Devonshire Characters and Strange Events - Sabine Baring-Gould 7 стр.

Nor may I be silent about an irreverence which an otherwise upright man used to show in the House of God. He would accost the country people he knew in a friendly manner. If a Clergyman was reading the Bible badly [for it was customary for a Cleric to read the Lessons now and then] when he finished with, Here endeth the second lesson our Knight would call out, Theest better never begun it. He would throw apples at the Priest in the middle of Divine Service.

Like Ajax and Peleus and other heroes he was not ashamed to woo a handmaid, and married one of his fathers servants. He died without issue, most widely mourned. His estate went to his kinsman, William Molesworth. The poor people, I believe, still cherish the memory of so dear a man, and give his name to their little ones in Baptism, as they might the name of a Saint.

If in these brief narratives, gathered here and there, I have in any way transgressed the rules of more classical Latin, I beg the kind reader to pardon me. If in any way I have departed from the truth, I have done so unwittingly. God be merciful.

Sir Paul W. Molesworth has dealt with John Arscott more tenderly than that man deserved.

A modern writer3 thus describes the sort of man that John Arscott was:

A familiar figure in the eighteenth century was the country squire, familiar the long wig, long coat, silver buttons, breeches and top-boots, the bluff, red face, the couple of greyhounds and the pointer at heel. When not hunting the fox, the popular sport of the day, he settled the disputes of the parish, or repaired to the nearest ale-house to get drunk in as short a space of time as possible. Usually he only drank ale, but on festive occasions a bowl of strong brandy punch, with toast and nutmeg, added to his already boisterous spirits. On Sundays he donned his best suit, which often descended from father to son through several generations, repaired to the parish church, and entered the family pew, where he slumbered during a great part of the somewhat dismal service. He seldom went further than his own country town, for a journey to London was still full of danger and discomfort.

Who that has read Fielding and other novelists of the period does not know the figure, full-blooded, coarse to brutality, with a certain amount of kindliness in his disposition, whose talk is of bullocks or horses or dogs, and who, after the ladies had withdrawn, spent the rest of the evening at his hospitable table singing ribald songs and telling obscene stories? I possess, myself, a little book in MS. of the after-dinner stories told by a great-great-uncle, that has to be kept under lock and key, so unfit is it for perusal by clean-minded persons. The songs were from Tom DUrfeys Pills to Purge Melancholy, or other collections of the sort. I had a collection of them that belonged to an ancestress, or rather near kinswoman of an ancestor, engraved on copper plate. I gave the volume to the British Museum. It was not a book to be kept on ones shelves when there were children in the house.

John Arscott was never married, or if he did marry, no trace of such a ceremony is forthcoming. He lived with a certain Thomasine Spry as his mistress. If he did make an honest woman of her, it was, as reported, on his death-bed. She survived him, and was buried at Tetcott in 1796, aged seventy-six. They had no issue.

Mr. Hawker, in his Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall, has told several stories of John Arscotts favourite, the last of the jester dwarfs, Black John, one of whose jokes, that entertained the company after dinner, was to tie together by the legs several live mice and swallow them one by one, and then, by means of a string, pull them up from his interior parts again. Another of his tricks was to mumble a sparrow. The living bird was gripped by the legs by his teeth, and then with his lips and teeth he would rip off the feathers, till he had plucked the unfortunate sparrow bare. A couple of projecting fangs were of especial value as sparrow-holders to Black John. His hands all the while were knotted or tied behind his back.

One evening he fell asleep by the hearth in the hall at Tetcott. Suddenly he started up with a cry, Oh, Master, said he, I was in a sog [sleep] and I thought I was dead and in hell.

Well, John, said Arscott, and what did you see there?

Sir, everything very much like what it is here in Tetcott Hall, the gentlefolks nearest the fire.

