The conclusion of the whole matter appears to be that there was really a band of semi-savage hut-dwellers established on Exmoor in the middle of the seventeenth century, and that they continued to be a nuisance to the neighbourhood, in the sheep-stealing and petty-pilfering way, until perhaps the first few years of the next era. But that they were ever the terrible marauders of legend is not for a moment to be credited. They were probably, like the old type of gipsy, only too glad to be able to sneak necessaries covertly, and then to make off, and to be let alone; and were never bold enough to make raids. The duck-gun at Yenworthy was not used necessarily against a Doone: for lonely farmhouses were of old, all over the country, not unlikely to be the objects of attack. For a striking instance of this truth reference may be made to Tangley Farm, or “Lone Farm,” as it is often called, in the neighbourhood of Burford, Oxfordshire, which was attacked boldly by the “Dunsdon Gang” one night about 1784.[7] Footnote 7: See _The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road_, Vol. I., pp. 248-252. It may here be not altogether out of place to remark that anything with which the late Rev. W. S. Halliday was associated is to be examined closely and suspiciously, for he was a person of a saturnine turn of humour, delighting to send antiquaries and others upon false scents. His ancient habit of burying Roman coins in the neighbourhood of his residence at Glenthorne, with the singular object of deluding future generations of archæologists into the belief that they have come upon plentiful evidence of Roman civilisation in these parts, is well known; and being well known (doubtless to the distress of his tricksy spirit) is not now likely to deceive any one. It must remain an open question as to how the outlaws of Badgworthy, in whom, with the reservations made above, we are prepared to believe, came by the name of Doone. The probabilities and theories have already been given, and the matter must rest there. The undoubted existence of old of other Devonshire semi-savage bands is itself a strong presumption of a like tribe here. The Gubbins band, in the neighbourhood of Lydford, “living in holes, like swine,” was well known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is made the subject of a reference by so serious a writer as Thomas Fuller, 1660. “Their wealth,” he says, “consisteth in other men’s goods: they live by stealing the sheep on the moors. Such is their fleetness, they will outrun many horses: vivaciousness, they outlive most men. They hold together like bees: offend one, and all will revenge his quarrell.” The Gubbins also have found their way into fiction, in “Westward Ho!” The Cheritons, on the other hand, who also lived on the borders of Dartmoor, at Nymet Rowland, have not found their apotheosis in literature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIII