These subdivisions gave great scope for neighbourly feeling. A man might have a tree that was no real good to him and damaged his neighbour’s patch by keeping sunshine off; but very few men would help a neighbour by cutting down a tree. My grandfather writes to my father, 5 January 1853, “I saw ***** yesterday, and he told me he was glad to say that Mr *****’s great elm tree was blown down, for it did so much injury to his garden. I should say that, for profit, the tree ought to have been thrown long ago, for it was equally large forty years ago as now: therefore it will (I think) be found decayed in the bottom—if so, much lessened in value.” He writes on 17 September 1857, “Mr ***** has cut down an ash tree in my hedge. I have no wish to go to law about it, but one cannot stand by and see one’s property taken with impunity.... The rule is, if you can pass a shovel to take up sufficient earth for lading the hedge, the tree belongs to the field of the opposite party; but if you must go outside it, the tree of course belongs to the hedge.” The neighbour said there was “width enough for the fattest man in the parish” between the tree and hedge. There was an arbitration, and the tree was awarded to my grandfather. I suppose the fattest man in the parish was no wider than a shovel, or else the neighbour had made room for him by digging into the hedge.
A man diverted a watercourse, and in heavy rains the water stirred his cesspool up and spread the contents on another man’s land below. He said it would enrich the land—“it is worth some pounds a year”—but the other man would not have it—“if it is so very valuable as he makes out, why trouble other people with it?” My grandfather writes to my father, 21 January 1864, “As fast as ***** turns the water and makes up the embankment, at some time or other (no one sees him) his neighbour breaks it down.”
At the same time another man was diverting another watercourse and stopping his cesspool up, thereby impoverishing a neighbour’s land below; and that neighbour was aggrieved—“it has always runned under his stables for time out of mind.” My grandfather mentions people who could say which way these cesspools overflowed in former times. “They are all old men; and let them die, there would be but little evidence that would be substantial. Would it not be worth while to get their depositions taken now?”
In ancient Rome there was a case of a man fixing gargoyles on his house in such a manner that they shot the rainwater off his roof into the front door of his neighbour opposite. We have that spirit here. The end of one man’s garden was opposite another man’s house, and the other man’s pig got into the garden and did some damage there. So the injured man cleaned out his own pigstye and made a nice manure heap in his garden, within a few feet of the other man’s front door, in just the right position for the prevalent winds to blow the perfume in.
A man’s latch-string was cut, and he could not get into his house. Being asked what he would do, he said decisively, “Coot thetty coot’n,” literally, cut that which cut it (thetty being the Anglo-Saxon thætte) but meaning, cut the latch-string of the man who has cut mine. Even when ordinary words are used, they are not always used in the accepted way. A youth married one of his loves and went on flirting with the others, but was found out at last. And he was greeted with, “Just come you here now, I’ve got something for you with your tea: your little secrecies is become the greatest of publicities.”
In another household the wife gave force to her remarks by throwing plates and dishes at her husband’s head. (She also had something for him with his tea.) He knew exactly how to dodge them; and, as his usual seat was in a line between his wife’s seat and the door, the things came whizzing out across the lane, to the astonishment of passers-by who did not know her ways.
Time softens these asperities. A bereaved husband was speaking of his wife in her last illness. “Her sat up sudden in the bed, and saith ‘I be a-goin’ up the Clave.’ [Lustleigh Cleave.] And I saith to her, ‘Thee canst not go up the Clave: thee be a-dyin’.’ And her saith to me, ‘Ye wicked, dommed, old mon.’ Poor dear soul, they was the very last words as ever her spoke.”
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.