Tristram Risdon

Tristram Risdon (c. 1580 – 1640) was an English antiquarian and topographer, and the author of Survey of the County of Devon. He was able to devote most of his life to writing this work. After he completed it in about 1632 it circulated around interested people in several manuscript copies for almost 80 years before it was first published by Edmund Curll in a very inferior form. A full version was not published until 1811. Risdon also collected information about genealogy and heraldry in a note-book; this was edited and published in 1897.

Biography Risdon was born at Winscott, in the parish of St Giles in the Wood, near Great Torrington in Devon, England. He was the eldest son of William Risdon (d.1622) and his wife Joan (née Pollard). (Joan Pollard was the daughter of George Pollard of Langley in the nearby parish of Yarnscombe, by his wife Thomazine Coplestone, a daughter of John III Copleston (1475-1550) "The Great Copleston" of Copleston, Devon.) Her younger brother Pollard, of unknown first name, was Gentleman Usher to Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and to her successor King James I (1603–1625) and married a sister of Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (c. 1527–1608) ("Bess of Hardwick"). Pollard's daughters by this marriage were Maids of Honour to Queen Elizabeth I. Risdon also stated that the family originated in Gloucestershire, where during the reign of King Richard I (1189–1199) they were lords of the manor of Risdon.

He married Pascoe Chafe, the daughter of Thomas Chafe of Exeter, on 2 December 1608 and they had four sons and three daughters. From about 1605 to the 1630s he devoted his time to the study of antiquities, especially those of Devon, and the result of his labours was his Survey of the County of Devon. He died at Winscott in 1640 and was interred in St Giles's Church;

The Survey According to John Prince, who had used the Survey as a source for his Worthies of Devon, Internal evidence shows, however, that it was not completed until 1632 at the earliest.

Unlike his antiquarian contemporaries, Risdon's work does not overly concern itself with genealogy and reads more like a travel book, apparently describing parishes in the same order as he visited them. Concerning his literary style, the opinion of Joyce Youings, former Professor of English Social History at Exeter University, was that although his general description has echoes of John Hooker's writing, "The three hundred pages of topographical detail which follow make extremely tedious reading, unredeemed by [Thomas] Westcote's style."

According to Gordon Goodwin, writing in the 1900 Dictionary of National Biography, Risdon was the first documentary source of several old Devonshire stories: of Elflida and Ethelwold, Childe the Hunter, Budockside and his daughter, and the Tiverton fire.

In its turn, Risdon's Survey has been used as a source for later topographies. For example, apart from John Prince's Worthies of Devon mentioned above, the Lysons brothers credit it and Pole's collections for the details of the descent of the principal landed property in the Devon volume of their Magna Britannia (1822).

Publication After the completion of the Survey, many copies of the manuscript entered into public circulation, none of them exactly agreeing with the others, each having something redundant or deficient. Ten copies of the manuscript are known to survive.

The Survey was first published in 1714 by Edmund Curll, the infamous London bookseller, who extracted the parts he thought would best suit his purpose, and printed them. But shortly before publication, the proposed book appears to have been shown to John Prince, who, being well acquainted with the original, persuaded Curll to publish the remainder as a continuation of the parts already printed. Curll did this in the same year, but it remained a very imperfect version.

In 1785 William Chapple published the first part of his Review of Risdon's Survey of Devon. It contained the general description of the county, but Chapple died before he could complete the work. The first complete edition of the Survey appeared in 1811 and included many additions by uncredited editors. (According to Gordon Goodwin's 1900 DNB entry these editors were John Taylor, who wrote 68 pages of updates; John Swete; William Woollcombe, M.D., of Plymouth; and one of the publishers, Rees of Plymouth.) No work has been done to compare the various manuscript and print versions, and Youings has said that until this is done it will remain unknown exactly what Risdon himself wrote. The original note-book is in Exeter Cathedral Library.