is stepdaughter, Katherine Salisbury. The next Nicholas de
Wichehalse married Lettice Deamond, the daughter of the Mayor of
Barnstaple, and it is an inventory of his shop, taken in 1607, that I
have quoted in a previous chapter.

His son Hugh married in due course, and continued to live at his family
mansion in Crock Street, until, in 1627, the fear of the plague which
ravaged Barnstaple and Bideford (it was supposed to have been brought
into the towns by an infected mattress which had been thrown overboard by
a plague-stricken ship, and was fished out of the river just below
Barnstaple by four children who were fishing) drove the de Wichehalses
out of the city.

Hugh de Wichehalse decided to send his family to the purer air of the old
Grange Farm of Lee, near Lynton. One can picture the removal: his wife,
his children, his servants, and a whole string of packhorses (carriages
were still rare as a means of transport), coming down Boutport Street,
and across Pilton Causeway, up the beautiful and fertile valley of the
Yeo, to Westland Pound on the edge of Blackmoor, and its inn, where in
all probability they slept. The next day they would be on the high
barren moors, where the air was too sweet and keen for infection, and so
would come across Parracombe Common, Martinhoe Common, Lynton Common, and
down the Valley of Rocks to Lee (what is now called Lee Abbey).

The farm stood about a mile and a half or two miles from Lynton, and
after the busy life of the town their solitude must have seemed to them
excessive, for their near neighbours would live half a dozen miles away,
and were inaccessible in winter. There were the Berrys from Crosscombe,
a branch of the Berrynarbor family into which Hugh's sister had married;
the Knights at West Lyn; the Pophams, who came from Porlock.

The family lived there for the next eighty years. Hugh was buried in the
parish church at Lynton, and his monument can be seen there; it is he to
whom Blackmore refers in "Lorna Doone" as Baron Hugh, who was somewhat
too much hand-in-glove with the Doones; but the "young Squire Marwood,"
who rode too frequently past the Ridds' farm and kissed Annie Ridd, is a
character of fiction, for Hugh de Wichehalse's son was called John, and
not Marwood, there was never one of that name.

John was a strong Parliamentarian, and married into the Venner family;
but very soon they were in opposite camps, and there was great distrust
and anger between them. C