7. Bewitched in East Budleigh! (3)

Continued from  
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/10/bewitched-in-east-budleigh-2.html

Top: The 1840 sign marking the foundation of a National School in Colaton Raleigh; the attractive-looking Drake’s School in nearby East Budleigh was built in 1860, though the first teacher was appointed in 1851

The village of Colaton Raleigh may have had a school as early as 1840 but overcoming countryside traditions such as belief in witchcraft through education was not achieved overnight.  

Credulity and prejudice continued to plague society, especially single women.  The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette of 24 April 1852 reported that Susannah Sellick, a 70-year-old widow from Colaton Raleigh, was accused of witchcraft and attacked by Mary Pile and Walter Gooding from the neighbouring village of East Budleigh.

In the subsequent investigation it was revealed that Gooding had attempted to drive a nail into the ground where Susannah was standing in the belief that this would break her power. Mary Pile explained to the court that she needed to draw blood from the ‘witch’ who had cast a spell on her 20-year-old daughter Amy.

The couple were fined, the magistrates complaining that this was the third case in as many months where elderly women unjustly accused of witchcraft had been assaulted. 

Dark reputations were made by such accusations. Eight years later, poor Susannah was attacked again in a case reported in the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser of 18 July 1860.  This time she complained that a lace-maker, Virginia Ebdon, had maliciously assaulted her in Colaton Raleigh, drawing blood. Susannah’s version of events was again accepted by the court and her assailant was fined.

The Church of St John the Baptist, Colaton Raleigh 

No further attacks on her were reported and she lived to the great age of 96, being buried at Colaton Raleigh on 23 March 1879.

The case of Susannah Sellick was revealed in great detail in Willow Winsham’s  book ‘Accused: British Witches Throughout History’ published by Pen & Sword Books Ltd in 2016. You can read a version of the case at http://winsham.blogspot.com/2014/12/

St Michael's Church, Otterton 

A similar case at around the same time of a woman from the  neighbouring village of Otterton is quoted by Owen Davies in his book Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736-1951, published by Manchester University Press in 1999. 

Sadly, the East Budleigh mill where Roger Conant was born is no more. But in the nearby village of Otterton the Mill, pictured above, still grinds corn and is open to visitors. A watermill was recorded in this locality in Domesday Book in 1068 AD 

In 1858 the elderly and 'half-witted' Mary Ford from Otterton was inevitably blamed when a young man and his future bride were taken with fits. Friends of the couple attacked Mary, leaving her with stab wounds; a subsequent investigation by the authorities led nowhere as nobody came forward to denounce the criminals. All believed that Mary was guilty of witchcraft.

This map, taken from Eric Delderfield's book 'The Raleigh Country' shows the area in which Roger Conant was brought up. The villages of East Budleigh, Otterton and Colaton Raleigh can be seen on the right, as can Budleigh Salterton - generally known in past times as Salterton

Small wonder that the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette’s  account ended with a lamentation that witchcraft is very prevalent amongst the illiterate in the Colaton, Salterton and Woodbury area.

And today? After all you’ve read you’d be forgiven for thinking that Roger Conant country is still rife with spells and pagan rituals.

Of course it’s not.

A sextet of scarecrows at East Budleigh's festival

The village does have a scarecrow festival of course. I was tempted to draw an admittedly uneasy parallel between this and Thomas Hardy’s portrait of the reddleman on Egdon Heath in ‘The Return of the Native’ – a diabolical figure, his clothing and flesh saturated with the red dye that he sold as redding for the sheep grazing beyond the heath, and, in Prof Tilley’s words ‘a traditional bogeyman for children’.

But it seems that the notion of the scarecrow as some kind of pagan manifestation, a survival of ancient pre-Christian fertility customs, is a modern myth. 

