SKIMMINGTON, EXETER, 1834

From The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette," 1st February 1834:

John Hawkes - a young gentleman of somewhat frightful appearance, having his physiognomy variegated with stripes of blue, red and white, tastefully painted in oil colours. - John Pulman , and Samuel Lamb, were brought up, charged with disorderly conduct in West-Street, on Friday last.

"It appeared that the wife of a certain butcher in the West quarter of the city, had been supposed to be guilty of impropriety, and the gallant gentry of that neighbourhood determined to give it publicity by adopting the ancient but riotous practice of skimmington; accordingly, nearly 500 persons assembled (after receiving a caution from the police) with two donkeys, a tri-coloured flag fastened to a long pole, decorated on the top with rams' horns gilded in a superior style: the painted man, in gaudy attire, being placed on one of the animals; various pranks and much noise ensued, which greatly disturbed the peace;  the officers soon interfered and took some of the delinquents into custody.  Pulman was very much intoxicated, and when apprehended chose rather to ride to the Guildhall than to walk quietly.  Lamb was requested to help the police, instead of which he knocked off an officer's hat.

"The Bench fined Pulman and Lamb 5s. each and liberated Hawkes, a pauper of St Thomas, as he was of unsound mind, after cautioning him not to become the tool of such parties in future."

Thank the Fates there are no skimmintons these days!  This 1834 skimmington in Exeter seems to have been organised to humiliate a cuckolded butcher and his wife but such riotous processions had for centuries been used by the mob to take what they saw as corrective measures against all kinds of perceived misdemeanours.   As in Hardy's skimmity-ride in the Mayor of Casterbridge, the cruelty of such mindless attempts at rough-justice seems today to be shocking, dangerous and despicable.   But, wait a minute!  Isn't there a parallel here with the modern thinking that political incorrectitude can be rooted out by those who are 'woke' enough to raise a mob online?  The potential of social media for skimmingtons is frightening!

This skimmington in the West-quarter of Exeter is a classic:  a pole, a tricolour (of revolutionary France presumably), gilded rams' horns, two donkeys and John Hawkes, a pauper of unsound mind, face-painted  and sitting on one of them and thereto five hundred unwashed citizens.

'Skimmington', ( the word is not nearly as old as the rough-ride - first recorded 1666 )  is of obscure origin but might have to do with the wooden spoons with which nagging wives traditionally beat their subordinate husbands.  (cf. Punch and his Judy?)   My own guess though would be a  Mr. or Ms. Skimmington  long, long ago deemed to be 'guilty of impropiety'    

NORTHERNHAY GARDENS AGAIN CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC, EXETER, OCTOBER 2022.

 I am publishing these two posts again because the gates to Northernhay Gardens are once again locked against the people of Exeter for whose recreation the gardens have existed for four hundred years.  

The Council of our glorious city have already given the keys to the same people who damaged the park last Christmas.   It will be locked until 18th November.  (25 days!)  What incredible arrogance!

Remembrance Sunday will again be celebrated by Semper Fidelis, if permitted by the key-holders, on a building site.

After 18th November until the New Year, it will be open to the public only as and when the Fairground Providers wish.   It will not again be the Gardens as they should be until after the New Year.

Even then it will be closed to the public for many more days while the Fairground people seek to restore the damage that will inevitably be done. 

O EXETER!

1.  THE RAPE OF NORTHERNHAY.  26th SEPTEMBER 2022.

So, rumour has it, there is to be a repeat of 'Winter Wonderland' in Exeter's unique Northernhay Gardens.   I would not be surprised!  The city-council appears not to have a ha'porth of imagination. The scars of the last 'wonderland' have not yet healed.  

Last year the park was turned into a construction site.  It was closed, effectively, to the people who

appreciate it as a public park for seventy-two days and later closed again in favour of the great lizards.  

Last year Exeter's Remembrance Sunday was, somewhat farcically, observed, by kind permission of the winter wonderlanders, at the edge of a half-constructed funfair.  (The county's remembrance  in the cathedral-close was not much more dignified.  It was tainted by the booths of the sons of Mammon,  - but that's a separate issue!)

