Winterborne Abbas, one of the twenty-five Winterbornes that plentifully dot the map of Wilts and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this treacherous descent: a small village of thatched cottages with a church too large for it, overhung by fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching inn, apparently also too large, with its sign swinging picturesquely from a tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road which, like the majority of Dorsetshire roads, is rich in loose flints.
Half a mile beyond the village, a railed enclosure on the strip of grass on the left-hand side of the road attracts the wayfarer’s notice. This serves to protect from the attentions of the stone-breaker a group of eight prehistoric stones called the ‘Broad Stone.’
THE RUSSELLS
Image unavailable: WINTERBORNE ABBAS.
WINTERBORNE ABBAS.
The largest is 10 feet long by 5 feet, and 2 feet thick, lying down. A notice informs all who care to know that this group is constituted by the owner, according to the Act of Parliament, an ‘Ancient Monument.’ The cynically-minded might well say that the hundreds of similar ‘ancient monuments’ with which the neighbouring downs are peppered might also be railed off, to give a welcome fillip to the trade in iron fencing, and certainly this caretaking of every misshapen stone without a story is the New Idolatry.
Just beyond this point is the castellated lodge of the park of Bridehead, embowered amid trees. The place obtains its name from the little river Bride or Bredy which rises in the grounds and flows away to enter the sea at Burton (= ‘Bride-town’) Bradstock, eight miles away; passing in its course the two other places named from it, Little Bredy and Long Bredy.
Now the road rises again, and ascends wild unenclosed downs which gradually assume a stern, and even mountainous, character. Amid this panorama, in the deep hollows below these stone-strewn heights, are gracious wooded dells, doubly beautiful by contrast. In the still and sheltered nooks of these sequestered spots the primrose blooms early, and frosts come seldom, while the uplands are covered with snow or swept with bleak winds that freeze the traveller’s very marrow. One of these gardens in the wilderness is Kingston Russell, the spot whence the Russells, now Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity into wealth and power. Deep down in their retirement, the world (or such small proportion of it as travelled in those days) passed unobserved, though not far removed. For generations the Russells had inhabited their old manor-house here, and might have done so, in undistinguished fashion, for many years more, had it not been for the chance which brought John Russell into prominence and preferment in 1502. He was the Founder of the House and died an Earl, with vast estates, the spoil of the Church, showered upon him. He was the first of all the Russells to exhibit that gift of ‘getting on’ which his descendants have almost uniformly inherited. Unlike him, however, they have rarely commanded affection, and the Dukes of Bedford, with much reason, figure in the public eye as paragons of meanness and parsimony.
Image unavailable: KINGSTON RUSSELL.
KINGSTON RUSSELL.
At the cross roads, where on the left the bye-path leads steeply down the sides of these immemorial hills to Long Bredy, and on the right in the direction of Maiden Newton, used to stand Long Bredy Gate and the ‘Hut Inn.’ Here the high-road is continued
Image unavailable: CHILCOMBE CHURCH.
CHILCOMBE CHURCH.
CHILCOMBE
along the very backbone of the ridge, exposed to all the rigours of the elements. To add to the weird aspect of the scene, barrows and tumuli are scattered about in profusion. We now come to a turning on the left hand called ‘Cuckold’s Corner,’ why, no legend survives to tell us. Steeply this lane leads to the downs that roll away boldly to the sea, coming in little over a mile to ‘chilly Chilcombe,’ a tiny hamlet with a correspondingly tiny church tucked away among the great rounded shoulders of the hills, but not so securely sheltered but that the eager winds find their way to it and render both name and epithet eminently descriptive. The population of Chilcombe, according to the latest census, is twenty-four, and the houses six; and it is, accordingly, quite in order that the church should be regarded as the smallest in England. There are many of these ‘smallest churches,’ and the question as to which really deserves the title is not likely to be determined until an expedition is fitted out to visit all these rival claimants, and to accurately measure them. Of course the remaining portions of a church are not eligible for inclusion in this category. Chilcombe, however, is a complete example. The hamlet was never, in all probability, more populous than it is now, and the church certainly was never larger. Originally Norman, it underwent some alterations in the late Perpendicular period. The measurements are: nave 22 feet in length, chancel 13 feet. It is a picturesque though unassuming little building, without a tower, but provided instead with a quaint old stone bell-cote on the west gable. This gives the old church the appearance of some ancient ecclesiastical pigeon-house. The bell within is dated 1656. The very fine and unusual altar-piece of dark walnut wood, with scenes from the life of Christ, is credibly reported to have been brought here from one of the ships of the ‘Invincible Armada,’ known to have been wrecked on the beach at Burton Bradstock, some three miles away.
