CRUWYS, William

An old Devon rhyme, preserved by John Prince in his Worthies of Devon in 1701, maintained that ‘Croker, Cruwys and Coplestone, when the Conqueror came, were all at home’.2 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 243. With such antiquity came a degree of proliferation, and by the fifteenth century there were several branches of the family in the county. The main line of the family had its seat at Cruwys Morchard near Tiverton, and throughout the Lancastrian period maintained close ties with the Courtenay earls of Devon.3 E34/1B/187; E101/49/34; KB9/267/42B; KB27/765, rex rot. 9; M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 273. William, for his part, probably descended from a cadet branch that had settled in Tavistock by the 1390s.4 Cornw. RO, Coode and French mss, CF2/215/34. One member of this branch, John Cruwys, had served as portreeve of the borough in 1401, and several others are recorded as party or witnesses to Tavistock deeds in the 1430s and 40s.5 Ibid. CF2/215/44, 51, 53, 60; Trans. Devon Assoc. lxxix. 150.

The property which William Cruwys himself held from Tavistock abbey included a tenement in Tavistock situated between the highway and the river Tavy.6 Coode and French mss, CF2/215/68. He is not known ever to have held office either locally or under the Crown, but he is occasionally found serving his neighbours as an executor or attesting their property transactions.7 Ibid. CF2/214/8, 215/64. Little else is known of him for certain.8 There was another William Cruwys, a yr. s. of John Cruwys of Cruwys Morchard, active in the mid 15th century: KB27/810, rot. 19d; 827, rot. 53; CP40/829, rots. 173, 445; C1/194/2. It was probably either he or a third, younger man, who lived at Great Torrington in the 1470s and saw military service in the Calais garrison: CPR, 1477-85, p. 29; C140/38/56, 41/39.