CHAPTER XI PILTON--BARNSTAPLE BRIDGE--OLD COUNTRY WAYS--BARUM--HISTORY AND COMMERCIAL IMPORTANCE--OLD HOUSES--"SEVEN BRETHREN BANK"--FREMINGTON--INSTOW AND THE LOVELY TORRIDGE

Barnstaple is heralded by its suburb, Pilton, on a creek (or “pill” as the word is here) of the river Yeo. The people of Pilton, who were among the earliest to manufacture cotton fabrics in a district that made only woollens, were in the early part of the seventeenth century looked upon in much the same way as the makers of base coin are regarded. “Woe unto ye, Piltonians,” exclaimed Westcote (1620), “who make cloth without wool!”

The churchyard of Pilton is entered in a singular manner, under an archway between almshouses. Here stood Pilton Priory, said to have been founded by Athelstan so early as the tenth century. Of that, however, there are no traces. The church, a very fine and interesting building, is largely Perpendicular. A curious and well-preserved grinning head with jester’s cap forms a stop to one of the window hood-mouldings, and a tablet over the south porch, now somewhat illegible, refers to “... late unhappy wars. Anno Dom. 1646,” and proceeds to record that it, or the tower, was rebuilt in 1696. The church, in fact, was injured during the operations attending the various takings and retakings of Barnstaple by Roundheads and Royalists. A long metrical epitaph will be observed in the churchyard, to John Hayne, d. 1797, aged forty, huntsman and servant for twenty-five years to William Barber, of Fremington.

The interior of the church is very beautiful. A fine fourteenth-century oak screen divides nave and chancel, and the font is surmounted by a sixteenth-century canopy, said to have formerly been the canopy of the Prior of Pilton’s chair. On one side is the staple to which the Bible was once chained. Among the relics in the church is an old pitch-pipe for the choir. But the most singular thing is the Jacobean hour-glass for the pulpit, held out by a projecting arm fashioned in sheet-iron and painted white. This fantastic object has acquired a very considerable celebrity in these days when every other tourist carries a photographic camera and hunts diligently for pictorial curiosities. The vicar and churchwardens of Pilton are also up-to-date, for they charge sixpence for the privilege of photographing the hour-glass and Pulpit: and see they get it.

Barnstaple is built along the north bank of the Taw estuary, at a point where it suddenly contracts, and where the river Yeo falls into it. In the tremendous language of the briefs sent out broadcast in the reign of Henry the Eighth, soliciting alms for the repair of Barnstaple bridge, crossing the estuary, the river is described as a “great, hugy, mighty perylous and dreadfull water, whereas salte water doth ebbe and flow foure tymes in the day and night.” This was “piling on the agony” with a vengeance: a prodigious swashing about with sounding adjectives that seems to the modern traveller singularly overdone.

Barnstaple, it is quite evident by this appeal for aid, had not yet arrived upon the threshold of that era of abounding prosperity which was so soon to come. In a few years more the town was well able to maintain its bridge, but in the meanwhile had to beg through the land! It was a very old bridge, even then, and incorporated portions built so early as the thirteenth century. There were then thirteen arches, three being added later; but even so late as 1796 it remained so narrow that the roadway was scarcely practicable for wheeled traffic. It was, in short, little other than a pack-horse bridge in all those centuries. There was then no space left for foot-passengers when the pack-horses were crossing, and all such were fain to take refuge in the V-shaped sanctuaries that opened out on either side on the piers of the arches, and to wait there until the long, laden pack-horse trains had passed. But it must be recollected that the roads leading up to the bridge were of the like complexion and were roads only by courtesy. Wheels were out of place on them, too; and pack-horses and that peculiar old Devonshire contrivance known as a “truckamuck” were almost the only ways of conveying goods. The truckamuck was just a rough cart without wheels, dragged by a horse along those uneven ways—a kind of larger and clumsier sleigh-like affair, combining the maximum of weight and friction with a minimum of convenience.

In 1796 the bridge was widened, and again in 1832, and it still remains a very composite structure. It is associated in old country lore with the exploit of Tom Faggus and his “strawberry horse.”

