A Map of Chulmleigh in 1711 – Martin Ebdon Maps

Chulmleigh is a village in the north of Devon. Historically, Chulmleigh was also the name of a manor which comprised dozens of farms, smallholdings and cottages in and around the village. Down the centuries, the manor passed through the hands of a series of great landowners, none of whom lived anywhere near Chulmleigh; for that reason, there was no manor house as such. (Colleton, nearby, is a substantial manor house, but Colleton and Chulmleigh were separate manors.)

In 1711, the then lord of the manor commissioned a survey to be made. (A survey in this sense was a written document which listed the lands and other assets belonging to the manor, telling the owner how much the property was worth.) One of the documents produced for the survey has been in the Devon Heritage Centre since the 1960s. More recently, a second document was discovered, and it too was eventually given to the Devon Heritage Centre. I became aware of it in 2005.

View near Chulmleigh — Some of the land that was covered by the survey. The valley to the east of Chulmleigh viewed from Huntacott Hill.

The survey of 1711 was an exceptionally detailed one, and I had the idea of trying to construct a map of the manor by doing a careful analysis of the information in the documents. Such a map would be interesting in its own right, because there are very few large-scale maps of the Devon countryside at such an early date. I thought that it might also give some insights into the history of enclosure – the process by which common land was divided up into the small private fields that we see today – which is a subject on which little research has been done in this part of the country.

The results of this project were published in a paper (see Further Reading below) which includes the map and an explanation of how it was done. Actually there is a series of maps that fit together, each one sized to fit a page of the journal.

In the course of this research I transcribed the texts of the two survey documents. Because the texts may be of interest to other researchers I am making them available here as a PDF document: Survey-Chulmleigh-1711.pdf. This document also includes larger-scale copies of the maps.

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