Returning to the highway at ‘Cuckold’s Corner,’ we come to ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ now a wayside inn on the left hand, situated on the tremendous descent which commences a mile beyond Long Bredy turnpike, and goes practically down into Bridport’s long street; a distance of five miles, with a fall from 702 feet above the sea, to 253 feet at ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ two miles farther on, and eventually to sea-level at
HILLS ROUND BRIDPORT
Image unavailable: ‘TRAVELLER’S REST.’
‘TRAVELLER’S REST.’
Bridport, with several curves in the road and an intermediate ascent or two between this point and the town. The cyclist who cares to take his courage in both hands, and has no desire to linger over perhaps one of the most magnificent scenic panoramas in England, can coast down this long stretch with the speed of the wind, and chance the result. But it is better to loiter here, for none of the great high-roads has anything like this scenery to show. From away up the road the eye ranges over a vast stretch of country westwards. South-west lies the Channel, dazzling like a burnished mirror if you come here at the psychological moment for this view—that is to say, the late afternoon of a summer’s day; with the strangely contorted shapes of the hills round about suggesting volcanic origin, and casting cool shadows far down into the sheltered coombes that have been baking in the sun all day long. Near at hand is Shipton Beacon, rising almost immediately beyond ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ and looking oddly from some points of view like some gigantic ship’s hull lying keel uppermost. Beyond are Puncknoll and Hammerdon, and away in the distance, with the Channel sparkling behind it, and the sun making a halo for its head, overlooking the sea at a height of 615 feet, the grand crest of Golden Cap, which some hold to be so named from this circumstance, while others have it that the picturesque title derives from the yellow gorse that grows on its summit. To the right hand rises the natural rampart of Eggardon, additionally fortified by art, a thousand years ago, whether by Briton, Dane, or Saxon, let those determine who will, with the village of Askerswell lying deep down, immediately under this ridge on which the road goes, the roof of its village church tower apparently so near that you could drop a stone neatly on to its leads. But ‘one trial will suffice,’ as the advertisements of much-puffed articles say, for the stone goes no nearer than about a quarter of a mile.
Very charming, this panorama, on a summer’s day; but how about the winters’ nights, in the times when the ‘Traveller’s Rest’ was better named than now; when the coaches halted here, and coachmen, guards, and passengers alike, half-frozen and breathless from the blusterous heights of Long Bredy, tumbled out for something warming? For this hillside was reputed to be the coldest part of the journey between London and Exeter, and it may be readily enough supposed by all who have seen the spot, that this was indeed the fact.
The last mile into Bridport has none of these terrify-descents, although, to be sure, there are sudden curves in the road which it behoves the cyclist to take slowly, for they may develop anything in the way of traffic, from a traction engine to the elephantine advance-guard of a travelling circus.
BRIDPORT
At Bridport, nine miles from the Devon border, the country already begins to lose something of the Dorset character, and to look like the county of junket and clotted cream. As for the town, it is difficult to say what character it possesses, for its featureless High Street is redeemed only from tediousness by the belfry of the Town Hall which, with the fine westward view, including the conical height of Colmer’s Hill and the high table-land of Eype to the left, serves to compose the whole into something remotely resembling an effect.
