Plympton St Maurice is located within Plymouth local authority area. Historically it formed part of Plympton Hundred. It falls within Plympton 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 604 in 1801 1117 in 1901 . Figures for other years are available on the local studies website. In 1641/2 159 adult males signed the Protestation returns.

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 Plympton St Maurice 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 124/7 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 124NE
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is SX546557. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet SX55NW,NE, 1:25,000 mapping: sheet Outdoor Leisure 20, Landranger (1:50,000) mapping: sheet 201. Geological sheet 349 also covers the area.

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

PLYMPTON EARL (or PLYMPTON ST. MAURICE) lies on a by-road 1.5 m. S. of the busy main road from Plymouth to Exeter. Those who have a special feeling for the small, ancient, and decayed boroughs of England will be delighted with Plympton. It has been left on one side in the past two hundred years or so, and one smells cow-dung in the streets instead of petrol fumes: the immemorial life giving smell of the land from which the little town took its birth in the 12th century.

The manor and honour of Plympton were granted by Henry I to Richard de Redvers before 1107. He built the castle on his demesne land, on the S. side of which there grew up a small community of traders and farmers. His descendant, William de Vernon, 5th Earl of Devon, made a borough of it in 1194, with a market and fair; and unlike so many of the seignorial boroughs of Devon Plympton grew into a town, though never of any great size. It was one of the few "regular boroughs" of Devon, returning members of Parliament without a break from 1295 until it was disfranchised in 1832; and it was incorporated in 1602 and had a mayor and corporation from then until 1859. In 1328 it was made one of the four stannary towns. By Elizabeth's time the town had a weekly market and no fewer than four annual fairs; and the charter of William and Mary added two more fairs, making six in all. The decay of the castle and the dissolution of the priory did not affect the life of the little town unduly. Even if we did not know this from the records, the architectural evidence from the 16th to the 18th cents. would reveal the prosperity of the place. Plympton carried on wool-combing, tanning and brewing, coopering and hat-making. All these trades died for one reason or another, and at the first census (1801} the borough had only 604 people. It grew slowly during the 19th cent., mostly at the perimeter and not in the old town itself. But it still has only some 1,200 people, and the town keeps its ancient atmosphere. Some recent growth is due to the influence of Plymouth.

The disfranchisement of the borough in 1832 gave it a mortal blow, for the close corporation depended on its patron and recorder (the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe) for meeting the greater part of its annual expenditure. (Report of the Commision on Municipal Coporations, 1835 (Plympton) With the abolition of the parliamentary borough, the patron withdrew the favour of his countenance and his cash. It was this that led the desperate corporation to start selling their pictures, including Sir Joshua Reynolds's self-portrait. The Guildhall is an interesting building in the local slate and granite, dated 1688-96. It is now occupied by the Plympton St. Maurice parish council, who succeeded the old corporation after an interval. The corporation allowed its charter to lapse in 1859, when the last mayor was elected; and the ancient borough, so long enfeebled, passed quietly away in its sleep.

The castle, built by Richard de Redvers, was surrendered during the rebellion of his son Baldwin in Stephen's reign, and is said to have been razed. The ruins of the stone keep date from this time. The earthworks of the castle, including the motte, are substantially intact and make a promenade from which one gets a good view over the roof-tops of the little town.

The grammar school, built about 1664 in a Jacobean Gothic and restored in 1870, is famous for its associations with Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose father was master here. Much of the original building remains, including the school room and the granite arcade or cloister, the subject of one of Reynolds's earliest drawings. Here also were educated Northcote, Haydon and Eastlake; Haydon was at the head of the school in 1801. Few schools in England can have such rich associations in the history of painting, but few towns in England can have been so unaware of their greatest son. Plympton pulled down the birthplace of the greatest portrait painter the country has produced; there was not even a memorial to Reynolds until a tablet was placed in the church in 1904.

The parish church (St. Maurice) was formerly dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, this dedication being changed in the time of Henry VIII. It is an exciting building of 14th and 15th century date, restored in 1879.

Many old houses survive in the grey streets of Plympton. Plympton House, now a mental hospital, was begun in 1700 by Sir George Treby, Lord Chief Justice, and finished by his son, George Treby, in 1720. It has a perfect Queen Anne front, and retains complete and intact its contemporary gardens.