The impact of economic and demographic change on the Cornish moorland community of West Draynes between 1793 and 1851
Dissertation submitted for the degree of Master of Science in Local History
Gary Crossley, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
September 2011
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The impact of economic and demographic change on the Cornish moorland community of West Draynes between 1793 and 1851
Dissertation submitted for the degree of Master of Science in Local History
Gary Crossley, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
September 2011
ABSTRACT
The remote Manor of West Draynes on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall experienced fundamental change between 1793 and 1851 and provides a good case study of how Cornish rural society responded to the challenges it faced during this period. The population of the manor more than doubled and the structure of society changed from one dominated by small farmers and cottagers to one where landless labourers were in the majority. In a move that was mirrored across Cornwall, the absentee landowner fundamentally changed tenancy arrangements, removing virtually all of the traditional three‐life leases that had provided substantial security of tenure to generations of tenants. These were replaced by 14‐year rack‐rental arrangements which, combined with poor farming economics after 1814, led to a greater turnover of tenants.
Mining speculation and moorland enclosure added to the instability. Migration ‐ both inwards and outwards ‐ increasingly affected the manor and by 1851 there were miners from west Cornwall living in West Draynes while former inhabitants of the district could be found in Australia, New Zealand,
Canada and the United States. Instability reached a peak in the ‘hungry forties’ when poverty and crop failure led to famine conditions. However, two interdependent factors gave the community a resilience and solidity in the face of this change. First, extraordinary levels of kinship links provided strong internal support networks and second, from the 1820s Bible Christianity began to dominate religious life in the district.
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The denomination also provided a political focus for the community, and its leaders ‐ mainly drawn from the small yeomen farmers and craftsmen ‐ increasingly clashed with the Established Church and larger landowning interests. They opposed the formation of a workhouse at Liskeard and supported labourers in their demands for better pay in the 1830s. The hinterland of the Bible
Christian chapel at Trenant came to define a community where the loss of economic strength was mirrored by a growth in spiritual and political independence which drove an agenda for change in the second half of the nineteenth century. These themes are explored though a range of evidence including manorial and parish records, nonconformist registers, personal correspondence, contemporary newspaper reports and census material. Record linkage and family reconstitution are key methods used to analyse change.
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Chapter 2. West Draynes and surrounding area in 1793 8 2.1 The landowners 8
2.2 The tenants 11
2.3 Life in West Draynes in 1793 17
Chapter 3. Sowing the seeds of change – the ending of three‐life leases and farm rationalisation 21
3.1 Changes to tenancies during French Wars 21
3.2 Post‐war decline 26 3.3 Moorland tenancy agreements 27
3.4 Occupation patterns in 1844 compared with 1793 28
Chapter 4. Demographic pressures and occupational changes 30 4.1 The factors behind population growth 30
4.2 The influence of moorland enclosure on population growth and structure 34
4.3 The impact of mining on occupational and household structure in the 1840s 37 Chapter 5. The significance of kinship and religious change 40
5.1 The importance of kinship 40
5.2 The growth of Bible Christianity 44 Chapter 6. The impact of economic and demographic pressures on the community 50
6.1 Unrest in the 1820s and 1830s 50
6.2 The Hungry Forties 56 Chapter 7. Conclusions 64
Bibliography 66
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List of abbreviations used
AD ‐ Daniel family papers, Trekieve and Redgate, St Cleer
AP ‐ Archdeaconry of Cornwall, Probate Court
BK ‐ Records of Bond, Peace, Eliot and Knape solicitors
BL ‐ British Library
BW ‐ Records of Bewes and Anstis families of Duloe and St Neot
CRO ‐ Cornwall Record Office
CSHER ‐ Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Record
CY ‐ Records of Coryton family of Pentillie, Pillaton
CN ‐ Records of Carlyon family of Tregrehan, St Blazey
NA ‐ National Archives
QS ‐ Quarter Sessions order books
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Chapter 1. Introduction
When tenant farmer John Doney appeared before Trecan Gate magistrates in September 1847 he was in a desperate situation. A series of disastrous harvests across Cornwall had culminated in the failure of the potato crop, resulting in famine conditions in many districts including Bodmin Moor parishes.1 During the previous 12 months scarcity of corn had seen prices double, with wheat reaching 13s 6d per bushel at Liskeard market in May 1847. The consequences led to widespread rioting across Cornwall.2 However, the rocketing cereal prices were of little use to small farmers whose crop yields were too low to provide a big enough surplus to pay the rent.
Doney had been struggling to pay the £18 a year rent on his 15‐acre farm for three years and was
£12 19s behind with his payments in the summer of 1847.3 Facing the prospect of losing his farm if he could not pay the rent due at Michaelmas, he stole 27 sheaves and 16 gallons of oats on 27
August 1847 from his neighbour William Henwood.4 In court his defence was that it was the habit of neighbouring farmers to borrow from and lend to each other, but this did not convince the jury and he was found guilty. Doney was sentenced to one year’s hard labour despite receiving a character reference from Peter Gerry, a jury member and prominent St Neot nonconformist.5
Doney was the only tenant of the manor to be convicted of theft during the period of food shortages, although there were similar isolated cases across the district. At the many disturbances across Cornwall it was more common for a classic moral economy to prevail with grain confiscated from sellers and sold to those in need at what was considered to be a fair price. Money realised was
1 B. Deacon, ‘Proto‐industrialization and potatoes: a revised narrative for nineteenth century Cornwall’, in P. Payton (ed.) Cornish Studies, Vol. 5 (1997) pp. 60‐84
2 J. Rowe, Cornwall in the age of the Industrial Revolution (1993 edn.) [hereafter, Rowe, Cornwall] p.163
3 CRO MS. CY/3879: Rentals, 1827‐1849
4 CRO MS. QS/1/14/314: Sessions held at Bodmin, 19 Oct 1847
5 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 3 September 1847
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then usually paid to the owner. Philip Payton has argued that this disastrous period in Cornish history has received too little attention, remaining ‘historiographically invisible’ compared with the coverage given to the famines in Ireland and Scotland.6 This dissertation will explore the factors which led up to the troubles of the 1840s and how the small moorland community of West Draynes and its absentee landlord dealt with the issues.
Figure 1. The Manor of West Draynes on a modern map of Bodmin Moor (approximate boundary of the main part of the manor, which covered 95% of its 1,200 acres, is marked in red).
The beginning of the period heralded a few years of prosperity for many in the district because of rising prices caused by the French Wars. However, the prosperity was short‐lived as a combination of demographic change, falling farmgate prices and the scrapping of most customary tenancy arrangements resulted in sharply falling standards of living for most inhabitants of the manor. It also led to a period of increasingly bitter conflict with authority. The willingness and ability of the people of West Draynes and surrounding area to stand up to authority was influenced by a number of
6 P. Payton, Cornwall, A History (2004) p.214
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factors: most of the principal landowners were absentee, leaving small occupiers to dominate the local political economy; they were linked by extraordinarily strong kinship networks which reinforced the sense of an independent community; and they drew comfort and a renewed sense of independence from the Bible Christian Connexion, which became the dominant religious denomination in the district from the 1820s.
The parishes of St Neot and St Cleer in which the manor sat are large moorland communities, covering 14,000 and almost 10,000 acres respectively. Most of the generally small farms had grazing rights on the moors or commons, which made up around two‐thirds of the land area. In West
Draynes the farmers and cottagers had turbary and grazing rights on the 250 acres of moorland on
Draynes Common. Both parishes had small settlements, or churchtowns, centred round their respective parish churches. However, in common with most of Cornwall the majority of the population lived in hamlets and isolated farms spread across the southern third of the parishes which had mostly been enclosed during the medieval period. The moors were largely uninhabited, although tinning was undertaken in some of the deposits close to the surface.
The boundary between the moor and enclosed land was no accident as it closely followed the geological division between the granite, with its thin and acidic soils known as growan, and loams over slate and shale on the killas to the south. As if to emphasise its marginal nature, West Draynes was one of only three manors on Bodmin Moor which had their centres on the granite.7 Most of the small population of West Draynes lived in two hamlet settlements: the hamlet of Draynes had six properties in 1793 and Trenant had four. There were four other isolated settlements of Pellagenna,
Wortha, Westerlake and Killham. Only Pellagenna and a cottage to the south of Treverbyn Bridge were in St Cleer and most of the manor’s land was in a single block in the parish of St Neot. There was no church or inn within the manor, or even within two miles of it.
7 N. Johnson and P. Rose, Bodmin Moor, An Archaeological Survey. Vol. 1: The Human Landscape to c1800 (1994) [hereafter, Johnson, Bodmin Moor], p.77
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Figure 2. View south‐eastwards across the southern part of the Manor of West Draynes. In 1793 around one‐third of the fields would have grown cereal crops.
The gently undulating landscape was divided by the steep wooded valley slopes of the River Fowey.
Most of the arable and pasture fields surrounding the settlements in the far south of the manor were small, averaging about two acres in size, with irregular boundaries made of thick stone and earth Cornish hedges. The moors made up at least two‐thirds of the manor’s land area, rising to just over 1,100 feet at Brown Gelly, the highest point in the parish of St Neot. In common with many
Bodmin Moor manors it was long and narrow: more than three miles north to south but rarely more than a mile wide. There were five moors: Brown Gelly in the far north; Diddylake; Redhill Downs;
New Closes; and Draynes Common.
It was a farmscape largely shaped in the early medieval period, but there is evidence from dozens of sites within the manor of earlier landscape influences. The moors had been subject to waves of occupation and habitation – of both farming and mining – going back to prehistoric times and the
Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Register has recorded 71 different sites of historical
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importance within the Manor of West Draynes.8 There is even a suggestion – based on eighteenth‐ century field and property names at Trenant ‐ that the manor had a church long before the Bible
Christians built Trenant Chapel in 1826, although an archaeological search failed to find any remains.
Place names provide evidence that occupation in the manor spread northwards during the early medieval period. Both Draynes and Trenant in the south are Cornish language names, while
Westerlake and Wortha higher up on the moorland fringe are later and English in origin.9
The volume and quality of manorial and parish records available for West Draynes enable the impact of change to be studied at a micro level. I will argue that the loss of customary leases transferred wealth from the manor’s occupants to its owners in a fundamental shift in the balance of economic power. However, strong kinship links reinforced by the rapid spread of Bible Christianity among the tenant farmers and cottagers enabled the remote moorland society to develop a strong religious and social identity.
Much of the information used in this dissertation comes from the manorial records kept by the owners and now deposited with the Cornwall Record Office. Further evidence of change is drawn from the surrounding area and key sources used include the parish records for both St Neot and St
Cleer, in which the manor was situated, Bible Christian registers, and census material from 1801 to
1851 for the same parishes. In addition, two ownership and occupation surveys provide further context: a survey of St Neot in 1793 detailing owners, occupiers, field names and sizes and rental values for farms, cottages and moors; and the tithe apportionment for St Neot in 1844 which collected similar information towards the end of the period.10
8 CSHER viewed online at: www.heritagegateway.org.uk
9 Johnson, Bodmin Moor, pp.79‐80
10 CRO MS. BK/442: Survey, St Neot Parish by David Palmer of Launceston, April 1793 [hereafter, Palmer, 1793 survey]; NA MS. IR 29/6/143: Tithe Commissioners for England and Wales, Apportionment of the rent charge in lieu of tithes in the parish of St Neot [hereafter, St Neot Tithe Apportionment], (1844)
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Figure 3. The Manor of West Draynes in 1793 showing locations of settlements and moors, together with properties bordering the manor listed in Palmer (Map drawn using Edina Digimap technology at http://edina.ac.uk/digimap, © University of Edinburgh. Heights are in metres).
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One of the cornerstones of the dissertation is an analysis of kinship patterns using techniques of family reconstitution developed by Wrightson and Levine in their study of Terling in Essex and subsequently by Reay in his study of the Blean area of Kent.11 This involved building a database of almost 100 families from West Draynes and the surrounding area listed in the 1841 and 1851 censuses, almost half of which featured in both censuses. Where possible the parents’ and grandparents’ families of household heads and their partners were also reconstituted using census returns, parish registers, Bible Christian records, manorial rental agreements and a small number of wills. Information was gathered over three generations on dates of baptisms and marriages, ages at marriage and completed family sizes and was recorded using the same methodology as the
Cambridge Group.12 This enabled a picture of the complex web of relationships between families to be constructed and revealed some surprising results compared with studies of kinship in England and France.
