Chapter II (2)

People in Devon are very dexterous in their choice of adjectives. At a supper here I thought the company had overeaten itself and might feel unwell next day. I inquired in due course, and was answered, “Us be feelin’ lovely.”--A labourer was discontented with his board and lodging: whereupon his host explained to me, “Us cannot give’n riotous livin’ on 18 pence a day.”--My finger-bowls came in for criticism here. “Gentlefolk don’t soil their fingers a-pickin’ up their meat; and if they did, how could they cleanse’n in they paltry basons?”

There is a cave amongst the rocks on the hill behind this house. I heard years ago, “Folk say it be a superstitious place, and they do tell of spiritual men uprisin’ there.” Spiritual men are ghosts; but I have only seen a spirituous man there, and he went down, not up.

A friend of my father’s writes to him from Moreton, 13 November 1843, “We are going to have a ringing match here tomorrow. There has been nothing else but this noise the last three or four days.” Blunt’s _Use and Abuse of the Church Bells_, 1846, gives a pretty picture of it all. “Toward the latter half of the last century the ringing of the church bells became a fashionable amusement among the yeomanry and gentry, and was degraded to the level on which the hurdle-race and steeple-chase now stand. This amusement, however, at any rate in most parts of the country, has long ago ‘become vulgar’ and ‘gone out of fashion’; till at last our belfries are left in a state of filthy dilapidation, receptacles for dirt and rubbish of all kinds, and very frequently the drinking-place of the most profane and profligate persons of the parish, who ring the bells for their amusement,” and so on.

My grandfather writes on 23 March 1861, “Mr ***** put some eggs under the jackdaws in the tower in hopes they would build in the town place, which they no doubt will some day.” It was the church tower, where the bells are hung; and Mr ***** was a churchwarden. The eggs, of course, were rooks’ eggs: he desired a rookery in the elms outside.

He writes on 26 December 1847, “The church singers by their inveteracy have rather disturbed the neighbourhood both Friday night and last night. [They used to bring the church bass-viol and violin and flute.] I order them not to come near, but unfortunately I am surrounded by a road, and they will pass near me: which my dogs notice.”

The dogs here were formidable. He writes, 10 May 1846, “I must get rid of Bess. She sat on a man to-day in the road.... If you strike Ben, you make him savage--I do not dare to repeat a blow to him--though such a good tempered old fellow.” There was always a Ben here, and this Ben was born in 1839 and died in 1852. My grandfather writes, 3 March, “Poor old Ben died on Monday, and was buried in the garden, just below where Fanny was buried. [Fanny, another old dog, died just before.] He lay down there on Saturday--I never before saw him lie there: one would almost think he found he was dying, and chose his place of burial.”

There are plenty of vipers hereabouts, but I never thought much of them until one killed my dog, 8 April 1920. She was a small sheep-dog, Rose by name, and she was out for a walk with me and was rummaging about in a hedge; and there the viper got her in the pad, between the second and third toes of the left fore-paw. These hedges harbour snakes. My grandfather writes to my father, 2 May 1852, “A fine sunny morning, and we went out for a walk to see if we could find any snakes in our hedges, for now is the time to see them, before the hedges get covered.”

He writes on 25 April 1858, “When I was at the Cleave on Friday, a viper made its appearance and then another and so on till there were four, all in a few minutes. It being very warm, this was (I think) their first appearance from their winter hiding place: they were very lean.” He speaks of fishing in the Bovey down below the Cleave, 17 May 1846, “There is a timidity about me, I am looking every step I plant my foot, fearing the ‘varmints’ as Farmer ***** calls them: not so before now--would brush by everything, and even step on them.”

He also writes, 22 March 1855, “Tuesday was the first day of summer, and it was so warm and pleasant that a lizard got on a shawl that was put out on the side of the hedge in the eye of the sun, where he appeared very comfortable in his warm bed. But the poor thing lost his life in consequence.” The people here call lizards crocodiles, and always slaughter them as noxious things. I never heard of a lizard doing any harm here, excepting one that was licked up by a cow and got down into her lung and killed her.

Some years ago a venerable lady came down to stay with me, and she wore a wide-brimmed hat with feathers enough to cover a swan. One afternoon I left her sitting on the hill side, looking at the view, while I went after something else; and presently I saw a buzzard hovering right over her with its head bent forward and staring intently down. Up there the buzzard could only see the feathers and very little else; and I feared she would be terribly upset, if this huge bird dropped down on her and carried off the hat. And the bird could easily have done it, as these buzzards measure forty or fifty inches across their outspread wings.

An owl came down the chimney of the Higher Parlour here and bounced into the room, its great eyes blinking through a cloud of soot; and it rather scared a couple of young people who were having a quiet flirtation there. And once the Higher Parlour was attacked by bees. Some honey had been taken from the hives and put into a cupboard there, and they came after it--there must have been ten thousand of them in the room at once. That was in the happy days before disease was brought here from the Isle of Wight. The bees are all dead now; but usually there were a dozen hives, and sometimes many more--the old straw hives, each standing on a sort of one-legged table and covered with a sheaf of straw like an extinguisher. It was pleasant on a sunny day to see the bees out playing round the hives, and the cats all stretched out in the grass below, waiting there to eat the mice that came to eat the honey.