‘There is insufficient evidence to suggest that scarecrows were anything other than a useful measure to control animal pests in an agricultural setting, although many of them no doubt ended up on end-of season bonfires,’ writes Cardiff University’s Dr Juliette Wood in an online article ‘The Great Scarecrow in Days Long Ago: Gothic Myth and Family Festival’ https://www.juliettewood.com/papers/scarecrow.pdf

East Budleigh's All Saints Church, where the Conant - and the Raleigh families - worshipped.  

Image credit: Peter Bowler  

In any case East Budleigh’s Scarecrow Festival is organised by the Friends of All Saints Church.

Ironically, it’s in this ancient church that you find the above relic  which has clear pre-Christian associations. The corbel of the central pier of the northern arcade is carved with a ‘Green Man’ motif below a cornice of four-leaf decoration. The National Churches Trust comments that the motif is one of the most powerful and enduring pagan symbols and was originally a Celtic fertility symbol.

A trio of bench ends in All Saints Church, East Budleigh.

Is the figure on the left really depicting the punishment of a tale-bearer? It has been described as eating a banana!  

Why and when was the central bench end bearing the Raleigh arms defaced? Did the image of the ship really inspire young Walter Raleigh with his overseas exploration?

All Saints Church is celebrated for its 60 carved oak Tudor bench ends, dated 1537. Some of them raise interesting questions.  You can read in detail about them at

https://www.ova.org.uk/article/carved-bench-ends-all-saints-church-east-budleigh

The bench end pictured above possibly depicts a second ‘Green Man’ much admired by visitors. Writing his 2010 article for the Otter Valley Association, David Jenkinson described the carvers as influenced by the threatening mythical creatures of the Dark Ages, including such examples as the wodewose and boggarts or malevolent spirits of the fields.  

Others, like Budleigh Salterton’s eminent Dr T.N. Brushfield, in his 1892 study of the Church of All Saints, noted that the figure ‘bears some resemblance to, and has been called, the decorated head of an Indian.’

‘It’s hard not to think “Red Indian!” writes Hilary Bradt, the Devon-based founder of the Bradt Travel Guides, seeing the figure on the bench end as wearing what seems to be a feathered headdress.

‘A sailor returning from the New World would have remembered the more flamboyant aspects and perhaps described them to local craftsmen,’ she suggests.

‘But the “feathers” could also be foliage,’ she admits in deference to followers of the ‘Green Man’ theory.

Yettington resident Hanneke Coates, who contributed to a guide to All Saints Church, definitely shares the view that the bench end depicts a North American Indian.  ‘That of course is completely different from what the historians write,’ she told me. ‘But I’ve spent a long time studying and drawing the bench ends and I know them intimately.’

Whichever view you favour, they both seem appropriate against the background of the links currently being forged between Roger Conant’s home village of East Budleigh and the American community of Salem in Massachusetts that he founded. 

It's known today as the Witch City.

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.

  

6. Bewitched in East Budleigh! (2)

Continued from 
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/10/bewitched-by-east-budleigh-1.html

Safely back after a wander on our East Devon ‘Egdon Heath’, with thoughts of pagan rituals forgotten, you’re heading perhaps towards the comforts of the excellent Sir Walter Raleigh pub.

The double yellow lines protecting those displays of plants make for a reassuringly tranquil scene on the village High Street with its pink and white thatched cottages.  

East Budleigh has had well deserved success in floral competitions over the years.

But a few years ago I did spot a voice of protest raised by 'An East Budleigh garden wildlife-lover' as shown in this poster at a window on the High Street.  

Where was the decay and disorder which are part of the natural order of things, it asked. Manicured gardens were no habitat for a proper variety of wildlife, including creepy-crawlies.  Hedgehogs – which I now know are one of the animals that witches turned into – had ‘gone with the wind’ lamented the poster.   ‘And we haven’t seen a toad or a frog for years,’ it continued. 

Above: A 16th century woodcut showing a witch feeding her toad familiars. The image is reproduced in various books regarding witchcraft, including a publication dealing with the witch trials of Elizabeth Stile, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell and Mother Margaret in Windsor, 1579 

Well, we know from historical records that any elderly lady in countryside communities of the past, spotted in the company of a toad, would be likely to end up on the gallows.  Prof Mark Stoyle, author of the 2017 book ‘Witchcraft in Exeter 1558-1660’ commented on the large number of cases involving toads. 

