“Now as to Miss Browne’s documentary evidence, I had the original of Charles Doone’s family history, and it was undoubtedly a genuine document of the age it purported to be. I made a full copy of it. Of other documents I only saw copies. The originals she stated to be in the possession of a cousin in Scotland, and promised to get them for me as soon as she could. I have, however, not seen them as yet. The relics also seem to me genuine.”
It must not be supposed that these were Blackmore’s only sources of information—they deal in the main with merely one side of the story. Other material, both written and oral, was available on the spot. Mr Chanter observes on this point: “I myself can perfectly recall that, when I first went to a boarding-school in 1863, there was a boy there from the Exmoor neighbourhood who used to relate at night in the dormitories blood-curdling stories of the Doones.” That boy, it is interesting to know, is still alive. At any rate, he was alive in July 1903, when he addressed to the Daily Chronicle the following letter in answer to a sceptical effusion from a correspondent signing himself “West Somerset.” “‘West Somerset’ could never have known Exmoor half so intimately as was the case with myself during my boyhood, youth, and early manhood, or he must have heard of the Doones. During the ‘fifties’ and ‘sixties’ of last century I lived on Exmoor, knew it thoroughly, and rarely missed a meet of the staghounds. The stories or legends of the Doones were perfectly familiar to me. They varied much, but the germs of the great romance were so well known and remembered by me that when it was issued, one of its many charms was the tracing of the writer’s embroidery of the current tales. I have hardly been in the district since 1868, but my memory is sufficiently good to remember the names of several from whom I heard the traditional annals. Among them were John Perry, the old ‘wanter’ or mole-catcher of Luccombe; Larkham, the one-armed gamekeeper of Sir Thomas Acland, and above all, Blackmore, the harbourer of the deer.[15] The name of another old man, who allowed me on two occasions to take down Doone stories at the inn at Brendon, has escaped me. So familiar were these stories to me when I was a boy that I used to retail them with curdling embellishments of my own in the dormitory of a West-country boarding-school. The result of this was that a room-mate of mine, either just before or just after he went to Oxford, wove my yarns (he had not himself then ever visited Exmoor) into a story, which he called ‘The Doones of Exmoor.’ This tale was eventually published in some half-dozen consecutive numbers of the Leisure Hour. My copy of it has long been lost, but I remember that, though it was delayed some time by the editor, it appeared three or four years before Lorna Doone. Moreover, I had a letter from Mr R. D. Blackmore, soon after his immortal work was issued, wherein he acknowledged that it was the accidental glancing at the poor stuff in the Leisure Hour that gave him the clue for the weaving of the romance, and caused him to study the details on the spot. I have never been across Exmoor since Lorna Doone was published, but I am sure that I could at once find my way either on foot or horseback to the very place that I knew so well as the stronghold of the Doones, either from the Porlock or the Lynton side.”
I am permitted to quote also a passage from a private letter of Miss Gratiana Chanter (now Mrs Longworth Knocker), author of Wanderings in North Devon, who is a firm believer in the Doones.
“I wish you could have a talk with old John Bate of Tippacott [he is dead]; he gave me a most exciting description one day of how the Doones first ‘coomed in over.’ No dates, of course; you never get them. He said there was a farmhouse in the Doone Valley where an old farmer lived with his maidservant. ’Twas one terrible snowy night when the Doones first ‘coomed.’ They came to the house and turned the farmer and his maid out into the black night. Both were found dead—one at the withy bank and the other somewhere else. He said, ‘They say, Miss, they was honest folk in the North, but they took to thieving wonderful quick.’
“Bate, and one John Lethaby, a mason, were both at work at the building of the shepherd’s cot in the Doone Valley, and had tales of an underground passage they found that fell in, and that they took a lot of stones from the huts for the shepherd’s cot.”
To return to Mr Chanter, we learn that, even before those nightly entertainments in the dormitory, he had read about the Doones in an old manuscript belonging to his father, and he adds that there were to be found at that period in North Devon several such manuscripts, which, he thinks, had a common origin, and might be traced to the tales of old people living in and around Lynton seventy or eighty years ago. In range of information and power of memory none might compare with a reputed witch, one Ursula Johnson, who, though now practically forgotten, can be proved from the parish register to have been born a Babb in 1738—not forty years after the exeunt of the Doones. The family of Babb were servants to Wichehalses, and one may recall the circumstance that in chapter lxx. of Lorna Doone John Babb is represented as shooting and capturing Major Wade. Ursula was not so ignorant as many of her gossips, and upon her marriage to Richard Johnson, a “sojourner,” could sign her name—a feat of which the bridegroom was incapable. Her long life reached its termination in 1826, when she was, so to speak, within sight of ninety.
Seven years later a locally well-remembered vicar, the Rev. Matthew Murdy, came to Lynton, and being keenly interested in the old lady’s stories, began a collection of them. Subsequently two friends of his, Dr and Miss Cowell, entered into his labours by “pumping” Ursula Fry, a native of Pinkworthy on Exmoor, and Aggie Norman. Both were tough old creatures, the former dying in 1856, at the age of ninety, and the latter in 1860, when she was eighty-three. In Mrs Norman, who passed a good deal of her time in a hut built by her husband on the top of the Castle Rock, in the Valley of
Rocks, Lynton, Mr Chanter identifies the original Mother Meldrum.