Site: Lustleigh

Name:Lustleigh CISP No:LUSTL
Place:Lustleigh Grid Ref:SX 7851 8127 (GB)   Map
Parish:Lustleigh Stones:1
County:Devon , England Saint(s):none
Site Type:ecclesiastical

Site Notes

Swanton/Pearce/1982, 140: `The settlement of Lustleigh lies at about 76m above sea level on the east side of the Bovey valley, which divides the main extent of moorland Dartmoor on the west from the upland parishes between the Teign and the Bovey on the east'.

Swanton/Pearce/1982, 140: `the south porch appears to have been a thirteenth century addition...The Lustleigh churchyard shows all the classic features of an Early Christian enclosed graveyard of the type well known in Cornwall and Wales, and probably also in north Devon...The earliest datable object now at the site, apart from the stone, is the inner part of the font which has Norman cable-moulding, and hints at the existance of an immediate post-Conquest church building...King Alfred's will, c. 881 AD lists an estate called Sutheswyrthe...the same name, in the form Sutrewortha, appears in the Devon Domesday Record, and...beyond all reasonable doubt...this estate was that subsequently known as Lustleigh...We may presume therefore that by the second half of the ninth century Sutheswyrthe was a recognised estate with legal boundaries...it seems a reasonable proposition that the ecclesiastical parish boundary preserved the boundary of the estate as it was in Alfred's time...native British estates...passed into Saxon hands soon after AD 650-700, and Lustleigh looks as if it, too, may have been one of these'.

References

Stones