When bees were swarming, we went out with bells and gongs and metal pans and made a hideous noise, relying on the old belief that clanging metal tempted swarms to pitch close by instead of flying away. But, by Lubbock’s showing, it was all in vain, as bees are deaf. In describing his experiments, _Ants, Bees and Wasps_, page 290, ed. 1898, he says--“I tried one of my bees with a violin. I made all the noise I could, but to my surprise she took no notice. I could not even see a twitch of the antennæ.” Bertini made a marble statue of Jenner vaccinating a child. Some modern man might rival it with Lubbock playing to a bee.

Whether the bees heard us or not, they usually pitched close by; and then the next thing was to gather some bame and cut down boughs of halse. (Bame is balm, and halse is hazel.) Then some sugar was put into a clean straw hive and was rubbed in with the bame, the sap making a sort of syrup; and then the hive was held out (upside down) underneath the swarm. If the swarm had pitched on the branch of a tree--as was usually the case--it could be jerked off bodily into the hive by giving the branch a knock: failing that, it might be swept in sideways with a brush. But, if the queen was left behind, the other bees went back to her; and then we had to try again. When the swarm was in, the hive was put down on a sheet (the right way up) and was covered over with the boughs of halse. And at nightfall, when the bees had gone to sleep, the hive was taken up again and placed upon its little table and roofed in with its sheaf of straw, and hoops were slipped on over the sheaf to keep it in its place.--But the swarms did not always pitch close by: sometimes they went soaring up, and then away across the valley, far beyond pursuit.

A few summers ago a stray swarm took possession of the letterbox near Lustleigh Cleave. Bees came out, when letters were put in; and, when the letters were taken out, the postman was so badly stung that he refused to go again. So the usual notice of Hours of Collection was superseded by a notice of Ware Bees. After proper correspondence the superintendent at Newton Abbot authorised the sub-postmaster at Lustleigh to pay a bee-man to clear out the bees. These bee-men take up bees in handfuls, and seem never to be stung; but the fact is they have been stung so often that the sting has ceased to take effect. One of them told me that he had been stung a hundred times in a day and hardly felt it. He cleared the box; and as he saved the swarm and got the honey and was paid as well, it was not unremunerative work.

At a farm of mine I noticed a stain and a bulge in a bedroom ceiling, and thought the rain was coming through the thatch. It was a colony of bees up there making such a quantity of honey that the ceiling could not stand the weight. The room was occupied by summer lodgers, and I fancied they would not forget their farmhouse-lodgings, if the honey and the bees fell through while they were there.

Bees are mentioned in the old Court Rolls of Wreyland Manor, but only as estrays. If stray creatures came to any of the tenements, the court adjudged them to the lord of the manor, unless the rightful owner put in a claim within twelve months and proved his ownership. There are difficulties in proving that a swarm of bees is yours, after you have once lost sight of it. Ponies, cattle, sheep and goats were claimed successfully; but the lord of the manor always got the swarms. Amongst others, he got a swarm that came to Wilmead on Midsummer-day in 1484 and was valued at twelvepence--a considerable sum at that date, as the penalty for assaults was only threepence, unless they had drawn blood, in which case it was ninepence.

In dealing with the Domesday survey _The Victoria History of the Counties of England_ makes these remarks on bees, _Devon_, vol. 1, page 400--“There is only a single notice of bee-keeping in Devon. At Lustleigh were five honeyers who paid seven sestiers of honey. No certain conclusion can be arrived at from this entry. Either bee-keeping was so common and taken such small account of as not to deserve mention, or bee-keeping was not practised at all, except at Lustleigh on the borders of Dartmoor.” It does not remark that there is only a single notice of donkey-keeping in Devon: there were two donkeys at Diptford.

Unluckily for Lustleigh, Domesday says these honeyers were at Sutreworda; and Sutreworda was clearly a much larger place than Lustleigh ever was, and in another district. By taking Sutreworda for Lustleigh and Wereia for Wrey, the _Victoria History_ has made itself a nuisance in this valley.

As for Sutreworda, the argument is merely this--the Honour of Marshwood had estates that formerly belonged to Walter of Douai; and, as it had a Lustleigh and no Sutreworda, and he had a Sutreworda and no Lustleigh, Sutreworda must be Lustleigh under another name. But there were Marshwood estates in Devon that never belonged to Walter, and he had estates in Devon that never passed to Marshwood, whereas the argument supposes that the two sets were the same. There is a similar argument about the Honour of Gloucester and Godwin the Thane, to show that his Wereia is Wrey. But this is weaker still. No doubt, John de Umfravill held some of the Gloucester estates in Devon, and he held Wrey; but there is a document of about 1285 showing that he held it from the Crown direct.

There is yet another argument for putting Wereia here. Domesday says that Godwin had a virgate of land at Wereia free of tax, and the Inquest of the Geld says that he had a virgate in Teignbridge Hundred free of tax. No doubt, his Teignbridge virgate may be his virgate at Wereia; but it may just as well be his virgate in four other estates of his which had a virgate each, or two half-virgates in any two of his three estates with half a virgate each. And the equation does not work out, as he has a quarter of a virgate more in Domesday than in the Inquest of the Geld.

