The 19^th century Tithe Survey is a legacy from the Victorian era routinely mined in local history studies. Among many facets of information, it provides an invaluable record of agricultural properties throughout England and Wales, including the names of property owners and occupiers, details of property size and land uses. Maps drawn at the level of individual fields and dwellings are often the earliest maps available for identifying particular landholdings on the ground.

Organised around tithe districts, usually parishes (see footnote 1), the Tithe Survey was set up to assess land values on which the payment of tithes for church income was based. By the early 19^th century, the ancient system of tithes in the form of produce, or ‘in kind’, was being replaced by money payments for the value of produce, though in a tangle of local practices developed over centuries. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 enabled a standardised system of tithe payments based on a nationally recognised criterion, the productivity of land. The Act was implemented through the Tithe Survey, conducted in more than 12,000 tithe districts in England and Wales over some 12 years. Focusing here on rural communities and leaving aside areas of tithe-free land in some regions of the country, the main purpose of the Tithe Survey was to establish appropriate values for particular properties, which in turn required data on the size, uses and yields of each holding.

The Tithe Survey was administered nationally by three tithe commissioners, two appointed by the government and one by the church, who in turn appointed a second tier of assistant commissioners working at county or regional level where local knowledge was essential in conducting district meetings, mediating disputes and encouraging voluntary agreement to a locally appropriate rate of ‘tithe rent charge’.  Other major players were land agents, usually professional surveyors and valuers, who were responsible for calculating the chargeable rate for each field or parcel of land, which was set out as an ‘apportionment’ for each separate property in the tithe district, and again their work depended on familiarity with local conditions.  Table 1 gives the names of the assistant tithe commissioners and land agents acting in Ewyas Lacy.

Table 1: Assistant tithe commissioners and land agents acting in Ewyas Lacy

(note 2)

Surveyors also arranged the production of the tithe map for each district. A proposal for a general survey and mapping of the whole country was turned down by Parliament on the grounds of expense. Instead, tithe maps could be put together from pre-existing surveys and maps where there were no objections from the parties concerned, being the local landowners who shared the cost of the finished tithe map. Consequently, tithe maps are of two sorts: those which were purpose surveyed and drawn and those which utilised existing maps. In general only the purpose made maps were approved as ‘first class’ by the tithe commissioners, stamped with their seal and given legal recognition in courts of law. Of the Ewyas Lacy maps, only two qualified as first class, for Craswall and Newton, and therefore presumably were purpose drawn; it is not known how much of the area in other parishes may have been pieced together from pre-existing maps but in any case they did not reach this highest standard.

The scale of Ewyas Lacy maps varied, from 3 to 6 chains (a chain being 22 yards/20.17 metres): at this scale they can be as large as a dining table and provide a great deal of detail, most significantly always showing field boundaries and buildings, and often features such as woodland, plantations and orchard, tracks and roads, mills, streams, ponds and quarries among a host of other local details. Table 2 gives the names of map makers for the Ewyas Lacy parishes, where indicated on the maps themselves, together with other information.

Table 2: Details of Ewyas Lacy tithe maps (note 3)

Local historians in Herefordshire are fortunate in having redrawings by Geoff Gwatkin of all the county’s tithe maps at a scale of six inches to one mile. Those for Ewyas Lacy have been utilised on this website , with the kind permission of Geoff Gwatkin, for identifying the landholdings of named individuals in the series of records titled ‘Owners and Occupiers of Land’ in each of the parishes.  

Comparisons between the acreage and number of landholdings in each of the parishes are shown in Table 3.

Table 3: Area and landholdings of Ewyas Lacy parishes (note 5)

The number of landholdings can be difficult to ascertain, for example where tenants of some farms appear to have more than one lease from the same owner for particular fields, or where two parcels of land at a distance from each other are occupied by the same tenant from different owners.

Within this overall picture of settlement, the schedules and maps on this website provide further detail on the names of owners and occupiers, size of holdings and their locations. Again, there are issues of interpretation, as the meaning of ‘owner’ and ‘occupier’ in the Tithe Survey is not straightforward. Tithe apportionments were solely concerned about who could be responsible for the tithe payment and this varied from holding to holding according to the judgment of the land agent. For the purposes of tithe apportionment, the owner was the person ultimately responsible for tithe rent-charge payments, and not necessarily the legal owner of the property. The occupier was the person from whom the tithe rent-charge was derived, who might be a freehold owner, a copyholder with heritable tenure, or a leaseholder with specified tenure, though not necessarily the person in residence. An independent check on residence can be made from the 1841 census: for instance, sub-tenants, who are rarely noted in the tithe apportionments, may have been in residence though not designated as occupiers.

The size and location of holdings offer a close look at social and economic conditions - from subsistence-level smallholdings to increasing gradations of more substantial farms; from areas of common and encroachment to hamlets and the one village at Longtown. 

The maps are also invaluable as a clue to historical development, making it possible to cross-reference family names with properties identified from other sources, such as earlier manorial surveys where only the name of the landholder is given without a clear guide to location of the property. This range of information offers enormous scope for in-depth research, as well as for an interest in named persons and particular properties by family historians and local residents.

References:

Evans, Eric (1976). The Contentious Tithe , London

Kain, R and R Oliver (1995). The Tithe Maps of England and Wales , Cambridge

Tithe apportionments, Hereford Record Office (on microfilm)

Notes:

(1) The four townships of Clodock in the 1840s (Craswall, Llanveynoe, Longtown and Newton) will here be referred to as parishes, as they later became.

(2) Source for Table 1: Tithe Apportionments, Hereford Record Office

(3) Source for Table 2: Kain and Oliver (1995), p210-17

(4) Source for Table 3: Tithe Apportionments, Hereford Record Office