England Land and Property: Difference between revisions

Any large landowner will acquire numbers of documents as evidence of title, needed if any property is to be mortgaged or sold. He will also create other records for administrative purposes. These estate records will arise regardless of whether the properties are owned by a private individual or family, a corporation or charity, a London City Company, the church or a university or college, county council or whatever.<br>'''Estate surveys'''. An estate will also generate more record when there is a change of owner and the new man wants a clearer picture of his revenues perhaps in order to raise money or perhaps after a difficult period with lax officials and low revenues. A land surveyor is then commissioned to make a survey of the estate, summarising the situation about every piece of property held, its extent, the manner of its holding, and quite often the use to which the land is put. The accompanying large-scale map may be the earliest available for the area, some dating from the sixteenth century.<br>Such estate surveys were more frequent before 1700, but they are sometimes found at later dates, particularly when estates changed hands. At Therfield in Hertfordshire, where the main manor was owned by the Dean and Chapter of St Pauls, for instance, a new survey was made in 1724. Every field was listed, each with its map reference, statute measure, tenant’s name and index number. At the end an index of tenants shows their total land in each field.<br>As part of this survey the history of each tenement was traced in the court rolls to make sure that every rood or perch of manorial land was accounted for (there were 40 perches in a rood and four roods to an acre). Any disparities which needed further investigation were noted.<br>'''Tenants and Leases'''. As time went by and estates grew larger the records would be split to form different series. Where there are many properties, there will need to be not only a simple rental, in alphabetical order of the names of tenants and giving basic details about the tenancy, but also some record by place.<br>For their London properties the Dean and Chapter of St Pauls kept a book, starting about 1740 and running for more than a hundred years, showing by street details of the leases of the houses they owned. Successions of tenancies within the same family can clearly be seen. In each case the book shows the date, the length of lease, the nominal rent (which remains the same over a hundred years), and the fine (paid at the renewal of the lease) and the clear value, both of which go up very sharply over the years. Leases for twenty-one years were usual but in this instance leases for fourteen years were most common.<br>Although the fine system survived on church property into the nineteenth century, elsewhere the system of levying fines on the grant or renewal of leases was gradually abandoned by landlords after 1660. They sought then to maximise their income and began to grant instead short annual leases to their tenants for as much as they could get in what came to be called rack rents.<br>Where there are many leases there may be a chronological record showing when these were due to fall in, so that decisions about the future of the properties can be made in advance. The agents for the St Pauls estates kept a book with sections for different categories of lease. One list of leases for three lives covers all their estates and gives details of the property leased, the date, the value of the fine at its last renewal, together with the name, ages and addresses of the ‘lives’.<br>Leases for three lives are said to have been popular in the west of England and leases for twenty-one years in the east. Those for three lives, in which three living people (not necessarily related) were named, were cancelled or ‘determined’ at the end of 99 years, fresh names being added to the original three on payment of a fine. Although it was unwise to include the names of children who might die young this form of lease was generally considered more favourable than those for a fixed term of years.<br>'''Rentals and labour books'''. On the larger estates with good records the rentals, when used alongside the estate labour books, are a rich source of information about employees. Shane Beaver provides a good example from the records of the Marquis of Salisbury’s estate at Hatfield [''Hertfordshire People'', no. 64 (March 1998) page 13; FHL book 942.58 D25h] where Richard Oakley, a labourer, did hedging and ditching. Richard Oakley started by renting a house from Charles Kidman, who farmed Suttons Farm and was a tenant of the Marquis. As a sub-tenant Richard Oakley does not himself appear in the records (a standard problem with sub-tenants on estates and manors), but when Charles Kidman gave up the farm in 1881, Richard Oakley became a tenant of the Marquis and appears in the estate book. His wife and children appear in the labour book doing ‘twitching’ (weeding) at 2s 6d a day. The books show how, on becoming a parkman in 1894, he moved to one of the park lodges, and later, on retirement, to one of the estate’s cottages in Hatfield New Town.<br>'''Sales and advertisements'''. Many estate and family papers contain printed advertising material about properties which have been sold in the past and many advertisements about farms in particular have appeared in local newspapers. These may relate to sale, at the end of a tenancy, of farm equipment (both for cultivation and the making of cheese) and of livestock, showing their numbers and breed.