The Tithing of Turnips – a Hampshire Village in the Westminster Spotlight
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The Tithing of Turnips – a Hampshire village in the Westminster spotlight. Michael Blakstad Contents 2 Introduction 3 Previous History of Tithes in East Meon 6 Land Ownership and Tithe Appropriation 8 A Church in Decline 10 The Reverend Thomas Cooke Kemo=p 11 A Farming Community 16 The National Stage 18 Conclusion 19 Appendix 1. Sale of South Farm by Stephen Fox to William Hearst Appendix 2. Lease registers of Bishops of Winchester 1. Richard Eyles 1800 2. John Christmas 1800 3. Thomas Bonham 1825 4. Samuel George Pechell 1828 22 Appendix 3.Swing Riots, 1830. 1. Letters to John Bonham Carter 2. Cobbett’s Poor Man’s Friend & Cottage Economy 24 Appendix 4. Kemp v Welch Consistory Court 25 Appendix 5. Tithe Apportionments 1. East Meon 1851 Introduction, complete text 2. Froxfield 1841 Extracts 3. Steep 1851 Extracts 31 Appendix 6 Spreadsheet notes 32 Appendix 7 Bibliography Tables A East Meon and associated tithings, Religious Census 1851 B 1841 CEB East Meon Occupations, sectors C 1841 CEB Occupational sectors D 1851 CEB and TA combined. Farmers, land, rent and tithes. Excel spreadsheet E. FISKs of owners of land, taken from D. Access database F 1851/2 TAs and 1851 CEB: Locations, owners, tithed acres and occupations G Landowners listed in TA intro, as owning tithes on part or all of their estates. H Tithes apportioned to Reverend Kemp in 1851/2 1 Fig 1. The Hansard report on the Act for the Tithing of Turnips Severed from the Ground, passed in August 1835, reversing the decision of the Court of Exchequer two years earlier. Introduction What part did the vicar of East Meon play in the passing of the 1836 Tithe Commutation Act? A year before, an Act for the Tithing of Turnips had rejected a demand by the Reverend Thomas Cooke Kemp for a 20% increase in the tithes paid by farmers, claiming that turnips grubbed up for feeding livestock should be included. At a time when agricultural communities were economically depressed, and when the Anglican church was in decline, the owner of Bereleigh estate, Captain Samuel G. Pechell RN, had resisted the claim, and Kemp had successfully sued him in the Court of Exchequer. Members of East Meon History Group [EMHG] have studied the history of tithes through the prism of this Hampshire parish1. Seventeenth century Manorial Rolls and Indentures show the appropriation by secular landowners of rectorial tithes following the Restoration, while court records and Hansard have helped reconstruct the political tussles of the early nineteenth. Data from the 1851 Census Enumerator Books [CEBs] with East Meon’s Tithe Apportionments [TAs] have been combined to reveal who received tithes, how much farmers paid and, and the vicar’s income from tithes. We conclude that the Reverend Kemp’s demands for extra tithes made a small but timely contribution to the passage of the controversial 1836 Tithe Commutation Act. 1 In 2016, EMHG has emBarked on a project to research the history of Agriculture in the parish. ContriButions made By memBers are acknowledged in footnotes. 2 Previous history of tithes in East Meon To understand the reputation of tithes in 19th century East Meon, we need to step back a thousand years. East Meon had probably been a Minster in Saxon times and then a suBstantial Hundred including the tithings of Steep, Froxfield, Langrish, Ramsdean, Oxenbourne, Bordean, Riplington and Coomb2. Domesday records ‘Mene Hundred’ Belonging to Archbishop Stigand, then Bishop of both Canterbury and Winchester; and for a thousand years the Bishops of Winchester were Lords of the 3 Manors and rectors of the parish . 1 Fig 2. All Saints Church, East Meon, From the 11th century it consisted of mainly built in the 11th century, two manors, ‘East Meon’ of about with 13th century additions 20,000 acres and ‘East Meon Ecclesia’, 750 acres, entirely surrounded by the larger manor. The Winchester Pipe Rolls for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries record the rent paid and the produce of land farmed by tenants, and also of land farmed ‘in demesne’4. The Bishops also received the ‘greater tithes’, a tenth of all corn, barley and wheat grown by tenants, of livestock and of tradesmen’s earnings. Both manorial produce and greater tithes Fig 3 The 17th century barn at The Court House, were deposited in the barn in the which probably replaced an earlier barn for the grounds of The Court House 5. The collection of crops harvested for the manor, or greater tithes, or both, in which case, they would present barn (left) was built in the have been kept strictly separate. seventeenth century. Edward Roberts, architectural historian, says it could have been a manorial or 2 Yorke, Barbara, Wessex in the Early Middle Ages. Leicester University Press 1995. P183 A map, taken from Minsters and Parish Churches, ed J.Blair, shows three minster churches in this area, Titchfield, Bishop’s Waltham and East Meon. Other archaeologists Question their conclusions. 