Creekside Warfleet Dartmouth Devon TQ6 9BZ

Tel: 01803 833881

DARTMOUTH HISTORY RESEARCH GROUP

The Editor 9/28/2004

Dartmouth Chronicle RFDmChron

101-3 Fore Street

Kingsbridge TQ7 1AF

9/28/2004

Dear Sir,

Restoration of the Butterwalk, (article Nov. 19th)

Your very good article and photographs about the restoration of the Butterwalk was welcome, and we must be grateful to Dartmouth Town Council for at last financing the much needed work to preserve this unique building which they have owned since the 17th century. However, there were several historical inaccuracies in the article for which Robert Seymour, the architect, tells me he was not responsible, and it is a pity that the facts were not checked. The Dartmouth History Research Group is happy to advise on such matters and only a telephone call is needed.

Firstly, Mark Hawkings was not a Dutch merchant, but English. Hawkings was a common Devon name at the time.

Secondly, John Budley had nothing to do with the building of the Butterwalk. Deeds in the Corporation collection in the Devon Record Office, Exeter, show that William Gurney was given a lease on the western part of this waste land newly reclaimed from the sea in 1628 and built a house on it. Mark Hawkings took a lease on a site to the east of this in 1629, and in 1635 built there “several ... dwelling houses.” Hawkings took a mortgage of £2,500 to pay for this, and, because his cod trading activities collapsed when the Civil War interrupted trade after 1642, he was unable to pay the interest on this. The whole building passed to John Plumleigh in 1653 and he sold it in 1657 to John Barnes, who lived there himself.

Hawkings would have let out to others (of whom no record survives) the houses in the Butterwalk which he did not live in himself, and these tenants would have been responsible for the plasterwork in their own houses. The similarity of style between the plasterwork in all the houses does suggest it was all done by the same workmen at roughly the same time. However, any differences between the houses had nothing to do with John Budley.

The statement that the Jesse room could have been where Chaucer met John Hawley cannot be true, since Hawley died over two hundred years before the Butterwalk was built. Also, Chaucer was sent to the port by Edward III, not Henry II - who lived two hundred yers before Hawley - and he came because Dartmouth seamen (and no one has any evidence that Hawley was involved) had captured a ship owned by Genoese merchants from whom the king wanted to borrow money.

Yours faithfully,

Ray Freeman