Vital Statistics
Roger Pinson: xxxx – 1720 GRO1820 (Weaver and labourer, Bovey Tracey, Devon)
Elizabeth Symons: xxxx – xxxx
Married: 1683: Exeter, Devon
Children by Elizabeth Symons:
Joan Pinsent: 1684 – 1685
John Pinsent: 1686 – xxxx
Roger Pinsent: 1690 – 1701
Edmond Pinsent: 1692 – 1758 (Married Mary Satterley, Lustleigh, Devon, 1716)
Elizabeth Pinsent: 1697 – xxxx
Roger Pinsent: 1703 – 1783 (Married Anne Edwards, Bovey Tracey, Devon, 1724)
Family Branch: Teignmouth
PinsentID: GRO1820
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Roger Pinson may have been born in Bovey Tracey in 1660 (online sources); however, I have yet to find the record. I do not know who his father was, so he has been designated the founding father of the TEIGNMOUTH branch of the Pinsent family: a branch that very nearly made it through into modern time.
The parish record show that “Roger Pinson of Bovey Tracey” married Elizabeth Symons in Exeter in 1683. They seem to have had six children (four boys and two girls) over twenty years but only two of them can be shown to have married. Their son Edmond Pinsent “of Wrayland” married Mary Satterley in 1716 and his brother Roger Pinsent married Anne Edwards in 1724. Their lives are described elsewhere. What happened to their siblings is still uncertain.
Interestingly, one of their sons was another Roger Pinsent who was born in 1690 and died in 1701. His burial entry in the Register refers to his father as Roger Pinsent, “wea” – which probably means “weaver.” Similarly, when the second, viable, Roger was baptized in 1703 the register refers to his father as “l” meaning “labourer”. This tell us that Roger “sen.” was probably not a significant landholder. The intermixing of the the name “Pinson” with “Pinsent” probably reflects the whim of the parish clerk more than it does the wishes of the individual.
Cecil Torr transcribes some of the “Wreyland Manor Court Rolls” in his very useful little book “Wreyland Documents” (published by Cambridge University Press in 1910). One of them tells us that Roger Pinsent (and three other residents) was “presented” (i.e. held accountable) for their non-attendance at a court held on 13th October 1697. He was similarly absent when the courts were held on 14th October 1703 and 12th October 1904. He could not get out of attending in October 1705 as he was on the jury that year, and in 1709 he was appointed “tithing man”. He was back on the jury in October 1711- when his neighbour, James Fryer, was “presented” for “letting down his fences by reason whereof Roger Pinsent receives considerable damage”. James was slow to react and he was “presented” for the same offense the following year. Roger was, once again, on the jury – which must have made for some lively conversation! Good fences make good neighbours. Roger made his final appearance on the jury in 1714 and died in 1720. In his index to “Wreyland Documents,” Cecil Torr notes that Roger probably lived at “Higher Yeo” – one of the tenements in Wreyland.
According to Torr, there were eleven tenements in the manor of Wreyland consisted in 1726, of which eight were in Bovey Tracey parish and three in Hennock. Today, they are all in Lustleigh as parish boundaries are far from fixed. Several branches of the Pinsent family have owned or leased property in Wreyland over the years. Most notably the DEVONPORT Branch (see elsewhere) lived at Kelly for a few generations around this time. TEIGNMOUTH branch seems to be strongly connected to Yeo.
Yeo may have been a single entity (near the confluence of the Wrey and Bovey Rivers) but by the late seventeenth century it comprised three principal tenements (“Higher” (sometimes referred to as “Knowle” or “Uphill”), “Middle” and “Lower Yeo” (“Forder” etc.) that had been subdivided into quarters and then broken down into smaller fractions over the years – each of which had changed hands many times. Cecil Torr attempted to sort out some of the arrangements made prior to John Gribble’s sale of the “Manor of Knowle” that contained much of the old Wreyland land to Francis Daniell’s in 1797.
Farmers living in the “Manor” of Bovey Tracey were obliged take their corn to be ground at the King’s “grist” mill in Bovey Tracey. However, in 1602, the King insisted that the tenants of Wreyland Manor who lived in the parish of Bovey Tracey were also required to do so. They disagreed, as they had felt that they were beyond his jurisdiction and – besides – the mill at Lustleigh was a far more convenient. John Pinsent (“of Yeo”) was one of several Wreyland farmers who contested the King’s right in the “Court of Exchequer”. They claimed that they had had the right to mill their corn wherever they wanted “time out of mind”. The King disagreed and the issue remained contentions for several more generations. The descendants of this particular John Pinsent owned a considerable amount of “Lower Yeo” up until the death of a Thomas Pinsent, in 1796. He probably came from the main trunk of the TEIGNMOUTH tree but the details of his line have yet to be worked out. Nevertheless, they are touched on elsewhere.
Roger Pinsent probably came from a side-branch of the family. He was a contemporary of one of the (several) John Pinsent’s of “Lower Yeo” and they served on manor court juries together in the 1710s (C. Torr: Wreyland Documents: 1910). Roger died in Bovey Tracey in January 1720. I do not know when his wife, Elizabeth died. They seem to have left two sons whose lives are discussed elsewhere.
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