11 K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village (1995 edn.) [hereafter, Wrightson, Terling]; B. Reay, Microhistories: demography, society and culture in rural England, 1800‐1930 (1996) [hereafter, Reay, Microhistories]
12 E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen, R. S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitution 1590‐1837 (1997) [hereafter, Wrigley, Population history], pp. 563‐568
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Chapter 2. West Draynes and surrounding area in 1793
2.1 The landowners
When George Worgan conducted his survey of the state of Cornish farming for the Board of
Agriculture in 1808 he complained that property in Cornwall was ‘very much divided, subdivided and vexatiously intermixed; consequently the proprietors of land are numerous. The size of estates varies greatly, perhaps from 20 acres to 500 acres, very few exceeding £500 per annum’.13 In 1793
West Draynes was a good example of a small Cornish estate and Palmer’s survey valued it at £200 a year by gross rental value, although the rental income from the manor for the year came to less than
£20 because of the nature of tenancies, which were predominantly three‐life leases.14 West Draynes was more unusual, however, in that most of the land remained in a single block and continued to operate along traditional manorial lines for longer than many other manors in Cornwall.
The manor’s farms were relatively small by rental value – the biggest was Higher Trenant, its 52 acres of enclosed land valued at £29 3s a year by Palmer. They were also subject to a confusing mixture of tenancy arrangements. Figure 4 shows a rental for the manor from 1793 which reveals how the 13 tenants of the manor were distributed among the 17 holdings or tenements and various tenancy arrangements.15 The manor’s owner, Mary Tillie lived 20 miles away at Pentillie Castle on the banks of the river Tamar and an agent managed her various land holdings in Cornwall.16 In turn the agent dealt with a reeve who was appointed each year from among the tenants of West Draynes to keep track of local matters, and a manor court was held annually at Liskeard. Rents were paid at
Michaelmas and farm leases usually began at Lady Day.
13 G. Worgan, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Cornwall, Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (1811) [hereafter, Worgan, General View] p.17
14 Palmer, 1793 survey; CRO MS. CY/3876: Rentals, high and conventionary rents, various parishes, 1792‐1794
15 CRO MS. CY/3876: Rentals, high and conventionary rents, 1792‐1794
16 There were three owners of West Draynes between 1793 and 1851: Mary Tillie up to 1809, John Tillie Coryton from 1809 to 1843 and Augustus Coryton from 1843. All three lived at Pentillie Castle. 8
Figure 4. Manor of West Draynes rent roll for 1793, showing tenements and tenants by the three main rent types: three‐life leases, high rents and rack rents. In hand properties are at the bottom.17
Mary Tillie was one of 38 owners of enclosed farmland in St Neot in 1793 (Figure 5). Nine people owned 70% of this land in the parish and between them they also controlled a substantial proportion of the moors. One additional landowner, the Duke of Bedford, owned large tracts of unoccupied moorland in the far north of the parish. Of the biggest owners only John Rundle and St
Neot’s vicar Richard Gerveys Grylls were resident in the parish, although both only resided part‐time with the former also having property in Somerset and the latter a family home in Helston. John
17 CRO MS. CY/3876: Rentals, high and conventionary rents, various parishes, 1792‐1794
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Rundle was also the biggest owner‐occupier, although he only farmed about half the land he owned.
A total of 11 owner‐occupiers had less than 10% of the land.18 They included three owner‐occupiers in West Draynes, who paid annual high rents to the manor court. The death of reeve, Nicholas Gedye led to Lower Trenant becoming tenanted from 1794, leaving just two small owner‐occupiers in
Draynes.19
Figure 5. Ownership of enclosed land in St Neot in 1793 by rental value (Source: Palmer, 1793)
Much of the land bordering the manor was owned by two other absentee owners. George Hunt from Lanhydrock near Bodmin, one of Cornwall’s biggest landowners with in excess of 30,000 acres, owned the Manor of Carburrow which included Carpuan and Bowden adjacent to West Draynes, together with large areas of moorland close to Brown Gelly.20 Sir John Morshead, who was the
18 This excludes four landowners who temporarily had farms in hand.
19 CRO MS. CY/3864: Rentals, 1796‐1802;
20 CRO MS. FS/2/32/4: Lanhydrock Estate Atlas, Volume VI, 1696
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biggest landowner in St Neot, had farms bordering the south‐western and eastern sides of the manor at Treverbyn and East Draynes.
2.2 The tenants
If ownership at manorial and parish level was confusing, occupation was doubly so among the tenants. The tenants listed as paying high rents in figure 4 were owners in all but name, while those paying conventionary rents were also regarded as owners in the local community and for Land Tax purposes. In 1793 only Thomas Harris, who paid an annual rack rent on Hilltown Draynes, was regarded by everyone – landlord, tax collectors and himself ‐ as a tenant farmer. It is important to examine these differences in tenancies in more detail as they are critical to the way management of the manor evolved:
Conventionary or three‐life leaseholds had traditionally been the dominant form of tenancy
arrangement in Cornwall. Lessees paid a large sum up front, usually about 14 years’ rental
equivalent, and a small annual rent. Up to three lives were nominated by the lessee and the
agreement lasted for either 99 years or the life of the longest liver, whichever was the
shortest. When a life died a heriot of up to £2 10s was paid and it was customary for a new
life to be added for the equivalent of three years’ rental. These arrangements applied to
nine tenements in West Draynes in 1793. These leases had the advantage of giving security
to tenants, frequently over many generations, but in periods of rising prices were
disadvantageous to landlords. Marshall estimated that up to two‐thirds of tenancies in
Cornwall were for three lives in 1796.21
Properties charged high rents. These were nominal rents paid on properties which had in
effect transferred out of the ownership of the manor. Their origin was partly related to the
21 W. Marshall, The Rural Economy of the West of England, Vol. 1 (1796) [hereafter, Marshall, Rural Economy], p.71
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rights of free tenants, although a survey of the manor in 1648 listed only Thomas Harris as a
free tenant paying a high rent of 1s 6d a year.22 High rents were introduced on a further five
properties in 1683 when Sir James Tillie, who had recently taken control of West Draynes
from Sir John Coryton, sold them off. They included Lower Trenant and four tenements at
Draynes.23 There was no clear reason why Tillie chose to sell these tenements as, apart from
Lower Trenant, they were mixed with land in Draynes he continued to own.
Properties charged rack rents. In 1793 just one farm, Hilltown Draynes, was tenanted in this
way. Over the next 20 years this was to become the dominant form of tenancy arrangement,
not only in West Draynes but across the whole of Cornwall. Mary Tillie began a concerted
campaign from the mid‐1790s to convert the high and conventionary rented properties into
rack rented ones and had largely succeeded by 1820.
In hand properties. In 1793 all the moors were in hand, together with one farm temporarily
so because of the death of the tenant. The situation of the 500 acres of moors was more
complicated. They were all used for summering either sheep or cattle and records from the
eighteenth century onwards show a mixture of short‐term rentals by single tenants, shared
rentals among tenants and in‐hand management. Paradoxically, it was most of these moors
which were converted to three‐life leasehold arrangements before enclosure after the end
of the French Wars.
Leaseholders were the yeomen of Cornwall, described as such in many wills and other probate documents.24 Their three‐life properties were assets which could be assigned, sold and bequeathed.
22 C. Henderson, Henderson Papers, Vol 20, no. 203
23 CRO MS. CY/1085: Deed to lead to the uses of a fine, West Draynes and other lands, St Neot, 3 Apr 1684
24 Exactly what constituted a yeoman has never been clearly defined. A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (1941), p98, restricted the term to owner‐occupiers and described three‐life leaseholders as peasants or husbandmen. However, records up to the end of the eighteenth century are ambiguous and the term yeoman appears to 12
In many records they were treated as owners, for example in Land Tax returns and parish rate books, which makes it difficult to use these returns as sources for property ownership patterns in
Cornwall. For example, in the 1798 Land Tax return for St Neot, Mary Tillie was listed as owner for just the rack rented and in‐hand land, although she owned title to the leasehold farms as well.25
Unpicking the complicated structure of ownership and occupation is made easier for St Neot because a survey of every farm, field, moor and cottage was undertaken by David Palmer of
Launceston in 1793.26 For each property the owner, occupier and leaseholder were listed, together with the acreage and rental value of each piece of land. It is not clear why Palmer undertook the survey, although it coincided with the appointment of Richard Gerveys Grylls as vicar of St Neot and is probably related to tithes and/or parish rates.
Grylls and his son Henry were destined to be the vicars of St Neot throughout the period of study, both at times clashing with their parishioners while also occasionally providing a paternalistic helping hand. Table 1 summarises the occupation information from Palmer. The occupiers are broken down by rental value as this removes distortion by land type, which was huge in St Neot between the richer arable lands to the south and the more extensive moorland fringe farms further north. Marshall said that in 1796 arable land in the area was typically worth between 10s and 20s an acre, so a farm with a rental value of £25 would be equivalent to about 30 acres of average arable land.27
have more often been applied to both owner‐occupiers and three‐life leaseholders. With the loss of three‐life leases the term farmer was increasingly used instead of both husbandmen and yeomen.
25 NA MS. IR 23/9, fo.297: Land Tax redemption records, Cornwall, 1798
26 Palmer, 1793 survey
27 Marshall, Rural Economy p.82
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One important point to bear in mind is that the acre used for Palmer’s survey was the Cornish customary one, which was about 20% larger than the statutory English measure.28 It continued to be the most common form of land measurement in many parts of Cornwall until the tithe apportionments of the 1840s, although both were regularly used without it always being clear in documents which one was being referred to. Palmer identified 124 occupiers of property in St Neot with an average of 30 acres each of enclosed land. Thirty‐four of these – those with a rental value of less than £5 ‐ were described as cottagers and they typically had a large garden and sometimes an orchard or small arable field as well.29 If these cottagers are excluded from the farm size calculation then there were 90 farmers with an average farm size of 42 customary acres (50 statutory acres).
Table 1. St Neot’s occupiers in 1793 by rental value and total acreage. Excludes commons and moors. (Source: Palmer, 1793)
Rental value of Number of Total Rental % of total Total acres Average property30 occupiers Value rental value (customary) acres Cottages 34 £60 1% 20 0.5
Farms £4 ‐ <£25 50 £543 19% 776 16
Farms £25‐<£50 24 £828 30% 1,135 47
Farms £50‐<£100 12 £774 28% 1,084 90
Farms >£100 4 £592 21% 743 186
Total 124 £2,787 100% 3,758 30
28 R. Dilley, ‘The Customary Acre: An Indeterminate Measure’, in The Agricultural History Review, 23 (1975), pp. 173‐176
29 Some of the cottages were in multiple occupation and Palmer identified a total of 43 occupiers of 34 cottages. The lower number has been used here to be consistent with the way the tithe apportionment recorded occupation in 1844, which is analysed later.
30 A single farm represents the total land farmed by a single occupier, although the situation on the ground was more complex: some properties were in multiple ownership but sole occupation and these have been treated as single farms in the analysis. Palmer listed them separately by owner.
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Smaller farms worth less than £50 a year dominated the parish numerically and comprised half of the gross rental value. The biggest group were the 50 occupiers of land worth between £4 and £25, each with an average of 16 customary acres (19 statutory). Many of these were part‐time farmers, combining their own farming with crafts and trades, or by doing work for larger farmers. Typical of these was Killham Farm in West Draynes, which had a rental value of £5 18s, with successive tenants also providing carpentry services to other farms in the manor, probably due to its proximity to
Killham Woods. Some occupiers also probably combined farming with tinning but the lack of probate inventories after 1750 makes this difficult to quantify.
Figure 6. The farmhouse at the remote moorland edge farm of Wortha was in ruins at the time of Palmer’s survey in 1793 and was subject to irregular occupation afterwards.
At the other end of the scale 16 farmers held land worth half the rental value of the parish. Just four of these had farms with a rental value of more than £100 and an average of 186 customary acres each.31 A further 24 farmers occupied land worth a total of £828 and together these 40 larger farmers occupied 80% of the land by value and were of sufficient size that they would have
31 M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, (1996) pp.174‐5 points out that reliable farm holding size data was not available until 1870.
