ELFORD, John (1603-78), of Longstone, Sheepstor, Devon.

The Elfords were said to be of Cornish descent, with a lineage traceable in that county to 1302. Towards the end of the fourteenth century they settled on the south-western slopes of Dartmoor, probably at Longstone, the house they owned as proprietors of Sheepstor for three hundred years.9Polwhele, Devonshire, iii. 448. They were accounted gentlemen rather than esquires. John Elford, the MP’s grandfather and namesake, was a farmer who owned half the manor of Sheepstor and lands in other parishes, in 1583 wealthy enough to be able to bequeath small items of silverware and £600 in cash.10PROB11/66/87; C142/201/117. The Elfords rarely married out of their district. The Elizabethan John Elford married Elizabeth Drake, whose first husband was Thomas Drake of Buckland, brother of the celebrated navigator, naval commander and adventurer, Sir Francis Drake†.11Vis. Devon 1620 (Harl. Soc. vi), 96, 105. Walter Elford, the MP’s father, was typical of the pattern, marrying Barbara Crocker of Lyneham in the South Hams. Her grandfather was of the old faith, invoking the Blessed Virgin Mary when he drew up his will in 1611.12PROB11/121/328. In the 1620s, the links between the Drakes and the Elfords were still active, and evident in property transactions which saw Walter Elford and his brother acquire two manors from the Drake family.13Coventry Docquets, 552. Walter Elford’s property included the headwaters of the river which provided Plymouth’s water supply, and in 1603-4 he was made a freeman of the town in recognition of his strategic importance to the corporation.14Cal. Plymouth Recs. 144, 147.

John Elford was admitted to the Middle Temple at eighteen, and was bound with two west-countrymen, William Martin and Edmund Fowell, of the family which produced Edmund Fowell*, who first came into Parliament for Tavistock in 1646. The Elfords and Fowells were related through the Crockers of Lyneham.15MTR ii. 662; Vis. Devon 1620, 114. This was the inn of John Maynard*, and by 1627 Elford and Maynard were receiving other Devonians to be bound with them.16MTR ii. 722, 730, 731. When John Elford was called to the bar in 1629 it marked a significant leap forward in the family fortunes. As a barrister-at-law he was esteemed an esquire in social terms. Over a decade later this was apparent when the male residents of Sheepstor took the Protestation of Parliament. John Elford was noted as esquire, while his father was rated the more modest ‘gentleman’.17MTR ii. 752; Devon Protestation Returns, ii. 399. One of those admitted to the bar on the same day as Elford was Amias Bampfylde, his cousin through the Drakes of Buckland. This happy coincidence suggests that the links between Elford and the Bampfyldes of Poltimore were active and meaningful in Elford’s formative years.18MTR ii. 752; Vis. Devon 1620, 17.

The call to the bar seems to have marked the end of Elford’s time in London, and he gave up his chambers soon afterwards.19MTR ii. 757, 761. He returned to Devon to the life of a local landowner and farmer, and with his father enjoyed tinners’ rights in the stannary of Plympton.20Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 72/1034. He was not included in the commission of the peace before the civil war. In 1631 he contracted the first of his four marriages, to Elizabeth Copleston. The pattern of these marriages departed from that of Elford’s immediate forebears in that he successfully courted women of county gentry families no longer confined to western Dartmoor. Most if not all of Elford’s successive wives were from puritan families. Three of his marriages took place before the outbreak of civil war. Elford’s second wife, Anna or Ann Northcote, was the sister of John Northcote*, and the third, Mary Gale, who died in February 1643, is commemorated in Widecombe church.21Vis. Devon 1620, 199; Devon RO, 2955A/PZ 4. Her piety is recorded in a memorial that incorporated both an anagram and a chronogram. Mary’s memorial was not erected until 1650, when it was safe to erect a material expression of puritan piety without fear of damage by hostile visitors.

The civil war experience of Sheepstor villagers was coloured by the drawn-out siege of nearby Plymouth, as recorded by the puritan minister of Sheepstor, John Syms, who kept a diary of the civil war as it affected the South Hams and Dartmoor. Syms was a natural parliamentarian sympathiser, but the allegiances of the Elfords may have been divided.22Add. 35297. The minister recorded in detail how when in his cups the constable of Sheepstor betrayed Syms to the royalists by blurting to them that he ‘neglected the Common Prayer Book’. The officer added that ‘Longstone House’ supported Syms in this stance, but Alexander Elford backed up the allegation and disclosed unhelpfully that Syms prayed for Parliament.23Add. 35297, f. 22. Syms has nothing to say about John Elford, but Walter Elford, his father, left Syms money for a mourning ring in his will of 1648.24PROB11/204/588. A story that Elford hid in a cave among the granite rocks of Sheepstor to evade marauding soldiers made its first appearance in print towards the end of the eighteenth century, and may be fanciful. At least one nineteenth-century antiquary struggled to reconcile conflicting evidence on Elford’s loyalties: it seemed unclear from which side’s soldiers he might have been hiding.25Polwhele, Devonshire, iii. 449; C. Worthy, Devonshire Parishes (2 vols. 1887), i. 37, 39. In fact, the plea in Latin under Elford’s signature in a parish register, ‘from puritan barbarity and ignorance deliver us, Lord’ was a later comment on him and was not of his own authorship.26Worthy, Devonshire Parishes, i. 37.