‘One unfortunate old woman was spotted by a neighbour sitting by the fire with a toad in her lap, and that was enough to condemn her.’  

And if you haven’t quite forgotten Thomas Hardy’s story of heathland witchcraft you may well give a second look at this sign next to the ancient holly tree on East Budleigh High Street. 

Back in 2009, film maker Sandra Sykes included it in a series of films made by production company Changing Views, highlighting intriguing stories surrounding famous old trees in the beautiful East Devon countryside.  She described it as a ‘mark tree’, probably marking the boundary between two hamlets which have merged to form the village we know today. There was no written record of it, she discovered, ‘but as we hear, village folklore is so strong that no one dares to cut or even trim it!’
  

It's true that ‘beating the bounds’ to mark boundaries is a centuries-old custom in many English parishes, usually led by a priest and church officials.  

Even more ancient as recorded by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder is the belief that the holly tree protected against evil.

It’s a belief passed down through the centuries.  ‘Pliny saith, the branches of the tree defend houses from lightning, and men from witchcraft,’ wrote the famous herbalist Nicholas Culpeper in his 1652 book ‘The English Physitian', a page of which is shown above.

Above: V.C. Clinton-Baddeley. Image credit: Sherborne School Archives

Yes, belief in witchcraft does seem to have been particularly strong in Devon. 

The Cambridge-educated actor and author Victor Clinton-Baddeley (1900-70), born in Budleigh Salterton and buried in East Budleigh churchyard, devoted 15 pages to the subject in his study of the county, published in 1925. 

‘Here is a people still living in comparative isolation – at least little troubled as yet with the cold arguments of cities and factories,’ he wrote, explaining that, in the 20^th century, ‘witchcraft is still believed in.’

The many examples that Clinton-Baddeley quotes in his book ‘Devon’ do not include this curious monument at the crossroads half a mile or so outside East Budleigh village and known locally as the Brick Cross. I learnt that the original cross dates from 1580 when the Sheriff of Exeter ordered the burning of a witch at the site. 

Former local resident David Leyman comments: 'The story that "everyone knew" is that the witch was burnt there because it was at the junction of three parishes - East Budleigh, Yettington and Bicton and nobody in any of the parishes wanted her in their ground. This was considered neutral. The accepted name of the witch was Anne Morris or Marrish. All this is passed down aurally; there is, as far as I know, no documentation.'

Another local, Stanley Anniss, has vivid memories of the Brick Cross from his childhood: 'As kids we believed it to be haunted,' he wrote. 'On a dark winter's night, if I missed the bus from Otterton to East Budleigh after Wolf Cubs, I would run like mad past it imagining all sorts of things!!!'

David Leyman helpfully provided a transcription of the religious text on the four faces of the Brick Cross: 

"Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace." (West Face)  "Make us to go in the paths of thy Commandments for therein is our desire." (South Face)

"O that our ways were made so direct that we might keep thy statutes." (East Face)  "O hold thou up our Goings in thy Paths that our Footsteps Slip not." (North Face)

'This appears to be an object lesson in not turning to witchcraft for any solution to our problems but to rely on God only,' he commented. 

The Devon Witches plaque at Rougemont Castle, Exeter, where these poor women were tried for witchcraft

The 16^th and 17^th centuries saw the highpoint of persecution throughout Europe. Exeter has the shameful distinction of being where the last people in England were executed for so-called witchcraft; three women - Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles from Bideford - were hanged in 1682, while Alice Molland was executed in 1685. 

Hanging and burnings ceased, but credulity remained, even in the Age of Enlightenment.  At a time of imagined miracles and belief in varieties of witchcraft one of Devon’s celebrities was the so-called prophetess Joanna Southcott, pictured above. She was revered by tens of thousands of her followers as a saint but equally mocked as an imposter.