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employed most of the parish’s labourers. This is reasonably consistent with the first ‘official’ employment census in 1831 which said there were 45 farmers in St Neot employing labourers, 91 occupiers with no labourers and a total of 70 farm labourers aged 20 or over.32
It is not possible to quantify the number of farm servants in St Neot before the 1841 census, but it is likely they were more numerous than general labourers in 1793. Farm servants were a feature of farm economies dominated by small family farms, particularly in upland districts, and they were often the children of neighbouring farmers. Even as late as 1841 there were still 83 in St Neot, almost as many as there were farm labourers, although their numbers declined to 64 in 1851 and by
1891 there were just 23 left. This reduction reflected a polarisation of farms between larger ones employing more general labourers and small farms employing only family labour (see section 3.4 for changes in farm structure between 1793 and 1844).33
An analysis of manorial records and data from family reconstitution suggests there were about 15 households in the manor in 1793, made up of nine farmers, one miller and five households headed by cottagers/labourers. The population was about 70, equivalent to 8% of the total for St Neot.
West Draynes had no farmers occupying land with a rental value of more than £50 and the manor’s
11 farms varied from just three customary acres for Elizabeth Jane’s smallholding to the 52 customary acres at Higher Trenant, with an average size of just under 30 customary (36 statutory) acres.34
32 Parliamentary Papers 1833, xxvii (149): 1831 Census Abstract of Answers and Returns, Enumeration Abstract Vol. 1, p.79.
33 J. D. Chambers & G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution 1750‐1850 (1966) [hereafter, Chambers & Mingay], p.144
34 Palmer, 1793 survey, recorded that Elizabeth Jane leased another 11 customary acres at Treverbyn which she let out to Robert Keast of Higher Trenant. Wortha’s occupier was Samuel Doney who lived at Treverbyn where he occupied a second farm.
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Most of the additional labour on the manor’s family farms was provided by live‐in farm servants and the number varied according to the stage of the life‐cycle of the farmer’s family. William Henwood, who inherited part of Hawton’s Draynes in 1836, provides a later but good example.35 At the time of the 1841 census he had only recently married and, having no children of working age, he employed four male farm servants and two female indoor servants. Two of the males were the sons of neighbouring farmers.
2.3 Life in West Draynes in 1793
For most of the 15 or so families in West Draynes the annual farming cycle dominated their lives.
There was a relatively fluid relationship between households – the cottagers and smaller farmers would have provided labour or services to the larger farmers, sometimes only at peak times or for specialist jobs. The interdependence within the remote community was enhanced by extraordinarily strong kinship networks (see Chapter 5). Keast, Jane, Mallett, Davey, Doney, Gedye and Henwood had been recurring surnames in the St Neot or St Cleer registers and West Draynes manorial records for generations and they frequently married each other. It was not a completely closed community, however, and there were new arrivals: sometimes farmers and labourers moved in, mostly from neighbouring parishes, but it was the tinners and crafts people – the millers, carpenters, blacksmiths and masons – who were the most mobile.
The community was also largely self‐contained. Most food consumed locally would have come from the manor’s farms, with all grain ground at Trenant Mill as required in tenancy agreements. Cider was the drink of choice, produced from apples grown in the manor’s 14 orchards.36 Building materials were all locally sourced: wood from the deep Fowey valley at the southern end of the manor, granite from the moors and thatching straw from the arable crops. The only major import
35 CRO MS. CY/642: Release of legacies, West Draynes, St Neot, 4 Dec 1839
36 Palmer, 1793 survey
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was fertiliser: sea sand and lime brought up from the coast by pack horse. Marshall was struck by the lack of wheeled transport: ‘Twenty years ago there was not a pair of wheels in the country, at least not upon a farm; and nearly the same may be said at present. Hay, corn, straw, fuel, stones, dung, lime &c are, in the ordinary practice of the district, still carried on horseback.’37
Households relied on peat and furze for fuel, all sourced from Draynes Common and the surrounding moors. For a moorland community there was a surprisingly large cropped acreage, with around 120 arable fields covering more than 200 acres. However, the annual acreage of cereals grown was probably closer to one‐third of this because of the nature of crop rotations, which was neatly summarised by Fraser in 1794: ‘The whole is convertible, sometimes into arable and sometimes pasture. Arable is sown with wheat, barley or oats as long as it will bear any; and then grass for eight or ten years until the land is recovered and again capable of bearing corn.’38 Some fields called furze crofts, on the edges of moors were ‘only broke up once in 25 or 30 years’ while the moors themselves were ‘wholly unenclosed, consisting of marshy grounds, intermixed with rocks and mountains’.
Corn was cut with a small, back‐breaking reaping hook and the sheaves were collected together in
‘arish mows’ in fields before being stored together in a mowhay, close to the farmhouse.39 Threshing using a hand flail took place over the winter. The final corn crop was undersown with grass seed from which a hay crop would usually be taken in the first year and then the land would be grazed.
After a few years of grazing, the turf would be pared from the surface with special ploughs, often
37 Marshall, Rural Economy, p.113
38 R. Fraser, General View of the County of Cornwall, Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (1794) [hereafter, Fraser, General View] p.31
39 J. Rowe, Changing times and fortunes – A Cornish farmer’s life 1828‐1904 (1996), p.82. Arish was the Cornish word for stubble and the arish mow was a conical‐shaped collection of about 100 sheaves. The arish mows were left in the field before being transported back to the mowhay at the farmstead. The transcript of the court case of John Doney, mentioned in the introduction, confirmed that arish mows were still a feature of farming in the district in the 1840s.
18
hand‐drawn or pushed, gathered into piles, mixed with manure, left to dry and was then burnt. The process was known as beat burning and the resultant ash was then spread over the soil and seed for the next crop was then sown by hand.
Sheep and cattle were mostly small, unimproved local crosses, mainly kept to produce store stock for sale at local markets, although each farm would also keep one or two cows to produce milk, butter and cream. The latter was clotted in a traditional Cornish way by scalding the milk. All households kept at least one pig, mostly for personal consumption. Heavy Cornish ploughs were pulled by four or six oxen, worked by the ploughman at the back and a boy leading.
Figure 7. Occupations of grooms marrying in St Neot between 1756 and 1799.
The only other significant occupation in the district was mining, although it is difficult to assess how much was being undertaken in 1793. Tinning or streaming had been a significant occupation on and around Bodmin Moor for centuries, but as it was often combined with farming occupational data can only be taken as a general guide. Inventories from the early eighteenth century reveal that many yeomen were involved in tinning as a subsidiary occupation and writing in 1796 Fraser said: ‘seldom
19
do you find a man’s capital and industry solely directed to the produce of the plough’.40 Occupations of grooms were recorded in the St Neot parish register after 1755 and 12% were described as tinners
(figure 7). Labourers made up the biggest occupational group, but this presents a slightly distorted picture of parish employment as comparing this data with Palmer indicates that at least one‐third of grooms resident in St Neot and listed as labourers were farmers by 1793.41
Cornwall had been largely self‐sufficient until at least the mid‐eighteenth century, with surplus produce from east Cornwall sold in Plymouth and store stock from upland farms exported for fattening further east, often in Devon or Somerset. However, Cornwall’s rising population and growth in mining in the western districts meant that the balance of supply and demand was becoming increasingly precarious. During the French Wars, increasing demand from the navy in
Plymouth added further instability.42 When this was combined with a series of poor harvests in the late 1790s and early 1800s there was widespread disorder, including riots at Liskeard in the spring of
1801.43 Farmers were accused of profiteering at the expense of labourers but, as the next chapter will demonstrate, in West Draynes higher profits were rapidly transferred to the landowner as rent levels escalated.
40 Fraser, General View, p.64
41 CRO MS. P162/1/2: Register of marriages and banns of marriage, St Neot, 1756‐1809
42 C. Lemon, ‘Notes on the Agricultural Produce of Cornwall’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London Vol 4, No 3 (1841)
43 R. Wells, ‘The Revolt of the South‐West, 1800‐1801’, in Social History, Vol. 2, No. 6 (1977), p.722
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Chapter 3. Sowing the seeds of change – the ending of three‐life leases after 1793 and farm rationalisation
3.1 Changes to tenancies during the French Wars
Fraser and Worgan were both critical of the standards of husbandry of the yeoman farmers of
Cornwall. Worgan was particularly scathing, claiming that the ‘cultivation of leaseholders of this description….is necessarily feeble and spiritless and they live worse and work harder than any description of inhabitants in the country.’ He went on: ‘It is doubtful whether this peculiar way of leasing land is most injurious to the land, the tenant or the public.’44 These were harsh words but were they justified? There can be little doubt that the workload of a small yeoman farmer was huge, and they were perhaps sometimes slow to embrace new techniques.
However, there is also evidence to show that they were adopting new crops such as turnips and potatoes and their convertible husbandry techniques probably only lacked effective weed control. In addition, gradually rising commodity prices in the second half of the eighteenth century had provided a long period of rising prosperity and the wills of leaseholders of even moderately sized farms demonstrate no shortage of capital. For example, when Robert Keast from Higher Trenant died in 1796, his will confirmed that he had already shared out £450 between his three sons. In his will he distributed a further £20 to each of them, as well as £20 to each of his four daughters, while the lease of the farm went to his widow Mary. This does not seem like the will of someone ‘feeble and spiritless’.45
Worgan’s lengthy tirade against three‐life leases in 1808 came at a time when the granting of them was already in decline. Rowe said that rising prices at the end of the eighteenth century ‘dealt the death blow to life leases’, their relatively small annual rents and irregular heriot payments becoming
44 Worgan, General View, p.80
45 CRO MS. AP/K/981: Archdeaconry of Cornwall Probate Court, Will of Robert Keast, yeoman, of St Neot, 1796
21
increasingly unattractive to owners.46 Worgan’s main criticism of three‐life leases was that the purchase price of the lease, sometimes paid with money borrowed from the landlord, starved the farmer of capital and made him unwilling to invest in the property. In one sense he was probably right. The potential uncertainty surrounding the length of the lease, together with the irregular nature of the income to landlords, possibly did act as a disincentive to spend on capital improvements.
However, Worgan’s words have the feel of propaganda on behalf of Cornish landlords and in his report he acknowledged that his comments on leases were ‘based on information supplied by
Francis Gregor esq., of Trewarthenic’.47 Gregor was a prominent landowner in Cornwall and one of the biggest in St Neot where his main leaseholder was John Rundle, the most successful farmer in the district at the time. In reality, the main motivation for getting rid of three‐life leases was probably to increase the landlords’ share of the growing profits from farming, but it was carefully clothed in the name of farm improvement.
The reason behind the propaganda was the rise in farm prices. They had been gently increasing for many years, but they then rose sharply after 1793 and for a time leaseholders were the main beneficiaries. The total rent due for the Manor of West Draynes in 1793 was just £18 2s 11d, plus a
£2 Heriot owed for the death of a life.48 Mary Tillie was still extending conventionary leases as late as
1791, when Henry Cawrse added the life of his daughter‐in‐law Anne to the lease at Killham for
£20.49 The change in policy was abrupt and in 1800 rack rents alone brought in £220. By 1814 they were generating more than £300, before declining in the post‐war recession (see figure 8). It would
46 Rowe, Cornwall, p.216
47 Worgan, General View, p.42
48 CRO MS. CY/3876: Rentals, high and conventionary rents, various parishes, 1792‐1794
49 CRO MS. CY/2637: Reversionary lease, house called Kylliowham, West Dreynes, St Neot, 15 Oct 1791
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be the 1860s before rents climbed above £300 again but in real terms they never regained the 1814 peak.50
Figure 8. Annual rent roll for the Manor of West Draynes, 1793 – 1850.
