Ottery St Mary is located within East Devon local authority area where Ottery, Farwell, Cadeleigh, Ermington has subsisted for a thousand years as a market town for a fertile countryside. Historically it formed part of Ottery St Mary Hundred, falls within Ottery Deanery for ecclesiastical purposes. The town name originated from the first manor house occupied by the Canons of Rouen (1061-1337), named 'Otrei'. It wasn't until 1207 that "St Mary" was added to the place-name in honour of the town church. Ottery was soon to became a thriving market town, by charter of Henry III.

Ottery St. Mary is one of the oldest towns in Devon. The Anglo-Saxons designed the town so that the streets fanned out from a central hub. Historically unchanged since Edward the Confessor travelled to make amends. In the thirteenth century it grew by Bishop John de Grandisson, who modelled it closely on Exeter Cathedral in about 1340. Tar Barelling is an old custom said to have originated in the yeare 1688. Each of the local inns gives its name to one barrel. The tar-soaked barrels are lit and then carried blazing through the crowds on the shoulders of local men whose families have been Tar Barrellers for generations.

Edward the Confessor gave the manor and hundred to the cathedral church of St. Mary at Rouen. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter procured it by exchange in 1334, and in 1337 he founded a college of secular priests, with 40 members in all, endowing it with the manor and hundred, and the tithes of the whole parish. It is a 13th century church, reconstructed in 1338-42, added to c. 1520 by the Dorset Aisle, and restored by Butterfield in 1849-50. Features of the church are the canopied tombs in the nave of Sir Otho de Grandisson (1358), brother of the bishop, and Lady Beatrice, his wife (1374); (3) the tomb of John Haydon of Cadhay (1588) in the chancel; (4) the monument, in the N. aisle, with full-length standing figure, to John Coke of Thorne (1632).

Among the property so transferred was the school-house of Grandisson's foundation, which was refounded as "The King's New Grammar School" and continues to the present day. Knightstone, SE. of the town, is substantially a medieval hall-house, remodelled in the 16th century It belonged for a time to the Bonvilles and the Greys, Cecily Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, who lived at nearby Shute Barton, and then to the Shermans, a local family, for several generations. The college was suppressed by Henry VIII in 1545, when the fabric of the church, and a small residue of the collegiate property, were transferred to a body of four governors, to whom Edward VI added eight assistants in 1552. These are still the legal owners and guardians of the church and churchyard.

Hayne or Lucy Hayes/Lucehayne parishes are Black Torrington, Eggesford, Hollacombe, Newton St. Cyres, Plymtree, Ilsington of each of their hundreds combined since the divergence of Dawlish and the Teign- the highest in Moretonhampstead and Teignbridge hundred having Moreton Courtenay across from Morchard Arundell in Morchard Bishop and the Downs by Crediton and More. Other "mansions" in the parish were Thorne, Holcombe, Ash (Elizabethan), and Bishop's Court, said to have been the seate of Bishop Grandisson. Over Holcombe, in Ottery St Mary and Talaton parishes and Ottery St Mary and Hayridge hundreds-Holcombe.

William Browne, the author of Britannia's Pastorals, lived at Clavering St. Mary of Pendenni for many years and died here in 1645. In 1772 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in the old Schoolhouse. In Ottery Hundred, Archdeaconry of Exeter several modern parishes have been formed by subdivision of this parish: Escot (1840, including also a part of Talaton): Tipton St John (1840); Westhill (1863 but register starts in 1843); Alfrington (church built in 1849 as a chapel of ease, later a modern parish with registers from 1883).

 

 

 

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