From A.D. 928, when Athelstan is said to have conferred a charter upon the town, and 938, when he is supposed to have repaired the walls, already old and decayed, Barnstaple fully took advantage of its favourable situation in a sheltered estuary, and the port was large enough to be represented by ships at the siege of Calais in 1346. In 1588 it sent five ships to Liverpool’s one, in the levy raised to combat the Spanish Armada; among them vessels with the proud, high-sounding names, _Tiger_, _God Save Her_, and _Galleon Dudley_. After thus serving their country, the Barnstaple merchants served themselves well, by equipping numerous privateers that successfully preyed upon the Spanish mercantile marine, and brought home to the old port on the Taw great store of treasure in gold, silver, and goods brought by Spanish sail from the Spanish main, and intended for Cadiz rather than for North Devon. It was the Golden Age of Barnstaple. The burgesses manufactured woollen goods and baize and sold them in good markets, and the bold seamen sallied forth and patriotically scoured the ocean, and took by force of arms anything they liked. Sometimes they ran up against what a modern American would style a “tough proposition,” in the form of an innocent-looking Spanish merchantman better armed and more courageously manned than they suspected, and the results were not so fortunate: but, naturally enough, records of these misfortunes are not given so prominent a place in the history of these things; and you are invited rather to picture the returned sea-captains, bursting with riches, carousing in the taverns of Boutport Street, and paying for their entertainment with moidores, doubloons, “pieces of eight” (whatever _they_ were), and other outlandish coin. Coin of foreign mintage was more common than the pieces of Queen Elizabeth (“God Save Her”), and passed current as readily.