The Importance of Burton in Lonsdale’s Lay Subsidy of 1297

Tony Stephens
 JOURNAL 
 2021 
 North Craven 
 Heritage Trust 

Introduction

The chance survival of a single record can occasionally provide unique insights into a township’s history. This is the case for the Lay Subsidy (taxation) records of 1297 for the township of Burton in Lonsdale. In the interest of brevity we shall refer to Burton in Lonsdale in what follows as Burton. The Lay Subsidy provides highly detailed records of the items of value for each Burton household in 1297, making the records some of the most informative for any northern subsistence township for any period. With the exception of a single tradesman, all the householders of 1297 were subsistence farmers, taxed for their holdings of oats, barley, hay and a small number of animals. Importantly, the basic layout of Burton is today largely as it was in 1297. Many other townships have layouts which have survived from medieval times, but few also have detailed documentary records of the inhabitants from the time when they were subsistence townships. Burton’s records therefore provide a useful benchmark when studying other subsistence northern townships with similar farming practices whose records have not survived. Ashbourne in Derbyshire is such a township, and it will be shown how Burton’s records are helpful in suggesting where Ashbourne’s centre is likely to have been located in Anglo Saxon times.

Burton in Lonsdale in the medieval period

From early Norman times the Manor of Burton and the 300 square mile Burton Chase were two of the many holdings of the de Mowbray family of Kirkby Malzeard; a survey of the bounds of the chase carried out in 1307 is shown in Figure 1. After the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 the Earl of Derby acquired Burton and the Burton Chase, and a survey for the then Earl of Derby in 1682 revealed a chase unchanged from 1307. Although the de Mowbrays and the Earls of Derby were absentee lords of the manor, their records provide useful insights into the history of the township over many centuries.

Because of its strategic location near the Roman road north to Carlisle, a motte and bailey castle was established at Burton, and it was from Burton that the Chase was administered. Under the feudal system, the de Mowbrays were required to support 100 knights to fight for the king when called upon to do so, each knight being given a “knight’s fee” of approximately 1000 acres of de Mowbray land to support him. Because of the size of a “knight’s fee”, it was normally held as several portions of a “knight’s fee” in different locations. By the end of the 13th century so much land had been given to the monasteries that the king found it difficult to raise an army from those who owed him feudal service. In 1296, parliament gave Edward I permission to levy a tax equivalent to one ninth part of the assets of each lay household in order to pay mercenaries for his Scottish campaign of 1300. Luckily, the resulting lay subsidy of 1297 for Burton survives. It reveals a township of 31 farmers, 22 being taxed for their holdings of oats, 17 for their holdings of barley, and 15 for wagons of hay (six had a second hay wagon). There were few animals, only 29 oxen, 40 cows and heifers and 12 mares and no sheep. Only one resident was a tradesman, Johannes Tinctor, a dyer, whose stock was valued at 9s3d. John de Creppinges, the Burton steward in 1297, was a member of the de Mowbray household and also the Sheriff of Yorkshire. Since he was one of three people required to muster an army of 1500 in Carlisle for Edward’s Scottish campaign, it is highly likely that the 1297 Lay Subsidy will also have been used as a muster roll. De Creppinges held a quarter of his “knight’s fee” in Burton, to the north of the village, but lived near York, letting his Burton land to tenants for rent.

After the Black Death of 1348 there was a nationwide shortage of agricultural workers, and we can infer that Burton was affected by the Black Death from of a reference to the de Creppinges holding in Burton being temporarily reassessed as only a 1/16th of a “knight’s fee”, because of a “lack of tenants”. The scarcity of agricultural workers enabled many subsistence farmers elsewhere in England to acquire land in the second half of the 14th century, thereby improving the financial circumstances of themselves and their descendants. However, this did not happen in either the Burton Chase or the adjacent Percy estates in Ribblesdale and Wharfedale, where records show that the standard agricultural holding was still a subsistence oxgang in the 16th century. These holdings could not be sold, but were handed down from father to first son through the manor court. A possible explanation for the survival of this feudal land holding system is that, until the Battle of Flodden in 1513, there was a continuing need for lords of the manor to be able to muster their tenants to fight the Scots; allowing tenants to acquire more land would have reduced the number who could be called upon to fight. Important for an understanding of Burton’s history is that an extensive archive of papers relating to the Tatham family of Burton was deposited at the West Yorkshire Archive Service in Leeds in 1967. The Tatham ancestral home in Burton was the Homestead on Low Street (see Figure 3), and they would appear to have been the only Burton family to have progressed from holders of a single oxgang as tenants of the Earl of Derby in the 16th century to gentry in the 18th century. The Tatham records therefore provide a useful narrative for the changing nature of land ownership in the township between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Edmund Tatham was the first of the Tatham family to appear in Burton records, as a tenant of the Earl of Derby in a muster roll of 1522. Since Burton’s steward fought at Flodden in 1513, it is highly likely that Burton tenants would also have been at Flodden. An Edmund Tatham, who is likely to have been Edmund of 1522 or his son, was one of three Tatham family members who had their cattle confiscated by the Lord of the Manor in 1534 because they were unable to pay their rent. They were charged in the Star Chamber with rioting after rescuing their cattle “with 60 riotous persons… with bows, arrows, bills swerdes and other wapons invaysyve and defensive after the manor of warre….cast downe the ditches and made rescous of such goods and cattalles….”. Tatham family folklore also has it that several family members joined the Pilgrimage of Grace which opposed Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. Opposing Henry VIII was not always a wise thing to do, and it is probably no coincidence that the three Tatham tenants who were taxed for an oxgang of land in Burton in 1545 were, most unusually, women. In 1637 Robert Tatham appears to have been the first Tatham to be able to buy additional land in Burton, and a survey of Burton for the Earl of Derby of 1682 shows Richard Tatham (1620-1696) having accumulated 30 acres. This included a strip of 1 acre 30 perches in the Frount, the town-field immediately to the east of the village. Since the entry in the survey for a tenant’s strip named the tenants of the adjacent strips, it is possible to reconstruct the holdings in the Frount in 1682 and to identify the location of Richard Tatham’s strip.

