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An Oxford College, Two Parishes and a Tithe-Farmer: The Modernisation of Tithe Collection1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2008
Extract
The agricultural economy of eighteenth-century England exhibited many paradoxes, being in part progressive and even entrepreneurial, yet existing in a legal context which preserved many ancient customs, rights, duties and taxes. Within the one county of Northumberland we find the Culley brothers with their business-like attitudes and innovative and scientific farming methods and, in contrast, antique manorial regimes with courts, fines and heriots, such as prevailed in the manors of Hartleyburn and Bellister. We also find, as throughout England, the ‘contentious tithe’ and what must have been one of the most lucrative examples of tithe-farming, by which one of the North East's leading merchants and its first banker made a considerable part of his fortune out of a lease on this venerable tax from the appropriators, Merton College, Oxford.
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References
2. See Rowe, D.J., ‘The Culleys, Northumberland Farmers, 1767–1813’, The Agricultural History Review, 19 (1971), pp. 156–174.Google Scholar
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7. Merton College was the appropriator of the tithes of all the townships of Ponteland and all but one of the townships of Embleton. The impropriator of the township of Broxfield within Embleton Parish was the Duke of Northumberland.
8. As Dunbabin's study of college wealth, ‘College Estates’, makes clear it is difficult to establish the exact incomes of colleges in the eighteenth century but a cautious extrapolation from his figures from other college's incomes (p. 300), taking account of Merton's position as a moderately well-off college (p. 273), would suggest a total annual income of not more than £3,000 a year in 1750. In the late seventeenth century the college's income had been by its own methods of calculation just over £2,000 p.a. In 1670–71 it was £2,029.15s.3 3/4d and in 1673–4 it was £2,011.11s.4 1/2d. CMR 3.3 pp. 237 and 395. The tithes brought in about £260 a year (rents and fines) in the period 1748–55 and about £340 a year in the period 1755–62. I am most grateful to the college archivists, Dr. Steven Dunn and Dr. J.R.L. Highfield, for drawing my attention to the seventeenth-century figures for the college's income.
9. Tithes taken over by Episcopal, Capitular and Prebendal Corporations were usually said to have been appropriated and the same term was used for those taken over by colleges, schools and charitable institutions (usually clerical in their origins), while the term impropriated is used of tithes taken over by laymen for individual benefit.
10. Grove, Henry, Alienated Tithes (1896) p. 2,Google Scholar estimated that, in 1836, on the basis of the Report of the Ecclesiastical Revenue Commissioners, the tithes of 4,662 parishes were wholly or partly alienated and that lay individuals held 2,552 of these, bishops 355 and the rest belonged to various corporations of which colleges and hospitals owned 281.
11. As Evans, Eric J. points out, The Contentious Tithe: the Tithe Problem and British Agriculture, 1750–1850 (1976) p. 17,Google Scholar there were examples of tithes being claimed as lay property before the Reformation.
12. Another Oxford college which owned tithes in Northumberland was Balliol which owned the rectory of Benton to the east of Newcastle.
13. The Rectory is an early eighteenth-century red brick house. Nothing is left of the vicarage which stood next door to it in the eighteenth century for it was replaced by the 1860s vicarage, now a residential home. In its garden stands the remains of a tower house, the residence of earlier incumbents.
14. Tate, W.E., The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (1960).Google Scholar
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18. History of the University of Oxford, Volume 1, 1984, ed. Catto, J. I., chapter 8.Google Scholar
19. During the first half of the fourteenth century Merton usually leased the tithes to some wealthy man in each township but later it tended to lease either half or all of the tithes to one person, sometimes a powerful man who could protect the college's interests as with the lease to the Earl of Northumberland in 1394. During the second half of the fifteenth century, they were usually leased to the vicars. From the sixteenth century the leasing seems to have been very much a business transaction with the leases going to Northumberland farmers or businessmen and then often to Londoners, though the lease to the Earl of Essex in 1597 was perhaps an exception to this. History of Northumberland, Volume II, by Bateson, Edward (1895), 439–41.Google Scholar
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21. Pitt put an end to the system for crown lands and the Ecclesiastical Commission sought, in the 1830s, to end it for church lands.
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23. Ibid., p. 284.
24. Phillips, Maberley, ‘The Old Bank’, Archaeologia Aeliana, XVI (1894),Google Scholar argues that £30,000 was raised by Carr to pay the Hanoverian Army in Scotland. A recent article by Bamham, John, ‘A Very Great Public Convenience: the Origins of Banking in County Durham’, Durham County Local History Society Bulletin, 52 (1994),Google Scholar argues that it is more likely the money went to support the Royal Bank of Scotland which was experiencing a crisis of confidence.
