HUGH STAFFORD AND THE ROYAL WILDING
Hugh Stafford, Esq., of Pynes, born 1674, was the last of the Staffords of Pynes. His daughter, Bridget Maria, carried the estate to her husband, Sir Henry Northcote, Bart., from whom is descended the present Earl of Iddesleigh. Hugh Stafford died in 1734. He is noted as an enthusiastic apple-grower and lover of cyder.
He wrote a “Dissertation on Cyder and Cyder-Fruit” in a letter to a friend in 1727, but this was not published till 1753, and a second edition in 1769. The family of Stafford was originally Stowford, of Stowford, in the parish of Dolton. The name changed to Stoford and then to Stafford. One branch married into the family of Wollocombe, of Wollocombe. But the name of Stowford or Stafford was not the most ancient designation of the family, which was Kelloway, and bore as its arms four pears. The last Stafford turned from pears to apples, to which he devoted his attention and became a connoisseur not in apples only, but in the qualities of cyder as already intimated.
To a branch of this family belonged Sir John Stowford, Lord Chief Baron in the reign of Edward III, who built Pilton Bridge over the little stream of the Yeo or Yaw, up which the tide flows, and over which the passage was occasionally dangerous. The story goes that the judge one day saw a poor market woman with her child on a mudbank in the stream crying for aid, which none could afford her, caught and drowned by the rising flood, whereupon he vowed to build the bridge to prevent further accident. The rhyme ran:—
Yet Barnstaple, graced though thou be by brackish Taw,
In all thy glory see that thou not forget the little Yaw.
Camden asserts that Judge Stowford also constructed the long bridge over the Taw consisting of sixteen piers. Tradition will have it, however, that towards the building of this latter two spinster ladies (sisters) contributed by the profits of their distaffs and the pennies they earned by keeping a little school.
HUGH STAFFORD
From the original painting in the collection of the Earl of Iddesleigh