Finding home

Instead, it encouraged English fishermen to sail to Newfoundland in the spring, fish for cod either on the “Grand Banks” or around the coast, process (dry and salt) their catch on shore on temporary platforms called “flakes” and return to Europe in the autumn. The fishermen were expected to sell their catch in Catholic countries in the Mediterranean, and then head home to England.

This emphasis on a maritime fishery ensured that the country had a pool of well-trained seamen available when it fought its seemingly interminable wars. Sir Francis Drake was born in Tavistock, in Devon, and most of his ships when he fought the Spanish Armada in 1588 were crewed by men from the West Country. Even Nelson’s Navy depended disproportionately on sailors from the south and west of England.

In the early days, most West Countrymen contributed ships to a convoy that set out for Newfoundland every spring. However, as there was an advantage to being the first ship to enter and to settle in a cove (it’s captain had priority there throughout the fishing season), some wealthy merchants eventually started sending their ships early. From around 1700 onward, each ship carried its own crew and increasing numbers of “bye-boatmen.” They were independent operators who ran crews of long-line fishermen in small boats called “dories” alongside their mother ships. Eventually, the ship owners and merchants left “agents” to look after and protect their fishing stations over the winter, and the population started to grow as women started to arrive.

As an aside, there was an Admiral Pinzon who later gained fame (or notoriety if you prefer) in the New World. Admiral Luiz Hernandez Pinzon was a Spaniard sent to Peru on a goodwill mission in 1863. Unfortunately, someone murdered a Spanish citizen while he was there, and this triggered an international incident. The Admiral “invaded” the Chincha Islands off Peru’s coast in retaliation for the affront to Spain’s sensibilities.  The islands were an important source of guano (bird droppings) which were sold in Europe as fertilizer. Spain returned the islands to Peru after several years of ill feeling. Admiral Pinzon is a reminder that there is, or was, a branch of the “Pinson” family in Spain.

Although most of the early Devonshire “Pinsons” and “Pinsents” were born in inland parishes (Bovey Tracey, Hennock, Chudleigh etc.) quite a few took to the sea. The parish “clerk” in Hennock, when he recorded Thomas Pinsent’s daughter’s baptism in September 1630, made a point of noting that Thomas was a “sailor”.  He may well have done so to differentiate him from Thomas Pinsent of “Huxbeare” – a wealthy farmer who had his daughter baptized two months later. Both mothers were called Julian, just to complicate matters! At least some clerks tried to keep their records straight.

Andrew Pinson (1728 – 1810) was born in the Devonshire parish of Abbotskerswell. He joined John Noble in Bristol, in the mid-1700s, and helped run a fishery business in Newfoundland. Andrew took control of the company when Mr. Noble retired, and moved it to Dartmouth, on the south coast of Devon. The company had it’s Newfoundland base in St. John’s, and its boats fished on the Grand Banks, around Conche, in northern Newfoundland, and along the coast of Labrador. Andrew brought his son (another Andrew) and his two sons-in-law into the business and, according to Francis Niering (see below), owned around 50 ships. The “Pinsons” built a successful fishery at “Temple Bay” in Labrador; however, it was poorly defended and succumbed to an attack by an American privateer in 1778. The Newfoundland fishery was a high-risk business! Merchants and shipowners were at risk of losing their crews to the Royal Navy through “press-gangs,” and their ships, shore stations and fish to privateers. They also had bad weather to contend with and, inevitably, lost ships at sea!

Andrew’s branch of the family kept the “Pinson” name – but for which, it would certainly warrant inclusion in this database. The branch has its own cast of characters – including Lieutenant Albert Andrew Pinson of the 16th Regiment of Foot. He was a bit of a “dandy” and he so besotted Victor Hugo’s daughter, Adele, when they first met in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands) that she followed him to Canada, Barbados and back to England in the hope that they would marry. He was having none of it and she ended up in a mental asylum near Paris.

I hope to add something about this family someday. In the meantime, other people have studied it and there is a fair amount of material online (“Andrew Pinson: Dartmouth Merchant, Ship Owner and Gentleman Farmer, Trading to Labrador:” M.A. Dissertation; Francis Eduard Niering: University of Exeter: 1999).