Bridport is a town which would very much like to be on the sea, but is, as a matter of fact, situated rather over a mile from it. Just where the little river Bredy runs out and the sea comes banging furiously in, is a forlorn concourse of houses sheltering abjectly one behind the other, called variously Bridport Harbour and West Bay. This is the real port, but it matters little, or nothing at all, by what name you call the place; it remains more like a Port Desolation.
Bridport almost distinguished itself in 1651 by the fugitive Charles the Second having been nearly captured at the ‘George Inn’ by the Harbour, an ostler recognising his face, which, it must be conceded, was one that once seen could scarce have been mistaken when again met with. Charles was then trying to reach the coast after the disastrous battle of Worcester, and it is quite certain that if Cromwell’s troopers had laid their hands on him, there would never have been any Charles the Second in English history.
The tragical comedy of the Stuarts throws a glamour over the Exeter Road to its very end. The fugitive Charles, fleeing before the inquisitive stare of the ostler, is a striking picture; and so, thirty-four years later, is the coming of his partly acknowledged son, the Duke of Monmouth, to upset James the Second. Bridport was seized, and one of the ‘Monmouth men’ slew Edward Coker, gentleman, of Mappowder, on the 14th of June 1685, as the memorial tablet to that slaughtered worthy in Bridport parish church duly recounts. For their share in the rebellion, a round dozen of Bridport men were hanged before the eyes of their neighbours, ‘stabbed,’ as the ancient slang phrase has it, ‘with a Bridport dagger.’ The ghastly imagery of this saying derives from the old-time local manufacture of rope, twine, and string, and the cultivation of hemp in the surrounding country. Rope-and twine-walks still remain in the town.
Leaving Bridport behind, the coach passengers by this route presently came to its most wildly romantic part; only it is sad to reflect that the travellers of a hundred years ago had not the slightest appreciation of this kind of thing.
Through Bridport’s stony lanes our way we take,
And the proud steep descend to Morcombe’s lake.
Thus the poet Gay, but he writes from the horseman’s point of view, and if he had bruised his bones along this road in the lurching Exeter Fly, his tone would probably have been less breezy. Travellers, indeed, looked upon hills with loathing, and upon solitude (notwithstanding the poets of the time) with disgust; therefore it may well be supposed that when they came to the rugged scenery around Morecomblake, and the next village Chideock (called locally ‘Chiddick’), they did not enjoy themselves.
A ROYAL FUGITIVE
Here Stonebarrow Hill and Golden Cap, with many lesser eminences, frown down upon the steep highway on every side, and render the scenery nothing less than mountainous, so that strangers in these parts, overcome with ‘terrour’ and apprehensions of worse to come, wished themselves safe housed in the roadside inn of Morecomblake, whose hospitable sign gave, and still gives, promise of good entertainment.
Image unavailable: CHIDEOCK.
CHIDEOCK.
The run down into Charmouth from this point is a breakneck one. At this remote seaside place, in that same year, 1651, Charles the Second had another narrow escape. Travelling in bye-ways from the disastrous field of Worcester on horseback, with his staunch friends, Lord Wilmot and Colonel Wyndham, arrangements had been made with the master of a trading vessel hailing from Lyme, to put in at Charmouth with a boat in the stillness of the night. But they had reckoned without taking into account either the simplicity of the sailor, or the inquisitiveness of his wife, who wormed the secret out of him, of his being engaged in this mysterious affair with a party of strangers. All the country was ringing with the escape of Charles from Worcester and the hue and cry after him, and the woman rightly guessed whom these people might be. She effectually prevented her husband from putting in an appearance by the threat that if he made any such attempt she would inform the magistrate.
Image unavailable: SIGN OF THE ‘SHIP,’ MORECOMBLAKE.
SIGN OF THE ‘SHIP,’ MORECOMBLAKE.
