gardener and his wife, alone, for they have no children, was tenanted at that time by three families, and each was prolific in children. The morality was very bad indeed, and of spirituality there was next to none. How this dead and evil condition of affairs was to be altered I did not see, I did not even see how it could be altered.
My second purpose was the restoration of the parish church.
The church had been remarkably rich in carved oak; there was a magnificent rood-screen, and it was benched throughout with oak, the bench-ends richly carved.
The original church had been founded probably by S. Petrock, about the year 560. The present structure is on the foundations of one consecrated on August 2nd, 1261, when it was re-dedicated to S. Peter. It was again rebuilt about 1520, and the screen and benches were erected in 1523–4, when Anthony Monk and his wife Elizabeth lived in the manor-house. He died in 1545. Mr. Condy, the Plymouth water-colour painter, drew the interior of the church before it was renovated in 1832. This renovation was effected by my grandfather, who swept away the screen and all the benches, and filled the church from end to end with deal pews painted mustard-yellow, and the manorial and rectorial pews lined with blue baize. Happily I was able to recover some nine or ten of the bench-ends and sufficient fragments of the screen to enable me eventually to restore the seating of the church and the reconstruction and re-erection of the screen. The re-erection of the screen was begun in 1899 and completed in 1915.
The third purpose I had in my mind, as a boy of seventeen, was the restoration and reconstruction of the manor-house. The manor had belonged to the Trenchards, but in the reign of Henry III it passed by marriage to the family of Monk of Potheridge, and Lew became an appanage of the second son. There was then probably a gate-house, for on the bench-end giving a bust of Anthony Monk, beneath him is represented such an entrance, with pillars.[1] The gate-house was pulled down later, and the pillars employed for the entrance to the stable-yard, till my father threw them down and buried them to form the foundation of a set of pig-styes.
- ↑ Anthony Monk was the eldest son, but, through the death of his younger brother John, Lew reverted to him.
