On the Ways to the Old Literary Roads around Okehampton

       

Okehampton Castle
Photo Julie Sampson


Writing Women on the Devon Land
A-Z of Devon Women Writers & Places

On the Ways to the Old Literary Roads around Okehampton

        I could have chosen Offwell, Ogwell, Okeford, Otterton, or Ottery St Mary. But for this Alphabet of Devon Women Writers (up to about 1960), I settled on Okehampton. It's partly nostalgia, the town being a favourite place of my childhood, where I (albeit fairly briefly) and before me, both my parents attended school. I don't know of any individual woman author whose home was in the parish up to circa 1960 - but I do know several who included the place in their writings. Rosalind Northcote, Mary Ward and Sophie Dixon all set down in text their personal responses to the scenic, and/or historical characteristic of the Okehampton locality ...

     ... It is not just the romantic lines of Okehampton castle ruin that call, either when you spot Okehampton castle from the dual carriageway of the A30, or as you negotiate the upward swirls of the road curling up and away from the old town deep in the valley beneath, or through light reflected leaves on the left of the road. It is also the intricate lineage of the genealogical patterning of the past, which suggests that this near empty shell must once have harboured both men and women closely connected to the topmost ruling class, who were likely to be of the then literate fraternity. By the time you see the ruin you have entered the hallowed receptacle of the moor. Before you, are a multitude of enticements.

       For me, the northern doorway to Dartmoor's charm has always been the historical marker of this well-known Devon castle. Rosalind Northcote's travelogue/guide-book/historical survey, Devon; its Moorlands, Streams & Coasts (See on Project Gutenberg) outlined the ruin and its vicinity as it appeared in the rustic environment of the early C20.

   The castle of Okehampton stands about half a mile from the town and looks on one side over fertile hills and valleys, woods, and rich meadows, and the gleaming waters of the West Okement, on the other towards the bold, changeless outlines of the outer barriers of Dartmoor. The castle was once surrounded by its park ... The Okement rippling over a rocky bed – the name ‘uig maenic’ means the ‘stony water’ – hurries past the foot of a knoll on which the castle rises out of a cloud of green leaves that shelter and half hide the walls. Protected by the river and a steeply scarped bank on the south, a natural ravine on the north and a deep notch cut on the western side, the mass of slate rock that it stands on was a point of vantage.[i]

By West Okement, from where you can see glimpses
of ruins of Okehampton Castle glinting through the trees.

Old Town Park
Local Nature Reserve
Okehampton

          There are copies of Northcote's Devon book available from various sites, including Abe Books. I tend to agree with the fairly recent review of the book on the jsbookreader blog. The best feature of Devon; its Moorlands, Streams & Coasts is its inclusion of colour plates of Devon scenes, by acclaimed painter Frederick John Widgery. I feel rather mean saying this about this, but tend to agree with jsbookreader's assessment: Devon; its Moorlands, Streams &Coasts is 'largely built around scraps of learned but much-recycled material'.

Colour Plate of Okehampton Castle, painting by FJ Widgery.
taken from Devon: its Moorlands, Streams & Coasts.

         Devon; its Moorlands, Streams & Coasts is a book which anyone who likes to collect Devon history, or landscape books collectors, would love, and ought to have in their library. Of nostalgic value, the text is in the tradition of and influenced by such canonic male-authored Devon books as Crossing's Guide to Dartmoor; but once you get into the mind-set of the time in which it was written,
Devon; its Moorlands, Streams & Coasts does have a certain time-less appeal and Rosalind Northcote's passion for her home county is evident. There are individual touches which the author most likely obtained from personal visits to many of the places she describes. 
        Daughter of Walter Stafford Northcote, Second Earl of Iddesleigh, Lady Rosalind Northcote wasn't the only author in her family. I'm not sure whether she had any literary female relations, but both her father and her brother Stafford Harry Northcote, Viscount St Cyres  also wrote and published books, whilst her grandfather, Stafford Northcote First Earl of Iddesleigh, also had literary interests. For centuries, the Northcote family seat was at Pynes House near Exeter, which, though nowadays known as Devon's Downton Abbey and popular as a local wedding venue, is also known locally for its apparent close association with Jane Austin:

