Part 2 (2/2)
Within a few yards of St. Peter's stands the grammar-school, where Bishop Jewel and his neighbour and enemy, Thomas Harding, went to school in the early sixteenth century, and the poet Gay in the beginning of the eighteenth. It was originally a chapel of St. Anne, and became a grammar-school on the suppression of the chantries by Henry VIII. The upper part of the building dates from 1450, but the crypt is much older, and it is conjectured to be a Saxon foundation. The beauty of these buildings--the church, the grammar-school, and the old houses--consists so greatly in their surroundings, in the green of the gra.s.s and the unfolding chestnut-trees against the old grey stone, the twinkle of blossom by the angle of a house, and the soft sky of Devon above, that it is difficult to reproduce; it is a beauty of atmosphere rather than of outline, of sentiment and a.s.sociation.
I like, too, this lack of the ”picturesque cult” which one finds in these English towns; the beautiful is allowed always to be the useful, and the family was.h.i.+ng hangs on a line outside many a Tudor house as easily as in a London slum. In Boutport Street--that old street that runs more than halfway round Barnstaple, ”about the port”--stands the Golden Lion Hotel, which was formerly the town house of the Earl of Bath, and was enriched in the seventeenth century by most beautiful moulded plaster ceilings and fireplaces, made by Italian craftsman who were brought over from Italy.
The front of the building has been altogether modernized, but much of the beautiful decorated interior work remains, to enrich the rooms where the many unseeing visitors take their meals. The Trevelyan Hotel, in the High Street, which presents to the street a most unpretentious exterior, and where, indeed, the princ.i.p.al rooms are the Victorian of d.i.c.kens, with ugly curtains and carpets, wall-papers and furniture, Victorian pictures, and Victorian bronzes on the coffee-room mantlepiece, has treasures hidden away up its dark staircases and in its cheaper and more modest bedrooms--defaced and disregarded, alas!--an Italian ceiling of fine scroll-work cut in half by a part.i.tion boarding, and a fine mantlepiece, with figures in relief, being built half over, and gas-jets thrust through the moulding. They showed me a great open hearth, with decorated mantle, which must have been that of the dining-room; at present the room is used for lumber. Half of it has been pulled down to build a staircase, and the low cas.e.m.e.nt windows are blocked by a lean-to coalshed, making the room so dark that I could barely see the plaster modelling of the wall.
This, I confess, is a vandalism, but I still consider it as the necessary penalty we pay for not putting all the treasures of our past into museums, labelling them neatly--and never looking at them.
The Penrose Almshouses in Litchdon Street, a beautiful small quadrangle, with a low colonnade surmounted by an ornamented lead gutter and steep dormer windows in a red-tiled roof, are still kept to their old uses.
They stand the wear and tear of time as well as its mellowing, and, like language, if they are here and there vulgarized by the usage of every day, without it they would be a dead language.
Queen Anne's Walk, overlooking the river, and close to the town station, is a small colonnade of the Renaissance style, which is most familiar to us in the architecture of Bath; it has an outlandish look, with its cla.s.sical lines seen against the background of the smooth river and green Devons.h.i.+re country, and has not the homely charm of Elizabethan or Stuart building.
It has, however, its peculiar beauty; it is suggestive of red-heeled shoes and powder, and an artificial world of beaux and belles. It must have been a pleasant enough place to walk in, until the railway came between it and the river, and its earlier name of the Merchants' Walk (or the Exchange) gives more of its character than its present name.
One must beware, however, in the present popular quest for the ”antique,”
of overlooking the beauty of modern things; the market, for instance, which is a vast rectangular building standing on the High Street, has a strange and individual charm when you come into it out of the glare of the white street. The windows are fitted with light green gla.s.s, which gives a sort of ghostly twilight to its bare s.p.a.ciousness, with heavy ma.s.ses of gloom among the pillars of the flanking colonnade. It has no pretence to artistic ornament of any kind; it was built for a specific purpose, which it answers admirably, and when it is crowded with stalls on market-days, and noisy with buyers and sellers, it is a scene of bustle and movement which would arouse the enthusiasm of a traveller if he came upon it in some distant city of the East, though the difference of language and costume is all there is between the two. But when it is empty, with its bare walls and bare floor and high dark roof, sun and shadow make from it a beauty which it is worth a moment's pause and stepping aside to see.
The Athenaeum, also, which stands in the open s.p.a.ce at the head of the Long Bridge, which is a n.o.ble structure of the thirteenth century, is a modern building, endowed by the late Mr. Rock, and possessing one of the best libraries in Devons.h.i.+re. It is a plain, unpretentious building; on the ground-floor a geological museum, very useful for a student--for it contains a complete collection of Devonian rocks and fossils--and the library upstairs. Sitting there on a summer afternoon, and seeing through the open windows the smooth sunlit curve of the river below, and the gentle slope of wooded hills beyond, the Athenaeum has a charm--that charm of weather and daily custom--which architectural description fails to convey for any building, whether it is the Parthenon or a farm-house.
Without it, places lack their intimate personality, as photographs lack the personality of men and women. My memory of the Athenaeum Library is of the familiar, slightly musty smell of books, of the faint creaking of the librarian's boots, and the hum of bees and the whirr of a mowing machine, of the smell of an early summer afternoon, the white glare of the North Walk stretching beside the river, and the reflection of anch.o.r.ed boats, very perfect on the still water.
