Place:Barnstaple, Devon, England

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia Barnstaple is the main town of the North Devon District and possibly the oldest borough in the United Kingdom. It is a former river port, located at the lowest crossing point of the River Taw, which flows into the Bristol Channel. From the 14th century, it was licensed to export wool, since the merchants claimed that the town had been declared a free borough in Saxon times. This brought great wealth to Barnstaple, whose town centre still preserves a medieval layout and character. Later the town became an importer of Irish wool, but its harbour silted up, and it developed other industries, such as shipbuilding, foundries and sawmills. Its Victorian market survives, with its high glass and timber roof on iron columns. Barnstaple railway station is the terminus of a branch line from Exeter, known as the Tarka Line. Since 1974, it has been a civil parish governed by town council. From 1835 until 1974 it had been a municipal borough. The parish itself had a population of 24,033 in the 2011 UK census, and including the satellite settlements known as the Barnstaple Town Area (Sticklepath by Barnstaple, Roundswell in Tawstock parish and Bickington in Fremington), it is 53,514. East Pilton was part of the municipal borough from 1894.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

The earliest local settlement was probably at Pilton by the River Yeo, now a northern suburb. Pilton is recorded in the Burghal Hidage (c. 917) as a burh founded by Alfred the Great,^[1] and may have undergone a Viking attack in 893, but by the later 10th-century Barnstaple had taken over its local defence. It had a mint before the Norman Conquest.^[1]

The feudal barony of Barnstaple had its caput at Barnstaple Castle, granted by William the Conqueror to Geoffrey de Montbray, who appears as its holder in the 1086 Domesday Book. The barony fell to the Crown in 1095 after Montbray rebelled against William II. He transferred the barony to Juhel de Totnes, a feudal baron of Totnes. By 1107 Juhel had founded Totnes Priory and then Barnstaple Priory, of the Cluniac order, dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. After Juhel's son died intestate, the barony was split between the de Braose and Tracy families, before reuniting under Henry de Tracy. It then passed through several families, before ending in the hands of Margaret Beaufort (died 1509), mother of King Henry VII.

A market is first recorded in 1274. In the 1340s, merchants of the town claimed the rights of a free borough had been granted by King Athelstan in a lost charter. This was challenged periodically by successive lords of the manor, but it allowed merchants an unusual degree of self-government. The town's wealth in the Middle Ages rested on being a staple port licensed to export wool. It had an early merchant guild of St Nicholas. In the early 14th century it was Devon's third richest town after Exeter and Plymouth, and its largest textile centre outside Exeter until about 1600.^[2] The wool trade was aided by its port, from which five ships were contributed to a force sent to fight the Spanish Armada in 1588. Barnstaple was one of the "privileged ports" of the Spanish Company, (established 1577), whose armorials appear on two mural monuments to 17th-century merchants: Richard Beaple (died 1643), three times Mayor, and Richard Ferris (Mayor in 1632), who with Alexander Horwood received a payment from the Corporation of Barnstaple in 1630 for "riding to Exeter about the Spanish Company." in St Peter's Church, and on the decorated plaster ceiling of the old Golden Lion Inn,^[3] Boutport Street, now a restaurant beside the Royal and Fortescue Hotel.

The town benefited from rising trade with America in the 16th and 17th centuries, for the benefit of wealthy merchants who built impressive town houses. Some of these survive behind more recent frontages, for instance No. 62 Boutport Street, said to have one of the best plaster ceilings in Devon.^[4] The merchants also built almshouses, including Penrose's, and backed their legacy with elaborate family monuments inside the church.^[4]

By the 18th century, Barnstaple had ceased to be a woollen manufacturing town. Its output was replaced from Ireland, for which it was the main landing place; the raw materials were then taken by land to clothmaking towns in mid and east-Devon, such as Tiverton and Honiton.^[2] However, the harbour was silting up. As early as c. 1630 Tristram Risdon reported, "It hardly beareth small vessels." Bideford, lower down the estuary and benefiting from the scouring by the fast-flowing River Torridge, gradually took over the trade.^[2]

Although Barnstaple's trade in 1680–1730 was surpassed by Bideford's, it retained economic importance into the early 20th century, manufacturing lace, gloves, sail-cloth and fishing-nets, with extensive potteries, tanneries, sawmills and foundries, and some shipbuilding still carried on. The Bear Street drill hall dates from the early 19th century.

Barnstaple was one borough reformed by the Municipal Reform Act 1835. Between the 1930s and the 1950s it embraced the villages of Pilton, Newport, and Roundswell through ribbon development.

Newport in Barstaple

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).

"NEWPORT, a suburban village and a chapelry in Bishops-Tawton parish, Devon. The village is suburban to Barnstaple, on its S side, near the [railway] station; has a post-office under Barnstaple; was a borough, governed by a mayor, in the time of Henry VI.; and had, from the year 1294, a market and a fair which now are obsolete.

"The chapelry was constituted in 1847. Real property: £3,784. Population: 1,027. Houses: 212. The living is a [prepetual] curacy in the diocese of Exeter. Value: £300. Patron: the Vicar of Bishops-Tawton. The church stands at the top of the village, and is a very plain edifice. There is a national school."

Between the 1930s and the 1950s Barnstaple swallowed the villages of Pilton, Newport, and Roundswell (redirected to Barnstaple) through ribbon development. This was an alteration to municipal boroughs permitted under the Municipal Reform Act 1835.

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.)