'The second Earl, Walter Stafford Northcote, was a huge admirer of the literary talent of Jane Austen and believed most fervently that his house was indeed the inspiration for Barton Park in Austen’s iconic work, Sense and Sensibility. This tale is still told in the local area and remains as popular as ever' (Pynes House Website) 

       
         I'm not saying the information isn't out there in the archives, but in the limited time I've been able to devote to researching Rosalind Northcote I've not found much about her life; maybe someone out there does know about her, or has come across documentation about her in a record office somewhere. The Pynes archives  at A2A certainly seems promising. There are a couple of tantalising snippets dotted round the web. One concerns Lady Rosalind's next youngest sister, Lady Elizabeth Northcote, who in 1914 married Sir Randolph Bruce in a celebrated wedding held at Pynes. According to one source, there had initially been plans for Bruce to marry author Rosalind, eldest daughter, but she was found 'prickly' and 'unapproachable' (see Lady Windemere) Elizabeth was 38 at the time of her marriage, quite old for her generation. There are various easily accessible online accounts about this couple;  a year after their marriage they travelled to Paris with Rosalind, which suggests the two sisters were probably close. The same description notes that unlike her sister (!) Elizabeth had a 'sweet disposition' and 'was very thoughtful of others' (Lady Windemere). Sadly, Elizabeth died within a year of her marriage, probably of appendicitis.

        Lady Rosalind survived her other siblings and died at Pynes in 1950. A visitor to Pynes during her last years is said to have commented: 'She was a law unto herself quite a formidable woman. She used to spend most of her day in a large sitting room with the windows open, chain smoking.' (Lady Windemere).

      The National Portrait Gallery has a portrait of Lady Rosalind here.www.columbiavalleypioneer.com/news/the-lady-of-lake-windermere/ ....


         But, at this point, though it is tempting to stray further I must not wander away too far from Okehampton, the subject of this blog piece. One hundred years before Northcote's Devon book another local Devon author wrote about Okehampton castle and its surroundings.  Sophie Dixon's C19 journals provide us with another detailed panning shot of the castle and its vicinity in an even more pastoral, pre-technologically dominated landscape than that about which Northcote wrote.

Pages from Sophie Dixon's Journal
which mention Okehampton,
1830

        I get the feeling that unlike Rosalind Northcote, Sophie Dixon had more first hand acquaintance with the places she wrote about. You'll find Dixon's name pops up readily in Google searches, especially linked to various descriptions and accounts of Dartmoor. For instance:

 For sometime Dartmoor was the home of Miss Sophie Dixon, the charming writer, and her acquaintance with it was extensive. She was in the habit of taking long rambles, setting forth at an early hour, and covering as much ground in a day as many would do in three. Sometimes when on a pedestrian tour she would rise at midnight, and start on her journey soon after, in order to avoid walking under a burning summer sun (Quoted in William Crossing's One Hundred Years on Dartmoor). 

          Contemporary writers often refer to Dixon, probably because her writing is striking in its detail and immediacy. In his Garden History of Devon Todd Gray notes that she was 'decisive in her writing'. Along, with Anna Eliza Bray and Rachel Evans, two other contemporary female author/travellers whose homes were in the vicinity of Tavistock, Dixon contributed to the C19 discourse of Dartmoor discovery.
     
      In her book Ten days excursion on the western and northern borders of Dartmoor, you can still sense the immediacy of the rapturous, pseudo-pioneering mode of discovery experienced and then voiced by Dixon after she crosses the C19 wild Dartmoor reaches, in 1830:

… we passed near the source of the Lyd, and then altering the direction of our steps the Sourton Tors rose before us, until again diverging to the right we came in view of the West Okement, winding amid a rocky channel, below a descent almost precipitous ... The valley inclining almost to a ravine, the river enters by a winding channel at the foot of Black Tor, which closes the view in a southerly direction. An extensive range of hill, dark with heath, occupies the opposite side of the valley, while a third mountain meets it below.’

     ... Following a trip to the locality of Fatherford I scribbled a short piece reflecting simultaneously on my own visit and what I re-imagined of Sophie Dixon's ...