John Arscott had, as already related, an enormous tame toad that came out on the doorstep to be fed every morning, and went by the name of Old Dawty. The country people thought that it was John Arscotts familiar. When he whistled, the creature would hop up to him, and leap to his hand or to his knee. One day a visitor with his stick killed it; but seeing this Black John flew at him and knocked him down and belaboured him soundly. John Arscott came out, and when he heard what the visitor had done, turned on his heel, and when the gentleman had picked himself up and drew near, slammed the house door in his face.

This is Mr. Hawkers version of the story of the end of the pet toad, which is at variance with that related by the Rev. P. W. Molesworth, whose authority is more trustworthy than that of Mr. Hawker, a gentleman given to romancing.

Black Johns lair was a rude hut, which he had wattled for a snug abode close to the kennels. He loved to retire to it, and sleep near his chosen companions, the hounds. When they were unkennelled he accompanied and ran with them on foot, and so sinewy and so swift was his stunted form that he was very often in their midst at the death.

John Arscott had another follower called Dogget. My son Simon or simply Simon he was wont to call him. He also ran after the foxhounds.

There exists a fine ballad on the Hunting of Arscott, of Tetcott, in which Simon is mentioned. Mr. Frank Abbott, gamekeeper at Pencarrow, but born at Tetcott, informed me, concerning Dogget:

Once they unkennelled in the immediate neighbourhood of Tetcott, and killed at Hatherleigh. This runner was in at the death, as was his wont. John Arscott ordered him a bed at Hatherleigh, but to his astonishment, when he returned to Tetcott, his wife told him all the particulars of the run. Then, said Arscott, this must be the doing of none other than Dogget: where be he?

Dogget was soon found in the servants hall, drinking ale, having outstripped his master and run all the way home.

The ballad above mentioned begins as follows:

To return to Black John. His wonted couch when he could not get back to Tetcott at night was a bed among the reeds or fern of some sheltering brake or wood, and he slept, as he himself used to express it, rolled up, as warm as a hedge-boar, round his own nose. One day he was covered with snow, and found to all appearance dead. He was conveyed to Tetcott and put in a coffin. But as he was about to be buried, and whilst the service was proceeding, a loud thumping noise was heard within the coffin. The lid was removed, and he sat up. He had been in a long trance, but the funeral ride and jolting had revived him, and, said he, When I heard the passon say Earth to earth and dust to dust, I thought it high time to bumpy.

After that he had no love for parsons of the Church or indeed ministers of any denomination, for every one of them, he said, would bury him alive, if they could. Once an itinerant Methodist preacher came across him and asked his way. Black John volunteered to show him a short cut across the park, and led him to a paddock, in which his master kept a favourite bull. He thrust the preacher into it and fastened the gate. What ensued is matter of guess-work. A yell and a bellow were heard, and some object was seen projected into the air over the hedge. Soon after Black John appeared at the Hall with a white tie in his hands, which he gave to his master, and said, This be the vag-ends of the minister all I could recover.

When gout and old age had imprisoned Mr. Arscott in his easy chair, Black John nuzzled among the ashes of the vast wood fires of the hearth, or lay coiled upon his rug like some faithful mastiff watching every look and gesture of his master; starting up to fill the pipe or tankard of old ale, and then crouching again. At the squires death and funeral, the agony of the misshapen retainer was unappeasable. He had to be removed by force from the door of the vault, and then he utterly refused to depart from the neighbourhood of the grave. He made himself another lair, near the churchyard wall, and there he sobbed away the brief remnant of his days.

The story goes that on one long and tremendous chase, Dogget running by his masters horse

On this occasion the chase continued to Penkenner.

In this memorable run, the fox went over the cliffs and the hounds after him; but Arscott and the rest of the hunters drew up, and though he lost his hounds, he did not lose his life. Penkenner is a magnificent and sheer cliff, west of St. Gennys Church. A deep cleft is on one side, and Crackington Cove on the other. There was no possible escape for the fox. As to the sons of the Blue who were in this memorable run with Arscott, of Tetcott, opinions differ.

