We have here come into the very centre of what has in these later years become known as the “Lorna Doone Country”; the neighbourhood of Oare and the so-called “Doone Valley.” Oare lies in a profound valley, giving upon Exmoor, on the left hand, and to it we must needs go, for to write upon these parts of Somerset, where they march with Devon, and not to enter upon the subject of the Doones, would in these times be impossible, if the resultant book is to be at all representative.

No one who travels through North Devon and Somerset can escape “Lorna Doone.” Nor, indeed, should they greatly wish to do so, for it is a stirring romance. Since 1871, when the story first became popularised, it has pervaded the whole countryside, much to the combined profit and astonishment of the natives, who accept the good gifts it has brought, chiefly in the shape of greatly increased numbers of tourists, but at the same time they do not profess to understand it all, and have not been generally at pains to inform themselves as to whom all these developments are due.

“A Lunnon gennelman—I doan’t rightly knaw th’ name of ’en—wrote all about thesyer Doones there is so much tark of, an’ put’n into a book, yurs since. Read it? Not I, but my darter, she hev, an’ she do say that Lorna Doone was a proper fine gell; not that I b’lieve much on’t; although, mark you, it’s my idea that if so be them ‘Doone’ houses they do let on so much about wer’ tarned auver an’ dug up, ther’d be a deal o’ gold found there. There was some mighty queer folk lived up to Badgery in wold times.” Such are the somewhat contradictory opinions to be heard between Oare and Malmsmead.

Richard Doddridge Blackmore, author of the novel, “Lorna Doone,” came of a North Devon and Exmoor ancestry, and so was, as it were, the predestined author for these regions. He was born in 1825 and educated largely at Blundell’s school, Tiverton, where Jan Ridd, hero of the novel, got his schooling. Blackmore afterwards went up to Oxford, and imbibed there a certain fondness for classical studies and a love of literature that never left him; although a great part of his life, from 1858, was devoted to the cultivation of choice fruit at his residence at Teddington, beside the Thames. The public, however, that knew of Blackmore the novelist never heard of Blackmore the grower of choice pears and plums for the London market, on his eleven Middlesex acres.

His first book was “Poems by Melanter,” published in 1835 and heard of no more. In 1855 the Crimean War stirred him to authorship again, with “The Bugle on the Black Sea,” and 1864 saw his first novel, “Clara Vaughan,” published anonymously. It was not a success, nor was “Cradock Nowell,” in 1866, more fortunate.

In March 1869 was published “Lorna Doone,” with the same dispiriting want of success. The first edition was still hanging on hand in 1871, and seemed likely to go the unhonoured way of all completely unsuccessful books, when a strange reversal of fortune befel it. In the preface to the twentieth edition, years afterwards, Blackmore tells us vividly of this. One clearly perceives, in the manner of apostrophe to a personified “Lorna” he adopts, that he was, at the time of writing this preface, still entirely amazed at the abounding success that had at last come, but in a wholly mistaken fashion. He says:

“What a lucky maid you are, my Lorna! When first you came from the Western moors nobody cared to look at you; the ‘leaders of the public taste’ led none of it to make test of you. Having struggled to the light of day through obstruction and repulses, for a year and a half you shivered in a cold corner without a sunray. Your native land disdained your voice, and America answered, ‘No child of mine!’ Still, a certain brave man, your publisher, felt convinced that there was good in you, and standing by his convictions—as the English manner used to be—‘She shall have another chance,’ he said; ‘we have lost a lot of money by her; I don’t care if we lose some more.’ Accordingly, forth you came, poor Lorna, in a simple, pretty dress, small in compass, small in figure, smaller still in hope of life. But, oh—let none of her many fairer ones who fail despond—a certain auspicious event occurred just then, and gave you golden wings. The literary public found your name akin to one which filled the air, and, as graciously as royalty itself, endowed you with imaginary virtues. So grand is the luck of time and name—failing which more solid beings melt into oblivion’s depth.” In short, the dear, dunderheaded add-two-together-and-make-them-five British public came to the wholly erroneous conclusion that “Lorna Doone” was in some way connected with the marriage of Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter the Princess Louise with the Marquess of Lorne; an event which took place in 1871. The times were remarkable for the strong wave of anti-monarchical feeling then rising, in consequence of the recluse life led by the Queen in her widowhood; and there can be no doubt that “Lorna Doone” was, in the first instance, purchased so freely because it was suspected of being one of the many scandalous satires then issued in plenty and bought eagerly.

