before the gates of Exeter, a place already regarded, as it continued
to be for many centuries, as the key of the West of England. He took
the city after a brief siege and proceeded to secure his hold upon it
by building the castle of Rougemont, which was hardly finished when
it was unsuccessfully attacked by the Saxons. A year later the sons
of Harold also tried in vain to take it. The last man of mark in
Devonshire to hold out against Norman rule was Sithric, the Saxon abbot
of Tavistock, who, when all was lost, fled to Hereward's camp of refuge
in the Fens. A few Englishmen were left by the Conqueror in possession
of their estates; but the county, as a whole, was divided among a number
of Norman nobles, some of whose descendants, Courtenay, Carew, and
Champernowne, for example, still survive in Devonshire. An interesting
link with Norman times and customs is the ringing of the curfew bell,
which is still kept up at Exeter, Okehampton, and other places. At eight
o'clock every evening thirty strokes are sounded for "Curfew," and then
eight more for the hour.
In the stormy reign of King Stephen Exeter was the last place to hold
out for Queen Maud. The king was admitted into the town by the citizens,
but the castle of Rougemont cost him a three months' siege.
The importance of Devonshire sea-ports brought the county into great
prominence in mediaeval times. Part of Richard C[oe]ur-de-Lion's
crusading fleet, we are told, assembled at Dartmouth--a town which
Chaucer, probably regarding it as a typical sea-port, chose for the
native place of the Shipman in the _Canterbury Tales_. No other part
of England furnished so many ships and men for Edward III's expedition
against Calais. Again and again, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, the French, in reprisal for what they had suffered by the
attacks of England, harried the coast of Devon, plundering and burning
Teignmouth, Plymouth, and other places on the coast.
The Black Death, the most terrible and destructive epidemic of which we
have any record, which devastated the whole of England in 1348 and 1349,
was very severe in this county, paralyzing agriculture and trade, and
stopping for a time the building of Exeter cathedral.
Fighting in Devonshire during the Wars of the Roses was confined to an
unsuccessful and half-hearted siege of Exeter by the Yorkists, and to
attacks on the fortified manor-houses of Shute and Upcott. But many
men in the county took sides in the struggle, and some of the great
families suffered severely. Sir William Bonville was beheaded after the
second Battle of St Albans. Of the ancient house of Courtenay, Thomas,
Earl of Devon, was executed at York, Sir Hugh was beheaded at Sarum,
and Sir John was killed at Wakefield Green. The county as a whole was
Lancastrian. Queen Margaret herself was there after her defeat at
Barnet; and French gold coins found in Blackpool sands are believed to
be relics of the landing there, in 1470, of Warwick and Clarence. But
when in the same year Edward IV visited Exeter, he was so well satisfied
with his reception that he presented the corporation with a sword of
state, which is still carried in processions before the mayor.
The peace of Devonshire in the fifteenth century was further disturbed
by a rising, in 1483, against Richard III; by the march through the
county, in 1497, of an army of Cornishmen who had risen in revolt
against a heavy war-tax, and who were ultimately beaten at Blackheath;
and by the insurrection, also in 1497, of Perkin Warbeck, who claimed
to be the Richard Duke of York usually said to have been murdered in
the Tower, and who made a desperate although vain attack upon Exeter,
when some of his men fought their way into the town, but were driven out
again by the citizens.
About fifty years later, in 1549, there was a widespread and determined
and altogether much more serious rebellion called the "Commotion,"
caused partly by the suppression of the Monasteries, which was greatly
objected to by the poor, and partly by the introduction of the Prayer
Book. The insurgents, who had collected from all parts of the West
Country, and who were led by such men of mark as Pomeroy, Arundel, and
Coffin, laid siege to Exeter and Plymouth, and for a time held the
king's troops helplessly at bay. In the end, however, Lord Russell,
one of the newly-created Lords Lieutenant, aided by German cavalry and
Italian arquebusiers, defeated the rebels with great slaughter in a
series of hotly-contested battles. The vicar of St Thomas in Exeter, who
had encouraged the rising and who was described as very skilled both
with the long-bow and the hand-gun, was hanged "in his Popish apparel"
on the tower of his own church, and his body was left there for four
years.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth has been called the Golden Age of English
History. And among the heroic figures of that stirring time there are
few more striking than the little group of Devonshire men who played so
gallant a part in making England great:--Drake and Hawkyns, the scourges
of Spain; Ralegh, courtier and soldier, sailor and author; Gilbert,
the discoverer of Newfoundland; and Grenville, who at Flores, in the
_Revenge_ of immortal memory, kept at bay a Spanish fleet of fifty-three
sail.