Born near Ottery St Mary in 1750, she was a farmer’s daughter brought up in a family where her grandmother was famous locally for interpreting dreams, mixing potions and dispensing protection against evil spirits.  In her forties Joanna Southcott developed a reputation for prophecy, eventually publishing her writings which became best-sellers. 

By 1811, still unmarried, she had become the centre of a cult; thousands of followers believed her prophecy that at the age of 61 she would bear a Christ of the Second Coming, to be named Shiloh.  From all over Britain she received gifts for the expected child from her Southcottians as her followers were called. Many of these gifts are on display at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. 

Sadly for Mother Joanna, as she became known, nothing came of the hoped-for pregnancy and she died on 27 December 1814.  For three days her followers waited for her to rise again, as she had prophesied, but finally she was interred in a cemetery in Marylebone, London.

A 19^th century engraving of Budleigh after C.F. Williams and dedicated to Lady Rolle by the R.B. Paine Library, Salterton  

It’s interesting to note that Southcottians could be found even in increasingly fashionable Devon seaside resorts. The Taunton Courier newspaper of 15 January 1815 ridiculed what it described as the ‘astonishing fooleries committed by the Bedlamine followers of Joanna Southcott.’  

These included, the newspaper reported, ‘watch-papers curiously wrought in lace, by the female manufacturers at Budleigh Salterton, on which were designs emblematical of the miraculous pregnancy of the Old Lady!’*

*Watch papers are round decorative papers placed between the inner and outer case of a pocket watch to protect its inner workings. They also served as advertisements for watchmakers as they often included names and addresses along with elaborate designs.

Continued at 
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/10/bewitched-in-east-budleigh-3.html

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5. Bewitched in East Budleigh! (1)

 

View of East Budleigh, looking east towards Peak Hill and the sea

This blog is called Conant 400, but you’ll have to excuse me if I wander a bit while exploring the surroundings in which the founder of Salem grew up.  

I like to think that what I write here will be of interest to people who have never set foot in East Devon, but who might be tempted to do so, even if they’ve heard of it simply as ‘The Raleigh Country’.

And some might find that this post is just a bit too whimsical for words.  

Above is a photo I took of Roger Conant’s charming home village of East Budleigh, seen from one of my favourite walks

You don’t have to go too far from the village  before finding yourself on Woodbury Common, or more precisely the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands.  

An undulating landscape of gorse, heather and  pebbles – millions of them – stretching for miles.

Picturesque in many ways, but for some, including me, suggestive of deeper and even hostile elements.  Maybe that plaintive cry of the buzzard has something to do with it. 

Did you know that those gorse bushes – so pretty when in flower -  have been blamed for two deaths in recent years, including that of a young and healthy Royal Marine recruit?

I find that a painting by Alan Cotton in Fairlynch Museum’s collection entitled ‘Otter Valley Evening Light’, looking towards Woodbury Common on the horizon conveys this idea of a landscape as ‘a dark, brooding creature’.  Alan lives only a few miles from Roger Conant's birthplace of East Budleigh     http://www.alancotton.co.uk/

Too fanciful for words? That description comes from this 474-page recently published study of our local heathland by anthropologist Christopher Tilley.*  

Christopher Tilley with one of the many pebbles I've dug up in my garden - not all as massive as that one

Professor Tilley has been fascinated by East Devon’s pebbles for many years. Not just the pretty ‘sugared almonds’ or 'buns' on Budleigh’s celebrated beach, but all those left by the huge river which, about 250 million years ago, flowed through East Devon and southern England. 

It began somewhere in Brittany and terminated in the Midlands; it takes in my garden in Budleigh Salterton where I admire but sometimes curse the pebbles that it left in its path when I’m digging a new plant border.

Chris Tilley’s book ‘Landscape in the Longue Durée’ is based on the results of a four-year archaeological research project in the East Devon pebblebed heathlands, which was the subject of an exhibition at Budleigh Salterton's Fairlynch Museum in 2011.

