is not, however, my intention to speak of the great mansions of the nobility, but of those of the squirearchy, who are in residence on their estates all the year round.
These houses are elements of considerable blessing to the country. The families of the squires are always in the midst of the people, know the history, and wants, and infirmities of every one. They care for the good of the district. The ladies look after the girls; the squire attends to the condition of the roads and bridges; money is freely spent in the district, and a considerable amount of culture and moral restraint is acquired by those in the classes below, in the farm-houses and the cottages. Such only who have been in parishes that have been for generations squireless, and also in those where a resident family has been planted for centuries, can appreciate the difference in general tone among the people.
Should the time come when the county family will be taken away, then the parish will feel for some time like a mouth from which a molar has been drawn—there will be a vacancy that will cause unrest and discomfort. The molar does not grind and champ to sustain itself alone, but the entire body to which it belongs, and it is much the same with the country squire.
Sydenham House, Devon.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were far more resident gentry in the country than there are at present. The number began to dwindle in the eighteenth century. The registers of parishes are instructive in this respect. In a parish there may have been but a single manor, nevertheless there were in it some three or four gentle families, of as good blood as the lord of the manor, inhabiting bartons. Let us take a parish or two as examples. Ugborough in South Devon has valuable registers dating from 1538. In the sixteenth century we find in them the names of the following families, all of gentle blood, occupying good houses—the Spealts, the Prideaux, the Stures, the Fowels, the Drakes, the Glass family, the Wolcombes, the Fountaynes, the Heles, the Crokers, the Percivals. In the seventeenth century occur the Edgcumbes, the Spoores, the Stures, the Glass family again, the Hillerdons, Crokers, Coolings, Heles, Collings, Kempthornes, the Fowells, Williams, Strodes, Fords, Prideaux, Stures, Furlongs, Reynolds, Hurrells, Fownes, Copplestons, and Saverys. In the eighteenth century there are only the Saverys and Prideaux; by the middle of the nineteenth these are gone. The grand old mansion of the Fowells that passed to the Savery family is in Chancery, deserted save by a caretaker, falling to ruins. What other mansions there were in the place are now farm-houses.
Let us take another parish—Staverton. That had in it the grand mansion, Barkington, of the Rowes, who owned other estates in the same parish, in which were settled junior branches of the same family. All have vanished, root and branch. The Woolstones had a noble estate there. They are represented now by a clergyman in the neighbourhood. The Prestons were estated there also; they are gone, and their place knoweth them no more. My own family had two good houses there, Coombe and Pridhamsleigh, from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Both were sold at the end of last century. The Worths of Worth had estates and a house there, and have only a fine monument in the church to testify that they ever lived and died there. In another book I have mentioned the instance of Bratton-Clovelly, where were the Coryndons, Burnabys, Ellacots of Ellacot, Langfords of Langford, Calmadys, Willoughbys, Incledons—all gone, and not one of their houses remaining intact.
The country gentry in those days were not very wealthy. They lived very much on the produce of the home farm, and their younger sons went into trade, and their daughters, without any sense of degradation, married yeomen.
In South Devon, at Slapton, lived in state the Amerideths, deriving from Welsh princes. Griffith Amerideth was the first to settle in Devon; he was a tailor and draper in Exeter, and died in 1559. He married a daughter of a very good family, and his son married the eldest daughter of Lewis Fortescue, one of the Barons of the Exchequer, and his grandchildren married into the Fortescue, Rolle and Loveys families, all of greatest position and fortune in the West.
It has been claimed for the Glanvilles that they are of Norman extraction; they, however, became tanners at Whitchurch, where their tan-pits remain to this day, though their mansion has lost all trace of antiquity. Chief Justice Glanville, who came from this house, and died in 1600, gave it splendour, yet his brother and nephew were not ashamed of the tan-pits, and even allowed a daughter of the house to marry a Tavistock blacksmith, and entered him as "faber" in the pedigree they enrolled with the heralds. The Courtenays of Molland married their daughters to farmers in the place. When, a few years ago, the late Earl of Devon visited Molland, he met a hale old yeoman there named Moggridge. He held out his hand to him; "Cousin," said he, "jump into the carriage with me, and let us have a drive together; we have not met for one hundred and eighty years." When the Woolstones of Staverton registered their pedigree, they considered that there was nothing to be ashamed of to enter one daughter as married to a "clothier," another to an "agricola"—a yeoman.
It was quite another matter when one of the sons or daughters was guilty of misconduct; then he or she was struck out of the pedigree. I know of one or two little domestic scandals to which the registers bear witness, and I know that in such cases those who have stained the family name have not been recorded in the heralds' book. But that Joan who married a blacksmith, or Nicolas who was an armourer in London should be cancelled—God forbid!
My own conviction is, confirmed by a very close study of parochial registers, that some of the very best blood in England is to be found among the tradesmen of our county towns.
I know a little china and glass shop in the market-place of a small country town. The name over the shop is peculiar, but I know that it is one of considerable antiquity. In the reign of Henry VII. a Jewish refugee settled in Cornwall. His son, a barber-surgeon, prospered, and became Mayor of Liskeard. His children married well, mostly with families of county position, and a son settled in the little town I speak of, where he married one of the honourable family of Edgecumbe. And now the lineal descendant of this man, in the male line, keeps a little china shop. I know—what perhaps he does not—his arms, crest, and motto, to which he has just claim.
Let us take another instance. When the lands of the Abbey of Tavistock were made over to the Russell family, on one of the largest farms or estates that belonged to the Abbey was seated a family that had been for a long time hereditary tenants under the Abbot. In the same position they continued, only under the Russells. In the reign of Elizabeth or of James I. they built themselves a handsome residence, with hall and mullioned windows, and laid out the grounds, and dug fish-ponds about this mansion. They also acquired lands of their own; amongst other estates a house that had belonged to the Speccots. They produced a sheriff of the county in the eighteenth century. As late as 1820 they were seated in their grand old mansion. Then—how I cannot tell—there came a collapse. They lost the house and lands they had held since the thirteenth century; the Duke of Bedford pulled down the house, and the family is now represented by a surgeon, a hairdresser, and a hatter. The coat of arms borne by this family is found in every book of heraldry, it is so remarkable—a woman's breast distilling milk.
Sir Bernard Burke, in his Vicissitudes of Families, tells the pathetic tale of the fall of the great baronial family of Conyers. The elder line became extinct in 1731, when the baronetcy fell to Ralph Conyers, Chester-le-street, a glazier, whose father, John, was grandson of the first Baronet. Sir Ralph intermarried with Jane Blackiston, the eventual heiress of the Blackistons of Shieldun, a family not less ancient. His eldest son, Sir Blackiston Conyers, the heir of two ancient houses, derived from them little more than his name. He went into the navy, where he reached the rank of lieutenant, and became on leaving the navy collector of the port of Newcastle. He died without a son, and his title and property went to his nephew, Sir George, whose mother was a lady of Lord Cathcart's family. In three years this young fellow squandered the property and died, leaving the barren title to his uncle, Thomas Conyers, who, after an unsuccessful attempt at a humble business, in his seventy-second year
