Two fields in Bovey are called the Portreve’s parkes: a Tracey gave them to this Bovey (Bovey Tracey) as endowment for a banquet at the beating of the bounds. But the Charity Commissioners have flouted the pious donor’s wishes, and the rents are now applied to praiseworthy prosaic purposes. Till these Commissioners came, the bounders all rode horses decked with ribbons and flowers; and it was called the Mayor’s Riding. And now we all trudge round on foot, and are reduced to ginger-beer and buns.
There was a story of a landowner near here going to an Exeter lawyer in great alarm, “That scoundrel ***** has forged a Mortgage on my land,” and the lawyer soothing him, “Well, we can forge a Reconveyance.” Such documents could not be forged successfully except by lawyers or their clerks, but anyone can forge a Will. Forgery, however, is not what disappointed relatives suggest, at any rate in Devon: they always say the Will has been destroyed by someone who would profit by a former Will or an Intestacy. The thing is done, though rarely; but such suggestions are quite lightly made, as if it were a thing that anyone would do if he just had the chance. About twenty years ago a farmer told me that a certain person had destroyed the Reconveyance of a Mortgage on his farm. As he said he had the Mortgage, I asked to see it, and found the Reconveyance was endorsed on it. He thought the Reconveyance was a separate document, and seemed annoyed at finding that the other man was not as great a villain as he thought.
Two masons who did not like each other, were working at a granite wall that I was building here in 1906. Hearing angry voices, I went down and found one of them accusing the other of having stolen his spirit-level. I asked him where he used it last, and told him to take a few stones off the wall just there--I knew the way he worked--and there was the spirit-level in the mortar underneath a stone. He had put it there and overlooked it, and now was vexed to find he had no charge to make against the other man.
Thefts are very rare here. If there are goods or parcels for anyone who does not live near a main road, they are put down on the wayside where his road turns off, and he comes over to fetch them. There was a sad case some while ago--near Ipplepen, if I remember right. A man came over on a Monday to fetch some things that had been left for him on the Saturday; and they had gone. And people shook their heads and wondered what the world was coming to, if you couldn’t leave things by the wayside from a Saturday to a Monday without their being carried off.