Part 6 (2/2)
Minehead was a ”manor” in Domesday Book, and was given along with Dunster by the Conqueror to William de Mohun, who was one of the first of his n.o.bles to support his English expedition, and who brought to the standard of Duke William fifty-seven knights in his retinue, with their esquires and their men-at-arms. The name Minehead is a corruption of the Norman lord's name with the Anglo-Saxon word _heved_, a head; it used to be written ”Manheved.”
The Mohuns held it until the time of Henry IV, when, there being only daughters, it pa.s.sed out of the direct line, and was sold by Lady Mohun to the Luttrells, who have held it until the present time. It was incorporated by Queen Elizabeth, and governed by a ”port-reeve,” and later by two constables. The place was then of a size to consist of a Lower, Middle and Upper Town; the Lower Town, now called Quay Town, is the oldest remaining part. It lies under the high hill of Culver Cliff, around the harbour, and has more of the look of a Devon or Cornwall fis.h.i.+ng village--the steep, narrow streets, the whitewashed cottages with their large chimney-stacks and leaded windows--than the aspect of modern Minehead would lead one to expect. It was here, indeed, that the sea broke in the great gale of 1860, when the s.h.i.+pping in the harbour tore from its moorings, and was driven literally upon the houses of Quay Town, as the sea-wall gave way under the pounding of the waves, and the _Royal Charter_, getting clear from Culver Cliff, was driven on to the rocks off Anglesea, and lost with all hands.
Thirty years later, in 1891, the Minehead s.h.i.+pping was again wrecked by one of the fiercest storms that has ever been recorded over England.
It began on March 9, and raged for four days, chiefly over Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. s.h.i.+pping was driven on to the rocks from Land's End to Bristol; at Plymouth the solid iron seats on the Hoe were torn up and hurled about by the force of the wind; the heavy snowdrifts stopped all communication, even by train; some unfortunate people were practically buried in their houses; and along with the tragedies and devastation the strangest and most fantastic adventures happened, such as an old woman, struggling back from market, having her basket of provisions blown bodily out of her hand, and picking it up four days later, with every article in it unharmed, not even a burst packet of tea! Where the roads were not blocked with snowdrifts, they were mostly impa.s.sable from fallen trees, for the force of the wind was greater than anything which has been experienced in England, partaking more of the character of a cyclone, with the wind varying from N.E. to S.E. and with very rapid changes, but of greater duration than an average cyclone, for it raged from the 9th to the 13th.
Many fine and historic old trees were lost, and at Edgc.u.mbe Park alone, near Plymouth, it was estimated that at least two thousand were blown down, and the damage was so extensive that it took two years to clear the park; while at Cotehele, near the little town of Calstock, the damage was beyond description. One hundred thousand feet of timber, it was calculated, suffered in this one small district; and Cotehele House, which before had lain behind a screen of trees, was afterwards open to view from the town by this violent deforestation. Here is one of the most interesting descriptions of the storm, written by Mr.
Coulter, the steward at Cotehele:
”The wind, having blown a gale the whole day, continued to increase in violence as evening approached, and from seven till nine p.m.
accomplished, if not all, the greater part of the devastation to house and woods. The noise of the storm resembled the frantic yells and fiendish laughter of millions of maniacs, broken, at frequent intervals, by what sounded like deafening and rapid volleys of heavy artillery, and, as these died away, louder and louder again rose the appalling screams of the storm, with slight intervals of lull and perfect calm, only to return with tenfold violence, which made the whole house tremble and vibrate. . . . Several of the windows facing east were swept in as easily as a spider's web; lead and gla.s.s scattered all over the rooms, leaving only the shattered frames, through which rushed the resistless wind and blinding snow. . . .
Through the joints of doors and windows, the cracks and crevices, before unknown to the eye, the drifting snow penetrated and piled up in ridges, so that rooms and pa.s.sages had to be cleared like the pavement in the streets. . . . On an examination of Cotehele Woods, the scene presented gives one the idea of an earthquake rather than that of a storm. The majority of the trees are from two to three hundred years old, torn up by the roots, and tearing up like so much turf yards of macadamized road and huge blocks of strong stone walls.”
