Colcombe Castle

The manor of Colyton, in which Colcombe lay about half a mile north of the town, was at the Norman Conquest parcel of the king's demesne. William the Conqueror gave it to Robert de Mount Chardon; Henry II released it again, together with the manor of Whitford, and bestowed both on Sir Alan Dunstanville. His son Sir Walter Dunstanville gave the land in marriage, with King John's consent, to his nephew Sir Thomas Bassett, younger son of Lord Bassett by Alice Dunstanville. It descended to Bassett's two daughters: Joan, who married first Sir Reginald Valletort and then Sir William Courtenay, a younger son of Lord Courtenay; and Alice, who married Sir Thomas Sanford and afterwards Sir John Bissett. Alice's share was later sold to Hugh de Courtenay, 1st Earl of Devon, so that the whole of Colyton and Whitford came into the hands of the Earls of Devon. The descent was set down by the Devon antiquary Tristram Risdon, writing about 1630.

Hoskins states that the castle was first built in the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) by Hugh de Courtenay (1276-1340); Risdon has the Earl building a mansion house at Colcombe, near Colyton. Whether the place was ever a fortress is doubtful. Pevsner doubts it was a true castle or that it was fortified at all, and proposes only tentatively that the wide, shallow leat running beneath the present farmhouse marks a former moat; it might as easily have served a mill. In 1348 Hugh de Courtenay, 2nd Earl of Devon (1303-1377), founded a chantry chapel dedicated to St John at Colcombe and endowed it with lands, some of them in Colyton parish, and the endowment was remembered locally in the names Chantry Bridge and Chantry Meadow. That earl died in 1377.

Colcombe was used as his seat by Thomas de Courtenay, 5th Earl of Devon (d. 1458), while his widowed mother held Tiverton Castle, the principal seat of the family some 22 miles to the north-west, as her dower house. Its position near Shute, the seat of William Bonville, 1st Baron Bonville (1392-1461), the arch-enemy of the 5th Earl, led to some serious territorial battles between the two families, culminating in the Battle of Clyst Heath in 1455. The Earl died in 1458; Bonville lived until 1461.

Little physical evidence of the Courtenay residence at Colcombe survives beyond a monument in the parish church of St Andrew at Colyton. Its effigy, only about three feet long, is identified by tradition as Margaret Courtenay (d. 1512), "little choke-a-bone", an infant daughter of William Courtenay, 1st Earl of Devon (1475-1511), by his wife Princess Catherine of York (d. 1527), sixth daughter of King Edward IV. A 19th-century brass tablet above it records that she "died at Colcombe choked by a fish-bone AD MDXII and was buried under the window in the north transept of this church". Later authorities, reading the shields above the effigy as the differenced arms of Beaufort rather than the royal arms of Edward IV, have suggested instead that it commemorates Lady Margaret Beaufort (c. 1409-1449), wife of the 5th Earl. The face and head were renewed in 1907, said to have been modelled on the sculptor's own infant daughter.

Henry Courtenay, 1st Marquess of Exeter, 2nd Earl of Devon (1498-1539), rebuilt Colcombe "on a magnificent scale", in Hoskins's phrase. After his attainder and execution the house became forfeit to the Crown, and Risdon records it left in ruins for a time. Walter Erle (d. 1581), a royal courtier, was granted in 1543 the office of "Bailiff and Hayward of the manor and hundred of Colyton and Keeper of the park and mansion of Colcombe", and in 1546 a forty-year lease of Colcombe from Queen Catherine Parr; after the downfall of the Courtenays and the Dissolution of the Monasteries he bought the chantry and its lands from the Crown.

Mary I restored Colcombe, with other lands, to Henry's son Edward Courtenay, 1st Earl of Devon (1527-1556), the last earl of the family. On his death it passed, together with Tiverton Castle, to his heirs, the descendants of his four great-aunts, and eventually fell into a ruinous state.

The heirs general sold the manor and house, and it was divided into moieties: by Risdon's day one was held by Lord Petre, the other by Sir John Pole and Sir John Drake. Part of the Colcombe estate was bought by William Pole (d. 1588), who had purchased Shute House in 1560, and his son Sir William Pole (1561-1635), the antiquary, bought the remaining shares from the Courtenay heirs and rebuilt the house. Writing after 1618 in his "Collections towards a History of Devon", he set down what he had done: "A goodly building was here intended by the last erles but altogether unfinished, and nowe the whole being reduced from all ye co-heires unto my possession, I have newe built the howse and made it the place of my residinge".

Sir William spent most of his younger life at Shute, and during those years his son John, later the 1st Pole baronet, lived in the older building at Colcombe; the record of the birth of John's second son, Courtenay Pole, describes his father as "John Pole of Colcombe". In 1618 father and son exchanged residences. Sir William let Shute to John, moved to Colcombe, set about rebuilding it, and died there in 1635.

During the Civil War, in 1644, Colcombe served as the headquarters of Prince Maurice (d. 1652), who used it as the base for his attack on Stedcombe, then being held as a garrison for parliamentary troops by its owner Sir Walter Erle. The house was almost completely destroyed, only part of the kitchen and a large fireplace surviving. Many volumes of the antiquary's manuscripts for his great work on the history of Devon, carrying substantial additions made by his son the 1st baronet, were destroyed in the conflagration.

After the Civil War part of the building was rebuilt as a farmhouse on the other side of a lane. Colcombe appears to have passed out of the Pole family after the time of the 1st baronet, and was repurchased by Sir John de la Pole, 6th Baronet (1757-1799), the builder of New Shute House, possibly from Sir George Yonge of Colyton, from whom he had acquired several large properties in 1790. The 6th baronet seems to have decided to rebuild it in the grand style it had known under Henry Courtenay, but died before the plan could be effected, stipulating in his will that his heirs should build "a good substantial dwelling-house with suitable offices and at least five acres of land in Colcombe Park where his widow should live". It is unlikely the request was ever acted upon; his widow is known to have spent her last days at Lindridge House near Plymouth, tending her sick brother.

The Devon historian Polwhele called the place ruinous in his own time, and the topographer Rev. John Swete, who visited on 26 and 27 January 1795 and painted two watercolours there, wrote that "the castle of the Earls of Devon and of the antiquary Sir Wm Pole is now converted into a farmer's dung-court, such is the transition from splendour to meaness". Few remains survive on the site, occupied by a farmhouse and farm buildings called Colcombe Abbey Farm, a name with no known historical warrant since no abbey is recorded on the ground. One small building, converted to a house and Grade II listed, carries signs of the ancient construction in its mullioned stone window, and Hoskins reported it to contain "a splendid kitchen with a fireplace nearly 20 feet across with a private room above".