3 Hampshire Domesday Book, pp II & VII. 4 Page, Mark Ed the Pipe Roll of the Bishopric of Winchester, 1301 – 2 & 1409 – 10 Hampshire Record Series vols 14 & 16. 5 The present Barn (Fig 1) was Built in the seventeenth century. Edward Roberts, architectural historian, says it and its predecessor might have Been a manorial or a tithe Barn, or Both, in which case it would have Been clearly divided. 3 great tithe barn, or both. The vicar subsisted on one-tenth of ceremonies performed for parishioners throughout the parish6. His benefice might also have included a small stipend. Throughout the Middle Ages, monasteries and secular landowners appropriated many benefices, followed By the Dissolution of the Monasteries when ‘all their landed assets and appropriated churches passed to the crown and when almost half the parishes in this land passed to the laity’7. The diocese of Winchester, however, remained intact until the seventeenth century, when the whole system of tithing came under fire. Fig 4. Exterior of The Court Hall, built by Bishop Fig 5. Interior of The Court Hall, The William of Wykeham 1392 – 95. ‘The best preserved of Bishop’s reeve held assizes here, and the Bishops’ Palaces in Hampshire’ (Pevsner). administered the Bishop’s holdings in the Hundred of East Meon. In 1618, the polymath John Seldon had published his History of Tithes in which he highlighted the anachronism that tithes were subject to canon law, despite the number of lay appropriators the book was withdrawn but the debate had been kindled8. In 1640, Parliament acted against ecclesiastical courts and in 1641 it approved the second reading of a bill for ‘the utter abolishing and taking away of all archbishops, bishops….9’ In 1645 An Indictment of Tithes hoped that ‘it will now appear no more strange to abolish tithes…. than it hath been to abolish episcopacy, prelacy and common prayer’10. First during the Rump (1649 – 1653), and then Barebone’s (1653) Parliaments, debates raged between established churchmen who believed tithes should be maintained, moderates, led by John Owen, who proposed reform of tithes, and` radicals, led By John Canne, who demanded abolition: only political manoeuvres and knife-edge votes prevented their total abolition11. Owen’s committee on tithes did pass a scheme ‘for the appointment of commissioners …. to eject ignorant and scandalous clergymen’: 2,425 benefices were sequestered and their vicars replaced with more Puritan 6 Pounds , N.J.G. A History of the English Parish CamBridge University Press 2000 p53. Also, p64: 7 Pounds ibid p60 8 Seldon, John History of Tithes, 1618. New York facsimile edition 1969 9 McCall Fiona, Baal’s Priests Ashgate 2013, p5. Michael R Watts The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1978 p77 10 … by Divers Citizens of London before the Lord Mayor 1645, quoted By James , Margaret ‘The political importance of the Tithes Controversy in the English Revolution, 1640 – 1660’ History, 1941 p7. Wiley Online Library 11 James ibid p10, Watts, ibid p148 4 clergy12. East Meon’s vicar, John Shrigley, was lucky to escape. In March 1644, the Parliamentary Army had encamped in the parish; the more zealous of its members stripped the church and Court House of any ‘idolatry’ which had survived previous purges13. After three days, 12,000 men marched through the village on their way to the battle of Cheriton. Their departure must have been a relief to Shrigley who had Been appointed two years earlier by the Bishop of Winchester, Walter Curle, a Royalist and a fervent supporter of Archbishop Laud14. Shrigley was lucky to escape the ‘fines, imprisonment and sequestration’ which befell many clergy still using the prayer book rights15. (Perhaps he was among the group described by the Puritan Richard Baxter, who wrote: ‘when Parliament purged the ministry, they cast out the grosser sort of insufficient and scandalous ones, and gross drunkards and such like; and some few civil men that had resisted in the wars against the Parliament, or set up bowing to altars, and such innovations: but they had left in near one half the ministers, that were not good enough to do much service, nor bad enough to be cast out as utterly intolerable: these were a company of poor weak preachers, that had no great skill in divinity, nor zeal for godliness; But prreached weakly that which is true and lived in no gross notorious sin: these men were not cast out, but yet their people greatly needed help; for their dark sleepy preaching did but little good’)16. Despite the fact that its vicar escaped sequestration, East Meon would have been exposed to dissenting preachers, although there is no documentary evidence: the second oldest Friends’ Meeting House in the world was Built in the nearby town of Alton, and is still in use.