BOVEY TRACEY was an estabished Saxon community and was known as Boffa by 500AD. The town gained its second name from the de Tracey family who were "lords of the manor" after the Norman Conquest. One member of the family, William de Tracey, was implicated in the murder of Archbishop Thomas Beckett, who engaged in a conflict with King Henry II over the rights and privileges of the Church, in Canterbury cathedral of east Kent in 1170. The Cathedral's first Archbishop was St. Augustine, previously abbot of St. Andrew's Benedictine Abbey in Rome, sent to England by Pope Gregory the Great, arriving in AD 597. It is thought that de Tracey built the parish church of St Peter, St Paul and St Thomas of Canterbury as penance for the murder. The church still stands today and has an unbroken list of vicars from 1258.
South Bovey, is a small ancient town the valley of the West Teign or Bovey river of Moreton-Hampstead, Bovey river, Newton-Abbot, Chudleigh. Towards the end of the 13th century, Dawlish and Teignmouth had diverged. Abbotskerswell, or Abbot's Carswell, is a parish and pleasant village with Newton Abbot, Haytor hundred, Totnes archdeaconry, and Moreton rural deanery. The parish, which includes the hamlet of Aller. It had formerly within it two manors, namely, that of Abbotskerswell proper, belonging to the Abbey of Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, and that of Aller. Kerswell is a corruption of Carsewell, the more ancient way of writing the name, Carse being Saxon for cress, for which the stream running through the village was formerly noted.
In 1385, by order of King Richard II, a Court of Inquiry was held in Eggbuckland to determine whether Sutton Prior had the right to choose an independent mayor, this was before the three towns formed one single city. There were saltworks in the Forder valley until Medieval times, this flowed onto an alluvial meadow 1/4 of a mile from the church. In 1350 King Edward III founded in the parish of St. Botolph without Aldgate a monastery to be called St. Mary of Graces in honour of the Virgin, to whose mediation he attributed his escape from many perils by land and sea. The site was a place called the New Churchyard of Holy Trinity, because it had been acquired by a certain John Corey, clerk, from Holy Trinity Priory for a burial ground during the plague. St. Mary's was made subject to Beaulieu Regis, and from this abbey came the five Cistercian monks who under Walter de Santa Cruce, as president, formed the convent of the new foundation. Before his death he granted to the abbey the reversion of the manors of Westmill, Little Hormead, and Meesden, co. Herts., with the advowsons of the churches; and he enfeoffed John, duke of Lancaster, and others trustees of the manors of Gravesend, Lenches, Leybourne, Wateringbury, Gore, Parrocks and Bicknor, co. Kent, the manor of Rotherhithe and the reversion of the manor of Gomshall, co. Surrey, and the advowsons of the churches of Gravesend, Leybourne, and Bicknor, so that they might ultimately convey them to the convent in frankalmoign.
In the early days of the foundation the endowment was probably little more than sufficient for the maintenance of the monks, so that the construction of the necessary buildings did not proceed very rapidly. The abbey church dedicated to St. Anne was aided by a relaxation of penance offered by the pope in 1374 to those who on the principal feasts during a period of ten years visited it and gave alms.
King Edward had also bequeathed to the abbey in a similar way the reversion of the manors of BOVEY TRACEY, 'Northlieu,' Holsworthy, 'Longeacre,' co. Devon; Blagdon, Lydford, Staunton, co. Somerset; and 'Takkebere' co. Cornwall, with the advowsons of Blagdon, Lydford, 'Northlieu,' and Holsworthy; but when Sir James d'Audele, the life-owner, died, Richard II gave them to his half-brother John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, granting to the abbey instead 110 marks to be received every yeare from Scarborough church as long as the schism and the war with France lasted, and afterwards from the Exchequer. John Holland was executed in 1400, and his estates forfeited, whereupon Henry IV revoked the letters patent of his predecessor and gave the manors in question to the abbey in frankalmoign. It is difficult to say what occurred afterwards, for though the abbey had possession of at least one of the manors after the Hollands had been restored in blood, it appears to have held none of them in the next century.
An abbot's seal of the fourteenth century is a pointed oval, and represents the abbot with mitre standing in a canopied niche, with smaller niches at the sides; he lifts up the right hand in benediction and holds a pastoral staff in the left hand. At each side a shield of arms: left Edward III; right, per pale, dextra, per fesse, in chief a lion's face, in base a fleur-de-lis, sinistra, a pastoral staff in pale, for the monastery. Legend wanting.
