The word parish has two distinct meanings. A parish may be the area served by a particular Anglican church, or it may be a civil parish, the area for which a parish council is responsible. These areas are often the same, but sometimes are not: a civil parish might contain two active churches, and there are civil parishes that have no church. In recent decades, the actual boundaries of ecclesiastical parishes have become almost insignificant as ties between communities and specific churches have weakened. Civil parishes, on the other hand, have boundaries defined precisely on Ordnance Survey maps.
Parishes originated for ecclesiastical purposes in the period from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, when nearly all of Devon’s parish churches were founded. (Today’s churches are mainly the outcome of later rebuilding.) As people were expected to worship at a particular church, and the priest was supported financially by tithes on the produce of surrounding lands, parishes would have had definite territories from the outset. Some parts of their boundaries might have been vague at first, where two churches were separated by tracts of common grazing land, but hard boundaries became established where land was cultivated and enclosed.
From the sixteenth century onwards, parishes acquired some secular functions including poor relief and maintenance of public highways, funded by the parish rates; but until the late-nineteenth century there was no reason to distinguish between the ecclesiastical parish and the civil parish because their boundaries were the same. The term ancient parish is used for the territory that was associated with a parish church in the mid-nineteenth century and earlier.
Civil parishes began to diverge from ancient parishes in the Victorian period, especially after legislation in 1876 that permitted civil parish areas to be rationalized. It has been Ordnance Survey policy since 1879 to show the boundaries of civil parishes, not ancient parishes, on Ordnance Survey maps. The best sources of information about historical parish boundaries are the tithe maps that were made around 1840, because each map covered one ancient parish (or occasionally, a subdivision of a parish).
A Map of Ancient Parish Boundaries in Devon
I have created the map below that shows the parishes of Devon in the mid-nineteenth century and earlier. Use the buttons in the map’s top-left corner to zoom in or out. If you are using a PC, drag the mouse to move around the map, and you can also use the mouse wheel to zoom. If you are using a phone or tablet, swipe the map to move around, and pinch it to zoom.
Image viewer by OpenSeadragon.
Boundaries of ancient parishes are shown on the map by red lines. Black arrows indicate detached parts of parishes: they link each detached part to the main part of the parish that contained the church. Wherever a parish had two or more parts, all the parts are shown in the same colour. I have interpreted ‘parish’ quite broadly to include a few that were technically chapelries of other parishes (such as Buckland Tout Saints), as well as parishes in which the church was actually out of use by 1840 (such as Rousdon). Extra-parochial places (such as Dotton, near Newton Poppleford) have been left uncoloured.
The parish boundaries have been copied from tithe maps wherever possible. In certain parts of central Dartmoor, tithe map coverage is lacking and here I have copied the civil parish boundaries shown on large-scale Ordnance Survey maps in the 1880s; the few boundaries concerned are the same as ancient parish boundaries as far as I can tell. At one place – the detached part of Tavistock parish at Cudlipptown – the boundaries were obtained from an estate map of 1770 (in the Devon Heritage Centre). To ensure accuracy, all the boundaries were plotted on a modern Ordnance Survey base map (not shown here).
The topographical background shown in grey (roads, rivers, railways, and so on) is taken from old Bartholomew’s maps at the scale of one inch to two miles. I chose these maps for several reasons: they are out of copyright, they are accurate enough to overlay the parish boundaries without large discrepancies in position, and I own copies from which I could make a good digital scan. The original colouring was removed using Photoshop. Bartholomew’s published these particular sheets between 1916 and 1919, and they were based on Ordnance Survey mapping that was revised up to about 1908. Therefore, the topographical background in the above map is more than sixty years later than the overlaid parish information, which is dated about 1840. However, at this map scale, the landscape did not change very much in that period, except for some town growth (especially at Plymouth and Torquay) and the addition of numerous railways.
The map also shows the Devon county boundary as it was before 1844. The county boundary is shown as a continuous black line where it coincided with a parish boundary, and as a dashed black line where it did not (for example, in Maker parish near Plymouth). The grey background map includes the early-twentieth century county boundary, visible as grey dashes where it was different (for example, Chardstock and Hawkchurch had been added to Devon by then).
The main problem with this map is that the scale is too small for central Exeter, which was packed with seventeen tiny urban parishes and some extra-parochial precincts. I intend to produce a separate map for Exeter at some stage.
Other Summary Maps of Ancient Parish Boundaries
I think that the map on this page is the most accurate summary map of Devon’s ancient parishes that has been made to date, but it is certainly not the only map of its type. The first was published as early as the 1850s by Ordnance Survey. This was the ‘Index to the Tithe Survey’, a special edition of Ordnance Survey’s one inch to one mile map of the time, which had the boundaries of tithe districts added to it. (Tithe districts were normally ancient parishes.) The Index to the Tithe Survey was printed in very small numbers and it is rarely met with today. I have sheet 21 which covers the region around Tiverton, Taunton and Honiton, and it shows the boundaries reasonably well, although it is limited by the poor accuracy of the one-inch map itself. Understandably, some of the intricate details of small detached parts of parishes are not portrayed.
Digital maps of ancient parish boundaries for all of England and Wales were created by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver at Exeter University, and have been available since 2001 from the UK Data Service at Essex University. Kain and Oliver explained their methods in their book to accompany the maps, The Historic Parishes of England and Wales: An Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata (2001). Their principal source was the accurate record of civil parish boundaries on large-scale Ordnance Survey maps. In the case of Devon, most of those maps were produced in the late 1880s, which was after some rationalization of civil parishes had taken place, so some of the ancient boundaries were missing. To add older boundaries, Kain and Oliver copied them from the Index to the Tithe Survey series. Unfortunately, this meant that their mapping of detached parts of parishes, in particular, suffered from the limitations of that series mentioned above.
Maps of ancient parish boundaries covering all of England have also been published by T. C. H. Cockin in The Parish Atlas of England (2017). Like the maps by Kain and Oliver, Cockin’s maps are based primarily on the civil parish boundaries shown on large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, but to obtain older boundaries he consulted the tithe maps themselves instead of using the deficient Index to the Tithe Survey. There are a few minor errors (for example, detached parts of Membury, Mortehoe and Peter Tavy are not shown), but in general Cockin’s maps show small detached areas more fully and accurately than Kain and Oliver’s. The complex interlocking of Awliscombe and Buckerell parishes (near Honiton) is mapped quite well, although the equally complex parish of St Nicholas (near Teignmouth) is not.
Both Kain and Oliver’s digital maps and Cockin’s Atlas have the advantage of providing national coverage, drawn to a consistent standard.
Further Reading
Martin Ebdon, 2022, ‘Devon’s parish boundaries as recorded on tithe maps’, The Devon Historian, vol. 92, 34-49.
Angus Winchester, 1990, Discovering Parish Boundaries. (This book about their history also discusses other kinds of boundary such as counties and hundreds.)