Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 336

Tithe apportionments have long been one of the foundational documents of agrarian history, historical geography, and local and regional history. The parish-by-parish surveys of land ownership, state of cultivation, approximate value and tithe liability are the closest thing we possess in Britain to a European-style cadastral survey. Indeed, as Eric Evans’s concise but highly informative historical introduction to this volume makes clear, the tithe commutation process could have provided just such a thing. The plan by the superintendant of surveying, Lieut. Robert Dawson, for a series of detailed parochial maps all drawn on a common scale was vetoed on grounds of cost. The tithe apportionment schedules and their maps (where they survive) provide us with one of the few truly detailed, comprehensive and publicly accessible historical datum points for ownership, tenancy, cultivation and ecclesiastical property. It is particularly welcome, therefore, that the Worcestershire Historical Society, Worcestershire Historical Environment and Archaeology Service, the National Lottery (Local Heritage Initiative) and local history groups, and the editor, Peter Walker, have combined to produce this extremely useful transcription of the Worcestershire apportionments.

The volume is available in hard copy to members of the WHS, and as a CD-ROM to non-members. The CD-ROM contains an electronic version of the published introductory volume. It begins with an introduction to the editorial practices and some local recording peculiarities within the Worcestershire apportionments. This is followed by a brief overview of the project to transcribe these awards, and then by Eric Evans’s guide to the parliamentary history of the tithe commutation process. This is particularly valuable because it explains why the apportionments eventually took the form of parish-by-parish surveys, and commutations of tithes as rent-charge apportionments. It also devotes some time to the subsequent history of the tithe, and the process of tithe redemption (in exchange for government stock) initiated in 1936, and completed in October 1977. The introduction also contains a county map, indicating the location of surviving awards (generally good, but with fewer in the south-east corner of the county), and a hand-list of parishes and awards.

The awards themselves are found on the CD-ROM as Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets. For each surviving parochial apportionment the editor has provided an ‘Introduction’ (an abstract of the summary at the beginning of each apportionment schedule), and separate Excel ‘worksheets’ listing the summary of the survey arranged by landowner, the full plot-by-plot survey, and a summary of the apportionment arranged by landowner. The editor notes that he checked the surveys thoroughly, beginning with the arithmetic of the summary and then moving to the full listing, checking tenant-by-tenant. He concludes that most of the rent-charge valuations appear very rounded, and allotted to the entire farm or holding, rather than being apportioned according to the value of individual fields. There was also occasional confusion over ownership, with un-enfranchised copyholders of the Dean and Chapter of Worcester being described as ‘owners’ in the parishes of Doddenham and Broadwas. The editor also supplies a list of individual recording quirks identified in particular parishes.

This amounts to a fascinating and extremely valuable resource, one that fully repays the time, effort and collective endeavour required to produce it. The searchable spreadsheets will be a very important source for agrarian and local historians, and provide a new level of detail that should stimulate research into Worcestershire’s agrarian history. The volume also conjures the ‘pipe-dream of the possibilities that might arise from national transcription of the tithe apportionments’. While that prospect will probably always remain a fantasy, this volume certainly indicates how it should be done.