42   Widecombe-in-the-Moor

ancient tenement farms in the district to the west of Widecombe to attend church there instead of at Lydford, and it was no doubt the contributions of these and the successful tinners, streamers or miners, or both, that furnished the funds for the church. The latter have been credited exclusively with the. erection of the tower, and just as in Wiltshire many a noble church was "built upon wool-packs", so here, as indeed in many places, "tin" has played a very prominent part. The tower, which is battlemented, and finely crowned with crocketted pinnacles, has been compared with that of Magdalen College, Oxford. The raising of the roof of the nave would seem to indicate the fact of its being of later date than the remainder of the building. The oak rood-screen, or rather the lower portion of it, remains, and is decorated with representations of our Lord and various saints. The wagon roof is noticeable and also the bosses, with their curious carvings, including the three rabbits with single cars united in the centre, found also at Tavistock and Chagford. On a board beneath the tower is a record in verse of the terrible thunderstorm which wrought havoc in the church on October 21, 1638, and of which we have some account in Blackmore's Christowell. These verses are by Richard Hill, the village schoolmaster, and another poet, Carrington, " the poet of the Moor", judicially and judiciously observes- 

The village bard
In simple verse that time has kindly spared
Has sung it; and in style uncouth
The pious rural annalist has penn'd
The fearful story. 

There is no question of the "style uncouth", and a far more impressive account is the one written in the fine, sonorous, and almost Odyssean style of the time embodied in Prince's Worthies of Devon. Four people were killed and sixty-two injured, not, it appears, from the failing timber and stone, but from what is popularly known as a thunderbolt. The people were "in a terrible maze", but it says something for the nerves pf the

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