There were two Wreys on the river Wrey, just as there are two Boveys on the river Bovey not far off. They are distinguished as North Bovey and South Bovey or Bovey Tracey, and the Wreys were distinguished as Wreyford and Wreycombe. In the old title-deeds this place is Wrey or Wreyford as far as 1529 and Wrey or Wreyland in 1544 and onwards; but I do not know the reason for the change. There are several families called Wreyford or Wreford or Wrayford, and I presume their ancestors all came from here. But, so far as I know, there is not any family called Wreyland; and this tempts me to say that families had ceased (by 1544) to take their surnames from the places whence they came. There is, however, a family called Rellend; and sometimes Wreyland is pronounced like that.

Writers on Devon show a curious reticence about its good old name--Damnonium. There are writers like Moore and Lysons who give it correctly in Greek letters when they are quoting Ptolemy, and yet transpose the _m_ and _n_ on putting it into English, as if they could not face the Damn. Think of the lines in Carrington’s _Dartmoor_--“Erstwhile here the fierce Danmonii dwelt.” The softening takes off half its strength.

In his poem _Of the courtier’s life_, probably written in 1541, Sir Thomas Wyatt contrasts his country life with life at court, and says “In lusty leas at liberty I walk.” He was not at Lustleigh--he says “but I am here in Kent and Christendom”--but his verse gives the true meaning of the name. The ‘leas’ are fields and meadows, and ‘lusty’ is pleasant, the old English ‘lusty’ answering to the modern German ‘lustig.’ Lustleigh Cleave is Lustleigh Cliff, as ‘cleave’ and ‘cliff’ are really the same word. Other steep hillsides have the name--Caseleigh Cleave, Wrey Cleave, Neadon Cleave, and so on. And sometimes it is spelt the other way, as in a note of my grandfather’s, 31 May 1863, that he is laying in a stock of firewood--“all the oak wood on Casely Cliff at eight shillings per hundred faggots.”

Newton is the new town. There are many places of that name in England; and the new town nine miles from here was known as Newton on Teign--“Nyweton juxta Teng” in Quo Warranto in 1281. The town is not in Domesday in 1086, and is clearly of later origin than the civil and ecclesiastical districts here, as it stands in two hundreds and two parishes, the boundary being the Loman, which runs through the middle of the town into the Teign. The abbot of Torre abbey acquired the part in Wolborough parish and Haytor hundred; and this is Newton Abbot. Robert Bussell acquired the part in Highweek parish and Teignbridge hundred; and that is Newton Bushel. The two parts were nearly equal in extent until the railway came to Newton Abbot, and since then this part has grown. Most people call the whole place Newton Abbot now, and will tell you they are going to Newton Abbot when they really are going to Newton Bushel. The older people never called it anything but Newton.

The railway company called the station Newton Abbot to avoid confusion with the other Newtons on other companies’ lines. When they made this branch to Moreton, they called it Moretonhampstead to avoid confusion with the other Moretons. But there are other Hampsteads also. I saw a package on the platform there, sent down from London by mistake, and just endorsed--“Try Hemel Hempsted”--another 250 miles by train.

Moreton is the moor town, and the moor is Dartmoor; but the old spelling is retained in Moreton, though in Dartmoor it is obsolete--nobody writes Dartmore now. Such a name as Moretonhampstead is absurd, for _tun_ and _ham_ and _stede_ are Anglo-Saxon words, all meaning the same thing. It came into use somewhere about 1600, I do not know exactly when, nor why.

Dartmoor is a word that has two meanings. Usually it means the whole great tract of granite moorland in the middle of Devon. Technically it only means so much of this as lies in Lydford parish, the remainder being the commons of the surrounding parishes. On the Ordnance map Lydford parish contains 50,801 acres, or nearly eighty square miles. That gives the area of Dartmoor in the strict sense of the term. In the wider sense, with the surrounding commons thrown in, Dartmoor is said to have an area of 200 miles.

The difference between the moor and commons is greater than it looks. The moor belongs to the Duchy of Cornwall; and the Duchy can enclose the land there, but cannot enclose the land upon the commons.

This caused a sharp dispute in 1870 and 1871. A man at Bristol got the Duchy to grant him 280 acres for enclosure, and he began enclosing. People said that this enclosure was on Chagford common. But the Duchy officials said that the Ordnance map was wrong, and the Tithe map was wrong, and all the old inhabitants were wrong, although they had beaten the bounds, since they were young, just where their elders used to beat them. It seemed that nobody outside the Duchy office knew where the boundaries were. Inquiry was made if these officials had received a revelation from above; and then they came to earth with a Perambulation made on 24 July 1240. But that was a well-known document, printed in several books on Devon, and certainly did not prove their case.

