If the traveller passing down the Vale of Otter by rail looks out to the East, he will see a great grey church with transeptal towers—a rare feature—one crowned with a spire, standing on rising ground backed by a great continuous chine of hill. Around the church nestles a small town, and a clear, swift river hastens by it to the sea. This is the Collegiate Church of Ottery St. Mary, mainly the creation of Bishop Grandisson. Edward the Confessor gave the Manor of Ottery St. Mary in 1061 to the Chapter of the Cathedral Church of Rouen, in Normandy. Bishop Grandisson bought the Manor in 1335, laid the foundations of the college for forty secular monks, and amplified the church to suit the college. Bishop Bronescombe consecrated a church here in 1260. His work is seen in the nave and transepts of the present building. Bishop Grandisson built the nave, lady chapel and side chapels, etc., raised the towers over the transepts, and covered the whole with a stone-groined roof. The church left his hands a miniature cathedral. A wealthy lady, Cicely Bonville, wife, first of the Marquis of Dorset, and then of Henry Lord Stafford, added the north aisle—1503–1523—with its grand fan-tracery groining, a purely indigenous feature, which may be seen repeated at Cullompton, and the whole result is a majesty and variety of external elevation which no building of its size can well surpass. It was the central figure of a group of buildings. Chapter-house, library, cloisters, gate-house, all were there. The houses for the dignitaries stood around. Fragments alone remain. There still stand the vicar’s house, the warden’s house, the chanter’s house, and the manor house containing portions of old work. The houses of the minister, the sacristan, and the canons have disappeared.

From these haunts of ancient peace there was issued, in 1509, Alexander Barclay’s Stultifera Navis, or Ship of Fools, a translation, or rather paraphrase, of the Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brandt, which originally appeared in the Swabian dialect. Barclay’s book contains much original work, and breaks the great period of literary silence between Chaucer and Spenser. When we say, “Man proposes, God disposes,” “skin deep,” “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” “of two evils choose the least,” “from pillar to post,” “sticking like burrs,” “over head and ears,” “you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled,” “making the mouth water,” “out of sight out of mind,” “the burnt child dreads the fire,” we are unconsciously using phrases which appear in their first form in Barclay’s writings.

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:—

At the time of the Great Rebellion, Ottery St. Mary was for a time occupied by the King’s troops. At the advance of the Parliamentary army, however, in 1645, they withdrew beyond Exe, and the Roundheads took their place. The Commander-in-Chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, took up his quarters at the Chanter’s House, then owned by Robert Collins, a strong sympathiser. Fairfax was accompanied by Ireton as Commissary, and John Pickering as Colonel. In the dining-room, which still exists, and was then called the Great Parlour, he met Lord General Cromwell, and determined on the plan of campaign against the King’s forces in the West, which terminated in the capitulation of Sir Ralph Hopton in Cornwall in March, 1646. This room Polwhele calls “the Convention Room.” Here also a number of members of Parliament, in the name of both Houses, presented Fairfax with a fair jewel set with diamonds of great value, which they tied with blue ribbon and hung about his neck in grateful recognition of his signal services at Naseby.

Sickness overtook the army during its stay, and they removed to Tiverton. Local opinion at the Restoration swung round to the Monarchy, the Stuarts, and the Church of England. Violent strife, political and ecclesiastical, embittered social life. The Rev. Robert Collins, of the Chanter’s House, a descendant of the host of Fairfax, was the leader of the Nonconformists, and Mr. Haydon, of Cadhay, a fine quadrangular Tudor House in the neighbourhood, upheld the dominant party. Robert Collins insisted on disobeying the Act of Uniformity, 1662, and the Conventicle Act, 1664. Haydon resolved to see the law obeyed. There was a constant besetting of the Chanter’s House to discover the holding of an unlawful prayer-meeting, and finally persistent persecution drove Robert Collins and his family to Holland in 1685, where he died, brave and unflinching to the last, bequeathing money to the building of the Independent Chapel at Ottery St. Mary.