Books have strange fortunes. Their careers hang upon a hair. Many nowadays live but a season: others may be said never to have lived at all. Others yet enjoy a furious, but short, vogue, and then die as utterly as those that never enjoyed real life. The public originally purchased “Lorna Doone” under a misapprehension that was, perhaps, not very creditable, and then read the book and continued to buy it for its own merits. And so it continues to run ever into new editions, and has made the fortune of the Exmoor and North Devon districts, and the adjoining parts of Somerset. Here it should be noted that, although the public persists in regarding “Lorna Doone” as essentially a Devonshire book, it is really chiefly concerned with Somerset.

Written in the first person singular, as the memoirs and experiences of John Ridd, a seventeenth-century yeoman of Oare, the book, it will be seen, is cast in a fashion not easy to make convincing reading, but it successfully surmounts the difficulties of armchair expressions, and the strong story carries the reader over many a passage otherwise dangerously weak. But it is not great art. It does not compare with Stevenson’s novels in the same manner, written nearly twenty years later.

Still, such as it is, it is Blackmore’s best, and although he wrote many other novels, he never again approached “Lorna Doone,” either in sheer writing, or in commercial success. Booksellers stocked, and the public bought, or borrowed from the libraries, his later works, because they were by the author of “Lorna Doone,” and not for their intrinsic merits. For Blackmore always just failed to convince, and never quite dispelled an unreal kind of atmosphere that took his novels quite out of the experiences of actual life, and made his characters so many jumping-jacks, obviously actuated by strings.

The origin of “Lorna Doone” demands some notice. Blackmore freely acknowledged that he was led to contemplate a romance on the subject of the legendary wild squatters of these parts by reading a story published in the Leisure Hour during 1863, entitled “The Doones of Exmoor,” a very poor piece of work, loosely strung together from recollections of the Wichehalse and Doone legends that had long been floating about the West Country. He rightly conceived he could do better, and set to work upon his own early recollections of those legends, and, moreover, revisited Porlock and Oare and other places, for the purpose of acquiring more local colour, before beginning to write.

The question, Had the Doones ever a real existence? was debated somewhat half-heartedly in the lifetime of Blackmore, but has since his death been more and more keenly continued; until the literature written around the subject, for and against the credibility of such a band of outlaws having really made Exmoor their home, has assumed considerable dimensions.

An examination of the evidence available appears to conclusively establish the fact that no unassailably genuine documents have ever been produced by which the existence of the Doones can be proved. No one has ever traced legal documents, baptismal or other registers, or even records of sessional proceedings in which the name Doone appears in Somerset or Devon. Outlaws such as these, illiterate and half-savage, would not, on the face of it, be likely to find a place in church registers; but they would, on the other hand, it is fairly arguable, easily have found mention in the records of punishments, great or small, inflicted upon criminals or petty evil-doers. The inference that they, as Doones, never existed here, is therefore well-nigh irresistible.

But the legendary belief in them in all this countryside is strong, and dates far back beyond the appearance of Blackmore upon the scene with his “Lorna Doone.” Aged people who lived at Porlock, and in all the districts affected by legends of these robbers, and whose memories carried them back to the early years of the nineteenth century, have given testimony, not only to their having heard abundantly of “Doones” on Exmoor, but to their having received the legends from their parents. The long-lived fishermen of Porlock Weir, confronted with pamphlets written and published, elaborately arguing against the existence of those people, indignantly declared that one might as well pretend there were never Aclands of Holnicote. They were not in the least concerned with Blackmore’s story; for they had never read it, and did not carry the author’s name in their minds. A curious thing is that so few people of these districts have ever read “Lorna Doone.” But the fishermen, in common with others, knew the usual run of the stories; although, to be sure, they believed that the Doones were almost extinguished by the Reds of Culbone, and knew little or nothing of the Ridds of Oare.

We are met with several theories as to the origin of these floating legends, and the name of Doone. A favourite theory is that which dismisses these stories by contending that the name is a corruption of “Danes,” and that these more or less mysterious outcasts were really belated memories of those Danish sea-rovers who made such fierce havoc along all these shores in the ninth and tenth centuries.

A second belief, strangely supported by the undoubted existence in South Wales of a family, or band, of Dwns (the pronunciation is exactly that of “Doone”) in the time of Queen Elizabeth, is that a number of Welsh outlaws, fleeing from justice, came across the Channel from Carmarthenshire and became the Exmoor Doones. These Dwns were very objectionable people in their own country, and were largely intermarried, strange to say, with Ryds.