Henry the Third granted Dartmoor to his brother the Earl of Cornwall on 10 October 1239, and the Earl had this Perambulation made next year. It is clear that Furnum Regis is King’s Oven at the end of Hurston Ridge, and there is no difficulty about the words next after that, “et inde linealiter usque ad Wallebrokeshede et sic in longum Wallebroke usque cadit in Dertam,” but there certainly is something wrong about the words that go before, “et sic in longum Wallebroke et inde linealiter usque ad Furnum Regis.” How could the boundary run along the Wallabrook before reaching King’s Oven, and afterwards run along the Wallabrook for the whole length of its course from its head to its confluence with the Dart? The officials said there were two Wallabrooks here, and the unknown Wallabrook was the same as Hurston Water. This was really the only basis for their claim. But the Perambulation says ‘Wester Wallebroke’ in speaking of another Wallabrook on the other side of the moor, and would presumably say ‘Norther Wallebroke’ here, or else say ‘Wallebroke’ and then ‘aliam Wallebroke’ just as it says ‘Dertam’ and then ‘aliam Dertam’ on coming to the other Dart. Moreover, the sentence is imperfect as it stands. In all other cases the Perambulation takes the boundary to some fixed point and thence, etc. Either ‘usque ad ...’ has dropped out between ‘Wallebroke’ and ‘et inde,’ or else ‘et sic in longum Wallebroke’ has been put in by mistake. Possibly the scrivener saw the words in the next sentence, and repeated them in the wrong place.

My father joined in the dispute, as the enclosure was threatening our rights of common at Hurston. He looked up the evidence, and wrote a memorandum on it, ending (in red ink) with this--“The farmers will of course pull down the fences, and put the Duchy to the proof of its claims in a court of law.” And of course they pulled them down, and the Duchy dropped its claims. I did not see the demolition done, but have always heard it was an animated scene. Some twenty men went out to do it, and they took a cask of cider with them, to strengthen their conviction in the justice of their cause.

Enclosure is a mania that recurs at intervals; and deluded people think that, if they cut the moor up into fields, they will reap as much as in the valleys 1000 or 1500 feet below. It is noted in Moore’s _History of Devonshire_, vol. 1, page 486--“The speculators in these undertakings were in general but little versed in agriculture; and having inspected the country in a very cursory manner, were altogether mistaken with respect to the soil of Dartmoor, the produce for which it is adapted, and the methods to be pursued for its improvement: scarcely anyone in the neighbourhood had anything to do with these plans.” That was in 1829, and history repeats itself.

The latest of these Dartmoor schemes has been for taking water from the streams to generate electricity. Such schemes answer very well abroad, in mountainous regions where there are large volumes of water at great heights coming down precipitously. But on Dartmoor the heights are relatively small, and the streams are far apart and never very large, shrinking in summer into brooks, so that big reservoirs would be required for maintaining the supply. I fancy the promoters of this scheme were merely copying a thing that enterprising men had done elsewhere, without considering whether such men would do the same thing here. It seems absurd to spend big sums of money on these moorland streams, when there are great tidal estuaries not many miles away. At the mouths of the Exe and the Teign the estuaries run several miles inland and have very narrow entrances: the tide comes in and out; and twice a day the whole of this gigantic power goes to waste.

Dartmoor is often called a Forest and is marked as such on maps; but there are hardly any trees there now, and can never have been many. It was a Forest only in the legal sense; and that was long ago. Coke says in his _Institutes_, iv. 73, page 313, ed. 1798--“If the King, being seized of a Forest, grant the Forest to another in fee, the grantee shall have no Forest.” When the King granted the Forest of Dartmoor to the Earl of Cornwall, 10 October 1239, it ceased to be a Forest and became a Chase. It was granted to the Black Prince as the Chase of Dartmoor, 17 March 1336/7, when he was created Duke of Cornwall; and this is the grant by which the Duchy holds it now.

I ought to pay the Duke of Cornwall five-and-twenty pennies every year; but in these prosaic times my agent sends a postal-order to the Duchy office instead, and usually sends 12_s._ 6_d._ to settle it for six years at once. I have to pay these pennies as owner of Hurston for certain privileges it has upon the moor; and the payment is called Venvill. One finds “fines villarum” in an Inquiry held at Lydford on 19 June 1382, and “certos annuales redditus vocatos _fyn de vile_” in an Inquiry held at Chagford on 23 September 1388: so Venvill must mean Fines from Vills. Fine only means a payment that has been definitely fixed, and does not mean a penalty here. Vill is the same word as village, but with a wider meaning, and will take in anything from a township down to what we call a farm.

At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jurors said that these “fines villarum” were payable from time immemorial to the King and his progenitors by the tenants of divers vills near the forest of Dartmoor for profits that they had within the forest. And that looks as if Venvill were a survival from the times when Dartmoor was a royal forest, and had not yet been granted to Dukes or Earls of Cornwall.

The Venvill tenements form a ring outside the commons that surround the moor. According to the ministers’ accounts for Dartmoor in 1505-6 there were forty-five such tenements, and the payments were 20_d._ for Hurston, 5_d._ for Willandhead which adjoins it on one side, 4½_d._ for Venn which adjoins it on the other, 8_d._ and 3_d._ for Jurston and Higher Jurston which are next beyond Venn, 4_d._ for Littaford which is next beyond Jurston, and so on. The total is 4_l._ 10_s._ 8_d._; and it was 4_l._ 1_s._ 8_d._ in 1296-7, when these ministers’ accounts begin.

