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Lyme Regis, Dorset
The first written record of Lyme as a town dates from AD774 (one of the earliest such records in England). The area has an ancient history of human settlement with signs of a Neolithic (Stone Age) settlement only two miles away. During the Roman occupation there was an important Romano-British settlement at Holcombe.
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Lyme Regis for the most part clings to the walls of the Lim valley; a large part of the charm of the town. the steepness of the valley walls is in large part due to the soft nature of the black rock through which the river sliced its path.
Coastal erosion of the soft cliffs has always been a problem here and this was exacerbated in the 19th century by the wholesale removal of the offshore stone ledges to provide ballast for empty coal ships. With the herd barrier removed, the waves were provided with a free run to attack the beaches and cliffs.
Similar problems occured at Hengistbury Head and Chrischurch at the other end of the Dorset coast when the ironstone "doggers" were removed from the beaches in vast quantities.
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Medieval Lyme Regis was a port and cloth town.
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a praty market town set in the rootes of a high rokky hille down to the hard shore; there cometh a shalow broke from the hilles about three-miles by north, and cumnith fleting on great stones through a stone bridge in the botom |
...John Leland's 'Itinerary' (1535-40)
The prosperity of port and town brought important visitors and thatre troops to amuse them.
In 1558, the first skirmish between drake's ships and the Spanish Armada took place in the bay. Amongst the English fleet were five local ships.
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Three cannon stand pointing into the bay from the walls of the Cobb to remind townsfolk and visitors alike of the threat of raid or invasion which coastal towns and ports, and especially those of the south coast, have had to be prepared to meet since time immemorial into the 20th century. |
When conflict between King and Parliament errupted into Civil War, the town was a stronghold of Parliament. Because of its strategic importance as a town and a port, Lyme regis was beseiged by the Royalists under Prince Maurice in 1644 - a seige which the town withstood for two months.
The town's defence by a small local force was bolstered not only by the men and women of the town but also by no less than twenty-five religious preachers. Eventually the Royalists conceded defeat and withdrew to fight elsewhere.
The town's women stood side-by-side with their menfolk during the seige and reloaded their muskets. A poem was written to mark their part in the defence called "Joanereidos" in which they were compared to joan of Arc.
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The beach to the west of The Cobb is known as Monmouth Beach. |
In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth landed just metres to the west of the Cobb prior to raising his rebellion and twelve of his supporters were hanged here during the 'Bloody Assizes' which followed the revolt's failure.
 | The Duke and his supporters landing on Monmouth Beach,
just to the west of the Cobb at Lyme Regis
Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Standard Public House,
Lyme Regis, Dorset |
Monmouth landed just to the west of the Cobb at Lyme regis with 82 supporters on Thursday, June 11th, 1685, to the rallying cry of "Monmouth, Monmouth, God save the Protestant religion!". The West Country was strongly Protestant and the rebels were certain that they would easily raise support for their cause against a strongly Catholic king.
On the day of Monmouth's landing, Gregory Alford, the unpopular Royalist mayor of Lyme Regis who had been forced on the strongly Parliamentarian town was playing bowls with Thomas Tye, the Customs man. Tye was called away from the game to investigate the unnexpected arrival of three ships anchored in Lyme Bay. By the time the purpose of the ships had reached the town, the Royalist mayor had fled on horseback to the safety of Axminster in Devon. The ships anchored offshore and the rebels disembarked onto the beach.
The rebels made their way to the Market Place where they raised their green banner bearing the words "Fear Nothing but God". Robert Ferguson, an anarchist and former Presbyterian minister read a declaration referring to James II as the "present usurper" and even accused the king of poisoning his brother Charles II. The rebels then started recruiting amongst the menfolk of the town.
Monmouth's army marched northwards, recruiting on the way, through Taunton, Bridgewater and on to Shepton Mallet. Had the rebellion succeeded, the rebels would have been heros - as it happened, they were utterly routed at the battle of Sedgemoor and became prisoners or fugitives accused of treason.
Nearly a hundred men from Lyme Regis were accussed of aiding and abetting the Duke of Monmouth and twelve were hanged on Monmouth Beach where he had landed. Eleven of them suffered the full legal penalty for treason being drawn and quartered, the quarters of their bodies preserved by boiling in brine and tarring before being displayed in baskets for many years as a warning.
The notorious Judge Jeffreys who presided over the legal commission conducting the trials was not above bribery; Hannah Hewling, sister of the twelfth man, her 19-year-old brother William, paid the judge £1,000 not to spare her brother's life, but to spare him being drawn and quartered - the family were allowed to bury his body in the churchyard.
Lyme Regis had a flourishing ship-building industry in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the ships produced here were topsail schooners.
The port had its fair share of the smuggling which was rife along the south coast. One of the best known participants in the illicit trade was John Rattenbury, better known as "The Rob Roy of the West". Like the famous Gulliver, Rattenbury had a respectable face and one one occassion gave technical evidence about the coast to none less than the House of Lords.
The town became one of the first sea-side resorts in the mid-18th century, a favourite resort of Jane Austen and the society of Bath.
In 1811, Mary Anning, only twelve years old, found the famous fossilized icthyosaurus at Black Ven, a mile to the east of the town.
On Christmas Day, 1839, there was a huge landslip about three miles to the west of the town. About 40 acres of the blue lias cliffs, capped with sandstone, collapsed to leave a chasm 1.6 km (1 mile) long and 122 metres (400 feet) wide. Much of the 'landslip' is designated as as National Nature Reserve.
The coast between the town and the river Axe is subject to landslips and has changed much since 1839.
Captain Loxley of the HMS Formidable, the first battleship to be sunk in World War I, was claimed by the waters with his ship when it was torpedoed by a U-boat in Lyme Bay on New Year's Eve, 1915. Some of the bodies of the 550 seamen who were lost were washed up on the beach and the Pilot Boat Inn was used as a make-shift mortuary. The captain had his dog on the bridge when the battleship sank and its body was washed up on the beach at Abbotsbury where it was buried in the churchyard.
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