Culpeper, the herbalist, to illustrate the powers of the plant moonwort, tells of a wonderful incident that occurred to Lord Essex's horse, presumably when his army was here in 1644. Moonwort has (or perhaps had) a miraculous effect on iron, with power to open locks or unshoe horses. 'Country people that I know, call it Unshoe the Horse. Besides I have heard commanders say, that in White Down in Devonshire, near Tiverton, there were found thirty horseshoes, pulled off from the feet of the Earl of Essex's horses, being there drawn up in a body, many of them being but newly shod, and no reason known, which caused much admiration, and the herb described usually grows upon heaths.' Probably almost all the neighbourhood thought witchcraft a better explanation.
It is very difficult entirely to disentangle accounts that seem to contradict each other, but apparently Essex moved away from Tiverton after a short stay, and certainly the King sent his army to Tiverton the same autumn to halt there for a while on its way from Plymouth to Chard. And as this army was returning, reduced and exhausted, from fighting and long, hard marches in Cornwall, it could not have been sent to a town in possession of the enemy. The next year Fairfax sent General Massie to take Tiverton. The Governor, Sir Gilbert Talbot, was in a far from happy position, for afterwards he wrote: 'My horse were mutinous, and I had but two hundred foot in garrison, and some of my chief officers unfaithful.' In spite of his disadvantages, he was able to repulse the enemy in their first attack on church and castle, though unable to prevent their gaining possession of the town. Two days later Fairfax himself arrived, and batteries, furnished with 'several great Peeces,' were erected against the church and castle. The actual fighting lasted only a short time, for a shot broke the chain of the drawbridge, and it fell; the Parliamentary soldiers rushed across it without even waiting for the command, and the Royalists lost their heads and their courage and fled.
A copy of a letter that General Massie wrote from Tiverton to a Cheshire gentleman still exists, and in it he refers to a pamphlet, sent with the letter, even the title-page of which throws light on Puritan methods of influencing popular opinion against the Cavaliers. This startling page runs as follows:
A True and Strange
RELATION
of a
BOY,
Who was entertained by the Devill to be servant to him with the consent of his Father, about Crediton in the West, and how the Devill carried him up in the aire, and shewed him the torments of Hell, and some of the Cavaliers there, and what preparation there was made for Goring and Greenvile against they came.
Also how the Cavaliers went to rob a Carrier, and how the Carrier and his Horses turned themselves into