Wearied with watching for the promised boat, the King’s companions reluctantly had to make Charmouth the resting-place of the party for the night. In the morning it was found that the King’s horse had cast a shoe. When it was taken to the blacksmith, that worthy remarked the quaint circumstance that the three others had been replaced in three different counties, and one of these three in Worcestershire.
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS
When Charles heard that awkward discovery he was off in haste, for if a rural blacksmith was clever enough to discover so much, it was quite possible that he might apply his knowledge in a very embarrassing manner.
The little band had not hurried away a moment too soon, for the ostler of the inn (what Sherlock Holmes’s all these Dorsetshire folks were, to be sure!) who had already arrived independently at the conclusion that this was King Charles, had in the meanwhile gone to the Rev. Bartholomew Wesley, a local Roundhead divine, and told him his thoughts. Thence to the inn, where legends tell us the landlady gave Mr. Wesley a fine full-flavoured piece of her mind, and so eventually to the ears of a captain of horse, this wondrous news spread. Horsemen scoured the country; clergyman returned home to think over the loyal landlady’s abuse; ostler, probably dismissed, had leisure to curse his officiousness; while King and companions were off, whip and spur, to Bridport, whence, after that alarming recognition at the Harbour, to Broadwinsor.
Image unavailable: INTERIOR OF THE ‘QUEEN’S ARMS,’ CHARMOUTH.
INTERIOR OF THE ‘QUEEN’S ARMS,’ CHARMOUTH.
This historic Charmouth inn is still existing. The ‘Anchor,’ as it is now known, was for many years the ‘Queen’s Arms,’ but although the sign has thus been altered and half of the building partitioned off as a separate house, the interior remains very much the same as it was then, and the original rough, stone-flagged passages, dark panelling, and deep-embrasured windows add a convincing touch to the story of the King’s flight through England with a price on his head.
For the rest, Charmouth, which stands where the tiny river Char empties itself into the sea, consists of one long street of mutually antagonistic houses, of all shapes, sizes, and materials, and is the very exemplar of a fishing village turned into an inchoate seaside resort. But a sunny, sheltered, and pleasing spot.
On leaving Charmouth, the road begins to ascend again, and leaves Dorsetshire for Devon through a tunnel cut in the hillside, called the ‘New Passage,’ coming in four miles to ‘Hunter’s Lodge Inn,’ picturesquely set amid a forest of pine trees. From this point it is two and a half miles on to Axminster, a town which still gives a name to a particular make of carpets, although since 1835 the local factories have been closed and the industry transferred to Wilton, in Wiltshire. It was in 1755 that the industry was started here.
SHUTE HILL
There is one fine old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ at Axminster, with huge rambling stables and interminable corridors, in which one ought to meet the ghosts of departed travellers on the Exeter Road. But they are shy. There should, in fact, be many ghosts in this old town of many memories; and so there are, to that clairvoyant optic, the ‘mind’s eye.’ But they refuse to materialise to the physical organ, and it is only to a vivid imagination that the streets are repeopled with the excited peasantry who, in that fatal summer of 1685, flocked to the standard of the Duke of Monmouth, whom ‘the Lord raised vp’ as the still existing manuscript narrative of an Axminster dissenting minister says, to champion the Protestant religion—with what results we already know.
Pleasant meadow-lands lead by flat and shaded roads from Axminster by the river Axe to Axmouth, Seaton, and the sea, but our way continues inland.
There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles and a half between Axminster, the byegone home of carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of the lace industry, where all routes from London to Exeter meet. ‘Honiton lace’ is made now in the surrounding villages, but not in the town itself.
The first hill is soon met with, on passing over the river Yart. This is Shute Hill, where the coaches generally were upset, if either the coachman or the horses were at all ‘fresh.’ Then it is a long run down to Kilmington, where the travellers, having recovered their hearts from their boots or their throats, according to their temperaments, and found their breath, promptly cursed those coachmen and threatened them with all manner of pains and penalties for reckless driving. Thence, by way of Wilmington, to Honiton.