The governors of Devon's county-town seems to have a hankering for the lowest-common-denominator.  Exeter, the city, not the suburbs where the councillors live, has many advantages.  A castle famed in story, pleasing city walls, a most ancient guildhall,  where now the homeless lay their weary heads, a grand Victorian museum (ditto),  catacombs with neglected potential, underground passages, a brilliant riverside - more potential there! though the Quay is one thing that has been well done,  a green belt where funfairs and circuses could hold sway and do no harm,  (although some attraction less short-term would make more sense .)  and the one glorious valley-park,  miraculously preserved to the people, which is Northernhay, and which for at least three months of the year is being consistently denied to the people whose free inheritance it is and to visitors to our city.  

The Gardens are becoming shabbier and shabbier because of lack of intelligent management and common-sense policing.  (They no longer have a dedicated manager nor a dedicated team of gardeners. - and dedication is what is sorely needed!)  

Their future calls for some deep-thought and the Council's new games of neglecting them as gardens, using them as a site for vulgar amusement, limiting access wherever possible, wiring off footpaths and installing, very costly no doubt, close-circuit television cameras are not going to help.

2. PLASTIC DINOSAURS,   26th MAY 2022.   

The time-honoured Northernhay Gardens, as I write, are full of plastic dinosaurs.  Until June 16th the Gardens will be closed to the public except for those times the Amusement Company from Essex which has brought the plastic dinosaurs to Exeter, chooses to open them and no member of the public will be permitted to walk in the Gardens without paying.

These Gardens are exceptional.  They are a remarkable inheritance, a remarkable survival.  We are so lucky to have them!  They are not just any park.  They could make the city of Exeter celebrated far and wide.  Together with Rougemont they offer the most wonderful 'castle walk'.  Properly gardened and cared for they would attract visitors from all over the country and beyond.  They are also the place, the 'Valhalla', where Exeter remembers those Exonians who died in war and those men whose philanthropy benefitted the city.  They are simply much too precious to be closed to the public and farmed out to 'Amusement Companies'. 

A similar constraint of the traditional liberties of the people took place at Christmas/New Year 2021/2022, when the park was for seventy-two days transformed from it's traditional ideal, viz. a charming walk for weary citizens and a playground for the young, to become an unprepossessing  funfair.  The shocking fact is that for a quarter of the last twelvemonth the Gardens qua gardens will have been inaccessible to the public.

It used to be accepted that the Gardens were one of the city's glories.  Visitors, including monarchs, were invited to admire the wonderful 'Grove' which thoughtful, famous gardeners and responsible city government maintained and improved.    

Both these new, undignified, commercial initiatives, the dinosaurs and the funfair, break new ground.  For more than four centuries, with negligible and largely benign exceptions, the Gardens have been freely accessible to citizens of, and visitors to, Exeter.  Once they were described as perhaps being : "the most romantic walk in Europe."   Alas, no more!       

The Exeter City Council, which cable-ties its notices to the Gardens' proud Victorian ironwork gates but which never gets around to giving them a lick of paint,  appears to have the right to close the Gardens to the public whenever it chooses for whatever purpose.   This would seem to be the law and, in this, the law would seem to be an ass!  

The Council's responsibilities to the Gardens; on the other hand, are not being met.  The reputed 'danger' from the 'unsafe' castle walls has not been tackled in three years,  ugly steel fencing is everywhere, the statues need repairs and cleaning, the plants and trees are sadly neglected, nothing is planted, the bandstand is unpainted and unused, the noticeboards carry ludicrously out-of-date notices, the 'maps' have been vandalised, access to Rougemont Gardens is blocked, the park is crying out for good designers, for good gardeners, for good management.  

The distressing  anti-social behaviour in the Gardens is not controlled:  litter lies for days on the lawns,  grafitti regularly appear on the monuments, including the castle walls, radios are played at high volume and unsocial hours, the homeless sleep beneath the trees, 'disturbed' citizens 'act out' and do unchecked damage, there are nefarious (often criminal) midnight practices, of which the City Council is well aware.  Nothing of this is being controlled or dealt with.  The Gardens are not policed.  The regulations that exist are simply not enforced.

The 'events' will, of course, be hailed as a success.  Nearly everybody loves a funfair  (as do I)  and there is no harm in a few plastic dinosaurs fom Essex.  Little children with happy faces will jump all over the Gardens and the Amusers and the Council will make money.  But why Northernhay?  What a short-term betrayal of the generous traditions of four hundred years of a glorious and free (but controlled) public space!  What a betrayal of the philanthropic ideals of our ancestors!  What a dumbing-down by a once great and dignified city of a unique inheritance!