A third guess at the origin of the Doones is found in the belief, sometimes held, that they were originally fugitives from Sedgemoor fight, hiding from the retribution of the Government in what were then the fastnesses of the moor; but the obvious criticism of this view is that all danger would have been past after the revolution of 1688, and they would then no longer have needed to hide.

The fourth theory, and one stated to have been shared by Blackmore himself (although he was not necessarily a prime expert in the matter) is that the Doones were Scottish exiles. We have but to spell the name “Doune” for it to be at once recognised as Scottish. Certainly it is no West of England patronymic. At what period this view of the puzzle holds those supposititious Dounes to have come from Scotland does not appear. Scottish history may, if necessary, be made to afford many likely junctures at which various people would find it advisable to seek a sanctuary abroad. Of recent years an odd claim to relationship with the Doones, involving an attempt to connect them with Scottish exiles, has been made by the owner of a curiosity-shop at Hunstanton, Norfolk. This person, Beeton by name, and his niece, one Ida M. Browne, who has adopted the pseudonym “Audrie Doon” for literary purposes, have since 1901 produced what purport to be old family portraits, relics, and documents, taking their history back to the seventeenth century and connecting them and the Doones with the Earl of Moray of the early years of that century. According to this story, a brother of the Earl of Moray assumed the name of Doune, and after much persecution in the course of family disputes over property, was obliged in 1620 to leave Scotland. This “Sir Ensor Doune” as the claim has it, settled in this neighbourhood, where he and his “were more or less hated and feared by the countryside until their return to Perthshire in 1699.”

Thus Miss Ida M. Browne.

From this Sir Ensor Doune was descended (always according to this showing) long lines of Dounes, or Doones.

Among the “family relics” is an old oil-painting, inscribed “Sir Ensor Doune, 1679”; an ill-drawn daub representing an elderly man with small crumb-brush whiskers, and an expression which leaves the beholder in doubt as to whether he is half-drunk or half-mad: both Doone characteristics, if we have followed the legends at all attentively. Another item is an old flint-lock pistol inscribed on the barrel “C. Doone, 1681, Porlok,” and furnished further with a representation of skull and cross-bones. These, with a genealogy drawn up by one “Charles Doone of Braemar,” bringing the family down from 1561 to 1804, are the evidences adduced; together with what is put forward as the diary of a “Rupert Doune,” stated to have been a fugitive from Scotland after the rebellion of 1745. He, it appears, found his way at last to North Devon and Somerset; to the districts in which his seventeenth-century forbears had settled. Here are extracts from his journal:

“Sept. 3rd, 1747.—Went to Barum on my way to the place they call Oare, where our people came after their cruel treatment at the hands of Earl Moray.”

“September 3rd, 1747.—Got to Oare and then to the valley of the Lyn; the scenery very bonny, like our own land, but the part extremely wild and lonely. Wandered about and thought of the doings of the family when here, which I gather were not peaceable.”

How very precious is that last phrase—and how entirely unconvincing! It would, in short, were any claim to material things attached to these pretensions, be impossible to establish it on such slight foundations.

The first printed collection of Doone legends is that to be found in Cooper’s “Guide to Lynton,” published in 1853. It is derived from local folklore and from a manuscript collection of stories made for the Reverend J. R. Chanter in 1839. Among these legends, besides those of the Doones, we have the wild tales of Tom Faggus, the North Devon and Somerset highwayman, and his “enchanted strawberry horse,” and the fantastic and particularly stupid “legend of the de Wichehalse family,^[6] utterly without foundation.”

Caution is therefore evidently to be exercised before accepting anything in the way of these folk-tales, which tell of a fierce and utterly lawless band of Doones who dwelt up the Badgworthy Valley, from about the time of the Commonwealth, in a collection of some eleven rude stone-built huts, and lived by raiding the houses and stockyards of the neighbouring farmers. One of these stories tells us how the band was at length exterminated by the long-suffering countryside. One winter’s night, it appears, when snow was lying upon the ground, they made a raid upon Yenworthy Farm, a lonely farmstead which still stands, although since those times rebuilt, in a deep valley between the high-road near County Gate and Culbone. Here they were received with an unexpectedly bold front. Arma virumque cano; only in this instance it is of arms and the woman one must sing. It was, in short, the farmer’s wife who stood at an open window and opened fire upon them with a long duck-gun that is to this day preserved in the house. This scattering discharge appears to have severely wounded one, or several, of the raiders, for blood-tracks were traced in the snow, leading in the direction of Badgworthy. That same night the same party (or perhaps really another part of the numerous band) appeared at Exford, in midst of Exmoor, and attacked a farmhouse, in which were only a servant girl and a child. The servant hid in the oven, leaving the child in the kitchen. The robbers, the legend goes on to declare, killed the infant, and went off, with the mocking lines,

