The last great city in our summer path was Exeter, whose greatness is of the past. Exeter is, like Bristol, a county of itself, and yet stands, in a true sense, as the capital of Devonshire. It is, moreover, the heart of the whole West Country. "In Exeter," says Mr. Norway, a Cornishman, "all the history of the West is bound up--its love of liberty, its independence, its passionate resistance to foreign conquerors, its devotion to lost causes, its loyalty to the throne, its pride, its trade, its maritime adventure,--all these many strands are twined together in that bond which links West Countrymen to Exeter. There is no incident in their past history which does not touch her. Like them she was unstained by heathendom, and kept her faith when the dwellers in less happy cities further north were pricked to the worship of Thor and Odin at the point of Saxon spears. Like them she fought valiantly against the Norman Conqueror, and when she fell their cause fell with her. And since those days what a host of great and stirring incidents have happened here, from Perkin Warbeck beating on the gates with his rabble of brave Cornishmen, to William of Orange going in high state to the cathedral, welcomed already as a deliverer to that throne which it lay almost with Exeter to give or to withhold."
Exeter impresses the stranger to-day merely as a prosperous county-town, a pleasant cathedral city, yet in the reign of Stephen it was ranked for importance next after London, York, and Winchester, supplanting Lincoln, once the holder of the fourth place, from which it was soon itself to be dislodged by Bristol. But Exeter, seated on the hill where, in dim, wild ages a band of Britons built them a rude stronghold, beside the stream up whose reddened waters the vessels of Roman and Saxon and Dane have fought their way, does not forget. So faithful is her memory, indeed, that still the vicar of Pinhoe, a village almost in her suburbs, receives every year a handful of shining silver pieces in recognition of a deed of daring performed by a long-ago predecessor in his holy office. When the West Countrymen, bent on driving out the Danes, were in the thick of a hard fight there at Pinhoe, their supply of arrows fell short, and this plucky priest, girding up his gown, dodged through the enemy to the citadel, bringing back--so schoolboyish were those old battles--a bundle of feathered shafts that might have saved the day. But although the Danes triumphed, Exeter has paid an annual reward of sixteen shillings to the vicar of Pinhoe ever since--a period of some nine hundred years.