The 1842 tithe map
We know that, in 1647, the Harvey family bought virtually all the land and houses in Hempstead. For many years, the village archive has contained eight sheets of a tithe map dated 1842 (when the mediaeval system of tithes was being replaced by a form of land tax), which divide the village into over 600 fields and plots, each assigned a unique number. There is also a key, running to some 20 pages, which lists each of these fields in number order, together with its acreage and use (arable, pasture, woodland) and the names of both the owner and the occupier.
This all adds up to a considerable quantity of data, but little in the way of useful information. So we invested in some Sellotape and highlight pens, pasted the various sheets together and set to work, with the following very rough, but revealing, result.
The reconstructed map above shows that the two principal landowners in 1842 were John Drummond (orange) and Robert George Cecil Fane (green). Furthermore, their respective holdings map fairly closely to the mediaeval manors of Hempstead Hall and Crouchmans (later Wincelow Hall).
So who were Messrs Drummond and Fane? Well, it turns out that John Drummond was a banker who, in 1816, married Georgiana, the second daughter of Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey (of Trafalgar fame). Robert Fane was a judge whose ‘judicial bearing was marked by an eccentricity of manner’, but whose decisions were rarely reversed on appeal. In 1835, he married Eliab’s youngest daughter, Isabella. It seems that Hempstead may have been parcelled up in marriage settlements, although the details have not yet been worked out and there are still some anomalies to be resolved.
Looking at the tithe map in this way has thrown up at least three intriguing puzzles, one of which is now well on the way to being solved. The Strange Case of the Random Glebe Lands and the Curious Incident of the Disappearing Wood (see below) remain for any aspiring Sherlocks.
The Whittlesford Charity Farms
This mystery concerns a narrow strip of land of about 65 acres in the north-west of the parish (shown in blue in the enlarged section opposite), which seems to drive a wedge between two blocks of land, each owned by Robert Fane. Centred on Spitland, and divided into two blocks by Wincelow Hall Road, this strip is noted in the key as belonging to the ‘Whittlesford Charity’.
Going back 70 years, the 1770 survey of the Harvey lands (at page 63) also shows this area of land, described as ‘Westley’s Spitland Charity Farm to Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire’.
With the help of the headteacher of William Westley Primary School, Whittlesford and the Cambridgeshire Archives in Ely, we have pieced together the following story.
Lucy Biddulph was born in 1685 in Polesworth, Warwickshire. Her father Michael, a London merchant, was educated at St Catharine’s College Cambridge: he entered Parliament in 1690 as the member for Tamworth.
More importantly for our story, Lucy’s mother was a Wale. The Wales were an old Radwinter family: Lucy’s great grandfather had bought New House Farm in 1565 and the farm stayed in Wale hands until 1768. It seems probable, therefore that at some point in the early 1700s, Lucy paid a visit to her Essex relatives and there met the young William Westley, who had been born in Whittlesford in 1684. Whatever the circumstances of their meeting, Lucy and William were married some time before 1711. .
We don’t yet know how the Spitlands farm came into the hands of the Wale family. There is some suggestion that, in the fourteenth century, the land was owned by the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jersualem, However, it seems highly likely that, some time in the 1600s, the farms formed part of the dowry of Lucy’s grandmother. When Lucy’s grandfather died, the farm would have passed to her father and later formed part of Lucy’s own dowry on her marriage to William. If so, the land passed, in just three generations, from the Wales to the Biddulphs to the Westleys.
The farm was let to tenants, generating an income for William. We have no record of who farmed the land during William’s lifetime but in 1770, the tenant was James Moore and, as an interesting aside, we know from the tithe map of 1842 that the farmer at this time was Joshua Brazier, who was also the landlord of Hempstead’s Royal Oak.
William Westley established himself in Cambridge as a grocer and seems to have prospered commercially. Life at home, however, was much less happy. Within eight years of their marriage, Lucy had borne at least five children, none of whom survived long enough to be baptised. Robert, the first born, died in 1711; followed by Elizabeth in 1714, twins Richard and William in 1715, Lucy in 1718 and Bridget in 1719. Another child, William, is entered in the parish baptism record for 2 September 1723 but this entry has been subsequently struck through. Whatever the reason for this, the child also died in infancy – on 24 September, two months after his father.
William’s memorial in Whittlesford Church differs in a couple of respects from this account. First, it lists another Lucy, who is not recorded in the parish register as being either baptised or buried; this may have been a confusion with William’s wife. Also, the memorial refers to a child ‘Biddulph’, which seems to be a simple misreading of ‘Bridget’, whose burial in 1719 is clearly recorded in the register.
William’s untimely death in 1723 at the age of 38 seems to have been foreseen, as he made a Will immediately before he died: the preamble says that he is “sick and weak in body but of sound and disposing mind and memory (God be praised)”. The Will is rambling and repetitive (it is included below together with a transcript and experienced trust lawyers are invited to review and comment: redrafting it would make a good exercise for their trainees!). It makes several references to “my loving Wife Lucy Westley and the decease of such child or children as she is now bigg withal”. This may just have been lawyers’ caution, but it seems very likely that the reference to “child or children” in the context of Lucy’s pregnancy was influenced by William’s experience of fathering twins eight years earlier. It also suggests that he was not alive to see the birth – nor the death two months later – of his final son, William.