25. Collegii Mertonensis Registrum 1731–1822 (CMR), Merton College Oxford, Michaelmas 1733. I am most grateful to the Librarian of Merton College who allowed me to consult the register.
26. She refers to having made £90 from the Ponteland tithes in 1744. Copy of letter dated 21 Sept. 1747 (addressee unknown). Carr-Ellison Papers.
27. There was no legal reason why women should not control tithes. Grove, Henry, Alienated Tithes, pp. cxciii–cxciv,Google Scholar comments, in horror, that by pre–Reformation appropriations, ‘Knights, Lay Brothers, and very often women became Rectors of Parish Churches!’.
28. Carr, R. E., Family of Carr (1893) p. 81.Google Scholar Such purchases were not uncommon and Dunbabin comments that ‘College books often record the prices paid for such sales – somewhat wistfully, since they were so much in excess of any college receipts from fines.’ Dunbabin, , ‘College Estates’, pp. 278 ff.Google Scholar
29. Rowe, , ‘The Culleys’, pp. 172–3.Google Scholar
30. Warden of Merton College to John Carr, 10 November 1810 and 3 August 1811. Carr-Ellison Papers, Northumberland County Record Office 855, Box 3.
31. Fines paid: 1733-£274; 1738-£274; 1748-£431.15s.0d.; 1755-£1,000; 1762-£1,000; 1769-£1,000; 1776-£1,000; 1783-£1,000; 1790-£1,200; 1797-£1,200; 1804-£1,440; 1812-£6,816. 19s.Od.; 1818-£8,000.
32. CMR, 1733 and 1748.
33. Ibid, 22, Nov., 1755.
34. Financial efficiency may not have been the main motive in this development as a major row was going on at the time between the dictatorial Warden Wyntle and the bursar and fellows. Wyntle ascribed the decision to use bankers to a desire to exclude him from college business. See Dunbabin, , ‘College Estates’, p. 285n.Google Scholar
35. Doolittle, I.G., ‘College Administration’ in The History of the University of Oxford, Volume V, The Eighteenth Century, eds. Sutherland, L.S. and Mitchell, L.G. (1986), pp. 237–8.Google Scholar
36. CMR, 14 August, 1774.
37. Ibid, 2 September, 1769.
38. Ibid, Michaelmas, 1776.
39. Ibid, Michaelmas, 1790.
40. Dunbabin, , ‘College Estates’, p. 277.Google Scholar
41. Charles Grey to Ralph Carr, 29 December 1783. Carr-Ellison Papers, Box 3.
42. Horn, Pamela, The Rural World 1780–1850 (1980), p. 154,Google Scholar quotes the instance of a Dorset vicar: ‘The vicar could be seen gazing over gates and peering into the dusty recesses of barns to discover the hidden sacks of apples or the pound bag of clover seed.’
43. See Tate, W.E., The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (1960).Google Scholar It wasn't always the case that lesser tithes were the privilege of vicars. At Simonburn in Northumberland, the largest parish in England, the rector reigned over a number of curates and zealously held on to all tithes, even to the extent of taking the principal landowner in his parish, Sir Lancelot Allgood, to the bishop's court in 1779 to establish rights to tithe honey from him. Evans, , Contentious Tithe, p. 43.Google Scholar
44. Provisional Agreement for the Commutation of Tithes in the Township of Ponteland, 17 April 1841. Northumberland Record Office. Vicarial tithes had more often than rectorial become subject to such moduses, agreements to pay an agreed fixed sum in lieu of a tithe. As moduses were small and had usually been drawn up before the seventeenth century, tithes taken in this form declined in relative value as agricultural prices rose and rectorial incomes tended to rise faster than vicarial'. This happened at both Embleton and Ponteland.
45. CMR, 3 June 1773.
46. Commutation of Tithes Agreement for Ponteland, confirmed by the Tithe Commissioners, 17 April, 1841. NRO.
47. Carr, R.E., Family of Carr, p. 82.Google Scholar
48. Caroline Twistleton, unpublished ‘Family Memoirs’ in the possession of Sir Ralph Carr-Ellison.
49. This confirms the view of Evans, Eric J. expressed in The Contentious Tithe (1976)Google Scholar that collection in kind remained quite common and was not confined to the North West, parts of the South and areas of East Anglia as Lord Ernie claimed in English Farming Past and Present (6th ed. 1961). Kain, Roger J.P. and Prince, Hugh C., The Tithe Surveys of England and Wales (1985) p. 12,Google Scholar also concur that, although the heartlands of collection in kind were the South East and the North West, Northumberland was among the counties which retained ‘more than their share of tithes in kind’.
