The Cosserats Huguenot Refugees - by Lynda Pidgeon

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Following religious persecution in France many Huguenot Protestants fled to surrounding Protestant Countries. Many found their way to Devon, particularly Exeter, where immigrants could obtain work in the textile industry. In the late 17th and 18th centuries the immigrant Huguenots in the city used St Olaves church as their place of worship.

One of these immigrants was called Cosserat, he lived in the priory in the late eighteenth-century. The National Archive holds a number of wills for members of the Cosserat family which were proved during the years 1750 to 1825. These wills, along with other surviving documents have been used to try and trace the family who first arrived as refugees at the end of the seventeenth century, and to trace their lives, their friends and their associates.

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