William Pinsent of Port de Grave, Newfoundland, and his brother John Pinsent of Portman Square, London, from my HENNOCK branch of the family, took part in the cod fishery at much the same time as the “Pinsons”. Having two completely separate families trading into and out of Newfoundland at much the same time caused some confusion. It is not always clear which family owned which ship, or who exactly was involved in a particular deal. These days, nobody knows whether the small coastal community of “Pinsent’s Arm,” in Labrador, was named for the “Temple Bay” fishermen, or William Pinsent’s nephew, a Judge of the Labrador Court. The two families are quite separate.

I do not know who the first “Pinsons”/“Pinsents” who settled in Newfoundland were; however, they seem to have arrived in the Trinity Bay area in the late 1700s and generated large families of resident inshore fishermen. They have given rise to a population of “Pinsents” in Newfoundland and Canada that far exceeds that of the United Kingdom! Several Canadian “Pinsents” have compiled their own “Newfie” family histories and some of their work can be found online. My Newfoundland trees are coming along, but they are still very much a work in progress.

The families described above are anomalies. Most 17th and 18th century “Pinsons” and “Pinsents” lived in inland parishes; however, there was a family of “Pensons” settled on the south coast of Devon in the early 1700s. In this case, the name “Penson” is probably a local varient of “Pinson.” I am sure the family had nothing to do with the “Pensons” found in the Midland counties of Shropshire and Warwickshire.

TO THE MANOR BORN

The families who stayed home were made up of farmers and tradesmen who lived in small towns and villages south and east of Dartmoor. There is not much known about them in the aftermath of the first few bouts of plague (1350s) but scattered references in the surviving “manor rolls” tell us that some of them were living in and around Bovey Tracey in 1429.

They lived in a world of small villages, scattered farms and homesteads, enclosed fields, open woodlands, moorlands, streams, and meadows. It was a rural landscape that was divided into a patchwork mosaic of ecclesiastical parishes superimposed on both large and small feudal manors. Sadly, the boundaries of both have changed over the years, and nowadays they rarely seem to match!

The misalignments frequently led to legal complications. For instance, John Pynsent of “Yeo” (in Bovey Tracey parish) was one of several local farmers who refused to take his corn to be ground at the King’s (“grist”) mill in the manor of Bovey Tracey in 1602. The dispute was over a feudal obligation and it was bitterly contested in the “Court of Exchequer Chamber,” where two other Pinsents, John Pynsent of “Combe” in parish of Bovey Tracey and his brother Hugh Pynsent, who was by then living in the nearby parish of Ilsington, were called upon to testify. In those days, the law was to a large extent adjudicated on oral rather than written testimony.

John “of Yeo” and his colleagues claimed that as they lived in the manors of Wreyland and Llangalar, and not in the King’s manor of Bovey, they were not obliged to use his mill. They, like their ancestors, “time out of mind,” had the right to grind their corn wherever they chose. Presumably, they won their case as Frances Billinge in her online discussion of the Customs of the Manor of Bovey Tracey (boveytraceyhistory.org.uk) notes that by 1615, there was no obligation for anyone to have one’s corn ground in the King’s mill.

Bovey Tracey was a small market town that straddled a tributary of the River Teign. It had water-powered mills for processing wool (“fulling”) and for grinding corn.

According to Dr. Billinge; it acquired the right to hold a market around 1260, and it was a small market town by 1500. A hundred years later, the borough of Bovey Tracey and the surrounding manor lands had their own “Leet” and “Manor Courts.”

The manor of Bovey belonged to the de Tracey family until 1274 (Frances Billinge: Rep. Trans. Devon Assoc. Advmt. Sci. Vol. 128, 2016) – notwithstanding that a certain Sir William de Tracey and two other knights had acted on King Henry II’s wishes and, rather foolishly, rid him of his “troublesome priest” – Thomas Beckett – in 1170. They  killed him in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. The manor reverted to the crown in 1353 and, for the next three hundred and fifty years, it was either held or leased by a succession of aristocrats and/or gentlemen – at the King’s discretion. Eventually, the manor was sold to a local lawyer in 1614.