The process of change is worth detailing. There were slightly fewer than 200 acres of enclosed land surrounding the hamlet of Draynes, made up of 90 arable fields plus a small number of meadows and orchards, distributed among nine farm holdings or tenements. Of the holdings, four were let on three‐life leases, four paid high rents and one was let at rack rent. Some holdings were also split into different parcels, adding to the confusion. It is not clear why the distribution of land was so complex, or when it happened. Rowe has suggested that intermixing of tenements, which was common in many districts of Cornwall, was perhaps a legacy of the ancient Celtic runrig system of land distribution where land was shared out so that all tenants got a fair mix of good and poor land, but it is impossible to know if this was the origin of the structure in Draynes.51
50 CRO MS. CY/3876‐3879: Rentals, high and conventionary rents, various parishes, 1792‐1849
51 Rowe, Cornwall, p.212
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Rationalisation of farms at Draynes began in 1794 with the death of reeve Nicholas Gedye, which enabled Mary Tillie to take in hand two of the three tenements he leased there. She also began negotiations to purchase three further tenements in the hamlet from Stephen Henwood, John
Henwood and Richard Trenowth, completing the acquisitions between 1794 and 1797.52 These were three of the six tenements sold by Mary Tillie’s ancestor, Sir James Tillie in 1684. This process enabled her to rationalise about two‐thirds of the land in Draynes into two farms which she let out to Robert Keast junior and Joseph Davey for £64 and £67 a year respectively.53
Figure 9. The hamlet of Draynes from the 1842 tithe map showing the patchwork of arable fields surrounding the scattered farms and cottages (to give an idea of scale field 1160 was 1.5 acres).54
52 CRO MS. CY/5914: Articles of agreement, Vosper's, Bullen's and Hawton's in village of Draynes, St Neot, 14 Oct 1793
53 CRO MS. CY/2632: Counterpart of lease, land and property, West Dreynes, St Neot, 26 Jul 1797; CRO MS. CY/2633: Counterpart of lease, land and property, West Dreynes, St Neot, 13 Aug 1799
54 CRO MS. PCNEO/6/1: Tithe Map, St Neot, 1842
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The other substantial farms let on conventionary leases were Higher Trenant and Westerlake, together with smaller tenements at Killham, Draynes, Trenant Mill and Chapel Cottage, while
Pellagenna had fallen in hand. The leaseholder of Higher Trenant was persuaded to surrender the farm in 1800 for an annuity of £40 for the remainder of the two remaining lives and the farm was taken by Jonathan Keast on a 14‐year term, also for £67 a year. The remaining leasehold tenement in Draynes, in the hands of the executors of Nicholas Gedye, fell in hand in 1818 on the death of the final life and was added to Robert Keast’s farm for an additional £14 a year.
Most leaseholds were replaced with 14‐year agreements and the landlord began to introduce leases with husbandry restrictions. In particular, lease agreements began to define permissible crop rotations, mainly to limit the number of successive corn crops grown, and stipulate minimum quantities sea sand or lime which had to be used as fertiliser.55 For example, a clause in the 14‐year lease for Lower West Draynes in 1824 stated that the tenant was to ‘dress every acre for tillage with
80 horse seams of good salt sea sand or 50 bushels (double Winchesters) of good well burnt stone lime. Then to till only two crops of corn. Last crop to be sowed and harrowed in 8lbs of clover seed and 4 gallons of ever seed per acre. Thirty bushels of lime per acre for turnip crops’.56
There was also evidence of Mary Tillie spending some of the additional rental income on farm building improvements, mainly repairs to existing buildings, at the beginning of the 14‐year tenancies.57 For a very short period Mary Tillie was able to command ever increasing rents for these tenancies, with tenants fighting to outbid each other in the anticipation of continuing high farmgate prices.
55 Worgan, General View, p.35
56 CRO MS. CY/5814: Survey, tenement in Lower West Draynes and Draynes Hill, St Neot, 15 Jun 1824
57 CRO MS. CY/3864, Rentals, various demesnes, 1796‐1802
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3.2 Post‐war decline
Tougher conditions after the French Wars soon began to hit the farmers of West Draynes very hard.
They claimed their first casualty in the manor as early as 1815, when Jonathan Keast was forced to give up Higher Trenant. He could no longer afford the rent, which had risen from £67 to £80 a year when the lease was renewed in 1813.58 To add to his difficulties he had also taken on moorland at
Diddylake and Redhill in 1814. His timing was unfortunate because both meat and grain prices began to collapse after reaching a wartime peak in December 1813.59 At Lower West Draynes there was a similar situation. When James Davey’s £67 a year lease expired, it was taken on a 14‐year term by prominent St Neot farmer William Dangar for £100 a year from Lady Day 1814. Despite negotiating a reduction in the rent to £75 in 1816 he was forced to place a notice to creditors in the
Royal Cornwall Gazette in November of the same year and quit the farm shortly afterwards.60
Dangar’s financial difficulties probably influenced the decision of some of his sons to leave St Neot for Australia in the 1820s, becoming some of the districts first emigrants of the nineteenth century.
Had the tenants of West Draynes remained three‐life leaseholders it is likely that they would have still faced substantial difficulties in the post‐war collapse. However, the abrupt switch to rack renting intensified the difficulties for many and farms which had been held by the same families for generations began to change hands with increasing regularity. Rents did fall when the wars ended as new tenants were forced to tender lower amounts than their displaced predecessors, but rents did not decline as quickly as farm output prices.61 William Lord took Higher Trenant after Jonathan Keast at a rent of £50 and when he was replaced by James Carpenter in 1825 the rent had fallen to £45 a
58 CRO MS. CY/5808: Agreement for lease, Higher Trenant in St Neot, 3 May 1813; CRO MS. CY/2667: Quitclaim, Higher and Lower Trenant, St Neot, 1 Jul 1814
59 Chambers & Mingay, p.113
60 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 16 Nov 1816
61 Chambers & Mingay, p.111
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year. Figure 8 (page 23) demonstrates the rapid rise in annual rental income as three‐life leases were extinguished up to 1800, rising to a peak in 1815 before falling back. The jump in 1829 followed the running out or purchase of the three‐life leases at Westerlake and Killham.
3.3 Moorland tenancy agreements
Along with some other Bodmin Moor landowners, the owners of West Draynes decided to let out moorland on three‐life leases for the first time in the early nineteenth century, seemingly happy to let tenants to take the risk of investing in enclosure, which did not begin in earnest until the 1820s. It is ironic that three‐life leases on enclosed farms were expired in the name of improvement, yet they formed a cornerstone of enclosure on many parts of the moor.
It is also perhaps surprising that the moors were not enclosed sooner when prices were high during the French Wars. Fraser had been excited about the potential from enclosing the moors and wastes.
‘I am persuaded that there is, at the very least calculation, 100,000 acres of waste land [in Cornwall] which may be valued at 7s 6d an acre which could produce an annual rent of £37,500 per annum and leave a sufficiency of turbary for fuel if properly regulated. What an advantage would arise from such improvement to the force and wealth of this county.’62 However, Mary Tillie was more interested in maximising revenue returns from land already enclosed and appeared unwilling to invest capital in moorland enclosure.
Up to about 1800 the moors of West Draynes had been in hand for many years, used for summer grazing by charging lowland farmers per head of livestock. It was common practice for cattle to be brought long distances by herdsmen to graze the moor from early May to Michaelmas. In 1803 the moors were let to local graziers, John Taunton from Liskeard taking Brown Gelly for 3 guineas a year, and the other moors taken the following year by local farmers John Davey, John Mallett and Samuel
Doney for a 10‐year term at £2 a year. Then, in a complicated set of agreements made between
62 Fraser, General View, p.58
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1816 and 1819, the moors were let on three lives for £30 plus an annual conventionary rent of 10s.
The timing and impact of moorland enclosure will be discussed in Chapter 4.
Figure 10. Looking towards Diddylake from the west side of Draynes Common. Fields on the left of the hedge began to be enclosed in the 1820s. Granite like this large slab on the hedge bank was quarried on the common to provide building materials for farms, cottages and mine construction.
3.4 Occupation patterns in 1844 compared with 1793
By 1844 only 11 farms of any size in St Neot were still let out on three‐life leases, compared with at least 50 in 1793. All but one of the 11 comprised the farms of the Manor of Carburrow, which was owned by Anna Maria Agar of Landydrock, and it is not clear why she maintained this policy. As has already been noted, the loss of three‐life leases and the economic turmoil after the French Wars led to a rapid turnover in farms in West Draynes and this was a trend reflected across the parish of St
Neot. In 1844 just five farms were occupied by farmers with the same surname as in 1793.
A comparison of Palmer and the tithe apportionment highlights the rapid growth in both the number and proportion of cottagers in St Neot between 1793 and 1844 (Table 3), the reasons for which are discussed in chapter 4. The way information was recorded in the two sources means that comparison can only be attempted for houses and not households. The 1841 census listed 294 28
households in St Neot, compared with 201 properties identified in the tithe apportionment. Two factors account for the difference: first, some farms had cottages which were not separately identified; and second, many houses and cottages had been subdivided to accommodate the rising population.
Table 3. Changes in property numbers in St Neot between 1793 and 1844, excluding unenclosed moors and commons.63
Rental value per Number of Total acres in Number of Total acres occupier occupiers in 1793 179364 occupiers in 1844 in 1844
Cottagers 34 30 89 121
Farms 5‐<30 acres 50 923 49 1,165
Farms 30‐<75 acres 24 1,350 20 1,029
Farms 75‐<150 acres 12 1,290 26 2,558
Farms >150 acres 4 884 17 3,526
Total 124 4,477 201 8,399
Despite these limitations the comparison between 1793 and 1844 confirms the trend of a rising population and an increasing proportion of cottagers. However, it also paints a picture of a continuing wide spread of farmers by acreage. In 1844 farmers with fewer than 30 acres were still the largest group numerically, although the biggest growth was in the largest farmers with more than 150 acres. The increase in both the total number of farmers and acreage farmed between the two dates was the result of moorland enclosure, which accounted for approximately 75% of the increase, and also because some farms in 1793 only appear to have listed their arable fields.
63 Palmer survey, 1793; St Neot Tithe Apportionment
64 The acres in 1793 have been converted from customary to statutory by multiplying the total by 1.19.
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Chapter 4. Demographic pressures and occupational change
4.1 The factors behind population growth
Unpicking the reasons behind the rising population in St Neot and West Draynes is a complicated task, even for such a small geographical area. Factors at work included changing family fertility, declining death rates, moorland enclosure, the expansion of mining and inward and outward migration. The population of Cornwall had been rising from around the mid‐eighteenth century in both mining and agricultural districts.65 In St Neot and St Cleer births had begun to exceed deaths on a consistent basis from the 1750s. The pattern for St Neot from 1700 to 1840 is shown in Figure 11.
It demonstrates the widening gap between baptisms and burials, particularly from the 1780s onwards, and fewer crises. It is not always clear what caused these crises, although in 1741 when there was three times the average number of burials in neighbouring St Cleer, the burial register stated ‘this year the small pox was very fatal’. 66
Figure 11. St Neot Baptisms and Burials 1701 – 1840 (five‐year moving average).67
65 C. Lemon, ‘Notes on the Agricultural Produce of Cornwall’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London Vol 4, No 3 (1841)
66 CRO MS. P32/1/1: Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, St Cleer Parish Church 1675‐1796; E. A. Wrigley & R. S. Schofield, The population History of England 1541‐1871, p.334 confirmed that 1741 was a national crisis year.
67 CRO MS. P162/1: Registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, St Neot Parish Church, 1549‐1996
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Up to c1830 the trend for St Neot was similar to the moorland parishes of Devon included in Wrigley and Schofield’s study of the baptism, marriage and burial registers of 404 English parishes.68 After
1830 declining levels of fertility and outward migration led to falling populations in many rural parishes dependent on agriculture, both in England and parts of Cornwall, but the discovery of rich copper deposits on Bodmin Moor had the opposite effect in St Neot and St Cleer.
Population information before the first census in 1801 is both sparse and notoriously unreliable. The
Returns of the Clergy to Bishop Clagett in 1745 and Bishop Ross in 1779 estimated the population of
St Neot at 585 and 700 respectively.69 The first census of 1801 recorded 906 inhabitants, suggesting that the population had increased by about 50% in the second half of the eighteenth century.70
Whatever the exact rate of growth, the 80% increase recorded in St Neot in the first half of the nineteenth century represented a step change. Table 4 shows the changes in population for both St
Neot and West Draynes for the period from 1793 to 1851. The figures for West Draynes before 1841 are estimates based on baptism and burial numbers relative to those of St Neot.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the fastest rate of increase in the population of St Neot as a whole occurred between 1811 and 1821, well before the rapid growth in mining. Data for miners poses problems of interpretation as they come from varying sources over time. As has already been mentioned, 12% of grooms in St Neot in the second half of the eighteenth century were described as tinners (see page 20). There were then no occupational records until fathers were recorded in baptismal registers from 1813 to 1839, when the average was also 12%.71 In the 1841 census for St
68 R. Schofield, Parish Register Aggregate Analysis: the Population history of England database, (1998). Their study of 404 parishes did not include any from Cornwall.
