[Illustration: WATCHET; OLD TOWN HALL AND LOCK-UP.] He was son of the governor of Bridgwater, and one of the six hostages demanded by Fairfax on the surrender of the town. He died 1671. Let us sorrow for the unrecompensed services of a Royalist, fighting for Charles I.; but perhaps we may also spare a little consideration for Charles II., who, on his restoration, was so beset by claimants for honours and rewards on account of Cavalier sufferings and losses in “his martyred father’s wars” that not even the most generous ideas of compensation would have sufficed to satisfy the hungry crowds. Watchet, the little town to which this church of St. Decuman belongs, is a seaport of a stirring history, early and late. Its earliest disaster was the destruction and plunder wrought by the Danes in A.D. 988; the latest the violent succession of storms that from September 1903 demolished the harbour, and again demolished it, after expensive repair. There is much likeability in this little unfortunate port of Watchet, if only for the fact that it retains, even at this belated time o’ day, almost every feature of its natural self, and has added few alien ones. It is a small place, with paper mills and iron-foundries, railway-sidings that come down to the waterside, and a mineral line descending from the Brendon Hills. For the convenience of those whose religion is not of that after all not very robust kind, which will lead them a mile’s walk, chiefly uphill, to their parish church, a chapel-of-ease has been provided on the quay, over the old market-house, which has a kind of glory-hole in the basement, formerly the local lock-up. [Illustration: WATCHET.] Watchet shares with the Italian town of Magenta the honour of giving a name to a colour; only, while the colour “magenta” is a modern and a horribly inartistic kind of reddish purple, introduced soon after 1859, when Louis Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians at Magenta was popular in France, “watchet” is certainly as old as Chaucer who, in 1383, in his “Canterbury Pilgrims,” says: In hoses red he went ful fetishly, Y-clad he was ful smal and properly Al in a kirtel of lyght wachet; the colour “watchet” being a light, or celestial blue, as shown in “Hakluyt’s Voyages,” in which we read of “mariners attired in watchet, or skie-coloured clothe.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII CLEEVE ABBEY—OLD CLEEVE—BLUE ANCHOR