The neighbouring manor of Wreyland straddles a small tributary of the River Bovey, called the Wrey, to the north of Bovey Tracey.  The manor originally covered parts of the parishes of Bovey Tracey and Hennock; however, nowadays, much of it seems to lie in the adjoining parish of Lustleigh.

Manor and parish boundaries both changed over time so, although farms (obviously) remain where they are, they appear to bounce around from one parish to another – causing considerable grief to modern-day local historians. Wreyland had a chequered early ownership that is, fortunately, well laid out in a useful little book entitled “Wreyland Documents” written by a gentleman called Cecil Torr in 1910 (Cambridge University Press). It sheds considerable light on the early history of the district  – and of the “Pinsent” family’s activities. It is worth noting that one had to own your property “freehold” to hold office on the manor court. Several members of the family qualified.

There were “Pinsents” in the neighbouring market town of Chudleigh in the 16th and 17th centuries. I do not know when they first settled there; however, it was before the parish started to collect birth, marriage and death data.

The town had grown up around the rural palace of an early Bishop of Exeter who owned the manor. The Thomas Pynson, “clerk”, who died around 1551, may have been employed by the Bishopric. When King Henry VIII started to implement his plan to break the power of the Catholic Church, in 1538, by dissolving monasteries and dismantling other ecclesiastical establishments, the Bishop of Exeter may have felt that divestiture was the way to go. In 1547, he leased the manor of Chudleigh to the Duke of Somerset for 99 years. The net result of the “reformation” was that a considerable amount of land previously owned by the church was broken up and either sold or sublet.

The Clifford family acquired Chudleigh manor in 1595. They became, and still are, significant landowners in the Chudleigh area (chudleighhistorygroup.uk). Chudleigh’s manor records may not have survived but the Clifford family archives at Ugbrooke House must contain land ownership documents relevant to the “Pinsent” family. Note that the “Chudleigh” family for whom the town was named (or vice versa) owned the nearby manor of Ashton.

The “Pinsents” lived in the neighbouring parish of Hennock in the 1400s – if not earlier. I do not know when they arrived; however, it may have been quite early. Evidently, there was a Saxon village around the farm at Warmhill for quite some time before the current church and village at Hennock were built on an east facing slope higher up the hill. The Pinsent family farmed at Warmhill, Huxbeare and Knighton in Hennock for several hundred years. “Hennock” and “Knighton” are both mentioned in the Domesday Book (Hennock.org.uk/hennock_history).

The Exon Domesday tells us that Roger Fitz Payne held the manor of “Hanock”; which was said to be a small community of 20 households, from Sheriff Baldwin in 1086. The manor of “Knighton” (which at the south end of Hennock parish) was a smaller manor owned by the Bishop of (St. Peter’s), Exeter. It had 7 households. The manor was owned by the Southcote family in the reign of Charles I and the farm was held by the Pinsent family in the 16th and 17th centuries. There is a report of a “Perambulation of the Manor of Knighton made September 27, 1798” in the Devon Archives [Southwest Heritage Trust: 5421A/PB/1/f1]. However, that was after the “Pinsent” family had moved on. The old manor of “Knighton” is now probably almost entirely subsumed into the village of Chudleigh Knighton.

“Huxbeare” was one of five farms in the parish (Huish, Fluda, Clayparks, Lynham, and Huxbear) owned by Torre Abbey in the 13th century (Hennock.org.uk/hennock_history). All (except Lynham) feature in the family story to some extent. “Huxbeare,” the most important, may have been, like Knighton, a small manor in its own right. Many farms have been reduced in size through periodic sales, but “Huxbeare” still covered 230 acres in 1851. Perhaps there are documents in the Torre Abbey and/or Clifford Archives that could tell us more.

“Huxbeare Barton” (or “Huxbear” as it is now known) was once owned by the Chudleigh family; however, it must have passed to a Pomeroy as Sir Thomas Pomeroy petitioned the King, in 1402, to have it returned to him – claiming that Sir Philip Courtenay had attempted to repossessed it in the name of his wife (who was a Chudleigh by birth) while he, Sir Thomas, was serving with the King’s army in Wales. The case was heard in the Court of Star Chamber (SC 8/22/1078).

