Trist Families of Devon: Volume 9 Politics & Trade: Trist Families of Devon, #9

By Peter Trist

 

This series of e-Books will chiefly be of interest to family historians with Devon ancestry. This ninth volume contains information about how the politics and trade of Devon may have affected our ancestors.
It also contains information on Dartmoor and the semi-moorland parish of South Brent and genealogical charts and notes regarding the Trist families at South Brent.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Trist
• Release date: Nov 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648499190

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 in this volume summarises the political background to the Trist families’ history in Devon.

Central to the political and military events which they witnessed were firstly, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and secondly, the civil war between parliament and the king between 1641 and 1649, a conflict which ended in the king’s execution and the creation of the decade-long English Republic.

The Protestant Reformation received a mixed reception in Devon. The farming and gentry sectors in Devon were often conservative in their religious practices and were often ‘reluctant revolutionaries’. Pro-Catholic sentiment may have been evident in the beliefs of Nicholas Gill, a step-son of Stephen Trist of Harberton. Nicholas was forced to resign his position as a Master of Exeter College for what appear to have been theological reasons. His patron, Sir John Petre, was a catholic who intervened twice slowing down Nicholas Gill’s resignation from Exeter College. Four years later Sir John had Nicholas appointed as vicar of the Petre advowson of South Brent (St Petrock), one of the richest livings in Devon. This created a personal connection between Sir John Petre as landlord of the ex-monastic manor of Brent and the Trist family. The Devon Heritage Centre holds numerous leases between Trist yeoman families and Brent manor.

It was the seventeenth century which saw the literal interpretation of the scriptures replaced with a world view which was based on empirical and scientific evidence. Some historians regard this as change as marking the birth of the ‘modern mind’.

These seismic changes in outlook took place amid unparalleled disruption and destruction. In seventeenth century Europe the contest between Catholicism and Protestantism took place in the barbaric Thirty Years War. In England the bitter constitutional struggle between parliament and the crown between 1641 and 1649 was in effect a denial of the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule absolutely and without consultation. The crisis in England only lasted nine years but it still resulted in an estimated 84,000 military deaths and a further 100,000 deaths from war-related diseases.1

A.C. Grayling speculates that

It is entirely plausible to think that there might have been some people living between 1620 and 1690 who woke one day to the amazed reflection that how things seemed to them in their adolescent years in the 1630s now belonged to an utterly lost era.2

Two such individuals in the Trist family were Arthur Trist and his younger brother Thomas of Harberton, Devon. Thomas in particular lived through all of the big changes in England’s constitution. He must often have reflected how things had changed during his lifetime from 1619 to 1702 and perhaps also wondered how his brother Arthur, born about 1609, would have felt had he lived beyond 1670.

The traumatic conflict of the Civil War was followed in quick succession by the restoration of the monarchy and finally by the Glorious Revolution of 1689 by which the crown became a constitutional monarchy governing only with the cooperation and agreement of parliament. From there it was only a short distance to party politics and the world of Whigs and Tories in which Browse Trist, discussed in Volume 8, was a participant.

The economy and trade of Devon is covered in Chapter 2 and the influence of its peaks and troughs can be detected in the lives of all the Trist people mentioned in earlier volumes. Those who were involved with the mining or the woollen textile industry were affected more than others. The career of Nicholas Trist (Chart 2/238, 1668-1741), for example, which flourished with the peak of the serge manufacturing industry was covered in the last volume. Most members of our family would have been affected by the vicissitudes of the wool industry whether indirectly as owners of flocks of sheep or more directly in the fulling of woollen textiles and other manufacturing and trading processes.

The relationship between the upland moors of Dartmoor and the lowland coastal areas is discussed in Chapter 3. There were Trist families living in both regions echoing the practice of transhumance farming whereby flocks of sheep were driven to higher ground in the summer and then moved in the winter to the more sheltered lowland pastures.

These immemorial farming practices were reinforced by the personal connection mentioned above between Nicholas Gill, vicar of South Brent from 1600 onwards and his step-father Stephen Trist of Harberton (c. 1533-1619, Chart 1/1) and half-brother John Trist of Harberton (c. 1580-1637 Chart 1/2)

Chapter 4 gives the genealogical details and family Charts of the Trist families who lived at South Brent (Charts 4, 4A, 4B and 4C).

