At Werrington the Lord Abbat had a deer park, which still remains in existence, his piscatories, and all the appendages suited to a feudal baron.
This property, together with all the other possessions of the monastery, passed by a grant from King Henry the Eighth, in the 31st year of his reign, to the family of Russel, with whom a considerable part of this immense largess still remains; but Werrington was sold to a successor of the renowned circumnavigator Sir Francis Drake, who parted with it to Sir William Morris. This gentleman was the son of a clergyman from Wales, who had obtained a Canonry of Exeter; and he rose in station and in fortune by an early and close intimacy with General Monk, when that military adventurer sacrificed not only his political associates, but the liberties of his country, even to the Petition of Rights, for the purpose of assuring his own aggrandisement, a misconduct which entailed on the nation all the doubtful and vacillating struggles in the reign of Charles the Second, and demanded for its final remedy the glorious Revolution of 1688. Werrington continued in Sir William Morris’s family till the year 1775, when it was sold to Sir Hugh Smithson, created Duke of Northumberland in consequence of his marriage with Elizabeth only daughter of Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and of Elizabeth, sole daughter and heir of Josceline Percy, Earl of Northumberland. The Duke of Northumberland wishing to pursue the path of ambition which then lay open to any man of wealth, acquired with Werrington the commanding property at Newport and the influence at Launceston, and having made a similar acquisition lower down on the banks of the Tamar, he had the satisfaction of attaining the objects kept steadily in his view.
Although the parish of Werrington is completely in Devonshire, and is believed to have formed a part of the original endowment of Tavistock Abbey by Ordgar Earl of Devonshire about the year 960; yet in spiritual matters it forms a part of the Archdeaconry of Cornwall. At the last census this parish contained sixty-six inhabitants; and the annual value of the Real Property was returned in 1815 at £2809.
St. Stephen’s, with its little town of Newport, are obviously too near Launceston to allow of their possessing any separate market. Three fairs are, however, holden, as is not unusual in the suburbs of most towns.
As so few persons attain the age of a hundred years, it may be worth remarking, that the Editor remembers, about fifty years ago, an aged person called Sarah Coat, in the service of Sir Jonathan Phillips’s family. She lived to 1814, and completed her hundred and fourth year.
This parish measures 3401 statute acres.
| £. | s. | d. | |
| Annual value of the Real Property, as returned to Parliament in 1815 | 3,467 | 0 | 0 |
| Poor Rate in 1831 | 430 | 18 | 0 |
| Population,— | |||
| in 1801, 738 | in 1811, 896 | in 1821, 977 | in 1831, 1084 |
giving an increase of 47 per cent. in 30 years.
Present Perpetual Curate, the Rev. C. H. Lethbridge, presented by the Trustees in 1818; net income in 1831, £80.