A hospital for lepers, founded as early as the fourteenth century, was now used for the deserving poor; and near the old chapel, attached to the hospital cottages, the place was pointed out to us where the local followers of the Duke of Monmouth who were unfortunate enough to come under the judgment of the cruel Judge Jeffreys were boiled in pitch and their limbs exhibited on the shambles and other public places.

We had a comparatively easy walk of sixteen miles to Exeter, as the road was level and good, with only one small hill.  For the first four miles we had the company of the small river Otter, which, after passing Honiton, turned here under the highway to Ottery St. Mary, on its course towards the sea.  The county of Devon is the third largest in England, and having a long line of sea-coast to protect, it was naturally warlike in olden times, and the home of many of our bravest sailors and soldiers.  When there was no foreign enemy to fight they, like the Scots, occasionally fought each other, and even the quiet corner known as the Fenny Bridges, where the Otter passed under our road, had been the scene of a minor battle, to be followed by a greater at a point where the river Clyst ran under the same road, about four miles from Exeter.  In the time of Edward VI after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII changes were made in religious services, which the West-country people were not prepared to accept.  On Whit-Sunday, June 9th, 1549, the new service was read in the church of Sampford Courtenay for the first time.  The people objected to it, and compelled the priest to say mass as before, instead of using the Book of Common Prayer, which had now become law.  Many other parishes objected likewise, and a rebellion broke out, of which Humphrey Arundel, the Governor of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, took the lead.  Their army of 10,000 men marched on to Exeter and besieged it, and they also occupied and fortified Clyst St. Mary and sent up a series of demands to the King.  Lord Russell, who had been glutted with the spoils of the monasteries, and was therefore keen in his zeal for the new order, was sent with a small force accompanied by three preachers licensed to preach in such places as Lord Russell should appoint; but he was alarmed at the numbers opposed to him, and waited at Honiton until the arrival of more troops should enable him to march to the relief of Exeter.  Being informed that a party of the enemy were on the march to attack him, Russell left the town to meet them, and found some of them occupying Fenny Bridges while the remainder were stationed in the adjoining meadow.  He was successful in winning the fight, and returned to Honiton to recruit.  He then attacked the rebels on Clyst Heath and defeated them, but it was a hard-fought fight, and “such was the valour of these men that the Lord Grey reported himself that he never, in all the wars he had been in, did know the like.”  The rebels were mercilessly butchered and the ringleaders executed—­the Vicar of St. Thomas’ by Exeter, a village we passed through the following morning, who was with the rebels, being taken to his church and hanged from the tower, where his body was left to dangle for four years.