One of his conclusions was that to prehistoric people these extraordinarily colourful pebbles had magical power. 

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and the 1929 edition of 'The Return of the Native' published by Macmillan

The above portrayal in Professor Tilley’s book of a heathland landscape as ‘a dark, brooding creature’ is actually used to describe a fictional area invented by the West Country author Thomas Hardy in a celebrated 19^th century novel.  

Professor Tilley has ‘a firm belief that we have much to learn about landscapes from novelists as an antidote to the sometimes impoverished accounts that archaeologists and historians provide’. In his view Hardy is the principal ‘historian’ and ‘ethnographer’ of the English lowland heathland such as we find in East Devon and Dorset.   

Hardy's cottage at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset

Image credit: Peter Trimming

Hardy was born and brought up on the edge of the Dorset heathlands. His 1878 novel ‘The Return of the Native’ is set on Egdon Heath, an imagined place based on at least a dozen different heathland areas in the southeast of the author’s home county. 

It's been said that the author's choice of themes — sexual politics, thwarted desire, and the conflicting demands of nature and society — makes this a truly modern work.  It certainly raised some eyebrows in Victorian Britain when it appeared in serial form in the magazine 'Belgravia' — a publication known for its sensationalism — before being published as a book.   

Hardy’s description of Egdon Heath's wildlife, traditional heathland occupations and — as Chris Tilley puts it — ‘the deep-rooted and enduring pagan customs of its inhabitants’ all combine to create what is generally considered to be a powerful character in its own right in the novel.  

Even the bushes on the Heath contribute to the general spookiness: in Hardy's words, they ‘whistled gloomily and had a ghastly habit after dark of putting on the shapes of jumping madmen, sprawling giants, and hideous cripples’.   

A ‘poppet’ of stuffed fabric in Edwardian-style black dress with stiletto through face, South Devon, England, 1909–13.  Image credit: The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle.  This image was widely used to publicise the Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Spellbound 2018-19. I wonder where it was actually found. 'South Devon' is often used to include East Devon!

Prof Tilley notes that Eustacia Vye, one of the central characters in the novel, is believed by some heathland people to be a witch; one of them, Susan Nonsuch, makes an effigy of her out of beeswax and pricks it with pins to protect her son. 

Hardy writes of maypoles, mummers and dancing around a fire lit on top of a Bronze Age barrow, ostensibly to mark Guy Fawkes Night.  

His description of this heathland fire festival emphasises its pre-Christian orgins: ‘it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder plot’. **

For Prof Tilley, it’s as if ‘The Return of the Native’ could have been set in Roger Conant’s homeland. ‘Replace topographical and geological details and Hardy’s Egdon Heath could be the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands,’ he concludes. 

Ronald Frederick Delderfield (1912-72) lived in various places in East Devon, including Exmouth, Budleigh Salterton and Sidmouth 

The only East Devon author of stature who could have matched Hardy in bringing so brilliantly the heathland to life is R.F. Delderfield.  But really there is no comparison. 

Of course the author of ‘To Serve them all my Days’ and ‘Diana’ was born in London.

* Prof Christopher Tilley’s book ‘Landscape in the Longue Durée - A History and Theory of Pebbles in a Pebbled Heathland Landscape' was published in 2017 by UCL Press. You can download the book free at https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/94977 

** Interestingly, for Hardy fans, the late John Paterson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, noted that Hardy’s original manuscript in the description of dancing at East Egdon, read:  ‘Christianity was eclipsed in their hearts, Paganism was revived, the pride of life was all in all, they adored themselves & their own natural instincts.’ The reference to the eclipse of Christianity, which appears in the 1878 serial edition of the 'The Return of the Native' published in the 'Belgravia' magazine was omitted in the first edition of the book. Clearly, Hardy felt that some Victorian readers would object.   

Continued at 
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/10/bewitched-in-east-budleigh-2.html

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.