Bob: I suggest the following amendment to your para. 3. The rest of your draft is fine, historically speaking.

Old documents now in the Devon Record Office show that Dartmouth Corporation leased to Mark Hawkings in 1635 a piece of waste ground (recently reclaimed from the mud of the river) next adjoining on the eastern end of a tenement lately erected by William Gurney, and then in the tenure of Mark Hawkings. Hawkings plot was 48 feet from east to west, and in breadth at the west end 34 ft and 42 ft. in the east end. So Hawkings took over Gurney’s house, which he then altered to include it in the final Butterwalk. The document says he erected “several” dwelling houses. This implies “more than two”, or the lawyers would have said “two”. One must presume (and therefore may be wrong!) what happened next, but the architectural evidence suggests that the whole Butterwalk was built to one design - there is nothing else like it in Dartmouth or elsewhere - and that Hawkings did it as what we would call a “spec”, i.e. to make money by letting off the houses he did not need for himself. The facts that his initials MH are on No. 10, and that this has the largest room with the elaborate Pentecost overmantel, suggests that this was the one he lived in. Just as today a builder would let a buyer choose the colour of his bathroom suite or kitchen units, so Hawkings would have let the lessees choose their own plaster ornamentation, and some had plainer tastes than others.

A document of 1655 says that the house on the eastern end of the Butterwalk, now the NatWest Bank, was in the possession of Henry Crue, Vintner, “between the house of John Barnes, lessee of Mark Hawkings, in the west and the water of Dart on the north, east and south.” So the lessee of No. 6 and probably 8 too was definitely John Barnes by then. [As you say later] Hawkings had borrowed money for the building and because of a slump in overseas trade was unable to pay the interest on his mortgage, so the whole building passed to his creditor John Plumleigh. Plumleigh left the tenants including John Barnes in place, and, because the building was then subsiding, gave him permission to erect a wall on the west side, as it describes in the document of 1675. As no other person is mentioned in that document it seems likely that Barnes was the occupier and responsible for 6 & 8 . The later tenant of the western end of the Walk was said to be Ambrose Mudd, who had bought it from John Plumleigh.