ST. WINNOW.
HALS.
St. Wennoe is situate in the hundred of West, and hath upon the north Braddock and Cardenham, west the Foye river or sea, south St. Veepe, east Lanreth.
In the glass windows of this church, the Patron Saint is called after the Latin St. (Sanctus) Winotus, but further knowledge of him I have not.
In the Domesday Book 1087, this district was taxed by the name of Tre-vocar-Winoe. In the Inquisition of the Bishops of Lincoln and Winchester, 1294, Ecclesia de Sancto Winotho was valued lxs. In Wolsey’s Inquisition 1521, it was rated 5l. The Patronage in ——; the incumbent Laurence; the rectory in possession of ——; and the parish rated at 4s. per pound Land Tax, 1696, for one year, £210. 8s. 8d.
In this parish is a chapel of ease dedicated to St. Nectan, vulgo vocat. St. Knighton, or Nighton, whose revenues in the Inquisition of the Bishops of Lincoln and Winchester 1294, were thus rated, Capella de Nectan, in decanatu de West, vs. This Nectan was born in Devon about the year 940, a man of singular piety and holiness, as most of those days afforded, who lived a monkish or eremitical life, at Hartland, in Devon, where he died about the year 1010. After his death his relics (see Rawlegh’s Relicta Nomen viri) were enshrined and set up in the same little chapel where he served God there; in which place Githa, wife of Godwin Earl of Kent (or rather Goditha his daughter, afterwards married to Edward the Confessor), as Malmesbury informs us, 1030, built and endowed a monastery of secular priests, which might marry wives; valued at the suppression, 26 Hen. VIII. at £350 per annum; and the reason of this her pious foundation is said to be, for that
she was fully persuaded that her husband, Earl Godwin, escaped the danger of a shipwreck in a raging tempest at sea by his merits and intercessions.
Galfrid de Dynham, Lord of Hartland, was a great benefactor to this monastery, and changed the Secular Priests into Black Canons Augustine, who were prohibited marriage by their rule. See the Monasticon Anglicanum, tome II. p. 285, concerning Nectan and Hartland.