Everything within Lynton church has been smartened up and clean-swept; even the old wall-tablet in memory of Hugh Wichehalse has been gilded and tended until it glows like a modern antique, unlike the genuinely old relic it is. And since much of the ancient history of Lynton and its neighbourhood is inseparable from the story of the Wichehalse family, let that story be told here.

In the many old guide-books that treat of Lynton, it is stated, with much show of circumstantial evidence, that the Wichehalses were of Dutch origin, and fled from Holland about 1567, to escape the persecution of the Protestants. We are even told how “Hughe de Wichehalse” was “head of a noble and opulent family,” and learn how he had fought in the Low Countries against the persecuting Spaniards. Harrowing accounts are even given of his narrow escape, with wife and family, to England.

But the supremest effort is the legend, narrated in a score of guide-books, of Jennifrid Wichehalse and the false “Lord Auberley,” who loved and who rode away, in the days of Charles the First. It is a tale, narrated with harrowing details, of a daughter’s despair, of a tragic leap from the heights of “Duty Point” at Lee, and of a father’s revenge upon the recreant lover at the Battle of Lansdowne; where, with his red right hand (you know the sort of thing), he struck down the forsworn lord in death. Follows then the sequel: how the father, a Royalist, was persecuted, and forced, with kith and kin, to put off in a boat from Lee. “The surf dashed high over the rocky shore, as a boat manned by ten persons, the faithful retainers of this branch of the house of de Wichehalse, pushed desperately into the raging waters. It was never more heard of.”

But that is all fudge and nonsense. There was never a Jennifrid Wichehalse; still less, if that be possible, was there ever a Lord Auberley, and the Wichehalse family did not end in the way described. All those things are doubtless creditable to the imagination of their compilers, but they do not redound either to their sincerity, or to the tepid interest taken in the neighbourhood by past generations of visitors. Any cock-and-a-bull story sufficed until recently, but now that local history is acknowledged to be not unworthy of research, it has been proved to demonstration by painstaking local antiquaries that the Wichehalses were not Dutch, but of an ancient Devon stock, and that they consequently could not have been the heroes of those hair’s-breadth ’scapes ascribed to them.

But their own true story is sufficiently interesting. They are traced back to about 1300, to the hamlet of Wych, near Chudleigh, in South Devon, a hamlet itself deriving its name from a large wych-elm that grew there. From the hamlet the family drew their own name, spelled at various times and by many people in some twenty different ways; commonly, besides the generally-received style, “Wichelse,” and “Wichalls.”

It was in 1530 that the Wichehalses first came to North Devon; Nicholas, the third son of Nicholas Wichehalse, of Chudleigh, having settled at Barnstaple in that year. Like most younger sons in those days, even though they might be sons of considerable people, he went into trade, and became partner of one Robert Salisbury, wool merchant, and prospered. Robert Salisbury died, and Nicholas Wichehalse married his widow in 1551; prospered still more, became Mayor of Barnstaple in 1561, and lived in considerable state in his house in what is now Cross (formerly Crock) Street. The great wealth he accumulated may best be judged by mentioning merely some of the manors he purchased: those of Watermouth, Fremington, Countisbury, and Lynton. To this eminently successful kinsman, the nine children of his brother John, who had died in 1558, were sent, as wards. His own family numbered but two, Joan and Nicholas, who came of age in 1588.

Nicholas, succeeding his father, retired from trade, and is described in local records as “gentleman,” and appears incidentally in them as wounding another gentleman with a knife, in a quarrel. Something of a young blood, without a doubt, this young Nick. He never lived to be an old one, at any rate, dying in 1603, aged thirty-eight, leaving five sons and three daughters.

Large families appear to have been a rule not often broken among the Elizabethan Wichehalses. It was indeed in every way a spacious era, and one of the most continuously astonishing things to any one who travels greatly in England, and notices the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century monuments in the churches, is the inevitable repetition of family groups, with the reverend seniors facing one another, in prayer, above, and the Quakers’ meeting of children below, boys on one side and girls on the other, gradually receding from grown-up men and women, down to babies in swaddling clothes. Early and late the Elizabethans laboured to replenish the earth and people the waste places.

Hugh, the eldest son of Nicholas, the buck, or blood as I shall call him, was seventeen years of age when his father died. He also had nine children, and resided at the family mansion in Crock Street, until 1628, when that terrible scourge, the plague, frightened away for a time the trade of the town and such of the inhabitants as could by any means remove. It was a sorry time for Barnstaple, for the political and religious wrangles that were presently to break out in Civil War were already troubling it. For many reasons, therefore, Hugh Wichehalse, who appears to have been an amiable person, and above all, a lover of the quiet life, resolved to leave Barnstaple and reside at Lee, or Ley, in the old thatched manor-farm that then stood where Lee “Abbey” does now. Here he died twenty-five years later, as his monument in Lynton church duly informs us. The epitaph, characteristic of its period, is worth printing, not only as an example of filial piety, but as an instance of extravagant praise. From what we know of him, he certainly seems to have been the flower of his race; but, even so, he probably was not quite everything we are bidden believe.

HUGH WICHEHALSE OF LEY,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
Christide Eve, 1653,
æt. 66.