THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

I am fascinated by, and have already blogged, the fifteenth century Five Wounds Window in Sidmouth church.   For one thing, what is represented is not so much five wounds as five glass phials filled with blood.

The window depicts five glass phials with 'heavenly crown' lids containing blood taken from the wounds of Christ.  Each of the phials is labelled,  thus:

blood from the right hand:   phial of wisdom.
blood from the left hand:     phial of mercy.
blood from Christ's side:     phial of everlasting life.
blood from the right foot:    phial of grace.
blood from the left foot:      phial of ghostly comfort.

All of which seems very strange and unique.   Such a window was probably intended to stimulate prayer.  There was a special mass dedicated to the five wounds and prayers to the wounds were deemed to be very powerful and could earn very large dispensations and indulgences saving the devout Christian many centuries of pain in Purgatory.   Praying to the wounds of Christ was linked to the rosary and could be prayed to at designated intervals as the contrite sinner worked his or her way around the beads.

 I don't know whether the different wounds were generally linked, in the medieval mind, with the virtues and rewards indicated by the phials of Sidmouth church  but clearly one could not pray better than for wisdom, mercy and so on.  Ghostly comfort presumably was what the sinner hoped to gain from confession to a holy (ghostly) father of the church.        

THE SALCOMBE AND SID LENDING LIBRARY

The little school at Salcombe Regis in 1850 housed a lending library.  We know this, if not from elsewhere, from a remarkable polemic by Thomas William Christie entitled " Extracts from Books Taught at Salcombe Regis National School with Remarks on their Popish Character."  published in Sidmouth by J Harvey, Fore Street and in London, 1850 and now to be found in the British Library.   The title and rules of the lending library seem first to have been promulgated in 1847.  The title was The Salcombe and Sid Lending Library, interesting perhaps in that at so late a date the Regis was not found in an official title but Christie uses it three years later.

It was not much of a library!  There were only 152 books and all of them seem to have been religious works.  The charge made for borrowing a large book was one penny.   A halfpenny would let you take away a small book and for a farthing you could borrow a tract.  Anyone connected with the school, including the children, could read the books without paying.

This Thomas William Christie, was a prolific writer and ferreter-out of papists and according to the Alumni Cantab.  was "a faithful preacher of the faith of God's elect."  He seems to have been something of a Irish peripatetic trouble-maker.   In 1850 he was living or lodging at Salcombe Mount.   

I intend to blog more on the nineteenth century Puseyites of Salcombe Regis as and when.

THE FIVE WOUNDS

This is fun!

Theodore H Mogridge, a local doctor,  in his descriptive sketch of Sidmouth, 1836, describes the great east window of Sidmouth church in some detail.  He notes a piece of glass which he recognises to be mediaeval and thinks he is looking up at an ancient coat of arms.  Not only does he note it, he blazons it for posterity. "argent, five piles on saltire gules." and he wonders whose arms they can be.

But it is not a coat of arms at all!

It is, as that remarkable Sidmothian, Peter Orlando Hutchinson, (1810 - 1897) recognised "The five wounds of Christ crowned and bearing mottoes."   In his Sidmouth Guide  he lets us know:  "The piece of glass in the vestry window was another of my protégés.  It was taken out of the great east window and lost sight of for some time, but after an outcry on my part it was produced, when I had it placed where it is and a wire guard outside."

It  is there to be seen in Sidmouth Church today,  It would seem to be a very rare depiction, in England at any rate, and all credit to Orlando for finding it and preserving it.

MACKEREL DYING, SIDMOUTH 1836

There is nothing here we did not already know and it is galling for today's fishermen to read of the great shoals of yesteryear but I think this passage (with my italics) from Theodore H Mogridge's "Descriptive Sketch of Sidmouth 1836" is worth blogging if only for the sake of Theodore's wonderful purple prose:

"Occasionally however vast multitudes of the finny and scaly nation are caught opposite the town and during the season it is no very unfrequent ocurrence for from five to ten thousand mackerel to be brought to shore at a single haul of the seine,   At such periods to survey the fishermen at their employments and the fruit of their labours is interesting; the eye is rivetted by the diversity of tints, the ever-varying colours, the silver white shaded by purple dyes alternately fading to a light green and a thousand variations marked with exquisite delicacy produced by the agonies of dissolution or, as humanity hopes, by simple muscular contractions of the expiring inhabitants of the liquid world."

