Frederic Moorman came of a stock which, on both sides, had struck deep
roots in the soil of Devon. His father's family, which is believed to
have sprung ultimately from "either Cornwall or Scotland"--a
sufficiently wide choice, it may be thought--had for many generations
been settled in the county.(1) His mother's--her maiden name was Mary
Honywill--had for centuries held land at Widdicombe and the
neighbourhood, in the heart of Dartmoor. He was born on 8th September
1872, at Ashburton, where his father, the Rev. A. C. Moorman, was
Congregational minister; and for the first ten years of his life he was
brought up on the skirts of the moor to which his mother's family
belonged: drinking in from the very first that love of country sights
and sounds which clove to him through life, and laying the foundation of
that close knowledge of birds and flowers which was an endless source of
delight to him in after years, and which made him so welcome a companion
in a country walk with any friend who shared his love of such things but
who, ten to one, could make no pretence whatever to his knowledge.

In 1882, his father was appointed to the ministry of the Congregational
Church at Stonehouse, in Gloucestershire; and Frederic began his formal
schooling at the Wyclif Preparatory School in that place. The country
round Stonehouse--a country of barish slopes and richly wooded
valleys--is perhaps hardly so beautiful as that which he had left and
whose memory he never ceased to cherish. But it has a charm all its own,
and the child of Dartmoor had no great reason to lament his removal to
the grey uplands and "golden valleys" of the Cotswolds.

His next change must have seemed one greatly for the worse. In 1884 he
was sent to the school for the sons of Congregational ministers at
Caterham; and the Cotswolds, with their wide outlook over the Severn