Small Talk at Wreyland. First Series

by Cecil Torr

Even at Lustleigh there were mishaps in church; and my grandfather used to note them in his letters to my father. Thus, on Sunday 18 August 1844, “a magpie walked into the church and sat himself on the communion table, to the great annoyance of the congregation; and the sexton had much difficulty in driving him.” Then, on Sunday 15 December 1844, “one of the candles fell from the pulpit into the seat below.” And so on. Once, within my recollection, there was a sermon by a stranger, who enhanced his eloquence by gesture; and with one wide sweep of his arms he brought down candles, glasses, cushion, and everything. The cushion caught the clerk upon the head, just as he was getting to sleep; and I have been told that what he said was just Amen, and nothing more.

I see that I first went to Lustleigh Church on the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of 1862, while I was down here on a visit to my grandfather. In those days the service was mainly a dialogue between the parson and the clerk, the parson in very cultured tones and the clerk in resonant dialect, one saying ‘As for lies, I hate and abhor them’ as if it was superfluous for him to say so, and the other responding ‘Seven times a day do I praise thee’ as if it was a fact and he wished it generally known. The singing was confined to hymns. There was a choir of men and boys in a gallery below the tower, and a harmonium near them. But there used to be a choir of men and women, and an orchestra of bass-viol, violin and flute; and the tuning made a pleasant prelude to the service. There were three men who could play the viol; and it went by rank, not merit. One man farmed his own land, and he had first claim: next came a man who was a tenant farmer; and last a man who had no farm, but played better than the other two.

There were high pews then, and a razed three-decker—parson over clerk, with sounding-board on top, and reading-desk alongside half way up. Nearly all the windows had plain glass, so that one could see the trees and sky; and everything was whitewashed.

The whitewash was removed in 1871, and made way for much worse things—green distemper on the walls, blue paint and gilt stars on the roof, crude stencils on the side walls of the chancel, and on the eastern wall a fresco made in Germany. The trees and sky are hidden by glass that is exasperating in its colour and design. Lavatory tiles replace the granite paving of the chancel, and there is marble of the sort one sees on washstands.—It makes one crave for the French system of scheduling old churches as National Monuments, and putting them under the Ministry of Fine Arts.

All the old stained glass has gone, except some bits of four small figures—the Virgin and Child, and saints Nicholas, Catherine and Martha—and in 1880 these figures were made up, and put into a window. Some say that the old glass was destroyed by the Reformers, others by the Puritans; but such things were done by most unlikely people. There was a window in St Edmond’s church at Salisbury; and the Recorder of Salisbury “was placed in the church in such a seat as that the said window was always in his eye.” Its absurdity annoyed him—it made God “a little old man in a blue and red coat”—and one afternoon in October 1630 he got up and smashed it with his staff. He was fined: State Trials, vol. i, pp. 377 ff., ed. 1730.

Tristram Risdon visited Lustleigh church about three hundred years ago, and in his Survey of Devon he says, “Another tomb there is arched over, where some say the lord Dynham and his lady were interred, whose pictures are to be seen very glorious in a glass window, having their armories between them, and likewise on their surcoats escutcheons of arms.” This probably was like the window at Beer Ferrers—Lysons, Devonshire, plate 6—with pictures of William de Ferrers and his wife with their armorial bearings. William was contemporary with Robert de Dynham; and probably it was Robert and his wife, not lord Dynham and his lady, who were portrayed in the stained glass that has perished and in the stone effigies that survive.

There was an Inquiry here on 22 December 1276, and William de Torr was on the jury. And the verdict was that Robert’s wife would be entitled to Lustleigh manor when she came of age, and meanwhile he was renting it for £10 a year, to be spent in praying for the soul of John de Mandevill. The wife, Emma de Wydeworth, had just been married at the age of ten: her father and mother were dead, and the mother had been a lunatic. In her effigy she looks as if she might have been a lunatic herself.

She inherited the manor from her father, and he inherited it from William de Wydeworth, an energetic man who kept a gallows of his own at Lustleigh. He had no warrant for a gallows, but gallows were wanted in the reign of Henry III. As the King could not enforce the law, lords of manors had to do the necessary thing.

There was some lawlessness in Lustleigh even after Edward I. John de Moeles, the owner of Wreyland, had a brother Roger, born in 1296 and married in 1316 to Alice le Pruz, who was ten years older than himself. And on 26 July 1317 the King issued a commission:—On complaint by Roger de Moeles it appears that John Daumarle and certain other malefactors and perturbers of the peace have seized Alice, the wife of this same Roger, by force of arms at Lustleigh, and have carried her off together with goods and chattels and certain charters and muniments of his, etc. etc.

Roger was a ward of the King, and the King thus had the right of choosing a wife for him, while he was under age; but the King sold the right to William Inge, who kept what we should call a Matrimonial Agency. Roger chose Alice—or perhaps it was Alice chose Roger—without Inge’s intervention, and Inge got his money back: at any rate, he got orders on the Exchequer, 20 July and 13 December 1316, to refund the money or take it off the price of the next match that he bought. He could not have claimed anything, if he had merely failed to sell what he had bought; so he declared that Roger died before a marriage could be arranged. That was palpably a lie, but such lies might serve. There was a case in Norfolk a few years after this, Folsham v. Houel. The jury gave a verdict for the plaintiff, and then the defendant got a Writ of Attaint against the jurors for giving such a verdict. The plaintiff and his friends entered into a conspiracy to declare that he was dead, as his death would put an end to the proceedings. They announced the death, and had a grand funeral with an empty coffin, and even had masses for his soul. Then the coroner came down, and they put a body in the coffin, and made him believe it was the plaintiff’s; and the Writ was quashed on his report. But on 12 June 1347 the King issued a commission for arresting all the people concerned in the affair, and keeping them in prison until further orders.