[Illustration: Signatures of Drake and Hawkyns]
The great event of the reign was the defeat of the Armada. And although
Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral, showed himself a skilful and
intrepid sailor, it is Drake whom we always think of first in connection
with the victory. It was Drake whose buccaneering exploits on the
coasts of Spain and her colonies did so much to heighten Philip II's
ambition to humiliate England. It was Drake who, in 1587, dashed into
Cadiz, where the Armada was preparing, and by destroying 100 ships and
vast quantities of stores, delayed for a whole year the sailing of the
expedition. And when at last the Armada had been sighted, it was Drake
who, according to the commonly received tradition, thinking it wiser
to wait until the enemy's fleet had passed Plymouth Sound, and so take
them in the rear, persuaded his fellow-captains to stay and finish that
never-to-be-forgotten game of bowls, before the English ships, lying
ready in the Catwater, should slip their moorings and stand out to sea.
It was Drake who was foremost in the attack. It was Drake who took the
_Capitana_, the flagship of Pedro de Valdez, and brought her, the first
prize of the great victory, into Torbay. And when the English fireships
had scattered the hostile fleet in headlong flight, it was Drake who was
foremost in the chase.
[Illustration: Flagon taken by Drake from the "Capitana" of the Armada
(_In Windsor Castle_)]
[Illustration: Drake's Drum]
Among the relics of Devonshire's greatest hero, carefully treasured
by his descendants at his old home at Buckland Abbey, are his sword
and the famous drum that he carried with him round the world; while at
Nutwell Court are flags that he flew while in command of the _Pelican_,
the miniature of herself given to him by Queen Elizabeth, and other
objects of the greatest historical interest. And among the Royal plate
in Windsor Castle is preserved the noble wine-flagon of bold silver-gilt
_repoussé_ work, standing nearly a yard high, which Drake took from
the _Capitana_ of the Armada and presented to Queen Elizabeth. An
illustration of it, from a photograph taken for this book by command of
the Queen, is here shown for the first time.
[Illustration: The "Mayflower" Stone on Plymouth Quay]
During the retreat to Spain a second Armada vessel, the hospital-ship
_St Peter the Great_, was driven ashore in Hope Cove; and the pulpit
of St James's church, Exeter, and the timber roof of Tiverton School
were, it is believed, made of wood either from this ship or from the
_Capitana_.
It was not until this period that Plymouth came into prominence as a
naval station. A special tax was levied on the pilchard fishery to
provide money for the fortifications, and a leat or water-course was
constructed with the primary object, it is said, of supplying fresh
water for the royal ships.
A memorable event in James I's reign was the sailing of the _Mayflower_.
Preceded by another ship called the _Speedwell_ she set sail from Leyden
in the autumn of 1620, having on board a number of Puritan refugees
bent on finding in North America the religious freedom denied to them
in England. The two vessels having met at Southampton and put into
Dartmouth, were finally driven back by stress of weather into Plymouth,
whence--her consort having proved unseaworthy--the _Mayflower_ alone
continued the voyage, ultimately landing her 101 exiles at Plymouth,
Massachusetts, which, however, had received its name five years before.
In the Civil War between Charles I and the Parliament, few counties saw
more fighting than Devonshire. The fighting consisted, however, not
of pitched battles, but of sieges and attacks on fortified positions;
which, indeed, was characteristic of the whole war, in whatever part of
the country it was waged. Every Devonshire town of importance, a great
number of villages, many castles, manor-houses, and even churches played
a part in the struggle.
As a whole, the towns, with the exception of Exeter, sympathised with
the Parliament, while the rural districts, encouraged by the great
landowners, were mainly for the king. The royal forces were, however,
numerous in Devonshire; Goring's army, in 1642, was 6000 strong; and
although fortune wavered, and although towns were taken and retaken,
there came a time, before the arrival of Fairfax and the New Model Army,
when the royal standard flew from nearly every important town in Devon,
Somerset, and Cornwall. There was one conspicuous exception. The party
of the people never lost its hold on Plymouth, which, at a cost of 8000
lives, or more than the entire population of the town, withstood a
blockade lasting from 1642 to 1646, together with many desperate attacks
by Hopton, Prince Maurice, and the King himself, enduring altogether a
longer siege than any other town in England.