A quarter of a mile before reaching that town the traveller comes upon a singular debased Gothic toll-house. If he walks or cycles he may pass freely, but all carts and cattle have still to pay toll. This queer survival is known as King’s Road Gate, or by the more popular name of ‘Copper Castle,’ from its once having a peaked copper roof above its carpenter-gothic battlements.
Image unavailable: ‘COPPER CASTLE.’
‘COPPER CASTLE.’
THE LAST COACH
Honiton, whose name is locally ‘Honeyton,’ is a singularly uninteresting town, with its mother-parish church half a mile away from the one broad street that forms practically the whole of the place. Clean, quiet, and neither very old nor very new, so far as outward appearance goes, Honiton must be of a positively deadly dulness to the tourist on a rainy day; when to go out of doors is to get wet, and to remain in, thrown on the slender resources for amusement afforded by the local papers and the ten-years-old county directory in the hotel coffee-room, is a weariness.
Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long, empty street is not too wide; but all the year round, and every year, the broad highway hence on to Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic. Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-grabbing, enclosing country gentleman upon this generous width of macadamised surface, and are allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient for the present needs of the traffic. It is fifty-five years since the Great Western Railway was opened through to Exeter, and during that more than half a century these long reaches of the road have been deserted. Do belated cyclists, wheeling on moonlit nights along this tree-shaded road, ever conjure up a picture of the last mail down; the farewells at the inns, the cottagers standing at their doors, or leaning out of their windows, to see the visible passing away of an epoch; the flashing of the lamps past the hedgerows, and the last faint echoes of the horn sounding in melancholy fashion a mile away? If they do not, why then they must be sadly lacking in imagination, or ill-read in the Story of the Roads.
Where the roads branch in puzzling fashion, four and a half miles from Honiton, and all ways seem to lead to Exeter, there stands on the grassy plot at the fork a roadside monument to a missionary bishop, Dr. Patteson, who, born 1st April 1827, met martyrdom, together with two other workers in the missionfield, in New Zealand, in 1871. He was the eldest son of Sir John Patteson, of Feniton Court, near by, hence the placing of this brick and stone column here, surmounted by a cross, and plentifully inscribed with texts. The story of his and his friends’ death is set forth as having been ‘in vengeance for wrongs suffered at the hands of Europeans by savage men whom he loved and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.’
This memorial also serves the turn of finger-post, for directions are carved on its four sides; and very necessary too, for where two roads go to Exeter, the one by Ottery St. Mary some two miles longer than the other, the passing rustic is not wholly to be depended upon for clear and concise information. Cobbett in his day found that exasperating direction of the rustics to the inquiring wayfarer, to ‘keep straight on,’ just as great a delusion as the tourist now discovers it to be. The formula, according to him, was a little different in his time, being ‘keep right on.’
‘Aye,’ says he, ‘but in ten minutes, perhaps, you come to a Y or a T, or to a X. A fellow once told me, in my way from Chertsey to Guildford, “keep right on, you can’t miss your way.” I was in the perpendicular part of the T, and the top part was only a few yards from me. “Right on,” said I, “what, over that bank into the wheat?”—“No, no,” said he, “I mean that road, to be sure,” pointing to the road that went off to the left.’
