21. HOLLEWAY

Sampson Tree

ROBERT HOLLEWAY (21)

 

ROBERT HOLLEWAY was the last of that name to be lord of the manor of Holway in North Lew.

North Lew is a North Devon parish 4 miles SW of the market town of Hatherleigh. White’s Devonshire Directory of 1850 describes it as: “a large and pleasant village, on a lofty eminence, commanding delightful views, and having two ancient crosses, one in the centre, the other at the cross roads.”

A rather different picture is painted by R N Worth in his History of Devonshire (1886). He calls North Lew “a bleak upland parish, where, according to the local proverb, ‘the devil died of the cold’.”

We know little about Robert Holleway, neither his parentage nor his wife’s name. All we do know is that his daughter Margaret was his only child, or his only surviving child. At his death, the manor of Holway passed to her and her husband Sir John Cary. It remained in the Cary family for a number of generations.

We see this connection between the families in the arms of Thomas Cary (d.1567) of Cockington, on his monument in St Saviour’s Church, Tor Mohun, Devon. In the third quarter we find:

Gules, a fess between three crescents argent. (Red, a horizontal band between 3 silver crescents.) These are the arms of the Holleway family,

Robert would have attended the church of St Thomas of Canterbury in the village. This still has the Norman font, the Norman west door and the lower part of its Norman tower, all of which Robert would have known.

His daughter Margaret is thought to have been born around 1354. Robert must have married before then.

A genealogy of the Cary family in Vivian’s Heralds’ Visitations tells us that there was a settlement before Margaret’s marriage in 1376, at the end of the reign of Edward III.[1] Robert was evidently still alive then, but we do not know when he died.

Margaret was his sole heir.

 

[1] The visitations of the county of Devon : Comprising the herald’s visitations of 1531, 1564, & 1620 / With additions by Lieutenant-Colonel J. L. Vivian