The strange thing is that Davy should have made a gift to Lustleigh, knowing what had happened to the gift of Robert Phipps. By his Will (2 October 1676) Phipps gave £40 to be bestowed in lands of inheritance, the rents and profits whereof were to be employed to buy linen cloth at Easter for such old men and women of the parish of Lustleigh as had none or little relief from the parish, the linen cloth to be dowlas of 10d. per yard or thereabouts, and each poor man or woman to have three yards. The linen was distributed until 1802, and then the trust-fund disappeared, and has not been heard of since. It had not been invested in land; and this may have been the reason why Davy chose to give a piece of land in his own lifetime rather than bequeath a sum of money by Will.
He could have given the school a larger income by putting his £325 into the Three per Cents. at the price they stood at then. As he did not do that, he would hardly have approved of selling the land and putting the proceeds into Funding Loan, though this will give a larger income than the rent in recent years. The present rent is not the only thing to be considered in trusts that are in perpetuity. Harrow accepted a fixed annual sum in lieu of the rent of land that then was farms and now is part of London.
At the Parish Meeting there was an overwhelming majority against the sale--only five people voting for it--and nearly the same majority for a resolution calling on the trustees to resign. But the sale was carried through by a majority of the trustees in spite of every protest. Three of the trustees in the majority were people who had only lately come to live in Lustleigh, and the most active of them was a new arrival who soon went away. Things have changed since Parson Davy’s time. He was here for forty years himself: the living of Lustleigh was held by two Rectors for ninety-six years, 1791 to 1887; and the living of Bovey was held by two Vicars for a hundred years, 1735 to 1835. In the present century there have already been four Rectors of Lustleigh, and the vacancies have not been caused by death.
These people who come and go, will never take the same amount of interest in a place as those who spend the best part of their lives there; and they may even take delight in doing some lasting damage to a place that has not quite appreciated them. That is a kindly view to take. Unkind people called the sale a job; and nobody believed the talk of getting more money for school prizes--Lustleigh is some miles from Buncombe. If more money was wanted for the prizes, there were plenty of people who would have subscribed the few pounds’ difference between the rent of the meadow and the interest on the Funding Loan.