Devon Notes and Queries. 169 129. Stonb with Prowsb Arm3. — ^The stone, of which we give an illustration, is over a chimney-piece in a room in the farm-house, close to Pennycross Church. It is apparently the upper portion of a floor slab, from which the part with the inscription has been cut away, and no doubt it came from the church of St. Pancras. The arms are those of Prowse. J.B.R. 130. The St. Sidwell's Weather Cock. — St. Sidwell's V western tower, the finest example of a 15th century one, m or near Exeter, was built fully 550 years ago. During the Civil disturbances in 1549 gunpowder was stored in its belfry, with the by no means singular result that some of it exploded and blew off the parapets and upper portion of the fabric. The damaged parts were some time afterwards, in 1606, made good by brickwork. The latter patching up has now been all removed, and under the jealous care of Mr. £. H. Harbottle, the Cathedral architect, the brave old tower has been con- servatively restored to something like its pristine condition. But there is nothing " new " about it as a tower. The ancient vane, proved as its date is by the Cathedral's Fabric Roll, is not only the oldest metal representation of a crowing cock utilised as a vane, existing in Great Britain, but probably in the whole world, measures 2 feet 9 inches from the point of the beak to the extreme outside curve of the tail, and is 2 feet 6 inches high. It was made by a sturdy Exeter son of Vulcan no less than 420 long years ago. When Bishop Courtenay in 1482 exchanged some of our own smaller Cathe- dral bells for the big one at Llandaff, and the latter upon arrival was found too large to swing securely in the Norman North tower, it was affixed at the top of that particular struc- ture and a Jk>w spire built above to protect it in that position from the elements. Then it was in 1484 that the copper counterfeit rooster and the iron vane below, upon which it turns to-day as easily as it did then, were taken straight from the blacksmith's anvil and affixed atop. There it stayed, a safe indicator of the changeful moods of Boreas, until the spire was removed in 1752 — «./., after exactly 268 years' servitude. Then it appears to have had a long rest in the Dean and Chapter's store room, remaining there until 1812^ when a particularly ugly wooden spire having been placed upon St. Sidwell's doughty old tower, the Chapter, whose
