The Survey of Chulmleigh in 1711
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The Survey of Chulmleigh in 1711 Documents Edited and Maps Drawn by Martin Ebdon 2008 Copyright © 2008 Martin Ebdon Website: www.martinebdon.com/chulmleigh1711 The texts of the M and P documents are published in this edition with permission from the Devon Record Office. 2 Contents 1. Introduction 5 2. The manuscripts 6 3. Editorial conventions 7 4. The M document (DRO 5911Z/E1) 8 5. The P document (DRO 1591M/1) 35 6. Reconstructed maps 42 7. Comparison with the tithe apportionment 60 Index of place-names 83 Index of surnames 86 3 4 1. Introduction This report is a supplement to ‘The landscape around Chulmleigh in 1711: a reconstructed map’, a paper published in the Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association.1 The reader should refer to that paper for background information, explanations, and general discussion. The supplementary material presented in this report is in four parts. First, the report reproduces the complete texts of the two historical documents on which the paper is largely based (known as the M and P documents). The documents record the results of a very detailed survey of the manor of Chulmleigh in Devon that was carried out in 1711. Second, maps of the manor that have been reconstructed from an analysis of those documents are printed in this report at a larger scale than was possible in the small pages of the Transactions. Third, the report sets out in full detail the analysis that underlies the maps. Finally, as an aid to further research using these documents, the report provides indexes to the place-names and personal names that occur in them. For information about the history of Chulmleigh that is not directly related to the present study, in particular when writing the footnotes for the transcripts, I have largely relied on the published works of Richard Bass.2 Dates of houses, inns and chapels are taken from the official records of listed buildings in Chulmleigh parish.3 Other sources are explicitly referenced in the footnotes. 1 M. Ebdon, ‘The landscape around Chulmleigh in 1711: a reconstructed map’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 140 (2008), 45–89. 2 J. Mair and R. C. M. Bass, Chulmleigh: Short History and Walkround Guide (Revised Edition, Chulmleigh, 1990). See also the bibliography in M. Ebdon, op. cit. 3 On the English Heritage website. 5 2. The manuscripts The following transcripts reproduce the text of two documents. The first, which is here called the M document, is contained in a well preserved volume measuring 31 by 21 centimetres that has The Mannor and Borough of Chulmleigh in Devonshire 1711 written on its front cover.4 It was deposited in the Devon Record Office in 2000; before that it had been the property of Hannaford and Southcombe, a long established firm of auctioneers and estate agents in Chulmleigh. Apart from the M document, the volume contains three other documents which are not transcribed here. The first of the other documents, on the volume’s first page, is a short valuation of the prebends of Brookland, Pendalls and Higher Haynes in Chulmleigh. This is followed (after five blank pages) by the M document, which fills 61 pages, written in a very elegant hand. Following the M document, in a different and much less readable hand, are 78 pages of household accounts dated 1783–95. After that there are many blank pages, until at the end of the volume there is a four-page valuation of part of Chulmleigh manor dated 1767. Preliminary research on the volume was done by Richard Bass. In an article in The Devon Historian,5 he established that the household accounts are those of Joseph Wimpey, a gentleman farmer from the Christchurch area in Dorset, and that the manor valuation at the end of the volume is a partial copy of a document which is now in the Duke of Beaufort’s estate papers.6 (Wimpey purchased the manor of Chulmleigh from the Duke of Beaufort in 1767.) The prebend valuation on the volume’s first page is entitled ‘Three Prebends in Chulmleigh in the Hands of Shirley Cotes, Survey taken in 1711’. It is known from a different source that Shirley Cotes was the prebendary of Brookland in 1761,7 fifty years after the survey, which makes it very unlikely that the prebend valuation was actually written in 1711. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that there is no mention of Cotes in the P document, which deals with the prebends. It is possible that the prebend valuation was written in 1767, at the same time as the manor valuation at the end of the volume, although its figures were copied from the 1711 survey. The second document transcribed below, which is here called the P document, is a volume entitled The Parsonage and Preband Lands in the Mannor and Burrough of Chulmleigh Divonshire Surveyed MDCCXI.8 It was deposited in the Devon Record Office in 1967 by Mrs R. A. Abigail of Wyndhams, Chittlehampton, and nothing else is known of its provenance. The document consists of 11 large pages, measuring about 51 by 42 centimetres, and they must have been in a rather fragile state until 1967 when the volume was given conservation treatment. Fortunately, the content is almost entirely intact. Four of the P document’s pages (pp. 1, 4, 6 and 10) are occupied by maps. The first map shows the prebendal land around Chulmleigh village, including a depiction of the village itself,9 and the other three maps show Brookland Farm and southern parts of Parsonage Farm. The maps in the present report are partly based on the maps in the P document. The P document is certainly one of the original documents of the 1711 survey, the work of the surveyor Joseph Gillmore. The origin of the M document is more obscure. This problem is discussed in the accompanying paper.10 4 Devon Record Office 5911Z/E1. 5 R. C. M. Bass, ‘Joseph and William Wimpey. Elusive manorial lords?’, The Devon Historian, 62 (2001), 11–17. 6 Gloucestershire Record Office D2700/PB2/3. 7 Devon Record Office 89Z/T3. 8 Devon Record Office 1591M/1. 9 This map is reproduced in M. R. Ravenhill and M. M. Rowe, Devon Maps and Map-Makers: Manuscript Maps Before 1840 (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, Exeter, 2002), plate 5. 10 M. Ebdon, op. cit. 6 3. Editorial conventions The following transcripts reproduce the spelling and capitalization of the original text, except that ‘ff’ at the beginning of a word has been replaced by ‘F’. Punctuation has been edited slightly to improve readability but has not been corrected systematically. Abbreviations in the manu- scripts have generally been extended in the transcripts (e.g. ‘Fra.’ is transcribed as ‘Francis’), but ‘&’ and ‘&c’ (meaning et cetera) have been retained. A stylized form of the letter ‘p’ in the manuscripts has been transcribed as ‘per’, the abbreviation ‘als’ as ‘alias’ and ‘ye’ as ‘the’. Areas are given in the manuscripts in acres, roods and perches11 and they are reproduced in the transcripts separated by hyphens (for example ‘2-1-17’ means 2 acres, 1 rood and 17 perches). Monetary values are in pounds, shillings and pence12 and usually occur in the manuscripts without currency symbols, but in the transcripts they are always shown with the symbols ‘£’, ‘s’ and ‘d’ to distinguish them clearly from areas. Editorial insertions in the transcripts are either in square brackets or in footnotes. ‘[?]’ after a word indicates that the reading is uncertain and ‘[...]’ indicates missing text caused by damage to the manuscript. Text that is crossed out in the manuscripts is omitted from the transcripts if it is just a trivial error correction, but if it is more significant then it is noted in square brackets. Words inserted into the text in the hand of the original writer (i.e. with a ‘^’ mark below the line) have been incorporated into the transcripts without comment. Each of the original documents is divided into numbered sections which are referred to in the documents themselves as ‘folios’. In the M document there are 39 folios, each of which is either a single page or two facing pages. Folio numbers, from 1 to 39, are written at the top of each page. In the P document all the folios are single pages; no folio numbers are marked (they might have been lost when damaged page edges were trimmed off) but there are references to folio numbers in the document which imply that they were numbered from 1 to 11. In the present report, folio numbers that refer to the M and P documents are prefixed by the letters M and P. The transcripts also give (in square brackets on the left of the page) a separate reference number for each itemized piece of land, obtained by numbering the items consecutively within each folio; for example, ‘[M4.6]’ means the sixth item listed on folio M4. These reference numbers do not exist in the original manuscripts; they have been introduced in this report for the purpose of cross-referencing. In the manuscripts, the information is generally set out in the form of tables. In most of the folios there are table columns that contain the acreages of meadow, pasture, arable and wood, and the value per acre and value per annum of each piece of land. Acreages of farmsteads and orchards are conventionally in the meadow column, and some of the figures in the wood column are annotated with the word ‘furze’, ‘brake’, ‘broom’ or ‘coppice’. In the P document only, there are also table columns that give map references.