69 Rowe, Cornwall, pp.67.40
70 Parliamentary Papers 1801‐2, vi (9), Census of Great Britain, 1801, Abstract of the answers and returns, part 1, p.58
71 CRO MS. P162/1/9: Register of baptisms, St Neot, 1813‐1939
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Neot 12% of males by occupation were also listed as miners or tinners.72 This suggests an absolute increase in the number of miners over the period because of the general population rise, but not an increase in the proportion. It was only after 1841 that the proportion of miners increased significantly, reaching 27% of male employment at the 1851 census. 73
Table 4. Population movements for St Neot 1793 to 1851 with estimates for West Draynes over the same period74
Year St Neot % growth Index West Draynes % growth Index population population*
1793 820 (est.) 100 70 (est.) 100
1801 906 10.5% 109 78 (est.) 11.4% 106
1811 1,041 14.9% 125 90 (est.) 15.4% 120
1821 1,255 20.6% 151 105 (est.) 16.6% 140
1831 1,424 13.5% 172 125 (est.) 19.0% 167
1841 1,515 6.4% 183 136 8.8% 181
1851 1,628 7.5% 196 183 34.6% 244
*For comparison purposes the West Draynes population excludes residents of two households in St Cleer, which totalled 13 in both 1841 and 1851
So why did the parish’s population rise at the fastest rate between 1811 and 1821? The answer appears to be partly related to changes in ages at marriage, larger completed family sizes and a declining death rate within the rising population. This is similar to the trend in England measured by the Cambridge Group, which saw ages at marriage decline from 26 to 23 from the late seventeenth
72 NA MS. HO 107/153: Census Enumerators’ Books for the Hundred of the West, Cornwall, 1841. Tinner or streamer usually referred to those who extracted tin from deposits at or close to the surface, while miner referred to underground workers. However, miner was sometimes used more generally by enumerators.
73 NA MS. HO 107/1902: Census Enumerators’ Books for the Liskeard Registration District of Cornwall, 1851
74 Parliamentary Papers 1852‐3, lxxxv (1631), Census of Great Britain, 1851, Population tables, I. Number of the inhabitants in 1801, 1811, 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851. Vol. I, p.58
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to the early nineteenth century.75 In order to investigate the impact of changing patterns of family size in the area in an around Draynes a sample of 90 families from the family reconstitution database, where marriages took place between 1721 and 1849, was analysed. Table 5 shows the results of the analysis.
Table 5. Mean ages at marriage for females and completed family sizes for Draynes 1721‐1849.
Year of marriage Sample size Mean age at first marriage Completed family size
1721‐1750 20 24.8 6.5
1751‐1780 20 22.5 7.9
1781‐1815 20 21.0 8.5
1816‐1834 15 21.4 7.8
1835‐1849 15 22.2 6.7
Completed family sizes peaked in the 25‐year period up to the end of the French Wars. From 1816 onwards there was a gradual rise in age at marriage and corresponding reduction in completed family size. Wrigley calculated a mean age at marriage for females in England to be 23.5 at the start of the nineteenth century, compared with 26.1 during the second half of the seventeenth century.76
This change was enough to raise fertility by more than a fifth. Draynes had lower marriage ages than the English data but the trend in was broadly similar.
Reasons for the peak in family sizes during the French Wars and the subsequent decline are not entirely clear. It is possible that the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 acted as a stimulus for smaller families, but change was already underway in Draynes well before this date. Perhaps more significant factors were the poorer post‐war economic climate and pressure on resources caused by the rapid increase in population in the district before 1821.
75 K. Tiller, English Local History – An Introduction (2002 edn.), pp.124‐125
76 Wrigley, Population history, pp. 136‐137
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Declining levels of fertility after the French Wars was only one factor influencing the rate of population growth in St Neot and West Draynes. Overlaying this was a complex mixture of both inward and outward migration, and a shift in the proportion of population between the old enclosed farmland in the south and the moors to the north. Between 1814 and 1837 there was a net surplus of baptisms over burials of St Neot residents (including nonconformist baptisms and those which took place in neighbouring St Cleer and Warleggan) of 629 people, approximately 250 more than the population rise over the same period, which suggests substantial net outward migration. From the
1830s outward migration increasingly meant emigration and population levels in the agricultural south of St Neot began to fall. The markedly faster rate of growth in West Draynes from the 1830s onwards, and particularly after 1841, came from a combination of moorland enclosure and the development of speculative mining activity.
4.2 The influence of moorland enclosure on population growth and structure.
Up to about 1815 virtually all of the increase in population of both St Neot and West Draynes was in the long‐established hamlets and isolated settlements in the south. This growing population was mainly employed in agriculture: the French Wars led to an intensification of production, with more arable cropping and a shortening of the period of grassland in convertible rotations on already enclosed land.
There appears to have been little attempt to enclose land on the moors until towards the end of the
French Wars. Earlier moorland enclosures, such as at Stuffle in the Manor of Carburrow which bordered West Draynes, had been abandoned before the end of the seventeenth century.77 On the moors of Brown Gelly and Redhill in West Draynes there was evidence of four medieval longhouses
77 CRO MS. FS/2/32/4: Lanhydrock Estate Atlas, Volume VI, 1696
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and cultivation ridges, also long since abandoned.78 Palmer in 1793 recorded no permanent settlement on the moors, apart from a few long‐established farms and cottages in the valleys on the southern fringes, and the 1808 Ordnance Survey Surveyors’ Drawings showed no recent enclosure on the moors apart from a single ‘tinners’ enclosure’ on the edge of the Draynes Valley, which also featured on an estate map in 1811 (Figure 12).79 These early occupiers were soon joined by others who mostly combined tinning and farming to make a living.
Figure 12. Encroachment on the St Neot moors in 1811. The ownership of the land, which was to the north of Brown Gelly, was disputed but claimed by the Duke of Bedford.80
Baptism records show location of births within St Neot from 1813 onwards. However, only a minority of baptisms of moorland families took place at St Neot parish church. Warleggan and St
Cleer churches were frequently used, probably because these were often closer to where families
78 N. Johnson and P. Rose, Bodmin Moor, An Archaeological Survey. Vol. 1: The Human Landscape to c1800 (1994), p.94
79 NA MS. OSD/11E: Ordnance Survey Surveyors’ Drawing for Bodmin East, 1808; NA MS. OSD/16:
Ordnance Survey Surveyors’ Drawing for South Petherwin, 1808
80 CRO MS. BW/65: Plan, the Duke of Bedford's lands, St Neot, Jun 1811
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settled.81 In addition, small numbers of Wesleyan Methodist baptisms were recorded at both
Liskeard and Launceston circuits from the late 1790s and more frequently at Trenant and St Luke’s
Bible Christian chapels from the 1820s.82 By combining these records it is possible to trace the pattern and pace of moorland occupation. Just five moorland families baptised 10 children between them in the period from 1813 and 1819. Four of these families had the surname Hooper and were all closely related, rapidly becoming one of the moorland dynasties. The fifth family, Richard and Ann
Beswetherick, probably became the first illegal encroachers of Draynes Common, baptising their first child born there in January 1816.83
In the 1820s moorland occupation began to spread rapidly: fifty children were born to a total of 24 moorland households and new locations began to appear in the baptism registers for the first time, including Dozmary, Pinnock’s Hill, Meadows and Diddylake. The latter place, on the moors of West
Draynes, appeared in registers for the first time in 1824 when Thomas and Elizabeth Keast had their first child.84 At the same time William and Ann Wilton joined the Beswethericks to encroach on
Draynes Common, baptising their first child to be born there in April 1824. The Wiltons were destined to become the dominant moorland family of West Draynes for the next 50 years. Moorland occupation continued to grow so that by the 1851 census there were 252 people in 46 households living on the St Neot moors, accounting for 15% of the total population.
Enclosure and an expansion of tinning on St Neot’s moors were responsible for more than one‐third of the growth in households between 1801 and 1851. Most of this growth occurred after 1820 and
81 CRO MS. P32/1/2: Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, St Cleer Parish Church, 1813‐1837; CRO MS. P247/1/4: Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, Warleggan Parish Church, 1813‐1837
82 NA MS. RG 4/429: Launceston Wesleyan births and baptisms, 1794‐1815; NA MS. RG 4/430: Liskeard Wesleyan burials and baptisms, 1806‐1834; NA MS. RG 4/110: St Neot Bible Christian births and baptisms, 1821‐1837
83 In notes at the back of Palmer’s survey (added in 1812) there is also reference to land at Gillhouse and Harrowbridge becoming occupied by the Wills and Parkyn families at some stage between 1793 and 1812.
84 CRO MS. P162/1: St Neot Parish Church registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, 1549‐1996
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probably accounted for up to half of St Neot’s population growth between 1820 and 1840. Three quarters of the new moorland residents listed tinning or mining as occupations in the 1851 census, although the nature of employment between mining and farming remained fluid. Moorland occupation in West Draynes lagged slightly behind St Neot as a whole, with the biggest growth coming in the 1840s when it accounted for just over half of the total population expansion in the manor. By 1851, 24% of the population of West Draynes lived on recent enclosures on the moors.
4.3 The impact of mining on occupational and household structure in the 1840s
From the late 1830s the biggest demographic change in the district was caused by the rapid expansion of mining. In St Neot the number of people employed in tinning or mining increased from
47 in 1841 to 122 in 1851. However, this was dwarfed by the experience in St Cleer where employment in mines rose to more than 500 by 1851 following the discovery of rich copper deposits. In West Draynes the numbers of mine workers increased from six to 17. Figure 13 shows the impact of mining on employment patterns, although for St Neot and West Draynes farming continued to be the dominant employer.
Figure 13. The structure of employment in St Neot, St Cleer and West Draynes in 1851.85
* includes farm servants and farmers’ sons
85 NA MS. HO 107/1902: Census Enumerators’ Books for the Liskeard Registration District of Cornwall, 1851
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Two important changes to community structure occurred with the growth in mining. First, the proportion of labourers in the overall working population increased, rising from under half to almost two‐thirds of male employment in West Draynes between 1841 and 1851. Second, mining encouraged an inward migration of people from surrounding parishes and also increasingly from the mining districts of west Cornwall. The structure in 1851 is shown in figure 14, which emphasises the impact of mining on the origins of people in St Cleer. For West Draynes, the impact was less dramatic with 58% of the working population being born in St Neot. It is also striking how few people migrated into the district from outside Cornwall, despite the relatively close proximity of Devon.
Figure 14. Place of birth of the adult working population (aged 15 or over) in 1851.
For a tiny community like West Draynes the changes in household structure over the first half of the nineteenth century represented a fundamental change in social composition. From 15 households in
1793 dominated by small farmers and cottagers it had grown to 36 households in 1851, 25 of which were headed by labourers. The manor had filled up from the bottom and although there were still four small farmers they were very much in the minority. Eight of the 36 families lived on the moors and six of these were made up of William Wilton and five of his sons. The encroachers on Draynes
Common were charged a nominal rent of 1s a year as acknowledgement for their illegal
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encroachment, although manorial account books show rents were paid irregularly if at all.86 Most of these moorland properties had a short existence and by 1881 all the encroachment households on
Draynes Common had been abandoned, leaving just two families at Diddylake. The rent book noted two of the abandonments in 1867 and 1875 with the simple poignant statements ‘given up and destroyed’ and ‘house burnt down’.87
Figure 15. Site of an illegal encroachment on the edge of Draynes Common, occupied from about 1820. It was abandoned in 1867.
86 CRO MS. CY/3882: Rent accounts under names of individual tenants, various parishes, 1846‐1853
87 CRO MS. CY/4005: Rentals, 1867; CRO MS. CY/4013: Rentals, 1875
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Chapter 5. The importance of kinship and religious change
5.1. The significance of kinship
Despite the rapid growth in population and an increase in both inward and outward migration, one thing which remained exceptionally strong in West Draynes and surrounding area was the kinship links between families. In order to measure this, family reconstitution was undertaken in the way described (p. 7), beginning with households listed in the 1841 and 1851 censuses for the hamlets of
Draynes, Trenant and Treverbyn together with the surrounding farms and cottages. This provided a database of 94 families, which was added to where possible with families of parents and grandparents of household heads and their partners, providing a total database of 150 families.