Exeter was early seized for the Parliament, but the majority of the
citizens were Royalists, and the city, which was regarded as one of
the strongest Cavalier holds in the west, was soon retaken by Prince
Maurice. Queen Henrietta was there in 1644, and there King Charles's
youngest daughter, afterwards Duchess of Orleans, was born. When Fairfax
retook the town in 1646 he allowed the garrison to march out with all
the honours of war.
That year saw the final ruin of the Royal cause in the west, and the
dispersal of the only army which, although little better than a mob,
still kept the field for the King.
One of the most important, and at the same time most fiercely-contested
Parliamentary victories, was the storming of the town of Torrington
by Fairfax, at midnight, in the winter of 1646. After the battle, the
church, which had been used by the king's troops (as also was Exeter
cathedral) as a powder-magazine, was blown up, and 200 Royalist
prisoners who had been confined in it and many of their guards were
killed. The loss of Torrington was the death-blow of the Royal cause in
Devon. All that a brave man could do, Hopton did. But the county was
sick of the Royalists and their methods. The people had learnt that
the well-disciplined troops of Fairfax were not mere robbers, like the
ruffians of Grenville and Goring; and after Torrington the Royal army
melted away.
The last place in the county to hold out for the King except Lundy,
where there was no fighting, but which did not surrender until 1647,
was Clifton Castle, or Fort Charles, near Salcombe. After enduring a
blockade and siege of four months, with the trifling loss of one man
killed and one wounded, the besieged were granted the same terms as
the garrisons of Exeter and Barnstaple, and marched out with matches
lighted, drums beating, and colours flying.
After the Battle of Worcester, in 1651, Charles II took refuge for
a time in Devonshire. Four years later there was an attempt at an
insurrection in his favour, known as Penruddock's Rising, and Charles
was proclaimed King at South Molton. The movement was promptly
suppressed, and its leader, Colonel Penruddock, was executed. It is
interesting to remember that, at the Restoration in 1660, Exeter was the
first town in England to acknowledge Charles II, and that he was there
proclaimed King ten days before he landed at Dover. Seven years later,
in 1667, the great Dutch Admiral De Ruyter captured all the shipping in
Torbay.
During the Commonwealth and later, when there was no copper coinage in
this country, many tradesmen all over England struck money of their own,
chiefly in the form of farthings. Nearly 400 varieties of Devonshire
"tokens," as they were called, issued by sixty different towns, are
known. Ninety-one were struck at Exeter alone, which is more than were
issued from any other provincial town except Norwich. At a much later
period shillings and sixpenny tokens of leather were in circulation at
Hartland.
After the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme in Dorsetshire, in 1685,
Axminster was the first town that he occupied, and a number of Colyton
men are said to have joined his army. Otherwise the rebellion hardly
touched Devonshire. Yet Judge Jeffreys put to death, at various places
in the county, thirty-seven of the Duke's misguided followers. After the
Battle of Sedgemoor, Wade and other fugitives attempted to escape by sea
from Ilfracombe, but they were obliged to put back, and were caught in
the woods near Lynton.
When, under very different auspices, William of Orange landed at Brixham
on the 5th of November, 1688, he marched to Exeter, as the chief city of
the west. The citizens at first held aloof, but in the end they gave to
the Deliverer their hearty and most valuable support.
Two years later the French admiral Tourville, fresh from his victory
over our fleet off Beachy Head, landed a strong force at Teignmouth, and
sacked and burnt that part of the town which ever since has been known
as French Street.
Both in 1715 and in 1745 the county was suspected of showing sympathy
with the exiled Stuarts. But when in the former year the Duke of Ormond,
with a small party of French soldiers, appeared in a war-ship off
Brixham, expecting to be welcomed by the Devonshire Jacobites, he met
with no encouragement.
Several episodes in the history of Devonshire are associated with the
French war of the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
nineteenth centuries. In 1797 a French squadron, afterwards captured
by Admiral Bridport, sank the fishing-boats in Ilfracombe harbour. A
few years later, in 1809, Princetown was built for the reception of the
rougher class of French prisoners of war, and during the five years that
followed 12,679 Frenchmen and Americans were confined there, while many
others were billeted at Okehampton, Ashburton, Tavistock, and Moreton
Hampstead. The Princetown buildings were afterwards disused--except for
a short occupation by a naphtha company--until 1850, when they were
converted into a prison for convicts.