Blackmore, in “Lorna Doone,” laid hands upon the old Faggus legends, as upon many others, and worked them into his story; but the redoubtable Tom was a real person, although more than a mere touch of the marvellous has been given in folk-lore to his career; so that he seems a creature compact of Dick Turpin and Robin Hood, in equal parts. He was a native of North Molton, and a blacksmith by trade. Ruined in a vindictive lawsuit brought against him by Sir Richard Bampfylde, he was obliged to leave his home, and then turned “gentleman robber.” That odd description would appear in his case both to mean that he robbed gentlemen only and that his own status was that of a gentleman. It is a quaint rustic valuation, and seems to have been based upon the belief that he was a champion of the poor against the rich; that he doubled, as it were, the parts of highwayman and relieving officer. His exploits long ago became, by dint of much oral repetition around the old cottage inglenooks, quite Homeric, and his enchanted “strawberry horse” figures as fiendishly intelligent, trampling the enemies of Faggus with hoofs and savaging them with teeth, like a devil incarnate. On one occasion Faggus was recognised in Barnstaple and pursued to the bridge, whereon he and his strawberry horse were cleverly caught by the watch posted at either end. But the highwayman was still more clever. He put his steed to the parapet, cleared it and swam off safely downstream.

Faggus was at last captured at Porlock and his famous horse shot; himself finally being hanged at Taunton.

There will be no more Fagguses in North Devon and no more Doones; for the conditions that produced them are dead, and legends such as those that were told and retold of them around the farmhouse inglenooks on winter evenings—and that with every re-telling gained some fresh marvel—no longer form the entertainment of the farmers’ men. All the rustics can read now: the maids burning the midnight candle over novelettes, the men addling their brains over the rag-bag weeklies, whose success with the million you perceive exemplified in the pioneer instance writ large at Lynton. So the old stories that were handed down from one generation to another have come to an end with the last surviving of the illiterates, and the only people who remember the simple folk songs are the occasional old men who may now and then be induced to sing them, in a quavering voice, for collectors of such things to write down before their final disappearance. Such a song was the following record of some feckless person, whose every bargain was a bad one, finally bringing disaster. Where and when it originated, who shall say? With slight variations, and with different choruses, the identical song is found in all parts of rustic England; a kind of rural classic:

Barnstaple is in local speech, “Barum,” after that fashion which makes Salisbury and Shrewsbury figure on the milestones round about as “Sarum” and “Salop.” The name thus locally current has given a chance to those modern rhymesters whose activity bids fair to presently fit every place in the gazetteer with its more or less appropriate verse:

It matters little, or nothing, that there are not any cliffs at Barnstaple, and that you would not seek at this precise spot for the most boisterous breezes.

The town is alike the oldest and the most important on this coast. Long before that usual starting point, the coming of the Normans, it figured prominently as Beardanstapol. Although it was once the site of a castle, and was for many centuries a walled town with defensible gates, its inhabitants were essentially, from the beginning, a trading community, as the “staple” in the place name indicates. It was also one of the oldest Parliamentary boroughs, having sent representatives from 1295 until 1885, when ruthless redistribution, utterly without sentiment, merged it in a county division. Then the ancient local passion for bribery and corruption ceased automatically to be satisfied at intervals by competitive candidates for the honour of representing the “free and independent” burgesses, who greatly liked the free-handed and rejected with scant ceremony those who were not prepared to dive deeply into their pockets. Thus, when in 1865 Mr. Henry Hawkins, afterwards Lord Brampton, was invited to stand in the Liberal interest, the invitation was issued quite as much in the local interest and in the expectation that he would be as liberal with his money as in his political opinions. But the eagerly expectant people of Barnstaple received a nasty shock, for the rising barrister refused to spend a penny in bribery. The indignant electors, mindful of the glorious election of 1841, when £80 was paid for one vote, had their feelings outraged in the tenderest place, and rejected him with remarkable completeness.

From A.D. 928, when Athelstan is said to have conferred a charter upon the town, and 938, when he is supposed to have repaired the walls, already old and decayed, Barnstaple fully took advantage of its favourable situation in a sheltered estuary, and the port was large enough to be represented by ships at the siege of Calais in 1346. In 1588 it sent five ships to Liverpool’s one, in the levy raised to combat the Spanish Armada; among them vessels with the proud, high-sounding names, Tiger, God Save Her, and Galleon Dudley. After thus serving their country, the Barnstaple merchants served themselves well, by equipping numerous privateers that successfully preyed upon the Spanish mercantile marine, and brought home to the old port on the Taw great store of treasure in gold, silver, and goods brought by Spanish sail from the Spanish main, and intended for Cadiz rather than for North Devon.

