HUNDRED OF WITHERIDGE

The Hundred of Witheridge is above all other Hundreds the Hundred of small thanes. It contains not a single ancient Crown lordship, not a single borough. The hundreds of Black Torrington, Shebbear, Braunton, and Plympton contain each of them many thanes Lands, but the Hundreds of Witheridge seems almost exclusively made up of them. With the exception of Bishop's Nymton and King's Nymton, Chulmleigh and Cruwys Morchard, there is hardly an estate which can have held the position that is now termed a manor. Nearly all are the cotliffs or quillets of small thanes ranging from 50 - 100 acres, and where several thanes held them together, the several thanes are not manorially subordinated, but held in parage. Two thanes lands are enumerated (in Domesday) as added to the royal estate of Witheridge, one to that of King's Nymton, one to Thelbridge, one to Creacombe, one estate at Worlington was made up of the land of two thanes; another, West Worlington, with Ashton, the Affetone of Episcopal registers, had formerly been the land of twelve thanes, yet another Worlington represented the land of three thanes. To Washford Pyne a thane's land has been added. Three of the estates in Little Washford, the outlier of Witheridge, consisted of the land of six thanes.

It looks as if the great Down Wood (Donewold), which formerly stretched away from Exmoor south-westwards as far as Dartmoor, like a wedge dividing the county into two portions, was at no very distant date before Domesday an almost wholly uninhabited waste, partly moor, partly wood, with only here and there a settler's clearance, and that the four great intakes of King's Nymton, Bishop's Nymton, Chulmleigh and Cruwys Morchard were of comparatively recent origin. The legend, therefore, which tells of Chulmleigh as having once been King Aethelston's park is no doubt substantially correct, if only it is understood as conveying that King Aethelston was wont to hunt over Chulmleigh or ever it was 'towned', when it was as yet part of the forest unenclosed.

Such in the words of Reichel (D.A.T. L. XXX, p391) was the state of pre-Domesday Witheridge so far as we can read it. The account goes to make it clear how it is that there were so many Domesday manors in what is now the parish of Witheridge, and how it is that there identification is so difficult. Reichel devotes forty pages of volume XXX of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association to the Hundred of Witheridge, and his own alterations in the margin of his copy have been helpful in this matter of identification.

WHITE'S Directory, 1850 says that Witheridge Hundred is a fertile district of hill and valley, of an irregular figure, averaging about fifteen miles in length and nine in breadth, in the Northern Division of Devon, Archdeaconry of Barnstaple, and Deaneries of South Molton and Chulmleigh, except for Templeton parish, which is in the Archdeaconry of Exeter, and Deanery of Tiverton.