkness more impenetrable than before; but the narrowness of the road was an advantage to us, as we knew we could not get far astray. Coming to a good hard road, we arrived at a bridge where there were a few houses, and soon we were walking quickly again on the right way to Liskeard; but how we blessed that countryman who with the best of intentions had directed us the nearer way! In a few miles we saw a light ahead, and found it came from a small inn by the roadside where one road crossed another, and here we called to inquire our way, and were informed we had arrived at St. Eve, which we thought must be the name of some doubtful Cornish saint; but that impression was removed when we found it was the local pronunciation for St. Ive. We could just discern the outline of a small church to the right of our road, and as there were so few houses we did not confound it with the much larger place in Cornwall, St. Ives, nor, needless to say, with another place named St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, which we passed through on our walk from London the previous year.

It was getting unpleasantly near "closing time" when we reached Liskeard, but we were just in time to be well entertained and housed for the night.

(_Distance walked thirty-six miles_.)

_Thursday, November 16th._

Liskeard was visited in 1757 by John Wesley, who described it as "one of the largest and pleasantest towns in Cornwall," a description with which we agreed, but we were inclined to add the words, "and of no occupation," for there was no outward or visible sign of any staple industry. As in other similar places we had visited, the first question that suggested itself to us was, "How do the people live?" Their appearance, however, caused us no anxiety, as every one we saw looked both well and happy. They had made a clean sweep of their old castle, which was said to have been built in the thirteenth century by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, the brother of Henry III; the site they had formed into a public park, in which stood the old grammar school where Dr. Wolcot was educated, who wrote a number of satirical odes, letters, and ballads, under the name of "Peter Pindar," in the time of George III, many of his satires being levelled at the king himself. Eventually he sold his works for an annuity of £250.

Liskeard was remarkable for the spring of water round which the town had been built, and which was described by Leland in his _Itinerary_ as "a good conduit in the middle of the Town very plentiful of water to serve the Town." Four pipes originally conveyed the water to different points, and the street where the well existed was known as Pipewell Street.

The wells of Cornwall were famous, being named after the different saints who had settled beside them in ancient times, appreciating the value of the pure water they contained. We had often tested the water of the wells and springs we had come to in the course of our long walk, and the conviction had grown upon us that we owed much of our continued good health to drinking water. We naturally perspired a good deal, especially when we walked quickly, which of course created thirst; and the different strata of the various rock-formations we had crossed must have influenced the water and ourselves to some extent. We had come to the conclusion that people who went on holidays and attributed the benefit derived solely to "the change of air" might have equally benefited by the change of water!

In one part of Cheshire, formerly in possession of the Romans, there was a rather remarkable spring of water known as the "Roman Well," over which appeared the following Latin inscription, difficult to translate, but which had been interpreted thus:

_Sanitate Sacrum_: Sacred to Health!
_Obstructum reserat_, It removes obstruction.
_Durum terit_, It crushes the hard,
_Humida siecat_, It dries the moist,
_Debile fortificat_, It strengthens the weak,
_Si tamen arte bibis_. Provided thou drinkest with knowledge.

The water rises from some subterranean source in the sandstone rock and enters with considerable force into the receptacle prepared for it, which is about five feet deep. The water was always beautifully clear and cool, and visitors often amused themselves by throwing halfpennies into the bath and watching them apparently being transformed into shillings as they reached the bottom--a fact attributed to the presence of lime in the water.

In striking contrast to this was the water afterwards brought through the district from a watershed on the distant Welsh hills, which depended for its supply almost entirely on the downfall from the clouds. The difference between that and the water from the Roman well was very marked, for while the rainwater was very soft, the other that contained the lime was very hard, and therefore considered more conducive to the growth of the bones in children. Our personal experiences also with the water at Inverness, and in the neighbourhood of Buxton in the previous year, which affected us in a similar way, convinced us that water affected human beings very markedly; and then we had passed by Harrogate and Leamington, where people were supposed to go purposely to drink the waters. Even the water of the tin-mining district through which we were now passing might contain properties that were absent elsewhere, and the special virtues attributed to some of the Saints' Wells in Cornwall in olden times might not have been altogether mythical.

