by Grant Allen
With the growth of the mediæval export trade in wool, the city advanced rapidly in size and importance. But at the close of the thirteenth century it received a serious check to its commercial prosperity, which for a while threatened to prove as disastrous as the rise of Liverpool has proved to Chester, or as the rise of Hull has proved to York. Isabella de Redvers, to revenge herself upon the citizens, built the obstruction at Topsham, still known as Countess Weir, so as completely to cut off the city from its navigable water-way. Under Hugh Courtenay, Topsham became commercially all that Exeter had once been. The burghers, however, did not lose heart; and after two centuries of lawsuits and fruitless endeavour, they at last cut the ship canal from Topsham to Exeter, in the reign of Henry VIII. — a work of remarkable spirit and enterprise for such an age. The cathedral city speedily regained its former greatness, and was erected into a royal port by Charles II. It resumed its position as the chief mart for woollen goods and serges in the West of England, being described by Defoe as second only to the Brigg Market at Leeds. The handsome Elizabethan Guildhall bears witness to this revived prosperity. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the country gentry were acquiring the habit of keeping up a town-house but had not yet centralised themselves on London, Exeter became the fashionable centre of the west, where many county families passed the winter. But at the same time, its trade began to decline, partly from the slight draught of water at the quay and partly from the northward determination of all commercial enterprise towards the coal and cotton country. Woollen fabrics no longer went away from the basin “in whole fleets.” Still, Exeter has survived the change far better than most other practically disused ports; its position makes it the natural receiving and distributing centre for the two main fertile districts of Devon, and it is the only large town between Bristol and Plymouth, so that it necessarily attracts to itself the mercantile interests of a wide intervening tract. The extension of the railway system, on which it is an important junction, and the growth of considerable watering-places or health resorts at Torquay, Exmouth, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Newton, and Ilfracombe, as well as the large tourist traffic to Dartmoor and the North Devon coast, have each tended to advance its fortunes; and at the present day Exeter has still all the appearance of a prosperous and rapidly growing city.
ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE
I. KING’s PEDDINGTON
The ancient borough and decayed seaport of King’s Peddington lies in a sunny corner of a southern shire whose exact position its present historian has no intention whatsoever of disclosing, seeing that he himself has taken up his abode there because of its total retirement from the pressing cares and noisy turmoils of a too civilised world. It possesses its first name in contradistinction to the neighbouring village of High Peddington, which stands a couple of miles farther up the river Churn; and it owns its distinctive prefix to the fact that it was a royal manor in the days of Richard II., when its upper namesake was still a dependency of the Cistercian monks of Churney Abbey. King’s Peddington stretches over the alluvial flat where the little river bursts through a shingle bank into the sea; and its old stone pier is still frequented by a few fair-weather fishing vessels — trawlers of small burden and less draught, which suffice to supply the local demand for soles and lobsters in the neighbouring country. At a distance of a mile or so on either side the red sandstone cliffs rise boldly above the valley to a considerable height, but between them a rich and alluvial plain fills up the whole hollow cut through the hills by the Churn and its tributaries, and stretches backward for some ten or fifteen miles into the agricultural parishes at the rear. These low-lying fields form a splendid pasture for sheep and neat-kind, while the slopes of the marly hills are covered in summer by heavy crops of corn, shading into barley as we reach the uplands above.