Here a branch of the river Otter crosses the road in the wooded dell of Fenny Bridges, and in the course of another mile, on the banks of another stream, stands the ‘Fair Mile Inn,’ the last stage into
EXETER
Image unavailable: ‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’
‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’
Exeter in coaching times. Lonely the road remains, passing the scattered cottages of Rockbeare, and the depressing outlying houses of Honiton Clyst, situated on the little river Clyst, with the first of the characteristic old red sandstone church-towers of the South Devon looking down upon the road from the midst of embowering foliage. Then the squalid east end of Exeter and the long street of Heavitree, where Exeter burnt her martyrs, come into view, and there, away in front, with its skyline of towers and spires, is Exeter, displayed in profile for the admiration of all who have journeyed these many miles to where she sits in regal grandeur upon her hill that descends until its feet are bathed in the waters of her godmother, the Exe. Her streets are steep and her site dignified, although it is partly the level range of the surrounding country, rather than an intrinsic height, which confers that look of majesty which all travellers have noticed. The ancient city rises impressive in contrast with the water-meadows, rather than by reason of actual measurement. Wayfarers approaching from any direction brace themselves and draw deep breaths preparatory to scaling the streets, which, at a distance, assume abrupt vistas. Villas, with spacious gardens, and snug, prebendal-looking houses, eloquent of a thousand a year and cellars full of old port, clothe the lower slopes of this rising ground, to give place, by degrees, to streets which, as the traveller advances, grow narrower and more crooked, their lines of houses becoming ever older, more picturesque, and loftier as they near the heart of the city. Modernity inhabits the environs, antiquity is seated, impressive, in the centre, where, on a plateau, closely hemmed in from the bustling, secular life of the streets, rises the sombre mass of the cathedral, the pride of this western land.
Exeter is called by those who know her best and love her most the ‘Queen City of the West.’ To historians she is perhaps better epithetically remembranced as the ‘Ever Faithful,’ loyal and staunch through the good fortune or adversity of the causes for which she has, with closed and guarded gates, held fast the Key of the West. She has suffered much at different periods of her history for this loyalty; from the time when, declaring against the usurpation of Stephen, her citizens fought and starved within the walls; through the centuries to the time of Perkin Warbeck, the impostor, and so on to the Civil War between King and Parliament, when the citizens were more loyal than their rulers and were disarmed and kept under surveillance until the Royalists came and took the place, themselves to be dispossessed a few years later.
THE KEY OF THE WEST
Loyalty, tried for so many centuries at so great a cost, broke down finally in 1688, and the city gates were opened to the Prince of Orange. Had James been less of a bigot, and had his hell-hounds, Jeffreys and Kirke, been animated with less zeal, who knows what these Devonshire men would have done? Possibly it may be said that William’s fleet would, under such circumstances, never have found its way into Tor Bay, nor that historic landing have been consummated at Brixham. True enough; but granting the landing, the proclamation at Newton Abbot, and the advance to the gates of Exeter, how then if James had been less of the stubborn oak and more of the complaisant willow? Can it be supposed that they would have welcomed this frigid, hawk-nosed foreigner of the cold eye and silent tongue? And if the Dutchman and his mynheers had been ill-received at Exeter, what then? Take the map and study it for answer. You will see that the ‘Ever Faithful’ stands at the Gates of the West. The traveller always has had to enter these portals if he would go in either direction, and the more imperative was this necessity to those coming from West to East. Even now the traveller by railway passes through Exeter to reach further Devon and Cornwall, equally with him who fares the high-road.
What chance, then, of success would a foreign expedition command were its progress barred at this point? Less mobile than a single traveller, or party of mere travellers, it could not well evade the struggle for a passage by taking another route. William and his following might, in such an event, have at great risk forced the passage of the treacherous Exe estuary, but even supposing that feat achieved, there is difficult country beyond, before the road to London is reached. To the northwards of his march from Brixham lies Dartmoor and its outlying hills, and let those who have explored those inhospitable wastes weigh the chances of a force marching through the hostile countryside in the depth of winter to outflank Exeter.
But all hope for James’s cause was gone, and although the spirits of the ambitious William sank when, on entering the streets of Exeter, he was only received with a chilly curiosity, he was not to know—for how could that most stony of champions read into the hearts of these people?—that their generous enthusiasm for faith and freedom was quite crushed out of existence by the bloody work of three years before, when the peasantry saw with horror the progress of the fiendish Jeffreys marked by a line of gibbets; when they could not fare forth upon the highways and byeways without presently arriving at some Golgotha rubricated with the dishonoured remains of one or other of their fellows; and when many a cottage had its empty chair, the occupants dead or sold into a slavery worse than death.
