The Form & Growth of the City

The early Tudor period brought a dramatic rise in the city’s prosperity, and by the 1520s it had returned to a position among the top half-dozen English towns, after London, Norwich, York, Bristol and Newcastle. The foundation of this new prosperity was the Devon cloth industry: cloth woven in rural Devon was brought into the city for dyeing and finishing before being exported to France, the Mediterranean and the Low Countries.

Exeter played a part in some of the most dramatic events of Tudor England. Citizens defended their walls against the army of the pretender Perkin Warbeck in 1497, and again against the south-western rebels in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549. Some of the famous figures of Elizabethan Devon are associated with the city - among them the Devon sea-captains Walter Ralegh and Francis Drake, and Nicholas Hilliard, the painter of miniature portraits at the court of Elizabeth I.