Besides the four Stannary towns in Devon there were originally four in Cornwall, including Liskeard, where all tin mined in their respective districts had to be weighed and stamped. Probably on that account Liskeard returned two members to Parliament, the first members being returned in 1294; amongst the M.P.'s who had represented the town were two famous men--Sir Edward Coke, elected in 1620, and Edward Gibbon, in 1774.

Sir Edward Coke was a great lawyer and author of the legal classic _Coke upon Littleton_. He became Speaker of the House of Commons, Attorney-General, and afterwards Chief Justice, and was the merciless prosecutor of Sir Walter Raleigh, and also of the persons concerned in the Gunpowder Plot; while his great speech against Buckingham towards the close of the career of that ill-fated royal favourite is famous.

Edward Gibbon was the celebrated historian and author of that great work _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. The history of his Parliamentary connection with Liskeard was rather curious. One morning in 1774, when in London, he was asked if he would like to enter the House of Commons, and when he consented, the "free and independent electors" of Liskeard were duly "instructed" to return him. But it was very doubtful whether he ever saw any of the electors, or had any dealings with the Constituency whatever, although he acted as one of their members for about eight years. Possibly, as there were two members, the other M.P. might have been the "acting partner."

Liskeard church was the second largest in Cornwall, and in it we saw a "Lepers' squint" and also a turret at the corner of the aisle from which the priest could preach to the lepers without coming in contact with them, for the disease was very infectious--so much so that the hospital built for them was a mile or two from the town. "Lepers' squints" had been common in some parts of England, and as the disease is often mentioned in the Bible, we considered it must have been imported from the East, perhaps from Palestine by the Crusaders. We had not seen or heard of any cases of leprosy on our journey, and we concluded that the disease could not have been natural to our colder climate, and had therefore died out as a result of more cleanly habits. The pulpit was dated 1632, the carving on it being the work of a local sculptor, whose remuneration, we were told, was at the rate of one penny per hour, which appeared to us to be a very small amount for that description of work. Possibly he considered he was working for the cause of religion, and hoped for his further reward in a future life; or was it a silver penny?

The houses in Liskeard were built of stone, and the finest perhaps was that known as Stuart House, so named because King Charles I stayed there for about a week in 1644. This was of course in the time of the Civil War, when Cornwall, as it practically belonged to the King or his son, did not consider itself as an ordinary county, but as a duchy, and was consequently always loyal to the reigning sovereign. It was also a difficult county for an invading army to approach, and the army of the Parliament under the Earl of Essex met with a disastrous defeat there.

But we must not forget the Holy Wells, as the villages and towns took their names from the saints who presided at the wells. That of St. Keyne, quite near Liskeard, is described by Southey:

A Well there is in the West Country,
And a clearer one never was seen;
There is not a wife in the West Country
But has heard of the Well of St. Keyne.

An oak and an elm-tree stand beside,
And behind doth an ash-tree grow,
And a willow from the bank above
Droops to the water below.

St. Keyne introduced the rather remarkable belief that the first of a newly married couple to drink of the water of her well, whether husband or wife, should in future rule the home. We supposed that the happy pair would have a race to the well, and the one who arrived there first would ever afterwards play the first fiddle, if that instrument was in use in the time of St. Keyne. But a story was related of how on one occasion the better-half triumphed. No sooner had the knot been tied than the husband ran off as fast as he could to drink of the water at St. Keyne's Well, leaving his wife in the church. When he got back he found the lady had been before him, for she had brought a bottle of the water from the well with her to church, and while the man was running to the well she had been quietly seated drinking the water in the church porch!

The story was told by the victim to a stranger, and the incident was recorded by Southey in his poem "The Well of St. Keyne":

"You drank of the Well, I warrant, betimes?"
He to the countryman said:
But the countryman smiled as the stranger spake,
And sheepishly shook his head:

"I hastened as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my wife in the porch;
But i' faith! she had been wiser than me,
For she took a bottle to church."

