CORNWOOD

One rate survives for this parish located ten miles north-east of Plymouth. In 1630 Thomas Westcote noted in his A View of Devonshire that Slade, the first property noted on the church rate, was ‘inhabited by a worshipful race of long continuance of the Coles’. Henry Smith, ‘a man of worth and learning’, was appointed vicar the year following this rate and during the Civil War was forcibly removed from his post. He escaped from his persecutors by fleeing out of a garret window. The contributors to the church rate were nearly 10 per cent of the parish population from whom a considerable number of legal suits reached the London Courts. This included a mid-sixteenth-century dispute between the vicar, who was also treasurer of Exeter Cathedral, and Walter Hele regarding the rental of houses in the parish. Before this four parishioners had argued over alleged assaults and forcible entry and about this time the Countess of Devon had her oxen seized which were grazing on Penmore Common.

46. CORNWOOD, Church Rate, 1628

DHC, Diocese of Exeter, Principal Registry, Cornwood Church Rates, 1628

Note: This rate, a fair copy, was written on a sheet of paper which has been folded to make four pages, each of which measures approximately 6 inches in width and 15½ inches in length. There has been considerable damage to the right hand side. The numerals are Roman. It is endorsed ‘Cornewood pishe. A rate for the maintenance of the Church 1628’, and in a later hand ‘Cornwood Rate 1628’.