Devonshire Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

The monument is probably as fictitious as the names of the witnesses. There is not, and there never was, such in South Tawton Church any more than in that of Zeal Monachorum. Lysons gives the Oxenham monuments as he found them there: William Oxenham, gent., 1699; William Oxenham, Esq., 1743; George Oxenham, Esq., 1779. “It is proper to add,” says Lysons, “that there is no trace of the Oxenham family, nor of the monument before mentioned, either in the register, church, or churchyard of Zeal Monachorum, nor have I been able to learn that it exists at Tawton, or elsewhere in the county.”

I was at South Tawton in 1854, staying with Mr. T. Burkett, the then vicar, and I drew some of the monuments in the church, and am certain this particular stone was neither in the church nor outside.

So also Polwhele, in his History of Devonshire, 1793, says: “The prodigy of the white bird ... seems to be little known at present to the common people at South Tawton; nor can I find anywhere a trace of the marble stone which Mr. Howell saw in the lapidary’s shop in London.”

In Sir William Pole’s Collections, published in 1791, there stood originally: “Oxenham, the land of Wm. Oxenham [the father of John, the grandfather of Will, father of another John, grandfather of James; whose tombstone respects a strange wonder of this famyly, that at theire deaths were still seen a bird with a white brest, which fluttering for a while about theire beds suddenly vanisht away, which divers of ye same place belive being eyewitnesses of]”.

Sir William Pole died in 1635, and he said not one word about the bird of the Oxenhams; that which has been placed within brackets was an addition made by his son, Sir John, who had probably read the pamphlet or Howell’s Letters. Risdon, who lived not far from South Tawton, knew nothing about the bird. In fact, the whole legend grew out of the story in the tract.

That this story is not wholly baseless may be allowed in the one case of John Oxenham. As he was dying the window very probably was opened, and a ring ouzel, attracted by the light, may have entered, fluttered about, and then flown out again. That the window was open I said was probable, for it is an idea widely spread in England that when a person is near death the casement should be thrown open so as to allow the soul to escape. I said once to a nurse who had attended a dying man: “Why did you open the window?” “You wouldn’t have had his soul go up the chimney, sir?” was the answer.

The appearance—accidental—of a bird in the death chamber would, in a superstitious age, be regarded as supernatural. I was attending the wife of an old coachman who had been with my father and myself. She was bed-ridden. One day she said to me: “I know I shall go soon, for a great bird came fluttering at the window.” She did not, however, die till two months later.

The story of John Oxenham and the bird got about, and then some one remarked that a similar sort of thing had happened, so it was said, when the young man’s grandmother died. That sufficed to set the ball rolling. For the purpose of the pamphleteer, three additional cases were invented, cases of Oxenhams who never existed, and the account of the stone was added, so as to give the tale greater appearance of verisimilitude.

Kingsley introduces the white bird as an omen of the navigator Oxenham. He was justified as a novelist in predating the tradition which did not exist in his time, and was hatched out of the tract of 1641.

I have said white bird—for as the story went on the white-breasted bird became white, hoary with attendance on generations of Oxenhams. It may be interesting, at all events it is amusing, to note, how out of this pious hoax serious convictions have grown that the bird really has been seen, and that repeatedly.