CHAPTER XV STEART--STOGURSEY--THE FOLK-SPEECH OF ZUMMERZET--GLATT-HUNTING AT KILVE--ST. AUDRIES

To touch the coast on the left-hand of the Parret estuary is to adventure into a little-visited land. But although the way is long—the distance is six miles to Steart Point—the road is sufficiently easy, being downhill from Cannington to Cannington Park, scene of the battle of Cynuit, and to Otterhampton; and then flat for the remaining four miles. At Otterhampton, a village of a few farms and cottages, the church contains a memorial to a former rector, the Rev. Dr. Jeffery, who held the living for no fewer than sixty-seven years, from 1804 to 1871.

The river bends abruptly and nears the road at a point a mile and a half out, where the little waterside hamlet of Combwich—“Cummidge,” as it is styled locally—stands looking on to muddy creeks and the broad grey bosom of the Parret itself, with a colour like that of a London fog. Bridgwater spire is plainly visible, far off to the right, across the levels: sailing barges are loading the bricks made here from the kilns close at hand, and carts rattle and rumble along the few narrow alleys that form the only streets of the place. Away across the river, a whitewashed house marks the position of a little-used ferry from the out-of-the-world district of Pawlett Hams to this even more outlandish peninsula of Steart.

Steart Point thrusts out a long tongue of land over against Burnham, whose houses and tall white lighthouse seem so near across the levels, yet are almost two miles distant, over the rivermouth and the mud-flats. The name of “Steart” has come down to us little altered from Anglo-Saxon times, an “a” replacing the “o” with which it appears to have originally been spelled. It is the same name as that of the Start in South Devon, and signifies a boldly projecting neck of land, “starting” out to sea. Otherwise there is no likeness between that Devonian promontory of cruel, black jagged rocks and this flat, muddy and shingly fillet of land.

The fisher village of Steart is a singular place: a fishing village without boats! The shrimps, eels and flounders usually caught here are taken in nets set by the men of Steart going down to the sea at low water on “mud-horses.” Everything is conditioned here by the deep mud of the foreshore, which may only be crossed by special appliances, evolved locally. Chief among these is the “mud-horse,” which, it may at once be guessed, is no zoological freak. If it is related to anything else on earth, it may perhaps be set down as a hybrid production: a cross between a towel-horse and a toboggan sledge.

When the fishermen of Steart prepare to go forth a-fishing, they proceed to undress themselves to the extent of taking off their trousers and putting on a cut-down pair, very little larger than bathing-drawers. Mud-boots clothe their feet. Then they bring down their wooden “horses,” and, leaning against the upright breast-high framework, give a vigorous push, and so go slithering along the buttery surface of the flats; the nearest approach to that fabulous body of cavalry, the “Horse Marines,” any one is ever likely to see:

The traveller has to pass the little church and scattered cottages of Otterhampton on the way to Steart; and on the return, if he wishes to keep near the coast, he comes through Stockland Bristol, a pretty rustic village, with prosperous-looking manor-house and an entirely modern church. Beyond it are Upper Cock and Lower Cock farms, that take their names from a tumulus down in the levels near the estuary known as “Ubberlowe.”

“Upper Cock,” in its original form, was “Hubba Cock”; “Cock” signifying a heap, and comparing with “haycock.” “Ubbalowe” is properly “Hubbalowe,” i.e. “Hubba’s heap,” both names pointing to the probability that here was buried the chieftain Hubba, who, as we have already seen, fell at Cynuit.

From this point a succession of winding lanes leads down again to the curving shore of Bridgwater Bay at Stolford. Here meadows, a farmstead with well-filled rickyards, and a compound heavily walled and buttressed against flooding from the salt marshes, border upon a raised beach of very large blue-grey stones, which replaces the mud that gathers round the Parret estuary. Here at low spring tides traces may yet be found of the submarine forest off-shore. A sample of the foreshore taken at Stolford usually suffices explorers, and fully satisfies their curiosity; for the clattering loose stones of the heaped-up beach form an extremely tiring exercise-ground.

These level lands of highly productive meadows, lying out of the beaten track, below the greatly frequented high road that runs out of Bridgwater to Nether Stowey, and so on along the ridge to Holford and West Quantoxhead, are much more extensive than a casual glance at the map would convey. They are at one point over five miles across. The centre of this district is Stogursey, which is, as it were, a kind of capital, if a large agricultural village may be thus dignified.

