The town must have sadly suffered for a time from a dissolution of the College. But as soon as the rule of Philip II. in England was over, and his fanaticism began to work in the Netherlands, the Flemings flying to England added a great impetus to our wool trade. Some, I think, must have come to Ottery St. Mary, for a flourishing woollen industry sprang up here about this time, and a small outlying portion of the town still bears the name of Dunkirk. The pastoral character of the Vale of Otter, and the ample water-power of the river were advantageous to the trade, which was only killed by the discovery of steam. The great factory built by Sir George Yonge, the Secretary of State for War in 1790, a prominent feature to the passer-by, shows the extent to which the industry once flourished. In Mill Street there stood a house “beturreted and wearing a monasterial aspect,” which Sir Walter Ralegh, who was born at Poer’s Hayes, now Hayesbarton, further down the valley, is said once to have inhabited. A house built in the quiet, dignified style of the eighteenth century, called Ralegh House, marks the site. Our town and vale were not unnoticed by poets. William Browne, the author of _Britannia’s Pastorals_, full of quaint conceits, but with a true vein of poetry running through them, alludes to the Naïads who fish and swim in the clear stream of Otter. And he is believed, on the authority of Southey, to be the author of two fine inscriptions in the small south chapel of the church, one on John Sherman and his son, who died on the same day in 1617, and one on the wife of Gideon Sherman, who died in the first week of her marriage. Michael Drayton thus described the broad pastoral character of our vale:— Here I’ll unyoke awhile, and turn my steeds to meat, The land grows large and wide, my team begins to sweat. At the time of the Great Rebellion, Ottery St. Mary was for a time occupied by the King’s troops. At the advance of the Parliamentary army, however, in 1645, they withdrew beyond Exe, and the Roundheads took their place. The Commander-in-Chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, took up his quarters at the Chanter’s House, then owned by Robert Collins, a strong sympathiser. Fairfax was accompanied by Ireton as Commissary, and John Pickering as Colonel. In the dining-room, which still exists, and was then called the Great Parlour, he met Lord General Cromwell, and determined on the plan of campaign against the King’s forces in the West, which terminated in the capitulation of Sir Ralph Hopton in Cornwall in March, 1646. This room Polwhele calls “the Convention Room.” Here also a number of members of Parliament, in the name of both Houses, presented Fairfax with a fair jewel set with diamonds of great value, which they tied with blue ribbon and hung about his neck in grateful recognition of his signal services at Naseby.