CHAPTER 1

Politics in Devon

Ending of The War of the Roses

John Trist of Diptford (ca 1468-1532)

John was fortunate to have been born just as the War of the Roses was ending. The civil war between Lancaster and York (1459-71) had been restricted to the aristocratic factions, with their liveried followers and henchmen. Unless the Trists of Devon had continued their association with Sir Philip Courtenay’s family, they would have stood aside from the conflict like most people of the middle and lower classes and let the barons fight it out.3

The real significance of the final battle of the civil war at Tewkesbury in 1471 for ordinary people was that it marked the end of a long period of weakness of the monarchy. The bitter struggle between Lancaster and York had reduced the numbers and power of the nobility and strengthened the crown.4

John Trist was no doubt in sympathy with the vast majority of his countrymen ‘who shared the vivid memory of the brutalities, disorder and impoverishment of the civil war.’5 This state of the popular mind was a psychological aid to the monarchy for men would now submit to great arbitrariness and oppression rather than resort to rebellion and civil strife.6

John Trist at Diptford seems to have made the most of this new pacifist mood of the country for he apparently prospered and was in the top two per cent of taxpayers in the 1520s. In the absence of hard evidence we must assume that he had secured a good livelihood as a farmer and/or a clothier and was prepared to act as an attorney in legal matters for his neighbours.

John would have been about seventeen years of age when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and like many of his countrymen he welcomed a ‘strong ruler who would restore peace and justice’.7 This the Tudor monarchy accomplished during the lives of John and his son Richard (ca 1498-1571). The absolutism of Tudor kings Henry VII and Henry VIII was something to be borne lightly as a strong monarchy created the relatively peaceful conditions for the middle and lower classes to flourish.

The Protestant Reformation in England

Richard Trist (ca 1498-1571) and Stephen (ca 1533-1619)

Both Richard and his son Stephen were born in a society which was still largely medieval in outlook. Their lives however, were decisively shaped by Henry VIII who broke with Rome, dissolved the monasteries and set up the independent Church of England. Not only did English become the language of the church, replacing Latin, but the system of registration of births, marriages and deaths in every parish, enabled ordinary folk to obtain an unchallengeable, legally constructed identity.

Insofar as any one decade can be said to alter the character of a civilization, it was the 1530s which saw the close of a medieval England that had lasted for nearly six centuries. It was at this point that so many growing tendencies of the late Middle Ages, especially anti-clericalism and nationalism, reached their resolution. The dissolution of the monasteries and the sale of their vast estates to the rising middle classes of merchants, gentry and yeomen marked in so many ways the passing of the feudal age.8

King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the remaining monasteries (that Cardinal Wolsey had not already dissolved) and his assumption of the role of the head of the church was in effect merely putting the axe to the dead wood of the Middle Ages. Medieval institutions which had been decaying since Chaucer satirized them in good humoured English one hundred and fifty years earlier, were either demolished or drastically reformed.

The irony is that the administrative axe by which Henry achieved these ends was one fashioned largely by Cardinal Wolsey himself.9 The Cardinal’s seizure of the lands of some monasteries and his ostentation had inflamed the ordinary Englishman’s resentment of the Church’s sweeping powers and privileges and of the Pope’s influence in England.

This explains why, despite the magnitude of Henry’s actions, there was so relatively little effective or widespread opposition to him. Henry had accurately read the minds and sensed the feelings of most of his subjects and countrymen. Whilst many may have nursed nostalgia for the images, pictures, colour and certainties of the medieval church, few opposed the king’s rejection of the pope’s authority.

As part of his reforms to the English church, Henry VIII ordered that registers of baptisms, marriages and burials be maintained in each parish from 1538 onwards. Consequently, Henry’s reform also marks the effective date from which a family history can be compiled. It is mainly these parish registers that have made possible the writing of this family history of the Trist family in Devon.

The most immediate and visible action of the king was the forcible closure of the monasteries in 1536.10 Next came the distribution of their land to lay purchasers. The chief receivers of monastic spoils in South Devon were Sir William Petre and John Russell the first Earl of Bedford. Petre, for example, took (by exchange and purchase) the manor of Brent (previously owned by Buckfast Abbey) and Russell, the estates of Tavistock Abbey, the largest monastic establishment in Devon. The estates of the Augustinian Priory at Cornworthy were, by the 1660s, in the hands of the Wyse family, merchants of Totnes. We know this because Thomas Trist leased Court Prior farm from Richard Wyse in 1661.11

But these were merely bread-and-butter issues. More important to many people were the more radical changes made to the practice of their religious faith after the death of King Henry and in some parts of Devon this led to open rebellion.