Stogursey is a considerable village, taking the second half of its name from the de Courcy family, who once owned it, but the thick speech of Somerset rendered the place-name into “Stogursey” so long ago that even maps have adopted the debased form; some, however, inserting a small (Stoke Courcy) in brackets, under the generally accepted form. The visitor will at the same time notice, in the title of the local parish magazine, that efforts are being made by the clergy to restore the original name. The church was built by those old Norman lords, but the family died out so very long ago, that no memorials of them remain in it; and the net result of all their ancient state and glory is—a name! It is a large and fine church, in the Norman and Transitional Norman styles; consisting of a large and lofty nave without aisles, a central tower, north and south transepts, and deep chancel. The clustered shafts supporting the central tower have elaborately sculptured Norman capitals of a distinctly Byzantine character. A variant of the place-name is seen on a monument to one Peregrine Palmer, where it appears as “Stoke Curcy.” The Palmer family is seen, on another monument, revelling in a pun beneath the Palmer coat of arms: in this wise, “Palma virtuti.”

But the Verney aisle of this beautiful church contains more interesting memorials than those of Palmers; notably two altar-tombs with effigies of the Verneys of Fairfield. The earliest is that of Sir Ralph Verney, 1352. The other, that of Sir John Verney, who died in 1461, is of very beautiful workmanship, and displays, among other shields of arms, the punning device of the family: three ferns—“verns,” as a rural Somerset man would say, in that famous “Zummerzet” doric that is not yet wholly extinct.

No one could justly declare the village of Stogursey to be picturesque. Nor is it ugly; but at the radiant close of some summer day, when an afterglow remains in the sky, the village takes a beautiful colouring that cries aloud for the efforts of some competent watercolourist. It is an effect, as you look eastward down the long broad village street to the church, standing in a low situation at the end, of a rich red-yellow, like that of a ripening cornfield, on houses, cottages, and church alike, with the lead-sheathed spire gleaming like oxidised silver against the chilly blue-grey of the eastern sky at evening, spangled already, before the sun has finally gone to bed, with the cold, unimpassioned twinkle of the stars. Daylight heavily discounts this romantic effect, for then you perceive that the lovely hue on the church-tower at evening was the dying sunset’s transfiguration of the yellow plaster with which the tower was faced at some time in the Georgian period.

But Stogursey has a castle, or the remains of one, styled by villagers “the Bailey.” The stranger looks in vain for it in the village street.

Stogursey Castle stands in a meadow, surrounded by a stream which in the olden days was made, not only to form the moat, but to turn the wheels of the Castle mill. The mill-leat still runs on one side of the lane branching from the main village street; a lane now smelling violently of tanneries, and lined with cottages of a decrepit “has been” character; for it should be said that Stogursey is a decaying place. Changes in method of agriculture; changes in methods of communication, making for swifter and cheaper import of corn and other products of the soil; changes, in fact, in everything have all conspired to injuriously affect the place. The few remaining local shops do not look prosperous, and the village is full of private houses whose windows clearly show them to have once been shops, that gave up the pretence of business long ago. These bay-windowed, many-paned shop-fronts retired from business are familiar all over rural England. The villagers generally turn them to account as conservatories for geraniums and other flowers, and a pleasant sight, treated in this way, they often are. But there is a future for the Stogursey district; if not for the shopkeepers, certainly for the farmers. No light railway yet serves it, but the need of such an enterprise is great; and when it comes it will effect great changes in local fortunes.

“Stoke,” as it was styled originally, is a place of greater antiquity than any neighbouring village, as its name would imply; indicating as it does a stockaded post in a wild and dangerous district innocent of settled houses.

That post was probably on the site of the castle whose scanty ruins remain. The de Courcy castle was destroyed as early as the time of King John, when it passed by the second marriage of Alice de Courcy to one Fulke de BreautÉ, who set up here as a robber lord, and issued from this stronghold from time to time for the purpose of levying involuntary contributions from all who passed to and fro on the highway yonder, from Bridgwater to Quantoxhead. His castle can never have been strong, for its situation forbade strength, but the district was remote and little known, and people who were plundered on the ridgeway road had little inducement to plunge down here after this forceful taker of secular tithes. But de BreautÉ’s proceedings at length grew so scandalous that a strong force was sent at the instance of Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar of the realm, and this thieves’ kitchen was burnt and more or less levelled with the ground. The subsequent history of the castle is vague, but it would appear to have been at some time rebuilt, for it was again, and finally, destroyed in 1455. A glance at the remains will show that it could never have been seriously defended against any determined attack. The moat, still in places filled with water, was deep as could be made, for it was the only external defence. Fragments of curtain-wall and portions of towers with loop-holes for arrows remain; and the entrance-towers may yet be traced, although a modern cottage has been built on to them, in all the incongruousness of red brick and rough-cast plaster. Such is the modern economical way with the shattered walls of this old robber’s hold. For the rest, the enclosure is a tangled mass of undergrowth and ivy-clad ruins of walls, and the meadow without is uneven with the ancient foundations of outworks that disappeared centuries ago.

