Motor Tours in the West Country 19

Motor Tours in the West Country 19

Our good road takes us on, through Williton, to the foot of the

Quantocks, with the sea and the distant Welsh shore upon the left.

Beyond the railway we bear round to the right and drive below the green

and purple slopes of the hills that were loved and often trodden by

Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Hazlitt, the hills on which the writing

of the _Ancient Mariner_ was planned. At Crowcombe among the trees there

is a tall cross in the village, and a beautiful one in the churchyard,

and a porch with fan-tracery. About three miles beyond this we may turn

aside for a moment to Combe Florey, and see the old red manor-house of

the Floreys with their three flowers over the gateway, and the village

where Sydney Smith’s blue pills were a doubtful blessing, and the church

where he preached, and the vicarage on the hill, where he tried to impose

upon his London visitors by fastening antlers to his donkeys’ heads. It

was here that Henry Luttrell spent a day with him. “He had not his usual

soup-and-pattie look,” wrote Sydney Smith, “but a sort of apple-pie

depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman.… He was very

agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup.”[19]

 

At Bishop’s Lydeard is a church that is fine enough in itself to wile us

from the highway. The bishop who gave it its name was the learned and

literary Asser, who has told us himself how King Alfred asked for his

friendship, which indeed seems to have been worth having. “He asked me

eagerly to devote myself to his service and become his friend, to leave

everything I possessed … and he promised he would give me more than an

equivalent for it in his own dominions.” This manor of Bishop’s Lydeard

was part of the equivalent he gave, when Asser, after some hesitation,

left St. David’s and came to be Bishop of Sherborne. Having forsaken

the main road to see the splendid tower of this church, and the painted

screen and bench-ends, and the tall cross in the churchyard, we may as

well drive on a little further to the very foot of the wooded Quantocks,

to the church and manor-house of Cothelstone. For many centuries this

land was owned by the Stawells, who have left their cross-lozengy above

the house-door and in the church; and in later years it became the home

of Shelley’s blue-eyed daughter, Ianthe. As we pass the outer gateway,

on which two of Jeffreys’ victims swung in Lord Stawell’s despite, we

can catch a glimpse of the inner gatehouse and of the red-tiled roof and

Jacobean doorway beyond. This is but a fragment of the old manor-house,

for when that “loftie proud man,” Sir John, raised four troops for

Charles I. he was sent to prison for it, and his house was brought low by

Blake.

 

There is a letter still existing, yellow now with age and very fragile at

the folds, in which Sir John’s bailiff writes to him piteously concerning

this disaster. “The cruell and base dealyng,” he says, “wch is now acted

at Cothelstone doth astonish and amaze all people wch do either see it or

heare of it; for they have now taken downe all the Leads of the house …

and have already taken downe that part of the house wch is over against

my Ladye’s garden.… I am very sorry that ther is occasion gyven me to

make soe sadd a relation unto you.… I beseech God to send us better

tymes.” It was in the eighteenth century that this restored wing of the

old house passed to the Esdailes, ancestors of that Edward Esdaile who

married Shelley’s daughter.

 

Behind the house is the church that was once the private chapel. It has

some carved bench-ends and some old glass, but its special features are

the two beautiful tombs in the south chapel: the finely carved figures

of a fourteenth-century Stawell and his wife, with their painted shields

below them, and the still more beautiful Elizabethan tomb with the

effigies of marble. In a corner of the churchyard is a white stone “in

sweet memory of Ianthe.”

 

Again we return to our high-road, and this time do not pause till

we drive into the market-place of Taunton, the quiet centre of a

country-town, where cabbages are bought and sold, and loitering cabmen

smoke their pipes without a thought of Monmouth or of Jeffreys. Yet some

of these very houses were wreathed with flowers at the coming of the

foolish duke: here where the fountain is he stood and smiled while the

pious maids of Taunton, made rebels by his handsome face, gave him a

Bible, and a fine banner of their own working, “One would have thought

the people’s wits were flown away in the flights of their joy.” Here

he was proclaimed King James and called King Monmouth, and here his

followers paid for their ill-placed devotion in torrents of blood. Into

this market-place came Kirke and his Lambs with their victims in chains;

and over there at the corner of Fore Street and High Street stood the

“White Hart,” whose signpost was the gibbet. Hither came Jeffreys of the

sinister face. “He breathed death like a destroying angel,” says Toulmin,

“and ensanguined his very ermines with blood. The victims remained

unburied; the houses and steeples were covered with their heads, and

the trees laden almost as thick with quarters as with leaves.” He went

in to his monstrous work through that arch with the embattled towers;

and passed on through the inner entrance of yellow stone, where Henry

VII.’s shield and Bishop Langton’s are above the door. Within it is

the great hall, with the timbered roof and the whitewashed walls that

were hung with scarlet while Jeffreys, “mostly drunk,” stormed at his

victims of the Bloody Assizes. The little girl--she was hardly more than

a child--who had won Monmouth’s easy smiles by her speech among the June

flowers in the market-place was ransomed with her schoolfellows; but her

sister had seen the Judge’s face, and died of the terror of it.

 

[Illustration: TAUNTON CASTLE.]

 

Such are some of the memories of quiet, prosperous Taunton. Nor is the

rest of its long history much more placid. The eighth-century castle

of wood to which King Ina of the West Saxons called his “fatherhood,

aldermen, and wisest commons, with the godly men of his kingdom, to

consult of great and weighty matters,” only survived for twenty-one

years. In the twelfth century the Bishop of Winchester built another,

which was improved and enlarged by his successors, and has partly

weathered the many storms and stresses of its long experience: Wars of

the Roses, invasion by Perkin, and the siege of the Civil War. Taunton

held for the Parliament, consistently, but at the first not very stoutly.

No sooner did the royalists come near the town, says Clarendon, than

two “substantial inhabitants” were sent out to treat with the general;

while the garrison settled the matter by departing, like Perkin on a

former occasion from the same castle, “with wonderful celerity.” A year

later, however, the Parliament took Taunton again, and making Blake its

defender, kept it. For Blake, who afterwards summed up a sailor’s duty

in memorable words--“It is not for us to mind state affairs, but to

keep the foreigners from fooling us”--knew the duty of a soldier too.

“As we neither fear your menaces nor accept your proffers,” he answered

the summons to surrender, “so we wish you for time to come to desist

from all overtures of the like nature unto us.” Wyndham, Goring, Hopton,

Grenville, all did their utmost in vain. It remained for Charles II.’s

spite to ruin Taunton’s defences. The castle that defied the King was

dismantled, and the town-walls utterly wiped away.

 

Of the Augustinian Priory that was founded by Bishop Giffard of

Winchester and supported by so many noteworthy people--by Henry de Blois

and the Mohuns, Montacutes and Arundels, William of Wykeham and Jasper

Tudor--there is nothing left but a barn, the priory church of St. James,

and the splendid chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, now the parish church. The

graceful tower from which Macaulay looked out over a land flowing with

milk and honey was shortly afterwards taken down, but the present one,

with its three tiers of Decorated windows and its pinnacles and parapet,

is exactly copied, it is said, from the original.

 

From Taunton we pass, through pretty undulating country, by way of Hatch

Beauchamp to Ilminster. After the wild scenery of Devon this quiet land

is not exciting; but there are pleasant woods here and there, and the

villages of Somerset need fear no comparisons with any in England. The

towns are less attractive, except in the matter of churches. Ilminster,

for instance, is clean and old-fashioned, but has no real beauty save

the church of yellow stone with the fine tower. When Monmouth made his

successful progress through this country in his youth, from hospitable

house to flower-strewn town, he came to this church one Sunday morning

from White Lackington. He saw the tower with the triple windows and Sir

William Wadham’s fifteenth-century transepts; but the nave has been

rebuilt since then, and betrays the fact. In the northern transept is the

enormous tomb of the builder, inlaid with brasses; and near it is the

ponderous but unlovely monument of Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, founders

of Wadham College. They “lie both interr’d under a stately monument,”

says Prince, “now much defaced, the greater is the pity, by the rude

hands of children and time.”

 

At the outskirts of the town is Dillington House, where Mr. Speke

entertained the popular duke when he came to Ilminster. We pass the

entrance to the park as we drive out upon the road to Yeovil--the park

whose palings were broken down by the crowd that surged about Monmouth,

when he rode in with his self-constituted bodyguard of two thousand

horsemen. Our progress, if greeted with less enthusiasm than his, is

quicker. We spin through dull scenery upon a splendid road till the bluff

outline of Hamdon Hill comes into sight. For a moment we touch the Fosse

Way, then swing slowly round the base of the hill through Stoke, and see

St. Michael’s Tower above us on the right.

 

It was this sugar-loaf hill that prompted William de Mortain the

swashbuckler to name his castle Montacute, when he built it where the

tower now stands. His father Robert de Mortain, who had come successfully

through many battles with the standard of St. Michael borne before him,

regarded that saint as the particular patron of his family. It was he

who dedicated “the guarded Mount” in Cornwall and gave the monastery to

its namesake in Normandy, “for the health of his soul.” His son, whose

piety was peculiarly spasmodic, not only built his castle here, but

founded the Cluniac priory whose lovely fifteenth-century gatehouse still

stands at the foot of the hill. Everything at Montacute is lovely: this

gatehouse with the oriel windows and the towers and creepers: the church

with its many styles of architecture, from Norman to Decorated: the

village square with its houses of warm yellow stone, and all its windows

made beautiful with drip-stones and mullions: above all, the splendid

Tudor front of Montacute House, and its formal, parapeted garden.

 

The Summer-land, as we leave it, is not beautiful, nor is Yeovil an

interesting town. But the road is very good; the engine is singing

softly; and as for us--we are remembering