The Waymouths: Devon Venturers

By David Waymouth

A cousin could not find a Waymouth ancestor born earlier than 1727.

In my innocence, I wondered why. That is how and why this book came to be written.
Who begat who is of less interest than where they lived, what they did and what they thought and believed. The story starts in the 13th Century and goes on today.

Farmers, wool traders, fishermen, ship builders, captains and owners, explorers, colonists, bankers, shop keepers, soldiers, ship insurers, industrialists, scholars and men of the Royal Navy: ordinary people who made something of their lives and still do, all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Waymouth
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301971466

David Waymouth

Having served for over 30 years as an officer in the Royal Navy, David became a senior Civil Servant working on legislation in Parliament and Brussels. He and his wife retired to Downton in Wiltshire. He realised it had a long and fascinating history so he tried to draw all that was known together in 'Downton: 7000 years of an English village'. He has published two other books.

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THE WAYMOUTHS : DEVON VENTURERS

By David Waymouth

Published by D C R Waymouth at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 D.C.R.Waymouth

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 HERITAGE AND HISTORY

CHAPTER 2 ENGLISH FAMILY, CELTIC ROOTS

CHAPTER 3 MALBOROUGH –OVER 400 YEARS ON ONE FARM

CHAPTER 4 EXETER:HOME FROM HOME

CHAPTER 5 MAKER JOHN AND ALL WHO FOLLOW

CHAPTER 6 COCKINGTON, ST MARYCHURCH AND THE MARINERS

CHAPTER 7 ODDS AND ENDS, BITS AND BOBS, AROUND AND ABOUT

CHAPTER 8 ROMANTIC POSTSCRIPT

CHAPTER 1 HERITAGE AND HISTORY

This book is about people. Many of them are from one family. Most of are of little importance as the world judges importance. Together they tell a 1,000 year story which is of the essence English. For a generation which has forgotten or never knew its roots, perhaps it will touch some chord. Anyway it's done. These few notes on what it is about and on what it is not about are partly for anyone who may want to pick up where I leave off. They set the scene.

THE WHEN, WHERE, WHY AND HOW OF ONE FAMILY

A cousin drew up a family tree of the Waymouths with over 200 names on it. Although he claimed to descend, through his Glanville great-grandmother, from some Viking brigand turned respectable by becoming a Norman and powerful enough to help William seize the throne of England, he could not find a Waymouth ancestor born earlier than 1727. In my innocence, I wondered why. That is how and why this book came to be written.

As it was primarily for members of the family and only incidentally for a wider audience it will, perhaps, from time to time become a bit 'who begat who'. However I have tried to set the family into its wider context. Going back over eight centuries, as this study does, could cover twenty generations or more. If one zealously tracked back all the male and female lines and if no cousins had married there could be well over 2,000 other family lines to follow back apart from Waymouth should one wish. That is why my main aim has been to show the background, the historical setting, for a family which in many ways is typically English and particularly, peculiarly Devonian.

What I have not yet done is to study the Waymouths of North America, of Cornwall and the rest of England and any of them born much after 1900 and very few after 1800. The American link may be especially important although a recent gene match only shows a relatively modern migration there.

It has been a detective story with too many missing clues but I hope it gives the family a sense of belonging and others an insight in to what made Englishmen the way we are.

DEVON IN THE WEST

For those less familiar with English geography, most of this book is about people who lived in Devon which is something over 200 miles West South West of London in the South of England. Only Cornwall lies between Devon and Land's End. It is the largest county, dominated by the granite uplands of Dartmoor with a fringe of fertile coastal lowland. The Waymouths lived mainly in the southern half of this coastal land and at the time we are looking at this strip contained the five most important towns, Exeter in the East, Totnes, Torquay, Dartmouth and Plymouth round to the West, on the border with Cornwall. All of them with ports sitting on rivers flowing off the moors.

DIFFICULT TO FIND OUT ABOUT WAYMOUTHS

The Waymouths are a Devonian family. Few of them have left any trace other than their birth, death and marriage. In too many cases they have not even done that so that in tackling the hunt for ancestors most Waymouths have a tough job getting back earlier than 1800 and very few get beyond 1700. Record keeping was haphazard and spasmodic. Many sources have since been lost, destroyed or poorly preserved.

PROBLEMS OF UNDERSTANDING

Particular colonies of Waymouths will be looked at in the following chapters but before doing so there are some general points about this family and their times which those unfamiliar with early English history may find helpful.

VERY FEW RECORDS

The first is not obvious to a generation used to the mass of information stored about each of us on computors, often, even usually, without our knowing it. Apart from births, deaths and marriages the fact that we know anything about them means that they had some standing in their community. To be mentioned in the records you had to own something or be responsible for something - or be caught doing something wrong. Even then, most of the records have been lost or destroyed.

