Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

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 12s. 6d. 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 20d. for Hurston, 5d. for Willandhead which adjoins it on one side, 4½d. for Venn which adjoins it on the other, 8d. and 3d. for Jurston and Higher Jurston which are next beyond Venn, 4d. for Littaford which is next beyond Jurston, and so on. The total is 4l. 10s. 8d.; and it was 4l. 1s. 8d. in 1296-7, when these ministers’ accounts begin.

The payments were primarily for pasturing cattle on the moor, and in 1296-7 the 4l. 1s. 8d. 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.