The people received William with a well-simulated lack of interest, because they knew what would be their portion were he defeated and James again triumphant. They could not have cherished any personal affection for the Prince of Orange, but can only, at the best of it, have had an impersonal regard for him as a champion of their liberties; and of helping such champions they had already acquired a bitter surfeit. Thus it was that the back of loyalty was broken, and Exeter, for once in her story, belied her motto, Semper Fidelis, the gift of Queen Elizabeth.
THE CITY SWORD-BEARER
The gifts that loyalty has brought Exeter may soon be enumerated, for they comprise just a number of charters conferred by a long line of sovereigns; an Elizabethan motto; a portrait of his sister, presented by Charles the Second; a Sword of Honour, and an old hat, the gifts of Henry the Seventh in recognition of Exeter’s stand against Perkin Warbeck in 1497. Against these parchments, this picture, and the miscellaneous items of motto, sword, and old hat, there are centuries of lighting and of spoliation on account of loyalty to be named. It seems a very one-sided affair, even though the old hat be a Cap of Maintenance and heraldically notable. Among the maces and the loving-cups, and all the civic regalia of Exeter, these objects are yet to be seen. Old headgear will wear out, and so the Cap, in its present form, dates back only to the time of James the First. It is by no means a gossamer, weighing, as it does, seven pounds. As may be seen by the accompanying illustration, it is a broad-brimmer of the most pronounced type.
The crown fixed upon the point of the sword-sheath belongs to the same period, while a guinea of the same reign may be seen let into the metal of the pommel. On occasions of State, at Exeter, this sword is carried before the Mayor and Corporation by their official Sword-Bearer.
Image unavailable: THE EXETER CITY SWORD-BEARER.
THE EXETER CITY SWORD-BEARER.
The dignified effect of the affair, however, is generally spoiled by the commonplace black kid gloves worn by him, and by his everyday clothes visible under the official robes, which can be seen in the illustration.
Of late the Cap has been replaced by one built on the lines of those worn by the Yeomen of the Guard in the Tower of London, the old Cap being thought too historical to be any longer exposed to the danger of being worn, while possibly some feelings of humanity towards the Sword-Bearer may have dictated the replacing of the seven-pound hat by something lighter. It is now preserved in the Guildhall, where it may be seen by curious visitors.
It is a relief to turn from the thronging streets to the absolute quiet of the cathedral precincts, shaded by tall elms and green with trim lawns.
Externally, the cathedral is of the grimiest and sootiest aspect—black as your hat, but comely. Not even the blackest corners of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London, show a deeper hue than the west front of St. Peter’s, at Exeter. The battered, time-worn array of effigies of saints, kings, crusaders, and bishops that range along the screen in mutilated array under Bishop Grandison’s great west window are black, too, and so are the gargoyles that leer with stony grimaces down upon you from the ridges and string-courses of the transepts, where they lurk in an enduring crepuscule.
A COACHING STRONGHOLD
The sonorous note of Great Peter, the great bell of the cathedral, sounding from the south transept tower is in admirable keeping with the black-browed gravity of the close, and keeps the gaiety of the surrounding hotels within the limits of a canonical sobriety.
Elsewhere are ancient hostelries innumerable, with yawning archways under which the coaches entered in the byegone days. The ‘Elephant,’ the ‘Mermaid,’ and the ‘Half Moon’ are the chief among these, and have the true Pickwickian air, which is the outstanding note of all inns of the Augustan age of coaching. It must have been worth the journey to be so worthily housed at the end of the alarums and excursions which more or less cheerfully enlivened the way.