The violent storm in the South of England in February, 1916, gives one only a faint idea of this famous blizzard of 1891; for, great though the damage was, it was more local, and the storm was of shorter duration and did not interrupt the train and telegraph services over many scores of miles, as the earlier storm did, travellers in the West being out of touch with their friends for as much as four days or a week, snow-bound in some small village until the railway line was cleared and the postal service re-established.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Doone Valley in Winter]
The fury of such a storm across these always windy Exmoor heights can hardly be imagined; only Conrad could convey in words some adequate idea of the fury and the force, as he has done in ”Typhoon.” Anyone who was in Exmoor during these three days would have been fortunate to have reached shelter alive, and not to have been lost, as were so many unfortunate sheep and ponies, in the deep snowdrifts. There is a scene in ”Lorna Doone,” where John Ridd and his servant Fry go out on a bleak stormy morning to rescue their sheep from the snow, which gives a vivid picture of what must have been many times enacted in the Exmoor valleys during those wild March days. Of the loveliness of the scene when the snow had fallen, and after the fury of the wind had abated, when the March sun shone on the smooth upland curves and beautiful rounded hollows of the moors, stainlessly white and wonderful under the clearing sky, Mr. Widgery's picture of Lorna's Bower under snow gives a beautiful impression.
Apart from its cattle industry and its herrings, Minehead was noted in the seventeenth century for its alabaster mines, ”harder than ye Darbis.h.i.+re alabaster,” says Thomas Gerard in his ”Particular Description of Somerset,” written in 1633; ”but for variety of mixture and colours it surpa.s.seth any, I dare say, of this kingdom.” The mines are said to have been discovered by a Dutchman, but I cannot find that they were much worked, or were very abundant; for there is no record of them a century and a half later. They were not like the Combe Martin silver-mines, which were worked for centuries--some say in the time of the Phoenicians, when the mines of Cornwall furnished tin for half the bronze in Europe--which helped Henry V to pay for his wars in France, and were reopened by Adrien Gilbert in Queen Elizabeth's time, and a great cup and cover, fas.h.i.+oned from the silver, was presented by him to the City of London, and may still be seen among the city plate. The water got into the workings, and they were running poor after so many centuries, and were finally abandoned in the seventeenth century; for which Combe Martin is the more picturesque, according to our modern standards, if less prosperous.
There is another industry of Minehead, or, more properly, a curiosity; for there are no traces of the most enterprising approaching the matter from a commercial standpoint. ”There is on the rocks at low-water a species of limpet which contains a liquor very curious for marking fine linen,” says our seventeenth-century authority, and he gives directions for breaking the mollusc ”with one sharp blow,” and taking out ”by a bodkin” the little white vein that lies transversely by the head--a somewhat delicate operation. ”The letters and figures made with this liquor on linen,” he continues, ”will appear of a light green colour, and, if placed in the sun, will change into the following colours: if in winter about noon, if in summer an hour or two after sun-rising and so much before setting, for in the heat of the day in summer it will come on so fast that the succession of each colour will scarcely be distinguished.
”Next to the first light green it will appear of a deep green, and in a few minutes change to a full sea-green; after which it will alter to a blue, then to a purplish-red; after which, lying an hour or two (if the sun s.h.i.+nes) it will be of a deep purple-red, beyond which the sun does no more. But this last beautiful colour, after was.h.i.+ng in scalding soap and water, will, on being laid out to dry, be a fair bright crimson which will abide all future was.h.i.+ng.”
Is this indeed the ”murex,” as Browning calls it, of the Tyrian purple, which can be found on the Minehead rocks at low-tide by the holiday-makers of our day?--that ”purple dye” for which, the weary Roman usurper said,
”We'll stain the robe again from clasp to hem With blood of friends and kinsmen . . .,”
and yet which is only
”Crushed from a sh.e.l.lfish, that the fisherman Brings up in hundreds, yet rejects as food.”
In coming to Dunster we come to the last of the many beautiful places that lie within the compa.s.s of this fifty miles of England, places with so varied a loveliness that nowhere else, I think, can you match with them.