It was at this period that Torquay came into note, having become a place
of residence for the families of naval officers serving on men-of-war
anchored in Torbay. In Torbay, too, was enacted what may be called the
last scene of the war. For it was here, on the 24th of July, 1815, that
Napoleon was brought a prisoner. And here he remained, except for a few
days spent in Plymouth Sound, until the 11th of August, when he was
taken to St Helena.
19. Antiquities.
To the archaeologist and the antiquarian Devonshire is one of the most
interesting counties in England. With the exception of Cornwall no other
district is so rich in relics of the ancient inhabitants of Britain;
and it was from the caves of this county that Pengelly obtained that
clear evidence of the extreme antiquity of man in this island which
proved that he lived here, unnumbered ages back, when such animals as
the cave-lion, the hyaena, and the mammoth ran wild in what we now call
England.
[Illustration: Palaeolithic Flint Implement
(_From Kent's Cavern_)]
The people who inhabited Britain before the coming of the Romans are
said to have belonged to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age,
according to the material which they used for their tools and weapons;
and the first of these epochs is further divided into the Earlier and
the Later Stone Ages, or the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Periods.
The implements of the former were very roughly fashioned of chipped,
unpolished flint; those of the latter were more skilfully made, and were
sometimes very highly finished.
Relics of all these periods have been found in Devonshire, but it is not
always possible to say to which age a particular weapon or implement
belongs. The use of flint for arrow-heads, for example, certainly
continued long after the invention of bronze; and bronze was employed,
especially for ornaments, long after iron had come into regular use.
Traces of Palaeolithic man are nowhere common, and they are rare in
Devonshire; but they have been found, in the shape of massive tools of
roughly chipped flint, in Kent's Cavern near Torquay, in the Cattedown
Cave, now destroyed, near Plymouth, and in the river-drift near
Axminster. Very fine examples have been obtained from a ballast-pit at
Broome.
Remains belonging to the Neolithic Age, on the other hand, are not only
much more abundant, but are of greater variety, showing an advance in
knowledge of the arts of life, and they include not only axe-heads,
spear-points, and arrow-tips of flint, in some cases beautifully
finished, but weapons and ornaments of bone and horn, rude pottery,
spindle-whorls, and even primitive musical instruments. No traces of
the dwellings of the people of this age, except as regards the caves
that sheltered some of them and their predecessors of the earlier time,
have yet been found, nor of their graves, if we except the Spinster's
Rock, two miles west of Drewsteignton. This is a dolmen consisting of
three huge stones, on which rests a still larger block, twelve feet long
and estimated at sixteen tons in weight; it doubtless was a Neolithic
burying-place.
[Illustration: Dolmen near Drewsteignton]
Relics of the Bronze Age are far more abundant, and they form, indeed,
the chief archaeological feature of Devonshire. Dartmoor in particular,
chiefly perhaps because its great upland wilderness has never been
broken up by the plough, is dotted all over with remains of primitive
Bronze Age dwellings, sometimes standing alone, sometimes grouped in
villages and surrounded by a wall, and also with many stone circles,
tumuli, kistvaens, menhirs, and rows of upright stones. It is, moreover,
intersected by a network of ancient trackways, linking settlement to
settlement.
[Illustration: Palstave of the Bronze Age
(_In Exeter Museum_)]
The best example of an early Bronze Age village is Grimspound, eight
miles north-east of Princetown. It consists of twenty-four round huts
made of stone slabs set on end and standing about three feet above
ground, scattered over a space of about four acres, surrounded by a
nearly circular double wall, from nine to fourteen feet thick, and about
five feet high, built of blocks of granite, some of which are tons in
weight. Half the huts contain fire-hearths, which have been much used;
and a good many have raised stone benches, from eight inches to a foot
high. Except that the roofs, which were no doubt made of poles and
thatch, have disappeared, these primitive dwellings, of which there are
hundreds on Dartmoor, are probably much in the same condition as when
they were inhabited, perhaps 2000 years ago. It has been suggested that
Grimspound, like many ancient camps or hill-forts, was a place of refuge
in times of danger, rather than a permanently occupied fortress.
