Dolton Roots

By Ivor H. Leverton, ivor.leverton@cwctv.net

Liverton House faces the War Memorial in Dolton, but was there long, long before it. But who or what was Liverton? 

In fact, it could well have been Livaton, Levadon, Levyton, Leviton, Leveton, Levaton
or Leverton House, as all these surnames had been used by my ancestors in earlier days. 
Of course, in illiterate times any written entry showed how the name given to a priest, etc. simply appeared as it sounded, and all the above variations spoken in a Devonshire brogue would sound very similar.

My family's earliest known connection with Dolton was in the Muster Rolls of 1569. when John, one of the three Headmen of the village, shared responsibility for an assessment of the weaponry available should the Spanish succeed in landing in Devon. In addition to the more lethal equipment he promised his bow and arrows! Before this we find his father and grandfather in Iddesleigh; the latter would have been born during the Wars of the Roses Going back, there is now a very large unrecorded gap, and then we find that in the Subsidy Rolls of 1332 there were only four men with our name taxed in the whole of the West Country, namely Simon and William de Loveton in Bondleigh and Walter and John de Lyvaton in South Tawton, on the northern fringes of Dartmoor. The surname of the latter pair, in its Norman form, demonstrated that they were 'of Livaton' a tiny hamlet which still exists on the eastern boundary of the parish. Surnames only became necessary with greater mobility, even though this was limited to walking distance, and it was generally the occupation, appearance or home locality which decided this. The name derives from the Old English: farmstead (tun) by the marshes (laefer) We know nothing of the entry in an 1174 index of Devon surnames which shows William de Levitona, the Latin equivalent.

The northward migration took two centuries before Dolton was reached, and we can wonder why this route was taken.  I think Dolton was a magnet in those times; it formed part of the lands settled by William the Conqueror on his cousin Baldwin, whom he made Sheriff of Devon, and whos daughter, on succession, was styled 'Lady of Dolton'. The AngloSaxon font in St. Edmund's Church, in which generations of our family were baptised, appears to be constructed from two parts of a Phoenician memorial. Dolton developed as a centre for transport for all North Devon, and still contains more than its fair share of coaching inns.  For two centuries it must have been difficult to walk down any street in the village without meeting one of the family, which seems to have become more and more established, and we can see a change in the social aspect, with the appearance of Henry who was the first to use a consistent form of the name, in the shape of Liverton, and we now find evidence of living away from a farmhouse, while owning tenanted farms. We also find the first use of the term Gent., which demonstrated how Gentleman was an accepted 'occupation' Henry Liverton married at 40 and died at the advanced age of 80. being buried in St Edmund's Churchyard on 16 September, 1732. He had three sons, Thomas, Henry and George, these names following the custom of repeating, in order, those of the paternal grandfather, the father and maternal grandfather. Although Henry, senior, maintained the same spelling, all three of his sons were buried under the surname of Leverton. However Thomas' line soon reverted to the name of the family home, while the other two have kept to Leverton right up to the present.  It is interesting to compare these three strands of the family` and we can see in Stuart Roberts' exhaustive tree how Thomas Liverton's descendants became so prolific that the name is spread widely all over the Weat Country and the whole world, particularly the Antipodes. By contrast those descended from the second son, Henry, junior, had a predilection for producing daughters, and the end of the name in this branch is in sight. George's family lies in between numerically speaking, and this is the line to which I proudly belong.  

George moved with his son George to Meeth, facing Iddesleigh across the River Torridge, where hia grandsons, George, who lived to the remarkable age of 94, and John, born in January, 1763. were baptised. It was John who left his home county for London, and founded the concern now known as Leverton and Sons, Ltd., which celebrated its eighth generation by being appointed as Funeral Directors to H.M. the Queen. I feel that all the generations would have been proud to watch, with an estimated half-a-billion others, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, for which my sons were responsible, as they were more recently for those of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. I would always be pleased to hear from anybody interested in the history of 
an old Devon family, but don't wait too long! I was born before the War (not the Boer War, as some of my 'friends' suggest)