A Somerset Lad

It was a surprise to discover from a television programme that eels had become a critically endangered species. In teenage years, we thought eels were a nuisance, they seemed so resilient that we could not have imagined that they would ever be endangered. How could a creature that could survive crossings of the Atlantic to breed in the Sargasso Sea, and that could find its way into our obscure waterways ever be threatened?

Fishing with rod and line in the River Yeo to the east of Langport, we rarely caught anything of note (we rarely caught anything at all, an odd perch, roach or dace, but always very small ones). The one thing that would regularly be landed was eels.

There were some fishermen who had a special interest in eels. There was a National Anguilla Club whose activities must have been reported upon in the Angling Times, the weekly fishing newspaper, for there is no other way I could have known of the club’s existence.

In some parts of the county, eels were caught in large numbers to be sold for food. The local name for the activity was “rayballing.” Earthworms were tied together using a ball of wool and the ball of bait would be fastened by wire to the end of a wooden pole. The bait would have been lowered into the water and pulled up from time to time. The teeth of the eels would be caught in the wool and they would have been lifted, wriggling from the water. The eels would have been knocked free from the bait against the side of a tin bath in which their number would accumulate until the catcher was content with his haul.

Eels were extraordinary creatures. There were tales of their migration across land to reach isolated ponds and lakes, stretches of water that could only be reached by lengthy periods in the open air. Even if the eels could survive, how did they know where they were going? How did they know the direction in which to crawl? How did they know that water awaited?

The thought of eels making terrestrial journeys seemed an unlikely one until a visit to the French city of Bergerac one autumn. In the middle of a street market, a fishmonger had a tank of live eels among what he was selling. From time to time, an eels would climb up the side of the tank and attempt to escape down the street. In between serving customers, the fishmonger would step down the street, pick up the escapee and throw it back into the tank.

The end of the eels would be the end of something quite different from any other creature.

Driving from Bridgwater to Langport and passing through Weston Zoyland, a sign at the former parish church announces that it is the Battle of Sedgemoor Visitor Centre. The building that was once used to hold five hundred prisoners from the defeated rebel army is now a place for tourists.

Monmouth’s army were always going to be losers. Many of them were ill-equipped Somerset peasant farmers who had nothing by way of military training, they were men without a hope of military victory when they were faced with the army of King James II at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6th July 1685; hundreds of them were cut down by musket and artillery fire. The battle was only the beginning of a tragic period in Somerset history, it was followed by the “Bloody Assizes” of Judge Jeffreys, in which more than 300 of Monmouth’s ragged band were condemned to death.

There were no winners, though. James himself would be deposed in 1688 and his armies in Ireland defeated in 1690-91. Soldiers who had fought with him were expendable, as were all soldiers.

Langport had suffered the effects of battle some forty years previously, on 10th July 1645. Crown forces had been routed by Cromwell’s men; Cromwell regarding it as a mercy from God. The retreating Royalist soldiers had set fire to buildings in Langport to try to hamper the progress of the Parliamentarian troops and had been attacked by local “clubmen,” local men who had been armed by the Crown but who had turned on the king’s men in order to protect their town.

The battle of Langport was a victory for Cromwell, but most who participated were losers. The Royalist army suffered heavy casualties, those retreating were harried by the pursuing Parliamentary forces. Many lost their lives along Wagg Drove, many died in the retreat.

But the men of Cromwell’s army were to find that they were losers. Among the officers, the men who had joined in the Putney Debates, the idealists who believed they were creating a new society, there must have been a sense of their hopes having been betrayed. Cromwell was brutal in his treatment of those who opposed his authoritarian rule. Among the men who had fought in the New Model Army, there must have been a sense of disappointment at the grim protectorate that emerged, and a sense of it all having been a futile effort when the monarchy was restored in 1660.

The battlefields within a few miles of here are a reminder that, for nearly everyone who goes into battle, wars only create losers.

My parents fell heir to a number of his books, a selection that included local history and archaeology writing on Gloucestershire, Bristol and Somerset, a number of books on church architecture, and at least half a dozen on churchyards.

Looking at the shelves, the number of books on churchyards seemed to be larger than the number on church buildings. He had been a Quaker, so perhaps the buildings had not seemed so important, but perhaps there was another reason for the interest in the ground that lay outside the solid wooden doors of the medieval churches. His wife was a bell-ringer, perhaps there had been occasions when she had gone to ring in other towers, as is the wont among ringers, and he had travelled with her to explore the headstones and memorial monuments that were to be found in the grounds.

Churchyards can be places apart, places of deep peacefulness.

Among evangelical Christians, it used to be said in the days of Communist rule in the old Soviet Union, that people who were unable to attend the sort of places of worship that they might have chosen would instead go and spend time in graveyards and cemeteries. Perhaps they did, but perhaps the reasons were far more complicated than people simply being unable to attend a church of their choice.

The churchyard in our village is crossed by a public footpath from the gateway at the south side of the churchyard to a small gate that lies to the north-west of the church. When I was young, children would have been afraid to have used the path in the dark – there was a fear of ghosts.

It would be hard to imagine a place less frightening than the village churchyard, the chief danger on a dark night would be to stray from the path and trip over one of the stones that is in a state of disrepair.

Lying at the north-west corner of the saltire shaped village green, the churchyard is ancient and its very antiquity probably means that it has many stories to tell someone who came searching.

There are people commemorated whose lives were long and full of years, there are others whose lives were tragically short.

The churchyard is fascinating because it is a closed book. For the past century, burials have been in the village cemetery, the occasional interment of ashes in a small plot against the south wall of the yard are the only burials that have taken place in recent times.

Perhaps one of the books would explain how to read a churchyard, how to discern stories that are written in the soft sandstone.