Holy Disorders. Edmund Crispin

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       Gibbering Corse

      Tolnbridge stands on the river after which it is named about four miles above the sandy, treacherous estuary which flows into the English Channel. Up to Hanoverian times it was a port of some significance; but the growth in the size of shipping, together with the progressive silting-up of the river mouth, which is now penetrated only by a fairly narrow channel, pretty rapidly took from it that eminence, and it has fallen back into its pristine status of a small and rather inconvenient market-town for the farm products of that area of South Devon. There is still a fishing industry and (before the war at least) some holidaying, but the bulk of its prosperity has been transferred to Tolnmouth, a little to the east of the estuary, which as a summer resort is second only to Torquay on the Devon coast. Nor is Tolnbridge of much value from the military or naval point of view; it had received a certain amount of sporadic and spiteful attention from the bombers, but the main part of the attack was concentrated further up the coast, and it suffered little damage.

      The cathedral was built during the reign of Edward II, when Tolnbridge was enjoying an unexampled prosperity as the staple port for the wines of Bordeaux and Spain; in style it comes, historically, somewhere about the time of the transition from Early English to Decorated; but few traces of the later method are to be found in it, and it is one of the last, as well as one of the finest, examples of that superb artistry which produced Salisbury Cathedral and many lovely parish churches. Comparatively, it is a small building; but it stands in the centre of the town in a position of such eminence that it appears larger than is really the case. The river bank rises to a natural plateau, about a quarter of a mile back, on which the older part of the town is built. Behind this again there is a long and steeply-sloping hill, at the very summit of which the cathedral stands – the hill itself devoid of buildings, except for the clergy-house at the south-western end. So, from the town, there is a magnificent vista up this long slope, planted with cypress, mountain-ash, and larches, to the grey buttresses and slender, tapering spire which overhang the river. The effect would be overpowering were it not for the two smaller churches in the town below, whose spires, lifted in noble, unsuccessful emulation of their greater companion above, a little restore the balance and relieve the eye. Behind the cathedral, the hill slopes more gently down again to the newer part of the town, with the railway station and the paint factory, whose houses stream down on the northern side to join the old town and peter out to the south in a series of expensive and widely-spaced villas overlooking the estuary.

      It is perhaps surprising that Tolnbridge did not share the fate of Crediton and succumb to the See of Exeter. But Exeter’s diocese was large enough already, and Tolnbridge was suffered to remain a cathedral town. About seventy years after the erection of the cathedral, a tallow-maker of the town called Ephraim Pentyre, a miser and a notorious usurer, but a man who gave much money to the Church on the understanding that it should reserve him a front seat at the celestial entertainment, set out by the coast road on a pilgrimage to Canterbury (where he might, had he ever reached it, have encountered Chaucer’s pilgrims in person). So niggardly was he, however, that he refused to take servants for his protection, with the consequence that beyond Weymouth he was set upon, murdered, and incontinently robbed of his offering to the shrine of St Thomas. This incompetence and stinginess earned him his canonization, for his bones were returned to Tolnbridge and buried with much ceremony in the cathedral where their miracles of healing attracted pilgrims from all over the country, Edward III himself visiting the shrine in order to be cured of scurvy (his own legendary abilities in that direction having apparently failed); with what success it is not known. This was the heyday of Tolnbridge’s prosperity, none the less welcomed by the inhabitants because they remembered St Ephraim with dislike, or because worse and blacker crimes than usury had been commonly laid to his account.

      After that there was a slow but steady decline. Tolnbridge was too isolated to play any part in the great political and ecclesiastical disturbances which spasmodically racked the country up to the end of the eighteenth century, though upon occasion little symbolic wars were fought out on these issues among the townspeople, only too often with violence and atrocities. The transition from Mariolatry to Protestantism was made without fuss, the more so, as some said, because the old religion was allowed to persist and become vile in secret and abominable rituals. Some emphasis was given to these suggestions by a frenetic outburst of witch trials in the early seventeenth century, and by the equally frenetic outburst of witchcraft and devil-worship СКАЧАТЬ