Relatives of household heads, together with their partners, including deceased ones, were then linked together to enable kinship links to be measured. This method was identical to that used by
Wrightson and Levine in their study of Terling.88 Two calculations were applied to the data: first‐ order kinship links measured the number of links between households established through parents, children or siblings; and the absolute kinship density measured the average number of kinship links per family, providing a picture of the depth of links. As with other studies, some links will have been missed so the calculations should be regarded as minimum levels of kinship links.89
The first analysis using these methods was of the 32 households resident in the Manor of West
Draynes at the time of the 1841 census. Figure 16 shows each household head and diagrammatically matches first‐order kinship links between them. A remarkable 27 of the 32 heads or their partners
(84%) had parents, siblings or children living in other West Draynes households. This calculation excludes first‐order links between people who were not household heads (or their partners), which
88 Wrightson, Terling, pp.82‐91
89 J. M. Few, The Impact of Kinship Links and Communities on Migration Choices and Residential Persistence in North Devon 1841‐1901, University of Exeter DPhil (2009) [hereafter, Few, Kinship], p. 144; Reay, Microhistories, p.164; Wrightson, Terling, p.87
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would have added five more links. These links were mainly to young people working as farm servants. For example, both Richard Jane senior and William Wilton senior had children working as farm servants for William Henwood.
The web of links was dominated by the Keasts, the Wiltons and the Janes who between them accounted for 61% of the first‐order links. They contributed to a very high kinship density of 2.3.
Thomas Keast, for example, had seven direct kinship links and he was to rely on support from at least two of these when he had to quit his farm in 1848. The Keasts and Janes had been in West
Draynes for many generations, while the Wiltons were all descended from William Wilton who arrived on Draynes Common from St Cleer around 1820. By 1841 three of William’s eight sons had set up home on the West Draynes moors, at the same time marrying into other moorland families.
Figure 16. First‐order kinship links between West Draynes households in 1841 (Sources: 1841 census and family reconstitution using the St Cleer and St Neot parish registers together with the Bible Christian baptism records for the St Neot circuit)
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Some of those without first‐order kinship links within West Draynes itself nevertheless had links close by. Sampson Deacon’s brother Walter, who was miller at Trenant in the 1820s, had moved to
Treverbyn Mill by 1841, and sisters Agnes and Eliza Mallett, who were young and single and whose parents had recently died, had a wide network of second‐order links. Only labourer William
Edgecombe had no identified kinship links of any type in the wider district.
In order to explore this surprisingly dense kinship network further and to compare the results with other studies, the same exercise was undertaken for 1851 but the area for data analysis was widened to cover the hamlet of Treverbyn, together with farms and cottages either side of the manor of West Draynes. This provided a total sample of 68 households, 36 from West Draynes and
32 from the surrounding community. The first point to note is that the first‐order kinship links in
West Draynes itself remained virtually identical between 1841 and 1851 and analysis of the wider area for 1851 confirmed that this pattern of links was broadly repeated. The overall proportion of links was slightly smaller at 75%, but the kinship density was even higher (table 6). The table also shows the results from four other studies, two for the same period.
The hamlet of Bulkworthy was part of a study of kinship links and its influence on nineteenth‐ century migration patterns in north‐west Devon.90 Reay’s results from Hernhill in Kent at the 1851 census are also shown, as well as Wrightson and Levine’s findings from Terling in Essex from an earlier period, and Emanuel Todd’s study of kinship links in French villages, including Hallines.91 The results of this comparison are striking. Draynes exhibited a substantially greater proportion of first‐ order kinship links than any of the English communities; its 75% score compared with between 53% to 55% in rural Devon and Kent, and was much closer to the findings for Hallines in France.
90 Few, Kinship, pp. 129‐131
91 Reay, Microhistories, p.165; Wrightson Terling, pp. 86‐87
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The difference between households with three or more first‐order links is even more significant. This emphasises that not only did Draynes have more households linked by kin, but that the density of links were even stronger. This is reflected in an Absolute Kinship Density of 2.5 for Draynes, higher even than the French experience. A recent study of kinship between 1701 and 1810 over a much wider geographical area on England’s Leicestershire/Lincolnshire border revealed first‐order links of
51%, similar to both Bulkworthy and Hernhill, again emphasising the difference in Draynes.92
Table 6. First‐order kinship links in the Draynes district compared with results for communities in Devon, Kent, Essex and France.93
Draynes District Bulkworthy Hernhill Hallines Terling Cornwall 1851 Devon 1841 Kent 1851 France 1776 Essex 1671
Households 68 38 129 50 122
Related to 1 15% 18% 28% 30% 26%
Related to 2 20% 13% 9% 22% 7%
Related to 3+ 40% 21% 6% 30% 0%
Total related 75% 53% 55% 82% 33%
Unrelated 25% 47% 45% 18% 67%
Absolute 2.50 1.16 1.13 1.73 0.39 Kinship Density
Of all these contrasts, it is perhaps the one between Bulkworthy and Draynes that is the most significant as both were upland hamlet communities. One notable difference was that the farms, on average, were larger in Bulkworthy, emphasising a greater social division between labourer and
92 A. Fox, A lost frontier revealed – regional separation in the East Midlands (2009), p138
93 Few, Kinship, pp. 129‐131; Reay, Microhistories, p.165; Wrightson Terling, pp. 86‐87 (N.B. the French data is also reproduced from Wrightson, Terling, pp. 86‐87)
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farmer.94 In the Draynes area the farms were mostly small and many labourers were directly related to farmers. Of the 22 labourers or farm servants in West Draynes in 1841 only seven could not be identified as having first‐ or second‐order kinship links with farmers or craftsmen. For example, the extended Jane family had once been small farmers in West Draynes but had been reduced to the status of cottagers by 1841. However in 1851 they still had direct kinship links with farmers from the
Keast, Wilton and Higman families.
Indeed, it seems that the small farmers were the most important factor in the breadth of links, with their children marrying offspring of both labourers and larger farmers. Remoteness probably also played a part, but as West Draynes was not significantly more remote than Bulkworthy, it is probably other factors which influenced the extremely high proportion of kinship links. It is also notable that
Draynes had remarkably strong kinship links despite the turmoil of the previous 50 years. A high proportion of the population had married then lived locally even though the number of households had risen. New arrivals had also quickly married into the local community, which was increasingly dominated by the Bible Christians of Trenant.
5.2 The growth of the Bible Christianity
When Trenant Chapel was opened by the Bible Christian Connexion in 1826 it was destined to become more than just a place of religious worship – in some ways it also came to define the community and give it identity during a period of mounting financial and social pressures for the district’s labourers and small farmers. Until the chapel opened it is likely that relatively few of the
94 The difference in farm size structure between Draynes and Bulkworthy was consistent with the wider picture. In 1851 farms in Devon had an average of 4.3 farm labourers each, compared with 2.7 in Cornwall. This is based on data from the 1851 census which significantly understated the number of small farms in Cornwall. A comparison between the tithe apportionment and the 1851 census for St Neot reveals 11 moorland farms where the occupier was described as miner or tinner in the census. The first reliable survey of farm holdings in 1870 revealed that Devon had proportionately twice as many farms over 100 acres compared with Cornwall and significantly more between 50 and 100 acres. Structurally Cornish farming had more in common with Wales, while Devon had more in common with neighbouring Somerset.
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local population attended church on a regular basis. An 1853 Parliamentary Commission report on church buildings said that generally people were prepared to travel up to one mile to attend church, given good roads and weather.95
With both St Cleer and St Neot parish churches more than two miles away along narrow roads which were barely better than rough tracks, the effort to get to either regularly would have required an unlikely degree of commitment. In addition, baptism registers for the period from 1814 to 1829 which give exact location of residence show that 56% of parish church baptisms for residents of
West Draynes took place at St Cleer and only 44% at St Neot, despite the fact that all the parents lived in the latter parish. While this does not on its own confirm low attendance, it does indicate lack of loyalty to the parish church from the manor’s inhabitants.
Methodism was relatively slow to develop in and around Bodmin Moor until the Bible Christians made it a key target for growth. John Wesley’s focus was always on the far west of Cornwall where mining was rapidly expanding, but he did preach in and around Bodmin Moor while passing through on some of his 32 visits to west Cornwall between 1743 and 1789.96 His first recorded sermon in the district was at St Cleer in 1751, and it is thought he stayed with the Daniel family who were later to become leading Bible Christians in St Cleer and St Neot.97 From the late 1790s baptism records reveal a small but increasing number of Wesleyan Methodist adherents in the area. Among them was Nicholas Gedye, nephew of the farmer of the same name from Lower Trenant, who was later to become an itinerant preacher.98
95 D. Luker, Cornish Methodism, revivalism and popular belief, c. 1780‐1870, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (1988), p.65
96 T. Shaw, A History of Cornish Methodism (1967), p16
97 J. Pearce, The Wesleys in Cornwall (1964), p114
98 N. Gedye, The Gedye Exodus (2007), p.13
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There is also evidence that a Wesleyan society was formed at about the same time, but it was said to have dissolved due to ‘some unpleasant circumstance’ among its small membership.99 However in
1811 the future leader of the Bible Christians, William O’Bryan preached at a number of locations on the fringes of Bodmin Moor, including Draynes, while he was still a Wesleyan Methodist. According to Rowe, he was evangelising to the ‘fiercely independent yeomen farmers and their dependents, and the diminishing number of “free miners” who survived on the bleak wastelands of Bodmin
Moor’.100 O’Bryan must have been struck by the opportunity because one of his first acts after forming the Connexion was to send another founding father, James Thorne down to Bodmin Moor to help establish a society. The first quarterly meeting of the St Neot Circuit was held in 1817.101
For many years society meetings were held at Thomas Doney’s farmhouse at Treverbyn until the chapel at Trenant was built. Doney was typical of the pioneers of the Bible Christian movement, who tended to come from the tenant farmer/craftsmen tier of society.102 He had taken a 14‐year lease of
65‐acre Great Treverbyn at the peak of the market in 1813 at an annual rent £105 a year. Although his farm was bigger than the average for the district, he was certainly not wealthy and by 1818 his farmhouse had been divided to accommodate three households.103 Like many farmers in the post‐ war era, he did not see out the lease and the farm was let to John Davey in 1824 for £81, and Doney downsized to the 39‐acre Little Treverbyn.104
From Doney’s farm, the Bible Christian cause spread rapidly, and by 1820 services were being held in
39 cottages and farmhouses across the St Neot circuit. In an organisational structure identical to that
99 Bible Christian Magazine (1866), p.550
100 Rowe, Cornwall, p.261.19
101 J. Thomas, A Glance over the Shoulder ‐ St Neot parish from the 18th to the late 20th century (2004), p.82
102 Thomas Doney was uncle to John Doney convicted of stealing oats in 1847.
103 Morshead estates sale catalogue, 9 Sept 1818. Copy held by J. Thomas, Tremarkyn, St Neot, Cornwall
104 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 12 Nov 1825; CRO MS. V/EC/40: Land Tax return for St Neot (1830)
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of the Wesleyan Methodists, the circuit was served by two itinerant ministers, 13 local preachers and around 25 prayer leaders. Doney was one of the latter, along with shoemaker John Oliver from
Trenant Bridge, while Walter Deacon from Trenant Mill and Northwood farmer John Mallett became local preachers.
Figure 17. Richard Barnecut (born 1806) was typical of the lay preachers at Trenant Chapel. He was a farm labourer at Draynes until the 1850s when he took the tenancy of a 30‐acre farm at Northwood. His abrupt style of preaching was even criticised in his obituary105.
The circuit covered a wide area, from Bodmin Moor to the south coast, and preachers and prayer leaders could face journeys in excess of 20 miles on Sundays.106 This style of religion was well suited to Cornwall’s dispersed communities and Rowe argued that through it the ‘common men in the chapels and meeting houses gained the self‐assurance and qualities of character’ which enabled them to make more of their lives in the material world.107 Local societies formed the nucleus of new
105 Bible Christian Magazine (1874), pp.555‐557
106 CRO MS. FS/3/1677: Plan, St Neot Bible Christian Circuit, 5 Nov 1820‐25 Feb 1821
107 Rowe, Cornwall, p.67.39
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religious and social communities and, according to Bernard Deacon, this combination provided a buttress to ‘traditional ways of life, providing inner discipline and a sense of spiritual immediacy that allowed families and communities to resist external pressures’.108
Figure 18. Trenant Bible Christian Chapel opened in 1826 to serve the hamlet communities of Draynes and Treverbyn and the surrounding isolated farms and cottages. It closed in 1963.