Much later, an “Inquisition Post Mortem” (i.e. a local tribunal set up to establish the land holdings of a Lady or Gentleman after his or her death) was taken in 1570 on the lands of Christopher Chudleigh. It refers to Huxbeare farm, “which William Pynsent now holdeth”. So the Chudleigh family seems to have got it back in the end!

IN THE BEGINNING

The few Bovey Tracey Manor Rolls that have survived are instructive. They show that Joan Pynson paid a “heriot” (a customary payment made to the Lord of the Manor after the death of a tenant – in this case her husband Roger – in 1429. She paid an ox worth 10/6d for “2 ferlings in Warmehele” (which was in Bovey Tracey but is now, somewhat confusingly, in Hennock parish). The farm, which is referred to above, was still in Pinsent hands over a hundred years later.

Similarly, the Wreyland Court Rolls show that another Roger Pynsent held “half a furlong of land in Calwelegh (Kelly with Leigh)” in Bovey Tracey in 1437 (Wreyland Documents: 1910: Cecil Torr). Ten years on, an “Inquisition Post Mortem” on the lands of Anne Holand, Duchess of Exeter, tells us that John Pynson held land at “Culverhouse” in Bovey Tracey in 1447. It too was in Pinsent hands several hundred years later. Its last owner, Thomas, died without a male heir in 1798.

Inquisition and other Court Juries were typically made up of well-respected local “landowners” and “merchants” old enough to know not only who owned what land and where but, as important, how they acquired it and what feudal conditions – if any – were still attached to it. John Pynsent “senior” and John Pynsent “junior,” were called upon to serve at an inquisition held on the death of Elizabeth Mannying, in Hennock, in 1476. They must have had some standing in the community so they probably came from “Huxbeare”; however, that needs to be confirmed.

The Calmady Manuscripts (#372-3/1/14) in the West Devon Record Office tell us that a William Pynson co-owned property in Bovey Tracey in 1497; and a further inquisition into the lands of John Scoos held in Exeter in 1521 had a William Pyncent on its jury. Which one, I do not know. Similarly, there was a Thomas Pyncent on the jury of an inquisition held into the lands of Edward Elyotte, in Bovey Tracey, in 1523.

These and other such documents show that there were several “Pinson” and “Pinsent” families living in the Bovey Tracey – Hennock area, and that some of their members were eligible for jury duty. At this point, it is impossible to know exactly who they were and how they were related, as the family-at-large had been in the area for a couple of hundred years or more. The various families doubtless included yeomen farmers, merchants, craftsmen, tradesmen and labourers.

I doubt if anyone in the Pinsent family in the early to mid-1500s would have qualified as a “gentleman”. However, the John Pynsent (“of Combe” mentioned above) certainly had pretensions and made that important jump in status. He owned shares in a “tin mine” being developed on his property and had money. He acquired a coat of arms in the early 1600s and rubbed shoulders with the local “gentry.” His son moved to Chudleigh, where he seems to have become an upper middle-class “inn-keeper” and “merchant.”

This latter John (the “merchant’s”) son – another John – became a lawyer and married into the Clifford family in 1631. The Cliffords were “gentry,” and the family took another step toward respectability. This John Pynsent was to become a “Prothonotary” (“senior clerk”) in the “Court of Common Pleas” in London during the interregnum – that chaotic period between the execution of King Charles I and the restoration of the Monarchy under King Charles II. The appointment enabled him to acquire (we won’t ask how) the wealth he needed to build and endow “Pynsents Free School” in Chudleigh – and, after his death, – enable his nephew, William Pynsent, to purchase a baronetcy – but that is another story: [The Pynsent Baronetcy: The Trials and Tribulations of a Litigious Family: 1687 – 1976].

The original John Pinsent “of Combe” had several sons whose lives are discussed in the story (above). They too benefited from their father’s wealth and good fortune. Their lives and probable lines of descent are described in more detail in their “Combe Family Branch” biographies. Note that it is a broken branch that does not appear to have made it into the 19th century. Beware, some of the links are speculative!

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