This hints mysteriously of a misspent life, but no one knows anything of the circumstances.

Almost adjoining the church stands what was formerly St. Anne’s Chapel. At the Reformation, it became the Grammar School, and so remains. Between 1686 and 1761 it was also used, by permission of the Corporation, as a chapel, by the French Protestant refugees who had fled from the persecution of the Huguenots. A tablet facing Paternoster Row is to the memory of Thomas Lee, architect, drowned at Morthoe, 1834.

The River Taw is now bordered up-stream with leafy promenades, and by the Rock Park, another of the modern innovations upon the old order of things. To those who—seeing no rocks, but only smooth lawns and much landscape-gardening in the park—object that this pleasance belies its name, it is a sufficient reply to state that it was the gift of Mr. W. F. Rock, a native of Barum, and a member of the London firm of wholesale stationers, Rock Brothers.

And the river Taw runs past, over its broad bed of sand, or swirls fiercely up at the flood tide from the sea, bringing up seaweed and driftwood, and sometimes a fragment of wreck from the channel.

The wisdom of not retrieving all and every description of “wreck of the sea” seems to be pointed out by the sad seventeenth-century story of the four (not seven) brother fishermen who, fishing, after their daily custom, in the estuary of the Taw long ago, hauled ashore a bundle of rugs and bedding, floating up on the tide. It would appear that these articles had been flung overboard from some ship afflicted with the plague, for the fishermen themselves died of it and were buried up river, off Tawstock, at a point still known, by an odd confusion of ideas, as “Seven Brethren Bank”; the spot having originally been marked by seven elms. A tombstone, long since vanished, was erected by Thomas and Agnes Ley, parents of the unhappy fishermen, with the inscription:

“To the memory of our four sweet sons, John, Joseph, Thomas, and Richard, who, immaturely taken from us altogether by Divine Providence, are Hear inter’d, the 17 August, Anno 1646.

“Good and great God, to Thee we do resigne
Our four dear sons, for they were duly Thine,
And, Lord, we were not worthy of the name
To be the sonnes of faithful Abrahame,
Had we not learnt for Thy just pleasure’ sake
To yield our all, as he his Isaack.
Reader, perhaps thou knewest this field, but ah!
’Tis now become another Macpelah.
What then? This honour, it doth boast the more,
Never such seeds were sowne therein before,
Wch shall revive, and Christ His angells warne
To beare with triumphe to the heavenly Barne.”

It was in the same year of this tragical trover that Barnstaple was stricken with the plague, probably by the agency of the same ship: a cargo of wool having then been landed at Bideford quays from the Levant. Bideford suffered first, and then Barnstaple.

A hilly road takes you up, out of Barnstaple, on the way to Bideford, out of sight of the river. Past Bickington it goes, and Fremington—Fremington that was once a borough town and port, returning two members to Parliament in the reign of Edward the Third. Fremington finds mention in Blackmore’s “Maid of Sker,” where its creek is styled “Deadman’s Pill”; but there is little, otherwise, to remark about it. Pretty, and overhung with trees where the road runs past the old church; but otherwise, no place to demand much attention. It is different with Instow, down the road, where the rivers Taw and Torridge join forces with the sea.

Instow is in two parts; the somewhat inland village and the waterside fringe of houses known as Instow Quay. The first of these two is old enough to find mention in Domesday Book, where it is called Johannestow; and from that to “Johnstow” and the present form was only the inevitable action of the centuries. The church gave it that name, having been dedicated to St. John Baptist.