Prince is entirely delightful over this story. He goes on: 'Now, thus to handle a priest in those days was a very bold adventure;' as if to bury a priest alive was usually considered a pleasant amusement. Sir William, however, not only lived through the storm that the high-handed action raised, but actually succeeded in moving Parliament to pass an Act regulating the burial fees that might be asked of the poor. So our biographer finishes with the triumphant axiom: 'Evil manners are often the parent of good laws!'
Eleven miles west of Bideford is Clovelly. Here one feels, rather despairingly, that anyone who has seen this wonderful village can listen to no description of it; while to those who have never seen it, no description is of any value.
A road leads towards it through the Hobby, a wood overhanging the sea, which Kingsley describes as 'a forest wall five hundred feet high, of almost semi-tropic luxuriance.' The road was 'banked on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble-blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the delicate cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green sprays and grey stems gleamed that same boundless ocean blue.'
The village itself lies in a ravine of the rock, and the 'street' is so precipitous that the eaves of one house are on a level with the foundations of its next neighbour above. Kingsley and Dickens have written descriptions that, scarcely overlapping, seem to complete each other.
'I was crawling up the paved stairs, inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated Clovelly street; ... behind me a sheer descent, roof below roof, at an angle of 75°, to the pier and bay, two hundred feet below and in front of me; another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak and ash and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs and bright green railings packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of courtyard; calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet, and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland.'