Devon (England) -- Social life and customs; Wreyland (England)
Another great-great-uncle of mine (on my mother’s side) was a
prisoner-of-war in France, and he married a French lady. I remember his
son, a country parson down in Wales, and I must have heard the story
many times, but cannot now recall much more than the main facts. His
ship was captured in the war of 1795, and he was sent to Verdun as a
prisoner-of-war. Instead of coming back to England at the Peace of
Amiens in 1802, he stayed loitering about, and was still in France when
hostilities broke out again and all English were interned. He was
interned near Dijon, and thus met his future wife; and he found life so
pleasant there that he did not come back to England until 1817, not long
before his death.--These mixed marriages were fairly frequent then. One
of my great-uncles finished up the Waterloo campaign by marrying a
Belgian lady he had met in Brussels.
I can just remember the widow of a French naval officer who had been a
prisoner-of-war in England and had made her acquaintance then. It was
not quite a happy match, as she was very English; but the family doctor
wrote to my father, 15 December 1851, after paying them a visit at their
place in France, “Looking at all she endures from himself and his
family, one of the most tormenting things (to her) is want of
punctuality at meal times.” He died before I was born, but I heard
stories of him: for instance, when asked about his health, he always
said, “I am much better, but I am not good.” He had received the Légion
d’Honneur from the Emperor and the Saint Louis from the King; and when
he came to England, visiting, unmannerly young men would sing _The Vicar
of Bray_. And he would fret and fume and finally bounce up from his
chair, vociferating that he served no Emperor and no King: he only
served La France.
When on parole at Ashburton and Moreton and other little towns, the
prisoners-of-war were obliged to live in houses which the Agent had
approved: they were not allowed out before six in the morning or after
six or seven or eight at night according to the season of the year: they
might not go further than a mile from the end of the town; and they had
to keep to the main roads--if they went further or into cross-roads,
fields or woods, it was the Agent’s duty to send them into prison again.
However, Agents and others sometimes had blind eyes; and now and then
there were escapes. In fact, there were escapes from Dartmoor prison
itself--a good-looking sailor-boy once got a country-lass to let him
take her clothes, and thus escaped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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