The abbey before the end of the fourteenth century appears to have occupied a position of some importance, for when Pope Boniface IX issued letters exempting the Cistercian Order in England, Wales, and Ireland from the jurisdiction of the abbot of Citeaux as an adherent of the anti-pope Clement VII, the abbot of St. Mary's was ordered, with those of Boxley and Stratford, to convoke the order, and the abbey was named as the meeting place of the chapter-general. The royal foundation and patronage of the abbey may partly account for this and other tokens of papal favour: between 1390 and 1400 the pope conferred on three of the convent the dignity of papal chaplain, and in 1415 the use of the mitre, ring, and other pontifical insignia was granted to the abbot and his successors. ) A question as to the custody of the temporalities arose in 1441, the abbey being called upon to answer for £566 18s. 10d. said to be due to the king from its lands in London and Middlesex during the vacancy on the death of the last abbot, John Pecche.
The convent owned two water-mills called 'Crasshe Mills' in East Smithfield by the bequest of Sir Nicholas de Loveyne in 1375, and the manor of Poplar, co. Middlesex; the manors of Westmill, Meesden, and Little Hormead, co. Herts; the manor and castle of Leybourne, the manors of Wateringbury, Fowkes, Gore, Bicknor, Gravesend, Parrocks, 'Herber,' and Lenches, Swancourt, Slayhills Marsh, tenements in Woolwich, and land in Cobham and Rainham, co. Kent; the manors of Gomshall, and Rotherhithe, and land in Ewhurst, co. Surrey. They also possessed the advowsons of St. Bartholomew's by the Exchange, Westmill, Hormead, Meesden, Ridley, Gravesend, Leybourne, and Bicknor, and received a yearly pension of 40s. from the church of Emley, co. Kent. In 1428 the abbot held half a knight's fee in Meesden, and in conjunction with John Tewe two knights' fees in Westmill.
It was probably during the reign of Edward IV that the Lady Chapel was added at the expense of Sir Thomas Montgomery. After the difficulties with Rome had arisen the king appointed Henry More the abbot of St. Mary's, among others, to visit the houses of the Cistercian order in England, Ireland, and Wales, and More received the thanks of Margaret, marchioness of Dorset, in 1533 for the zeal he had shown in the reformation of the house of Tiltey. Reform, however, was not what the king wanted, and the abbey of Coggeshall must have been given to More in commendam in 1536.
There was a church at Over Stowey in the time of Ralph, whose grandson Hugh de Bonville between c. 1155 and 1189 endowed it, and before 1181 gave it to Stogursey priory. In 1239 the priory surrendered the church to Jocelin, bishop of Bath and Wells, in return for an annuity. In 1326 Bishop John Droxford exchanged the rectory with St. Mark's hospital, Bristol, but retained the advowson and the following yeare ordained a vicarage.
By 1393 an acre of land at Bincombe, probably given to the parish by the Nowlibbe family, was charged with an annuity of 4d. for obits for members of the family in the church. By 1440 the land was known as Peter's Acre. The land passed to John Verney in 1451 and probably descended with Fairfield. William Holland, vicar 1779-1819, collected his tithes in kind, but the farmers of the rectory tried to withhold tithe, claiming that the 13s. 4d. paid by Bristol corporation was in lieu of tithe.
The church of ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL, so dedicated by 1532, had been dedicated to St. Peter alone in the 12th century. It is built of rubble with freestone dressings and has a chancel with north chapel and vestry, a nave with north aisle and south porch, and a west tower. The short, narrow nave may be of 12thcentury origin but its earliest feature is a 14th-century window in the south wall. The chancel was probably rebuilt in the 14th century and the north aisle and tower were added in the 15th or early 16th century. In 1750 a window was inserted to give light to the pulpit. With the dissolution of the Monasteries under the reign of Henry VIII, the Priory of Plympton surrendered to the King, who seized the tithes of Eggbuckland. Sir Francis Drake built two corn mills at Widey in 1590. In 1584 the Water Act (to supply Plymouth with water from Dartmoor by means of a leat) it is spelt Hickbocklade. North Dartmoor is between Okehampton and Crediton- Down areas.
The first parish registers were written in 1653 and the Plymouth Puritans wreaked their revenge on Eggbuckland, destroying many religious artifacts and turning out the 80 yeare old vicar. Widey Court was built by the Yeoman Hale during the Elizabethan prosperity. The registers date from 1558 but the years 1654-86 are missing and there are no burial records 1753-78. Bampton Deanery