For old Photos of Otterton Click here.

Otterton must be fairly unusual in having been almost entirely leasehold, with only three successions of landlords in 900 years, the Priors of Otterton and the families of the Dukes and the Clintons. Polwhele, the great Devonshire historian says of Otterton in 1790, 'the farmers are leaseholders, there not being a single freeholder except the Vicar. There were 896 inhabitants. The males being almost entirely farmers and their labourers, and the females are entirely manufacturers of a coarse kind of thread lace'. From his standpoint he naturally fails to credit them with raising families in inadequate housing or the heavy chores implied by no piped water and other amenities we take for granted! In 1945 the present Clinton Devon Estates owned 95 per cent of the houses and land in and around Otterton and indeed N. D. James, the previous Land Agent for the Rolle Estate, is of the opinion that the Estate still owned 80 per cent of the Parish in 1960.

With few exceptions, most of the population then consisted of tenant farmers, farm workers, and a large number of estate workers such as builders, masons, thatchers, forestry workers, keepers, and all the ancillary trades then required, harness makers, boot makers and cobblers, blacksmiths, shoesmiths, wheelwrights and carpenters and those that supplied such a large local population, butchers, bakers and general stores and others. In fact the village was self supporting until the first world war.

There are photographs in the village of Lord and Lady Clinton's Golden Wedding in June 1936 showing some 200 employees of the Estate and their wives, even then, to illustrate this point, and the value of money and the level of employment remained fairly constant until 1939.
With the coming of the Second World War, came the great change. Labour was in short supply and everything had to be done to conserve this scarce commodity. Tractors began to appear and to take the place of horses and horsemen. Most of the jobs could be done more quickly by this means, thus saving a man, and fairly rapidly more complex machinery came in, culminating in the combine harvester, which at a stroke did away with the binder and all the work involved in stocking, carting and stacking corn. The itinerant threshing machine disappeared and the gang of casual labour that went with it.

At the same time farm workers' wages were rising fairly rapidly, and this quite rightly, but it gave further impetus to using less labour whenever possible, and so the process speeded up with bigger and more sophisticated machinery.

Then came the new Agricultural Holdings Acts primarily to safeguard the tenant and his family against bad landlords, one supposes, but in fact the tenant was given so much security of tenure that the value of tenanted land fell to about two thirds of the land in possession. The consequences of this legislation, well meaning in its way, was to cause landlords to take farms in hand whenever opportunity arose, and farm the land them­selves. Following from all this, farms just got larger, and machinery bigger, causing trees and hedges to be taken out to manoeuvre these land monsters, and altering the pattern of the countryside, One of the worst features of this trend is that it has made it more difficult than ever to rent a farm, which was the traditional stepping stone for the young farmer to make a start, and this has now been removed to a very large extent.

This complete change in the farming landscape has affected all villages drastically and none more so than Otterton which lost not only its farm workers but its estate workers also. The restrictions of the Rent Acts and the cost of repairs has caused landlords to sell leasehold property whenever opportunity arose, the consequence being a change from 20 per cent owner occupancy 20 years ago to a figure of 60 per cent at present, and a completely new sort of person is taking over, and a fresh village evolving, perhaps for the better, who knows?
Anyway nothing can live in the past, but 1 thought it was important to try to capture the old way of life before it is forgotten, as the people born and bred in the village and who remember its past unfortunately become fewer as the years pass by.

I also felt it would be more in context, and hopefully more interesting, if the earlier history of the Parish was re-written and short essays added on special subjects to do with the village life. 
This early history has been compiled with additions and comments from 'Some Notes on the History of Otterton' by the Rev. E. C. Grimaldi in 1928. In lighter vein there is Walter Scutt's 'Story of Otterton' in 1935, and a chapter in E. R. Delder­field's 'Raleigh Country' in 1949, and even a paragraph or two in the 'Guide to Budleigh Salterton' (price twopence) of unknown date by M. S. Gibbons.

 
As to the Church, a detailed account of its history was compiled by the Rev. Preb. Roger Granville, with the Rev. Mackworth Drake when they were collecting information about the Priors and Vicars for the Memorial Tablets in the Church, and printed privately. 

Otterton - A Devon Village
by
E. Michael Harrison

© Otterton Village 2010