         If you're lucky ... on moor's northen slopes, at the, just, still, tranquil site of Fatherford, just east of Okehampton and on the edgelands of the multiplying, mushrooming new housing estates, you can reflect and muse beside west Okement’s mirror river, where the wooden bridge crosses over into the glade the other side, where water’s lyrics, a ‘voice of waves’, will lull you to the beguiling wild haunts that writer Sophie Dixon intuited a hundred or so years ago ... Royal ferns flutter at our feet, taking us, slowly, surely, into their green and empty world, beyond glittering light.
        Sophie knew she felt, she heard, here, where road and river dissect, where dual worlds seem to briefly meet and part, here, where one looks (and moves us to loop unhurriedly, like snails snaking the undergrowth at our feet), back to the past and the other hurtles us onto the future, which can’t wait; this conveyor belt of concrete we cannot get escape.
      As you leave the glade,  spin around to catch a glimpse of your past, and hers, before a covey of orange monbretias in the hedge by the stream flare a signal, we are still here, still here, here, here, find us. Us ...

         Sophie Dixon also wrote poetry. Her Castalian Hours is made up of a sequence of poems; its title poem Stanzas Written on Dartmoor revels in the wildness and solitude of Longaford, and the surrounding moorland. It's with pseudo-Wordsworthian delight that she captures the scenic grandeur of moor's romantic enticements

And these are yours oh Mountains, these around
Your time-bleached summits, mingle in the air
A potent voice, a passion stirring sound ...

        William Crossing praised Dixon’s poems in his Dartmoor travelogue 'Amidst Devonia's Alps' but nowadays, like Rachel Evans and Anna Eliza Bray, although versions of her books are still obtainable, unlike that of their male equivalents, Crossing and Carrington, these women’s published writings are not generally recognised or acclaimed as being significant Dartmoor texts. This is a shame, for between them the trio of C19 Tavistock women fully documented a kaleidoscope of Dartmoor’s richly diverse data. There are, I believe, as yet unexplored interconnections between the three women, Bray, Dixon and Evans, linking both their lives and their texts. All three left a rich legacy of documents, which are testaments to the moor’s unique contribution to Devon’s landscape and heritage and are also encyclopedic in their value to the researcher. If a researcher wants to know something about someone or somewhere concerning Dartmoor’s history, then the likelihood is that they will eventually find the answer in one of the texts of Bray, Dixon or Evans ...

     ... I'm asking myself,  am I straying again from the ostensible main theme of this blog-piece? I hope not. I don't think so. Okehampton is very much enclosed within, or in the dip of the wrap-around protective landscape cloak, so the Dartmoor-linked comments about the women authors I've so far discussed are relevant ...

        ... Some fifty years or so before Dixon's journal was published, in 1807, in her collection Original Poems, a Devon poet called Mary Ward evoked the ruin in a poem titled 'Oakhampton Castle'. Albeit rather laboured in tone, Ward's poem's darkly laboured iambic lines project an appropriate mood of Gothic splendour:

stupendous pile whose mouldering towers/declare the wide uncultured day/when thou couldst boast terrific powers/that sought to make the world obey.      

         Ironically, the considerable historical significance of such an ancient skeletal and now ruined building as Okehampton Castle is emphasised because of the poet's use of overly ornate language. The style may be ornate, as well as foreign to contemporary ears, but the underlying message is authentic and eternal. Such an edifice, sunk into the foundations of solid earth within our land was – and is – forever replete with the stories of those who lived before. Nevertheless, Ward’s poem about the once striking and significant castle makes its own original contribution to the maintenance of the site’s importance in public memory. 'Oakhampton Castle's' flourish of romantic ornamentation can help to preserve reflecting fragments of history as they are wrapped within the sparse shell of a ruined building in the landscape. The poem aims to mirror the reality of what was.

       However, other than her poems in the collection Original Poems, little seems to be known about the poet herself. Mary Ward herself is elusive and attempts to discover anything substantial about her have proved well-nigh fruitless: she is said to have come from Brixham; she dedicated her book to the Countess of Loudon (who might be this Flora Campbell); she was an acquaintance of the owner of Raithby Hall, in Leicestershire, Robert Carr Brackbenbury, who rather intriguingly, was also known as a poet. Yet, that is all I have found... If there is anyone out there who knows anything about this elusive C19 poet, please get in touch, so I can add more information about her ...