The payments were primarily for pasturing cattle on the moor, and in 1296-7 the 4_l._ 1_s._ 8_d._ is entered as “de finibus villarum pro pastura averiorum habenda.” The right of pasture was restricted to as many cattle as could be wintered on the Venvill tenements, but there were some other rights as well. At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jury said that the Venvill men could help themselves to “carbones, turbarias, fugeras, jampnos et lapides,” and at an Inquiry at Okehampton on 16 August 1608 the jury made it “turves, vagges, heath, stone, cole,” and “all thinges that maye doe them good, savinge vert and venson,” vert being the greenwood that gave covert to the deer. I take ‘jampnos’ and ‘fugeras’ to be gorse and bracken, not heath and vagges--at any rate ‘vagges’ now means turf--and I presume that ‘carbones’ or ‘cole’ means peat, as the moor does not produce what we call coal.

The peat is mostly in the middle of the moor, too far out for many of the Venvill men to fetch it, and they use turf instead. This is cut about three inches thick, left upside down to dry, and then brought in; and it makes a very good fuel. Peat has naphtha in it; and for some years the Dartmoor peat was tried for this. My father notes in his diary, 5 September 1846--“Saw over the prisons at Princes Town, and the preparations for the Naphtha Manufactory there.” The prisons were built for prisoners-of-war, and were vacant from 1816 until 1850, when they were fitted up for convicts.

In very dry summers the peat turns into dust some feet in depth. Writing to my father on 4 September 1857, my grandfather says--“This is the hottest summer, I think, since 1826, when Mr Smethurst and I went exploring Dartmoor. We went two years following, and I think it was 1825 and 1826, the latter the hottest by far, for we could not get our horses over the same ground, the peat being so pulverized by the extreme heat; and we had hard work in digging out our horses.”

I used to tramp about the moor in former years, generally going out from here, but sometimes using Hurston as a base. And two or three times every summer I found people straying about, miles away from where they meant to go. They were lodging in the villages or farms, had gone out for a ramble on the moor, and were completely lost.

In the spring of 1915 I lost myself out there. I had driven as far as Natsworthy gate, and then sent the trap down the valley to wait for me at Widdicombe, saying that I would walk along the ridge of Hameldon, which flanks the valley on the west. I walked over to Grimspound and up to Hameldon cross--about 1750 feet above the sea--and then a mist came down and shut out everything over fifty yards away. There is no track there, and I could not see the landmarks by which I knew the way, nor could I make out whereabouts the sun was, as the mist diffused the light. I had not brought a compass with me, but I went steadily on, imagining that I was going straight ahead, until I was confronted by a mass of rocks that I recognized as Hookney Tor. I had been trending to the left all the while and had made a semicircle of two miles--I could not have reached that point in any other way except by going down into a hollow and coming up again, and I had kept upon the top. Having reached a point I knew, I went no further in the mist, but dropped down into the valley below, where I knew there was a road. But this was the valley on the other side of Hameldon, and I was now six miles from Widdicombe and from my lunch.

Nobody need be lost out there for any length of time. As soon as you see running water, you follow that down; and sooner or later it will bring you to a cottage or a mill, and so into a road that leads to somewhere, though it may not lead to where you want to go. But if you stay on the high ground and go on trying to find the place you want, you may be out all night.

In the summer of 1917 I found an old lady who had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. There were parties out in search of her, but they had all kept nearer home, not thinking that she would have wandered off so far. I ought really to have gone off on the search myself, but I had other things to do, and that was how I happened to see her.

Some summers ago two ladies took lodgings at a farm about a mile from here, and they went out after tea on the afternoon of their arrival. They did not come in, and people went out in search of them; and at dawn they were found sitting on the hillside, with their umbrellas up, and five-and-twenty bullocks standing round them in a circle, contemplating them.

Something of the same sort happened to two ladies whom I know, while they were staying in a Riviera town. On the morning of Ash Wednesday they were going to an early service at the English church, and on their way they met a party of revellers returning from some Carnival festivity, attired in costumes and masks. There must have been something about these ladies that filled the revellers with delight: it may have been a certain primness, or possibly it was their prayer-books. Whatever it was, the revellers just glanced at one another, made a circle and joined hands, danced round them in dead silence for a minute or two, and then went upon their way.

Out on Dartmoor the dancers should be pixies, and their footsteps ought to make a circle of fresh verdure on the turf. But a botanist assures me that pixies dance round _Agaricus Oreadis_, if they dance round anything at all. This is the plant that makes these circles, the fresh growth being further and further from the parent plant in each succeeding year.

There are other circles on the moor--great granite circles like Stonehenge, but not so big as that--and people say that these dance round, and they can tell you why. Thus, years ago nine maidens went to Belstone on the Beltane day and danced round naked in the noontide sun. (Beltane is May Day now, and we are more demure.) And the Nine Maidens were changed into nine granite pillars standing in a circle there. Every day at noon they try to dance, and some days they go dancing round.

I never saw a circle dance, but I once saw the avenue on Hurston Ridge do something very like it. It was a broiling day after a spell of wet, and a vapour went up from the peaty soil. In the shimmer of this I saw the rows of granite pillars all swaying and bobbing about like people in a country dance, and was quite prepared to see a couple make their bow and go off down the middle and up again.

These avenues and circles have lately been the victims of a theory that used to be applied to churches. Old churches in England usually face eastward, but seldom face due east; and the theory is that they face the point at which the sun rose on the day when the foundation-stone was laid, and this would be the feast-day of the patron-saint.