Burton’s pastureland was on Bentham Moor, to the south of the river Greta. When enclosed in 1767 it was apportioned to Burton residents in proportion to the land they held in the township. This would appear to have prompted Rowland Tatham (1730-1814) to carry out a survey of his land, which had increased to 97 acres and now included the whole of the Frount. A diary in the Tatham collection in Leeds shows that Rowland Tatham was no longer a farmer; he had let his land to tenants and was living on unearned income. This was the definition of a gentleman in the 18th century. He built Tatham House, adjacent to the ancestral home, which he would have felt appropriate for his newfound gentry status. Charlotte Tatham, the great, great granddaughter of Rowland Tatham (1730-1814) was the last of the Tathams to live in Burton. She ran a girls’ school in the Homestead, the ancient family home. Her death in 1956 brought an end to four centuries of documented Tatham family history.

As is the case in many northern townships, Burton’s original settlement will have been around an open green, but the building of the motte and bailey castle would have caused the western frontages onto the green to have been lost. The township was never able to expand outwards, having the castle to the west, the river Greta to the south, a beck to the east and a mire to the north; what expansion there was had to be as infill onto the green. As a result, we can be fairly certain that the basic layout of the township we see today is as it was in 1297. The 31 farmsteads recorded in the 1297 lay subsidy would have had a total frontage of 485m (excluding the courthouse frontage) as shown in Figure 4. Although an average frontage of 15.6m per farmstead might seem large for a medieval property, it has to be remembered that there were no field barns in the Medieval Period; the farmsteads will have had to accommodate the farmers’ animals over winter, together with their hay wagons and other farming equipment. Also, there will have been gaps between the farmhouses to allow access to the crofts behind.

Burton’s unusual arrested development may provide useful insights into the layouts of other subsistence townships with similar farming practices whose early layouts were later obscured by commercial developments. We shall now consider Ashbourne in Derbyshire, which had the same land assessment of 3 carucates at Domesday as Burton and, with a similar climate and soil, is likely to have had similar farming practices. Unlike Burton, Ashbourne had a market charter from around 1203 and underwent considerable commercial development in later years, particularly during the century when it was an important coaching town. The question is whether the Burton records provide any pointers to the possible location of the centre of Ashbourne in Anglo Saxon times, when it too would have been a subsistence township.

Possible location of Ashbourne’s ancient centre

A carucate was, by definition, the amount of land equivalent to 8 oxgangs. Since an oxgang was sufficient to support a subsistence farming family, Ashbourne’s assessment for 3 carucates at Domesday suggests a township of around 24 subsistence farmsteads in late Anglo Saxon times. The usual arrangement was for a church to be located close to the centre of a township and, mainly for this reason, it has been suggested that Ashbourne’s early centre is likely to have been near the church, migrating about 500m to its present location sometime after the town was granted a market charter in 1203. Lincoln cathedral appropriated Ashbourne church, St Oswald’s, in 1200, entitling it to St Oswald’s tithes. The first indication that St Oswald’s was never merely a Parish church comes from Ashbourne’s Domesday Survey, which reveals that it’s priest had a carucate of his own land and a plough, and had two villans and two bordars working for him. The chance survival at the Derby Record Office of a survey of Lincoln cathedral’s tithes from St Oswald’s in 1740 shows the cathedral receiving tithes from Ashbourne and Parwich, and also from many of the places which were recorded as berewicks of the two townships in the Domesday Survey; a berewick being a subsidiary estate of a township in Anglo Saxon times. This is evidence of a most unusual survival of an Anglo Saxon estate until 1740, a longevity which would appear to be a consequence of Ashbourne and Parwich being part of the royal estate in Anglo Saxon times, and still being part of a Crown estate in 1740.

In Anglo Saxon times kings endowed churches with land, making them minsters which served a geographical area rather than a single township. The carucate of land held by St Oswald’s at Domesday would appear to have been a royal endowment to establish St Oswald’s as a minster serving a wide area. This explains why, when St Oswald’s was rebuilt from around 1220, it was on a much larger scale than would have been justified for a parish church serving Ashbourne alone. Also, as a minster there would have been no reason for St Oswald’s to be particularly close to the Anglo Saxon centre of Ashbourne. The question arises of whether it is possible to identify the likely location of the early centre of Ashbourne.

