Archdeacon of Exeter
church of England ecclesiastical office
The Archdeacon of Exeter is a senior ecclesiastical officer of the Diocese of Exeter in the Church of England. The modern diocese is divided into four archdeaconries: the archdeacon of Exeter supervises clergy and buildings within the area of the Archdeaconry of Exeter.
History
The first recorded archdeacon of Exeter occurs in 1083, around the time when archdeacons were first appointed in Britain. Around that time, the Diocese of Exeter was divided into four archdeaconries: Exeter, Cornwall, Totnes (or Totton) and Barnstaple (or Barum). This configuration of archdeaconries within the diocese remained for almost 800 years, until the creation of the independent Diocese of Truro from the Cornwall archdeaconry. On 22 March 1918, the archdeaconries were reconfigured and the Archdeaconry of Plymouth created from Totnes archdeaconry. Presently, the diocese operates an informal 'area scheme' such that responsibility for roughly half the diocese is delegated to each suffragan bishop: special oversight is given to the Bishop of Crediton for the Barnstaple and Exeter archdeaconries and to the Bishop of Plymouth for the Plymouth and Totnes archdeaconries.
List of archdeacons
References
Sources
Le Neve, John; Hardy, Sir Thomas Duffus (1854). Archdeacons of Exeter . Fasti ecclesiae Anglicanae.
“Archdeacon of Exeter” enters the record as church of England ecclesiastical office. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Archdeacon, Exeter and church can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6561900. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1083, 1918 and 1854.
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This entry incorporates text from “Archdeacon of Exeter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.