[Illustration: Fernworthy Circle, near Chagford]
The objects found in these and similar dwellings consist of flint
implements, pottery--some of it decorated--spindle-whorls, and
cooking-stones such as are still in use among the Eskimo. So far, no
fragment of metal of any kind has been discovered, from which it might,
perhaps, have been inferred that the huts were the work of a race
unacquainted with the use of metal. But the pottery so closely resembles
that found in the burial-mounds of the Bronze Age that archaeologists
are satisfied that the dwellings belong to that period.
[Illustration: Hurston Stone Alignment]
Other remarkable monuments are the stone circles, or upright, unhewn
blocks of granite arranged in rings, of which there are many on
Dartmoor, and of which some of the finest are the Grey Wethers near Post
Bridge, and similar structures near Chagford and on Langstone Moor; the
avenues or alignments, consisting of rows of stones set up in straight
lines, as at Merivale Bridge, Hurston, and Challacombe; and the menhirs,
which are single stones, sometimes twelve feet high, of which the best
are at Drizlecombe, at Merivale, and on Langstone Moor.
[Illustration: Triple Stone Row and Circle near Headlands, Dartmoor]
It is probable that these structures were connected with primitive forms
of worship, but Sir Norman Lockyer has endeavoured to show, in one of
the most fascinating chapters of archaeological research, that the
circles and avenues, and the monoliths or menhirs connected with them,
were in all probability set up as rough astronomical instruments for
observing the rising of the sun or of particular stars, in order to
regulate the true length of the year. It is even possible, he contends,
to form some idea of the date of their erection. Thus the two avenues
at Merivale were probably laid out at different times, one about 1610
B.C., and the other about 1420 B.C., in order to watch the
sunrise in May, which was then regarded as the first month of the year;
while the avenues at Challacombe, among the most remarkable of all the
monuments, are probably of far older date, perhaps 3500 B.C., and seem
to have been arranged for the observation of sunrise in November, a month
long accepted by some Celtic tribes as marking the beginning of the year.
Kistvaens, of which nearly 100 have been found, almost all of them
on Dartmoor, are small stone burial chambers, generally used for the
reception of the burnt ashes of the dead, probably in many instances
originally covered with earth, and made of four slabs of granite set on
edge, forming a sort of vault, with another and more massive stone laid
on the top. Specially good examples have been found at Fernworthy, on
Lakehead Hill, and at Plymouth. The most remarkable kistvaen--belonging,
however, to a later period, when burial had displaced cremation--was
that discovered on Lundy, containing a human skeleton eight feet two
inches in length.
Tumuli or burial mounds, called cairns when they are made of small
stones, and barrows when they are merely piles of earth, are to be seen
in all parts of Devonshire, especially on high ground, sometimes alone,
sometimes in groups of from two to ten or twelve, and always round. No
long barrows have been discovered in the county.
The men of the Bronze Age reached a much higher stage of civilisation
than their stone-using predecessors, and very fine examples of their
bronze swords, daggers, spear-heads and axes; of their pottery, some of
it finely decorated; and of their ornaments, including beads of shale
and clay and amber, and an amber dagger-hilt with studs of gold, have
been found at various places in Devonshire.
Relics that can be attributed with certainty to the prehistoric Iron Age
are rare, partly, no doubt, because iron so quickly rusts away. Some
very remarkable remains of this period were however found on Stamford
Hill near Plymouth, during the construction of a fort, when the workmen
dug into an ancient burial-ground, in which, in addition to human bones,
were discovered red, black, and yellow pottery, mirrors and finger
rings of bronze, fragments of beautiful amber-tinted glass, and some
much-corroded cutting-instruments of iron. In the old camp called Holne
Chase Castle, a man digging out a rabbit came upon about a dozen bars
of rusty iron, two feet long, nearly two inches broad, and a quarter of
an inch thick, which although at first mistaken, as has been the case
elsewhere, for unfinished sword-blades, were subsequently identified
as specimens of the iron currency-bars which passed as money among the
ancient Britons. British coins of gold, silver, and copper have been
found in several places, particularly at Exeter and at Mount Batten near
Plymouth. The commonest are of what is known as the Channel Islands
type, bearing the effigy of a horse rudely imitated from the Macedonian
stater, and probably struck about 200 B.C.