Bideford Quay, that figures in circumstances of considerable stress in the great romance by Kingsley, is a very different place from the quay of Elizabethan days. A broad roadway runs now, where water and mudbanks once stood. Kingsley himself would scarce recognise it. Paradoxically enough, all these works and improvements have been undertaken since the commerce of the town has declined. There is no fierce energy at Bideford to-day, and such shipping as there remains is very casual. Some few old houses--older than they look from without, remain by quayside; in especial, the “Three Tuns” inn, with a seventeenth-century plaster mantelpiece in an upstairs room, with figures in the costume of the time, clinging uncouthly to Renaissance ornament.
Bideford church is so closely surrounded by narrow lanes that it is not a remarkably conspicuous building. Except the tower, it is quite modern, the people of Bideford having in the eighteenth century been afflicted with that perversity for destroying Gothic buildings and rearing classic in their stead which desolated so many places. In its turn, the fantastic thing that is said to have resembled a lecture-hall, rather than a church, was demolished in 1865. A fine monument to Sir Thomas Graynfylde, 1514, stands on the south side of the chancel, and near by is a brass plate inscribed with the dying speech of Sir Richard Grenville, at Flores. The register of 1591 describes him as “being in his lifetime the Spaniards’ terror.”
The monument of John Strange, merchant of Bideford, deserves notice, for he was no less brave a man. He died in 1646, the year the plague made such havoc here. It was the fourth year of his mayoralty. All others in authority had fled the infected place, but he remained to take care of the sick; at last, when the scourge was abating, he took the infection and died.
What with civil war and with pestilence, Bideford had a stirring time of it. Licence was then the order of the day, and it was even possible for sour Puritans to defile the font in the church. Polwhele is not unduly severe in his remarks upon how it “was appropriated for the purposes of a trough for his swine to feed out of, by one schismatic. And if he had had his deserts, he would have made one of their company.”