Page:Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries.djvu/316

 D^on Notes and Queries. 229 188. On Some Traditions, still current, concerning THE Robbery and Murder of the Revd. Gilbert Yarde, M.A., for 36 years Rector of Teigngrace, at Whiteway, in the parish of King's Teignton, in the year 1783, in the 71st year of his age. Nearly 43 years have elapsed since I went into residence in the vicarage of Dunsford, and, throughout that long period, fragments of old and mostly disjointed tradition relating to a crime, which created a great sensation at the time when it was committed, have occasionally been repeated in my presence. First one person and then another has more or less directly alluded to some incident connected with that crime as, on various errands bent, I have traversed the fair country whicht watered by the Teign, is situated to the westward of the lesser Haldon hills. BafBed in several resolute attempts to obtain not only detailed but official information on the subject— yet assured by an article in the Exeter Flying Post (May ist, 1783) of their general truth — I now venture to piece together the stories I have heard, in the hope that some reader of this note may be able to supply that accuracy which, of necessity, my narrative must lack. It is said, then, that in the early springtime of the year 1783, and during the long incumbency of a clergyman named Becke, who was Vicar of King's Teignton for 60 years (1748- 1 798), there was staying at Whiteway, which was his property, an old clergyman of the name of Gilbert Yarde, whose sister was married to the aforesaid Mr. Becke. This Mr. Yarde was Rector of the neighbouring parish of Teigngrace, his wife was named Elizabeth, he was at this time 70 years of age, and was presumably an eighteenth century squire-parson. He was an ancestor of the present owner of Whiteway, the Rev. J. T. Yarde, of Chudleigh, to whom I am much indebted for information. He probably farmed his Whiteway property himself, and resided at intervals both there and at Teigngrace, but I do not know certainly where he was buried. Although he was an eighteenth century squire-clergyman, and therefore, according to our present estimate of progress, probably ignorant as compared with ourselves, yet he seems to have been something of a scholar, for when John Greenslade,