Alluvial levels of this sort are predestined, as it were, for human occupation; and it is not surprising, therefore, that from the earliest age of mankind the Churn valley around King’s Peddington should have formed a natural centre for the homes of men. Even during those very ancient times when naked black savages, with prominent muzzles and shaggy eyebrows, alone inhabited the earth, such primeval hunters in person snared the mammoth and chased the reindeer over the lowlands of the Churn, and their [rough] hatchets may yet be occasionally picked up in the drift which covers the whole plain to a depth of many feet. They found their game most abundantly in the glades and thickets by the riverside. At a far later date, the brown Euskarians formed a village and a stockade beside the water’s bank, and a long barrow covering the remains of one of their chieftains stands out even now as a prominent landmark against the sky-line of Churnside Hill. The Euskarians were an agricultural and pastoral people, who had learned to polish their stone implements, to make pottery and cloth, to domesticate dogs, kine, and sheep, and to cultivate wheat, barley, and mullet. The long barrow was once opened by the Peddington Archæological Association, and in it was found the entire skeleton of the chieftain himself, together with the cleft skulls and scattered bones of the human victims sacrificed at his tomb — the wives and slaves whose ghosts were to serve him in the other world as they had already served him here on earth. With them lay mingled and huddled the horns of oxen and deer consumed at the funeral feast, together with the pieces of charred wood employed in cooking them. The long skull of the chieftain himself and of his murdered slaves sufficiently stamped the race to which they belonged; the polished greenstone axes, the amber beads, and the rude drinking-cups gave a clear idea of their civilisation. The country people point out the barrow as an “ancient British tomb” and connect it with some schoolboy nonsense about Druids and misletoe. But in reality the tumulus of Churnside Hill has nothing at all to do with the ancient Britons, if by that expression we mean the old Celtic inhabitants of the island, who spoke a language akin to modern Welsh. The men who raised it were short, swarthy, black-haired people, speaking a non-Aryan tongue, and sharply marked off by the form of their heads from their later conquerors, the Celtic Britons. If they have any unmixed representatives in modern Europe those representatives are to be found in the stunted folk of the Basque country, in the short dark race of Brittany, and in the “black Celts” of Connemara.
The little Euskarian colony which occupied the lower Churn Valley entered Britain, like the rest of their race, by a broad bridge of land which still connected the modern island with the mainland of France and Belgium. One small group, pushing westward as far as this spot, settled in the alluvial level by the seashore, while two other petty communities have left their traces higher up the dale at Churney and Brookford Bridge. On either hand the hills were thickly covered with dense forests, where lurked the great game which formed no inconsiderable share of their food supply; but in the centre of the valley itself a little clearing, laboriously hewn out by the polished stone axes, with the occasional aid of fire, made a platform, as it were, for the village and stockade, with its close rows of neatly thatched square and circular huts. For each colony stood apart from all others, as they do even now in New Guinea or the Central Indian hills; and between them stretched a mark or girdle of forest, at once the hunting ground and the sacred frontier of the tribe. The tribesman who returned through it from a fowling expedition announced his coming by loud coo-eys, lest he should be mistaken for a scout from some hostile village; the stranger who was found stealing through secretly was hacked in pieces on the spot with tomahawks and flint knives. Between the ring of virgin woodland and the group of huts lay the tilled clearing — a small plot of ground rudely sown with wheat; while just beyond, on the outskirt of the forest, the dogs watched over the flocks, and gave warning of approaching or hostile tribesmen. Yet these Euskarian savages had a certain settled polity of their own: a chief whose barrow rose after his death on the highest hill in the neighbourhood, and a strict subordination of inferiors implied by the massacre of slaves at the chieftain’s tomb. They had insignia of rank in the amber necklets and carved wooden clubs; and no doubt the village head-man lived
in a larger hut than his fellows, placed in the very centre of the circular stockade. They had religious ideas, too, as one sees from the evident traces of belief in another life, though their religion had hardly got farther as yet than the practice of a sort of Dahomey custom over the grave of their dead chieftains. Their culture was fairly advanced, when we judge by a neolithic standard. They span wool and flax with spindle and whorl, and they wove it in a rude loom. The stone whorls may be picked up still on the site of the old village, in a field about half a mile from King’s Peddington, and the children keep them to the present day as charms against the evil eye. They mined for flints in the chalk which caps the highest cliff along the coast; and they used grindstones to give their weapons a proper polish. They fashioned hand-made pottery, and ornamented it with rows of dots. And they dug out canoes from logs of wood, which they rowed with flat paddles, exactly like those of the New Zealanders in our own time.