Barnstaple is a very ancient borough; it is spoken of in the Devons.h.i.+re Domesday as one of the four ”burghs” of Devon, and as early as the reign of Henry I, before the election of Mayors had become part of English munic.i.p.al life, it was ent.i.tled to elect a chief magistrate for its own government. It was a fortified place under the Saxon Kings, and a large gra.s.s-grown mound in the centre of the town (near the town station) marks the site of Athelstan's castle. Athelstan is supposed to have come to Barnstaple in the early tenth century, when he was engaged in driving the British out of Devons.h.i.+re, beyond the River Tamar, which marks the boundary between Devon and Cornwall for the greater part; and this was only done by him, Westcote affirms, after he had exhausted every means of gentleness and clemency. The Taw, the Torridge, the Tamar, and the Tavy, all comprise some form of the same syllable, ”Taw”; and ”Tamar” is a corruption of ”Taw-meer,” which Westcote takes to mean the river-boundary, ”Taw” occurring in the names of the four princ.i.p.al rivers ”of these parts.”
There was a Saxon church at Barnstaple, probably on the site of the present parish church of St. Peter's, and the t.i.thes were given to the Abbey of Malmesbury. The original ecclesiastic seal bore the seated figure of King Athelstan. After the Conquest the barony of Barnstaple (which comprised the church) was given to Judhael of Totnes; from him it pa.s.sed to the famous family of Tracy, from them to the Martins (whose name remains in the little village of Martinshoe, near Lynton), and from them, again, to the Audleys.
It was a Lord Audley who distinguished himself so greatly in the Battle of Poitiers, and, as his family were then in possession of Barnstaple, it appears that the town changed hands frequently in the first three hundred years after the Conquest. The story told of Lord Audley is that he had made a vow that he would strike the first stroke in a battle for Edward III or for his son, and that at Poitiers he fought with such desperate courage in the forefront of the battle that he was carried off the field severely wounded. After the battle the Black Prince inquired after him, and was told that he lay wounded in a litter. ”Go and know if he may be brought hither, or else I will go and see him where he is,” said the Prince; so Audley had his litter taken up by eight of his servants, who carried him to the Prince's tent. The Prince took him in his arms, and kissed him, and praised him for the best and most valiant Knight of all that had fought that day, nor, though the wounded Knight disclaimed it, would he admit of any refusal, but gave him a yearly grant of 500 marks out of his own inheritance. Lord Audley, being carried back to his own tent, summoned his four esquires and divided the gift among them. The Black Prince, presently hearing of this, had Sir James once more brought before him, and asked if he did not consider the gift worthy of his acceptance, or for what other reason he had so disposed of it.
”Sire,” said the Knight, ”these four esquires have a long time well and truly served me in many great dangers, and at this present especially, in such wise that, if they had never done anything else, I was bound unto them, and ere this time they had never anything of me in reward; and, Sire, you know I was but one man alone, but by the courage, aid, and comfort of them I took on me to accomplish my vow; and certainly I had been dead in the battle had they not holpen me and endured the brunt of the day. Wherefore, whenas nature and duty did oblige me to consider the love they bear me, I should have showed myself too much ungrateful if I had not rewarded them . . . but whereas I have done this without your licence, I humbly crave pardon. . . .”
The Black Prince once more embraced him, praised him for his generosity as much as for his valour, and granted him a further 600 marks in place of what he had given away.
I have transcribed this episode because it seems to me a pretty tale of chivalry, of valour and courtesy, of generosity and n.o.ble, if fantastic, ideals.
Under King Athelstan's rule Barnstaple was governed by two Bailiffs, ”one for the King to collect his duties, the other for the town to receive their customs.” Under Henry I it was granted a charter, which was confirmed by John and enlarged by Elizabeth.
The earliest industries of the town seem to have been pottery and weaving; the pottery has always been of the cheaper, coa.r.s.er kind, and although some attempt was made at the close of the last century, when the industry was revived, to bring it to a higher artistic level of colour and glaze, it still, to my mind, continues mediocre, and has neither the highly finished beauty of such work as the Ruskin pottery, nor the genuinely simple lines or colouring of ”peasant pottery,” such as that from Quimperle in Brittany. The Barum ware has a sort of bourgeois mediocrity between these two different types, and there is room for a bold innovator to reform the present models and methods. It is a pity, perhaps, that he has not yet arisen, for a local industry of this kind adds greatly to the vitality of a town.
Of the weaving industry, what Westcote calls ”lanificium,” ”the skill and knowledge of making cloth, under which genus are contained the species of spinning, knitting, weaving, tucking, pressing, dying, carding, combing and such-like,” we have records from the twelfth century; though until the reign of Edward IV only friezes and plain coa.r.s.e cloth were made. In Edward's reign an Italian, ”Anthony Bonvise,” is reputed to have taught Barnstaple the making of fine ”kersies,” and spinning with a distaff; doubtless this was looked upon by the older generation of conservatives as a deterioration to luxury and soft living; they would hark back to the standards of a simpler age, when a King's breeches cost him no more than three s.h.i.+llings, and ”friezes” would be good enough for the n.o.blest. For Robert of Gloucester, in his Chronicle, tells us of King William Rufus:
”As his chamberlain him brought, as he rose a day, A morrow for to wear, a pair hose of say, He asked what they costned; three s.h.i.+llings said the other.
'Fie, a devil,' quoth the King, 'who say so vile deed?
King to wear any cloth, but it costned more: Buy a pair of a mark, or thou shalt be acorye sore.'
A worse pair of ynou the other sith him brought, And said they were for a mark, and unnethe so he bought.
'Yea, bel ami,' quoth the King, 'they be well bought; In this way serve me, or thou ne shalt serve me not.'”
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