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- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Bicton (#3 on map) is a civil parish and a former manor in the East Devon District of Devon, England, near the town of Budleigh Salterton. The parish is surrounded, clockwise from the north, by the parishes of Colaton Raleigh, Otterton, East Budleigh and Woodbury. According to the 2001 census it had a population of 280. In the 2011 UK census it had decreased to 140. No reason for this decline is known, but there may have been boundary changes.
Much of the parish consists of Bicton Park, the historic home of the Rolle family, with Bicton Common, adjacent to Woodbury Common, in the west. The parish includes the village of Yettington on its southern border.
History
- the text in this section is based on the same Wikipedia article
Bicton appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Bechetone", held by William Porter, probably by the service of guarding the gate at Exeter Castle and the prison there. The manor passed through several families until Sir Thomas Denys (1559–1613) left two daughters as co-heiresses. The eldest was Anne Denys, who by her marriage to Sir Henry Rolle (d.1616) of Stevenstone, brought Bicton to the Rolle family.
The gardens at Bicton were begun in around 1735, supposedly to a design by André Le Nôtre, but most of the work was undertaken by John Rolle, 1st Baron Rolle in the early 19th century. This included the digging of the lake in 1812 by French prisoners of war, planting the arboretum in 1830 and the noted araucaria avenue in 1842. Other features include the orangery (1806), the "bulbous" palm house (c. 1825), and the castellated octagonal China Tower of 1839.
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John Rolle died, childless, aged 86 in 1842. However, after his marriage to his second wife, Louisa Trefusis, he decided to appoint as his heir her nephew, the six-year-old Mark George Kerr Trefusis (the younger brother of the 20th Baron Clinton) requiring him to change his name to Rolle, which he did. However, when Mark Rolle died in 1907 he left no male heir so the Rolle inheritance passed to his nephew, Charles Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, 21st Baron Clinton (1863–1957).
The 21st Baron let and later sold the mansion house and surrounding lands to Devon County Council as an agricultural college, now Bicton College, which as of 2016 covers 490 acres (200 ha). The remainder of the land comprising the former manor of Bicton is still owned by Baron Clinton under the management of Clinton Devon Estates. This includes 17,000 acres (6,900 ha) of tenant farmland, 4,700 acres (1,900 ha) of woodland and 2,800 acres (1,100 ha) of the East Devon Pebblebed Heaths.
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.
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- 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.
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- 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.)
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