The avenue on Downtor is said to point to sunrise on April 29, and so also a line drawn through the centre of the circle at Merivale to a menhir about 300 yards away; and other lines are said to point to sunrise on other days about that time of year--Lockyer, _Stonehenge_, page 481, ed. 1909--the theory being that they pointed to the sunrise on the Beltane day--page 309. I presume the Beltane fires were what we call ‘swayling’ now, that is, burning off old gorse and heather to make way for fresh shoots that will be soft enough for beasts to eat. This swayling is done at any odd times now, and with insufficient care, fires often getting beyond control and burning down plantations of young trees; but in my early days it was done on Maundy Thursday with as much regularity as potato planting on Good Friday. It perhaps was done in former times on some fixed day about May 1, and that was Beltane day; but I fail to see why Beltane day should be picked out for setting up an avenue or circle, or why a circle should be used for marking a straight line.

Many of the Dartmoor avenues can never have faced the sunrise, as they point too much to northward or to southward of the east. And then the theory says--One side of the larger avenue at Merivale faced the rising of the Pleiades in 1400 B.C. and the other side faced their rising in 1580 B.C., the smaller avenue faced the rising of Arcturus in 1860 B.C., the avenue on Shovel Down faced the rising of Alpha Centauri in 2900 B.C. and the avenue at Challacombe faced its rising in 3600 B.C., and so on with many more--pages 483, 484. The church theory has an intelligible base--the saint’s-day sunrise--though the base is insecure; and the Beltane sunrise is intelligible also, though still more insecure: but this stellar theory has no base at all. You pick out any star you please and get a date accordingly.

Looking out on Dartmoor with its rain and mist and fog, it seems improbable that anyone would trouble much about the stars out there, or take them as a guide in setting up an avenue. The ancient Egyptians may have done such things in their pellucid air, and theorists say they did; but that, I think, is a mistake. The rising of Sirius is recorded in inscriptions of Rameses II and VI and X--engraved in Lepsius, _Denkmaeler aus Aegypten_, part 3, plates 170 and 227 to 228 bis--and these inscriptions cover a length of time in which the rising would have varied a good deal, yet the variation is ignored. The entries cannot have been based on observations--otherwise the variation would appear--and this Rising of Sirius must have been as great a fiction as our ecclesiastical Full Moon that gives the date for Easter.

There is a curious circle at Dûris in the Lebanon valley, and I went to see it, 31 March 1882. It has eight upright stones, about twelve feet high and six apart, with others laid on top of them like lintels, as in the outer circle at Stonehenge. So far as a circle can be said to point to anything, this circle points to Mecca, a Roman sarcophagus being set up on end in one of the intervals between the uprights, and thus forming a niche for the mihrâb. The uprights are drums of columns and the lintels are squared stones, evidently taken from a temple or some other building of Greek or Roman times. So the circle is comparatively modern, yet its builders were aiming at the same effect as the builders of Stonehenge.

Those rough stones on Dartmoor show no signs of high antiquity. The avenues might be tracks for driving sheep or cattle, and the circles might be pounds for penning them in; and some may really be no more than that. But the circles often have a grave in the centre, and the avenues sometimes have one at the end; and the graves have urns and implements and weapons as ancient as the Bronze Age or the last half of the Stone Age.

People are much too fond of giving those Ages definite dates, say 1500 or 1000 B.C. for the change from Stone to Bronze and 500 B.C. for the change from Bronze to Iron. In reality these Ages must have overlapped, surviving in some regions long after they died out in others; and there may have been people out on Dartmoor using bronze and flint long after Exeter was occupied by Romans.--A friend has given me a fancy portrait of some progenitor of mine out there denouncing their new-fangled notion of living in houses, instead of living in hut-circles as everybody should. I think it was inspired by something that I said about the comfort of having good thick walls and thatch, instead of merely brick and slate, when the weather is either hot or cold.

These hut-circles differ from those other circles in being formed of granite slabs set up on edge and touching one another, whereas those others are formed of pillars standing some way apart and enclosing much more ground. They probably had roofs of poles and thatch, looking like bell tents, but the roofing has all gone. They are common enough in all the Dartmoor district--there must be some thousands of them there--and usually they are in little groups of three or four. Some of the larger groups have ramparts round them; and these are known as Pounds. The grandest is Grimspound, with an area of about four acres containing five-and-twenty huts; but it has rather lost its dignity in these last fifty years, as a good road was carried down the valley in 1874 and comes within three hundred yards of it.

These ancient dwellings are usually on the sheltered slopes of hills; and on the summits of the hills there are great mounds that mark the graves of kings or chiefs. Sometimes, looking at the view and seeing those mounds against the sky, I get the same uncanny feeling that comes over me at places in Egypt and Etruria--the whole living country is dominated by the dead. There are six of these graves within about two miles on the range of hills behind Grimspound; and when one of them was opened in 1872, the chieftain’s dagger was found--a blade of bronze and a pommel of amber with a pattern worked in gold.

On a grave in Moreton churchyard there is a little granite figure of a child with wings. A man from Cornwall was working in a quarry near there; and when his child died, he got a block of granite from the quarry and carved an angel out of that. It is a crude piece of work without any of the mechanical excellence of other monuments close by, yet it impresses me much more. I fancy that the genius of the place is present there and gazing up towards those solemn hills where the Giant’s Grave stands out against the sky.