It was at Liskeard that we first heard of George Borrow, a tramp like ourselves. Although we should have been pleased to have had a talk with him, we should scarcely have been able to accompany him on one of his journeys, for he was 6 feet 3 inches in height against our 5 feet 8 inches, and he would have been able to walk quicker than ourselves. He was born in 1803 and died in 1881, so that he was still alive when we were walking through Cornwall, and was for many years a travelling agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society. In the course of his wanderings, generally on foot, he made a study of gipsy life, and wrote some charming books about the Romany tribes, his _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_ being still widely read. He was a native of Norfolk, but his father was born near Liskeard, to which place he paid a special visit at the end of 1853. On Christmas Day in that year, which was also a Sunday, he walked to St. Cleer and attended service in the church, Mr. Berkeley being the preacher, and although there was no organ, he saw a fiddle in the gallery, so fiddles must have then been in use in Cornwall. He would also see the Well of St. Cleer, which was quite near the church, and must in the time of the Saxons have been covered over with stone, as the old arches and columns were Saxon work. Borrow's father was born at Trethinnick Farm, near St. Cleer, which he also went to see. He left Liskeard in January 1854 on a tramp through Truro and Penzance to Land's End by almost the same route as that we were about to follow ourselves. As he made many notes during his wanderings in Cornwall, his friends naturally expected him to publish an account of his travels there, after the manner of a book he had published in 1862 entitled _Wild Wales_, but they were disappointed, for none appeared.

It was said that Cornwall did not grow wood enough to make a coffin, and the absence of trees enabled us to see a number of huge, mysterious-looking stones: some upright and standing alone, others in circles, or in groups named cists composed of upright stones, forming a cavity between them in the shape of a chest covered at the top, and not intended to be opened again, for they had been used as tombs. Occasionally the stones stood quite near our road, some in the shape of crosses, while we could see others in fields and on the top of small hills.

There were some remarkable stones near St. Cleer, including the famous "Cheesewring," formed of eight circular stones each resembling a cheese, placed one on top of another and rising to a height of about eight yards; but the strange part about this curious erection was that the four larger and heavier stones were at the top and the four smaller ones at the bottom. It was a mystery how in such remote times the builders could have got those immense stones to the top of the others and there balanced them so exactly as to withstand the storms of so many years.

Near this supposed Druidical erection was a rough cave known as "Daniel Gumb's House," formerly inhabited by a man of that name who came there to study astrology and astronomy, and who was said to have had his family with him. He left his record by cutting his name at the entrance to the cave, "D. Gumb 1735," and by inscribing a figure on the roof representing the famous 47th proposition in the First Book of Euclid.

The Trethevy Menhir, a cromlech or "House of the Dead," which George Borrow went to see, consisted of seven great hewn slabs which formed a chamber inside about the height of a man; over the top was an enormous flat stone of such great weight as to make one wonder how it could have been placed there so many centuries ago. At one corner of the great stone, which was in a slanting position, there was a hole the use of which puzzled antiquarians; but George Borrow was said to have contrived to get on the top of it and, putting his hand through the hole, shouted, "Success to old Cornwall," a sentiment which we were fully prepared to endorse, for we thought the people we saw at the two extremes of our journey--say in Shetland, Orkney, and the extreme north of Scotland, and those in Devon and Cornwall in the South of England--were the most homely and sociable people with whom we came in contact.

Some of the legends attached to the stones in Cornwall were of a religious character, one example being the three stone circles named the "Hurlers"; eleven in one circle, fourteen in another, and twelve in a third--thirty-seven in all; but only about one-half of them remained standing. Here indeed might be read a "sermon in stone," and one of them might have been preached from these circles, as the stones were said to represent men who were hurling a ball one Sunday instead of attending church, when they and the two pipers who were playing for them were all turned into stone for thus desecrating the Sabbath Day.

We crossed the country to visit St. Neot, and as the village was away from the main roads and situated on the fringe of Bodmin Moor, we were surprised to find such a fine church there. We were informed that St. Neot was the second largest parish in Cornwall, and that the moor beyond had been much more thickly populated in former times. We had passed through a place of the same name in Huntingdonshire in the previous year, when walking home from London, and had been puzzled as to how to pronounce the name; when we appealed to a gentleman we met on the road outside the town, he told us that the gentry called it St. Netts and the common people St. Noots, but here it was pronounced as spelt, with just a slight stress on the first syllable--St. Ne-ot, the letter "s" not being sounded officially.

