Richard Duke (died 1572)

Richard Duke (c. 1515 – 1572) was a lawyer and served as Clerk of the Court of Augmentations which position assisted him in acquiring large grants of former monastic lands in the West Country following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He served as MP for Weymouth in 1545 and for Dartmouth in 1547 and as Sheriff of Devon in 1563–64.

He was the eldest son of Henry Duke, son of a merchant of Exeter, Devon, by his wife Maud White, daughter of Roger White. The Duke family had been settled at Otterton in south Devon from the time of King Edward III (1327–1377).

He studied law at the Inner Temple where he was admitted on 8 February 1533. In 1536 the Court of Augmentations was established by King Henry VIII to manage the properties reverting to the crown following the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Duke was appointed for life as Clerk of the Court of Augmentations, which position he held until the court's abolition in 1554, upon which he was compensated for his loss of office with an annuity of £133 6s 8d.

Almost immediately following his appointment as Clerk of the Court of Augmentations he acquired his first grant of former monastic lands when in December 1536 he was granted a lease of Pilton Priory in north Devon. On 5 February 1540 he made a larger acquisition when he purchased the lands of the dissolved Otterton Priory near the south Devon coast, which comprised a large part of the country surrounding the estuary and lower course of the River Otter. He made Otterton Priory his home and it continued as the principal residence of the Duke family, which held the estate until 1786 when it was sold to Denys Rolle of Bicton, thus making him eventually the largest landowner in Devon. The estate remains largely intact as the core landholding of Baron Clinton's 55,000-acre Devon estate, whose family was the heir of the Rolles. The catalogue entry of the record of the grant in the Patent Rolls is summarised as follows:

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