The roads leading back from Stogursey to the coast have a distressing lack of signposts, and the district is for long distances without habitations, so that the way to Lilstock may well be missed. That they are fine roads for the cyclist, with never a motor-car about, is not sufficient to recompense the explorer who cannot find his way. And Lilstock—Little Stock originally; that is to say, some ancient small coastwise stockaded fort—is, perhaps, not worth finding, after all; for it appears to consist solely of a tin tabernacle, by way of church, and a lonely cottage amid elms, at the end of everything; a veritable dead-end. You climb to the lonely beach and have it all to yourself; the grey sea lazily splashing amid the ooze and scattered boulders, and a great empty sky above.

It is all the same beside the sea to Kilve, and rough walking too; the rebuilt church of Kilton prominent inland, on the left; very modern, but with a relic of a century ago in the shape of a battered old barrel-organ with a set of mechanical psalm and hymn tunes, that used to be ground out every Sunday to the long-suffering congregation, who must, by dint of sheer damnable iteration, have come to loathe this unchanging psalmody with a peculiar hatred.

We come now into the marches of West Somerset, where the folk-speech still to some extent remains; but the famous broad “Zummerzet” speech of these parts nowadays survives in its olden force only in the pages of dialect novels. The dialect novel is a thing of convention, like the dramatic stage, and is not necessarily a direct transcript from life. In novels of rural life, in rustic plays, and in illustrated jokes in which villagers appear, the countryman still wears a smock-frock and talks as his great-grandfather was accustomed to talk. Frequently, too, he wears a beaver hat, with a nap on it as luxuriant as the bristles of a boot-brush; and he is made to smoke “churchwarden” clay pipes about a yard long. Real rustics do not do these things nowadays. I only wish they did; for then exploring in the byways would be much more interesting. Nowadays, the unaccustomed Londoner can quite easily understand anything a Somersetshire man, even of the most rustic type, has to say.

This, however, is not to be taken as an assertion that all the old characteristic words and phrases have died out, or that the accent is altogether a thing of the past. The Somerset speech is really part and parcel of that delightful West of England trick of the tongue which still grows gradually more noticeable to the stranger as he progresses westward. You will not notice this in any measure until you have passed an imaginary line, which may be drawn from Oxford in the north, to Southampton in the south, passing on the way such places as Wantage, Newbury, Andover, and Winchester. Westward of this frontier-line, the West of England, linguistically, commences. Somerset, by some unexplained accident, was notoriously the home of the broadest speech; but recent years have witnessed the singular phenomena (singular when taken in conjunction) of Somerset folk-speech losing much of its old-time character, and that of Devon, which had also largely fallen into disuse, returning in almost its olden strength.

Much of this old manner of talking has been preserved in the publications of the English Dialect Society, in which we find embedded, among more stolid phrases, amusing scraps of rustic dialogues, illustrating the local shibboleths. Here we have, for example, a rural domestic quarrel, rendered in broad “Zummerzet.” It has not been thought desirable to reproduce the somewhat pedantic inflection-marks given in the Society’s publications, tending as they do towards the unnecessary mystification of those who do not happen to be philologists. The spelling has also been altered here and there, to bring it more into line with the enunciation usually heard by the ordinary person.

The woman in this first specimen says, “Uneebaudee mud su waul bee u tooÜd uundur u aaruz bee u foauz tu leave saeumz aay bee, laung u dhee. Tuz skandluz un sheemfeal aew aay bee zaard.”^[3]

To this pitiful complaint the husband answers, “U uumunz auvees zaard wuul neef uur udn aat ubeawt, un dhee aart nuvvur aat ubeawt.”^[4]

Here is another example from the collection already quoted from:

“Taumee, haut bee yue aiteen on? Spaat ut aewt turaaklee!”