St. Neot, supposed to have been related to King Alfred, being either a brother or an uncle, came here from Glastonbury and built a hermitage near his well, in which he would stand for hours immersed up to his neck in the water in order "to mortify his flesh and cultivate his memory," while he recited portions of the Psalter, the whole of which he could repeat from memory. Though a dwarf, he was said to be able to rescue beasts from the hunters and oxen from the thieves, and to live on two miraculous fishes, which, though he ate them continually, were always to be seen sporting in the water of his well!

St. Neot was the original burial-place of the saint, and in the church there was a curious stone casket or reliquary which formerly contained his remains; but when they were carried off to enrich Eynesbury Abbey at the Huntingdon St. Neots, all that was left here was a bone from one of his arms. This incident established the connection between the two places so far apart.

The church had a beautiful Decorated tower and a finely carved sixteenth-century roof, but its great glory consisted in its famous stained-glass windows, which were fifteen in number, and to each of which had been given a special name, such as the Young Women's Window, the Wives' Window, and so on, while St. Neot's window in its twelve panels represented incidents in the life of that saint. It was supposed that these fine windows were second to none in all England, except those at Fairford church in Gloucestershire, which we had already seen, and which were undoubtedly the finest range of mediæval windows in the country. They were more in number, and had the great advantage of being perfect, for in the time of the Civil War they had been taken away and hidden in a place of safety, and not replaced in the church until the country had resumed its normal condition.

The glass in the lower panels of the windows in the Church of St. Neot's, Cornwall, had at that time been broken, but had been restored, the subjects represented being the same as before. Those windows named after the young women and the wives had been presented to the church in the sixteenth century by the maids and mothers of the parish.

On our way from here to Lostwithiel, which my brother thought might have been a suitable name for the place where we went astray last night, we passed along Braddock or Broad-oak Moor, where in 1643, during the Civil War, a battle was fought, in which Sir Ralph Hopton defeated the Parliamentary Army and captured more than a thousand prisoners. Poetry seemed to be rather at a discount in Cornwall, but we copied the following lines relating to this preliminary battle:

When gallant Grenville stoutly stood
And stopped the gap up with his blood,
When Hopton led his Cornish band
Where the sly conqueror durst not stand.
We knew the Queen was nigh at hand.

We must confess we did not understand this; it could not have been Spenser's "Faerie Queene," so we walked on to the Fairy Cross without seeing either the Queen or the Fairy, although we were fortunate to find what might be described as a Fairy Glen and to reach the old Castle of Restormel, which had thus been heralded:

To the Loiterer, the Tourist, or the Antiquary: the ivy-covered ruins
of Restormel Castle will amply repay a visit, inasmuch as the remains
of its former grandeur must, by the very nature of things, induce
feelings of the highest and most dignified kind; they must force
contemplative thought, and compel respect for the works of our
forefathers and reverence for the work of the Creator's hand through
centuries of time.

It was therefore with some such thoughts as these that we walked along the lonely road leading up to the old castle, and rambled amongst the venerable ruins. The last of the summer visitors had long since departed, and the only sound we could hear was that made by the wind, as it whistled and moaned among the ivy-covered ruins, and in the trees which partly surrounded them, reminding us that the harvest was past and the summer was ended, while indications of approaching winter were not wanting.

The castle was circular in form, and we walked round the outside of it on the border of the moat which had formerly been filled with water, but now was quite dry and covered with luxuriant grass. It was 60 feet wide and 30 feet deep, being formerly crossed by a drawbridge, not now required. The ruins have thus been described by a modern poet:

And now I reach the moat's broad marge,
And at each pace more fair and large
The antique pile grows on my sight,
Though sullen Time's resistless might,
Stronger than storms or bolts of heaven,
Through wall and buttress rents have riven;
And wider gaps had there been seen
But for the ivy's buckler green,
With stems like stalwart arms sustained;
Here else had little now remained
But heaps of stones, or mounds o'ergrown
With nettles, or with hemlock sown.
Under the mouldering gate I pass,
And, as upon the thick rank grass
With muffled sound my footsteps falls,
Waking no echo from the walls,
I feel as one who chanced to tread
The solemn precincts of the dead.