There is Barnstaple, suave and clean and sunny, with its well-kept streets and smooth, broad river, and its air of all prosperity and peace, the very type and pattern of a decent English country-town; and almost within stone's throw of it the moors begin, lying widely under the expanse of the sky, with the perpetual running of waters, and the lonely farms, from which the smoke curls up, blue against the brown hillside. There are the sombre and unpretending small villages, Parracombe, Brendon, Bratton-Fleming, each with its history and its little church, and the homesteads from which the young men have gone, in their humble twos and threes, to take their part in this war of millions. There is the grand solitude of Heddon's Mouth and the raven-haunted cliffs to Lynton; there is Lynton itself, drowned in the green woods that surge up the steep hillside; there is the West Lyn Gorge, shadeless and sultry even on a spring day, and the East Lyn Valley, where ferns and lilies of the valley grow, and every green thing that loves moisture and shade; and the Watersmeet, where there is a perpetual rus.h.i.+ng of waters which drowns the song of the birds; there is Porlock, between the moors and the marshes, and the drowned forest of Porlock Bay; there is the green magnificence of Horner Woods or Bossington, and the cloud-wreaths that gather and lift on the summit of Dunkery; and here, easternmost of our journey, is Dunster, the castle on its wooded hill rising above the long street of the village, and the edge of Exmoor beyond, dipping now from its bleak heights in gentle wooded undulations to the sh.o.r.es of the Bristol Channel. The Tower on the Hill, that is the meaning of the word ”Dunster,” and the name fittingly describes it; for it dominates many miles of beautiful and fertile country, and stands feudally above the village, perceptible from every angle of the street, at once a guardian and a menace. It has stood so for a thousand years, for it was a stronghold of the Saxon Kings before William the Conqueror gave it to William de Mohun, and he built his gloomy Norman fortress, with its ma.s.sive, windowless walls, and squat strong towers, of which nothing now remains save a bowling-green which marks the site of the old keep.
The main part of the present building dates from ”the s.p.a.cious days of great Elizabeth,” when her n.o.bles needed rather magnificent country-houses than fortresses for defence; but the gatehouse, with its four flanking towers, was built in the time of Henry V, and the oldest part of the castle is the gateway by the side of the main entrance, which was built by Reginald de Mohun in the time of Henry III, while Henry Luttrell added the south front in the ”antique taste” of a hundred years ago. Yet, like so many cathedrals, and not a few of the castles and great houses of England, like Hampton Court or Ely Cathedral, the varying styles of architecture do not give an appearance of patchiness or incongruity, but rather a feeling as of the vitality of the old building, and the continuity of life within it, that century after century adapts and adds to the uses of the present the habitation of their ancestors. The sun and rain mellow all, and the ivy makes all green; stone urn and Roman column grow old and gracious beside steep Elizabethan gables and fantastic chimneys, and the grey pointed arches of the fifteenth-century gateway are as good to ride under to the meet on crisp September mornings as a Renaissance doorway or an eighteenth-century portico. Much of the charm of these old buildings cannot be reproduced by brush or camera; it lies in their intimate a.s.sociation with the scene around them, suns.h.i.+ne and cloud, summer and winter, their hills and their streams; it is the sense of age which they convey, of long-continued tradition and a certain mellow security.
It was in 1376 that the Luttrells bought the castle from the Mohuns; and they hold it still; the old receipt for the purchase-money is still preserved in the castle hall, with various ancient and yellowing t.i.tle-deeds, and a list of the ”muniments” of the castle, made by William Prynne, who was sent there as a prisoner by Cromwell in 1650, after having suffered branding and the loss of his ears at Royalist hands for his ”seditious teachings,” and who, firebrand and fanatic as he was, beguiled his imprisonment with this curiously peaceable occupation.
The village is as beautiful as the castle; in the long, irregular street every house is three to four hundred years old. The projecting upper stories are supported on great timber balks, often with the ends grotesquely carved. Under the projecting eaves the swallows build, and twitter about the diamond-paned windows which reflect so richly the sunset light. In the steep roofs there are dormer-windows, and the old tiles have mellowed to a deep rose-red, stained yellow with lichen, and sink into irregular planes and angles of beautiful, varied colour.
There are tall brick chimneys and steep gables, and all manner of odd delicious sc.r.a.ps and jags of architecture, where one building has crowded upon its neighbour in its growth, like trees in a forest.
There are old gardens also, long sunny walls with old fruit-trees that look like h.o.a.ry serpents writhing up them, until the spring comes and the delicate, exquisite forms of plum or peach blossom break out of the gnarled boughs; there are wallflowers and lavender and rosemary, for the sweet scent and the ”remembrance” of them, and tall hollyhocks to nod over high brick walls; creepers, green or flowering, to grow over the whitewashed s.p.a.ces, and great trees for shade on summer afternoons.
<script>