Perhaps the reader may be left to translate this. But how about the following, spoken by a waggoner on a hot day? “Mudn maek zu boalz t’ax vur koop u zaydur, aay spoÜz? Aay zuuree aay bee dhaat druy, aay kÜdn spaat zik-spuns.”^[5]

Here again is some time-honoured “Zummerzet.” “Come, soce! Yur’s yur jolly goed health. Drink ut oop tu onct!”

“Naw; daze muy ole buttonz neef aay due! Aay diddn nuvvur hold wi’ u-swillen of ut deown same uz thaet. Hurry no maen’s cattle tul ye’ve got’n ass o’ yur aeown! Hurry, hurry; ’tuz this yur hurryen what tarns everythen arsy-varsy vor me! Muy uymurz! what ood muy oal graanfer saay tu th’ likes of ut? Wooden dh’oal maen laet aewt!”

Among the curious expressions found in this last speech, that of “soce” is prominent. The word is a familiar expression in these parts. It is used between equals, and is equivalent to “my boy,” “old chap,” etc. Philologists generally consider it to be a survival from monastic times, when itinerant monkish preachers are supposed to have been styled, “socii,” i.e. “associates,” or “brethren,” or to have themselves used the expression in addressing their congregations.

“This yur,” that is to say, reduced to ordinary pronunciation, “this here” is, on the other hand, equivalent to a strong disapproval of the subject under discussion. It means “this new-fangled,” unfamiliar, or unpleasant thing.

The village of Kilve lies down along a lane leading to the right from the road just past Holford, and rambles disjointedly down to the rugged little church. Church, ruined priory, and a large farmhouse stand grouped together in the meadows, beside the little brook called Kilve Pill, a quarter of a mile from the low blue-has cliffs of the muddy and boulder-strewn lonely shore sung by Wordsworth, as “Kilve’s delightful shore.”

Kilve church is as rude and rugged as some old fortress, and probably its tower was originally designed with a view to defence. It is constructed of very rudely shaped blocks of blue limestone, many of them of great size, mortared together in rough fashion. For the rest, it is a small aisleless building, chiefly of Norman date, with a south transept-chapel of Perpendicular character, and a simple Norman bowl-font.

Giant, widespreading poplar trees adjoin the Priory farmhouse and the ruins of the Priory, or Kilve Chantry. This was a foundation by one Sir Simon de Furneaux, in 1329, to house five priests. The particular reasons that induced Sir Simon to establish his chantry in this lonely spot do not appear, for the history of the place is vague; but whatever they were, they did not appeal to Sir Richard Stury, to whom the property came, some sixty years later, on his marriage with Alice, the last of this branch of the Furneaux family. He abolished the establishment, and the building stood empty for centuries, or was used as a barn by the neighbouring farmer. Another use, not so much spoken of, was as a storehouse for smuggled goods. A long succession of farmers at the Priory farm were, in fact, more smugglers than farmers. The church-tower was said also to have been used by them. The present roofless condition of the buildings is due to a fire, many years ago, supposed to have been caused by a conflagration of these smuggled spirits.

In these latter days, now that many townsfolk on holiday seek quiet, secluded spots, there are few among the rustic cottages of Kilve that do not house visitors, and nowadays the Priory farm is in summer as much a boarding-house as farmstead; while amateur geologists may be found at low water on the “delightful,” if muddy, shore, searching for “St. Keyna’s serpents”; or, in other words, ammonites, which, with other fossils, abound in the blue lias clay. They are “St. Keyna’s serpents,” because the saint, coming to Somerset, transformed all the snakes of these parts into stone!

