rocks and at the entire expense and labour of the seamen the Kay head would have actually been down, as the river forced itself that way, and the rest must soon have followed after. And as the place is now so ruinous the seamen and other families must entirely leave it, and then it will all soon be washed away if not immediately repaired, which by a moderate computation will amount to £40.

Therefore the said petitioners humbly desire your honour to advance what your goodness shall think proper, as they will advance and do what lieth in their power, which may be advantage to you and your posterity and your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Dated Linton, 8th day of August, 1770.

This petition was signed by twenty-seven inhabitants, twenty-two in their own handwriting-one put his letters and four made their mark. It was entrusted to Mr. Nicholls, who forwarded it to Mr. Short endorsed with his strongest recommendations for its consideration.

Mr. Short replied that his steward, Mr. Hill, was there last summer but had no complaint and heard nothing of land floods, and as for the great stones, they would prevent any further mischief. At last the lord agreed to repair the foundations on the condition that the seamen would give their time to wait on the masons and do all the labourers' work in the repairs; and on their undertaking to do so the under-steward, Mr. William Litson, had orders to get it done as cheaply as possible. The work was completed in 1772, Mr. Short telling Litson that if there were any extras the seamen must pay for them. In the end the seamen paid three guineas extras and also bought and set up new mooring posts. It was not, however, very lasting, as in 1775 it was in as bad a state as ever. At this juncture a Mr. William Lock had settled in the parish and was engaged in the shipping business at the haven, and he took the matter in hand, did the most necessary repairs at his own expense, and called in an expert to survey the harbour works, who advised that an outlay of £200 would be necessary to put it in proper repair. The report was sent to the lord, who promised to give six guineas if the seamen and fishers would expend eighteen guineas of their own besides. This unsatisfactory reply brought the Rev. Edward Nicholls to the subject again. He represented to Mr. Short that if a tolerable quay was made many more sails of trading vessels and boats would come into the harbour, and thereby add to his interest if he would keep proper

posts and moorings, and that the poor fishermen had been obliged to be at the expense of it out of their own pockets as well as pay keelage, at which they greatly grumbled, and that six guineas would go very little way towards £200 expenditure; but if Mr. Short would contribute fairly they would raise the rest by a collection in all the neighbouring seaports.

The lord of the manor was however of opinion that Limmouth harbour was a place rather like the horseleech's daughters, always crying "Give, give," and that he got very little out of it and had little interest, as he had long ago disposed of most of the estates. Long negotiations ended in what remained of the manor and the manor rights being sold to Mr. Lock, by whom the quay was ultimately repaired.

The lawsuit between his grandson, Mr. Robert Lock Roe, and Mr. Geen as to the right to levy quay dues in A.D. 1870 is too recent to give particulars of, but it is interesting to note that the judges in giving judgment against Mr. Robert Lock Roe said they did so with great reluctance, but they could not override the evidence of a Record Office expert, Mr. Stuart Moore, who showed that while in the Assize Roll of the Pleas held before Solomon de Roffa in A.D. 1281 the Abbot of Ford, while claiming certain franchises and rights, made no claim of quay dues, and that as such claims are recorded in other cases the presumption was that the Abbot of Ford made no such claim or had no such right or franchise. This, I think, is of great interest as showing that researches into the records of the past, which certain uninterested people may describe as obsolete rubbish, have a commercial value in these present days, and I would also note that if Mr. Roe's advisers had taken equal care to search the records of the past the case might possibly have ended differently, as there are papers at the Record Office, some of which I have quoted in these pages, bearing on the subject which seem to favour the lord of the manor's claim.

The trade from the small haven has never been of any importance since the decay of the fishery. The export of oysters continued for some time; in A.D. 1801 they were still sent to Bristol and were sold at 2s. per 100. The only other exports were bark and oats, and the imports were coal and limestone, which was burnt near the sea; but the difficulty of conveying goods from the quay up the steep hills-the only conveyance being packhorses-was an

insuperable bar to any development, nor did the making of a wheel-track in the last century lead to any improvement, as the gradients were so steep. I have dealt at some length with the fishery and haven, for the history of it is almost the history of Lynton, for lying as it did far off from the main roads none of the great upheavals which figure so largely in the history of other districts touched it.

The suppression of the monasteries, so much of the parishes being abbey lands, might have been expected to have made great differences, but here it was scarcely felt, for the abbey property was administered not by one of the monks, but by a layman, one John Chidley, a Dorsetshire gentleman, who held the office of bailiff of the manors of Lynton, Countisbury, and Thorncombe, which he obtained through his relative Abbot Thomas Chard, alias Tybbs, Bishop of Solubria. And on the abbey being taken into the king's hands, Chidley obtained letters patent from the Crown to hold the office for his life, and held it during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, till it was sold to Nicholas Wichehalse.

The political and ecclesiastical storms of the Civil Wars passed it by. The nearest approach to it of any troops was the marching over Exmoor from Dunster to Barnstaple. The clergy were men of obscure note, at least so their successor said, and the livings so poor that their poverty was their protection. And there are no delinquents mentioned, though as I have shown in the account of the Wichehalse family it was the influence of the squire's son, John Wichehalse, the Parliamentary Commissioner, which was its protection. And so Lynton lived its quiet life, and after the brief episode of a resident squire, from A.D. 1628 to 1686, it sank back to a little country village, without a squire, rector, or vicar, or scarce a visitor for another hundred years. Even if one came, there was no accommodation of any kind. When the lord of the manor or his steward wished to visit his estate the only house able to accommodate them was a new one built by the curate, the Rev. Robert Triggs, and by a clause in the lease the owner had to find lodging and victual for the lord, his steward, servants, and horses. Its awakening was caused by the French Revolution. The shutting of the Continent for a long period to the tourists led them to seek for fresh pastures in the unknown parts of their native country, and in that period Lynton may be said to have been discovered by the general public; before, its existence and beauties