The North Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

SIR JOHN SCHORNE AND HIS DEVIL.

Old rotting ribs of wrecked ships, protruding like fangs from the wet margin of the sands, tell their own tale of unexpected and disastrous landfalls on the lonely shore.

On the left hand of the road is still to be seen “Saunton Court,” an old farmhouse mentioned with glowing description in Blackmore’s “Maid of Sker,” but the interest of the house in the novel is not reflected in the present circumstances of the place.

The road leads directly into Braunton; a large, sprawling village of cob-walled, whitewashed cottages; a place that has, so far, not been affected in the slightest degree by modern change. What Braunton was a hundred years ago, it remains to-day. Risdon, in “Survey of Devon,” 1630, says: “Brannockston, so named of St. Brannock, the king’s son of Calabria, that lived in this vale, and 300 years after Christ began to preach His holy name in this desolate place, then overspread with brakes and woods; out of which desert, now named the Boroughs (to tell you some of the marvels of this man), he took harts, which meekly obeyed the yoke, and made them a plow to draw timber thence, to build a church. I forbear to speak of his cow, his staff, his oak, his well, and his servant Abel, all of which are lively represented in that church, than which you shall see few fairer.” Brannock’s cow is really well worth speaking of; for, after it had been killed and carved into joints, the pieces reunited at the word of the saint, and the animal, restored to life, began to quietly graze in the meadows, as though nothing had happened. That, at any rate, is the legend. A legend that demands faith of a character not quite so robust is that of the vision which led Brannock to build his church here. In a dream he was shown a sow and her litter, and directed to select the spot where next day he should find the sow. A carved boss in the roof of the church represents the pig and her family, and St. Brannock himself, with his cow, is carved boldly on one of the old bench-ends.

It is a remarkable church, inside and out; with tower and lead-sheathed spire out of the perpendicular. Most of the old carved oak bench-ends, dated about 1500, remain, decorated with a large number of devices; among them, not only St. Brannock and his cow, but a bishop with his crozier; the head of St. John Baptist held up by the hair; Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, and Master John Schorne, the charlatan rector of North Marston, Buckinghamshire, late in the thirteenth century, who imposed upon the credulous folk of that age by pretending to have conjured the devil into a boot. To convince the most sceptical by ocular demonstration, he contrived a mechanical impish-looking figure, fastened on a spring at the bottom of a long boot, of the kind worn by hunting-men. When the spring was released, the imp would fly up to the edge of the boot, in what was in those times, you know, a really terrifying manner. The good Master Schorne, however, had him well under control, and, as so powerful a devil-compeller, was naturally feared and respected. He was further revered as a certain exorciser of the ague. Schorne and his devil in a boot are the originators of the children’s toy, “Jack-in-the-Box”; for to that complexion did his supernatural terrors come at last, when the springs that actuated the jumping imp were laid bare.

But Schorne was in his day, and for long after, something very nearly like a saint, in popular estimation, and is indeed sometimes represented fully furnished with the saintly nimbus. Pictures, or carved effigies, of him are extremely rare, for there are probably not more than six or seven in England. Here, no doubt, through some confused version of the legend, the carver has shown him holding what appears to be a cup, instead of a boot.

BRAUNTON CHURCH.

Braunton church is full of old pieces of carved woodwork, notably the Jacobean gallery in the north chapel, and the churchwardens’ pew, dated 1632. In the south chapel stands a richly decorated Spanish chest with undecipherable inscription; and another relic of the wreck of H.M.S. Weazel in 1799, a tablet to the memory of William Gray, surgeon of the ship, one of the one hundred and six who lost their lives on that occasion.

A prominent church-like tower, standing on the crest of a tall hill east of the church, and by the site of a hilltop chapel of St. Michael, is less ecclesiastical than it looks, being in fact a political monument commemorating the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832.