In the time of Baldwin de Rivers, second Earl of Devon and Lord of Plympton, the castle was the scene of events which strikingly illustrate the then unsettled state of the country, and the insubordination of even the most privileged class. Baldwin de Rivers was considered one of the richest and bravest men of the age; but having with some other nobles rebelled against King Stephen, on account, it is said, of the king refusing to confer certain honours on them, he fortified himself in his castle at Exeter, where he was besieged by the monarch; and it appears that certain knights, to whom he had entrusted his castle of Plympton, being apprehensive of the Earl’s danger, or alarmed about their own safety, treated for the surrender of Plympton; and the king sent two hundred men with a large body of archers from Exeter to Plympton, who unexpectedly appeared under the walls of the castle about daybreak, and, according to the chronicler, the fortress was then almost entirely destroyed. The lands of the Earl, which extended far and wide round Plympton Castle, and said to have been abundantly stocked and well cultivated, were harried by the king’s troops, who drove off to Exeter many thousands of sheep and oxen.[6] Baldwin was then dispossessed of all his honours, and banished the kingdom; but afterwards siding with the Empress Matilda, in the civil wars which ensued, he was restored to all his honours and possessions by Henry II. He died A.D. 1155, and was succeeded by his son, Richard de Redvers. ----- Footnote 6: Devonshire wool was already a valuable commodity, and was bought at that time, it is said, by Flemish merchants who frequented Devonshire ports. ----- Baldwin, the eighth Earl, was the last of the male Redvers or Rivers who held the barony of Plympton. His death, by poison, occurred in France in 1262, and the inheritance of the Earls of Devon and Lords of Plympton descended to Isabella de Redvers, the wife of the Earl of Albemarle, who styled herself Countess of Devon. Their only issue was a daughter, Aveline, who married the Earl of Lancaster, and she dying in 1293, without issue, Hugh Lord Courtenay, next heir to Isabella, Countess of Devon, and lineally descended from John Courtenay, Lord of Okehampton, who married the daughter of Sir William de Redvers, became ninth Earl. The possession by the Courtenays during succeeding centuries of the Earldom of Devon and the Barony of Plympton, was marked by many interesting and even tragical incidents, but these have no very immediate connection with the subject of this paper.[7] ----- Footnote 7: