Tristram Risdon - The Survey

The Survey

According to John Prince, who had used the Survey as a source for his Worthies of Devon, Risdon started work on the Survey in 1605 and completed it in 1630. Internal evidence shows, however, that it was not completed until 1632 at the earliest.

Risdon was one of a number of authors who wrote about the topography of Devon between the 17th and early 19th centuries. These authors regularly copied content from earlier works, and Risdon admitted that he had taken much of his Survey from his friend Sir William Pole's manuscript Collections towards a description of the country of Devon. Risdon did, though, make considerable additions and improvements of his own and he acknowledged his debt to Pole "from whose Lamp I have received Light in these my Labours".

However, in organizing his survey Risdon chose not to follow Pole's method, which was by the units of county government, and he also rejected the system adopted by Thomas Westcote, another friend, in his A View of Devonshire of 1630, which was based on the courses of the rivers. Instead he decided to begin "...In the east part of the county, and with the sun, to make my gradation into the south, holding course about by the river Tamer, to visit such places as are offered to be seen upon her banks. Lastly, to take notice of such remarkable things as the north parts afford".

Unlike his antiquarian contemporaries, Risdon's work does not overly concern itself with genealogy and reads more like a travel book, apparently describing parishes in the same order as he visited them. Concerning his literary style, the opinion of Joyce Youings, former Professor of English Social History at Exeter University, was that although his general description has echoes of John Hooker's writing, "The three hundred pages of topographical detail which follow make extremely tedious reading, unredeemed by Westcote's style."

"... the whole town, within little more than an hour, was consumed; the people in the mean time so amazed that they knew not what to do. Many were burned; namely, one Hartnoll, a blind man, lying in his bed, was carried to the market place for his safety, and yet there burnt..."

According to Gordon Goodwin, writing in the 1900 Dictionary of National Biography, Risdon was the first documentary source of several old Devonshire stories, of Elflida and Ethelwold, of Childe the Hunter, Budockside and his daughter, and the Tiverton fire.

In its turn, Risdon's Survey has been used as a source for later topographies. For example, apart from John Prince's Worthies of Devon mentioned above, the Lysons brothers credit it and Pole's collections for the details of the descent of the principal landed property in the Devon volume of their Magna Britannia (1822).