there is more difference between lynmouth and lynton than is found in the mere geographical fact that the one is situated over four hundred and twenty feet below the other; a certain jealousy on the one side and a little-veiled contempt on the other exist. lynmouth people do not speak in terms of affection of lynton. “suburban,” they say, and certainly lynton is overbuilt. moreover, at lynton, although it is on a height, you stew in the sun. it is cooler down below, at lynmouth, rejoicing in the refreshing breezes blowing off the sea.
and there is no doubt that lynmouth prides itself on being exclusive. as already shown, it does not cater for the crowd. up at lynton you are in the world and of the world, and find something of all sorts. lynmouth’s idea of lynton is instructive. it is that of a place where the gnomes work, who labour for the convenience and enjoyment of the village down by the sea: only here you have the paradox that the underworld of these labouring sprites is above, and that the socially superior place is the, geographically, nether world.22 it is only fair to remark that lynton does by no means agree with these estimates of itself, and is indeed, a bright, clean, pretty little town, with its own individuality, and an amazing number of hotels, boarding-houses, and lodgings, the houses mostly built in excellent taste; and i assure you i have seen no such thing as a gnome there. you do not, generally, on the north devon coast, as so often in south devon, find the scenery outraged by a terrible lack of taste, displayed in a plenitude of plaster.
when mr. louis jennings passed this way, about 1890, the cliff railway, or lift, was newly opened, but the lynton and barnstaple railway was not yet in being. lynton, nevertheless, was in the throes of expansion, and he found “the hand of man doing its usual fatal work on one of the loveliest spots our country has to boast of. flaring notices everywhere proclaim the fact that building sites are procurable through the usual channels; this estate and the other has been ‘laid out’; the lady reduced in circumstances, and with spare rooms on her hands, watches you from behind the window-blinds; red cards are stuck in windows denoting that anything and everything is to be sold or let. a long and grievous gash has been torn in the side of the beautiful hill opposite lynmouth—a gash which must leave behind it a broad scar never to be healed.
“‘who has done this?’ i sorrowfully asked the waiter at the hotel.
23 “‘tit-bits, sir.’
“‘who?’ said i, thinking the waiter was out of his mind.
“‘tit-bits,’ the man replied.
“‘well, then,’ said i, ‘what has tit-bits done it for?’
“‘to make a lift, sir. some people complain of the hill, and so this lift will shoot ’em up and down it, like it does at scarborough. they say it will be a very good spec. you see, sir, he came along here and bought the land; and i have heard say that rare-bits is coming too, and means to make a railroad.’”
however, as this horrified traveller was fain to acknowledge, even although these things had come to pass and though the once old-fashioned hotel had been changed into “a huge, staring structure, assailing the eye at every turn”—he meant the valley of rocks hotel—“it will take a long time to spoil lynton utterly.”
very much more has been done to lynton since then, and building has gone on uninterruptedly. the narrow-gauge lynton and barnstaple railway—the “toy railway,” as it is often called, from its rather less than two-foot gauge—opened in 1898, has been a disappointing enterprise for its shareholders, but has brought much expansion. probably it would have been a better speculation had its lynton terminus been in the town, rather than hidden on the almost inaccessible heights of “mount sinai,” another climb of about two hundred feet. the service is24 so infrequent and the pace so slow that, coupled with the initial difficulty of finding it at all, the traveller can perform a good deal of his journey by road to any place along the route, before the train starts. and an energetic cyclist can, any day, make a very creditable race with it.
lynton.
lynton has now become no inconsiderable town, very bustling and cheerful in summer: its narrow street quite built in with the tall “valley of rocks hotel” aforesaid, and a large number of shops and business premises not in the least rural. between them, they contrive to make the old parish church look singularly out of place. that is just the irony of it! the interloping, hulking buildings themselves are alien from the25 spirit of the neighbourhood, but they have contrived to impress most people the other way. “how odd,” unthinking strangers exclaim, as they see a rustic church and grassy, tree-shaded churchyard amid the bricks and mortar; not pausing to consider that the church has been here hundreds of years, and few of the buildings around more than twenty. but there is little really ancient remaining of the church, for it was rebuilt, with the exception of the tower, in 1741, and has been added to and altered at different times since then. quite recently it has again, to all intents, been rebuilt, and fitted and furnished most artistically, in the newer school of ecclesiastical decoration. those who are sick at heart with the stereotyped patterns of the usual ecclesiastical furnisher, with his stock designs in lecterns and an?mic stained-glass saints, his encaustic tiles with an eternity of repetitive geometrical patterns, and indeed everything that is his, will welcome the something individual that here, and in some few other favoured places, may be found to redress the dreary monotony.
everything within lynton church has been smartened up and clean-swept; even the old wall-tablet in memory of hugh wichehalse has been gilded and tended until it glows like a modern antique, unlike the genuinely old relic it is. and since much of the ancient history of lynton and its neighbourhood is inseparable from the story of the wichehalse family, let that story be told here.