          ... Before I leave the lanes and literary losts of Okehampton I'll just mention I've included a short fragment of fiction based on an imagined scenario at Okehampton castle in Part Two of the as yet unpublished Writing Women on the Devon Land. It's based on Hawisia ... a real noblewoman of the C12, whose ancestors from Okehampton were closely connected to the Norman/Plantaganet royal court. Following a lot of detailed and genealogical research, it occurred to me that this Hawisia may well have known the mysterious C12 poet Marie de France ... 'Someone, who in the mind's interior depths, heard a whisper from that long-ago past, telling me that yes indeed, she was Marie and not to leave her (and her circle of kin including Hawisia) out, from my own reinvented (or as I now see it, reinventing) story' ...

Here's a snippet from the opening of the fictional fragment:

Okehampton Castle’s ruins lie like an abandoned fairy-tale

 in a hollow on a spur of shale between two rivers flowing beneath Dartmoor. 

There’s a deep ditch between it and the country around. 

Outside the still quite massive wall of the castle,

above the curling west Okement river,

lie the immense lands of the Chase - 

the hunting-park of the medieval Courtenay family - 

which once sprawled its green-throw beneath the splatterings of C20/21 edifices. 

There’s the army camp, 

the relatively recently constructed A30, the golf-course, 

various other houses and paraphernalia ...

See also From the Devon Ridge Where a Book Began

Just in Jacobstowe

At Jacobstowe church

Women Writing on the Devon Land

A-Zof Devon Women Writers' Places 

Just in Jacobstowe

Well, for anyone who may previously have stumbled upon this blog and given up bothering to look again, thinking I'd forgotten to update it, here I am - and it is - again. Yes, admittedly I have been preoccupied with other writing projects, but the impasse here, in this A-Z was the letter. 'J' - and the complex deliberations involved as I tried to identify the identity of a certain Saxon lady.

      If any of you out there knows of a woman writer back through the centuries (before about 1960) who has lived in or has an important connection with a parish in Devon beginning with J, please let me know! 

     But then, at the outset I am restricted, given that there is only one 'J' parish. Jacobstowe! I love the parish; before the large family decamped down to Brixham it was the childhood home of my maternal grandmother, who recounted many nostalgic memories about her family. For several years their father Robert Abbott was Farm Bailiff of the Broomford estate (which, incidentally, in a future life was to be the sometime home of Noel Edmonds). 

Entrance gate of Broomford Manor, near Jacobstowe
cc-by-sa/2.0 - © David Smith - geograph.org.uk/p/3498311

(Anyone reading this who's keen on family history might like to skip over to my other familyhistory site). I write up this piece in memory of Annie and her siblings. 


     I will pop in an old photo, where Grandma appears as pupil teacher in Jacobstowe; it must have been around the late 1890's as she was about 16/17, having been born in 1884.

Annie Abbott a pupil teacher at Jacobstowe with her class.
Annie is at the back 4th from right. Several of her younger siblings are also in the photo.

       But, no Annie Abbott was not a writer, though scribblings in her sister's autograph book suggest she enjoyed writing lyric verse. 

    Perhaps, in another life, or if she were living now, when, in one way or another anyone who wants to be can be writer, Annie may have pursued her literary interests. But during those days, late C19, life in rural Devon was hard; Grandma had, instead, to earn her keep, learn to cook and care for her younger siblings. That was the story of a great many women's lives for at least one more generation. 

