The 1815 settlement examination of Mary Gidley of Bovey Tracey

I have recently been going back through my old notebooks in a decluttering exercise and found a couple of transcriptions of settlement examinations I had made at the Devon Record Office over the years. Rather than bin them, I will record them here for posterity.
Please note that they are unlikely to be the full transcript, merely the items of family history interest. For the complete examination the original needs to be consulted.

Bovey Tracey 5 June 1815
Mary Gidley now residing in the parish of Bovey Tracey, single woman, touching the place of her last legal settlement, taken on oath before two Justices of the Peace.
To the best of my knowledge and belief she was born in Bovey Tracey, when about 14 or 15 she went to live with Miss Savory of Dock, Stoke Damarel, under a weekly hiring at about 18d per week and lived under that hiring 12 months, then went and lived with Mr Nicholson, linen draper of Dock at about 2s per week, and lived with him about 1 and a half years, then went and lived with David Price of Stoke Damerel , hatter, at the rate of 2s 4d per week, and lived with him under that hiring about 6 years, then moved with Mr Price and his family to London and lived with Mr Price at no. 22 Oxford Street for 3 years under the same hiring, then returned to the said Bovey Tracey where she is now residing.
To the best of her knowledge she has done no other deed whereby to gain a settlement.

A hatter at work

The examination was triggered by the fact that Mary Gidley was about to give birth (or had already just given birth) to an illegitimate child, Mary Ann Gidley, christened in Bovey Tracey just a month later, on 9th July 1815. That child would be chargeable to the parish unless Mary could be proved to be the responsibility of another parish. Who was the father of Mary's child? A clue, perhaps, many years later, in the marriage register for the probable marriage of that illegitimate child, Mary Ann Gidley, to Joshua Levens. Mary Ann names her father as John Gidley, hatter. No such person existed, as far as I can see, but her mother was of course apprenticed for several years to David Price, a hatter.
So what happened to Mary Gidley and her daughter Mary Ann? There were obviously not many opportunities in Bovey Tracey and all the children of John Gidley and Elizabeth Purday left the village - two for London, one for Dover, then on to London, and another, John Gidley born about 1796, probably to Australia with his wife Elizabeth Facey.
By 1841 Mary Gidley had returned to London, and is a female servant in Pall Mall. In 1851 there is a bit more detail - she is a housemaid in 89 Pall Mall. The head of the household in each year is Elizabeth Fenning or Fanning, an unmarried fundholder of independent means. By 1861 Mary has moved to live with her younger brother George and his family in Limehouse, in London's East End, where she died in 1875. She never married.
It looks as though her daughter Mary Ann accompanied her to London. In 1841 she could well be "Maria" Gidley, a servant in Nelson Square, Southwark, in the household of Richard Perkins, an attorney. I think she married Joshua Levens in Whitechapel in 1855.