The old almshouses, for five poor men in Gold-street, were built by the same John Greenway who did so much for the church, and they are enriched in the same elaborate and quaint manner. They are quiet harbours for the last moorings of five old men, apart from the noise and conflict of the world. On the wall of the chapel are the lines:
Have grace, ye men, and ever pray
For the souls of John and Joan Greenway.
The eagle on a bundle of sticks (a nest), Greenway's device, is still to be seen here.
Tiverton is famous for its factory and its fifteen hundred lace makers. Devonshire was always famous for this human spider work, so graceful and so fragile. The famous Honiton pillow lace has been now superseded by cheap machine-made bobbin net; but machinery does not think as the hand does, and the result is far less refined and intellectual. Devonshire lace making was first introduced by fugitive Flemish protestants in the reign of Elizabeth.
A short flight lands the crow on to the Grecian portico of Silverton Park, not so much because the great Greek building belongs to the Egremont family, as because it enshrines that portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which the worthy Devonshire man painted in his honest pride and delight at being elected mayor of his native town—"an honour which he used to say had given him more pleasure than any other he had received during his life." His father had been master of the great school of Plympton. The corporation disgracefully sold this palladium of theirs to the fifth earl of Egremont for one hundred and fifty pounds.
A skim over the Egremont shrubberies brings the crow to Bickleigh Court, once a seat of the Carews; now only a farm house. The place recals a thousand legends, dear to schoolboy days, and not without some charm now, of that ingenious and half-crazed vagabond, Bamfylde Moore Carew, "the king of the beggars." Carew, the son of the rector of Bickleigh, was born seven years before the accession of Queen Anne. Bamfylde's scrapes began at Tiverton, where he led the stag hounds over some corn fields, and then ran away from school to avoid punishment. He joined some gipsies, and soon became conspicuous among them by his skill in disguise and begging, and his fondness for the wild, free, yet dissolute and lawless life.
Soon after being chosen king of the beggars, Carew was arrested at Barnstaple, sent to Exeter, and their, without trial, sentenced to transportation to Maryland for five years. At this time transported men were sold to the planters. Carew soon escaped from his master, and, flying to the woods, got among the Indians, and was helped by them on towards Pennsylvania. On returning to England, Carew, occasionally visiting his family in disguise, continued his career of beggar and small swindler, passing off as a shipwrecked sailor, broken-down farmer, or old rag woman; occasionally owning himself to friends of his family, and rejoicing quite as much in his own ingenuity and the success of his disguises as in the money he obtained. He is said, in old chap books, to have made money by successes in the lottery, and to have eventually returned to Bickleigh, and died there in 1758.
It seems remarkable how such a book as the Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew could ever have remained a popular chap book for a whole century; for, except his adventures among the Indians, and the narrative of his two transportations, the biography is little but a series of tricks to extort money. One day he was an old beggar woman laden with children, in her arms and on her back; the next day a burnt-out blacksmith, the day after a rheumatic miser. A mad Tom, a shipwrecked sailor, or a rat-catcher, Carew could assume any disguise at a moment's notice, always to the confusion of justices of the peace and the bleeding of the benevolent. The editor of one edition of the Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew thinks it necessary to defend his hero. "The morality of our hero," he says, apologetically, "is obvious in the various reflections he makes as he finds himself in different situations. His lessons are from the vast volume of nature; and though he passed but for a beggar, yet he often appears to have possessed every charm of the mind, and what is more worthy of praise—those better qualities of the heart, without which the others are but frivolous." Modern readers find in the rogue's adventures no trace of anything but promptitude and ingenuity.
A mile or two from Bickleigh the crow flits down to Cadbury Castle, on its isolated hill, where Romans once encamped, and which in 1645 Fairfax's army occupied. It looks across the Exe to another height called Dolberry, in Killerton Park. There is an old distich about these two hills:
If Cadburye Castle and Dolbury Hill delven were
All England might plough with a golden share.
The country people declare that a flying dragon, snorting and breathing fire, has been seen at night flying towards these two hills, guarding the great treasure hid in them by kings and warriors long dead. It is singular that there is another Dolberry on the Mendips, and that a rhyme almost similar gives hope of treasure there also. The time has no doubt come when a systematic investigation of all such localities as Dolberry should be made. The result would be in many cases as profitable as it would be interesting. From Cadbury many camps can be seen. They lie thick around Woodbury, Sidbury, Henbury, Dumpdon, Membury, and Castle Neroche, in Dorsetshire—all these the warriors of Cadbury may have wished to watch and supervise. The enclosure, with a circumference of about five hundred yards, has two fosses. In the first one there is a pit six feet deep, probably intended to collect rain water. It was excavated in 1848, and a curious finger ring, some gold bracelets, and styles for writing of late Roman character were found in it. They had been there for centuries within
