Note (return) — Chapter V · THE INCIDENT OF MR. JOEL FORD

John Grimbal, upon the morning that preceded the present supper party, had at last found a property to his taste. It might, indeed, have been designed for him. Near Whiddon it lay, in the valley of the Moreton Road, and consisted of a farm and the ruin of a Tudor mansion. The latter had been tenanted until the dawn of this century, but was since then fallen into decay. The farm lands stretched beneath the crown of Cranbrook, hard by the historic “Bloody Meadow,” a spot assigned to that skirmish between Royalist and Parliamentary forces during 1642 which cost brilliant young Sidney Godolphin his life. Here, or near at hand, the young man probably fell, with a musket-bullet in his leg, and subsequently expired at Chagford.1 leaving the “misfortune of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention to the world,” according to caustic Chancellor Clarendon.