Broadhembury is located within East Devon local authority area. Historically it formed part of Hayridge Hundred. It falls within Ottery 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 780 in 1801 554 in 1901 . Figures for other years are available on the local studies website.In the valuation of 1334 it was assessed at £02/01/04. The lay subsidy of 1524 valued the community at £08/06/08. In 1641/2 240 adult males signed the Protestation returns. A market is recorded from 14 cent..

A parish history file is held in Cullompton 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 Broadhembury 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 58/5 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 58NW
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is ST102048. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet ST00SE,ST10SW, 1:25,000 mapping: sheet Explorer 030, Landranger (1:50,000) mapping: sheet 192. Geological sheet 326 also covers the area.

Illustrations: The image below is of Broadhembury as included in the Library's Etched on Devon's memory website. Other images can be searched for on the local studies catalogue.

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

BROADHEMBURY takes its name from Hembury Fort on a spur of the Blackdown Hills, the finest earth-work in Devon. A brief account of it will be found in Part I. It is an Iron Age fortress superimposed upon a Niolithic causewayed camp, and it continued to be occupied until the second half of the 1st century The name means " the high burh."

Broadhembury is one of the most attractive cob-and-thatch villages in Devon: it is rural East Devon at its best. The Drewe Arms, a notable example of village building, is an early Tudor house, and was probably the Church House originally.

The church (St. Andrew) is late 14th to early 15th century, with a fine W. tower, good window tracery, and the usual pleasant Beer stone arcades. The S. chancel aisle was the chapel of the Drewes of Grange (in this parish) and there are two good early 17th century Drewe monuments in the chancel. Notice also the excellent 15th century font, the groined roof and inner doorway of the N. porch, and the nave roof which has kept a good deal of its original colour. The medieval rood-screen was removed to an out house about 1851, and there burnt: the determined "restorers" stuck at nothing. The Victorian interior of the church is pleasant, but it might have been beautiful had they been content to leave things alone. The Rev. Augustus Toplady, famous as the author of the hymm Rock of Ages(which he wrote in Somerset), ended his days here as vicar, 1768-78.

Near Kerswell, in the NW. of the parish, was a small monastic cell dependent on the Cluniac monastery of Montacute in Somerset, founded between 1119 and 1129. The Priory, about 1 m. NW. of Kerswell, occupies the site of this cell.

Grange, SW. of the village, was another piece of monastic property, belonging to Dunkeswell Abbey. It was bought in 1603 by Edward Drewe, a successful Elizabethan lawyer who already possessed Sharpham and Killerton in this county, and he began to build here. He died in 1622 (and is 'buried in Broadclyst, (q.v.), and the house was completed by his son Thomas. The latter was knighted at the coronation of Charles I, and d. 1651 (buried at Broadhembury). The house is still substantially the early 17th century house, though it was much pulled about and altered in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It is notable for its magnificent plasterwork and carved woodwork, very similar in style to that at Bradfield (see UFFCULME). The Oak Drawing Room is the most elaborate room in the house, and one of the most beautiful in all Devon.