The legend associating the assassin with Morthoe would appear to have been invented to account for the ancient altar-tomb, covered with an inscribed slab of black marble, bearing the name of one William de Tracy, that still stands in the south chapel of the old church. There was not, in the days when this tale originated, the disposition to criticise any story that imaginative persons might choose to tell. Research, for the purpose of recovering facts obscured by lapse of time, was unthinkable in the days when travel to the repositories of learning could be undertaken only at great risks and incredible cost; and so, what with both the will and the power wanting to arrive at mere facts, many an incredible tale has been started on its career. It seems, in this instance, never to have occurred to the people of Morthoe, who long accepted this story, that among the numerous Tracys with whom they were in old times surrounded, there must have been more than one William. William, indeed, appears to have been a favourite name among them. In short, the man whose tomb remains here was a Tracy who from 1257 to 1322 was rector of Morthoe. He thus died close upon a hundred and fifty years later than Becket’s assailant. Remains of the incised figure of a priest are yet traceable on the tomb, together with an inscription which has been deciphered, “Syre Guillaume de Tracy, gist ici. Dieu de son alme eyt merci.” The interior of the tomb was rifled long ago. In the quaint description by old Westcote, who wrote in 1620, “He rested in ease until some ill-affected persons, seeking for treasure, but disappointed thereof, stole the leaden sheets he lay in, leaving him in danger to take cold.” This Early English church with aisleless nave and two chapels, has few other memorials, none of them ancient; but many of the old carved bench-ends remain, the balance of them being imitations, carved locally, when the church was restored in 1857. In recent years the east windows of chancel and north and south chapels have been filled with beautiful stained glass, designed by Henry Holiday, and the space above the chancel-arch decorated in gold and coloured mosaic, with four stiffly decorative angels in the Burne-Jones convention, by Selwyn Image. The dangers of Morthoe, not only to seafaring folk, but also to bathers, appear in the memorial window to Thomas Lee, architect, of Barnstaple, who was drowned off Barricane Beach in 1834. The memorial of a more recent tragedy is seen in the churchyard, where a tombstone records the drowning of “Winifred, youngest daughter of Sir Walter Forster, M.P., who was swept away by the treacherous ground-swell, while bathing in Coombes Gate, Morthoe, Aug. 14, 1898, aged 21.” Near by is a rhymed epitaph upon one “Albion Bale Harris, aged 13,” who was killed in 1886 by falling off a cliff at Ilfracombe.