Pictures of Perfection

Volume the fifth

PROLOGUE BEING AN EXTRACT FROM THE DRAFT OF AN UNCOMPLETED

History of Enscombe Parish

BY THE REVEREND CHARLES FABIAN CAGE, D.D. (DECEASED)

To a casual eye Enscombe may appear the prototypical English village, with its setting, its architecture, its antiquities, its society, its economy, all combining to offer something like that pastoral perfection of which the poets dream. Yet a closer examination reveals much about the place which is deceptive if not downright deceitful!

Take the name. No problem here, one would think. The village in the combe or valley of the River Een. Yet a little pause may make one wonder what on earth a combe is doing in this county of dales? Combes or coombes are commonplace in the West Country and (as cwms) in Wales, yet I cannot readily think of another example in Yorkshire. Enscombe is the kind of name someone might invent who had never been further north than, say, Hampshire! Toponymists typically offer a puzzling variety of alternative derivations, such as Enna’s Combe and Eanna’s Combe, the first suggesting a connection with the Sicilian vale where Proserpine, gathering flowers, herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis was gathered; the second implying that the Irish Saint Enda, or Eanna, rested here while on his way from Galloway (where he trained as a monk) to Rome to be ordained. Neither suggestion deals with the intrusive combe, but together they are interesting in the choice they offer between the Christian and the pagan worlds.

Less attractive to the scholars but much more persuasive to a native is the theory advanced by the well-known Yorkshire folklorist, P. N. Walker. He refers to a legend that at some time in the mythic past a monstrous Grendel-type creature appeared in the northlands, bringing death and destruction wherever it went. Only one isolated hamlet by foresight and cunning managed to avoid the creature’s depredations, and this became known as the village that escaped ‘the monstrous visitor’, which is in Old English entisc cuma, eventually reduced to Enscombe.

Unconvincing? Well, I like it. But what’s in a name anyway? A date now is something different. We ought to be able to trust a date. We find the year 1508 carved all over Old Hall. Yet researches show that the building was completed some time in the 1560s. It appears that Solomon Guillemard, the then Squire, having appropriated much of the wealth of the dissolved priory of St Margaret to himself and bought the land and remnants of the priory at a knock-down price, determined to confuse any subsequent investigation by naming his new manor Old Hall and predating it by half a century! Interestingly, this accords very well with considerable back-dating which has occurred in regard to the Guillemards’ arrival in England. They were certainly not among the first wave of Norman nobility who conquered with the Conqueror. Rather they appear to have been part of that great invasion of ‘carpetbaggers’ which customarily sweeps in behind a victorious army.

I pointed this out to the Squire when he honoured me with the opening stanzas of his ballad history which describes his ancestors’ deeds of derring-do at Hastings. I also mentioned that I could find no reference to this curious myth of the talismanic kingfisher before a court case of 1661 when, after twisting and turning throughout the period of the Civil War and the Commonwealth in a manner which made the Vicar of Bray look like the Rock of Ages, Squire Gabriel Guillemard was claiming back land along the Een which he alleged had been stolen from him by the Parliamentarians. Running out of legal argument and factual evidence, he suddenly produced this myth of the kingfisher plus a dozen witnesses to swear they had seen it fly to the precise boundary of the claimed land, then turn and fly upstream once more. Nobody has ever lost money by overestimating the superstitious credulity of an English jury, and the case was won.

Selwyn clearly knew all this. He remarked not unjustly that it ill behoved anyone in my line of business to insist on literal truth, and gave me another dozen quatrains for my pains!

I do not tell these stories to accuse the deviousness of the Guillemards, but rather to suggest that such a leading family is exactly what one would expect Enscombe to have chosen. Not chosen in any electoral democratic sense, of course, but by that process of natural selection which is how all living organisms contrive to survive. And Enscombe is a living organism, make no mistake about that, and an incredibly adaptable one too, androgynously apotropaic, ready to be anything in the expectation of being ever, accepting change as the price of unchange, an Artful Dodger of a village making one demand only of its inhabitants, which is unquestioning love. Fucata non Perfecta (which incidentally was the coinage of one Cuthbert Guillemard who, after some misguided expressions of sympathy for Mary Stuart, decided after her execution that the family’s old French motto Sanz loy, sanz foy or Lawless and Faithless was capable of misinterpretation), Fucata non Perfecta really means, it’s better to be painted than perfect.

And so it is. For the monster is loose again, and has been these past several years, roaming free and ravaging the land. It too has the gift of disguise, now appearing as a wild-eyed woman, now as a vacantly smiling man. But always it gives itself away by the reek of greed and corruption that hangs about it.

Let us pray that when it reaches Enscombe it will not recognize us under our paint, but pass us by.