For obvious reasons townships tend to be located close to their town-fields. Until enclosed in 1622, Ashbourne had three contiguous town-fields of around 300 acres located in an arc of land to the north of the Market Place (see Figure 6). These town-fields are likely to have been the three carucates of land for which Ashbourne was assessed at Domesday. We would also expect Ashbourne’s centre to have been close to the crossroads of the two main highways through the township, which is on the corner of Dig Street and St John’s Street (see Figure 6). The locations of the former town-fields and the main township cross-roads suggest that the centre in Anglo Saxon times is likely to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the current Market Place. In Yorkshire we might have expected a settlement of a couple of dozen subsistence farmsteads to have been around a square green, as in Burton. However triangular greens were more normal in the Midlands (private communication from local historian Adrian Henstock). If the Ashbourne farmsteads had similar frontages to those in Burton, we would expect a triangular green with a peripheral measurement of around 374.4m. The fact that the current Market Place has a peripheral measurement of 385m strongly suggests that Ashbourne’s early centre was where it is today. The Anglo Saxon centre has been hiding in plain sight.

Further evidence that the Ashbourne farmsteads in Anglo Saxon times are likely to have been located around the present Market Place

Had, as suggested above, 24 farmsteads been sited around the current Ashbourne Market Place in late Anglo Saxon times, the Burton analysis would lead us to expect average farmstead frontages of around 15.6m, with crofts behind of similar width. The difficulty of finding surviving evidence of the likely locations of such farmsteads in Ashbourne is that it was for many years an important commercial centre. Its buildings will have been rebuilt many times over the centuries, although often on the footprint of earlier buildings. One of the oldest and best preserved building in Ashbourne is the Gingerbread shop on St John’s street. Built around 1492, this was where Pickford wagons stopped each day on their way from London to Manchester when Ashbourne was an important coaching town. With its two side wings, the Gingerbread shop has a width of 15m, so is a good candidate for being built on the site of what would have been a farmstead when Ashbourne was a subsistence township. Crofts will also have been much modified over the years. Perhaps because they were better protected from development by the Henmore Brook until it was culverted underground in 1970, the crofts between St John’s and the former line of the Henmore Brook are the best preserved in the township. This is particularly the case for the two crofts which are not built upon behind Specsavers and Rymans on St John’s Street. Both have widths of 15.1m, making them good candidates for being of Anglo Saxon origin.

Concluding remarks

Burton is unusual in having a detailed taxation record surviving from 1297 when it was a subsistence farming community cultivating oats and barley, but with few animals. Subsequent records show that Burton residents continued to be subsistence farmers holding only an oxgang of land until the 16th century, and that the basic layout of the township has changed little since 1297. This suggests that subsistence farming communities with similar climates and similar arable farming practices are likely to have had farmsteads with average frontages of around 15.6m. One such township is Ashbourne in Derbyshire where a number of other factors suggest that the centre in Anglo Saxon times was around the present Market Place. Not only do the average frontages match what we would have expected from the study of Burton, but the width of 15m of one of its oldest buildings and of 15.1m of two of its best preserved crofts give some confidence that it is possible to extrapolate lessons from the study of Burton to other northern townships with similar farming practices.

Reference

  • The Burton Lay Subsidy of 1297, which is in Latin, is to be found in Brown. William., 1894 Yorkshire Lay Subsidy being a ninth collected in 25 Edward I, 1297, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series No 21. Although Vol No 21 was not on line at the time of writing, it might be in future, since the YAS is in the process of putting all the volumes of the Record Series on the web.

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Figure 1 Burton in Lonsdale and the Burton Chase in 1307 and in 1682
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Figure 2. An aerial photograph, courtesy of Susan Gregory, which shows the approximate location of Richard Tatham’s strip in the Frount in 1682.
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Figure 3 Tatham House ( left) and the Homestead, the Tatham ancestral home (right)
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Figure 4 Burton in Lonsdale from the air ( google earth image taken 30 June 2018)
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Figure 5 St Oswald’s church rebuilt from 1220 to serve a wide area of Derbyshire
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Figure 6 Ashbourne in 1849 from its tithe map
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Figure 7 The Gingerbread shop of 1492 on St John’s Street and a croft behind St John’s Street
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StephensFig1.jpg
Figure 1 Burton in Lonsdale and the Burton Chase in 1307 and in 1682


StephensFig2.jpg
Figure 2. An aerial photograph, courtesy of Susan Gregory, which shows the approximate location of Richard Tatham’s strip in the Frount in 1682.


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Figure 3 Tatham House ( left) and the Homestead, the Tatham ancestral home (right)


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Figure 4 Burton in Lonsdale from the air ( google earth image taken 30 June 2018)


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Figure 5 St Oswald’s church rebuilt from 1220 to serve a wide area of Derbyshire


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Figure 6 Ashbourne in 1849 from its tithe map


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Figure 7 The Gingerbread shop of 1492 on St John’s Street and a croft behind St John’s Street


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