This chapel, built of old-time furze-burnt bricks in the manner known as “the Flemish bond,” is one of the oldest in the kingdom, has an air of Quaker-like seclusion, and is surrounded by a small graveyard occupying the site of an ancient bowling green. There existed a trap-door in the floor at the back of the pulpit, through which the minister could fly in case of danger, into the vaults which still exist below the schoolroom. The parish workhouse, now converted into cottages, stands near St. Saviour’s Bridge. Here, on the ground floor, were ranged the chained lunatics, to whom passers-by would throw scraps of bone and odds and ends to appease their raving hunger.

At the Vicar’s House was born, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar and schoolmaster, was an erudite Hebrew scholar, and assisted Dr. Kennicott in his literary labours. He was a pious, simple soul, beloved by his family, whose amusing absence of mind is described in a diverting anecdote by De Quincey, not quite fit to be repeated here. One of his scholars was Francis Buller, who sat for twenty-two years as a puisne judge, through whose influence Samuel Taylor Coleridge obtained a nomination at Christ’s Hospital.

This is not the place to describe at length the career of Ottery St. Mary’s most gifted son. But we can read in his poems of the profound influence of early scenes in the home of his boyhood upon the poet’s imagination. In his sonnet to the river Otter, his “native brook, wild streamlet of the West,” in after years he calls up the vision of the crossing plank, the marge with willows grey, the bedded sand, the flung stone leaping along its breast.

The last two lines describe with exquisite felicity the peaceful passages between the “stickles” of the bickering river.

In the year 1789, he cut his initials, “S. T. C.,” on the rock just outside Pixie’s Parlour, a small cavern in the sandstone on the left bank half a mile down stream.

Always keenly sensible to music, the cadence of the old church bells rang in his ears in later life when far away from home, for he sings:—

He spoke of them to Charles Lamb, his schoolfellow; for though Charles Lamb never came to Ottery St. Mary and never heard the bells, he makes his characters allude to them thus:—

A. W. Kinglake, the author of Eothen and the History of the Crimean War, was educated here at Rock House, now Sandrock, under the Rev. Edward Coleridge, who kept a successful private school. In the year 1849, Thackeray published the novel Pendennis. He lived as a youth at Larkbeare House, and the scene of many of his incidents is laid in the neighbourhood. We read of the little river running off noisily westward, of the fair background of sunshiny hills that stretch towards the sea, of the pattens clacking through the empty streets, of the schoolboys making a good, cheerful noise, scuffling with their feet as they march into church and up the organ-loft stair, and blowing their noses a good deal during the sermon; of the factory, of the single pair of old posters that earned their scanty livelihood by transporting the gentry round to the county dinners; of the hollow tree in Escot Park (then a noble house built by Inigo Jones, since burnt down, and now replaced by a modern building, the seat of the Right Hon. Sir J. H. Kennaway), in which the young lovers deposited their letters; and above all of the great grey towers rising up in purple splendour, of which the sun illuminates the delicate carving, deepening the shadows of the huge buttresses and gilding the glittering windows.

The town contributed its share to science. Here, in 1806, in Ralegh House, was born Edward Davy. In 1836 he sketched out a plan of telegraphic communication, and in 1837 he laid down a copper wire round the inner circle at Regent’s Park, and made wonderful experiments in electricity with it. In March, 1837, he took the first step to patent his invention by “entering a caveat,” and deposited with Mr. Aikin, Secretary of the Society of Arts, a sealed description of his invention, anticipating Cook and Wheatstone by two months. His invention and that of Cook and Wheatstone were held not to be quite identical. In 1839 he emigrated to Australia, leaving the field to his rivals.

The inhabitants are remarkable for the love which they bear towards their birthplace. In London a society of over one hundred members of townsfolk who have left to seek their fortunes in other scenes meet at regular intervals to talk over the present local gossip and call up past associations, and to renew or form a community of feeling based on common love of home. And when the members take a holiday, the first object of their pilgrimage, the shrine towards which their footsteps are directed, is the dear old town of Ottery St. Mary.