The dominance which the Bible Christians achieved in the district around West Draynes can be seen from baptism records of families resident in 1851 and the religious census of the same year. The hinterland of Trenant Chapel, calculated from locations of families in the St Neot circuit baptism register and the positions of other nonconformist chapels, had a population of 267 in 1851.109 This compares with total attendance on 31 March 1851 at Trenant of 223 worshippers, made up of 83 at morning service, 85 in the evening and 55 Sunday scholars, equivalent to 84% of the local population.110 There was almost certainly some duplication of attendance between morning and evening service, but the attendance at such a remote chapel was nevertheless high. On the same
108 Deacon, Cornwall – A Concise History (2007), p.116
109 NA MS. HO 107/1902: Census Enumerators’ Books for the Liskeard Registration District of Cornwall, 1851
110 NA MS. HO 129/303: Ecclesiastical Census Returns, Liskeard Union District, 1851
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day the aggregate attendance of all churches as a proportion of the total population was 61% for
England and 68% for Cornwall.111
Baptism records confirm the strength of the Bible Christians and comparing them with the 1851 census reveals that 71% of households in the same district had at least some of their children baptised at Trenant. The peak of Bible Christian influence in and around Bodmin Moor came after the end of the period under discussion. However, by 1851 the Connexion had established a firm hold on the remote moorland communities with approximately 20 chapels, most of which were in hamlets or remote rural settlements.112 The chapels were each focal points for their rural hinterlands, with their members increasingly vocal and active on issues such as tithes, alcohol consumption, emigration and education. In St Neot this led to increasing conflict with the
Established Church, which will be discussed in Chapter 6.
111 H. Mann, Census of Great Britain, 1851: Religious Worship in England and Wales (1854)
112 P. Herring (ed.), Bodmin Moor, An Archaeological Survey. Vol. 2: The Industrial and Post‐medieval Landscapes (2008), p.167
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Chapter 6. Conflict and community
6.1 Growing unrest in the 1820s and 1830s
By 1820 the impact of a rising population and a deteriorating economic situation was having a dramatic impact on parish finances. Poor rates in St Neot had risen from £458 in 1811 to £755 in
1821, increasing the cost from 8s 9d per head of population to 12s, in a trend reflected across east
Cornwall.113 This burden was largely falling on farmers who, as we have seen, were struggling to pay rents which were falling less quickly than commodity prices. The crisis in poor rates had peaked in
1819 when they reached £910, and through the 1820s they declined gradually so that by 1829 they had been reduced to £614.
Part of the improvement in St Neot during the 1820s was due to moorland enclosure and the opening of a number of mines, both of which provided improved employment prospects for the growing proportion of landless labourers in the parish. However, this was a relative change and did not represent a return to anything like prosperity. In a sign of growing assertiveness in the face of the continuing difficulties a new parish body known as the ‘Twelve Men’ was established in 1821.
According to its own declaration it was the resurrection of an ancient body which had once controlled the income from tithes and lands owned by the parish for the benefit of the poor and for maintaining the parish church.114
Two of the ‘Twelve’ were Robert Keast from Draynes and Bible Christian leader Thomas Doney from
Treverbyn. The group was set up a few months after Henry Grylls succeeded his father as vicar of St
Neot and the move seems to have been as much an attempt to control his freedom of action as to take a grip on parish finances. Many of the actions of the ‘Twelve’ were of a reforming nature. In
1822 they took the step of allocating rental income from parish lands towards putting the finances
113 P. Tremewin, ‘The Relief of Poverty in Cornwall 1780‐1881’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies, Vol. 16 (2008) p.87
114 CRO MS. P162/8/1: Twelve Men’s book, St Neot, 1821‐1855 [hereafter, Twelve Men]
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of the recently established Charity School on a firm footing. Three years later they further agreed in a declaration that all their own children would attend the school, that they and the vicar would jointly fund 40 poor children to attend and that they would ‘encourage the school by all means in our power’. However, a resolution to build a second school at Trenant or Draynes for those children who could not easily attend the school in St Neot does not appear to have been implemented.
This positive attitude to the education of the children of the poor was extended to the welfare of the poor themselves in 1829 when the ‘Twelve’ came out strongly against a proposed workhouse at
Liskeard to serve the parishes in the Hundred of the West. In an impressive statement of kinship unity they said ‘it would be painful to remove our aged poor….from their nearest kindred and from the spot to which they feel the strongest local attachment being confident that such removal would in many years shorten the period of life and feeling assured that in every case such removal could only be affected by measures of coercion’. 115
In the following year, there was further evidence of unity between farmers and labourers in St Neot against the burden of tithe payments. According to the West Briton farm labourers in St Neot had planned a demonstration in order to force a reduction in the tithe so that farmers could provide more work and raise their wages. The demonstration was only averted when the farmers persuaded
Henry Grylls to suspend collection of the tithe.116 It is not clear how much influence the Bible
Christians of St Neot had on the tithe dispute, but Rowe argued that disaffection with tithes ‘led many farmers to abandon the Church of England for Wesleyanism, whilst an even greater number joined the Bryanite or Bible Christian movement…’117
115 Twelve Men, April 1829, p.25
116 West Briton, 24 Dec 1830
117 Rowe, Cornwall, p.247
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The situation in St Neot reflected wider disturbances across England and Cornwall. At South
Petherwin, about 10 miles to the north‐east of St Neot, farmers issued a declaration demanding a reduction in tithe payments of 20% and in rents of up to 30% in order to accede to the ‘just demands’ of the labourers. In their declaration the farmers made it clear that continued high rents and poor rates were starving Cornish farmers of capital, reducing ‘hundreds of this class… from independence to extreme poverty and distress, and thousands are at this moment on the brink of ruin’.118 The liberal West Briton newspaper played a key part in communicating details of the unrest and the complaints of farmers and, while it condemned acts of violence, it was strident in supporting their cause.
Despite the widespread threats of disturbance, and the occasional outbreak of violence such as at a protest against tithes on fish in Mousehole, demonstrations had largely disappeared from Cornwall by the spring of 1831 without effecting significant change. Landlords showed little or no willingness to reduce rents and in the Manor of West Draynes they remained static throughout the 1830s. An idea of landowners’ attitudes can be seen in a letter written by the Deputy Lieutenant of Cornwall,
Ernest Augustus, to the Home Office in Dec 1830, in which he acknowledged that the wages of labourers were ‘shamefully low’ but added that the ‘most disagreeable circumstance is farmers instigating the people to riot to obtain lower rents or tithes’.119
However, the bigger national picture of which the disturbances were part was leading towards reform which came through the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 and the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. As a result, by the late 1830s the reluctant parishioners of St Neot had a workhouse thrust upon them and in the early 1840s a consistent method for commuting tithes was broadly accepted
118 West Briton, 24 Dec 1830
119 B. Deacon, The Cornish Family (2004), p.146
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by all parties. For a short period the situation was also alleviated by both emigration and a more rapid expansion in mining employment from the late 1830s.
The safety valve of emigration had begun to have an impact in St Neot in the 1820s in response to the more difficult economic conditions. Among the first to depart for Australia were three of the children of ‘Twelve’ member William Dangar, who was a tenant at Draynes until 1818. Some of the
Dangars became wealthy in Australia and recruited others from St Neot, including some of the
Gedyes, to emigrate and work for them.
However, it was the opening up of opportunities for farming in Ontario in the late 1820s, encouraged and supported by the Nonconformists, which speeded up the exodus. Among the first to depart for Canada was Peter Davey from Treverbyn, whose family had lived in and around Draynes for many generations, and Matthew Rosevear, another of the ‘Twelve’ and who was closely related to the Keasts of West Draynes. A letter from Peter Davey to his cousin John Davey at Treverbyn, published in the West Briton in 1832, extolled the virtues of Canada where there was ‘no rent to pay, no poor rates, no tithes, no Church rates, no land tax and only about 5s a year to Government. Tell
Mallett and Keast if they could get here their families would soon cease to be a trouble to them’.120
Figure 19.Monument to Henry Dangar in St Neot parish church. He was one of the first emigrants from the parish after the French Wars when he left for Australia in 1820.
120 West Briton, 10 Feb 1832
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Despite the increase in emigration, the population of St Neot and West Draynes continued to rise and one of the biggest challenges was to provide enough accommodation to house the additional labourers. Away from the moors most of the rising population was housed by a subdivision of existing farm houses and cottages, as illustrated by the sale in 1818 of Morshead family properties to the west and east of West Draynes.121
The sale prospectus reported that Great Treverbyn had a three‐bedroomed farmhouse, part of which had been ‘converted into two cottages, two rooms to each’. At nearby Wenmouth Cross, blacksmith Thomas Richards, whose family would later take Killham Farm, lived in a dwelling house
‘now converted to two cottages’. The prospectus also revealed that the houses of the smaller farmers differed little from those of labourers. John Copplestone’s house at 35‐acre Little Hammett had just two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room, while Thomas Crossman, who farmed 28 acres at
Milltown, had a ‘cottage house, covered with thatch, containing two rooms’.
In West Draynes, where the population began to rise faster than the rest of the parish, there was a rapid increase in the number of households from the 1820s onwards. Chapel Cottage at Trenant and
Draynes House at Hawton’s Draynes were divided to house four families each, farmhouses such as
Higher Trenant took in copper miners as lodgers and farm buildings at Lower Trenant were converted into a cottage. New properties were shoehorned into small plots of land at Draynes and
Trenant and half a dozen were built on the moors, at least half without permission. Some were poorly built and subsequently disappeared without trace, but others were more substantial.
Some of the investment in new properties came from the manor’s owners. It included a new farmhouse at Killham. The original house appears to have fallen into disuse and the farmer Sampson
Deacon had for many years lived in a cottage on the St Cleer side of Treverbyn Bridge. This development immediately preceded the attempt to sell the entire manor in 1841. Reasons for the
121 Morshead estates sale catalogue, 9 Sept 1818. Copy held by J. Thomas, Tremarkyn, St Neot, Cornwall
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attempted sale are not entirely clear but might have been related to the Coryton inheritance. John
Tillie Coryton, who died in 1843, had devised a complex will which put a significant burden of cash payments and annuities onto his son and heir Augustus Coryton.122 He had also overseen a large investment in updating the family home, Pentillie Castle.123 Whatever the reason, the manor failed to sell and the Corytons and their tenants were forced to face the worsening outlook of the 1840s together.
Figure 20. Sale notice for the Manor of West Draynes in the Royal Cornwall Gazette, 12 Nov 1841.
122 CRO MS. CY/1759: Probate of will of Jn. Tillie Coryton, Pentillie Castle, esq., 3 Aug 1843
123 S. Tyrrell, Pentillie Castle (2009), p.53
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6.2 The Hungry Forties
John Doney of Pellagenna, whose rather rash response to the crisis facing the labourers and small farmers of West Draynes was mentioned in the introduction, somehow survived and remained on his farm despite his gaol sentence and potentially crippling arrears. While he was awaiting conviction
Doney’s wife Elizabeth paid £10 of the arrears from 1846 and the following month paid a further £15 of the £18 due for 1847. It is possible she received help from her mother and brother who farmed close by or from others within her tight kinship community. To make matters worse for Elizabeth she was pregnant with their third child, baptised privately in April 1848. The rent book says Augustus
Coryton’s agent Mr Glubb ‘had instructions to distrain’ goods to recover arrears still owed after the above payments were made but it is not clear if this happened or if the remaining arrears were paid by some other means.
Doney’s case was extreme but he was not the only tenant in the manor to fall behind with his rent.
Sampson Deacon’s arrears on his 14 acres at Killham were even bigger than Doney’s, reaching £14 2s
6d in early 1848. Like Doney, Deacon managed to hang onto his farm, perhaps helped by his carpentry business. Thomas Keast, who farmed 27 acres at Hilltown Draynes, was not so lucky. He had failed to pay any of the £36 17s 10d rent due at Michaelmas 1848 and was ordered to leave
Hilltown at Christmas 1848, the West Draynes rent book simply stating that he was ‘unable from sickness and poverty to carry on the farm any longer’. However, his brother Stephen Keast and brother‐in‐law Edward Alford managed to prevent the distraint of Thomas’s remaining possessions by paying £25 to Augustus Coryton on 4 December 1848 in full settlement of outstanding rent.