      Before I go on, I will include a short extract from Annie's daughter's memoirs; here she describes the family's life in Jacobstowe. You will see at the end of this extract how, with regard to education and literary endeavour Annie's life journey, as girl, meant a totally different destiny from that of her brother:

My mother seemed to enjoy those teenage years in Jacobstowe when the Rector and Schoolmaster were the most important people in the village. The years she spent there must have been good for her, as, with her affinity with the Schoolmaster, the Rector, his wife and the Lady of the Manor, Lady-White-Thomson, many of her talents were encouraged and given their expression. Much of her cooking she learnt from her mother, Elizabeth, and from the cooks in the Main Kitchen where she spent many hours of her time. She learnt to appreciate music from her piano lessons with Mrs Kruger, the Rector's wife. Some of this knowledge she passed on to her younger sisters, Fran and Ida. They all three became very enthusiastic members of the Church Choir. A group of them met in the Schoolmaster's house where they held Gilbert and Sullivan evenings, where they performed on various instruments. Annie played the Mandolin, Will Stone the Violin. Suzy, his sister had a good voice. My mother also had Wood-Carving lessons. To the ensuing role of Farmer's wife she brought experiences which were to benefit her children, in later years.

    At the age of 16 Annie became a pupil-teacher in the school at Jacobstowe and would have liked to have gone on to College to train but her father couldn't afford the fees; in those days there were no grants. Her brother, Fleetwood, fared better because he went on to St. Luke's College in Exeter paid for by Mr. Stone, the headmaster. 
(written by Clarice Sampson).

       Anyway, to return to the main theme in this post, the more I considered it the more I realised that Jacobstowe is an excellent choice to include in this A - Z, but not because the parish can be identified as the home of one or more famous, respected, or even a single amateur female author. Anything but, apparently. But instead, because of the dearth of specific names associated with the parish, I see the place as a kind of case study, a blank-page, which exemplifies how (in general) until the mid C20 women as writers have tended to face the same fate: eventual absence from the literary canon. Just because there are no names rising above the parapet about a particular place doesn't mean they were not there. Once you begin to delve into the records in any way - i.e., google, or old books, or record offices etc, there are tiny little snippets of data staring up at you. From spaces in the ether. From the depths of history. In the archives they are just names, often passed over, as if irrelevant. 


       Jacobstowe, just as so many of its surrounding Devon parishes is an enigma; its history is fascinating. The Old English meaning of 'Stowe' is Place, often with the added implication of 'Holy', or 'Meeting' Place. Inevitably, as with any rural place in this part of the country, you need to start with the church; if there is anything of historical interest to be found, you can bet it will be there. And Jacobstowe really does come up with the treasured goods, because only a couple of years ago whilst the church's pew platforms were being repaired an unexpected discovery turned up a find, which in context of Devon church history was described 'as rare as hens’ teeth’. The archaeologists found  'the building’s original Eastern wall and a semi-circular wall – or apse'. A piece in Tavistock Times about the excavations notes that 

An apse is a semicircular or polygonal termination to the choir, chancel or aisle of a church building. First used in pre-Christian Roman architecture, the apse often functioned as an enlarged niche to hold the statue of a deity in a temple.

       The findings suggest there may have been a building here during Celtic i.e., pre-Anglo-Saxon times and are so important that they may mean complete re-evaluation of the history of church construction in the south-west. (See Antiquarian's Attic). Jacobstowe may have been a very early holy-site. As Antiquarian's Attic notes,

We know that Irish monks were coming to the West Country in the 5th-7th centuries so perhaps they came here too and formed a Christian community.

(You may like here to wander off and take a look at Boniface's Other Women a previous post in  my other blog, for an alternative or supplementary view about the beginnings of Christianity in the south-west. This piece is part of a much longer and now revised chapter included in Writing Women on the Devon Lands).


       Apropos Jacobstowe's early church, in the eastern wall of the porch there are two stone motifs - a daisy wheel, or rosette and a Greek cross, which experts believe may be of the C12. 

motifs in stone at Jacobstowe church
Photo Julie Sampson

artist's impression of how Jacobstowe church may
have looked in the Anglo-Saxon and Norman period
(See The Parish Church of St James
Jacobstowe; A History and Guide to this Ancient Church -
my copy obtained in the church)

      The first female name surfacing in any archive with a (possible) connection with Jacobstowe coincides with the late Saxon, early Norman period, the days of the original church. 

       I say possible with good reason, because recent commentators argue that Ælfgifu, Aleuea, Aleuesdef, Allef, Alueua, Alueue, Aluiua, Alveva, Alwewe, Aueue, Elfgiuæ, Elueua, Æleueua, Ælueua, Ælueue (all forms of the same name used in the Domesday Book) was not associated with Jacobstowe. 

