Posbury
Posbury is an ancient estate in Devon, now a hamlet, situated about 2 miles south-west of Crediton and 2 miles north of Tedburn St Mary and 1 mile west of the small hamlet of Venny Tedburn.
Posbury Hill Fort
Posbury
Manor of Posbury
The manor of Posbury is first recorded as held by the de Posbury family. On the failure of the male line, a daughter and sole heiress Eleanor de Posbury brought the manor to the family of her husband, a member of the Pollard family of Way, St Giles in the Wood, Devon.[2]
On 5 April 1581, John Bremridge did homage and service to George Pollard, then the Lord of the Manor of Posbury-Bradleigh, and duly recovered seizin of his inheritance of Bremridge, in the parish of Sandford. By an Inquisition post mortem dated 1599 it appears that he died "seized of one capital messuage or tenement called Bremridge, with three orchards, two gardens, seventy acres of land, four of meadow and half an acre of wood, within the parish and hundred of Crediton, all held of Richard Pollard and John Hele, serjeant-at-law, as parcel of the Manor of Posbury Bradleigh, by the eighth part of a knight's fee and by the annual rent of seven shillings and five pence."[3]
This branch of the Pollard family appears to be that seated at Langley, Yarnscombe, Devon, in which Richard Pollard (died 1626) was the son and heir of George Pollard.[4] Sir John Heale (d.1608) of Wembury, Serjeant at Law, was Recorder of Exeter 1592-1605 and was MP for Exeter. His monument survives in Wembury Church.[5]
Posbury House
Posbury House was the historic centre of the settlement, long the property of the Tuckfield family, whose early home was here or at adjacent Venny Tedburn or at nearby
St Francis's Convent
Posbury House in 2014 is home to an
St Luke's Chapel
St Luke's Chapel was built in 1835 by Richard Hippisley Tuckfield of Shobrooke House in order to supplement the capacity of nearby
Posbury School
At about the same time as Richard Hippisley Tuckfield was building St Luke's Chapel, his wife Charlotte Mordaunt (1777-1848), daughter of Sir John Mordaunt, 7th Baronet, was building a small school in the lane opposite.[12] She had an "ardent zeal for the training of the deaf and dumb and of school masters for the poor" (as commented the Educational pioneer Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet (1809-1898), both of whose wives were Charlotte's nieces).[13] Charlotte had developed an interest in teaching the deaf and dumb after a visit to her friend Grace Fursdon at Fursdon House, where she met her deaf and dumb protégée, who aroused her sympathy and interest. She travelled to Paris to study the teaching methods at the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris, the institution for the deaf and dumb run by the Venerable Abbe Sicard (d.1822). On her return home she sought out two similarly affected children and taught them herself. She was successful in her methods and was instrumental in establishing a school in Alphington Road, in Exeter, the precursor of the present Royal West of England School for the Deaf. She wrote a series of articles later published in a book entitled "Education for the People".[14] In 1838 Sir Thomas Acland established the Exeter Diocesan Education Committee, the first in Great Britain, which by 1840 had established St Luke's Teachers' Training College in Cathedral Close, Exeter. Thus there was little further need for Posbury School which closed and was for a while used as a Sunday School. In the 1920s, by which time it was serving only as a storage shed, it was demolished and its building stone served to make buttresses for the walls of St Luke's Chapel.[15]
Sources
External links
- Smith, S.G., The "Crediton Area" page, "Places and items of interest in the Crediton area"
- Windows Live Local, for images of the local area
References
- ISBN 0-86114-756-1- Chapter 2; The Iron Age in Devon. Map Page 11 of Iron Age hill forts in Devon includes Posbury.
- ^ Risdon, Tristram (d.1640), Survey of Devon, 1811 edition, London, 1811, with 1810 Additions, p.101
- ^ Worthy, Charles, Devonshire wills: a collection of annotated testamentary abstracts, together with the family history and genealogy of many of the most ancient gentle houses of the west of England, London, 1896, p.415 [1]
- ^ Vivian, Lt.Col. J.L., (Ed.) The Visitations of the County of Devon: Comprising the Heralds' Visitations of 1531, 1564 & 1620, Exeter, 1895, p.599, pedigree of Pollard
- ^ Vivian, 1895, p.464, pedigree of Hele
- ^ "The Tuckfield Memorial".
- ^ "The Tuckfield Memorial".
- Gray, Todd & Rowe, Margery (Eds.), Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of The Reverend John Swete, 1789-1800, 4 vols., Tiverton, 1999 , Vol 3, p.123
- ^ "The Tuckfield Memorial".
- ^ "St Francis". posbury.org.uk. Archived from the original on 10 December 2014.
- ^ "About".
- ^ "School". Archived from the original on 14 November 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
- ^ "School". Archived from the original on 14 November 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
- ^ "Posbury". Archived from the original on 14 November 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2014.
- ^ "School". Archived from the original on 14 November 2014. Retrieved 8 December 2014.