Ottery St Mary is located within East Devon local authority area. Historically it formed part of Ottery St Mary 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 2415 in 1801 3495 in 1901 7417 in 1991. Figures for other years are available on the local studies website. In the valuation of 1334 it was assessed at £20/00/00. The lay subsidy of 1524 valued the community at £79/02/02. The community had a grammar school from 1545. A market is recorded from 14c.-1888.

A parish history file is held in Ottery St Mary 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 Ottery St Mary 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 70/13 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 70SW
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is SY100955. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet SY09NE,SY19NW, 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 Ottery St Mary 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:

OTTERY ST. MARY is a pleasant little town set in the midst of a large, fertile, and beautiful parish. The parish occupies mainly the valley of the Otter, from which it takes its name, but it reaches both E. and W. to high ridges from which there are superb views over a luxuriant countryside.

Edward the Confessor gave the manor and hundred to the cathedral church of St. Mary at Rouen. Bishop Grandisson of Exeter procured it by exchange in 1334, and in 1337 he founded a college of secular priests, with 40 members in all, endowing it with the manor and hundred, and the tithes of the whole parish. The college was suppressed by Henry VIII in 1545, when the fabric of the church, and a small residue of the collegiate property, were transferred to a body of four governors, to whom Edward VI added eight assistants in 1552. These are still the legal owners and guardians of the church and churchyard. Among the property so transferred was the school-house of Grandisson's foundation, which was refounded as "The King's New Gram- mar School" and continues to the present day. John Coleridge (1719-81) was vicar of Ottery and master of the grammar school, and his son Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and philosopher, and perhaps the only literary genius that Devon has produced, received his earliest schooling here. Ottery is the Clavering St. Mary of Pendenni, by W. M. Thackeray, who used to spend his vacations from Charterhouse (1825-28) at Larkbeare, near by; and William Browne, the author of Britannia's Pastorals, lived here for many years and died here in 1645.

Although swept by great fires in 1767 and 1866, Ottery retains many good Georgian houses, especially in the neighbourhood of the church; but it is the latter (St. Mary) which is the glory of the town. It is perhaps the finest church in Devon other than Exeter Cathedral, upon which it was closely modelled by Bishop Grandisson when he greatly enlarged and beautified the existing church for his college of canons. It is a 13th century church, reconstructed in 1338-42, added to c. 1520 by the Dorset Aisle, and restored by Butterfield in 1849-50. Among the notable features of the church are (1) the 14th century clock (c. 1340) in the S. transept, with its original works, though no longer working; (2) the canopied tombs in the nave of Sir Otho de Grandisson (1358), brother of the bishop, and Lady Beatrice, his wife (1374); (3) the tomb of John Haydon of Cadhay (1588) in the chancel; (4) the monument, in the N. aisle, with full-length standing figure, to John Coke of Thorne (1632); (5) the 14th century choir stalls, altar screen, and sedilia; (6) the minstrels' gallery, stalls, and gilded wooden eagle, all in the Lady Chapel, the latter given to the church by Grandisson himself; (7) the fine pulpit (1722), carved by a parishioner, and the bronze lectern copied from that at St. Nicholas, King's Lynn; (8) the eight coloured bosses in the roof, extending from the middle of the nave to the E. end of the Lady Chapel, the W. boss depicting Bishop Grandisson in his episcopal robes, the others a summary of Our Lord's life and works; (9) the carved exterior of the N. porch; (10) in the S. transept the recumbent effigy by Thrupp of Jane, Lady Coleridge (1878).

Ottery has subsisted for a thousand years as a market town for a fertile countryside. It formerly had a considerable woollen manufacture, and still had in Lysons's day "a large manufactory for spinning wool." The old mill near the station was probably this manufactory. In the parish are a number of interesting houses, of which Cadhay, 1 m. NW., is the most notable. This is a fine Tudor mansion, built by John Haydon (d. 1588), a successful Devon lawyer who married the Cadhay heiress. There is a quadrangle known as " The Court of the Kings," with an entrance in the centre of each side, above which are the figures of Henry VIII and his three "sovereign" children.

Knightstone, SE. of the town, is substantially a medieval hall-house, remodelled in the 16th century It belonged for a time to the Bonvilles and the Greys, and then to the Shermans, a local family, for several generations. Other "mansions" in the parish were Thorne, Holcombe, Ash (Elizabethan), and Bishop's Court, said to have been the seat of Bishop Grandisson.