It was the Golden Age of Barnstaple. The burgesses manufactured woollen goods and baize and sold them in good markets, and the bold seamen sallied forth and patriotically scoured the ocean, and took by force of arms anything they liked. Sometimes they ran up against what a modern American would style a “tough proposition,” in the form of an innocent-looking Spanish merchantman better armed and more courageously manned than they suspected, and the results were not so fortunate: but, naturally enough, records of these misfortunes are not given so prominent a place in the history of these things; and you are invited rather to picture the returned sea-captains, bursting with riches, carousing in the taverns of Boutport Street, and paying for their entertainment with moidores, doubloons, “pieces of eight” (whatever they were), and other outlandish coin. Coin of foreign mintage was more common than the pieces of Queen Elizabeth (“God Save Her”), and passed current as readily.

To those times of unparalleled prosperity, which continued until well into the third quarter of the eighteenth century, belong many of those existing architectural remains of old Barnstaple that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the rebuildings and other changes of our own times. Out of the abundance of his riches old Penrose in 1627 founded the almshouses that still remain very much as he left them; and in that era the quays and Castle Street were occupied, not only with the warehouses, but the residences also, of the merchants who traded with distant countries or levied private war upon the foreigner, with equal readiness. A complete change has, indeed, come upon that quarter, for the Barnstaple Town railway station, a brewery, and some entirely modern houses stand upon the spot where the merchants did not disdain to live over their counting-houses, looking upon the river, where the weather-beaten vessels, at last come home from alien seas, were warped to shore. Of that old time there is a very fine old doorway left in Castle Street; and in Cross Street, near by, over a tailor’s shop, there is the first-floor front room of a late sixteenth-century house with a most elaborate Renaissance plaster ceiling and frieze, probably executed for some enriched merchant, fully conscious of what was due, in the way of display, to his wealth. The design is curious, the workmanship rough, the feeling of it imbued with a religious cast; characteristics, all of them, common to much work of the kind executed at that period in North Somerset and North Devon, from Minehead to Bideford. The Renaissance had come very slowly down this way, on its long journey from Italy, and had lost on the way the fine touch of its native land. It had lost also much of the somewhat pagan character it exhibited there, and became greatly concerned in the more prominent narratives of the Old Testament. Vague legends tell of wandering Italian craftsmen executing the plaster ceilings and elaborate chimney-piece designs often found in old houses of the better class in these districts, but they were probably Englishmen, who had picked up something of the trick of the new style, without very much of foreign dexterity, but had imported their own thought into the work. At any rate the numerous examples met with have so striking a general likeness of treatment that the conclusion of their being the work of a distinct school becomes inevitable.

Here, in this Cross Street example, the subject is Adam and Eve; Eve (with her arms ending in a trefoil instead of hands) about to pluck a very large apple off a very small tree, and Adam looking greatly alarmed. The Trevelyan Hotel has several decorated ceilings and a dark little back room—now merely a receptacle for lumber, and sadly injured—with a very elaborate chimney-piece in high relief, bearing a central medallion representing the Nativity, bordered by typical Renaissance scroll-work and flanked with two armour-clad figures, minus a limb or two each. The “Golden Lion” inn, however, has the finest display, to which, indeed, it has every right, the building having formerly been the town-house of the Bourchiers, Earls of Bath.

It is a fine old house, dating from early in the seventeenth century, with many oak-panelled rooms and passages, and several with ceilings intricately decorated in plaster reliefs. The large upstairs sitting-room is the gem of the house, displaying, as it does, a coved ceiling dated 1625, with pendants and the arms of the Bourchiers, together with scenes representing Adam and Eve, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Sacrifice of Esau, disposed at intervals amid a large mixed assemblage of horses, pheasants, and storks.

But most significant of all amid these signs of Barnstaple’s prosperous old days, when all goods were sea-borne, and when its importance as capital of North Devon was impossible to be questioned by undue ease of communication with distant cities, is the curious old loggia, or covered way, known as “Queen Anne’s Walk.” Not Queen Anne, but the Barnstaple merchants, walked here, and it was really built in the reign of Charles the Second. It was the merchants’ Exchange, their Rialto, where all news was discussed, bargains made, and debts paid. All those uses are past and done with, but the curious flat-topped pedestal remains in front, on which those old traders paid their debts. Exactly such things are still to be seen, for example, outside the Exchange at Bristol. There they are called “nails”; and from them and this own brother to them derived the expression of paying for anything “on the nail.” Nowadays the saying is a synonym for paying ready money, but it would no doubt be incorrect to deduce from it the lack of long credit in times of old. The only association this building has with Queen Anne is found in the statue of her, surmounting it, dated 1708, the gift of Robert Rolle of Stevenstone.

