This outrage formed the breaking-point of the rustic endurance of the Doones, who were tracked to their lair by large bodies of countryfolk and slain, and their stone huts demolished. The incident of the killing of the infant is told, with variations, by Blackmore, in “Lorna Doone”; a footnote declaring the author’s belief in the truthfulness of the legends regarding the raid, but holding that the Doones did not wilfully kill the child, which was fatally injured by being tossed playfully to the ceiling, and accidentally let fall.
Variations of the final ending of the Doones place the scene at Robber’s Bridge, on the Weir Water, and tell how the Ridds were chiefly instrumental in bringing on the fight.
Yenworthy Farm, formerly the property of the Snow family, was sold to the late Reverend W. S. Halliday of Glenthorne, by the late Mr. Nicholas Snow. Mr. Halliday also purchased the duck-gun traditionally said to have wounded the Doones. It is to remain always here, as a relic of the lawless old times.
We may perhaps find in the name of Snow a significant clue to the evolutionary processes of these old stories told in past generations around local firesides on winter’s nights in those times when few could read, and when, if they owned that accomplishment, literature of any sort was scarce and dear. In tales repeated from mouth to mouth, all kinds of accretions are to be expected; and it will already have been noted how many are the variants of these Doone and other stories. The patient and contemplative seeker after truth may easily find in the name of Snow the origin of the snowy night on which the Doones attacked Yenworthy Farm, the owner of the property being gradually brought into the tale by the mishearings incidental to repetition.
The last two surviving Doones are said, in legends current some years ago, and related by the Rev. W. H. Thornton, many years since curate at Countisbury, within the North Devon border, near Lynmouth, to have perished about the year 1800. They were an old man and his granddaughter, who for a long time had been used to roam the country, singing carols at Christmas-tide. They were said to have been found together in the snow, frozen to death, on the road between Simonsbath and Challacombe.
The conclusion of the whole matter appears to be that there was really a band of semi-savage hut-dwellers established on Exmoor in the middle of the seventeenth century, and that they continued to be a nuisance to the neighbourhood, in the sheep-stealing and petty-pilfering way, until perhaps the first few years of the next era. But that they were ever the terrible marauders of legend is not for a moment to be credited. They were probably, like the old type of gipsy, only too glad to be able to sneak necessaries covertly, and then to make off, and to be let alone; and were never bold enough to make raids. The duck-gun at Yenworthy was not used necessarily against a Doone: for lonely farmhouses were of old, all over the country, not unlikely to be the objects of attack. For a striking instance of this truth reference may be made to Tangley Farm, or “Lone Farm,” as it is often called, in the neighbourhood of Burford, Oxfordshire, which was attacked boldly by the “Dunsdon Gang” one night about 1784.[[7]]
[7]. See The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road, Vol. I., pp. 248-252.
It may here be not altogether out of place to remark that anything with which the late Rev. W. S. Halliday was associated is to be examined closely and suspiciously, for he was a person of a saturnine turn of humour, delighting to send antiquaries and others upon false scents. His ancient habit of burying Roman coins in the neighbourhood of his residence at Glenthorne, with the singular object of deluding future generations of archæologists into the belief that they have come upon plentiful evidence of Roman civilisation in these parts, is well known; and being well known (doubtless to the distress of his tricksy spirit) is not now likely to deceive any one.
It must remain an open question as to how the outlaws of Badgworthy, in whom, with the reservations made above, we are prepared to believe, came by the name of Doone. The probabilities and theories have already been given, and the matter must rest there.
The undoubted existence of old of other Devonshire semi-savage bands is itself a strong presumption of a like tribe here. The Gubbins band, in the neighbourhood of Lydford, “living in holes, like swine,” was well known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is made the subject of a reference by so serious a writer as Thomas Fuller, 1660. “Their wealth,” he says, “consisteth in other men’s goods: they live by stealing the sheep on the moors. Such is their fleetness, they will outrun many horses: vivaciousness, they outlive most men. They hold together like bees: offend one, and all will revenge his quarrell.”