       Many sources about the Domesday Book tell us the following: 

        Iacobescherca

Alueuia habet I mansionem queae nocatur Iacobescherca quam ipsa tenuit ea die qua rex Eduuardus fuit uiuus et mortuus et reddidit gildum pro i uirga et dimidia. Hanc potest arare i carruca. In ea habet Alueuia i carrucam et ii cotarios et i suruum xiiii oues et ualet per annum xl denarius.- Exon D. (487) 450

Alueuia has a manor called Jacobeschurca, which she herself held on the day on which King Edward lived and died, and it rendered geld for one virgate and a half. This can be ploughed by one plough. In this Alvevia has one plough and two cottars and one serf, (and) fourteen sheep; and it is worth by the year forty pence.

      And in the volume Devonshire written in the early C19, it is noted that it was probable that Alveva, a Saxon lady, held Jacobstowe at the time of Domesday:

        Risdon confirms this link between Alveva and Jacobstowe in
A chorographical description or survey of the county of Devon, which I think was published in 1811:

And yet another C19 source relates how Alveva and Jacobstow/e are connected: 

       However, one hundred years later, at the beginning of the C20, local historians began to change their minds and in one issue of Devon & Cornwall Notes and Queries (see below) the writer was adamant that Jacobscherche, Alveva's holding as stated in Domesday was not Jacobstowe, but rather, St James' Priory in Exeter. 

        Who am I to argue with the specialist historians? I can't. And yet, in some ways, why not? It is far more romantic to imagine Alveva, whoever she may have been, as connected as landholder of the lands circling the then new Celtic church of the little Devon parish. If nothing else, the recent unexpected discoveries at Jacobstowe church tell us that our assumptions about the history of this area are still to be challenged. And the so-called 'expert' historians do not always get their facts (or spellings) correct, because, or for example (as in the passage above) a frequent confusion seems to be to conflate, or swop, Jacobstowe in Devon with Jacobstow, in Cornwall. Although I understand the reasoning in the extract above, what puzzles me is that if Jacobscherche in the DB is the church or priory in Exeter, rather than Jacobstowe, why is the latter not mentioned in said DB? Fair enough, C11 Jacobstowe might indeed have been part and parcel of Hatherleigh, as suggested, but now the remains of the original church have been discovered, does that not suggest otherwise? Was Domesday Jacobstowe, a distinct estate with its own special little holy site - where the 'river Ock streameth by Stow'? (Risdon) I wonder.

        Perhaps we ought to change tack and consider the identity of  Alveva, Alvenu, or Aelfgifu. Who, in any case, was she? Well as far as I can tell, the sources do not seem to make much effort to explain or examine her specific identity. And where they do there is not necessarily agreement. Re Aelfgifu and its alternative names/forms, the domesday pase website notes that 

'A provisional attempt has been made to identify the people recorded in Domesday Book who bore this name; however, the material remains to be checked and edited, and profiles of these people remain to be written.'

This is not surprising perhaps, given the complex variations in spellings of this name. It is hard to be sure and I am not Janina Ramirez. But I have some ideas.  Firstly, the chances are Aelfgifu was from the heart of the then Saxon/Norman royal network, many of whom held lands recorded in Domesday Book. During the time of the late Saxons and early Normans many of these were closely and intricately connected with what is now Devon. And Jacobstowe is situated on the edge of what was then a large royal estate or demesne, whose centre was the upper reaches of the river Taw. In 1066 North Tawton was still royal and South Tawton was held by Gytha, mother of Harold. (See, for example, below taken from W.G. Hoskins, Provincial England; essays in social and economic history). 

from Hoskins' Provincial England

      Some of the women from the royal clan were born in Devon, or/and lived there, or/and held lands there. Famously, Gytha, Harold's mother, was in and made her escape from Exeter in 1067, at the height of the Norman Invasion. 

from Pauline Stafford
Women in Domesday

        I have written about some of these Saxon and early Norman royal women in the manuscript of Writing Women on the Devon Land (See From the Devon Ridge). In particular, I have tried to emphasise these women's probable literary expertise. For example, Elfrida or Aefthryth, a Devon daughter who became Queen of England, whose own words when in the throes of a land dispute apropos lands near Taunton, can still be read, when she sends her humble greetings to an Archbishop:

