The town was dominated by the College. The bridge by which you entered the town from the west was the bridge of the Holy Saviour. In one of its recesses the sacred light was ever kept burning, inviting those who passed to pray. We have Pater-noster Row, Jesu Street, Chapel Lane, Butts (St. Budeaux) Hill, Paradise; names of a flavour ecclesiastical. In the Flexton, as the open space is called where now the Town Hall and a Jubilee Memorial Pillar to Queen Victoria stand, the markets and fairs were held, and in the churchyard may still be seen the ancient stocks. Great fires, however, in 1604, 1767, and 1866, have destroyed much of interest in the town.
Henry VI. visited the College in 1451, and Henry VII. in 1497.
The College disappeared at the Reformation. Some portion of its funds were used to found the King’s Grammar School, which took root in what remained of the collegiate buildings. The fortunes of the school varied with the capacities of the head masters. It was successful under the Rev. John Coleridge, 1760–1781, and under his son, the Rev. George Coleridge, 1794–1808, it became almost the equal of Blundell’s School at Tiverton. It subsequently slowly declined, the buildings were unsuited to modern requirements, and it finally disappeared, reviving recently on another site in another form under a scheme of the Charity Commission.
The town must have sadly suffered for a time from a dissolution of the College. But as soon as the rule of Philip II. in England was over, and his fanaticism began to work in the Netherlands, the Flemings flying to England added a great impetus to our wool trade. Some, I think, must have come to Ottery St. Mary, for a flourishing woollen industry sprang up here about this time, and a small outlying portion of the town still bears the name of Dunkirk. The pastoral character of the Vale of Otter, and the ample water-power of the river were advantageous to the trade, which was only killed by the discovery of steam.
The great factory built by Sir George Yonge, the Secretary of State for War in 1790, a prominent feature to the passer-by, shows the extent to which the industry once flourished.
In Mill Street there stood a house “beturreted and wearing a monasterial aspect,” which Sir Walter Ralegh, who was born at Poer’s Hayes, now Hayesbarton, further down the valley, is said once to have inhabited. A house built in the quiet, dignified style of the eighteenth century, called Ralegh House, marks the site.
Our town and vale were not unnoticed by poets. William Browne, the author of Britannia’s Pastorals, full of quaint conceits, but with a true vein of poetry running through them, alludes to the Naïads who fish and swim in the clear stream of Otter. And he is believed, on the authority of Southey, to be the author of two fine inscriptions in the small south chapel of the church, one on John Sherman and his son, who died on the same day in 1617, and one on the wife of Gideon Sherman, who died in the first week of her marriage.
Michael Drayton thus described the broad pastoral character of our vale:—
Here I’ll unyoke awhile, and turn my steeds to meat,
The land grows large and wide, my team begins to sweat.