built and dedicated a church to their own saint of the dove's name, in
the hope that he would save them from the claws of the invaders.

Of Minehead as it is now, no greater contrast can be imagined with
Porlock and St. Culbone, except that of Ilfracombe, with the grand
desolation of Heddon's Mouth and the solitariness of Trentishoe or
Morthoe. For both Ilfracombe and Minehead have become so popular for
summer visiting that most of their original character is lost under a
flood of new houses, trim streets and shops, which have grown to meet
the requirements of a large but fluctuating population. Unduly to
deplore this is, I suppose, a form of intellectual snobbery. Both
Minehead and Ilfracombe are still undoubtedly beautiful in their
setting of sea and moorland, the one upon lofty cliffs, the other among
gently rounded and wooded hills; and it is fitting that more people
than the favoured and aristocratically-minded few, who elect to stay in
cottages and shun their fellow-men, should be given opportunity to
enjoy them.

Minehead is a place with a history; its position on the Bristol Channel
made it a port of considerable value, and throughout the Middle Ages it
did a large trade with Ireland, and a foreign trade with France and
Spain, only second to that of Bristol from the West of England. In the
seventeenth century, like Bristol also, it had an extensive trade with
Virginia and the West Indies, and it exported annually forty thousand
barrels of herrings to the Mediterranean. But the herrings left these
coasts, as I have already had occasion to state in speaking of Lynton,
and an Act passed in the reign of Charles II, forbidding the import of
Irish cattle, though passed with the intention of protecting the
English farmers against Irish competition, had the usual result of such
short-sighted policy, and, while it crippled the Irish trade and ruined
the prosperity of such ports as Minehead, it ultimately benefited
nobody. Any ship smuggling cattle, that was captured, was sold, and a
part of the proceeds went to charity and a part to the Crown. The "Cow
Charity" is a fund which is still administered in Minehead.

Minehead was a "manor" in Domesday Book, and was given along with
Dunster by the Conqueror to William de Mohun, who was one of the first
of his nobles to support his English expedition, and who brought to the
standard of Duke William fifty-seven knights in his retinue, with their
esquires and their men-a