The Western Rising of 1549

There was opposition to the root-and-branch reformation of the church in Devon by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset who ran the country during the boyhood of Henry’s son Edward VI. Seymour had sent commissioners around the country to pull down religious statues in churches and destroy the pictures on the walls. In Devonshire these provocative and destructive acts caused a rebellion known as the Western Rising of 1549, which began at the remote village of Sampford Courtenay in north Devon.

The number involved in the rebellion is not known but it was probably a few thousand ordinary folk living in the Sampford Courtenay area who took to the field under Sir Thomas Pomerey and Arundel. They probably spoke and fought for many thousands more who detested the changes and the mass was everywhere celebrated and Exeter besieged.12

The rebels were only with difficulty overcome by in battles at St Mary Clyst and Sampford Courtenay. Many men were killed in these fierce encounters. Those who escaped into Cornwall and Somerset were caught up and captured by the government forces led by John Russell (using foreign mercenaries). At the end, the leaders of the rebellion, Arundel and two others were hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.13

Stephen Trist was a teenager at the time of the Western Rising probably living at Aveton Gifford with his parents Richard and Margaret. One might wonder what they were feeling at this dramatic time. We know so little that anything we can say is idle speculation. At least one Trist man, Hugh Trist, was a monastic pensioner at South Milton, which means that he was probably a monk, or at least, a functionary of a former monastery.14 Due to their distance from the centre of the rising at Sampford Courtenay Stephen and his parents at Aveton Gifford, were almost certainly not actively involved in the Western Rising of 1549 although they may have sympathized with it.

The only hint we have concerning Stephen Trist’s own religious orientation comes from his step-son, Nicholas Gill, a scholar of Exeter College, Oxford University. I think Nicholas may have been a religious conservative who leant too far towards Rome and forfeited his position as a Master of Exeter College, Oxford. It would be surprising if Stephen Trist and his second wife, Kathryn (formerly Gill) differed markedly in outlook from her son Nicholas. It was, after all, the outlook of most people in Devon at this time. They gave Nicholas a generous price for his share of the lease of Drake’s Ground. In this way they assisted him to remain an independent cleric. (see Volume 4 and below).

The Reformation inaugurated important changes to our ancestors’ spiritual and intellectual life through the changes made to the format of services conducted in the ordinary parish churches. In 1549, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset,15 asked Archbishop Cranmer to draw up a service in English. Thus the first English prayer book with the resonant language so familiar to our forefathers and ourselves came into being.

Stephen Trist would have been a little boy at the time of the Reformation.16 Did these years perhaps interrupt the educational services offered by the secular clergy to boys like Stephen, who as an adult, could not write his own name?

One thing is certain: the Reformation begun by Henry VIII laid the political foundations for a national church and no doubt, the most noticeable outcome for ordinary people was the increased accessibility of the bible and prayer book newly translated into English. The translation of the bible from Latin into their native tongue must have been a great incentive to people to learn to read and removed a big barrier to literacy for those Englishmen like our yeoman forbears whose schooling was usually limited to one or two years at the local parish school.

There is little doubt that these changes to the church and school establishment conferred great intellectual and spiritual benefits on the citizens of England and led to a more deeply felt national and cultural unity.

However, Devon’s leading family, the Courtenays, suffered dispossession at the hands of the Tudor government. The earl, whose royal blood made Henry VIII uneasy, was imprisoned and the earldom’s estates confiscated. The Courtenay family never got them back and they are still merged with the Duchy of Cornwall.

Religious Confusion And Persecution (1538-1558)

Our ancestors must have experienced traumatic conflicts for a period of twenty years during the contradictory reigns of the boy king Edward VI and his successor, Mary Tudor. The Protestant regime of Edward VI was a regency of the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland which extended the reforms of Henry VIII whereas Mary’s government brought back Catholicism and persecuted Protestants burning many of them (including Archbishop Cranmer) at the stake as heretics.

At the village level, under Edward VI, the religious images would have been taken out of the parish church. Under Mary they would have been brought back if they could be found or replaced.

The