50. Family of Carr, p. 83.
51. John Carr to his brother, Ralph Carr, March (day unspecified) and 23 March 1807, Carr-Ellison Papers Box 4.
52. CMR, Michaelmas 1797.
53. National corn prices are taken from Chambers, J.D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution 1750–1880 (1966).Google Scholar
54. CMR, Michaelmas 1804.
55. Family of Carr, pp. 85–6.
56. Family of Carr, p. 84. The difficult renewal referred to by the Hankeys was probably that of 1755 when the fine was more than doubled and set at £1,000. MCR, Michaelmas 1755.
57. J. Oglander to Ralph Carr, 27 December 1818, Carr-Ellison Papers, Box 6.
58. CMR, 6 June, 1822.
59. Ralph Carr's Will 1805, Carr-Ellison Papers, NRO, ZCE, Jan 1 1805.
60. As we cannot accurately determine Carr's costs of collection, his profits cannot be exactly calculated but it is unlikely that they were less than £25,000 over the 38 years allowing for his purchase price and fines and rent. To this must be added the price the lease would have commanded if he had chosen to sell it, which would have been worth more than the £18,000 value he put on it.
61. Family of Carr, p. 74.
62. Ralph Carr to his son, Ralph Carr, 30 April 1788, Carr-Ellison Papers.
63. See Purdue, A. W., ‘John and Harriet Carr: A Brother and Sister from the North-East on the Grand Tour’, Northern History, XXX (1994).Google Scholar
64. Carr-Ellison Papers, 3 August 1811. 855, Box 3.
65. In 1811 Brasenose College increased its fines to just over one and three-quarter year's annual value. Dunbabin, ‘College Estates’, p. 278.
66. CMR, 30 Oct. 1811.
67. John Carr had corresponded with John Dinnings about the value and possible purchase of land in North Northumberland. J. Dinnings to J. Carr, 12 Sept 1802 and 21 Dec. 1802, Carr-Ellison Papers, Box 4.
68. CMR, 13 Nov 1811.
69. Ibid, 22 November 1811.
70. Ibid, 6 December 1811.
71. Ibid, 11 December 1811.
72. Ibid, 13 December 1811.
73. Ibid, 1 August 1817.
74. J. Oglander to R. Carr, 14 August 1818, Carr-Ellison Papers Box 6.
75. Ibid, 20 November 1818.
76. The Oxford University Commission, known as the ‘Jeune’ Commission after Francis Jeune, Master of Pembroke College, heard evidence from Merton that the college was ending several of the beneficial leases; many colleges did not run out such leases for another quarter of a century. Parliamentary Papers, 1852, xxii, 195–6. Where tithes were leased to incumbents, they were sometimes leased at less than their true value as a way of augmenting the value of benefices, a practice not uncommon in the second half of the nineteenth century.
77. Commutation of Tithes Agreement for Ponteland Township, 17, April, 1841 and for Kirkley Township, 16 June, 1840.
78. Caroline Twistleton reckoned the living to be worth around £520 in 1866, ‘Family Memoirs’, p. 96.
79. Embleton Township Tithe Agreement, confirmed by the Commissioners, 21, November 1839 and Craster Township Tithe Agreement confirmed 7, May, 1841. NRO.
80. Twistleton, Caroline, ‘Family Memoirs’, p. 96Google Scholar
81. Oxford University Commission, Parliamentary Papers, xxii, 195–6.Google Scholar
82. Hughes, Edward, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century, The North East 1700–1750 (1952) p. 333 and p. 336.Google Scholar
83. Family of Carr, p. 82.
84. G. Tate to Ralph Carr, 12 July 1854, Carr-Ellison Papers, Box 6.
85. Tompson, Richard, The Charity Commission in the Age of Reform (1979) p. 225.Google Scholar
86. As we have seen Ralph Carr had on occasions both collected in kind and sub-let the Embleton tithes. Whether the college knew of this is uncertain. Colleges often knew that their property was being sub-let but as college muniments were concerned with transactions between college and leaseholder they say little about sub-letting. In one instance (p. 18) Carr sublet the tithes of one township for a seven year term to a local landowner for a rent of £75 and in another (p. 21) he sub-let for a single year to a farmer prepared to collect in kind.
87. Evans has shown however that in a number of cases tithe income was greater after the awards than previously because of assistant commissioners' interpretations of law and practice. Tithes. Maps, Apportionments and the 1836 Act, p. 24.
88. Best, G.F.A., Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne's Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commission and the Church of England (1964) p. 470.Google Scholar