immediate neighbourhood during the
course of the war.

Culpeper, the herbalist, to illustrate the powers of the plant moonwort,
tells of a wonderful incident that occurred to Lord Essex's horse,
presumably when his army was here in 1644. Moonwort has (or perhaps
_had_) a miraculous effect on iron, with power to open locks or unshoe
horses. 'Country people that I know, call it Unshoe the Horse. Besides I
have heard commanders say, that in White Down in Devonshire, near
Tiverton, there were found thirty horseshoes, pulled off from the feet
of the Earl of Essex's horses, being there drawn up in a body, many of
them being but newly shod, and no reason known, which caused much
admiration, and the herb described usually grows upon heaths.' Probably
almost all the neighbourhood thought witchcraft a better explanation.

It is very difficult entirely to disentangle accounts that seem to
contradict each other, but apparently Essex moved away from Tiverton
after a short stay, and certainly the King sent his army to Tiverton the
same autumn to halt there for a while on its way from Plymouth to Chard.
And as this army was returning, reduced and exhausted, from fighting and
long, hard marches in Cornwall, it could not have been sent to a town in
possession of the enemy. The next year Fairfax sent General Massie to
take Tiverton. The Governor, Sir Gilbert Talbot, was in a far from happy
position, for afterwards he wrote: 'My horse were mutinous, and I had
but two hundred foot in garrison, and some of my chief officers
unfaithful.' In spite of his disadvantages, he was able to repulse the
enemy in their first attack on church and castle, though unable to
prevent their gaining possession of the town. Two days later Fairfax
himself arrived, and batteries, furnished with 'several great Peeces,'
were erected against the church and castle. The actual fighting lasted
only a short time, for a shot broke the chain of the drawbridge, and it
fell; the Parliamentary soldiers rushed across it without even waiting
for the command, and the Royalists lost their heads and their courage
and fled.

A copy of a letter that General Massie wrote from Tiverton to a Cheshire
gentleman still exists, and in it he refers to a pamphlet, sent with the
letter, even the title-page of which throws light on Puritan methods of
influencing popular opinion against the Cavaliers. This startling page
runs as follows:

A True and Strange

RELATION

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