Barnstaple Friday market, held every week, is to this day an astonishing revelation to the stranger of the amount of business done in the great market buildings. On any other day he will find the town so quiet that the excellent shops and the many strikingly expensive new buildings seem to require some explanation. Friday, however, when every street is thronged, removes any such necessity. And the annual occasion of Barnstaple Fair, opened with some ceremony on September 19th by the Mayor, is still a great event in North Devon. On that momentous day the Mayor and Corporation regale a select company at lunch, after an old custom, with spiced ale and toast; and still the stuffed white glove, old-time symbol to debtors that they may adventure into the town during the continuance of the fair without fear of arrest, is displayed outside the Town Hall, although its significance is not now of much moment to either debtor or creditor.

In 1642 there burst upon the quiet Barnstaple folk, only too anxious to be let alone to manufacture woollens, and to import foreign wines, and so grow rich in trade, the great Civil War. The town was very comfortable then; still rich with the privateering of years before, but by force of circumstances, more respectable, for England had been for awhile at peace with Spain, and throat-cutting, treasure-grabbing expeditions, once patriotic, would then have been sheer piracy on the high seas. In this highly proper mood, and with their commercial instincts outraged by King Charles’ illegal demands for Ship Money, and the like exactions, it is not surprising that Barnstaple people declared for the Parliament. But the vindictiveness with which they took that side is surprising. Not content to remain splendidly defensive of their rights and their money-bags, they detailed a force to go and attack the small Royalist force holding Torrington. They were successful, and drove out 500 men, killed 10, took 40 prisoners and 200 stand of arms. The Royalists were further worsted at Sourton Down, on the borders of Dartmoor, but regained their position in the West at the battle of Stratton, where Sir Bevil Grenville most severely defeated the Roundheads, and subsequently demonstrating against Bideford, planted a Royalist garrison in a fort at Appledore commanding the sea approaches to Bideford and Barnstaple; with the looked-for result attending that last strategical disposition. Barnstaple surrendered, September 2nd, 1643, and the Royalists took possession. And here they remained, in fancied security, until the townsfolk revolted and retook possession. Appledore fort, however, held out, and within the month another force of King’s men, marching upon Barum, again reduced it. The Royalist position here then became so secure, that the Prince of Wales (afterwards Charles the Second) was sent here for safety, with his tutor, and remained until July 1645, when it was thought safer, in the waning fortunes of the Royalists, to remove him further West. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax were coming, beating down Royalist resistance as they came. At length, in April 1646, they besieged Barum, and, nearly all else being lost to them in the West, the Royalists in five weeks finally laid down their arms.

Barnstaple old parish church is a great roomy building, its walls plentifully furnished with monuments of the old merchants. It stands in an alley known as Paternoster Row; its wooden, lead-sheathed spire, like that of Braunton, warped on one side, and in like manner. A plain white tablet on the exterior wall reads:

This hints mysteriously of a misspent life, but no one knows anything of the circumstances. Almost adjoining the church stands what was formerly St. Anne’s Chapel. At the Reformation, it became the Grammar School, and so remains. Between 1686 and 1761 it was also used, by permission of the Corporation, as a chapel, by the French Protestant refugees who had fled from the persecution of the Huguenots. A tablet facing Paternoster Row is to the memory of Thomas Lee, architect, drowned at Morthoe, 1834.

The River Taw is now bordered up-stream with leafy promenades, and by the Rock Park, another of the modern innovations upon the old order of things. To those who—seeing no rocks, but only smooth lawns and much landscape-gardening in the park—object that this pleasance belies its name, it is a sufficient reply to state that it was the gift of Mr. W.F. Rock, a native of Barum, and a member of the London firm of wholesale stationers, Rock Brothers.

And the river Taw runs past, over its broad bed of sand, or swirls fiercely up at the flood tide from the sea, bringing up seaweed and driftwood, and sometimes a fragment of wreck from the channel.