Thomas and his family were forced into pauperism in a moorland cottage at Diddylake and he was not the only farmer in Draynes to be reduced to this state. John Bickford who had farmed at Great
Draynes from 1814, and had at one time been an overseer of the poor, was a pauper himself at
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Draynes Bridge by 1851.124 Bickford and Keast were joined by other paupers in Draynes including
Ralph Jane at Trenant, who came from a long line of Draynes farmers, former tinner Richard
Beswetherick from Draynes Common and labourer Edward Bennett from Draynes.125 Stephen Keast, who helped his brother in 1848, did not become a pauper but he was reduced from a farmer to the status of farm labourer by the time of the 1851 census.
In 1846 and 1847 there was an additional and very real threat of famine among labourers caused by the failure of the potato crop and shortages of grain. In the spring and summer of 1847 there were food riots in towns across Cornwall, with attempts made to prevent exports of grain leaving ports such as Wadebridge, and there were cases of grain being requisitioned to be sold at ‘fair’ prices to labourers.126 It is likely that starvation was only avoided by the availability of fish in Cornwall, the importation of grain, mainly from Spain, and an acceleration of emigration.
Figure 21. Site of the farmhouse and buildings at Hilltown Draynes which were abandoned when Thomas Keast was forced to quit in 1848 (the field in the foreground comprises the parcels numbered 1228 to 1232 on the tithe map on p.25).127
124 CRO MS. P162/12: St Neot Overseers’ Accounts, 1765‐c1869
125 NA MS. HO 107/1902: Census Enumerators’ Books for the Liskeard Registration District of Cornwall, 1851
126 West Briton, 14 May 1847
127 I am grateful to M. Smith, Great Draynes Farm, St Neot, for helping to identify the location of this field.
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In St Neot, vicar Henry Grylls wrote to the absent landowners asking for donations to buy food for hungry parishioners. His letter referred to a ‘perambulation of the parish to ascertain the extent of the famine’ which found labourers ‘without the slightest particle of food of any description in their houses’.128 There is no correspondence to indicate how Augustus Coryton responded to the plea but the rent books show that, unlike the protests of the 1830s presided over by his father, he did provide rent abatements of up to 15% to the tenants of farms and cottages between 1848 and
1851.129
Henry Grylls might have done his best for the parishioners in 1847, but at other times he came into conflict with them. The first serious recorded clash since the tithe arguments of the early 1830s came with a refusal to bury the dead of the Bible Christians in St Neot burial ground. This had become an issue in many parts of Cornwall and was only resolved in St Neot in 1843 when a burial ground opened at Trenant.130 The dispute appears to have had a temporary impact on Bible
Christian baptisms, which declined dramatically in the mid‐1840s before increasing again.
Grylls also clashed in the 1840s with the ‘Twelve’, which by this time had a number of prominent nonconformists among its membership. He had taken the lease of parish lands in 1829, the income from which was supposedly controlled by the ‘Twelve’ for distribution to poor parishioners.
However, Grylls and the ‘Twelve’ argued over the tenancy arrangements and payment of the rent, which resulted in the threat of distraint against Grylls. When Bible Christian Peter Gerry, a farmer at
Northwood, became chairman of the ‘Twelve’ his first action was to serve Grylls with a notice to quit.131
128 CRO MS. CN/1613: Letter asking for money to help alleviate conditions of famine in St Neot, 1847
129 CRO MS. CY/3882: Rent accounts under names of individual tenants, various parishes 1846‐1853
130 West Briton, 31 March 1843
131 Twelve Men, 26 Sept 1851, p.39
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Figure 22. Thirteen‐year‐old farmer’s daughter Jane Grigg Mutton from Lower Bowden became the first person to be buried at Trenant cemetery, opened in 1843 in response to the refusal of the Established Church to bury children baptised as Bible Christians (Source: West Briton, 31 March 1843)
The paradox of the 1840s for West Draynes and surrounding area was that the difficulties of the
‘hungry forties’ for the rural poor and the clashes with the Established Church came at a time of improving employment opportunities as a result of the investment in new mines. This reflected the wider experience of the mining districts of Cornwall where almost full employment meant that pauperism had a much lower impact than in parts of western England and was mainly confined to the elderly and infirm.132 The main issue for the labourers of West Draynes was that its location on the periphery of the main mining district meant most mines struggled to make any money.
Wheal Victoria copper mine, which opened in Draynes Woods in 1844, was typical of the erratic performance of the district’s mines.133 It ceased production after just two years when investment
132 P. Payton, ‘Reforming thirties and hungry forties – the genesis of Cornwall’s emigration trade’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornish Studies, Vol. 4 (1996) p.115
133 CSHER: Wheal Victoria site of historic interest, catalogue reference no. 17286. Viewed online at http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MCO13185&resourceID=1020
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capital ran out, only to open again in 1851 when it secured fresh backing following an advertisement in the Manchester Times.134 The advertisement was supported by encouraging statements from local mine captains about the mine’s enormous potential but this proved illusory and in 1855 it closed for good. Other similarly small mines operated intermittently at Northwood, Brown Gelly, Killham (also known as Wheal Coryton and Pensilva) and Carpuan. As a result, the miners of Draynes were forced to move mines frequently as speculators came and went, and one writer suggested some St Neot miners walked up to nine miles to work as mines opened and closed.135
Figure 23. Remains of an abandoned wheel house in Draynes Woods. It was part of Wheal Victoria copper mine, which was worked intermittently between 1844 and 1855.
134 Manchester Times, 16 April 1851
135 E.C. Axford, Bodmin Moor (1975) p.163
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Many of the miners who migrated into the district left just as quickly when the mines closed. Among them was the family of the notorious Bible Christian preacher Billy Bray.136 He arrived in St Neot in the mid‐1840s, taking a job at Wheal Sisters to the east of St Neot village.137 Born in the parish of Kea near Truro, Bray had worked in a number of mining districts before arriving in St Neot, in the process taking his evangelical Bible Christian message with him. While in St Neot three of Bray’s children married local nonconformists: Grace Bray married William Davey, a nephew of Peter Davey who had left Treverbyn for Canada in 1830; Mary Bray married Joseph Mallett from Treverbyn, another nephew of Peter Davey; and James Bray married Joseph’s cousin Eliza Mallett from Draynes.138
By the time of the 1851 census all the Brays had left St Neot. James and Eliza departed for New York in 1848 with Eliza’s sister Agnes and her family, while the rest of the Brays moved to work in mines elsewhere in Cornwall. As a result none of the family appeared in any St Neot census. James Bray’s departure was part of an acceleration of emigration from the area in the 1840s, which included both miners and farmers. Families left Draynes for Canada, the United States and the Australian provinces of New South Wales and Tasmania. It is hard to assess whether push or pull factors dominated the decisions to emigrate as both were important, but most of those who left were skilled miners or farmers with capital. They were enticed to leave by agents and encouraged by relatives and former neighbours who had already emigrated.139
136 F. W. Bourne, The King’s Son (1890 edn.). This official biography of Billy Bray ran to 41 editions between 1872 and 1890.
137 C. Wright, Billy Bray in his own words (2004), p.11. This book is principally a transcription of Bray’s own journal but draws on other sources as well. The original journal is kept at the John Rylands Library, Manchester University.
138 CRO MS. P162/1/5: Register of marriages, St Neot, 1837‐1947
139 CRO MS. AD1976/36: Letter, Peter Werry of Ontario, Canada, to Mark Daniel, 21 Feb 1849
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Figure 24. Draynes House was built in the 1840s on land bought by James Bray, son of the Bible Christian preacher Billy Bray. At the peak of the copper mining boom it housed four families. A blocked‐up front door can be seen to the left of the present entrance.140
The investment in mining also created opportunities for some of the community’s more established families. The most successful was Petherick Higman, whose prosperity appears to have resulted from quarrying granite on Draynes Common for use in new buildings. By the time of the 1851 census he had the tenancies of both Higher Trenant and Higher West Draynes as well as the granite business and he employed 11 labourers.141
Higman also took a prominent role in parish affairs, becoming a member of the ‘Twelve’ and like most local farmers and labourers became a Bible Christian. Five of his children married into local
Bible Christian families, helping to reinforce the position of Trenant Chapel within the community.
Yet even Higman’s prosperity was tinged with tragedy in that he only came to take on Higher West
Draynes following the suicide of Jeremiah Keast, his son‐in‐law and previous tenant of the farm.
Keast, who was brother to Stephen and Thomas Keast, had been in a state of despondency for some
140 CRO MS. CY/632: Conveyance of premises to Jas. Bray of Draynes, miner, 1 October 1846
141 NA MS. HO 107/1902: Census Enumerators’ Books for the Liskeard Registration District of Cornwall, 1851
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time according to the inquest, which recorded that he ‘was found by his wife hanging to a stittle, or cow‐hook, in a cow‐house’ on the farm.142
The census of 1851 proved to be the highest census populations for both St Neot and West Draynes, and there followed a 15‐year period of relative stability as farming fortunes recovered and the mines continued their rather erratic performances as speculators came and went. At Michaelmas 1851 the manor court sat as usual, but the manorial services and duties, the customary tenancies and associated heriot payments had all but disappeared. West Draynes was little more than an estate of tenanted farms and cottages, owned by a rather reluctant and absent owner. Yet even though the shape and structure of the community had changed out of all recognition, it retained a cohesiveness and independence which was reinforced by its deep kinship links and Bible Christianity.
142 Royal Cornwall Gazette, 10 Feb 1843
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Chapter 7. Conclusions
This dissertation has attempted to chart the impact of the enormous economic and demographic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century on the inhabitants of a small Cornish moorland community. The challenges of the 1840s were the culmination of 50 years of change for the inhabitants of West Draynes and surrounding areas. A rising population, the virtual elimination of three‐life leases and reduced opportunities to get on the farming ladder fundamentally shifted the balance of economic power within the community.
The most significant changes to social structure were the decline of yeoman farmers and the rise to numerical dominance of households headed by landless labourers. This was reflective of a wider trend but in West Draynes the change was concentrated into a short period, mostly completed in just two generations. In 1793 virtually the whole of the manor was farmed by yeomen farmers – defined as small owner‐occupiers or three‐life leaseholders – but by 1851 there was not a single yeoman left. Having systematically removed three‐life leases on the enclosed farms, the Coryton family had become responsible for all capital investment in the manor. However, the available evidence suggests that successive owners were only prepared to spend the minimum necessary to attract or retain tenants. As a result, rental income was drained from the local economy and transferred to a distant owner.
By the 1820s a short‐term market economy had largely replaced a customary society which had been substantially intact only 30 years earlier. At the same time the rising population of Draynes and
St Neot put an increasing strain on parish finances, a burden which was largely borne by tenant farmers whose own financial position was increasingly precarious. In West Draynes there was a more than doubling in the number of households, 80% of which were made up of labourers drawn from a mixture of long established local families and miners from further west.
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Loyalty to and connectivity with the parish of St Neot remained relatively weak. A small number of the manor’s farmers served as overseers, vestry members or as part of the ‘Twelve’ but these positions became increasingly radicalised and representative of nonconformist agendas. For a majority of inhabitants the manor was a more appropriate definition of community until the Bible
Christian chapel was built at Trenant. From then it was increasingly the hinterland of the chapel which defined the geographical boundary of the community. If anything, the separation from the parish intensified with the expansion of Bible Christianity and it was no longer necessary to visit either St Neot or St Cleer parish churches for baptisms, marriages or even burials after 1843.
Despite the demographic and economic changes the social cohesion within the society of West
Draynes remained strong, and was probably strengthened by adverse pressures. This strength was reinforced by two complementary factors: Bible Christianity provided a religious, social and increasingly political structure to local society; and the extraordinary level of kinship links super‐ glued the community together. It is significant that the chapel embraced a majority of the households in the district from the most prosperous farmers and tradesmen to the transient miners from west Cornwall. The combination of a growing nonconformist religious following and the absence of a significant resident landowning influence led to an enduring independent spirit even though the manor’s inhabitants had lost much of their economic independence.
In this dissertation it has only been possible to give partial justice to some of the issues raised, particularly in relation to kinship and religion and a number of questions remain either unanswered or only partially so. For example, how typical were the kinship links in West Draynes compared with similar moorland/hamlet communities? Were these links sustained or intensified under the influence of Bible Christianity or other Methodist denominations? How important an influence on kinship were the demographic and social structures of Bodmin Moor communities? How did the situation develop after 1851? It is to be hoped that further research will help to answer some of these questions. 65
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