Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor

by S. Baring-Gould

Fox Crymes' suit for Urith was not instigated wholly by his admiration for her charms; it sprang quite as much out of his desire to obtain the small patrimony which would fall to her on her mother's decease.

Willsworthy was an ancient manor, never of great importance, and without fertility, yet not despicable in the eyes of a poor gentleman. It lay on the extreme limits of cultivated land, or rather it may be said to have occupied the debateable ground between the waste and culture. It occupied a hill that ran as a spur out of the moorland, between torrents, and seemed to be what, no doubt, it was, a portion of wilderness snatched from savagery, and hedged in. It possessed no good soil, it lay too high for wheat to ripen on it, it was destitute of these pasture meadows by the waterside, where the grass grows knee-deep, and is gold-sprinkled in spring with buttercups; it was dominated by rugged tors, and stood near the entrance of the gorge of the Tavy, where it roared and leaped, and shot as it came down into the lowlands, and with it came down the cold blasts that also roared and whirled, and beat about the lone Manor of Willsworthy.

Mrs. Malvine talked disparagingly of her farm, her brother Solomon Gibbs averred it was an estate on which to starve, and not to live. Urith accepted their verdict as final, she knew the need for money that ever prevailed in her house; and yet Fox Crymes cast greedy eyes upon the estate. He saw that it possessed capabilities that were disregarded by the widow and her brother. The manor owned considerable rights. It had the freedom of the moor, to send out upon it an unlimited number of sheep and cattle and colts; at a time when English wool was fetching a high price, and was exported to the Mediterranean, to Cadiz, to Leghorn, to Palermo, to Marseilles; this was important—it afforded exceptional opportunities of making money. There needed but the initial outlay on the stock, their keep was free. Not only so, but sheep in lowlands were, in wet seasons, afflicted with disease which slew them in great numbers, which sometimes exterminated entire flocks. But sheep on the moor were never known thus to suffer; they enjoyed perfect immunity from the many maladies which attend keeping them on cultivated land.

The climate in the West of England is so mild that it was possible to let the sheep run on the moor through the major portion of the year, only for a few months in the depth of the winter, possibly only when snow lay on the moor, was it needful to provide them with food; and the meadows of Willsworthy, though they did not produce rank grass, yet produced hay that was extraordinary sweet and nutritious, and in sufficient abundance to support a large number of sheep and cattle for the short time during which they were debarred from foraging for themselves. Anthony Crymes saw plainly enough, that if he had the management of the estate of Willsworthy he would make it a mine of gold; and that the reason why it did not now flourish was the lack of capital in the acres, and mismanagement. Anthony Crymes knew that some money would come to him from his father, not indeed much, but just sufficient for his purpose, should he acquire this property—and he was very ambitious of obtaining it.

At present, Mrs. Malvine entrusted the conduct of the farm to her brother Solomon who belied his name; he was a man without any knowledge of farming, and with no interest save in his violin, and who took delight only in good company. The farm was allowed to take its course, which was naturally a retrograde one—a relapse from former culture into pristine wilderness.

At the period of this tale, some two hundred years ago, every squire farmed, if not his entire estate, at all events a portion of it. Men of ancient pedigree, proud of their ancestral properties and mansions, of their arms and their alliances, did not disdain to ride to market and cheapen cattle.

The Civil War ruined most of the squires who had taken up arms for the King, litigation ruined others; then came in the great merchants and bought the old owners out, and established themselves in their room. They understood nothing of farming, and esteemed it despicable and unworthy of their new-fangled gentility to pursue it.

With the gall of envy bitter in his heart did Fox see the other Anthony walk alongside of Urith, and assume towards her an intimacy to which he himself had never attained. The girl had ever avoided him, had treated him with coldness tinged with ill-disguised disdain. She had not made that effort to veil her dislike which will gloss over a repulse. Fox saw another man better favoured than himself, reach at a bound a position he had laboriously tried to mount, and had failed.

Hall, or as the country-folk called it "Yall," was the house of the Cleverdons. It had belonged to the Glanville estates—had been bought by old Judge Glanville, in the reign of Elizabeth, who had founded the family. The Glanvilles had flourished for awhile, and had spread over the country-side, taking up estate after estate, and had collapsed as suddenly as they had risen. The Cleverdons had been farmers, renting Hall, and when that estate was sold old Cleverdon by some means got together sufficient money to purchase it, and since the purchase had laid out considerable sums to transform what had been a modest farmhouse into a pretentious squire's mansion.

Old Anthony was in that transitional state in which, passing from one rank of life to another, he was comfortable in neither. He was sensitive and ambitious—sensitive to slights, and ambitious to push himself and his son into a better social position than that which had been occupied by his ancestors; and, indeed, by himself in early life. The Crymes family had been connected with the Glanvilles by marriage, and now old Anthony schemed on the acquisition of another portion of the Glanville property, through the marriage of his son and heir with Julian Crymes. The old man's success had fostered his ambition. He indulged in a dream of the Cleverdons, by skilful management, assuming eventually the position once maintained by the Glanvilles.