1 62 Devon Notes and Queries, work. These shipwrights were at a loss how to begin, so the Bishop desired them to build a ship upside down, which they did with good effect. Certainly from ail accounts the construction must have resembled that of the ancient "ship-shaped" houses from which the long open inside, some suggest, originated the designation, nave^ or galilee, viz., " galley," a long ship.* The accompanying illustration will show the anci^at character of the building which did duty for more than five centuries. But the greatest social works of the good Bishop were his educational foundations, which may be studied with profit by educationalists of to-day. Stapledon, in conjunction with his brother. Sir Richard, founded Stapledon Hail, in the University of Oxford, which for a time bore his name and subsequently that of his Diocese — Exeter College. The Bishop himself drew up the statutes for the govern- ment of the hall, in which he insisted that in the selection of scholars, all favour, fear, claims of consanguinity and affection should be set aside, they only to be preferred who were deemed the best recommended by reason of their capacity, good conduct and straitened circumstances. Eight scholars were to be natives of Devon and four of Cornwall, they were to be youths in whom these three conditions were most fully combined. The Rev. C. W. Boase in his Register of Exeter College calls attention to the regard paid to comparative poverty as the means which brought forward some valuable men, he gives as instances John Prideaux, Bishop of Worcester ; Benjamin Kennicott, the famous Hebrew scholar, son of the parish clerk who was master of a charity school at Totnes, and William Gifford, of Ashburton, who began life as a cabin boy at Brixham, and was afterwards apprenticed to a shoemaker in his native town. But then educational advantages were brought nearer home to us at Ashburton, for in 13 14 Stapledon founded a Guild and built the Chantry of S. Laurence and endowed a priest, who, besides other duties, was to keep a free school for the sons of the burgesses.
- See S. D. Addy, Evolution of the English House, p. 29.