Kilve, in common with other villages situated on this part of the Somerset shore, indulges in a curious kind of sport: that of “hunting the conger.” It is in the autumn that the unfortunate conger-eel is taken unawares, through the low tides that then generally prevail. The conger, known here as the “glatt,” is the big brother of the ordinary sand-eel, who is dug out of the foreshore, all round our coasts. He lives in the blue lias mud hereabouts, generally beneath the boulders that are sprinkled about the shore like currants in a bun; and is clever enough, in the ordinary way, to have his home well below low-water mark. But the treacherous spring-tides are the undoing of him; laying bare perhaps a hundred and sixty feet more of mud than usual. At such times a large proportion of the rustic population anywhere near the shore assembles and proceeds to the muddy or sandy flats, accompanied by fox-terriers and other dogs, and armed with stout six or eight-feet-long sticks, cut from the hedges and sharpened at one end to a chisel-like edge. If there be by any chance a belated visitor in those October days when hunting the glatt is usually in full swing he is apt to imagine the simple villagers are trying to take a rise out of his ignorance of country life, when, in answer to his questions, they tell him they are off hunting conger-eels—and with dogs! But it is simple truth. Hunting the wild red deer on Exmoor is the aristocratic sport of this countryside, and hunting the conger is the democratic; and where in a purely inland district your sporting rustic may keep his lurcher, here the rural sportsman values his terrier or spaniel in proportion to his merits as “a good fish dog.”

There is not that smartness among the pursuers of the glatt which is the mark of the hunting-field in the chase of the fox or the deer, and renders a fox-hunt or a meet of staghounds so spectacular a sight. Smart clothes are not the proper equipment of the glatt-hunter, whose hunting chiefly consists in wading, ankle-deep, through the mud, heaving up huge boulders, and mud-whacking after the wriggling, writhing congers, while the dogs rush frantically among the crowd, scraping holes in the mud and essaying the not very easy task of seizing the slippery fish. In fact, the oldest clothes are not too bad for this sport; and the spectacle of a company of such sportsmen as these, properly habited for the occasion, is rather that of an assemblage of scarecrows than that of a number of self-respecting members of the community. That this precaution of wearing the oldest possible garments is not an excess of caution becomes abundantly evident at the conclusion of a rousing day’s sport, when the mud has been flying in proportion to the enthusiasm of the chase, and every one has become abundantly splashed, from top to toe. The congers, or “glatts,” captured on these occasions scale, as a rule, about four or five pounds, but occasionally run to twenty pounds.

Over the meadows by church-path from Kilve to East Quantoxhead, is a pleasant stroll, bringing you into the village by the old watermill and the village pond. Not, mark you, an ordinary village pond with muddy margin and half-submerged old superannuated pails and the like discarded objects long past use, but a crystal-clear lakelet, with stone and turf parapet, well-stocked with trout—and the fishing preserved too, members of that branch of the Luttrell family living in the adjoining manor-house coming down occasionally to cast a fly. This is not angling in such public circumstances as might be supposed, for the village is very small and retired, and few strangers find their way hither. Indeed, things here are so little conventional that you enter the churchyard through a farmyard.

Church and manor-house stand side by side, both built of the local blue-grey limestone. In the chancel of the little aisleless church, stands a Luttrell altar-tomb of alabaster, inscribed to Hugh Luttrell, 1522, and his son, Andrew, 1538, with shields displaying their arms and those of the Wyndhams and other families with whom they have intermarried.

The large, square-shaped manor-house adjoining is the ancient home of the Luttrells, who were seated here at East Quantoxhead long centuries before they acquired the greater estates of Dunster and Minehead; being descended on the distaff side from that Ralph Paganel who held this and other manors from William the Conqueror.

The tall, ugly masonry retaining-wall that fringes the hollow road for a long distance as you come uphill from East to West Quantoxhead, is that of St. Audries, the park of Sir Alexander Acland Hood. Where this ends, on the hilltop, the lovely park, sloping down to the seashore, is disclosed, like a dream of beauty. West Quantoxhead and St. Audries are convertible terms, the parish church being dedicated to St. Etheldreda, popularly known in mediÆval times as “St. Audrey.” The mansion in the park, the rectory, the post-office, and a few scattered cottages constitute all the village. The church itself is modern, having been built by Sir Peregrine Acland Hood in 1857. It is far better, architecturally, than the mere date of it would suggest; doubtless because the architect relied more upon the traditional local style than on his own initiative. Although having stood for over half a century, the church looks astonishingly new. The mansion itself, a happy combination of stateliness and domestic comfort, and built of red brick and stone, is glimpsed romantically between the fine clumps of trees with which the park is studded; and in a cleft you note the blue sea—for the Severn Sea is not so muddy and so dun-coloured under sunny conditions as some would have us suppose. Down on the beach, where a waterfall plunges boldly over the cliffs of curiously stratified rock, the Somerset coast proves itself again to be more picturesque than it is generally allowed to be. The Devon and Somerset staghounds sometimes meet on the lawn, in front of St. Audries House, as the Quantock pack were used to do.