In this district there are many granite crosses still remaining, though many have been broken up. Here in Lustleigh parish there is one at South Harton that has been cleft down the middle to make a pair of gate-posts, another one at Sanduck that was built into the porch of the house and came to light again when that was taken down, the top of another in a field near Higher Coombe, and the base for another by the road-side near the railway-station. The base has the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369. This cross, therefore, was ecclesiastical; but some were not. There was an inquiry at Brent on 25 August 1557 as to the boundary between Dartmoor and Brentmoor, and the commissioners certified that they had marked the boundary by setting up stone crosses. They probably thought that people were less likely to tamper with a cross than with a common boundary-stone.

Under cover of the War a great big painted crucifix has been set up in a churchyard about three miles from here. The early Christians never portrayed the crucifixion, and their successors idealized it--a majestic figure in regal robes with outstretched arms, to which the cross just formed a background. Then came the miserable type that we all know--a realistic study of a condemned man suffering the last penalty of what was then the law. There is no semblance of divinity about it; and in the countries where one sees it most, the Trinity that they invoke is Gesu-Maria-Giuseppe or Jésus-Marie-Joseph. The whole thing has become mundane.

The old granite crosses always have short arms, and may belong to a primæval type that had nothing to do with crucifixion. According to Cæsar (_De bello Gallico_, vi. 18) the Druids said that Dis was the ancestral deity of all the Celtic race; and figures of this deity have come to light. As his attribute he holds up a big sledgehammer; and I suspect his hammer was the prototype of all these crosses--the ancient symbol was retained, but with an altered meaning.

When these northern nations were converted, the new religion was grafted on the old; and the grafting was not always neatly done. The Anglo-Saxon kings all claimed descent from Woden, and he was once a god; but when they took up Christianity, they had to fit him in. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (855) knows better than the Pentateuch what happened in Noah’s Ark. That speaks only of Shem and Ham and Japheth; but Noah’s wife had another baby while she was on board--“se wæs geboren in thære earche Noe”--and this was Woden’s ancestor.

That seems incongruous enough, but it is nothing to the incongruity of an Anglo-Saxon coin with its inscription all in Arabic except two lines of Roman letters, “Offa the King,” which come in upside down between three lines of Arabic, “Mohammed the Prophet of God.” It is a gold coin, a mancus, of the same weight as an Arabic dinar; and it is dated in year 157 of the Hegira, or 773 A.D. It was found in Rome, and must be one of those gold mancuses that King Offa undertook to pay Pope Hadrian for Peter’s Pence.

The southernmost part of Italy was known as Bruttium in Latin, but Brettia in Greek, and was said to take its name from Brettos (a son of Hercules) who came over with the first Greek colonists. And this, I suspect, is the only basis for the story that Britain took its name from an imaginary Brutus who brought a colony here. I suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth got the Brettos story at second hand through Stephanos, who quotes it from Antiochos of Syracuse, say 423 B.C. And our Geoffrey either got it wrong, or altered it to suit his theme, and thus created Brute the Trojan.

The story of Brute the Trojan is not wilder than the story of Æneas, and the motive is the same--to connect the Britons (like the Romans) with the Homeric heroes and thus with the Olympian gods. (Brute was a great-grandson of Æneas, so Venus was his great-great-grandmother.) I cannot see why the story makes the Trojans land at Totnes, fifteen miles from here, rather than in any other part of Britain. But at Totnes they show you the very stone on which Brute stepped ashore, just as they show you the stone at Brixham on which Dutch William stepped ashore, and the stone at Newton from which he was proclaimed as King.

Nobody takes Brute the Trojan very seriously now; but I cannot understand the people who scoff at Trojans coming to Britain, and then talk solemnly of Phœnicians coming here. In books and pamphlets and essays and articles and by word of mouth, in Devon and in Cornwall and the Scilly isles, one hears everlastingly of these Phœnicians.

All this talk of the Phœnicians is founded on a blunder. Strabo devotes book iii of his _Geographica_ to what we now call Spain and Portugal. In iii. 5. 11 he says that the Cassiterides islands were off the coast of Spain and Portugal, and that the tin trade with these islands was formerly in the hands of the Phœnicians. In iii. 2. 9 he says that tin was found in Spain and Portugal and in the Cassiterides, and adds parenthetically “and it is brought also from Britain to Marseilles.” Diodoros is more explicit, v. 22, 38, saying that the British tin came from the western part of England, and went to Marseilles overland through France, a journey of thirty days with horses. I suppose people have forgotten Diodoros, and failed to see that Strabo is using a parenthesis; and have then mixed up the whole of what he says in iii. 2. 9 with what he says about the Phœnicians in iii. 5. 11. There is no suggestion in any ancient author that the Phœnicians ever had anything to do with this trade in British tin.

As for the Cassiterides, they must be the Burlings. These are the only noticeable islands on the outer coast of Spain and Portugal; and ancient authors say the Cassiterides were on that coast. Strabo and Diodoros, Mela and Pliny, Ptolemy, Dionysios and Avienus, all agree in putting them there, though they give them various positions from Cape Finisterre and Ferrol down to Cape St Vincent, and call them Hesperides or Œstrymnides as well as Cassiterides.

