NEW BOOK CHARTING DARTMOUTH’S ARTISTIC HERITAGE AND INSPIRATION DArtMOUtH An enchanted Place by Joslin Fiennes O
n the 16th August, a new book exploring the extraordinary history of Dartmouth is launched. The book is a richly illustrated addition to anyone’s coffee table and is researched
and authored by Joslin Fiennes who has already been interviewed by this magazine (see May 2013 issue) about her illustrious international career as an economist. Painting and sculpture, poetry and adventure, the present and the past, the local and the cosmopolitan; all belong to this exploration of the Dartmouth area. Although Joslin’s career has focused on international economics, the book is a return to writing for her. Early jobs included a stint as sub-editor for Punch and assistant editor for The Journal of Modern African Studies, when living in Tanzania. While in Botswana she published short stories, principally about Africa. In this exclusive interview, she talks to Phil Scoble about how the book came about and what discoveries the reader will make.
DARTMOUTH An Enchanted Place
Joslin Fiennes
“It’s about seeing what you are looking at – I mean really seeing.” Joslin Fiennes’ eyes light up with excitement as she takes me through her new book, Dartmouth: An enchanted Place, which is published this month by the Antiques Collectors Club in association with Richard Webb. “We all look at the town and the area around it and see a beautiful, historical place, but when you dig down into the history and, perhaps more importantly, find the people who made and kept it, then what you see is far richer and much more entertaining.” Joslin has spent 18 months painstakingly bringing together her story of the art, writing and entrepreneurship that has been
readiness; despite his wealth from booty, he saw himself as a protector of the realm. And either he or his son chose to have him remembered dressed as a knight, which he never was, in the brass over his grave in St Saviour’s chancel. The image he wanted to leave was of a noble life.
The Bretons were the likeliest threats to Dartmouth’s wine fleets sailing down to Bordeaux, and its natural competitors for the merchant ships sailing up the west coast of France and turning into the Channel towards the markets of Calais and Flanders. It was a time of constant attack and reprisal. Incidents of piracy, privateering and truce-breaking involving the Bretons and the Devonians pepper French and English records, with monarchs alternately trying to impose peace and arresting those who broke it and then licensing the same seamen to make war. The game intensified in the early 15th century. In 1403 the Bretons ‘attacked Plummouth by night and burnt the town’ under their leader Guillaume du Châtel. Three Dartmouth shipowners including Hawley were commissioned ‘to make war on men of Britanny’ in reprisal and Sir William de Wilford and a fleet from Bristol and Dartmouth ravaged the Biscay coast.
* In 1403-04, records show that Hawley, with others, brought into Dartmouth a ‘barge laden with iron and other merchandise of Spain’; the Seint Nicholl of Orio (Castile) ‘laden with 108 tuns of wheat, 2 tuns of peas, 4 half cloths ‘Darafroll’ and 50 yards of cloth and other harness, goods and armour amounting to 1300 crowns of gold’; ‘the Seint John of Vermew (Castile) with freight of 787 crowns of gold, 125 quintals of iron of Spain, 250 dozen goatskins and 70 ox-hides, etc.’ (Watkin, 1935, p.377.) Dartmouth had to have had a sophisticated network to unload, store, market and distribute all this along the coast or up the mule tracks out of town. At the same time, Hawley pursued legitimate trade, sailing in convoy down to Bordeaux to exchange his wool for wine every year, employing some 600-700 seamen, although his own ships were attacked just as he attacked others. John Hawley: Merchant, Mayor and Privateer, by Michael Connors (Richard Webb, 2008) gives a comprehensive account of the man and his time.
To give the English ‘une rude leçon’, a Breton force set out in April 1404 to attack Dartmouth. By then, defences had been built on either side of the Dart estuary, and the Bretons veered away to land at Slapton, meeting an English force at Blackpool Sands. The Chronique de Saint- Denis, a broadly accepted contemporary French record, describes a disaster of French leadership, ‘Everything was lost through a rashness bordering on madness’. A force of 300 ships with 2,000 knights and men-at-arms left Brittany under the command of three leaders. But on the way, part of the Breton fleet was distracted by some Spanish wine ships, and part disliked the proposed landing place, so only a small force of lightly armed men, but including all the knights and squires, landed under two of the leaders, de la Jaille and du Châtel.
All records agree broadly on what happened. The forces met on either side of a tidal ditch full of water at Blackpool Sands. De la Jaille, ignoring du Châtel’s sage advice to go behind the English, led the charge, fighting over a narrow crossing. Many knights drowned, many were killed, including du Châtel, la fleur des vaillants, and three lords and twenty knights were taken prisoner. The rest, sensibly, fled.