The Churnside Hill barrow and the circular depressions where the huts once stood are not the only relics of the Euskarians which occur in the Peddington district. On the top of the opposite hill an old earthwork, now half eaten through by the sea, hangs on the very edge of the mouldering cliff, and gives us a further glimpse of Euskarian manners. Its irregular outline and workmanship, as well as the implements picked up in it, sufficiently vouch for its origin. This earthwork, universally known hereabouts as the British Camp, formed the place of refuge in time of invasion for the population and cattle of the villages below. Probably it was the common property of the three little colonies which occupied together the Churn Valley. So long as none of their neighbours came on the war trail against their herds and their homes, the three little tribes lived comfortably in the rich bottoms, where they could obtain abundant water and fuel and cultivate the deep alluvial soil in their simple fashion. They quarrelled among themselves, no doubt, at such times, especially over their respective rights of hunting in the common mark. But when a stronger tribe from the larger valley of the Eden, just behind, crossed the watershed and descended upon their lesser dale, they hastened to make friends again and to oppose a united front to the invader. Every man took his own family and his own cattle up to the camp, each carrying with him his separate store of water and provisions. There they stayed while the invaders burned their huts, reaped their corn, carried off their movables, and enslaved the old men and the superfluous women whom they had left as useless mouths in the village below. But if the enemy tried to storm their fort, the Churnside men defended their stronghold with energy and resolution. They kept up a fire of arrows and sling stones against their assailants, and cracked the heads of the bolder among them with club and tomahawk as they endeavoured to cross the fosse and scale the rampart with its tall crest of wooden palisades. The round pebbles used for slinging, the carefully chipped arrowheads, and the polished axes have all been discovered among the rubbish which forms the earthwork. Something of this sort, then, was probably the first page in the long annals of King’s Peddington. Yet perhaps the most curious fact about it all is this, that mixed descendants of those self-same swarthy Euskarians are undoubtedly living on at King’s Peddington to the present day, in spite of Celtic, Roman, and Teutonic conquests; and the eye of an ethnologist can pick out the Euskarian features at once, in more or less diluted forms, among a good quarter of the children who now attend the Board School in the Vicarage Road.
II. MANBURY CASTLE
Above the left bank of the Churn, beyond Churnside Hill, rises a higher and much more conical knoll or beacon, known to all the country side as Manbury Castle. Throughout the whole south-western district of England, a prehistoric earthwork is universally called a castle; and Manbury Castle is such an earthwork, of a far more pretentious character than the rude and shapeless Euskarian stronghold on the broken edge of the mouldering cliff. Its name alone sufficiently proclaims its Celtic origin [?]; for though bury is good English for a hill-fort, man is a common Celtic word for a stone — the Welsh mæn, whose debased form is familiar to us all in such compounds as the Old Man of Coniston. This regular oval rampart, with its labyrinthine entrance defended by special outworks, marks a great advance in the art of warfare upon the simple irregular Euskarian palisade; while the bronze hatchets and spearheads, rarely found among its fosses, mark an equally great advance in culture upon the rude Euskarian clubs and stone axes. At some unknown period, after Britain had become severed from the Continent by the breaking down of the isthmus which once joined Kent to Flanders and Picardy, a branch of the tall white Aryan race made its way into the island in open canoes, and began with fire and sword the subjugation of the short and swarthy Euskarians. These Aryans were Celts by family, and they brought with them, of course, the distinctive Celtic culture, such as it was. They had learned on the Continent the method of making and casting bronze, and the bronze weapons with which they were armed made them easily superior to the small dark indigenous race, with their stone hatchets and wooden clubs. In a very short time, no doubt, the Celtic chieftains and their long-haired followers had walked over the greater part of Britain, and everywhere subdued or slaughtered the helpless natives. Ireland, it is true, they only colonised in small numbers; and even in Great Britain they left a branch of the dark race, afterwards known as the Silures, in possession of the wild Welsh hills, while another body held out bravely in the most rugged part of the Scotch Highlands. But throughout the greater portion of the English lowlands and river-valleys the Celtic chieftains established their rule almost without opposition, spreading over the self-same rich and cultivable districts which were afterwards occupied in like manner by the Teutonic conquerors, and leaving the wildest mountain regions to the Euskarians, as the Teutons afterwards left them to the Celts themselves. For, in the matter of ruthless and selfish aggression at least, history does truly repeat itself; and the successive stories of Celt, Englishman, Scandinavian, and Norman — of Ireland, South Africa, and Polynesia — are only the same old tale repeated again and again under slightly different disguises.