This outrage formed the breaking-point of the rustic endurance of the Doones, who were tracked to their lair by large bodies of countryfolk and slain, and their stone huts demolished. The incident of the killing of the infant is told, with variations, by Blackmore, in “Lorna Doone”; a footnote declaring the author’s belief in the truthfulness of the legends regarding the raid, but holding that the Doones did not wilfully kill the child, which was fatally injured by being tossed playfully to the ceiling, and accidentally let fall.

Variations of the final ending of the Doones place the scene at Robber’s Bridge, on the Weir Water, and tell how the Ridds were chiefly instrumental in bringing on the fight.

Yenworthy Farm, formerly the property of the Snow family, was sold to the late Reverend W. S. Halliday of Glenthorne, by the late Mr. Nicholas Snow. Mr. Halliday also purchased the duck-gun traditionally said to have wounded the Doones. It is to remain always here, as a relic of the lawless old times.

We may perhaps find in the name of Snow a significant clue to the evolutionary processes of these old stories told in past generations around local firesides on winter’s nights in those times when few could read, and when, if they owned that accomplishment, literature of any sort was scarce and dear. In tales repeated from mouth to mouth, all kinds of accretions are to be expected; and it will already have been noted how many are the variants of these Doone and other stories. The patient and contemplative seeker after truth may easily find in the name of Snow the origin of the snowy night on which the Doones attacked Yenworthy Farm, the owner of the property being gradually brought into the tale by the mishearings incidental to repetition.

The last two surviving Doones are said, in legends current some years ago, and related by the Rev. W. H. Thornton, many years since curate at Countisbury, within the North Devon border, near Lynmouth, to have perished about the year 1800. They were an old man and his granddaughter, who for a long time had been used to roam the country, singing carols at Christmas-tide. They were said to have been found together in the snow, frozen to death, on the road between Simonsbath and Challacombe.

The conclusion of the whole matter appears to be that there was really a band of semi-savage hut-dwellers established on Exmoor in the middle of the seventeenth century, and that they continued to be a nuisance to the neighbourhood, in the sheep-stealing and petty-pilfering way, until perhaps the first few years of the next era. But that they were ever the terrible marauders of legend is not for a moment to be credited. They were probably, like the old type of gipsy, only too glad to be able to sneak necessaries covertly, and then to make off, and to be let alone; and were never bold enough to make raids. The duck-gun at Yenworthy was not used necessarily against a Doone: for lonely farmhouses were of old, all over the country, not unlikely to be the objects of attack. For a striking instance of this truth reference may be made to Tangley Farm, or “Lone Farm,” as it is often called, in the neighbourhood of Burford, Oxfordshire, which was attacked boldly by the “Dunsdon Gang” one night about 1784.^[7]

It may here be not altogether out of place to remark that anything with which the late Rev. W. S. Halliday was associated is to be examined closely and suspiciously, for he was a person of a saturnine turn of humour, delighting to send antiquaries and others upon false scents. His ancient habit of burying Roman coins in the neighbourhood of his residence at Glenthorne, with the singular object of deluding future generations of archÆologists into the belief that they have come upon plentiful evidence of Roman civilisation in these parts, is well known; and being well known (doubtless to the distress of his tricksy spirit) is not now likely to deceive any one.

It must remain an open question as to how the outlaws of Badgworthy, in whom, with the reservations made above, we are prepared to believe, came by the name of Doone. The probabilities and theories have already been given, and the matter must rest there.

The undoubted existence of old of other Devonshire semi-savage bands is itself a strong presumption of a like tribe here. The Gubbins band, in the neighbourhood of Lydford, “living in holes, like swine,” was well known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is made the subject of a reference by so serious a writer as Thomas Fuller, 1660. “Their wealth,” he says, “consisteth in other men’s goods: they live by stealing the sheep on the moors. Such is their fleetness, they will outrun many horses: vivaciousness, they outlive most men. They hold together like bees: offend one, and all will revenge his quarrell.”

The Gubbins also have found their way into fiction, in “Westward Ho!” The Cheritons, on the other hand, who also lived on the borders of Dartmoor, at Nymet Rowland, have not found their apotheosis in literature.