Bishop's Tawton is located within North Devon local authority area. Historically it formed part of South Molton Hundred. It falls within Barnstaple Deanery for ecclesiastical purposes. The Deaneries are used to arrange the typescript Church Notes of B.F.Cresswell which are held in the Westcountry Studies Library. The population was 747 in 1801 2632 in 1901 . Figures for other years are available on the local studies website. In 1641/2 271 adult males signed the Protestation returns.

A parish history file is held in Barnstaple Library. You can look for other material on the community by using the place search on the main local studies database. Further historical information is also available on the Genuki website

Maps: The image below is of the Bishop's Tawton area on Donn's one inch to the mile survey of 1765.

On the County Series Ordnance Survey mapping the area is to be found on 1:2,500 sheet 13/11 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 13SE
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is SS566303. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet SS53SE, 1:25,000 mapping: sheet Explorer 139, Landranger (1:50,000) mapping: sheet 180. Geological sheet 293 also covers the area.

Extract from Devon by W.G.Hoskins (1954), included by kind permission of the copyright holder:

BISHOP'S TAWTON is a large village, now almost a suburb of Barnstaple. There is a long-standing tradition that it was the site of the see of Devon before Crediton was chosen in 909, but conclusive proof of this is not yet forthcoming. Throughout medieval times Bishop's Tawton was, next to Paignton, the bishop of Exeter's most valuable property. He had a palace here, of which some remains are to be seen in the 15th century building (next to the church) now occupied as a farmhouse.

The church (St. John the Baptist), one of the few in Devon with a medieval spire, is substantially a 14th century building, but has undergone sweeping restorations. The chancel, S. porch, and vestry were rebuilt in 1860. In the chancel are some mural monuments to the Chichesters of Hall.

Hall was the seat of the Halls, whose heiress brought it to a younger son of the Chichesters of Raleigh in 1461, so establishing a new branch of that formerly ubiquitous family in North Devon, and now the only one to survive in its old home. The present house, built in 1846-8 in the Elizabethan style, contains a galleried banqueting hall. A quantity of finely carved oak fittings, formerly in the private chapel at Hall.

are now in a chapel of ease, erected at Herner in 1888. Little Pill, now a farmhouse, was formerly a "mansion," with a private chapel licensed in 1400. At Whitemoor farm some medieval work survives, including a 15th century oak doorway, and an example of "cruck" building, rare in Devon.

New Bridge, over the Taw, existed in 1326 when Bishop Stapeldon left 60 shillings for its repair. The present bridge was probably built early in the 19th century. The foundations of an earlier bridge can be seen 100 yards downstream.

Godden Hill (630 ft.), in this parish, is associated with W. N. P. Barbellion (born at Barnstaple), whose book, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, was a literary sensation of the early 1920s and contains much good descriptive writing about the Barnstaple country.