Exeter and the far West of England were the last strongholds of the coaching interest. The Great Western Railway was opened to Exeter on 1st May 1844, and up to that time over seventy coaches left that city daily for London and the cross-country routes. Nor did coaching languish towards the close. On the contrary, it died game, and, until finally extinguished by the opening of the railway, coaching on the old road between London and Exeter was a matter of the utmost science and the best speed ever attained by the aid of four horses on a turnpike road. Charles Ward, the best-known driver of the old ‘Telegraph’ Exeter coach, driven from his old route, retreated westwards and took the road between Exeter and Devonport, retiring into Cornwall when the railway was opened to Plymouth on 1st May 1848; but not before he had brought the time of the ‘Telegraph’ between London and Exeter down to fifteen hours.
The ‘Half Moon’ is the inn from which the ‘Telegraph’ started at 6.30 in the morning, breakfasting at Ilminster, dining at Andover, and stopping for no other meal, reaching Hyde Park Corner at 9.30 P.M. It was kept in 1777 by a landlord named Hemming, who had a very good understanding with the highwaymen Boulter and Caldwell, and doubtless with many another. There is a record of those two knights of the road being here, one of them with a stolen horse, when a Mr. Harding, of Bristol, being in the yard, recognised it. ‘Why, Mr. Hemming,’ said he, ‘that is the very mare my father-in-law, Mr. James, lost a few months ago; how came she here?’ To which the landlord replied, ‘She has been my own mare these twelve months, and how should she be your father-in-law’s?’
‘Well,’ replied Harding, ‘if I had seen her in any other hands, or met her on the road, I could have sworn to her.’ Boulter and Caldwell were at that moment in the house at dinner, so the landlord took the first opportunity of warning them.
For the rest, Exeter is still picturesque. It possesses many quaint and interesting churches, placed in the strangest positions; while that of St. Mary Steps has a queer old clock with grotesque figures that strike the hours and chime the quarters. The seated figure is intended to represent Henry the Eighth, and those on either side of him men-at-arms, but the local people have a rhyming legend which
EXETER CASTLE
Image unavailable: EXETER, FROM THE DUNSFORD ROAD.
EXETER, FROM THE DUNSFORD ROAD.
would have it that the King is a certain ‘Matty the Miller’:—
The people around would not believe
That Matty the Miller was dead;
For every hour on Westgate tower,
Matty still nods his head.
And, in fact, the King kicks his heels against the bell and nods with every stroke. The Jacobean Guildhall of Exeter, too, is among the most striking relics of this old-world city; while away from the High Street, but near the continual clashing of a great railway station, there stand the remains of Exeter Castle, the appropriately named Rougemont, that cruel Blunderbore, drunken in the long ago with the blood of many a gallant gentleman. At the end of a long line of those who suffered were Colonel John Penruddocke and Hugh Grove, captured at South Molton after that ineffectual Salisbury rising. Executed in the Castle Yard, in the very heart of this loyal city of Exeter, many a heart must have ached on that fatal morning for these unhappy men. ‘This, I hope,’ said Penruddocke, ascending the scaffold, ‘will prove like Jacob’s Ladder; though the feet of it rest upon the earth, yet I doubt not but the top of it reaches to Heaven. The crime for which I am now to die is Loyalty, in this age called High Treason.’
Image unavailable: ‘MATTY THE MILLER.’
‘MATTY THE MILLER.’
They knew both how to fight and how to die, those dauntless Cavaliers. The Earl of Derby, who suffered at Bolton, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, barbarously shot at the taking of Colchester; gray-haired Sir Nicholas Kemys at Chepstow, and many another died as valiantly as their master—
Who nothing little did, nor mean,
But bowed his shapely head
Down, as upon a bed.
It is away through the city and across the Exe, to where the road rises in the direction of Dartmoor, that one of the finest views back upon the streets and the cathedral is obtained. Exeter from the Dunsford road, glimpsed by the ancient and decrepit elm pictured here, is worth seeing and the view itself is worth preserving, for elm and old-world foreground, with the inevitable changes which the growth of Exeter is bringing about, will not long remain. Like many another relic of a past era along this old highway, they are vanishing even while the busy chronicler of byegone days is hastening to record them.
The End