This season I have caught none of the finny and scaly nation despite trying.  My son-in-law, with much effort,  has taken a dozen or so mackerel and one bass.  Mogridge was a local doctor; hence perhaps his interest in the death and pain of the fish.   

A PUZZLE

Whose stone is this I do not know.  It is so degraded as to prove something of a puzzle.  The stone is flaking away.  It is embedded into the South wall of Salcombe Regis church and has presumably been in the church since the seventeenth century.   I think the verse must  have been composed by Philip Avant, the parson poet whom I have already blogged under the title A GLORIOUS DAY with reference to  his long published poem welcoming King Billy whose ships sailed up the Exe in 1688.

The verse, here 'modernised' is in parts illegible but must, I think, read:

We within this earthly shell

for a time with worms may dwell

till the morning when the just

shall be awaked out of their dust.

Our bless'd redeemer then will raise

us up, his glorious name to praise.

With saints and angels we shall sing

hosannas to the heavenly king.

The memory of such are blessed

and precious to him is their dust.

This is a memorial to a man and his wife.   The man died in 1674, his wife in the March of a subsquent year.  His name seems to begin ELI (Elias perhaps?)  and his surname to end in P (a Clapp perhaps?)  These are wild guesses.

MAGDALENE HARVEY

In the churchyard at Salcombe Regis stands a gravestone to Magdalene the wife of Henry Harvey who died the twelfth of July 1822.   She was only 29 when she died.  The stone is unpretentious.  It is a solid rectangle without any of the extravagances that many of the stones here display.  It records her name, her husband's name and the dates of her birth and death.  No more than that. The significance of Magdalene's life was revealed to me by the verger here, the much-missed Gill Thomson, who had been sent a recent publication of the book, first printed in 1904, in which Magdalene gave the world a graphic account of the week after the battle of Waterloo and the days that she spent at the side of her first husband who was dying of his wounds.. .

This first husband was Sir William de Lancey,  a soldier who served as Wellington's Quartermaster at the time of the famous victory.  He was thirteen years or so older than she and she seems to have known him for less than a year and to have been married to him for only three months. Her portrait suggests that she was a very bright, pretty young woman.

Magdalene subsequently married Henry Harvey and bore him three children  The birth of the third  brought about her death.  Because of her manuscript account of de Lancey's death, which was circulated to a multitude of readers including Dickens and Scott and posthumously published in book form a hundred-odd years ago, the early part of her life is fully recorded as at:  http://www.johngraycentre.org/people/heroes/magdalene-hall-de-lancey/
but I can find nothing further that records the circumstances that brought her to Devon and to be buried in Salcome Regis churchyard.

Her book, which has been republished by a host of small publishers in the last few years, is usually entitled:  A Week at Waterloo.   It is a stunningly good read and it has established Lady de Lancey's fame nationwide.  But it is Salcombe Regis that has Magdalene Harvey's bones.

A DRAGON IN SALCOMBE REGIS CHURCH

I have discovered a dragon in Salcombe Regis Church which I want to record for posterity.  No doubt she, dragons are mostly female, has been recorded by others but I don't want to take any chances.  She has almost disappeared beneath the feet of worshippers.   Sometimes I think worshippers should , like the early Nonconformists, be encouraged to take to the fields. In a decade or so this dragon will have completely disappeared.  Right now one can just about trace her wonderful tail and her dragon legs.  She is on the floor just West of the font. What I can read of the inscription is as follows:

HERE LYETH Ye BODY OF

GEORGE DRAKE WHO DEP

ARTED THIS LIFE Ye

2nd (?) of AUGUST 164?.

The dragon or wyvern or wyver-dragon is that of Drake of Ashe, an ancient family with which Sir Francis Drake tried, and initially failed, to share the fiery beast.  This is canting heraldry of course,  Drake being, or considered to be, derived from  draco  and nothing to do with ducks. She is a red dragon. Who this George Drake was I do not know.  I wish the indefatigable Ray Girvan was still here to find out.  The great slab beneath which George was buried signifies he was a man of substance.

This Wayland Wordsmith blog has now registered more than fifty thousand page-views but for a long while has been much neglected by me.  Today's post constitutes a significant change of direction and, for me, a liberation.  There are personal reasons why I can no longer limit myself to blogs of a salty, estuarial or coastal nature and I hope readers will follow me elsewhere, who knows where?   Perhaps to the stars!