It was in 1530 that the Wichehalses first came to North Devon; Nicholas, the third son of Nicholas Wichehalse, of Chudleigh, having settled at Barnstaple in that year. Like most younger sons in those days, even though they might be sons of considerable people, he went into trade, and became partner of one Robert Salisbury, wool merchant, and prospered. Robert Salisbury died, and Nicholas Wichehalse married his widow in 1551; prospered still more, became Mayor of Barnstaple in 1561, and lived in considerable state in his house in what is now Cross (formerly Crock) Street. The great wealth he accumulated may best be judged by mentioning merely some of the manors he purchased: those of Watermouth, Fremington, Countisbury, and Lynton. To this eminently successful kinsman, the nine children of his brother John, who had died in 1558, were sent, as wards. His own family numbered but two, Joan and Nicholas, who came of age in 1588. Nicholas, succeeding his father, retired from trade, and is described in local records as “gentleman,” and appears incidentally in them as wounding another gentleman with a knife, in a quarrel. Something of a young blood, without a doubt, this young Nick. He never lived to be an old one, at any rate, dying in 1603, aged thirty-eight, leaving five sons and three daughters. Large families appear to have been a rule not often broken among the Elizabethan Wichehalses. It was indeed in every way a spacious era, and one of the most continuously astonishing things to any one who travels greatly in England, and notices the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century monuments in the churches, is the inevitable repetition of family groups, with the reverend seniors facing one another, in prayer, above, and the Quakers’ meeting of children below, boys on one side and girls on the other, gradually receding from grown-up men and women, down to babies in swaddling clothes. Early and late the Elizabethans laboured to replenish the earth and people the waste places.