I bear witness that Archbishop Dunstan assigned Taunton to Bishop Aethelwold, in conformity with the Bishop's charters ... And the king said that he had no land to grant out, when he durst not, for fear of God, retain the headship himself; and moroever he then put Ruishton under the Bishop's control. And then [Wulfgyth] rode to me at Combe and sought me 

     This rare example of a text attributed solely to an Anglo-Saxon queen' is a 'writ, composed sometime between 999 and 1001, which stands out as the only extant document in Ælfthryth's own voice ... Ælfthryth not only acts primarily on behalf of female litigants, but the surviving record explicitly highlights gender as the principal reason behind her intervention [but] as an authority specially qualified to represent female concerns to male authority. (See Old English Newsletter). I quote here from Ælfthryth's writ directly because I wanted to give the sense of these historical women's vivid presence, as well as their commitment to literacy and intellectual pursuits. 

        Surely, we can take as given that Countess Alveva/Aelfgifu of the disputed Domesday 'Jacobscherche' came from the inner circle of the then Wessex royals; or if not, was jostling amongst them. But even that narrowing of the field leaves a tangle of possible candidates. Aelfgifu was a very popular Old English female name and if you begin to look it up in a google search (for the appropriate time period) you may, like me, soon become bemused by the results. Taking into account my own peace of mind and the focus of this blog-post I am trying to narrow my selection of possible women to two; one of them was Queen Aelfthryth's daughter-in-law, AElfgifu or Emma of Normandy wife of  Etheldred the Unready, then of Cnut; the other, through Emma, Aelfthryth's granddaughter-in-law Aelfgifu, or Edith (I have seen her named Edith of Wessex); she was wife of Elfrida's grandson, Edward the Confessor) who happened also to be one of Gytha's daughters - but I must stress that other women of the time could equally have been the elusive Alveva of Domesday Devon. For example, another daughter of Gytha, also Aelfgifu, who died before her arranged marriage to a Norman nobleman, is said to be named in the DB - see The Godwins. Then, there is Aelfgifu of Northampton, Cnut's first wife/mistress.

        Both Emma and Edith had intricate connections with Devon lands, as well as networks of kin from the region. As well, both Emma and Edith, typical of royal women of their day, were highly educated and both commissioned literary works celebrating the lives of their husbands. As far as dates are concerned we may take Emma of Normandy out of the equation in our search for Aelfgifu, for Emma died in 1052, before the Domesday Book was compiled. But, my understanding of the complex issues that swirl round any analysis of the DB is that some of the DB records are of people who had previously held stated land; so, in my mind, Emma of Normandy (who had the title Lady of Exeter) is not yet quite ruled out. There are many links between her and Devon and recently it was discovered that a copy of the literary text she commissioned, the story of her own life The Courtenay Compendium had been stored for many years at Powderham. 

       Emma's daughter in law Edith of Wessex was known to be the wealthiest women of her time, her intellectual accomplishments were also celebrated:

You teach the stars, measuring, arithmetic, the art of the lyre,
The ways of learning and grammar.
An understanding of rhetoric allowed you to pour out speeches,
And moral rectitude informs your tongue
(Godfrey of Cambrai)

Said to be mentor of the spiritually inclined Margaret of Scotland, Edith studied the lives of English saints and her hagigographic account of her husband's life, the Vita Ædwardi Regis was one of the distinctive manuscripts of the period. Edith's name is usually given as Ealdgyth rather than spelled in the form of Aelfgifu, but I have noticed that other Ediths of the Saxon period were alternatively Aelfgifu. 

       So, either of these women; if she were (or is) identified as the Countess Alveva/Aelfgifu of the Devon Domesday Book' and if Jacobscherche might indeed be Jacobstowe, as pre-C20 scholarship reappraisal, C19 historians assumed; and if she did have any real connection with the place, rather than being just a name inscribed on parchment marking her position as distant landowner, then, as looking back we read the name of a woman from that distant past, we can begin to flesh out a sense of a real person: a noblewoman of the time, who may have visited and tramped across the lands that she held and even, dare I suggest, composed narratives about her life-journeys.

