In 1558 good Queen Bess mounted her father's throne; and one day bethought her of the Modbury orchestra. So with her royal hand she wrote down to Henry Champernowne, grandson of Sir Philip, to bid him bring up to court his "consort of fine musicke," for that she desired greatly to hear it.
Henry was tactless, and he replied that the visit to Windsor previously had cost his grandfather two of his best manors, and that he really could not afford it. Queen Bess was highly incensed, and found occasion against Henry Champernowne to mulct him of four or five fine manors, as a lesson to him not to return such an answer to a royal mistress again. This marked the beginning of the decline of the Champernowne family at Modbury. The manor passed from them in 1700. But although the Champernownes are gone, the band is still there. It has never ceased to renew itself, and Modbury prides itself as of old on its "consort of fine musicke."
Bigbury takes its name from some great camp or bury that has disappeared under the plough. In the church is a very fine carved oak pulpit, like that of Holne, given by Bishop Oldham to Ashburton Church in or about 1510. At the same time he presented an owl as lectern to Ashburton Church, the owl being his badge. In 1777 the wiseacres of Ashburton sold pulpit and owl to Bigbury for eleven guineas. When the Bigbury folk saw that they had got an owl instead of an eagle, they were disgusted, sawed off the head and sent it to Plymouth, with an order for an eagle's head of the same dimensions. Accordingly, now the lessons are read in the church from a lectern that has an owl's body with an eagle's head. But really--as in the puzzle pictures--one is disposed to ask, "Where is the owl?" and to look for it first among the Ashburton folk who sold their bird, and secondly among the Bigbury folk who objected because he was an owl. There are some brasses in the church to the Burton family, into which married the De Bigburys.
At S. Anne's there are an old chapel and a holy well. S. Anne did not come into fashion as a saint till the fifteenth century, and there are no early representations of her, or dedications to her. But Anne was the mother of the gods among the Celts, and the name was given to several notable women, as the mother of S. Samson, and the daughter of Vortimer, king of the Britons, mother of S. Wenn, who married Solomon, king of the Dumnonii; and a suppressed cult of the old goddess went on under the plea of being directed to these historic women, till the great explosion of devotion to Anne, mother of the Blessed Virgin--known to us only through the apocryphal gospels.