The versions of the ballad vary greatly. I have had a copy, written in 1820, with explanatory notes. The date of the song is sometimes set down as 1752, sometimes as 1772. The sons of the Blue are taken to have been Sir John Molesworth, of Pencarrow, Bart., William Morshead, of Blisland, and Braddon Clode, of Skisdon. But neither Sir John Molesworth nor Mr. Morshead was, as it happens, a naval man. If the date were either 1652 or 1672, it would fit an earlier John Arscott, of Tetcott, who died in 1708; and Sir John Molesworth of the period was Vice-Admiral of Cornwall; and the sons of the blue were his sons, Hender, Sparke, and John. The second John Molesworth married Jane, daughter of the elder John Arscott, in 1704. It seems probable, accordingly, that the ballad belonged originally to the earlier John Arscott, and that it was adapted a century later to the last John Arscott. The melody to which it is still sung at the rent-audit of the Molesworth estate at Tetcott is a very ancient one, which was employed by Tom DUrfey, in his Pills to Purge Melancholy, 1719, for a song entitled Dear Catholic Brother. I have given it in my Songs of the West.

Since the death of Arscott, he still hunts.

The belief that he is to be heard winding his horn and in full gallop in chase through the park at Tetcott is still prevalent, and there are those alive who assert positively that they have heard and seen him.

Curiously enough much the same belief adheres to Dunsland, and there one of the Bickfords is thought to be the Wild Huntsman. I know of one who is so convinced that he and his hounds rushed past her through the grounds along a certain drive, that nothing afterwards would induce her on any consideration to go along that drive at night.

WIFE-SALES

There is no myth relative to the manners and customs of the English that in my experience is more tenaciously held by the ordinary Frenchman than that the sale of a wife in the market-place is an habitual and an accepted fact in English life.

It is so far as my experience goes quite useless to assure a Frenchman that such transfer of wives is not a matter of everyday occurrence, and is not legal: he replies with an expression of incredulity, that of course English people endeavour to make light of, or deny, a fact that is notorious.

In a book by the antiquary Colin de Plancy, on Legends and Superstitions connected with the Sacraments, he gives up some pages to an account of the prevalent English custom. I heard a country curé once preach on marriage, and contrast its indissolubility in Catholic France with the laxity in Protestant England, where any one, when tired of his wife, puts a halter round her neck, takes her to the next market town and sells her for what she will fetch. I ventured to call on this curé and remonstrate, but he answered me he had seen the fact stated in books of the highest authority, and that my disputing the statement did not prove that his authorities were wrong, but that my experience was limited, and he asked me point blank whether I had never known such cases. There, unhappily, he had me on the hip. And when I was obliged to confess that I did know of one such case, Mais, voilà, mon Dieu, said he, and shrugged his shoulders with a triumphant smile.

Now it must be allowed that such sales have taken place, and that this is so is due to rooted conviction in the rustic mind that such a transaction is legal and morally permissible.

The case I knew was this.

When I was a boy there lived a tall, thin man in the parish who was the village poet. Whenever an event of any consequence took place within the confines of the parish, such as the marriage of the squires daughter, he came down to the manor-house with a copy of verses he had composed on the occasion, and was then given his dinner and a crown. Now this man had actually bought his wife for half a crown. Her husband had led her into Okehampton and had sold her there in the market. The poet purchased her for half the sum he had received for one of his poems, and led her home with him a distance of twelve miles, by the halter, he holding it in his hand, she placidly, contentedly wearing the loop about her neck.

The report that Henry Frise was leading home his half-crown wife preceded the arrival of the couple, and when they entered the village all the inhabitants turned out to see the spectacle.

Now this arrangement was not very satisfactory to my grandfather, who was squire, or to my uncle, who was rector of the parish, and both intervened. Henry Frise maintained that Anne was his legitimate wife, for he had not only bought her in the market, but had led her home, with the halter in his hand, and hed take his Bible oath that he never took the halter off her till she had crossed his doorstep and he had shut the door.