The year succeeding the Battle of Hastings found William the Conqueror before the gates of Exeter, a place already regarded, as it continued to be for many centuries, as the key of the West of England. He took the city after a brief siege and proceeded to secure his hold upon it by building the castle of Rougemont, which was hardly finished when it was unsuccessfully attacked by the Saxons. A year later the sons of Harold also tried in vain to take it. The last man of mark in Devonshire to hold out against Norman rule was Sithric, the Saxon abbot of Tavistock, who, when all was lost, fled to Hereward's camp of refuge in the Fens. A few Englishmen were left by the Conqueror in possession of their estates; but the county, as a whole, was divided among a number of Norman nobles, some of whose descendants, Courtenay, Carew, and Champernowne, for example, still survive in Devonshire. An interesting link with Norman times and customs is the ringing of the curfew bell, which is still kept up at Exeter, Okehampton, and other places. At eight o'clock every evening thirty strokes are sounded for "Curfew," and then eight more for the hour. In the stormy reign of King Stephen Exeter was the last place to hold out for Queen Maud. The king was admitted into the town by the citizens, but the castle of Rougemont cost him a three months' siege. The importance of Devonshire sea-ports brought the county into great prominence in mediaeval times. Part of Richard C[oe]ur-de-Lion's crusading fleet, we are told, assembled at Dartmouth--a town which Chaucer, probably regarding it as a typical sea-port, chose for the native place of the Shipman in the _Canterbury Tales_. No other part of England furnished so many ships and men for Edward III's expedition against Calais. Again and again, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the French, in reprisal for what they had suffered by the attacks of England, harried the coast of Devon, plundering and burning Teignmouth, Plymouth, and other places on the coast. The Black Death, the most terrible and destructive epidemic of which we have any record, which devastated the whole of England in 1348 and 1349, was very severe in this county, paralyzing agriculture and trade, and stopping for a time the building of Exeter cathedral.