This book describes the nature of tithe payments, the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 and the survey of over 11,000 parishes.

A reference work on the tithe maps of England and Wales for historians, geographers and lawyers.

This guide shows you how three great land surveys can provide information on your ancestor's home as well as historical snapshots of your area. The tithe, Valuation Office and National Farm surveys were comparable to the Domesday Book in their coverage. Spanning the period 1836-1943, they provide abundant information on rural and urban localities; on dwellings, settlements and landscapes; and on individual householders and tenants, farmers and industrialists. The surveys are of value to family and local historians. This guide is your companion to researching these records. The text explains why and how the surveys were made, and shows you how to identify and interpret the records that will put your ancestors or neighbourhood 'on the map'.

Brings to life a fascinating page of history in a scholarly but highly readable account of the "tithe war". During the 1930s, farming communities waged a campaign of "passive resistance" against Tithe Rentcharge, the modern version of medieval tithe. Led by the National Tithepayers' Association, farmers refused to pay the charge, disrupted auctions of seized stock and joined demonstrations to prevent action by bailiffs. The National Government condemned their "unconstitutional action", ruled out changes in the law and mobilised police to support the titheowners. Meanwhile, the Church of England and lay titheowners - including Oxford and Cambridge colleges, public schools and major landowners - sought to vindicate their right to tithe; in a particularly shameful episode, the Church established a secret company to buy taken produce and remove it from farms. This "tithe war" was fought outside farms, in the courts, in the press and in the wider arena of public opinion. It posed problems for the Church, legal system, and every political party; split the National Farmers' Union; and provided opportunities for the British Union of Fascists and other sections of the extreme right to cause disturbance. Drawing on extensive archival research, accounts in local newspapers, and private papers, John Bulaitis traces the evolution of what has been described as this "curious rural revolt", from the late nineteenth century to its climax in 1936, when the Tithe Act brought an end to this form of tax.

Throughout history the control of land has been the basis of political power. Cadastral maps - cartographic records of property ownership - played an important role in the rise of modern Europe as tools for the consolidation and extension of land-based national power. The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Properly Mapping, illustrated with 127 maps, traces the development and application of rural property mapping in Europe and European colonies from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. The authors go beyond traditional cartographic research, approaching the maps as political instruments rather than as simple geographical or historical tools. The result is an unprecedented examination of the political and economic forces behind the production of maps and advances in cartography, demonstrating how the seemingly neutral science of cartography became a political instrument for national interests. Beginning with a review of the roots of cadastral mapping in the Roman Empire, the authors concentrate on the use of cadastral maps in the Netherlands, France, England, the Nordic countries, the German lands, the territories of the Austrian Habsburgs, and the European colonies. During the seventeenth century, governments began to use maps to secure economic and political bases; by the nineteenth century, these maps had become tools for aggressive governmental control of land as tax bases, natural resources, and national territories. The culmination of extensive bibliographic and archival research made possible by the authors' considerable linguistic skills, this work draws from source materials in ten languages and spanning five centuries. It will remain thedefinitive source on the subject for years to come. The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State was awarded the 1991 Kenneth Nebenzahl Prize for the best new manuscript in the history of cartography.

Volume 34 of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies features eight essays that together demonstrate geographers' diverse scholarly engagement with the practise of their subject. There are two physical geographers (a Frenchman and an Englishman, both geomorphologists), a British historical geographer, a French colonial geographer, a Russian explorer-naturalist of Central Asia and Tibet, a British-born but long-time Australian resident and scholar of India, Pakistan, and the Pacific world, an American regionalist and eugenicist, and a Scots-born long-time American resident, one of the world's leading Marxist geographers and urban theorists. Equally but differently committed to geography's many specialisms, these subjects wonderfully illuminate the vibrancy – and the contradictions – behind the living of geographical lives.

This book is a historical study of the survey and mapping system of Palestine under the British Mandate. It traces the background and the reasoning behind the establishment of the survey programme, examines the foundations upon which the system was based, and strives to understand the motivation of those who implemented it. This study shows that the roots of the modern survey system of Palestine are to be sought in the Balfour Declaration and its implications regarding land in Palestine. The land issue was at the core of the mapping of Mandatory Palestine, and it remains as a core issue at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

"Out of the Hay and into the Hops explores the history and development of hop cultivation in the Weald of Kent together with the marketing of this important crop in the Borough at Southwark (where a significant proportion of Wealden hops were sold). A picture emerges of the relationship between the two activities, as well as of the impact this rural industry had upon the lives of the people engaged in it. Dr Cordle draws extensively on personal accounts of hop work to evoke a way of life now lost for good. Oral history, together with evidence from farm books and other sources, records how the steady routine of hop ploughing and dung spreading, weeding and spraying contrasted with the bustle and excitement of hop picking (bringing in, as it did, many itinerant workers from outside the community to help with the harvest) and the anxious period of drying the crop. For hops, prey to the vagaries of weather and disease, needed much care and attention to bring them to fruition. In early times their cultivation provided work for more people than any other crop. The diverse processes of hop cultivation are examined within the wider context of events such as the advent of rail and the effects of war, as are changes to the working practices and technologies used, and their reception and implementation in the Weald. Meanwhile, in the Borough, an enclave of hop factors and merchants, whose interests sometimes conflicted with those of the hop growers, arose and then suffered decline. A full account of this trade is presented, including day-to-day working practices, links with the Weald, and the changes in hop marketing following Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. This book provides readers with a fascinating analysis of some three hundred years of hop history in the Weald and the Borough. Hops still grow in the Weald; in the Borough, the Le May facade and the gates of the Hop Exchange are reminders of former trade."--Book description.

Until recently, historians tended to stress the perceived technological and ecological shortcomings of medieval agriculture. The ten essays assembled in this volume offer a contrary view. Based upon close documentary analysis of the demesne farms managed for and by lords, they show that, by 1300, in the most commercialized parts of England, production decisions were based upon relative factor costs and commodity prices. Moreover, when and where economic conditions were ripe and environmental and institutional circumstances favourable, medieval cultivators successfully secured high and ecologically sustainable levels of land productivity. They achieved this by integrating crop and livestock production into the sort of manure-intensive systems of mixed-husbandry which later underpinned the more celebrated output growth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If medieval agriculture failed to fulfill the production potential provided by wider adoption of such systems, this is more appropriately explained by the want of the kind of market incentives that might have justified investment, innovation, and specialization on the scale that characterized the so-called 'agricultural revolution', than either the lack of appropriate agricultural technology or the innate 'backwardness' of medieval cultivators.

This fascinating book looks at how local history developed from the antiquarian county studies of the sixteenth century through the growth of 'professional' history in the nineteenth century, to the recent past. Concentrating on the past sixty years, it looks at the opening of archive offices, the invigorating influence of family history, the impact of adult education and other forms of lifelong learning. The author considers the debates generated by academics, including the divergence of views over local and regional issues, and the importance of standards set by the Victoria County History (VCH). Also discussed is the fragmentation of the subject. The antiquarian tradition included various subject areas that are now separate disciplines, among them industrial archaeology, name studies, family, landscape and urban history. This is an authoritative account of how local history has come to be one of the most popular and productive intellectual pastimes in our modern society. Written by a practitioner who has spent more than twenty years teaching local history to undergraduates and M.A. students, as well as lecturing to local history societies, John Beckett is currently Director of the VCH. A remarkable book that will be of great interest to students and scholars of local history as well as amateur and professional genealogists.