Behind the
altar the Lady Chapel, which has a stone screen, contains an old
minstrels' gallery. The carving here, and the vaulting throughout the
church, but especially in the chapel on the north side, is deservedly
famous. During the time of Bishop Grandisson, about 1340, the church
was made collegiate. In 1850 a so-called restoration by Butterfield
did much damage, and some of the woodwork then introduced could well
be "scrapped" and the church again restored to something of its
previous simple dignity. The painting of the nave and chancel roofs
has a peculiarly "cheap" and tawdry effect.
Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have lived in the town for a time, and
during the Civil War it was for a month the head-quarters of Fairfax,
who turned the church tower into a temporary fortress. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge was a native of Ottery and the son of one of its vicars. The
poet was only nine when his father died in 1781. He was then placed in
the Bluecoat school and there met his lifelong friend, Charles Lamb.
The theological studies that at first seemed to be his natural bent
were no doubt a consequence of his early environment.
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