A Project Undertaken by the Friends of Devons’s Archives

Introduction

Under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, all tithes were to be paid in money, not in kind. To work out the amount of tithe payable it was necessary to draw up accurate maps, from which acreages were calculated and payments deduced. These maps, mainly of the ecclesiastical parishes, but including a few other miscellaneous districts or tithings, number over 460 for Devon. Devon’s tithe maps, mostly dating from the 1840s, cover 97.4% of the area of the county, but they do not exist for some urban areas - the urban parishes of Exeter, Kingsbridge, Dartmouth St Saviours, East Stonehouse in Plymouth, the town of Tiverton etc - therefore, many highly-populated areas are not covered.

Usage of the Tithe Maps and Apportionments

Apart from parish registers, the tithe maps and apportionments are often the most used class of documents in any Record Office. They give detailed information of local topography, and land usage, as well as including field-names and the names of the owners and occupiers of properties. Most people who use the tithe documents are investigating individual parishes. With the maps, their greatest asset - the amount of detail shown - leads to their greatest drawback - they are extremely large and not easy to handle. The apportionments are also often quite bulky. If information about more than one parish is needed, each apportionment and map has to be ordered separately. If a searcher wishes to find out the extent of one individual or family’s ownership or occupation of land within Devon, then, apart from looking at every apportionment, the task is impossible.

The Project

The aim of this project is to produce two indexes of the Tithe Apportionments for the county of Devon. The first will be the primary index arranged alphabetically by parish and, following the order of the original document. This will produce an index such as

The second index will be generated from the information contained in the primary index, and will be a personal name index, arranged in alphabetical order, of all the owners, lessees and occupiers of property. This will look like -

Accessibility

The final format of the indexes is yet to be decided upon - they could be paper copies, computer diskette/C.D. etc. However, in whatever format, they will be made available at the Exeter Record Office, with copies at the Plymouth and Barnstaple offices, possibly with further copies being available at the Record Office service points, or for sale to the public- depending on demand and form

Advantages

The production of the two indexes will enable searchers to look at information culled from all the apportionments. In how many parishes did the Fortescue family hold land? How many farms over 50 acres were there in Axminster? And the surrounding parishes? Where did Alexander Maunder live? All of these questions will be answerable by consulting the indexes, instead of having to search all the apportionments. One further advantage could be that, in many cases, it may not be necessary to consult the original documents at all; this would mean less work for the Record Office staff and would result in less wear-and-tear on the documents themselves.

Limitations

The main limitation with these indexes is that they will not contain field names or numbers and, except for named holdings whose location is known, the searcher will have to resort to the original Tithe Apportionment and map to obtain a geographical location of property. To transcribe the field names would be far too large a task and the end-product would be unmanageable and an index of these names would not be advantageous except for highly-detailed research.