Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe - Sabine Baring-Gould (books to read to improve english TXT) 📗

in him boiled up--away went shovel-hat and boots, he peeled off his gaiters and knee-breeches, tore his lawn sleeves to rags, and dashed off a howling savage, stark naked, to take to himself a dozen wives, and to go head-hunting. What was born in the bone would come out in the flesh.

Probably there is an underlying vein of the savage in all of us, but it is kept in control by the restraints of habit accumulated through generations of civilisation. Yet there it is. A quiet, well-conducted dog will sometimes disappear for a few days and nights. It has gone off on a spree, to poach on its own account. Then, when it has had its fling, it returns, and is meek, docile, and orderly as before.

There is something of this in man. He becomes impatient of the trammels of ordinary life, its routine and matter-of-fact, and a hunger comes over him for a complete change, to shake off the bonds of conventionality, escape the drudgery of work, and live a free, wild life. Among many this takes the form of going to the Colonies or to Wild Africa or Western Canada, to shoot game, to camp out, and be a savage for a while. Among the artisan class it takes another form--the great army of tramps is recruited thus. The struggle to maintain a family, the dry uninteresting toil, drives the man into a fit of impatience, and he leaves his work, his wife and bairns, and becomes a wanderer; idle, moving on from place to place, never starving, never very comfortable--in dirt and idleness, and often in drink--but with no ties, and going here, there, and everywhere as he lists.

Not many years ago there was a man who lived by the Devil's Dyke, on the South Downs of Sussex, in a shelter under a hedge, picking up coppers from visitors to the Dyke, dressed like Ally Sloper, but living in a manner more squalid and under a worse shelter than would be endured by most savages in the darkest parts of Africa. What his history was no one knew.

It is now somewhat longer since a medical man, in an excess of impatience against civilisation, constructed for himself a hovel out of hurdles thatched with reeds, in South Devon. He lived in it, solitary, speaking to no one. Occasionally he bought a sheep and killed it, and ate it as the appetite prompted, and before it was done the meat had become putrid. At length the police interfered, the stench became intolerable in the neighbourhood, as the hovel was by the roadside. The doctor was ordered to remove, and he went no one seems to know whither.

In Charles the First's time there were men living in the caves and dens of the ravines about Lydford in South Devon. They had a king over them named Richard Rowle, and they went by the name of the Gubbins. William Browne, a poet of the time, wrote in 1644:--

"The town's enclosed with desert moors,
But where no bear nor lion roars,
And naught can live but hogs;
For all o'erturned by Noah's flood,
Of fourscore miles scarce one foot's good,
And hills are wholly bogs.

And near hereto's the Gubbins' cave;
A people that no knowledge have
Of law, of God, or men;
Whom Caesar never yet subdued,
Who've lawless liv'd; of manners rude;
All savage in their den.

By whom, if any pass that way,
He dares not the least time to stay,
For presently they howl;
Upon which signal they do muster
Their naked forces in a cluster
Led forth by Roger Rowle."

I extract the following from the _Daily Express_ of May 10, 1910: --

"It was stated at an inquest held on Richard Manford at Market Drayton yesterday, that he was over eighty years of age, and had for the greater part of his life dwelt in a cave near Hawkstone. He was found dying by the roadside."

Elsewhere [Footnote: "An Old English Home," Methuen, 1898.] I have given an account of the North Devon savages, to whom Mr. Greenwood first drew attention. Till a very few years ago there lived on the Cornish moors a quarryman--he may be living still for aught I have heard to the contrary---in a solitary hut piled up of granite. He would allow no one to approach, threatening visitors with a gun. His old mother lived with him. By some means the rumour got about that she was dead, but as the man said nothing, it was not till this rumour became persistent that the authorities took cognisance of it, and visited the hovel. They found that the old woman's bed had been a hole scooped out of the bank that formed part of the wall; that she had been dead some considerable time, and that her face was eaten away by rats. Daniel Gumb was a stone-cutter who lived near the Cheese Wring on the Cornish moors in the eighteenth century. He inhabited a cave composed of masses of granite. It is an artificial cell about twelve feet deep and not quite that breadth. The roof consists of one flat stone of many tons weight. On the right hand of the entrance is cut "D. Gumb," with a date 1783 (or 5). On the upper part of the covering stone channels are cut to carry off the rain. Here he dwelt for several years with his wife and children, several of whom were born and died there.

