And so the claws of this tiger were cut, and himself rendered harmless until that time when the factious, assured at last that they were too well matched ever to bring the struggle to a decisive issue, made peace, and thus sent the unruly and restless back to an undesired state of order. We read incidentally, in those old accounts, of Dunster Castle being washed on one side by the sea. That passage places in a yet more picturesque setting the picturesque scene even now presented to the traveller; for where the road now goes past the level meadows on the way from Carhampton to Minehead, the sea then ebbed and flowed in a shallow bay, whose shores reached to the foot of the commanding hill on whose crest the castle turrets still loom up, majestically. Yet, beautiful in its wild original way though it may have been in those days, when the castle was a sea-fortress and the little town of Dunster something in the nature of a port, Dunster Castle in our own times, and on some evening of late summer, when the sun sets gloriously over the hills and irradiates the burnt-up grass to a golden tinge, affords a picture of surpassing beauty, viewed from the road to Minehead, across those level pastures. The de Mohuns who succeeded the turbulent William of King Stephen’s time make little show in the history of the place, and even that mid-fourteenth century John, Lord Mohun of Dunster, who was one of the original Knights of the Garter, is more notable to us for the doings of his wife, than for any action of his own. He married in 1350 Joan, daughter of Sir Bartholomew de Burghershe. This lady it was who, according to a legend, declared by serious antiquaries to have no real foundation, obtained from her husband the grant of as much common-land for the poor of the town as she could walk barefoot: after the fashion of that Lady Tichborne who, although an invalid, crawled on hands and knees over an amazing acreage in one day. With this Lord Mohun, the de Mohuns of Dunster came to an end, and the West of England presently witnessed the entire extinction of the family, root and branch; or its gradual decline into obscurity through the growing poverty of landless collaterals who became absorbed by the middle-class, and survive here and there to this day as shopkeepers, and even as agricultural labourers, under the plebeian name of “Moon.” As more peaceful and commercial times succeeded the era in which arms decided the fate of noble families, the fortunes of those who by any chance had lost their lands grew desperate. In the altered circumstances, when law and order had replaced brute force, the sharp sword was no longer a match for sharp wits. Hence the great rise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the trading class, to wealth, power, and honours.