In Churnside, however, as in the rest of England, the Celts did not wholly exterminate the native dark race. Doubtless, when the advanced guard of the bronze-weaponed men poured over the downs that bound the little valley and burst upon the astonished aborigines, who could have expected nothing worse than a scalping and harrying inroad of their old familiar foes in the vale of Eden, they murdered the Euskarian chieftain in his stockade, and killed such of his warriors as offered them any definite resistance. But they probably settled down quietly afterwards in the ready-made village, and appropriated to themselves the women and children, and the remnant of the men, as slaves, just as they appropriated the land, the huts, the cattle, and the sheep. Doubtless they brought few of their own wives with them; and so, to some extent, the fair-haired Celt and dark-haired native slowly coalesced. Certainly at a later date we find the two races amalgamated; though the long skulls of the Euskarian serfs may often be found side by side with the broad Aryan skulls of their Celtic masters in positions where the nature of the interments shows the respective status of the two races. One can trace to-day the Euskarian characteristics in many of the Churnside peasantry, especially in the upper part of the valley; while at King’s Peddington itself the fair and round-headed English type is now far more common. Still, the fact remains indubitable that in Churnside, as in Yorkshire, in East Anglia, and in so many other places, fragments of the Euskarian population still survive into our own times, more or less mixed with the later Celtic and Teutonic blood. Yet the Euskarian tongue died out so utterly, as the slaves were quickly Celticised, that not a single word, not a single local name even, [seems to have] lived on into modern Welsh and English.
The Celtic invaders largely changed the aspect of the Churn Valley. Their bronze axes enabled them to cut down the forest far more thoroughly than their swarthy predecessors had been able to do with their quartzite hatchets. Thus, instead of clearing a few isolated patches only, they cleared the larger part of the dale along the course o
f the river, and planted it with grain, or laid it down in grazing enclosures, which of course soon supported a considerably larger population than that of the three original colonies. Accordingly, the round enclosure or dun of Manbury Castle is calculated for holding many more families and cattle than the primitive earthwork on Churnside Hill. Nor is this the only mark of higher development to be found at Manbury Castle. Though it stands in the same relation to the valley of the Churn as did the earlier work, it stands in a very different relation to the valley of the Eden beyond. Under the Celtic rule these two little neighbouring dales were no longer hostile to one another; they formed parts of the territory belonging to a single tribe, a tribe far larger than any of which the narrower Euskarian mind could ever have dreamed. Looking northward and eastward from the summit of the rampart, you can see five high downs, crowned by five other “castles,” ringing round the whole horizon, each of them bearing a name of equally indubitable Celtic etymology. These five earthworks form part of a great semi-circle of defences running across the downs for seventy miles, from the sea on the west to the sea on the east, and guarding the frontier of the Katuriges — as we call them in our Latinised Welsh — the Celtic tribe who occupied the valleys of the Churn, the Eden, and half a dozen other considerable streams. The narrow valley of Churnside required but one such hill-fort, or dun; but the larger vales to eastward are often supplied with six or seven, where the inhabitants might retire with their cattle on the approach of the hostile Burdonians beyond the highest range of downs. The Burdonians on their part had a similar system of frontier forts, which show in like manner an immense advance in political integration. In every case the valleys of half a dozen hostile Euskarian tribes became under the more warlike and more civilised Celts the principality of a single central chieftain.