Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland

by John Presland

And with this tolerant and unpedantic frame of mind I am in hearty accord.

But if Caesar and the Romans, who for several centuries had a station at Exeter, their great "camp on the Exe," called the wide province of Devon and Cornwall "Damnonia," what did the Phoenicians call it when they traded Cornish tin along the Mediterranean, and even, it is said, into remote Africa, and ran their galleys into the little bay of Combe Martin, to lade with the silver and lead which can still be mined there, and which they may have carried to the old buried palaces of Knossos, to be fashioned into amulets and trinkets by those Cretans who built the dancing-floor of Ariadne and the maze of the Minotaur? That is a question that we cannot answer; all the busy speech of all those peoples is silent; only the old mine-workings remain, and the sacked and buried palaces of Crete, and a Phoenician ingot-mould fished up in Plymouth Harbour, and fitting, so 'tis said, an ingot which has been found in Central Africa.

With the coming of the Romans comes, as always, a little light, for they were a shrewd and mighty people, who liked their house set in order, and tabulated and recorded and organized, and have left traces of their orderliness on the face of the land, and the speech of the people, and the laws of the nations in three continents. They subdued Damnonia, and held it from their armed camp at Exeter, where Roman coins, pottery, brick, and inscriptions are found abundantly. Perhaps also they held and transformed several of the great earth-camps for their own uses, such as the Clovelly Dykes or the escarpments at Ilfracombe, built by the Britons or some earlier people. But the Romans do not appear to have settled in Devonshire as they did in East Anglia and the Midlands; I believe there are few traces of their dwellings, villas, roads, or baths, beyond Exeter in the West.

When their rule weakened and declined in the fifth century, certainly Damnonia would be one of the first provinces over which their jurisdiction waned, because of its inaccessibility, its deep wooded valleys, the wastes of Exmoor and Dartmoor, and the danger of its coasts; and we may well suppose that the old Celtic traditions and customs continued here but little modified by the Roman occupation.

Then at some time in the fifth and sixth centuries the Saxons came, but they seem to have come to Devonshire more peaceably than in their fierce raids on the south and east coasts; they came as Christians to the Christian British, and though they conquered them, they did not drive them out, nor compel them into mountain fastnesses, as the earlier Saxon conquerors drove the British into Wales. So that in Devon, though to a lesser degree than in Cornwall, and still less than in Wales, there is a larger admixture of original Celtic blood than in Kent, Sussex, Essex, and the counties of the Saxon heptarchy. But, according to Westcote—who is, for all his discursiveness, no bad authority—the Britons and the Saxons came to loggerheads; for the government being Saxon, and the laws and the language, the poor Britons could neither hear nor make themselves understood, and so took arms against the settlers, and were by them driven "beyond the river now called Taw-meer" (i.e., Tamar), and so out of Devon into Cornwall. This was done by King Athelstan, after he had beaten the Welsh at Hereford and subdued the Picts and Scots.

From this time forth, says Westcote, the Britons began to be called "Corn-Welshmen or Cornishmen," and he gives an elaborate etymology of the name, but adds that he need speak no further of Cornwall, "being eased of that labour by the industrious labours of the right worthy and worshipful gentleman Richard Carew, who … hath very eloquently described it."

The Saxons, as we know, led a struggling and turbulent existence for five or six centuries in contest with the Danes. Probably the full total of the misery inflicted on this country by the Danish raids can never be reckoned, but that they crippled and exhausted Saxon England by their frequency and the great duration of time over which they extended is apparent by the advance made in civilization in the short period between the breaking of their power and the coming of the Normans. Devonshire was not spared by them, and the cliffs of Teignmouth are said to be blood-red since a great slaughter of the Danes in 970. Certainly the Saxon Chronicle records contests bloody and pitiless enough, and tradition lingers still in many places where history has no record. In Devon, for instance, wherever the dwarf-elder grows folk say that Danish blood has been spilt, and that a group of these trees marks the site of an old battlefield; indeed, the dwarf-elder is still called "Danes-elder" in the West Country.

Between Bideford and Appledore, on this northern coast of Devon, stands Kenwith Castle—long called Hennaborough or Henry Hill—under whose walls the great Alfred and his son met the Danes under Hubba, and defeated them with great slaughter about the year 877. The English captured the famous standard of the Danes, the Raven, which was "wrought in needlework by the daughters of Lothbroc," and which had magical properties—clapping its wings when defeat was at hand. The remnant of the Danish force, carrying their wounded leader with them, retreated to their ships, and Hubba died there on the beach, and was buried by his followers before they fled aboard, under a great rock called Hubba's Stone, and now in corrupt form Hubblestone, a name which still clings near the spot, though probably the rock of Hubba is now swept by the sea. But under this rock he lies, with his weapons and trophies about him and his crown of gold on his head, until the last trump shall rouse him.