THORNCOMBE’S QUAKERS

Records of Thorncombe’s tradition of religious dissent date  back to the first half  of the  seventeenth century. Opposite the entrance to Southcombe on Venn Hill,  is a field  which seems to have been  used as  a Quaker burial ground during the eighteenth century for at least 36  years if not more.

 Evidence of Thorncombe’s long  forgotten Society of Friends is hidden away in the parish Burials in Woollen Affidavits book. The law required all corpses  to be wrapped in wool and  formally  witnessed. Quakers excepted, there was no religious objection among other non-conformist sects to burial in consecrated ground.  The book spans 1680-1745. Entries for 1723-1727 are missing from the original document but survive as entries in Noble’s 1966  transcription of the parish registers in the Devon Records Office. Sixty six individuals buried in wool but not listed in the burial register have therefore been indentified as Quakers. The last recorded Quaker buried in woollen was William  Ousley in 1735.

    Thorncombe’s  earliest  recorded Quaker found  to date  is  Hannah Limbry who married [cloth] maker  Peter Loman from Honiton  in 1672. The first mention of a Thorncombe Meeting in the minutes of the first Devon Quarterly Meeting of June 1676, puts Thorncombe’s Society of Friends among George Fox’s west country pioneer converts. The joint minute books of Thorncombe and Membury Meeting covering the period 1678-1727  have survived and show that Membury and Thorncombe began to hold alternate meetings from 1696. Thorncombe meetings were held in the house of Robert French possibly at Synderford, where later his sons were cloth merchants, from 1689. Details of a 99-year lease for a dedicated meeting house for Thorncombe, acquired in 1701, are recorded by the Plymouth Quarterly Meeting of that year. According to the monthly minutes book   rent was paid in 1704 by Joseph French to Richard Hillary for ‘our meeting house and ground at Ven’, thus signposting its location. In 1714   Amos Phelps agreed  ‘ to keep  the burial ground in order’.  Richard Hilary left ‘the meeting house’ to his grandson of the same name in his 1737 will.

   Dating back to 1816, Venn Chapel, which sits at the junction of  Causeway Lane and Venn Hill  was used variously by Anglicans and Baptists until 1972,  and is now a private house.  However, no building is recorded on this site on the 1806 and 1809 Ordnance Survey maps. The 1809 OS map locates Venn on the opposite side of the road to Venn Chapel, to the south east of the junction. Shaded in black meaning it was thatched is a building in its own grounds, it is marked abutting Venn Hill, and directly opposite the entrance to Southcombe.  This appears to be the location of  Thorncombe’s eighteenth century Quaker meeting house and burial ground between 1701 until  at least 1737.

To find out more go to:  http://www.foda.org.uk/main/projects/eighteenthcentury/thorncombe/quakers.htm

Eve Higgs, March 2011