Ian Mortimer: what was new in 2013?

It's another lovely day, looking out at the garden and the moor. After living for thirteen years on the other side of Moretonhampstead where I had no garden and only a view of one hill, living here is blissful. The house is fascinating too: I've spent far too much time working out its history. Astonishingly, it proved relatively easy to trace its ownership over the centuries. Normally townhouses are very difficult to trace because all you have to go on is a brief line such as 'messuage in such-and-such street' and in many places small towns like Moreton did not have street names before the eighteenth century. This house, however, had two distinctive fields with it, which formed part of the tenement. In addition the tenement acquired a name inthe seventeenth century: Merdons or Maredon's Tenement. Later it became Jackson's Tenement, after one Clement Jackson (either the famous Baptist minister or his son) lived here. Furthermore it was inherited by a succession of families from the 16th century to 1811 (the Peryam family of Exeter, the Reynell family of Creedywiger and finally the Tuckfield family of Shobrook Park) and the leases from 1640 all survive in Devon Record Office. To make things even easier, the Tuckfield family only ever had one tenement in Moreton, this one, so that made it very easy to trace its ownership. Both fireplaces and most of the woodwork seems to have been done in about the time of William Stoning, gent. (d. 1618), and his wife Izot Weekes (d. 1612), who leased the house from the Peryam family. And before that, it seems the Peryams bought it along with Halstow in Dunsford in 1525 from one John Halstow alias Sutter. This John seems to have inherited it from his antecedents at Halstow, who mention their property in Moreton several times in the family documents and who descended from the Sutter family of Moreton. The earliest deed in the collection mentions the sale of the messuage by Adam de Morton, vicar of St Marychurch, to one Henry Sutor in 1300. Adam was a chaplain at Moreton before then: in 1276 he was accused of murder and was bailed by the king. He bought his house from John the Palmer, an earlier chaplain. That takes us well back into the thirteenth century - and almost back to when the burgage plot on which the house sits was laid out (in 1207 when the market was founded, presumably, as the house is on one side of the old marketplace). I've had a detailed survey of the house done to examine the fabric further and the 3ft-thick irregular front wall of the house would appear to be even older than the walls that support the smoke blackened rafters (which date from when it was a hall house in the fifteenth century). It is possible that some of the ancient fabric survives: that when they demolished the thirteenth-century house in the fifteenth century they retained the front wall as the base of the new wall.