Among my papers here I have a memorandum of a better way of settling such disputes:—“London, 4 January 1854. Mr Torr bets Mr Jackson (& Mr J. Mr T. vice versa) that Buttern Down summit is at least 700 feet above Forder, Moreton, a dinner at the White Hart, Moreton, to all the friends the winner chooses to invite.”—It is only 500 feet above.
My grandfather writes to my brother, 16 January 1862:—“I enclose a piece of poetry, which was sent to me, on the old Cross Tree at Moreton. The stone cross erected there with a bason on the top to contain holy water, you are aware, is a relic of Popery. There was one at Chagford like it until some three years ago the lord of the manor, old Mr Southmead, destroyed it cross and all, for he had such dislike of Popery. I have known others in town-places, but this at Moreton is the last that I know of remaining; and the old tree is going to decay. I should tell you that some fifty years or more ago Mr Harvey’s house was an inn, and the innkeeper had the interstices of the tree floored over like a room, and people used to go up and drink and smoke, and all holyday times dancing was kept up for many nights together. I have danced there and drank there with good jovial parties: times were different then.” And he goes on to mention other people who used to dance there—people whom I remember in their old age, sedate and solemn, and looking as though they had never danced anything less stately than a minuet.
At the close of the Crimean War he had some peace-rejoicings of his own for the people in this hamlet: thirty-eight all told, men, women and children. He writes to my father, 1 June 1856:—“Well, I gave our villagers roast beef, plum pudding, vegetables, bread, etc., a regular good hot dinner, and plenty of good beer. The dinner was at 1 o’clock, and the tea at 5. For tea plenty of Ashburton cakes and bread with plenty of cream and butter. It was held in the barn [next Pit Lane] as the air was cold and no sun. They had fiddlers, and walked in procession: afterwards returned to the barn to dance, which they kept up merrily until 12 o’clock. We had the Union Jack over the barn, and many arches well decked with flowers.”
There were rejoicings at Lustleigh on the marriage of the Prince of Wales. And on 12 March 1863 he writes:—“Where all the folks came from I can hardly tell, but I am told there were but few that did not belong to Lustleigh or the Tithing. Tho’ they all knew me, there were many I could not recognize until they spoke to me. There are but very few here about that belong to the parish: for instance we have but one in all the village that was born in Lustleigh.”
Here ‘tithing’ means the bits of Hennock and Bovey Tracey parishes that lie in Wreyland manor, and ‘village’ means Wreyland hamlet, Lustleigh village being called the ‘town.’ Thus in old notes here I find:—“All the children in the village and Lustleigh town”—“Sent over to town to buy stamps”—and so on. And again:—“Poor old ***** from yonder town dropt down in the town-place in a seizure.” The yonder town is the group of houses near the Baptist chapel, and the town-place is the open space outside the church-yard—at Moreton it is the King’s-acre outside and God’s-acre within. King’s-acre and town-place are good old names, connoting certain rights; but our Uitlanders want to call these places Squares.
My grandfather did not always approve of everything his neighbours did, but he kept his comments for his letters to my father. Thus, on 13 August 1843, he writes:—“There was a party of parsons and doctors at *****’s at Gidly last week. They played at wrestling, and ***** of Manaton was thrown with a broken arm in two places. High time to do something with these fellows. How can people go to church and sit under them.”
Writing on 31 March 1860 about a staghound that had been worrying sheep, and had killed above a hundred in a month, he observes:—“The farmer is generally a selfish man, not caring much about his neighbour; and they did not take the thing up in good neighbourly spirit until Thursday last, when all the farmers in the different parishes assembled, some 150, to drive up the country, which was the only way to succeed; and they succeeded in finding him in a coppice not far from Meacombe. A man discharged both barrels at him, and wounded him: then the horsemen went in full chase for some three or four miles, and regularly rode him down and dispatched him.... I often find farmers laughing at the misfortunes of another, but now the loss was so general that there were but few to laugh.”
On 19 January 1840 he has a few words on a neighbour who was too fond of talking politics:—“Old ***** is very cross and tedious—I can hardly bear with him. He is all but a Tory, indeed he likes to associate more with Torys than Liberals: he detests Whigs; and nothing but Chartism, or something like it, will do for him, for he has lived all these years in expectation of a Revolution, and none come, and is afraid he shall die without seeing it.”
He writes on 24 May 1852:—“A greater nuisance there cannot be than a magistrate in a little rural district.... We never before had a magistrate nearer than *****, and if any little paltry squabble happened between parties, their courage invariably cooled down on crossing the water, and almost invariably they returned home without a summons. But now whilst passion is up they have only to go to *****, and a summons is granted, I find, much to the regret of many after cool reflection.”
There is a footpath here that cuts off the corner at Wreyland Cross, and leads down to Wreyford Bridge; and he writes, 20 July 1856:—“The farmer has nailed up and wreathed up Wreyford Park gates, and says (I am told) he will summons anyone who passes that way. I asked his landlord if he had sanctioned it; he said No, but when the farmer applied to him, said he might do as he liked.... I told him I should take down the wreath, and if he chose to summon anyone, I was the best he could summon, for I would prove about sixty years a quiet and unmolested pathway, and my mother about eighty, and others in the village more than fifty.” (He was sixty-seven then, and my great-grandmother was ninety-one.) He writes next day that the farmer is taking the obstruction down.