Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/270

260[February 13, 1869] reach of any spade; so treasures often lie unnoticed under our very feet.

Swift ply the black wings through the ebb and flow of the blue air, over the fine tower of Stockleigh Pomeroy, and the grand umbrageous trees of Shobrook Park, and the crow alights softly on the central tower of Crediton Church. "Kirton," says the local proverb, "was a town when Exeter was a mere range of furze and thorns," but ages ago ancient Britons, looking from Down Head, Posbury Hill, or Blackadown, saw houses clustering here beside the river Creedy. Anglo-Saxons, with axes at their belts, and spears in their hands, must have boasted, just as Kirton men now do, of the rich Lord's meadow of Sandford, and that of all the hay in Devonshire, there was no hay like Kirton hay, and of all Kirton hay, no hay like the hay of the Lord's meadow. In that broad pasture stretching down to the Creedy river the red Devons revel, as well they may, on the thick flowers and the fresh juicy grass.

Crediton was the birthplace of one of the greatest of the Saxon saints, Winfred—better known as St. Boniface—the first preacher of Christianity in central Germany, and the founder of the famous monastery at Fulda, in Hesse Cassell. This saint, educated at Exeter, travelled to Rome, received a commission from Pope Gregory the Second in 719, and then went as a missionary into Bavaria and Norwegia, and preached Christianity amid the forests to the half savage hunters of those early ages. On his return to Rome he was made first bishop to the Archbishop of Germany, still preaching among the wild tribes, and founding churches whenever the worshippers of Thor would permit him. He built the Abbey of Fulda, in 746, but, still untiring, bravely left his abatial splendour to plunge again among the savage Germans, and venturing into Friesland was slain with all his monks and cross bearers in the summer of 755. His works fill a dusty shelf still in old ecclesiastical libraries. Boniface was a great pioneer of civilisation among the German forests, and the fellow-countrymen of Luther owe him gratitude. This Devonshire martyr is the patron saint of innkeepers (probably in his travels the worthy man learned to value a good hotel, and on his return perhaps established an inn or two) and hence his worship by the class. For several hundred years after his martyrdom Crediton, then famous for woollen manufactures (now driven out by shoemaking), remained the seat of the Devonshire bishops.

In 1549, when the Roman Catholic peasantry broke out into rebellion, and bore the crucifix aloft through many a Devonshire town, the rebels gathering, too, at Crediton, built up a great barricade of carts, timber, and stones at the town's end, and fortified some barns adjoining. Sir Peter and Sir Jarvais Carew, riding from Exeter with a score or two of lances, desired to "have speech of the rebels," but, being denied access, dashed at the barricade, and either set the barns on fire, or compelled the rebels to burn them to prevent their being held against them. The rebels after this always took "the barns of Crediton" as their rallying cry.

The church at Crediton, in 1315, was the scene of one of those spurious miracles contrived in the middle ages to rouse the zeal of the country people. The bishops of Exeter used to reside here, and preside in the collegiate church over the stalls filled with stately rows of eighteen canons and eighteen vicars. In August, 1315, at the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula, while Bishop Walter Stapledon (afterwards torn to pieces by a London mob) was celebrating mass, a blind man, who had been praying far away from the splendour, glitter, and perfume of the central altar, before a side shrine of St. Nicholas, suddenly recovered his sight. Some temporary attack of ophthalmia had at last passed away. The cry of "a miracle! a miracle!" passed from worshipper to worshipper, till it reached the bishop, who instantly held a chapter in the Lady Chapel, proclaimed it as a bonâ fide miracle, and ordered the bells to instantly clash out a thanksgiving. The man was a fuller, of Keynsham, who had lost his sight in the previous Easter week, and had dreamt that he would be cured if he should visit the Church of the Holy Cross at Crediton.

In the south chancel aisle is the altar tomb of Sir John Sully, a knight who fought up and down Picardy, Saxony, and Spain, side by side with the Black Prince, and, in spite of storms of sword strokes, thousands of spear thrusts, rains of arrows, and many smashing experiences among maces and war hammers, lived till he was upwards of one hundred and five, and was then left here calmly to his rest; and on the north side of the chancel Sir William Peryam, a chief baron of the Exchequer of Elizabeth's time, sleeps near him.

Now to the ivied bastion of old Rougemont the crow bears right on, and from the ruined citadel of Exeter surveys the grand old cathedral, the great carved tomb of so many illustrious dead, and the twenty-one tributary parish churches. Julius Cæsar, who is said to have built the Tower of London, is reported to have set his hands to work at masonry here also. It is supposed that some of the Saxon kings next inhabited Rougemont, and issued from thence their fiery menaces to the rival potentates of Dorsetshire and Wiltshire, and the hostile Britons of Berkshire. Then came the Dukes of Cornwall, one of whom figures in King Lear, and of whom the less said the better, history being rather oblivious about that branch of the early English peerage. The rough conqueror came here, too, swearing his great oath, "Fulgore Dei," and beat at the gates of Rougemont. He altered the castle to show his power, and then gave it to the first Earl of Devon, the husband of his niece Albreda. In Stephen's troubled reign (one long battle indeed), the king attacked it, and burnt the outer works, and so tormented the garrison with fire that they had to empty all their wine