In the Scillies it is an article of faith that those islands are the Cassiterides, and this heresy of mine aroused the wrath of good Scillonians. (They never say Scilly Islanders themselves: it is too ambiguous.) Those islands seemed very remote, when I visited them first, in the autumn of 1886. The cable was broken, and the mail-boat did not waste her coal on making the passage in an equinoctial gale. But people told me I could get a pilot-cutter to take me off in any weather for £5. If it failed to make Penzance, it was sure of making Cork or Brest.

My going to the Scillies was indirectly the cause of Walter Besant’s going there and writing his novel of _Armorel of Lyonesse_. I was often talking of the islands after I came back, and he went in the spring of 1889. The novel pleased the islanders, and when I went there next (1896) there seemed to be an _Armorel_ in every house. It was a contrast to Tarascon and Alphonse Daudet’s book. I never saw a _Tartarin_ anywhere there.

Being at Tarascon, I inquired for the Tarasque--the dragon that was led captive by Saint Martha--and I found it locked up in a stable, 18 March 1891. It is not allowed out in processions now, as it has broken too many people’s bones by the waggings of its tail. Getting inside it, I found a tiller that worked the tail as if it were a rudder, and I made it wag.

The dragon at Tarascon is not unlike the dragon in one of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s _Kampf mit dem Drachen_, where the knight uses a dummy to accustom his horse and hounds to the look of a dragon in real life. He does this in France, and then goes back to Rhodes and kills the dragon there. The story is told of Dieudonné de Gozon; and he must have seen the dummy at Tarascon, as he was at Avignon from 1324 to 1332. But in one version the knight dressed up a bull to personate the dragon. In a version current at Rhodes it is a dervish, not a knight. He loaded forty donkeys with eighty sacks of lime, and drove them past the dragon’s den. The dragon swallowed them, lime and all, and then went down to drink.

The dragon at Rhodes was killed near Phileremos, the citadel of the ancient town of Ialysos; and Phorbas of Ialysos had killed a dragon there about two thousand years before. The old Greek legend was put into a mediæval dress; and another of those legends has been put into a dress that is completely modern. There are elevated beds of sea-shells in various parts of Rhodes, showing that the island has risen from the sea; and the story of its rising from the sea is told by Pindar in his ode in honour of Diagoras of Ialysos, _Olympia_, vii. 54-71. Either Thomson or Mallet copied this from Pindar into _Rule Britannia_, and now it is Britain that at Heaven’s command arose from out the azure main.

Many years ago I wrote a couple of volumes on the history of the island of Rhodes: they were published in 1885 and 1887, and now are obsolete. At first I only thought of writing about the Rhodian colonies in Sicily, but the subject led me on to Rhodes itself, and then to the adventures of the Knights after they had quitted Rhodes; but these were not included in the book.

The Knights were the Hospitallers, or Order of Saint John of Jerusalem; and their first home was at Jerusalem. But the Saracens drove them out of Palestine in 1291, the Turks drove them out of Rhodes in 1522, and the French drove them out of Malta in 1798. Malta was taken by the English in 1800; and by the tenth article of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802, England undertook to give up Malta to the Knights within three months. It is ancient history now that England held on to Malta, and thereby made a precedent for dealing with an inconvenient treaty as a scrap of paper.

In 1814 some of the French members of the Order formed a committee at Paris to see what could be done. But there were scamps among them, and these men admitted new members to the Order and made appointments in it--neither of which things had they any right to do--and pocketed the money that they took for entrance-fees, etc. The climax came in 1823 with an attempt of theirs to borrow money in the name of the Order. The office of Grand Master was vacant then, but the Lieutenant of the Mastery sent them a peremptory letter, 27 March 1824, saying that the committee was merely a self-appointed body without authority, and must forthwith be dissolved. The French Minister for Foreign Affairs also wrote a letter, 29 April 1825, saying that the admissions and appointments made by the committee were altogether illegal and could not in any way be recognized. And when the committee proposed to meet again in May 1826, the meeting was stopped by the Prefect of the Police.

France was now too hot for them, but the rogues found dupes in England. They began admitting new members to the Order and making appointments in it over here; and they appointed the Rev. Dr Peat as Prior. That was the foundation of the present Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in England.

All the English and Irish estates of the Order were confiscated by Act of Parliament in 1540, and the incorporation of the Order was dissolved in England and in Ireland, 32 Henry VIII, cap. 24. There was an attempt, 2 April 1557, to circumvent this Act by Letters Patent under a later Act, 4 & 5 Philip & Mary, cap. 1, but this was defeated by another Act next year, 1 Elizabeth, cap. 24. Of course, these proceedings had no effect outside the realm, and therefore did not touch the Order itself, as that was an international body with headquarters then at Malta. But they cut off revenue and practically closed a good recruiting ground; and there were few Englishmen or Irishmen among the Knights in after years. For administrative purposes the Order had been divided into Languages or Nations, one of which was English and included Ireland. But the members of the Order were simply Knights Hospitallers or Knights of Malta or of Rhodes, not Knights of any separate Nation or Language.