The mound on which the castle stood was originally of Celtic construction, but was afterwards converted into one of the fortresses which the Normans built in the eastern part of Cornwall as rallying-points in case of any sudden insurrection among the "West Welshmen." The occupation of the fortress by the Normans was the immediate cause of the foundation of the town of Lostwithiel, to which a charter was granted in 1196 by Robert de Cardinan, the then owner of the castle and the surrounding country.

An exchequer deed showed how the castle and town of Lostwithiel came into the possession of the Dukes of Cornwall:

Know ye present and to come that I, Isolda-de-Tracey, daughter and
heir of Andrew de Cardinan, have granted to Lord Richard, King of the
Romans, my whole Manor of Tewington.... Moreover I have given and
granted to the aforesaid Lord the King, Castle of Restormell and the
villeinage in demesne, wood and meadows, and the whole Town of
Lostwithiel, and water of Fowey, with the fishery, with all
liberties, and free customs to the said water, town, and castle,
belonging. Whereof the water of Fowey shall answer for two and a half
knights fees (a "knight's fee" being equal to 600 acres of land).

In the year 1225 Henry III gave the whole county of Cornwall, in fee, to his brother Richard, who was created Earl of Cornwall by charter dated August 12th, 1231, and from that time Restormel became the property of the Earls of Cornwall. Afterwards, in 1338, when the Earldom was raised to a Dukedom, the charter of creation settled on the Duchy, with other manors, the castle and manor of Restormel, with the park and other appurtenances in the county of Cornwall, together with the town of Lostwithiel: and it was on record that the park then contained 300 deer. Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, caused extensive alterations and improvements in the castle at Restormel, and often made it his residence, and kept his Court there. He was elected King of the Romans or Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at Frankfort on January 13th, 1256, and crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle, November 27th, 1257. Edward the Black Prince, upon whom the Dukedom was confirmed when only seven years old, paid two visits to Restormel. The first of these was in 1354, possibly while his expedition to France was being prepared at Plymouth, and the second in 1363.

In the time of the Civil War the commanding position of the castle caused it to be repaired and held by the Parliamentarians; but after the disastrous defeat of their army under the Earl of Essex in 1644 it was garrisoned by Sir Richard Grenville for the King. In recent times it was again visited by royalty, for on Tuesday, September 8th, 1846, the royal yacht _Victoria and Albert_ sailed into Fowey and landed a royal party, who drove to Restormel Castle. It revived old memories to read the names of the party who came here on that occasion, for in addition to Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, there were the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales, Lady Jocelyn, Miss Kerr, Mdlle. Geuner, Lord Spencer, Lord Palmerston, Sir James Clark, Mr. Anson, and Col. Grey.

The castle was not a very large one, and we were more impressed by the loneliness of its situation than by the ruin itself, for there was a long approach to it without a cottage or a friendly native in sight, nor did we see any one in the lonely road of quite a mile along which we passed afterwards to the town of Lostwithiel. But this road was quite pleasant, following the tree-covered course of the River Fowey, and lined with ferns and the usual flower-bearing plants all the way to that town.

Here we rejoined the Liskcard highway, which crossed the river by an ancient bridge said to date from the fourteenth century. At this point the river had long ago been artificially widened so as to form a basin and landing-place for the small boats which then passed to and fro between Fowey and Lostwithiel.

The derivation of the last place-name was somewhat doubtful, but the general interpretation seemed to be that its original form was Lis-guythiel, meaning the "Palace in the Wood," which might be correct, since great trees still shut in the range of old buildings representing the remains of the old Palace or Duchy House. The buildings, which were by no means lofty, were devoted to purposes of an unimportant character, but they had a decidedly dungeon-like appearance, and my brother, who claimed to be an authority on Shakespeare because he had once committed to memory two passages from the great bard's writings, assured me that if these old walls were gifted with speech, like the ghost that appeared to Hamlet, they "could a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up our souls; freeze our young blood; make our eyes, like stars, start from their spheres; our knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine"; but fortunately "this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood," and so we hurried away up the town.

