What are Tithe maps

Tithes were payments made from early times for the support of the parish church and its clergy. Originally these payments were made in kind (crops, wool, milk, young stock, etc.) and usually represented a tenth of the yearly production of cultivation or stock-rearing. Predial tithes were the products of crop husbandry - such as grain, woodland, vegetables.
Mixed tithes were the products of animal husbandry - such as calves, lambs, wool and milk.
Personal tithes were the profits of man's labour - such as fishing or milling (and largely insignificant after 1549).
It is more usual to refer to tithes as "Great Tithes" and "Small Tithes". The great tithes, also known as the "rectorial tithes", were payable to the rector and generally comprised the predial tithes of corn, grain, hay and wood while the small tithes, also known as the "vicarial tithes", were payable to the vicar and comprised all other tithes.
The ownership of tithe was a property right that could be bought and sold; leased or mortgaged; assigned to others. This resulted in many of the rectorial tithes passing into lay hands - particularly after the dissolution of the monasteries. These tithes then became the personal property of the new owners, or lay impropriators. After the sale of the tithes forfeited to the Crown in the 1530s, about 22.8% of the net value of tithes in Wales were held by lay impropriators at the time of commutation in 1836. A vicar usually continued to have the spiritual care of the parish and to receive the vicarial tithes.
From early times money payments had begun to be substituted for payments in kind. Fixed sums (moduses) were substituted for some categories of production, particularly for livestock and perishable produce; while adjustable payments known as compositions, which were sometimes assessed annually, were increasingly being substituted in local arrangements in latter years
Tithes were still payable in almost all Welsh parishes (and in a majority of English parishes too) in 1836. The early nineteenth century had been an age of much political, social and economic reform. There had been an increasing demand for the Commutation of Tithe (some reformers campaigned for the abolition of tithe) and in 1836 the government of the day successfully steered the Tithe Commutation Bill through Parliament. The Act received the Royal Assent on 13 August 1836. It was this Act that was to allow the substitution of a money payment - the tithe rent-charge - for payment in kind.
The 1836 Act set up the Tithe Commission headed by three Commissioners sitting in London: William Balmire, Thomas Wentworth Buller and the Rev. Richard Jones. William Balmire was the chairman. A Cumberland farmer, he had to resign as M.P. on his appointment to the Commission. The Rev. Richard Jones was the Archbishop of Canterbury's nomination.
The first tasks of the Commissioners were to ascertain to what extent commutation had already taken place, and also to establish the boundaries of every unit in which tithes were paid separately. This unit was known as a tithe district to distinguish it from a parish or township. Enquiries were directed to every parish or township listed in the census returns. The results of these enquiries are found in the Tithe Files (Class IR18 in the Public Record Office). There are 1,132 such files for Wales and they include all districts in Wales, not only those places where tithe was still paid in 1836. Tithe districts are usually parishes, but a minority are townships, and a handful are chapelries, hamlets, extra-parochial places, many of which enjoyed separate status solely for tithe commutation purposes.
In Wales only 41 files do not have a corresponding tithe map. Of these 41, 5 refer to duplicate files under alternative names for the same district; 9 refer to districts already included in other tithe districts. 14 of the 41 files, therefore, do not refer to defined tithe districts. Of the remaining 27 tithe districts for which no map was prepared we find that in Ifton (Monmouthshire) the tithe had been commuted in the enclosure of 1776. In another 11 districts all the tithe rent-charge was merged before apportionment and the remaining 15 relate to districts where no tithe was paid in 1836, and probably had always been free of tithe as very small extra-parochial districts (9) or former monastic lands (6). Declarations of merger were prepared for these districts also to regularise the position.
The contents of these files have been described in detail in Roger J.P. Kain, An atlas and index of the tithe files of mid-nineteenth century England and Wales (Cambridge, 1986).
There were two distinct stages to the commutation process; first the fixing of a global assessment for the tithe district and then the apportioning of the tithe rent-charge on the individual properties.
The maps vary considerably in accuracy depending on the skill of the many hundreds of local surveyors employed on the task. More than 200 different surveyors worked in Wales.
The first specification (British Parliamentary Papers, Session 1837, Vol. XLI) 405 for the mapping proved to be over-ambitious. This was drawn up by one of the Assistant Commissioners, Lieutenant R.K. Dawson of the Ordnance Survey, and was intended to be at the scale of 3 chains to the inch [1:2376]. Amending legislation had to be passed in 1837 permitting the presentation of less accurate maps, often on a smaller scale. Many of these maps were compiled from existing estate maps and involved very little new surveying. The Tithe Commissioners refused their seal to inferior plans. In Wales only 50 of 1,091 were sealed as first-class maps, approximately only 4.5%, all except three being in Monmouthshire or Breconshire. The remainder were simply certified as being the documents on which the tithe rent-charge apportionment was based, i.e. second-class maps. They are a very mixed bag varying greatly in scale; there are some at the prescribed scale of 1:2376 (3 chains to the inch) which for some now inexplicable reason were not sealed as first-class maps; while others are little more than topographical sketches (e.g. Llangeitho, Cardiganshire [1:7920]; Nantglyn, Denbighshire [1:21,120]) and of no value for information about property boundarie

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Amlwch tithe map 1841

The following table lists people and property from the tithe map

Listed by owner

Listed by property

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