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       Well, my intention in this piece was to thread up along the centuries through the historical chain and muse upon the possible literary links of several other named women whose names pop up quite often with a google search including Jacobstowe. But time, space and Aelfgifu of The Domesday Book mean that instead I must let them go back into the archival ether from where I first retrieved them and wait for another chance (another researcher?) to re-invent their lives. But before I do I will just jot down a couple of their names together with a little snippet, found somewhere or other on the Internet.  

1.   There is C14 Juliana de Bromford

She was previously married as the second wife of John de Bromford of Bromford and Jacobstowe. She could not have been married to him for very long if he had a son by a previous wife born after 1362 and his own death occurring in early 1363.Julianne married as her third husband Matthew de Hordelegh by 15 December 1387 when they presented at Rackenford. He was again named as ‘Matthew Hordelegh who has married the widow Julianna Cruwys’ when Robert Cruwys confirmed the ‘dower from her late husband Alexander Cruwys’ in 1388 (Wiki Tree)

       2. There is C15 Sybil de Durneford.
         National archives hold a document concerning the Will of Sybil de Durneford at Discovery -

1435: 12d to Rector of Church of Stowe St James (Jacobstowe) to pray for her soul. 12d to the furniture of St. Cross in the said church. 20s for Masses to be celebrated immediately after her death. Residue to her executor, Thomas Prous, to distribute for her soul and the souls of those to whom she is bound, and for the execution of her will. (Who was Sybil?)

       

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        I realise I must now let this 'homage' to Jacobstowe find its own way in the nether regions of virtuality, and therefore decide on a place to draw this post to a conclusion. My talented grandmother, who featured at the beginning and frames this whole piece returns to haunt the white screen, whilst synchronistically, a rather unexpected finding surfaces via the web. I find that during the time that Annie Abbott's family lived at at Home Farm, on the Broomford estate, in Jacobstowe, late C19, a portrait of Anna Seward, so-called 'Swan of Lichfield', who was once one of the country's foremost C18 female poets was displayed in the main house. I hesitate to display an image of that portrait for obvious copyright reasons, but you can see it here at wikipedia commons. It is a striking picture of the acclaimed poet, who, in the active act of turning the page of a book (of Milton's poetry), (or perhaps marking it), returns her gazes reflectively, intently back, at the viewer. If my grandmother was lucky enough to have been invited into the inner sitting-rooms of her family's employer, though probably unaware of the identity of its subject, she may have had the pleasure of viewing this painting of the renowned poet. And the literary nature of its content can not have escaped her.

    

      It seems that Anna Seward was related to the White-Thomsons. Robert White-Thomson inherited the portrait along with the miniature (see above). Somewhere, I have come across information re the rather intricate details of their familial connection, but can not at present locate it. Another source, the National Portrait Gallery, tells us that the painting was passed to Anna Seward's nephew 'Thomas White of Lichfield, thence by descent to his grandson Leonard Jauncey White-Thomson Bishop of Ely of Broomford Manor, Exmouth' - but there may be errors in this explanation. I think Leonard was probably Robert White-Thomson's son, but shall leave it to other detectives out there to chase up the detailed genealogy of the families. A good place to start is at Liverpool University archives with White-Thomson's Letters. 

       I do not think that Anna Seward had any personal links with Devon - though as I have not had a chance to study her life, I may be wrong. However, the poet did apparently make forays toward the county when, travelling south-westwards, she visited Bath-Easton. See, for example, Revolutionary Players. 
       But I like to conjure an image of this once famous female C18 poet gazing down from the wall of the Devon drawing room through the corridors and hallway, out of the gabled porch of the splendid new Neo-Jacobean mansion, to the rural vistas of the mid-Devon village where my own maternal grandmother spent her formative years. Symbolically, she, the poet-on-the-wall, represents the occult nature of hidden potential, as well as the lost literary accomplishments of a variety of women from the endless past stretching way back before her, at least to a distant point of time when a little wooden church was built on the special site next to the special holy well of the 'stowe'. 

Inside Jacobstowe Church

See also From the Devon Ridge Where a Book Began