Devon

‘I never saw a goodlier haven’, wrote the Earl of Surrey about Dartmouth in 1522. Leland saw ‘good merchant men in the town, and to this haven long good ships’, but he noted that gravel and sand from the tin works were choking the river Dart and harbour. The ‘water of Dart’ belonged to the duchy of Cornwall, and until early in Henry VIII’s reign the port dues collected by the water bailiff went to the duchy. Two grants made by the King in 1510 and 1521 allowed the common council to keep the customs and other revenues, subject to a nominal rent to the duchy.

Barnstaple was the only port of any consequence in north Devon, but by the 16th century the haven had begun to silt. Although the town continued to prosper, it was overtaken by Totnes as the third richest town of the county and its mayors attributed to poverty the townsmen’s failure to pay their subsidy contributions in full. Of the 2,000 inhabitants during this period, only six had assessments of £382 for the subsidy of 1523.W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, Devonshire Studies, 172, 218; Hoskins, Devon, 328; J. C. Russell, Brit. Med.

Saltash, a borough owned by the duchy of Cornwall, lay not far from Trematon castle, which by the 16th century was ruinous and in use only as a prison. Although commercially outstripped by Plymouth at the mouth of the Tamar estuary, the town with its market, port and ferry across the river was a prosperous settlement.

It would not be difficult to refute Justice Thirning’s opinion, delivered in 1388, that Totnes was ‘de plus auncien de tout dengleterre’, but undoubtedly there was a settlement there in the ninth century, if not before. Totnes had been one of the Saxon fortified ‘burghs’, and the town was chosen in the tenth century to house a royal mint and in the 11th a castle. It soon became the most important market town between Exeter and Plympton and eventually was also a depot for overseas trade.

A small settlement existed at Tavistock even before the Benedictine abbey was founded there in c.974, but the borough as such owed its existence to the abbots. At some date between 1105 and 1185 one of them deliberately created a town on the right bank of the Tavy, detaching an area from the extensive rural manor of Hurdwick for this purpose. By 1291 the place contained 120 messuages and tenements (55 of them with gardens) and 35 plots separately held, all owing rent to the abbey.

The town of Plympton Erle took the second part of its name from the earls of Devon. In 1107 a member of the family of Reviers built a castle on his manor of Plympton, shortly afterwards another erected the church, and in 1194 a third, William Reviers, earl of Devon, gave the town the status of a mesne borough. Earl William allowed the burgesses a market and a fair, and by a charter granted in 1242 by his descendant, Earl Baldwin, they were permitted to hold the borough at farm and to have the same liberties as were then enjoyed by the citizens of Exeter.

In the late 14th century Exeter was a city of modest proportions; its estimated population of about 3,000 suggests that it was only a quarter the size of York or Bristol, half the size of Salisbury, and outstripped by some 20 other provincial towns.

Dartmouth owes its existence to the magnificent deep-water anchorage in the estuary of the Dart. The town resulted from the coalescence in the 12th century of two small riverside settlements, Hardness and Clifton, and was generally known in the medieval period by its full title, Clifton-Dartmouth and Hardness. The suburb of Southtown is first recorded in 1328 and marks the expansion of the population.

The poll tax returns of 1377, which noted Barnstaple’s adult population as no more than 680, suggest that the town was then only about one third the size of Exeter and a seventh that of Plymouth. But in the assessments for taxation made in Devon in 1334 Barnstaple had come next after these two places in economic importance, and seems to have held that position for the rest of the century.

The manor of Ashburton became ecclesiastical property in the early 11th century, and from 1050 onwards it belonged to the bishops of Exeter. At some date before 1238 most of the inhabited portion of the manor was constituted as a borough. The bishops were represented in Ashburton by their stewards, who visited the town only to hold courts, leaving the day-to-day administration and rent collection in the hands of the portreeve of the borough, the reeve of the manor and the bailiff.