in the many old guide-books that treat of26 lynton, it is stated, with much show of circumstantial evidence, that the wichehalses were of dutch origin, and fled from holland about 1567, to escape the persecution of the protestants. we are even told how “hughe de wichehalse” was “head of a noble and opulent family,” and learn how he had fought in the low countries against the persecuting spaniards. harrowing accounts are even given of his narrow escape, with wife and family, to england.
but the supremest effort is the legend, narrated in a score of guide-books, of jennifrid wichehalse and the false “lord auberley,” who loved and who rode away, in the days of charles the first. it is a tale, narrated with harrowing details, of a daughter’s despair, of a tragic leap from the heights of “duty point” at lee, and of a father’s revenge upon the recreant lover at the battle of lansdowne; where, with his red right hand (you know the sort of thing), he struck down the forsworn lord in death. follows then the sequel: how the father, a royalist, was persecuted, and forced, with kith and kin, to put off in a boat from lee. “the surf dashed high over the rocky shore, as a boat manned by ten persons, the faithful retainers of this branch of the house of de wichehalse, pushed desperately into the raging waters. it was never more heard of.”
but that is all fudge and nonsense. there was never a jennifrid wichehalse; still less, if that be possible, was there ever a lord auberley, and the wichehalse family did not end in the way described.27 all those things are doubtless creditable to the imagination of their compilers, but they do not redound either to their sincerity, or to the tepid interest taken in the neighbourhood by past generations of visitors. any cock-and-a-bull story sufficed until recently, but now that local history is acknowledged to be not unworthy of research, it has been proved to demonstration by painstaking local antiquaries that the wichehalses were not dutch, but of an ancient devon stock, and that they consequently could not have been the heroes of those hair’s-breadth ’scapes ascribed to them.
but their own true story is sufficiently interesting. they are traced back to about 1300, to the hamlet of wych, near chudleigh, in south devon, a hamlet itself deriving its name from a large wych-elm that grew there. from the hamlet the family drew their own name, spelled at various times and by many people in some twenty different ways; commonly, besides the generally-received style, “wichelse,” and “wichalls.”
it was in 1530 that the wichehalses first came to north devon; nicholas, the third son of nicholas wichehalse, of chudleigh, having settled at barnstaple in that year. like most younger sons in those days, even though they might be sons of considerable people, he went into trade, and became partner of one robert salisbury, wool merchant, and prospered. robert salisbury died, and nicholas wichehalse married his widow in 1551; prospered still more, became28 mayor of barnstaple in 1561, and lived in considerable state in his house in what is now cross (formerly crock) street. the great wealth he accumulated may best be judged by mentioning merely some of the manors he purchased: those of watermouth, fremington, countisbury, and lynton. to this eminently successful kinsman, the nine children of his brother john, who had died in 1558, were sent, as wards. his own family numbered but two, joan and nicholas, who came of age in 1588.
nicholas, succeeding his father, retired from trade, and is described in local records as “gentleman,” and appears incidentally in them as wounding another gentleman with a knife, in a quarrel. something of a young blood, without a doubt, this young nick. he never lived to be an old one, at any rate, dying in 1603, aged thirty-eight, leaving five sons and three daughters.
large families appear to have been a rule not often broken among the elizabethan wichehalses. it was indeed in every way a spacious era, and one of the most continuously astonishing things to any one who travels greatly in england, and notices the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century monuments in the churches, is the inevitable repetition of family groups, with the reverend seniors facing one another, in prayer, above, and the quakers’ meeting of children below, boys on one side and girls on the other, gradually receding from grown-up men and women, down to babies in swaddling clothes. early and29 late the elizabethans laboured to replenish the earth and people the waste places.
hugh, the eldest son of nicholas, the buck, or blood as i shall call him, was seventeen years of age when his father died. he also had nine children, and resided at the family mansion in crock street, until 1628, when that terrible scourge, the plague, frightened away for a time the trade of the town and such of the inhabitants as could by any means remove. it was a sorry time for barnstaple, for the political and religious wrangles that were presently to break out in civil war were already troubling it. for many reasons, therefore, hugh wichehalse, who appears to have been an amiable person, and above all, a lover of the quiet life, resolved to leave barnstaple and reside at lee, or ley, in the old thatched manor-farm that then stood where lee “abbey” does now. here he died twenty-five years later, as his monument in lynton church duly informs us. the epitaph, characteristic of its period, is worth printing, not only as an example of filial piety, but as an instance of extravagant praise. from what we know of him, he certainly seems to have been the flower of his race; but, even so, he probably was not quite everything we are bidden believe.
hugh wichehalse of ley,
who departed this life
christide eve, 1653,
?t. 66.
