Following up on my issue, I have now seen photos of some of the original Pitcher/Pitchard entries for Newland. Thank you to Graham for helping me here.

The transcriptions appear to be accurate and I'd like to congratulate the transcriber. I can see it would have been a tremendously difficult task given the condition of the registers and it doesn't help that the rats have eaten their way into some of them.

My deductions are:

• There apppears to be a variety of handwriting in the registers which could quite easily account for the name variations
  
• Looking at other Pitcher/Pitchard families in Newland on the website, I notice that they too, follow a similar pattern of either being Pitcher or Pitchard. It chops and changes a bit around 1691 and 1693 but this is consistent with the different handwriting as far as I can tell.
  
• It would probably have been quite easy for the original scribe to mistake/mis-hear Pitchard for Pitcher. Rather than sounding the 'a' as an 'a', perhaps it was spoken in such a way that it was more likely to sound like Pitcherd. It would have been easy to think there was a 'd' on the end too.