Lostwithiel, one of the Stannary towns, was at one time the only coinage town in Cornwall, and traces of the old Mint and Stannary Court could yet be seen. The town had formerly the honour of being represented in Parliament by the famous writer, statesman, and poet, Joseph Addison.

The church was dedicated to St. Bartholomew, and was described as "a perfect example of the Decorated period" and the "glory of Cornwall." It possessed a lantern spire "of a kind unexampled elsewhere in the West of England"; but as our standard was high, since we had seen so many churches, we failed to appreciate these features, and, generally speaking, there were no very fine churches in Cornwall compared with those in other counties. This church, however, had passed through some lively scenes in the Civil War, when the Royalist army was driving that of the Parliament towards the sea-coast, where it was afterwards cornered and captured. A Provost named Marshall commanded the detachment of the Parliamentary forces at Lostwithiel, and to show their contempt for the religion of the Church of England, they desecrated the church by leading one of their horses to the font and christening him Charles "in contempt of his most sacred Majesty the King." Meanwhile two Cavaliers, supporters of the King, and gentlemen of some repute in the county, had hidden themselves in the church tower and drawn the ladder up after them. When they saw the Provost preparing to depart, for he was now in a hurry to get away from the approaching Royalist soldiers, they jeered at him through a window in the tower. He called to them, "I'll fetch you down," and sent men with some "mulch and hay" to set fire to the tower into which the Cavaliers had climbed, but they only jeered at him the more, which caused him to try gunpowder, intending, as he could not smoke them out, to blow them out; but he only succeeded in blowing a few tiles off the roof of the church. The font was a fine one, octagonal in form, and carved on all the eight panels, though some of the figures had been mutilated; but it was still possible to discern a horrible-looking face covered with a wreath of snakes, a mitred head of a bishop, a figure of a knight with a hawk, horn, and hound, and other animals scarcely suitable, we thought, for a font.

The army of the Parliament was gradually driven to Fowey, where 6,000 of them were taken prisoner, while their commander, the Earl of Essex, escaped by sea. Fowey was only about six miles away from Lostwithiel, and situated at the mouth of the River Fowey. It was at one time the greatest port on the coast of Cornwall, and the abode of some of the fiercest fighting men in the British Isles. From that port vessels sailed to the Crusades, and when Edward III wanted ships and men for the siege of Calais, Fowey responded nobly to the call, furnishing 47 ships manned by 770 men. The men of Fowey were the great terror of the French coast, but in 1447 the French landed in the night and burnt the town. After this two forts were built, one on each side of the entrance to the river, after the manner of those at Dartmouth, a stout iron chain being dropped between them at nightfall. Fowey men were in great favour with Edward IV because of their continued activity against the French; but when he sent them a message, "I am at peace with my brother of France," the Fowey men replied that they were at war with him! As this was likely to create friction between the two countries, and as none of his men dared go to Fowey owing to the warlike character of its inhabitants, the King decided to resort to strategy, but of a rather mean character. He despatched men to Lostwithiel, who sent a deputation to Fowey to say they wished to consult the Fowey men about some new design upon France. The latter, not suspecting any treachery, came over, and were immediately seized and their leader hanged; while men were sent by sea from Dartmouth to remove their harbour chain and take away their ships. Possibly the ships might afterwards have been restored to them upon certain conditions, but it was quite an effectual way of preventing their depredations on the coast of France.

They seem to have been a turbulent race of people at Fowey, for they once actually became dissatisfied with their patron saint, the Irish St. Finbar, and when they rebuilt their church in 1336 they dismissed him and adopted St. Nicholas to guide their future destinies. Perhaps it was because St. Nicholas was the patron saint of all sailors, as he allayed a great storm when on a voyage to the Holy Land. What is now named Drake's Island, off Plymouth, was formerly named St. Nicholas. It would not be difficult to find many other churches dedicated to St. Nicholas on the sea-coast from there to the north, and we remembered he was the patron saint at Aberdeen.

St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of the Russians, some of the Czars of that mighty Empire having been named after him. While St. Catherine is the patron saint of the girls, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of the boys, and strange to relate is also the patron saint of parish clerks, who were formerly called "scholars."