This abuse of the Gardens is likely to continue, so too the neglect.  The failure, as so often with Exeter councils, lies in lack of imagination.  Can this council really find no way to improve the Gardens?  Must they become shabbier and shabbier?  Can the Council conjure up no better way to entertain children and to put a few ducats in the coffers than in the locking-up and degradation of Northernhay?   Must we really reconcile ourselves to witnessing a whittling away of the traditional liberties of the people and a neglect of the potential of an exceptionally beautiful site of considerable historic interest? 

 

  

   

THE WRONG COW, EXETER, 1833.

From The Western Times of 20th July 1833:

"ELIZABETH WILLEY and MARY SOPES, two girls apparently about 12, were charged with having milked the cow of a Mr. Searle, in a field near Hill's Court, on the preceding Sunday.  The case was fully proved against them, by witnesses who saw them in the act.

The defence set up, when caught, was that they had not intended to milk Mr. Searle's cow, but Mr. Alderman's Sanders's.

The case being proved, Mr Searle stated that he did not wish to press the charge, but merely to caution delinquents of this character, that they were committting a robbery.  The court said that it was a felony, liable to the punishment of transportation; and Mr. Warren, who was in court, stated that a man had been tried and conviceted of this offence at the County Sessions. 

-   Mr. Alderman Sanders cautioned them against milking his cows, as he had been a frequent sufferer from this kind of petty theft, and declared, upon his honour,  if ever any of them were caught with his cow, to go the full extent of the Law with them.

The girls were fined a shilling each and discharged.

Caught white-handed, Elizabeth and Mary pleaded that it was all a mistake .  It was the alderman's cow they meant to milk, not Mr. Searle's.  

If the magistrates and the grown-ups seem not to have been amused, this was because this was clearly becoming a prevalent offence in the fields of St. Sidwell's.  The magistrates were hoping to make their point to all the light-fingered, little milkmaids and milklads of greater Exeter. 

 It seems an odd sort of 'felony' to pop into a field on a quiet Sunday morning and to milk a cow.  I don't think these days that you could find a twelve-year-old in Exeter capable of it!  Nevertheless I'm sure the magistrates were right when they said this was an offence that could send you to Botany Bay, or wherever, and the poor in St Sidwell's were very hungry.

Hill's Court was an ancient mansion in the parish of St. Sidwell's of which nothing remained by 1822.  By 1833 there were already new town-houses on the site.

THE BACK-GRATE, EXETER, 1831.

Mr. H. Lloyd Parry in his book The History of the Exeter Guildlhall, (published in Exeter by James Townsend, 1936)  describes the Back Grate of the Guildhall at just this time:   "Complaints had been frequent that the cells in the Back Grate were damp and cold, and there appears to have been leakage from the large water cistern above the cells.  To such a complaint made in 1829 the Mayor replied that a place of punishment should not be made too comfortable, cooling was desirable, which elicited the the retort that the cells were used asa place of detention for prisoners till found guilty and not as a place for punishment."

Matters were not put right until in 1838 when there was an inquest on a prisoner who had died from illness aggravated by the Back Grate and the jury denounced the place as being unfit for humans.

Nevertheless, The ExeterFlying Post , 16th July, 1831, reported how the ailing widow of a  fallen soldier,  these day he would no doubt have been a war-hero', had made her way back from the isle of France (Mauritius) with her two children and, after being  kicked out of Bodmin,  had ended up  in the Back Grate, presumably with her children, for the offense of being a 'vagrant',  for which read 'sick and poor'.  

" A family of Scotch paupers consisting of a mother and two children, were brought before his worship, from the back-grate, having commited an act of vagrancy.

"The mother evidently appeared to be suffering acutely from disease; she stated that her husband had been a soldier of the 29th and had died in the isle of  France, whither she had been with him, but had returned at his death, and settled in Bodmin, maintaining herself by making caps and bonnets.  But, falling sick, and likely to bercome chargeable, she had been sent on from Bodmin to the next town in a cart, and so on up the road which had given her a cold in the bones, so that she felt it impossible to proceed any further.

