PLYMPTON IN THE OLDEN TIME. 
BY 
JAMES HINE, F.R.I.B.A. 
Any interest attaching to Plympton belongs to the olden time. 
Of many other places it may be said that the new has entirely 
supplanted the old. Modern business requirements, new ware- 
houses, and thoroughfares, have had the effect of stamping out all 
vestiges of the past, and even the traditions of them. An un- 
pretending Railway Station, and a dozen or more new houses have 
not had this effect at Plympton. The town has no novelties to 
shew us ; the lions are just what they were 200 years ago. 
Plympton in the olden time had its castle and its priory, its 
two churches, and later its Guildhall and Grammar School. Not 
quite in the olden time, but only just on the verge of our prosaic 
modern time, Plympton gave to the world England's greatest 
painter, — a circumstance which (though forgotten by the native, who 
on being asked by a tourist where Sir Joshua Reynolds was born, 
replied he "never heeard of sich ") should indeed make this 
honoured little town almost as famous as Stratford-on-Avon. 
In the Doomsday Book, Plympton is designated "Terra Regis," 
so also are Tavistock, Ashburton, and Tiverton, " all which places 
were then the King's demesne towns," but not boroughs. 
A date anterior to the Norman Conquest has been ascribed to 
the castle, on the ground of its similarity to Trematon, Launceston, 
and Restormel castles, which Borlase and Grose assert to have 
been built before the year 900. The antiquaries, however, of the 
last century are often extremely inaccurate in their classification 
both of military and ecclesiastical structures. S. Germans Church, 
the ancient cathedral of Cornwall, is designated Saxon by them, 
