Introduction

The collegiate church of the Holy Cross and Mary at Crediton, Devon, had probably been in existence for about 800 years by the time that the Reformation deprived it of both its college and its lands. The earliest reference to a church at Crediton is in its putative foundation charter (S 255), which is dated 10 April 739. In its surviving form S 255 is a composite text written shortly after the Norman Conquest and includes interpolated material and an anachronistic boundary clause, yet it is clear that underlying the text is an authentic charter of Æthelheard, king of the West Saxons (726–c. 740). The current consensus is that there seems little reason to suspect its primary content and purpose, namely a grant by the king to Forthhere, bishop of Sherborne, of land ‘to build a minster in the place where it is called Cridie’. There is no further mention of this minster until the early tenth century, nor has any early fabric survived. It is therefore primarily an assumption – albeit a reasonable and not entirely unsupported one – that the minster was built as intended, soon after 739, and that there was institutional continuity thereafter.

The relationships between the original grant, the extant charter and the boundary clause have not fully been resolved, and further ambiguities arise from Crediton's location in what had once been part of the British kingdom of Dumnonia.