"She had applied to the Mendicity Society of Exeter, but they refused to do anything for her; she then went to the Mayor who sent her to some individual, who had put her in the back-grate all night.

"The Court immediately directed the officers of the poor to relieve the unfortunate woman."

According to Mr. Lloyd Parry, the word grate, in this context, was first recorded here as early as 1493. Interestingly my OED  gives: 'grate - A barred place of confinement, a prison or cage (first recorded usage - 1774)

Somebody should tell them, Exeter was regularly recording the word thus, 281 years earlier!

A YOUNG CIRCUMCISED RASCAL, EXETER, 1830

The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette had writers who clearly enjoyed insulting everyone equally,  not too often the rich and the powerful but often enough them too.

I am old enought to share their enjoyment. The most lively writing comes about when the writer is amusing himself and there is, perhaps, nothing more enjoyable than making odious comparisons.  The sense of freedom with which The Gazette's  court reporter hurled personal and no doubt hurtful comments on  all and sundry does not so much shock and anger as amuse me and I find it curious that writers nowadays have to, by the law of the land, avoid unkind words and phrases for fear of the knock on the door.    All the fun of the world has its dark side.  

I see, with amusement, the paradox of young (mostly) people on the qui vive for writers &c. who are not 'kind' and 'thoughtful' and 'correct' so that they can exercise their freedom of speech to pick a fight with them.  That's all fair enough,  -  but legislation?  

Freedom of speech, however, it seems to me, is an absolute and is the bedrock of a free society .  In any case, it is a freedom that will not let itself be banned.   

This was a court report for the 5th June 1830:

"On Saturday last, a Hebrew lad was summoned before the Mayor for attempting to emancipate himself from the thraldom of his father.

"The father stated that his son had formed various bad habits, which could only tend to utter ruin and in proof of the assertion handed in a written document purporting to be a charge for three pints of beer, two glasses of gin and two ditto of rum and water.

"When this Jew bill was brought into the house for the anxious parent to pay he was surprised to find that his son had been having such a jubilee and remonstrated.

"The young circumcised rascal pursued the same course and pleaded now before their worships excited  feelings as the cause of his drinking, his father and his mother having had a quarrel.

"Their worships rebuked him in a proper manner, and the lad promised to amend -  but at first he wished his father to set him up with 'a pound's worth of goods' and he'd never trouble him more.

"The court over-ruled the proposition and he went home to his mother."'`

I can forgive the racist undertones but I'm not sure I can so easily forgive the bad puns.

AN EXHILARATING SIGHT, ON THE ROAD TO EXETER, 1818.

  According to The Exeter Flying Post of 25th June 1818,  Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, the grand Tory who for 17 years was a  Member of Parliament for the County of Devon, rode from Killerton to Exeter at the head of a cavalcade (the mot juste) of respectable yeomen and other respectables, respectably mounted. 

"....at least a thousand of the most respectable Yeomanry in this part of the County, accompanied by many Gentlemen and Clergy voluntarily joined and met him on his road to Exeter.

"A more exhilarating sight, and a more decisive testimony to character, we never recollect to have witnessed, than this orderly cavalcade, extending nearly a mile in length, respectably mounted, bearing in their hats the oak leaf, the antient designation of the Acland Family, and evidently appearing to be inspired with a high, but well regulated enthusiasm, for the cause of the worthy Baronet, who by their own request rode at their head."

It  seems remarkable, this cavalcade, how it assembled on the road, arriving from all quarters, organised somehow by Acland's agents.  There is no mention, I note, of Yeowomen,or Ladies trotting along!  1818 was election year and feelings were running high.   In Exeter the mob was waiting for him and he was to be heckled in public to the point where he could not speak and, indeed he lost this election and was out of office for two years.

The antient ,in 1818, association of  the oak-leaf with, the Acland family (this must surely be a reference to some heraldic  device but I have not traced it) and,also, it would seem, with local Toryism generally,  was well established at this time.  It probably faded away with the Acland descendants becoming Whigs, Liberals, and even, like the one who taught me at St. Luke's, of the Labour Party.

There was an oak-leaf ballad in this same number of the Flying Post:

Come, ye Lads, who wish to share/ In your County's glory,/Wave the Oak-leaf high in air,/ and carry all before ye.  &c.

Now, that is a sweet image:  Georgian Devonshire Tory Lads waving their oak-leaves high in the air!!!