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INTRODUCTION
In 1837 Civil Registration for the whole of England and Wales began. Between 1838-1847 76 CHISWELL births were registered in 18 Registration Districts, the distribution being - Plymouth area 25, Bristol area 17, Leicester area 12, London area 11, Manchester area 6 and Birmingham area 5.
In more recent times (1965-1974) there were 95 CHISWELL births registered in 45 Registration Districts, the main areas still being those listed. The 1975 Telephone Directories confirmed this pattern. Statistics show that about 50% families had telephones in 1975. There were 134 entries for the whole of the British Isles in the directories for that year showing that there must have been about 268 CHISWELL families altogether; this supposition was checked in Plymouth using the Electoral Roll and found to agree exactly.
ORIGIN OF THE NAME
The name is generally accepted to be of Anglo-Saxon origin, and to have been taken from a place-name. The Bosworth/Toller "Anglo-Saxon Dictionary" shows that "well, welle, wielle, will, wille, wyll, wylle" were different spellings of the Saxon word meaning a well, spring or fountain. "Will" also means a person`s will or pleasure. The "Chis-" sylable is more difficult: It could derive from the Saxon words (again spelled in various ways) "ces" (chosen or gravel), or "Cissa" (a personal name, Chichester, for instance, meaning Cissa`fortification). It is hard to imagine what a "cheese-well" might be; a "choice-well" could be one which gave pure, sweet water; "ces-well" could be the spring around which the Saxon tribe chose to settle; "chisil" could be an unusually gravelly place
(e.g.Chesil Bank in Dorset) or somewhere connected with the ruins of a Roman Villa ("Field Archaeology", HMSO 1963); "Cissa`s-well" could be a well or spring on Cissa`s land. When the place or places where the name originated are found, some of these derivations might be shown to be inappropriate.
DEVON: The place CHISWELL in the manor of Langford Barton in the parish of Ugborough in south-west Devon, altered through history (see Land Tax Assessments) from various spellings of Chiswell until its present designation as fields named Inner and Outer Chissels, has a spring but no gravel or Roman remains on the site, and pure water in the county is not unusual. Ugborough was a large Saxon village, and there seems little doubt that one of the Saxons named Cissa had a spring on his strip or field. Langford is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086; Richard de Chiswill quit-claimed one ferling of land in Langford in 1244; John de Chisewille and Hugh de Chiswill` are the only people
of that surname mentioned in the whole of Devon in the Lay Subsidy of 1332, and they both lived at Langford. Records are scarce in this period, but in the 1400s people called Chiswell lived at Totnes, Milton Abbott and Cornwood in the Langford area. Four Chiswell men married at Plymouth just after 1538 when the parish registers began, and their families may have been living there for
generations - it is not too far from Langford - but although their children were born in Plymouth they had all moved away by 1616; they were merchants, and may have moved to London. Ughborough parish registers also date from 1538, but the first Chiswell entry is 1576 when John Chiswell married Dorothy Mudge; their seven children and five of their grandchildren were baptised in Ugborough
church, but the family had moved away before 1650, perhaps through the Civil War. Other parish registers have early Chiswell entries at Loddiswell, Ermington and Totnes; by 1641 Chiswells were also living at Kingsbridge and Cornwood.
DEVON, NORTH AND EAST: John, son of Bartholomew Chishull who was a tailor and innkeeper of Chelmsford in Essex, became rector of Pitt Portion, Tiverton (between Exeter and Taunton) in about 1654. He married locally twice. When he refused to accept the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 he was ejected from his Living and went to Enfield in Middlesex. His son John, born in Enfield in 1665 and a physician, later returned to Devon and also married
twice. He lived at Bideford on the north coast and is variously named in parish registers as Chishull, Chiswill and Cheswell. There were still a few people with those surnames in the Bideford parish registers until 1731, but the connection is not proved. Possibly the name changed again, to Shazel
or Shessel, which were still to be found in the area in the mid-1800s. In 1761 a John Chesewell married at Stoke Damerel, Plymouth, but when he married again at Exeter in 1792 the name was recorded as Chiswell, which he always used afterwards. Where he came from is not known, but he was a mariner and gentleman who settled in Ilfracombe in north Devon and died there in 1819.
His son John had several children, the last of whom died there in 1908 when the name died out in that area.
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