VERY FEW PEOPLE

The second will be more comprehensible to a New Zealander than to an Englishman. There were about 2,000,000 people in England in 1500, 4,000,000 by 1600, 5,250,000 in 1650 and then a decline until 1675 to 5,000,000 where it stabilised. Today there are ten times as many. We can watch Waymouths increase and decline to match this general pattern but there weren't very many people and they did not get about very much.

Something else New Zealanders will understand, especially if from Auckland, is that throughout English history about a quarter of the population lived in one big city, London. What happened there did profoundly affect the lives of provincial Devonians even though they were over 200 miles away .London was two or three days travel from Exeter and to get there would have been hard going. So much so that most trade went by sea.

Devon was remote and sparsely populated so any information about Waymouths in a given village or town is more likely than not to be about the same few families in that place. Although in the Bronze Age there had been a relatively large and wealthy population living up on Dartmoor in order to mine the tin that was shipped all over Europe, by Norman times the main settlements were South of Dartmoor, spread out in an arc from Exeter in the East to Plymouth in the West. By the Conquest Devon was already a recognised entity, called Defenascire by the Saxons.

NORMAN DOMINANCE

The Saxons having displaced the Britons, they in turn were displaced by the conquering Normans. Out of 1,000 manors in 1086, only 54 were still held by Saxons. 560 of these manors were held by six Normans. It was they and their successors who held the land which the Waymouths farmed. There are thought to have been 10,000 farms in Devon at this time, most of them small, most of them farmed by a family with few if any paid help. Small fields, isolated homesteads, many of the farms were still little larger even fifty years ago. Today the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union has caused amalgamations and diversification to an agriculture which until recently had changed little throughout the five hundred years and more that Waymouths are known to have farmed in Devon.

ALL IN 500 SQUARE MILES

The South Ham which cover most of this populated area are hilly, well-watered, fertile (much of it is Devon red soil, the best, although, oddly, deriving geologically from ancient deserts) and intersected by deep valleys which end in usable ports - Exeter, Powderham, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Tormoham[later called Torquay], Brixham, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge and Plymouth - and it is home to the Waymouths whether as farmers, traders or seamen. This is the third point: almost all come from an arc not more than 50 miles wide by 10 miles deep.

FREQUENTLY IN THE WARS

The fourth point to note is that, for almost all the time covered in this book, England was at war or recovering from war and, even in times of peace, prosperity was not the norm, pestilence was common. Waymouths were involved whether just being listed on the Muster Rolls with their arms and taxable worth or actually away fighting. There are two Waymouth badges, part of coats of arms, both of which indicate military service. The first is very simple, often a sign of antiquity. It is a black shield with a golden diagonal stripe on which two silver arrows are placed. The crest is a mailed fist grasping three arrows and this is used by all branches of the family.

The second shield is more complex. The top half is again black and separated from the bottom by a black belt which also indicates military action. The bottom half has six alternate white and blue diagonal stripes. Such stripes are sometimes a count of actual campaigns or battles in which the first to bear the arms took part. On these stripes is a swan swimming on waves and one cannot but wonder if there is here a maritime connection. We have no date for either.

We know that Henry the banker, of whom more anon, used the first badge, quartered with his wife's, I think, but whether this was just nouveau riche vanity or preservation of a long tradition we do not know. I would be happy with the latter although money was not short. My guess for the bearers of the second badge would be the Cockington Waymouths and they, too, will be looked at later. The point I believe is that this family were frequently sending sons to war, often to sea but also as soldiers.

Much of the land they farmed was owned by the Earls of Devon, the Courtenays, and their family was by a long way the most powerful in Devon. It would be likely that the Earls would demand military service from their tenants whether engaged on behalf of the monarch abroad or in internal battles such as the War of the Roses. The Careys of Cockington were responsible under Lord Howard of Effingham for the defence of West Country shores against the Armada. It would be inconceivable that his Waymouth tenants could or would want to avoid service and we know that Christopher Waymouth was Master of one of the ships sent to meet the Armada.

IGNORE THE SPELLING

Finally, a trivial point perhaps, but we must ignore the ancients' spelling. I have so far collected over 40 different spellings of the name - much of it by semi-literate clerks trying not too hard to understand the broad Devon brogue they probably despised and which may have still had an extra Celtic overlay.

With these general ideas in mind - (a) very limited information, but if there is any then it indicates a status above the generality, (b) very few people and little mobility, (c) an area of interest only fifty miles long by ten miles wide, (d) a time of war and political and religious flux, not much security and little prosperity and (e) nobody could spell Waymouth right - we can look at the different places and families in turn with the dual purpose of searching out our relations and looking at our heritage as a family.

CHAPTERS' ORDER

The following chapters have been put in the order they are partly for chronological reasons but also to sort out where we are from and where we