John Elford’s election at Tiverton in December 1646 must have been through the good offices of gentry seated nearer the town than Elford was. His associates, the Bampfylde family, retained a significant interest in Tiverton: the family was represented on the county committee, and Elford’s brother-in-law, John Northcote, was among the committee’s leaders. Like that of his colleague, Robert Shapcote*, however, Elford’s career in this Parliament was negligible. He was in the House to take the Covenant on 9 June 1647, but was given leave of absence less than three weeks later.27CJ v. 203b, 226b. There is no indication that he ever returned to Parliament thereafter. From then until November 1648, when Elford was ordered to Devon to bring in arrears of the assessment, he was recorded by the clerks either as absent or as a grantee of leave. This strongly suggests that the November 1648 order merely rationalized his continued residence in Devon.28CJ v. 330a, 377a, 543a; vi. 58b, 87b. Although his name appeared on a list of the imprisoned and secluded Members which George Thomason picked up in London on 26 December after Pride’s Purge, it seems most unlikely that he was anywhere near the capital.29A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). There is much more evidence for his modest local public career. He was named to the commission of the peace for the first time probably in March 1647, following his election to Parliament, and in the summer of that year joined the Devon county committee for taxation. He was at the committee meeting in Exeter on 4 September, when members were jostled by soldiers complaining of their arrears of pay, and signed the letter to Speaker Lenthall complaining of their mutinous behaviour. The letter was a report on the ‘sad condition of this county and the infinite sufferings thereof’ and an appeal against what the Devon men took to be an unfair tax burden relative to that on other counties. 30Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507.

Elford’s usefulness to the parliamentary cause in Devon if not at Westminster continued. In August 1648, he was named to the second committee covering west Devon following the initiative to reorganize in which Elford’s relative, (Sir) John Bampfylde* played a prominent part.31Add. 44058, ff. 26v-27. It is most unlikely that Elford approved of the trial and execution of the king. There is no record of his attending quarter sessions at Exeter during the late 1640s, and only from the summer of 1652 did he reconcile himself with the commonwealth regime sufficiently to be able in conscience to sit on the bench of magistrates. Thereafter, he played a modest part at quarter sessions, continuing to attend when the Rump gave way to governments in which Oliver Cromwell* held supreme authority as lord general or lord protector. He was more active in government in his part of Devon, partnering Edmund Fowell* in investigations into disputes between parishes, the finances of Tavistock town and parish and supervising the management of Tavistock house of correction.32Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9.

Elford seems to have been more comfortable with the protectorate than with the commonwealth. His puritan piety won him a place as a commissioner for ejecting ‘scandalous ministers’ from the Cromwellian state church, and during the civil emergency in the west country provoked by the rising of John Penruddock he was appointed a commissioner of oyer and terminer for one session only. He may have found the regime of the major generals distasteful, as his attendances at quarter sessions during 1656 and thereafter tailed off somewhat.33Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9. As far as can be ascertained, Elford remained a conservative puritan throughout his public career, and would have approved of the public career of his brother-in-law from 1647, John Wollocombe, whose family had been partners with the Elfords in a tin mine during the 1620s. Wollocombe was a staunch attender at quarter sessions and the most vigilant guardian of sexual morality in Devon that the interregnum regimes produced.34Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 72/1034; S.K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County (Exeter, 1985), 202-3, 206. Elford busied himself in the dividing of the Copleston estate among several coheirs in the later 1650s. He wrote a number of letters to Sir John Yonge* on these transactions. When Yonge journeyed to Devon from London following the dissolution of the second protectorate Parliament in 1658, Elford congratulated him on his safe return, but confessed he would have been even more pleased if Yonge and other Devon MPs had ‘enjoyed further time on good occasions to have remained there longer’. Elford added, sententiously, that ‘God’s time, means and ends must be waited on by his creatures’.35Devon RO, 530M add/E13.

Immediately before and during the restoration of the monarchy, Elford remained a fitful participant in local government, attending quarter sessions twice in 1659 and once in 1660. In the late 1650s among his associates in regulating affairs in Tavistock was William Morice*, and in the same period Elford was engaged in a small flurry of business transactions with Sir Coplestone Bampfylde* over the former Copleston lands in which they both had interests.36Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 407/T6,7,8; 1311/14(a); Risdon, Devon, 97, 402. Elford was certainly no republican, and would have found it easy enough, at least initially, to conform to the restored episcopal church. Indeed in 1660, he signed an order in December 1660 to the constables of Marytavy, requiring them to summon the rector there to declare his loyalty to the Church of England and the basis of his entitlement to his living.37Bodl. Walker c.4, f. 417. But as a former committeeman, Elford was bound to be suspect. There is no evidence of any interventions by either Morice or Bampylde with the authorities after 1660 on Elford’s behalf, nor any of Elford himself attempting to salvage his public career. He attended quarter sessions in January 1661 for the last time, and must have lost his place in the commission of the peace shortly afterwards.38Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9. He was never again even appointed a tax commissioner. He lived until 1678. His great-great-grandson, Sir William Elford (d. 1837) sat for Plymouth.39Vivian, Vis. Devon, 331.