The North Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

But there seems still that spice of original discovery and exploration of the little-known, clinging to the trip to Lundy, which impels even the worst of sailors to commit himself to the symptoms of sea-sickness, for sake of an out-of-the-way experience: although, to be sure, the trip to the island is now a commonplace, everyday affair.

LUNDY.

Lundy has ever been a place, if not exactly of mystery, at any rate of the wildest romantic doings. It appears to have been the “Heraclea Acte” of the ancients, and is, in effect, a huge mass of mingled granite and slate rock, nearly three and a half miles in length, by about three quarters of a mile broad. It has nine miles of rugged and extremely indented coast-line, here and there rising in abrupt cliffs considerably over four hundred feet high. There is only one good landing-place; on the south-east, where the height of Lamator and the lump of rock known as “Rat Island,” shelter a little curving beach from the heavy Atlantic wash.

The isle contains 1046 acres, chiefly of barren upland, covered with rough grass, gorse, heather, and bracken, and inhabited at the present day by some thirty-five persons.

Mentioned in the Welsh legends of mystery and magic, the Mabinogion, Lundy was known to the Welsh as Caer Sidi. Its present title is due to Scandinavian settlers, who named it from the “Lund,” or puffin that then, as now, frequented it in great numbers. The real, as opposed to the legendary, history of Lundy begins in 1199, when King John gave it to the Knights Templars. It at that time belonged to the de Marisco family, and was, consequently, not really in the king’s gift, but such small considerations as those of private ownership were very frequently overlooked by the Norman sovereigns. Moreover, the Mariscos appear to have been at the time in rebellion against the Crown. But William de Marisco the then lord, by no means agreed to this disposal of his island home, and as the king had merely given it to the Templars, and had not enforced the surrender by armed intervention, he succeeded in keeping possession. He did even more, for he turned pirate, and was still in undisturbed possession of the place in 1233. He had a considerable stronghold on the heights of Lamator, overlooking the landing-place. The remains of it, still known as “Marisco Castle,” are at the present day incorporated with some cottages and Lloyd’s signal-station.

There was wild blood in the Marisco veins. Sir William, a younger son of this original William, succeeded; his elder brother, Sir Geoffrey, having been slain in a descent upon Ireland in 1234. Sir William himself was outlawed in the following year, for murdering an Irish messenger, in London. Then followed what appears to have been a trumped-up charge against him of having conspired to assassinate Henry the Third. Threatened with the most serious consequences, William the younger then fled to Lundy, described as “impregnable from the nature of the place.” The account of his doings then proceeds to tell how he “attached to himself many outlaws and malefactors, subsisted by piracies, taking more especially wine and provisions, and making frequent sudden descents on the adjacent lands, spoiling and injuring the realm by land and sea, and native as well as foreign merchants.”

During four years the piracies of this desperate man continued. It does not, however, appear that he could do otherwise than rob upon the high seas, and really perhaps he deserves a little sympathy. Falsely accused of plotting to assassinate the king, he had of necessity to abscond, if he desired to save his life: and once upon Lundy, where no sufficient sustenance grew, he was further obliged to help himself from passing vessels. And having thus, from the mere instinct of self-preservation, become a fugitive and a pirate, he continued (impelled by the Moorish blood thought to run in the veins of his race) to follow the trade of buccaneer from sheer delight in it, and from merely helping himself to necessaries, descended to the enormity of seizing whatever he could. It all sounds like the downward career of a good young man, as read in religious tracts. First we see him, son of a turbulent father, with a heritage of bad blood. Then the mere peccadillo of killing a stray Irishman—an incident not worthy a moment’s consideration—clouds his fair horizon. No one in those times would, in the ordinary course of things, have thought much of that; but his father’s wild career was doubtless remembered against him, and he was, as we have already seen, outlawed. The rest of his descent was easy; and at last, in 1242, he was captured—how, we are not told—“thrown into chains, and with sixteen accomplices condemned and sentenced to die. He was executed on Tower Hill, with especial ignominy,” his body gibbeted and divided up into small portions, in a manner which it scarce beseems these pages to narrate.

Then at last the island was for a time in the king’s hands. But in 1281 Richard the Second re-granted it to a descendant, and Mariscos ruled for a while, until Edward the Second granted it to the elder of his Despenser favourites. The force and vigour of the once-fierce Marisco family appear to have been lacking in Herbert, their last known representative, for he seems not to have opposed the grant with any determination, and died in 1327; the year after the king himself, fleeing from the plots of his wife and Mortimer, despairingly considered for a time the project of hiding in this then almost inaccessible retreat.