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So go he did, and whither he went nobody knew, and for the moment nobody cared. But all Tedworth soon had occasion to wish that his lamentations had moved the Squire to pity. Hardly a month later, when Mompesson had journeyed to the capital to pay his respects to the King, his family were aroused in the middle of the night by angry voices and an incessant banging on the front door.
The riding that graces the Shires, that makes Tedworth and Pytchley, the Duke's and the Fitzwilliam's, household words and "names beloved" that fills Melton and Market Harborough, and makes the best flirts of the ballroom gallop fifteen miles to covert, careless of hail or rain, mire or slush, mist or cold, so long as it is a fine scenting wind is the same riding that sent the Six Hundred down in to the blaze of the Muscovite guns; that in our fathers' days gave to Grant's Hussars their swoop, like eagles, on to the rearguard at Morales, and that, in the grand old East and the rich trackless West, makes exiled campaigners with high English names seek and win an aristeia of their own at the head of their wild Irregular Horse, who would charge hell itself at their bidding.
He says the greatest warrants that ever he had to believe any, is the present appearing of the Devil in Wiltshire, much of late talked of, who beats a drum up and down. Mompesson, at Tedworth, Wilts, occasioned by the beating of an invisible drum every night for a year. 16th. Dined with Sir W. Batten; who tells me that the House have voted the supply, intended for the King, shall be by subsidy.
Within a few days the Mompesson family at Tedworth began to be annoyed at night by strange noises or drummings on the roofs. All the phenomena and manifestations which we associate with a modern haunted-house story were observed by this alarmed family of the seventeenth century.
Joseph Glanvill, who could also tell strange tales at first hand, and from his own experience. He had investigated the case of the disturbances in Mr. Mompesson's house at Tedworth, which began in March, 1661. These events, so famous among our ancestors, were precisely identical with what is reported by modern newspapers, when there is a 'medium' in a family.
Questions were asked of the agencies, and to the interrogation, "Are you a devil?" a most deafening knock replied. "We all jumped backwards." Now comes a curious point. In the Wesley and Tedworth cases, the masters of the houses, like the cure of Cideville , were at odds with local "cunning men". Mr.
For a moment I do assure ye that we bethought us that it might be a judgment upon us for our attention to such carnal follies. Then it crossed my mind that it might be the doing of some malicious sprite, as the Drummer of Tedworth, or those who occasioned the disturbances no very long time since at the old Gast House at Little Burton here in Somersetshire.
Mompesson, having returned to his house, at Tedworth, from a journey he had taken to London, was informed by his wife, that during his absence they had been troubled with the most extraordinary noises. Three nights afterwards he heard the noise himself; and it appeared to him to be that of "a great knocking at his doors, and on the outside of his walls."
The raps and scratches seemed to come on the bed of little Elizabeth Parsons, just as in the case of the Tedworth drummer, investigated by Glanvill, a hundred years earlier; and in the case at Orleans, 230 years earlier. 'Scratching' was usually the first manifestation in this affair, and the scratches were heard in the bedroom occupied by certain children.
He had been furnished the narratives which he used by "honest and honourable friends." Yet, if this scientific investigator could be duped, as he had been at Tedworth, much more those worthy but credulous friends whom he quoted. From a simple assertion that he was presenting facts Glanvill went on to make a plea used often nowadays in another connection by defenders of miracles.
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