In the fog-shrouded lanes and cider-soaked villages of early twentieth-century Devon, forgotten eccentrics lived lives stranger than any fiction. S. Baring-Gould, that indefatigable collector of English curiosities, turned his antiquarian's gaze not on the great and famous but on the county's remarkable misfits: the enthusiastic apple-grower who discovered a legendary cider apple, the sailor who pretended to be a prince from Java, the deluded prophet who convinced thousands she was the Virgin Mary reborn. Here are rogues and worthies, clergymen who went mad and poets who went to sea, all rendered with Victorian fascination for human oddity. The book reaches its dark climax with the Princetown Massacre of 1814, which Baring-Gould investigates with forensic impartiality, sifting legend from fact. These are not the heroes of history books but the extraordinary footnotes, the characters history almost forgot. For readers who delight in the strange fringes of English life, this is an indispensable glimpse into a world where the line between folklore and fact dissolved entirely.