30
no, not in silence, least these stones below,
that hide such worth, should in spight vocal grow;
we’ll rather sob it out, our grateful teares
congeal’d to marble shall vy threnes with theirs.
this weeping marble then drops this releife
to draw fresh lines to fame, and fame to griefe:
whose name was wichehalse—’twas a cedar’s fall.
for search this urn of learned dust, you’le find
treasures of virtue and piety enshrin’d,
rare paterns of blest peace and amity,
models of grace, emblems of charity,
rich talents not in niggard napkin layd,
but piously dispenced, justly payd,
chast spousal love t’his consort; to children nine,
surviving th’ other fowre his care did shine
in pious education; to neighbours, friends,
love seal’d with constancy, which knowes no end.
death would have stolne this treasure, but in vaine
it stung, but could not kill; all wrought his gaine,
his life was hid with christ; death only made this story,
christ call’d him hence his eve, to feast with him in glory.
the play upon words, “’twas a cedar’s fall,” should be noticed above: it is by way of contrast to the “wiche”—i.e., wych-elm, in the wichehalse name.
four years before the death of hugh wichehalse, his eldest surviving son, john, had married one elizabeth venner. he distinguished himself as one of the most bitter and relentless among the puritans of barnstaple, and especially as a persecutor of the loyal clergy. he found it prudent in after years to retire to lee, and endeavour to efface himself when the royalists returned to power. whether it was for love he married again, a woman of royalist sympathies, after the death of his first wife, who had been as bitterly puritan as himself, or whether it was policy, does not31 appear; but, at any rate, when he died in 1676, aged fifty-six, he left the family estates much shrunken. the enriched wichehalse family was already on the decline.
his eldest son, john, was an ineffectual and extravagant person, with a bent, that almost amounted to perverse genius, to muddling away his property; and a wife who in every respect aided and abetted him. after a while, they removed to chard, in somerset; then, returning, he sold the manor of countisbury, to pay his debts. he raised repeated mortgages on his other properties, borrowed right and left from his own relatives and his wife’s; and finally, at his death in london, after the foreclosure of mortgages and many actions at law, practically all his lands had been dispersed.
his misfortunes were largely caused, according to popular superstition at the time, by the part he took in the capture of major wade, one of the fugitives after the battle of sedgemoor, on july 6th, 1685. wade and some companions had fled across country after the battle, and, coming to ilfracombe, seized a vessel there, intending to make off by sea. but being forced ashore by ships cruising in the channel, they were obliged to separate and skulk along the coast. at farley farm, above bridgeball and lynmouth, wade was so fortunate as to excite the compassion of the wife of a small farmer named how. she brought food to him, hidden among the rocks, and induced a farmer named birch to hide him in his still more32 secluded farm on the verge of exmoor. information leaked out that a fugitive was concealed in one of the few houses at farley, and on the night of july 22nd, john wichehalse, mr. powell, the parson of brendon, robert parris, and john babb, one of wichehalse’s men, searched the place. three houses were entered unsuccessfully, but in the fourth—which happened to be birch’s—major wade was hiding behind the front door, as the search-party, armed, came in. grace how admitted the party. wade, who was disguised in philip how’s rough country farmer’s clothes, ran off through the back door, with two other men, and john babb, raising his gun, fired and hit him in the side. wade was made prisoner. his wound was healed, and himself afterwards pardoned. it is a pleasing thing to record that he afterwards pensioned grace how, who had succoured him in time of need.
the only tragedy of the affair was the suicide of birch, who, afraid of his part, hanged himself some few days after the capture.
this affair deeply impressed the country-folk. wichehalse was thought never after to have prospered, and it was told how john babb was thenceforward a man accurst. he left his master’s service and went into the herring-fishery; whereupon the herrings deserted lynmouth. he died unhonoured, and his granddaughter, ursula babb, was afflicted with the evil eye. she married and had one son, who was drowned at sea; and thenceforward lived lonely at lynmouth, half-crazed;33 telling old stories of the departed grandeur of the wichehalses which grew more and more marvellous and confused with every repetition. it was she who told the reverend matthew mundy the legends, which he took down and first printed—with many embellishments of his own—of jennifrid’s leap.
there was never (let it be repeated) a jennifrid wichehalse. the feckless john wichehalse, who ruined the family, had three sons and one daughter. the sons died without issue; the last vestiges of the family wealth being dissipated in their time by the effectual means of a chancery suit. mary, the daughter, married at caerleon one henry tompkins, and had one son, chichester tompkins. she returned, in a half-demented condition, to lynmouth, and was used to wander along the cliffs, the scene of her ancestors’ former prosperity, accompanied by one old retainer, mary ellis. at last mary tompkins fell over a steep rock into the sea, her body never being recovered; and so ended the last wichehalse. to-day, in spite of those large families of the various wichehalse branches, you shall not find one of that name remaining in devonshire.
to-day the newnes’ interest dominates lynton. i shall draw no satirical picture of what has been made possible by the elementary education act of 1869 and tit-bits. such an alliance carries a man into unexpected horizons, but with so many richmonds now crowding the field, the thing will not be so easily repeated. on the crest of holiday34 hill stands the residence of sir george newnes, bart., and in the town the town hall he gave is a prominent object: picturesqueness itself, in its combined gothic and jacobean architectural styles, and contrasted masonry and magpie timber and plaster.
there is always, in the summer, a cheerful stir in lynton, and the railway has by no means abolished the four-horsed coach that plies between ilfracombe and this point, and even on to minehead. but when the close of the season has come and the holiday world has gone home, what then? the hotel-keepers and all the ministrants to the crowds of visitors must surely, to protect themselves from sheer ennui, institute a kind of desperate “general post,” and go and stay with each other, on excessive terms, to keep their hands in, so to say.
