Place:Bampton, Devon, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Bampton is a civil parish with a with a small town of the same name in northeast Devon, England, on the River Batherm, a tributary of the River Exe. It is about 6 miles (9.7 km) north of Tiverton, 19 miles (31 km) north of Exeter and the parish borders Somerset on its north-east and north-west sides with the parish of Morebath directly north. Bampton was originally in the Bampton Hundred, an ancient division of Devon. Between 1894 and 1935 it was an urban district. In 1935 it lost its urban district status and became a parish in the Tiverton Rural District. Since 1974 it has been a part of the Mid Devon district municipality. Bampton is a major part of the electoral ward of Clare and Shuttern. The ward population at the 2011 Census was 3,412. For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Bampton.

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"BAMPTON, a small town, a parish, a [registration] subdistrict, and a hundred, in Devon. The town stands in a vale, on the rivulet Batherne, about a mile above its influx to the Exe, 7 miles N of Tiverton [railway] station. It was an ciently called Bahantune, Bannton, Bathampton, and Bathrumpton; and it disputes with Bampton in Oxfordshire being the Beamdune of the Saxon chroniclers, where, in 614, the Britons were defeated with great slaughter by Cynegilsus, king of the West Saxons.

"It is supposed by some to occupy the site of a Roman station; and it had a castle, erected in 1336 by a member of the Cogan family, on a knoll at the east end of Castle street, now called the Mount, and crowned with firs. The town consists of stone houses, irregularly scattered over a space of about ½ a mile; and has picturesque environs. It was formerly a borough, and sent two members to parliament; it was governed by a portreeve and other officers; and it is now a seat of petty sessions It has a post office under Tiverton, and two good inns; and it formerly had a manufacture of serges and pottery. A weekly market is held on Saturday; fairs, on Whit Tuesday and the last Thursday in Oct.; and great markets for cattle, sheep, and Exmoor ponies, on the last Wednesday in Nov. and the Wednesday before Lady-day. John de Bampton, a Carmelite friar, who first read lectures on "Aristotle" at Cambridge, and died in 1391, was a native.

"The parish includes also the hamlets of Petton and Shillingford. Acres: 7,785. Real property: £9,144. Population: 1,971. Houses: 397. Limestone is worked, in about 15 quarries, for supplying the country as far as to South Molton. There is a chalybeate spring of some celebrity.

"The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £130. Patron: Rev. E. Rendell. The church is decorated and perpendicular English; consists of nave, aisles, transept, and chancel, with western tower; and contains a fine carved oak screen, and mounments of the Bourchiers. A small chapel of ease is at Petton; and a small Baptist chapel in the town. Charities, £9.

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

• Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
• GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.

• Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.

• Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.

• This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
• Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.

• There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)