French and English records do, however, differ in their detail. The Chronique records an English army of 6,000 well-trained troops forming an impenetrable defense at the ditch, and that the Bretons, before succumbing, managed to massacre 1,500. Thomas Walsingham, on the other hand, records women and peasantry repulsing the invaders with fury, killing them without mercy. Ray Freeman describes Hawley, forewarned, despatching an army of ill-equipped local countrymen, none of them knights. (There’s no record of Hawley taking any other part in the affair.) Perhaps it was this victory of peasant over knight, many captured and good ransom potential, that created such a fuss in London, astonishing the court and inspiring Henry IV to order a Te Deum in thanks.
As to what happened then, the Chronique records that du Châtel’s brother, Tangui, immediately put together another force. A month later he attacked Dartmouth, entering without resistance, and burnt it to the ground, leaving only ruins. For the next two months he reportedly ravaged
The stream over which the Bretons and Devonians are believed to have fought still comes down to the sea across Blackpool Sands. © 2013 Nigel Evans
inspired by Dartmouth and its river. she shows me a magnificent image of a face carved rather crudely into a pillar of st Clements church. “This is a mason who helped build this church and it’s centuries old,” she says. “It was probably a self portrait. It is still here because generation after generation of Dartmouth people decided they wanted to keep it. Why? Who knows? But for us, it’s a link with somebody here who built this church and a connection with all the later generations who cared enough about his carving to keep it. That is what we have here today: what people have chosen to preserve. The town and its surrounding area are a living embodiment of what is now and what went before.” Joslin has immersed herself in the modern scene and its social and political history – and clearly has a passion for what she has discovered. she tells not only the story of modern artists and writers and those who have lived and worked here, but of the merchants, inventors,
the coast, pursued by the English king in person, returning safely, exhausted, burdened with immense booty. But local English records dated from the summer and autumn of 1404, after the presumed pillage, show Dartmothians being pardoned for debt, raising bonds, and transferring lands while the usual commissions are established for the restitution of booty. There is no English record of any attack. In fact, there is a record of Tangui requesting the mayor to return his brother’s remains, and another suggesting that Tangui himself was imprisoned (see below) suggesting that this part of the Chronique cannot be correct.
While there are no records of Henry IV pursuing Tangui across the Devon countryside, there are records of him pursuing Hawley for a share in the ransoms of the twenty captured knights. Within five days of the battle, Nicholas Aldewyche was commissioned to bring the king ‘five, six or seven of the more valid and sufficient of the King’s enemies captured near Dertemuth’, and on 25 May, the sheriff of Devon and the mayor of Dartmouth were told to bring five named knights and ‘a certain Welsh
esquire...that the King may have colloquy with them and learn the secrets of his enemies’.
* Most of our local knowledge of medieval times comes from records of local court decisions, land transactions, charters and correspondence with the king and ecclesiastical and naval events and decisions. These are inevitably patchy, although those for Dartmouth are far more comprehensive than they might have been had they not been rescued by two heroic historians. Stuart A. Moore documented them in 1879-80, and found an iron cupboard to put them in, and more than half a century later, Hugh Watkin recovered them from the town gaol, transcribed a précis of each record, indexed them and in 1935 published the first volume of his enormously valuable work.
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DARTMOUTH An Enchanted Place
Previous Spread: The medieval church of St Saviours and the Castle enclose the modern town. © 2013 Nigel Evans
BURGESSES AN St Saviours and Chaucer
The deep, sheltered waters of Dartmouth’s harbour offered de people grasped it. The sea was the thoroughfare for Englishm secular wars of medieval times, and its harbour lent the town na went off on crusades; it was the rendezvous for European vesse point for the third, with more than a hundred ships sailing out of t from here to Santiago de Compostela, thirty-seven ships ‘heavily after the marriage of Henry II with Eleanor of Aquitaine and the lo later they hammered out in early autumn across a gusty channel an taking wool and tin to Bordeaux and bringing back wine, to underp years. Even during the great famine of 1317-21 ships brought back
Joslin Fiennes
ANTIQUE COLLECTORS’ CLUB IN ASSOCIATION WITH
RICHARD WEBB
Kings came. Richard I probabl assembled the fleet for the third c Dartmouth. Fifteen years later, K from ‘Dertemuth’ when he stayed fr Dorchester. In 1286, Edward I cam with Queen Eleanor at Exeter, contribution of ships to his wars Walsingham records that he came sheltering from a storm with his army
The ancient but undated door of St S two heraldic leopards, royal emblems o a tree of life. Richard I, who died in 119 coat of arms and three on his second Edward I used the same three leopa supporting the town’s claim for a church
A copy of the charter issued by Edward I on 16 F the burgesses of Dartmouth permission to ere in the town. Calligraphy by Melvyn Stone, Devo V
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