It is interesting to note how all property throughout England had advanced in value since "the day that King Edward was alive and dead"; in the old English, "on pam timan pe Eadward cing was cucu and dead"--_i.e._, on the fifth of January 1066--which is a clear intimation that the firm rule of the Conqueror had increased the material prosperity of the country in one generation. After the Conquest there was peace in Devonshire for many years, though Exeter was besieged by Stephen for three months in 1137, when he and Matilda, the mother of Henry II, rent England with a war of succession; but the young Henry came to the throne in 1152, and ruled wisely and strongly for thirty-five years. Under him Devon prospered, as did all England, and the cloth-making industry, which in Westcote's time, in the seventeenth century, was so notable a part of the wealth of Devon, probably had its first considerable beginnings in this reign. But Henry II is remembered less for his wise laws and far-sighted government than for the murder of Thomas a Becket, which clouded his latter years and brought his enemies--his wife and his son among them--swarming about his ears. This northern coast of Devon is linked with that dark crypt in Canterbury where Becket fell in the sacerdotal robes of High Mass; for it was a Tracy who was one of the four knights who spurred from London to rid Henry "of this turbulent priest," and the Tracys owned Lynton, Countisbury, and Morthoe. It is to Morthoe that Tracy is supposed to have come after the murder, with the curse upon him which descended to his family--that, wherever they went, "the Tracys Have always the wind and the rain in their faces"-- and to have lived out the bitter end of his life with the horror of sacrilege in his heart. There is a monument in the church of Morthoe of William de Tracy, but it is of early fourteenth-century date, and belongs to a descendant of King Henry's knight, who was rector of the parish. A later Tracy was Baron of Barnstaple, and was appointed Governor of the island of Lundy in the reign of Henry III. Nearly a century later Edward II, flying from the armies of his Queen and the turbulent barons, took ship for Lundy, but was driven back to Wales by contrary winds. And of this event a poem was made in the reign of James I, which is quoted by Westcote as written by a "modern poet," though he does not give us the name. The verse still retains a smack of the Elizabethan diction--not the Shakespeare magic, indeed, but the euphuistic, antithetical, fantastic balance of phrases: "To Lundy which in Sabrin's mouth doth stand, Carried with hope (still hoping to find ease), Imagining it were his native land, England itself; Severn, the narrow seas; With this conceit, poor soul, himself doth please. And sith his rule is over-ruled by men, On birds and beasts he'll king it once again."