How instinctively the man of the present day will revert to primitive usages and to the ground as his natural refuge may be illustrated by a couple of instances. Mr. Hamerton, in "A Painter's Camp," says that near Sens on a height is a little pleasure-house and the remnant of a forgotten chapel dedicated to S. Bondus. This belonged of late years to a gentleman of Sens who was passionately attached to the spot. "Near my tent there is a hole in the chalk leading to the very bowels of the earth. A long passage, connecting cells far apart, winds till it arrives under the house, and it is said that the late owner intended to cut other passages and cells, but wherefore no man knows. One thing is certain, he loved the place, and spent money there for the love of it. Night and day he came up here from his little city on the plain, sat in his pleasant octagon room, and descended into his winding subterranean passages, and hermit-like visited the hollow cells." On his death he bequeathed it to the Archbishop of Sens. [Footnote: "A Painter's Camp," Lond. 1862, Bk. iii. c. 1.]

Another instance is from our own country. Mr. L.P. Jacks' very remarkable book, "Mad Shepherds," gives an account of one Toller of Clun Downs, who went deranged, took to the moors and lived for a considerable time, stealing sheep and poultry. "Beyond the furthest outpost of the Perryman farm lie extensive wolds rising rapidly into desolate regions where sheep can scarcely find pasture. In this region Toller concealed himself. About two miles beyond the old quarry, on a slaty hillside, he found a deep pit; and here he built himself a hut. He made the walls out of stones of a ruined sheepfold; he roofed them with a sheet of corrugated iron, stolen from the outbuildings of a neighbouring farm, and covered the iron with sods; he built a fireplace with a flue, but no chimney; he caused water from a spring to flow into a hollow beside the door. Then he collected slates, loose stones and casks; and by heaping these against the walls of the hut, he gave the whole structure the appearance of a mound of rubbish. Human eyes rarely came within sight of the spot; but even a keen observer of casual objects would not have suspected that the mound represented any sort of human dwelling. It was a masterpiece of protective imitation.... His implements were all of flint, neatly bound in their handles with strips of hide. There was an axe for slaughter, a dagger for cutting meat, a hammer for breaking bones, a saw and scrapers of various size--the plunder of some barrow on Clun Downs." There Toller lived for several months, and there he died, his hiding-place being known to one other shepherd, and to him alone; and there after his death he was buried. "My 'usband dug his grave wi' his own hands," said the widow of this shepherd, "close beside the hut, and buried him next day. He put the axe and slings just as he told him, wi' the stones and all the bits of flint things as he found 'em in the hut." [Footnote: "Mad Shepherds, and other Human Studies," Lond. 1910, p. 137 _et seq_.]


CHAPTER III


SOUTERRAINS

In the year 1866 the Prussian Army of the Elbe broke into Bohemia, when it was found that the inhabitants of a certain district had vanished along with their cattle and goods, leaving behind empty houses and stables. It had been the same during the Thirty Years' War, and again in the Seven Years' War, when the invaders found not a living soul, and contented themselves with destroying the crops and burning the villages and farms. Even the Government officials had disappeared. Whither had they gone? Into the rock labyrinths of Adersbach and Wickelsdorf, each accessible only through a single gap closed by a door. The mountain of what the Germans call Quadersandstein is four miles long by two broad, and was at one time an elevated plateau, but is now torn into gullies, forming a tangled skein of ravines, wherein a visitor without a guide might easily lose himself. The existence of this labyrinth was unknown save to the peasants till the year 1824, when a forest fire revealed it, but for some time it remained unexplored. [Footnote: It had indeed been mentioned by Dr. Kausch in his _Nachrichten ueber Boehmen_, 1794; but he lamented its inaccessibility.]

As Adersbach and Wickelsdorf lie on the frontier of Bohemia and Silesia, the existence of this region of cliffs and natural refuges had been kept secret by the natives, who looked upon it as a secure hiding- place for themselves and their chattels when the storm of war swept over the Riesen Gebirge. But the fatal fire of 1824 betrayed their secret to the world, and after a little hesitation, thinking to make profit out of it as a show-place, paths were cut through it, and it was advertised in 1847. When, in 1866, the Prussians passed by, they incurred neither the risk nor the trouble of hunting out the refugees from their place of concealment.

The rocks run up to 200 feet, the loftiest being 280 feet. They assume the most fantastic shapes. The passage through the fissures is so narrow that in some places it can be threaded by one man alone at a time, the others following in single file. A rivulet, clear as crystal, traverses the network of gullies, and in one place forms a tiny cascade. One nook is called the Southern Siberia, because in it the snow lies unmelted throughout the summer.

At intervals the rocks fall back and form open spaces, and at one describe an amphitheatre upon a vista of rolling forest.

But if this "petrified forest," as it has been called, served as a refuge for the peasants in troublous times, it has also been employed by brigands as their fastness whence to ravage the country and render the roads perilous. But of their exploits I shall have more to say in the chapter on robber-dens.

Caverns, as well as chasms, have always served this same purpose.

There is something remarkably human