But the chief historic association of the church, and what has led our wandering feet here to furnish a text to hang our little story on, is found in the chancel, though very little comparatively is to be seen there even, by the uninitiated as things at present are, to give direction to his thoughts.
Tisbury tells of Arundell! Such is the first suggestive thought to him of the west-country that cometh to that little rural town, and specially in this chancel, beneath whose pavement the dust of the earlier members of one of its most distinguished descents is at rest. But the home-land of that antient race, so happily and allusively named after our gentle summer visitant,—the graceful-flighted "chimney-haunting" swallow,—is not here.
Not on the boundless arid chalk plains, on whose rocky skirt the swallow of the west has with kindred instinct migrated, seek we his parent nest. In the dusky twilight of our national history we trace probably his earliest haunts, chronicled in the great accompt of the Norman Conqueror, as then holding considerable possessions amid the rich plains of Somerset and breezy uplands of Dorset. Then we hear of him nestling in a green combe in leafy Devon, and anon occupying a "coigne of 'vantage" on the southern fringe of tor-crested Dartmoor, and where his name still clings though its possessor has long since fled. From thence in the days of the earlier Plantagenet kings, he winged his flight across the deep-banked Tamar into far Cornubia, where the soft mists of the Atlantic and warm southern sunshine alternate, bathe the granite bastions that defend her valleys, and there finally settled Arundell, there built he his parent nest and reared his "procreant cradle," and thenceforward he and his for centuries flourished and multiplied in great honour and ample estate, until his name for power and influence was styled the Great, and it became a household word in the county of his adoption.
But wealth and honour, not even when allied with teeming descendants scattered around and settled in divers descents seemingly to defend it, can perpetuate a race,
"There is no armour against fate,"
and to the mutation and decay, impartially entailed on human destiny, both peer and peasant alike are equally doomed.
So, in Cornwall, for centuries, the generations of Arundell succeeded each other at Lanherne and Trerice, the great twin stems of this noble stirpe, and spread and rooted themselves, in divers offshoots located near. But gradually that name, although surnamed the Great, and their descendants, one after another, dwindled away under the breath of Time, until its sound became an echo and a tradition only, in the regions of its olden home, and finally became extinct.
In 1701, the Great Arundell of Lanherne (from them the dormant Arundells beneath our feet were descended), last of his name of the elder house, died, and a distaff only followed him to his grave. She was wedded and the mother of a son,—but his name was not Arundell,—but on him his grandfather settled all his estates, and the heritage of his antient name.
Again the succession was denied, daughters only were born to him, and distaff succeeded distaff. One of them sleeps below, presumably in life a happy and unique fate befell her, as by her marriage with Lord Arundell was united the two descents of Lanherne and Wardour, and her name will probably recur to our thoughts again before our little story ends.
Seventy years—just a spell of human life—later, in 1773, the final representative of the almost equally distinguished descent of Trerice (they had been ennobled by Charles II. in 1664), John, fourth and last Baron Arundell of Trerice, passed to that bourne, from which no traveller, however distinguished, returns. It is curious that both he, and his noble wife—who was a sister of the Earl of Strafford and pre-deceased him—both found their sepulchre far eastward of their native home, and repose in the chancel of the church of Sturminster-Marshall in Dorset, not very far from this.