| |
The following notes are based on depositions made for a Court of Exchequer case concerning Eskdale, Miterdale, Wasdale and Wasdalehead tithes in 1763, before Andrew Hudleston Esq., Daniel Robinson & Henry Littledale, gents. (Carlisle Record Office D/Hud/8/38 - depositions dated 8 April 1763, made under a court order dated 26 Feb 1763). The plaintiff was George Edward Stanley, owner of the tithes (an infant, for whom Mildred Stanley, widow, his mother, stood as guardian and next friend); the defendants were Eskdale & Wasdale farmers Joseph Sharp, William Russell, William Tyson, William Nicholson, Thomas Tyson, John Wasdale etc.
Eskdale and Wasdale were chapelries within the huge parish of St. Bees, formerly run from the great monastery there. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII, the rights to tithes which had formerly supported the monastery rather than the local priests could be acquired by anybody with cash to spare, which in the case of these chapelries meant the Stanley family. In the 18th century, the tithes payable to the Stanleys each year by sheep farmers in the Eskdale / Wasdale chapelries were as follows:
- Tithe of lambs: one in ten of the lambs dropped that spring which survived to St. Peter's day (29 June). In practice, as the heafs around Eskdale and Wasdale were rarely less than a couple of miles from the farmsteads, it would be madness to drive the lambs all the way down to the valley when they were so young, so a "modus" payment of 2 shillings was made in place of each nominally-titheable lamb. As some small stock-holders had fewer than ten lambs in a year, there was a sliding scale:
- Half a penny per lamb if there were four lambs or fewer
- One shilling (=12 pence) for five lambs
- One shilling and ten pence for 6 lambs, plus half a penny more for each extra lamb up to nine.
Though the lambs were counted on or about 29 June, the payment was deferred until Michaelmas (29 September).
- Tithe of wool: The sheep were sheared around midsummer, and the tithe collected in the week following St. Peter's Day (usually about the Monday in Wasdale Head; Tuesday in Eskdale). To make sure that farmers did not send simply dump the wool from their oldest sheep as a tithe payment, this was divided into two categories-
- Tithe of hogg wool- one tenth of the wool from sheep which had been born in the spring of the previous year.
- Tithe of elder sheep.
In theory, the wool tithes could also be converted to money payments, but in Eskdale and Wasdale this rarely happened.
The dispute concerned the relationship between the tithe of lambs and the tithe of hogg wool, and was the sequel to an earlier case involving the late Margaret Sharpe, mother of current defendant Joseph. Mrs Sharpe's reasoning seems to have been that if the tithe of lambs were paid in kind by giving one lamb in ten to the tithe owner, then the tithe owner would automatically be getting one tenth of the hogg wool when those same lambs were a year older, and that the two-shilling modus payment had been calculated to take account of this, so no separate tithe of hogg wool was payable. The catch was that in living memory nobody else had seen the situation in that way.