In 1377 the town was partly burnt by the French, and in 1403 Dartmouth combined with Plymouth, and their ships ravaged the coasts of France, where, falling in with the French fleet, they destroyed and captured forty-one of the enemy.

In the following year, 1404, the French attempted to avenge themselves, and landed near Stoke Fleming, about three miles outside Dartmouth, with a view to attacking the town in the rear; but owing to the loquacity of one of the men connected with the enterprise the inhabitants were forewarned and prepared accordingly.  Du Chatel, a Breton Knight, was the leader of the Expedition, and came over, as he said, “to exterminate the vipers”; but when he landed, matters turned out “otherwise than he had hoped,” for the Dartmouth men had dug a deep ditch near the seacoast, and 600 of them were strongly entrenched behind it, many with their wives, “who fought like wild cats.”  They were armed with slings, with which they made such good practice that scores of the Bretons fell in the ditch, where the men finished them off, and the rest of the force retreated, leaving 400 dead and 200 prisoners in the hands of the English.

[Illustration:  OLD HOUSES IN HIGHER STREET, DARTMOUTH]

In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers called at Dartmouth with their ships Speedwell and Mayflower, as the captain of the Speedwell (who it was afterwards thought did not want to cross the Atlantic) complained that his ship needed repairs, but on examination she was pronounced seaworthy.  The same difficulty occurred when they reached Plymouth, with the result that the Mayflower sailed alone from that port, carrying the Fathers to form a new empire of Englishmen in the New World.

We were delighted with the old towns on the south coast—­so different from those we had seen on the west; they seemed to have borrowed some of their quaint semi-foreign architecture from those across the Channel.  The town of Dartmouth was a quaint old place and one of the oldest boroughs in England.  It contained, both in its main street and the narrow passages leading out of it, many old houses with projecting wooden beams ornamented with grotesque gargoyles and many other exquisite carvings in a good state of preservation.  Like Totnes, the town possessed a “Butter Walk,” built early in the seventeenth century, where houses supported by granite pillars overhung the pavement.  In one house there was a plaster ceiling designed to represent the Scriptural genealogy of our Saviour from Jesse to the Virgin Mary, and at each of the four corners appeared one of the Apostles:  St. Matthew with the bull or ox, St. Luke with the eagle, St. Mark with the lion, and St. John with the attendant angel—–­probably a copy of the Jesse stained-glass windows, in which Jesse is represented in a recumbent posture with a vine or tree rising out of his loins as described by Isaiah, xi.  I:  “And there shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.”