But the legendary belief in them in all this countryside is strong, and dates far back beyond the appearance of Blackmore upon the scene with his “Lorna Doone.” Aged people who lived at Porlock, and in all the districts affected by legends of these robbers, and whose memories carried them back to the early years of the nineteenth century, have given testimony, not only to their having heard abundantly of “Doones” on Exmoor, but to their having received the legends from their parents. The long-lived fishermen of Porlock Weir, confronted with pamphlets written and published, elaborately arguing against the existence of those people, indignantly declared that one might as well pretend there were never Aclands of Holnicote. They were not in the least concerned with Blackmore’s story; for they had never read it, and did not carry the author’s name in their minds. A curious thing is that so few people of these districts have ever read “Lorna Doone.” But the fishermen, in common with others, knew the usual run of the stories; although, to be sure, they believed that the Doones were almost extinguished by the Reds of Culbone, and knew little or nothing of the Ridds of Oare. We are met with several theories as to the origin of these floating legends, and the name of Doone. A favourite theory is that which dismisses these stories by contending that the name is a corruption of “Danes,” and that these more or less mysterious outcasts were really belated memories of those Danish sea-rovers who made such fierce havoc along all these shores in the ninth and tenth centuries. A second belief, strangely supported by the undoubted existence in South Wales of a family, or band, of Dwns (the pronunciation is exactly that of “Doone”) in the time of Queen Elizabeth, is that a number of Welsh outlaws, fleeing from justice, came across the Channel from Carmarthenshire and became the Exmoor Doones. These Dwns were very objectionable people in their own country, and were largely intermarried, strange to say, with Ryds. A third guess at the origin of the Doones is found in the belief, sometimes held, that they were originally fugitives from Sedgemoor fight, hiding from the retribution of the Government in what were then the fastnesses of the moor; but the obvious criticism of this view is that all danger would have been past after the revolution of 1688, and they would then no longer have needed to hide.