In any event, the relevant provision of the Will is that the Spitland farm does not pass directly to Lucy but to three trustees (including a John Wale of Saffron Walden, possibly a relation. While Lucy benefits from the income during her lifetime, on her death everything is to be used to establish a charity school for the children of Whittlesford.
The Will is quite prescriptive about the school and gives us a good idea of the perceived importance of educating girls.
“I will that thirty boys and fifteen girls….. shall be admitted into the said charity school and….. that the managers of the said charity have the power of choosing and putting in all Schoolmaster and Schoolmistress to teach the said boys in writing and reading and casting accompts and to teach the said Girls in reading Sewing knitting….. and to allow the Master fifteen pounds per annum and the Mistress five pounds per annum……”
Following William’s death, the school and parish websites say that Lucy bitterly contested the Will until her death in 1737. We have found no evidence for this claim, which seems unlikely. First, we know that Lucy commissioned William’s monument to “preserve the memory of her deceased husband and of this excellent charity’. And secondly, since Lucy benefited from the lifetime income and had no surviving children, it is hard to see why she would have wanted to contest the will (although one could imagine a Wale trustee being keen to see the land revert to the family’s ownership).
Nevertheless, we do know that after William’s death the land was conveyed to trustees, who set up a school in the guildhall. According to a later trustee, Ebenezer Hollick, the trustees then set about embezzling the money, depleting the funds available until the school had to close. The villagers successfully took the matter to the Chancery Court and in 1771 a scheme was made which finally complied with William’s Will.
But it was not all plain sailing from there. From 1805, the schoolmaster was a ‘bad tempered ex marine’ who had lost his right arm at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1901, but who kept the other arm busy with his whip. At this time, the boys and girls were taught in separate rented cottages, and by 1854 the boys’ schoolroom was in a ‘ruinous shed’ that had formerly been a blacksmith’s shop. Eventually, in 1859, the Westley endowment was used to build a new schoolhouse on Whittlesford High Street.
Fast forward to 1972, when the school moved to new premises on Mill Road, where it survives to this day as William Westley C of E Primary School. The school still celebrates William Westley Day on the Friday nearest to the anniversary of William’s death, when the children go to church to hear the story of the man whose lands in Hempstead gave existence to their school.
The original of William Westley’s Will
The pattern of Glebe lands
A glebe is an area of land within a parish (often including the parsonage house/rectory and grounds) which is used to support a parish priest. The land may be owned by the church, or its profits may be reserved to the church. Glebe land can include strips in the open-field system which we all learned about when we studied the feudal system at primary school, or in some cases may be grouped together into a compact plot of land or smallholding. Glebe land was either granted by a lord of the manor or accumulated from donations of particular pieces of land.
At first sight, the tithe map of 1842 shown above seems to show a completely random assortment of glebe lands scattered around the parish. These are the individual fields highlighted in yellow. There are sixteen individual parcels of land, amounting in total to just over 57 acres, which are recorded as belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury. To this must be added an acre of Vicarage Meadow next to St Andrew’s which is listed as belonging to the incumbent who, in 1842, as confirmed by the list of incumbents displayed in the church, was Rev Jeremiah W. Carver.
There is no obvious pattern to these individual bits of glebe land. For example, this enlargement of the south western corner of the tithe map shows four such isolated parcels. The largest lies at the bend of an old track which connects Moss’s farm to the place on Radwinter Road where many of us will remember standing in 2014 to watch the Tour de France.
Reference to another document – the survey of lands held by the Harvey family in 1770 – makes slightly more sense of this, as it contains (at pages 65 and 66) a list of the Hempstead glebe lands separated into the farms of which they formed part. At that date, all of the four parcels above were held with Anser Gallows Farm, while other groupings of glebe land were associated with Great Darkins (Dawkins) and the Boarded Barn (Wincelow Hall). This still doesn’t explain why the glebe lands are exactly where they are, but it does at least explain why they are scattered so widely around the parish.
Curiously, the one piece of land which we know today as the Glebe, the area to the rear of the Village Hall, is not shown as having been glebe land. At the time of the tithe map, it was known as Steeple Meadow and was owned by John Drummond and let to George Moore from Miller’s House, who operated the windmill on the other side of Church Hill.
Where did the Wood go?
The tithe map of 1842 shows a wood, known as Latchley Wood, just within the eastern boundary of the parish. It is adjacent to a smaller, L-shaped wood known as Lakers (now Lakehouse) Grove and, at its southern extremity, connects to Spains Wood in the parish of Finchingfield.
In the next fifty years, Latchley Wood disappeared completely from the map.
There may be nothing unusual here: the destruction of English woodlands has been well documented. But the timing is slightly strange, as the growth of the railways during the 19th century enabled coal to be transported more widely and reduced the need for wood as fuel. Nor was Latchley wood cleared and turned into conifer plantations, as happened in many other places. In fact the current OS map (bottom right in the figure above) shows a reservoir in the centre of the depleted area.
The other curious feature is that the 1842 map records the owner of Latchley Wood as being George Gibson (1818-1883), a Quaker philanthropist from Saffron Walden. The Gibson family owned a brewery, a chain of public houses, a bank and a number of large residential houses. George Gibson built the splendid building on the Market Square which was until recently a branch of Barclays, and was instrumental in bringing the railway to the town. Intriguingly for our purposes, Gibson was also an eminent botanist and naturalist.
I sense a story here, which someone may want to follow up!