The wisdom of not retrieving all and every description of “wreck of the sea” seems to be pointed out by the sad seventeenth-century story of the four (not seven) brother fishermen who, fishing, after their daily custom, in the estuary of the Taw long ago, hauled ashore a bundle of rugs and bedding, floating up on the tide. It would appear that these articles had been flung overboard from some ship afflicted with the plague, for the fishermen themselves died of it and were buried up river, off Tawstock, at a point still known, by an odd confusion of ideas, as “Seven Brethren Bank”; the spot having originally been marked by seven elms. A tombstone, long since vanished, was erected by Thomas and Agnes Ley, parents of the unhappy fishermen, with the inscription:

“To the memory of our four sweet sons, John, Joseph, Thomas, and Richard, who, immaturely taken from us altogether by Divine Providence, are Hear inter’d, the 17 August, Anno 1646.

It was in the same year of this tragical trover that Barnstaple was stricken with the plague, probably by the agency of the same ship: a cargo of wool having then been landed at Bideford quays from the Levant. Bideford suffered first, and then Barnstaple.

A hilly road takes you up, out of Barnstaple, on the way to Bideford, out of sight of the river. Past Bickington it goes, and Fremington—Fremington that was once a borough town and port, returning two members to Parliament in the reign of Edward the Third. Fremington finds mention in Blackmore’s “Maid of Sker,” where its creek is styled “Deadman’s Pill”; but there is little, otherwise, to remark about it. Pretty, and overhung with trees where the road runs past the old church; but otherwise, no place to demand much attention. It is different with Instow, down the road, where the rivers Taw and Torridge join forces with the sea.

Instow is in two parts; the somewhat inland village and the waterside fringe of houses known as Instow Quay. The first of these two is old enough to find mention in Domesday Book, where it is called Johannestow; and from that to “Johnstow” and the present form was only the inevitable action of the centuries. The church gave it that name, having been dedicated to St. John Baptist.

The Quay, looking straight across to Appledore and out to the west, commands magnificent sunsets over the sea, with lovely views up the river Torridge and its heavily-wooded banks; the famous bridge of Bideford and the white houses of that town clearly to be seen, three miles away; or, lovelier still, and mysterious in the twilight—“the dimpsey,” as they call it in North Devon.

The river Taw is fine, but the lovely Torridge is its much more beautiful sister. Those familiar with South Devon will readily find a remarkable resemblance between the estuaries of the Exe and the Torridge, and in the upper reaches will not fail to note an equal likeness to the Teign, just below Newton Abbot. And, to clinch the resemblance, Instow Quay is not unlike Starcross, with the further similarity of a railway running by. Here is the same waterside line of houses, chiefly of the Regency and Early Victorian white-faced sort, just on the verge of becoming romantic, by mere effluxion of time. Little plaster-faced villas with green-painted verandahs and hairpin railings enclosing close-cropped hedges of privet or euonymus, approached by neat pebble-pitched pathways, sometimes, for greater effect of decoration, done in white pebbles, with a pattern of brown. I can imagine our great-grandmothers, as pretty girls of sweet seventeen, in book-muslin, taking holiday here and reading Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell.

Opposite lies Appledore, with the tall tower of what looks like a church on its scarred hillside, and is really a look-out tower known as “Chanter’s Folly”; and sometimes you may see the grey mass of Lundy, on the horizon. Lonely Lundy, to which His Majesty’s mails go only once weekly from Instow Quay, per sailing-skiff Gannet. For those who like tumbling on the ocean wave, the cruise there and back in the day on those weekly sailings is enjoyable; but for those who do not happen to be good sailors, the return fare of five shillings only admits to five shillings’ worth of sheer misery. So Lundy generally remains to unseaworthy visitors to Instow a great unknown quantity.

The road runs close beside the estuary, all the way from Instow to Bideford, passing the nobly wooded hillsides of Tapeley Park, with its tall obelisk to the memory of one of the Cleveland family who fell at Inkerman. Bideford, on the opposite shore, becomes revealed, not only as a waterside town, but as very much of a hillside town as well, and with a not inconsiderable suburb on the hither side of the river: a suburb known as “East-the-Water.” Here we come to the heart of that district of North Devon so intimately associated with Kingsley and his “Westward Ho!” that it is very generally known as the “Kingsley Country.”

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