The North Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

It matters little, or nothing, that there are not any cliffs at Barnstaple, and that you would not seek at this precise spot for the most boisterous breezes.

The town is alike the oldest and the most important on this coast. Long before that usual starting point, the coming of the Normans, it figured prominently as Beardanstapol. Although it was once the site of a castle, and was for many centuries a walled town with defensible gates, its inhabitants were essentially, from the beginning, a trading community, as the “staple” in the place name indicates. It was also one of the oldest Parliamentary boroughs, having sent representatives from 1295 until 1885, when ruthless redistribution, utterly without sentiment, merged it in a county division. Then the ancient local passion for bribery and corruption ceased automatically to be satisfied at intervals by competitive candidates for the honour of representing the “free and independent” burgesses, who greatly liked the free-handed and rejected with scant ceremony those who were not prepared to dive deeply into their pockets. Thus, when in 1865 Mr. Henry Hawkins, afterwards Lord Brampton, was invited to stand in the Liberal interest, the invitation was issued quite as much in the local interest and in the expectation that he would be as liberal with his money as in his political opinions. But the eagerly expectant people of Barnstaple received a nasty shock, for the rising barrister refused to spend a penny in bribery. The indignant electors, mindful of the glorious election of 1841, when £80 was paid for one vote, had their feelings outraged in the tenderest place, and rejected him with remarkable completeness.

From A.D. 928, when Athelstan is said to have conferred a charter upon the town, and 938, when he is supposed to have repaired the walls, already old and decayed, Barnstaple fully took advantage of its favourable situation in a sheltered estuary, and the port was large enough to be represented by ships at the siege of Calais in 1346. In 1588 it sent five ships to Liverpool’s one, in the levy raised to combat the Spanish Armada; among them vessels with the proud, high-sounding names, Tiger, God Save Her, and Galleon Dudley. After thus serving their country, the Barnstaple merchants served themselves well, by equipping numerous privateers that successfully preyed upon the Spanish mercantile marine, and brought home to the old port on the Taw great store of treasure in gold, silver, and goods brought by Spanish sail from the Spanish main, and intended for Cadiz rather than for North Devon.

It was the Golden Age of Barnstaple. The burgesses manufactured woollen goods and baize and sold them in good markets, and the bold seamen sallied forth and patriotically scoured the ocean, and took by force of arms anything they liked. Sometimes they ran up against what a modern American would style a “tough proposition,” in the form of an innocent-looking Spanish merchantman better armed and more courageously manned than they suspected, and the results were not so fortunate: but, naturally enough, records of these misfortunes are not given so prominent a place in the history of these things; and you are invited rather to picture the returned sea-captains, bursting with riches, carousing in the taverns of Boutport Street, and paying for their entertainment with moidores, doubloons, “pieces of eight” (whatever they were), and other outlandish coin. Coin of foreign mintage was more common than the pieces of Queen Elizabeth (“God Save Her”), and passed current as readily.

To those times of unparalleled prosperity, which continued until well into the third quarter of the eighteenth century, belong many of those existing architectural remains of old Barnstaple that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the rebuildings and other changes of our own times. Out of the abundance of his riches old Penrose in 1627 founded the almshouses that still remain very much as he left them; and in that era the quays and Castle Street were occupied, not only with the warehouses, but the residences also, of the merchants who traded with distant countries or levied private war upon the foreigner, with equal readiness. A complete change has, indeed, come upon that quarter, for the Barnstaple Town railway station, a brewery, and some entirely modern houses stand upon the spot where the merchants did not disdain to live over their counting-houses, looking upon the river, where the weather-beaten vessels, at last come home from alien seas, were warped to shore. Of that old time there is a very fine old doorway left in Castle Street; and in Cross Street, near by, over a tailor’s shop, there is the first-floor front room of a late sixteenth-century house with a most elaborate Renaissance plaster ceiling and frieze, probably executed for some enriched merchant, fully conscious of what was due, in the way of display, to his wealth. The design is curious, the workmanship rough, the feeling of it imbued with a religious cast; characteristics, all of them, common to much work of the kind executed at that period in North Somerset and North Devon, from Minehead to Bideford. The Renaissance had come very slowly down this way, on its long journey from Italy, and had lost on the way the fine touch of its native land. It had lost also much of the somewhat pagan character it exhibited there, and became greatly concerned in the more prominent narratives of the Old Testament. Vague legends tell of wandering Italian craftsmen executing the plaster ceilings and elaborate chimney-piece designs often found in old houses of the better class in these districts, but they were probably Englishmen, who had picked up something of the trick of the new style, without very much of foreign dexterity, but had imported their own thought into the work. At any rate the numerous examples met with have so striking a general likeness of treatment that the conclusion of their being the work of a distinct school becomes inevitable.

AN OLD DOOR, BARNSTAPLE.

Here, in this Cross Street example, the subject is Adam and Eve; Eve (with her arms ending in a trefoil instead of hands) about to pluck a very large apple off a very small tree, and Adam looking greatly alarmed. The Trevelyan Hotel has several decorated ceilings and a dark little back room—now merely a receptacle for lumber, and sadly injured—with a very elaborate chimney-piece in high relief, bearing a central medallion representing the Nativity, bordered by typical Renaissance scroll-work and flanked with two armour-clad figures, minus a limb or two each. The “Golden Lion” inn, however, has the finest display, to which, indeed, it has every right, the building having formerly been the town-house of the Bourchiers, Earls of Bath.

It is a fine old house, dating from early in the seventeenth century, with many oak-panelled rooms and passages, and several with ceilings intricately decorated in plaster reliefs. The large upstairs sitting-room is the gem of the house, displaying, as it does, a coved ceiling dated 1625, with pendants and the arms of the Bourchiers, together with scenes representing Adam and Eve, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Sacrifice of Esau, disposed at intervals amid a large mixed assemblage of horses, pheasants, and storks.