The agreement having been made, the rent-charge decided, the draft apportionment made and the approval of the landowners obtained the last thing to do was to write up everything that had been agreed to and send it to the Tithe Commission for final approval and the official seal of the Commission. When received at the Tithe Commission the draft apportionment underwent a fourteen point examination and the map a five point examination [In Depth- The Tithe Commission.] Any queries were returned to the valuer for clarification. In Martin’s case this can be seen at Frome Vauchurch.

Once all points of contention had been agreed the final document that was forwarded was known as the Instrument of Apportionment.  Original images of all of England and Wales tithe commutations have been published by the Genealogist. Here you see the valuer at work, his writing, his occasional errors or revisions, his attempts to reduce the number of pages and so on. As the images are copyrighted I have not used them here but luckily there survives at Dorset History Centre a draft copy of the instrument that was made by John Martin and that is illustrated here. In real life the final Instrument would have been almost exactly the same. Both were large documents, the closest modern equivalent would be A3 and written on paper.

As it is the definitive legal record of the commutation process it does not record or describe the various meetings and processes that led to its creation. Any such details, if they survive at all, will be found in the Tithe File of each parish and the National Archives explains how to find out if any such documents exist within the file.

The instrument is typically made up of four parts. The first part is a re-statement of the original terms of the voluntary agreement or the award made by the assistant tithe commissioner but the date on the instrument is not the date the agreement was made in the parish but the date it was confirmed by the Commission.

The second part, the most important part of the whole process to the tithe owner, is a single page detailing how much wheat, barley or oats could be bought with the tithe-rent. Occasionally if the agreement was short it is crammed into the bottom of one of the other pages.

The third part, which is usually the longest, details the holdings of the land owners and the share of the rent-charge they had to pay. At the end is a summary page of the same.

The final page of the third part bears the signatures and seal of the commissioners who confirmed the apportionment. Attached -annexed – to the instrument was a map of the parish although usually this has been subsequently detached. On occasions there will be found additional pages titled “Altered Apportionment of the Parish of..” which were produced when land usage altered at some later time.

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The first three pages of the draft apportionment made by John Martin at Rampisham.

The first page of every instrument begins with the same words,

The details were hand written on a pre-printed book. Two companies were used by John Martin and he appears even handed. For the Draft apportionment at Rampisham he used one by Shaw and Sons of London whilst the final Instrument was printed by J A Patrice of 3 Clifford’s Inn London. Sometimes, as at Child Okeford the usual printers endorsement, at the top of the page, is not included and some like the Maiden Newton commutation were written out on parchment by hand. Very rarely [and never by John Martin] the instrument was completed in print. How much time pre-printing actually saved is debatable in the example given below the parts in dark red were written in by hand.

When the instrument resulted from a voluntary agreement the entire document is usually in one hand and appears to have been written out in its entirety by the apportioner. The Rampisham apportionment, like all of Martin’s apportionments appears to have been written by him and the handwriting is unmistakeably his [1]. When the ATC made an award he usually wrote out the first part of the award and the apportioner the apportionment part. The next part tells us whether the tithe were commuted by voluntarily or by compulsion. In Rampisham it was voluntarily as the word “Agreement” is included.

It is interesting to see how particular they were in recording information. Note that the Agreement had already been sent to the Tithe Commission for ratification. Although the agreement is restated in the Instrument of Apportionment they are clear to make the point that what follows in the Instrument is only a copy of the original agreement, not the original.

Although I have mentioned the Agreement in general terms we now see the details recorded in what were called the ‘Articles of Agreement’. The TCA specified what had to be included in the articles. They had to include an account of the various meetings that had been held between landowners and tithe owners, and the date the agreement had been made. The names of the tithe owners and others who had an interest in the tithe are given and there had to be a statement confirming that the requisite authority to make the agreement, had been obtained. With minor changes of names, venues and dates the articles are the same for virtually every parish in the country.

Next comes a statement as to the amount of rent-charge that should be paid to the rector and/or the vicar or curate of the parish, together with the amount of rent-charge given in lieu of the tithe of Glebe land.

In many parishes the identity of the Rector was relatively simple but it was not always so. Details will be mentioned under each commutation later but one of the most complicated was that at Stratton. The rector at Stratton had been a lay impropriator, John Trenchard, who at his death had bequeathed the right to claim the tithe to the Revd. George Pickard. As he had no clerical duties in Stratton Pickard was not claiming the tithe by virtue of any religious right but as a layman. However Pickard was a lucky man for he happened also to be the ecclesiastical rector at Warmwell where he also claimed the tithe. The iniquity of the tithe system is here exemplified. For Pickard received £275 rent-charge from Stratton, whilst the curate at Stratton, Robert Albion Cox, who did all the clerical work, was only entitled to the money arising from the modus and the villagers gardens, valued at a mere £5 per year. Luckily for him he held a second or plural curacy at Charminster which was worth £17 per year. Not a lot of money for a clergyman.

Note the rule about the Glebe land. This was land that had, in ancient times, been given by the lord of the manor or other donors, to the incumbent of the manor or parish for their support. As the church did not pay tithe to the church the owner of the Glebe would not pay tithe but if it was rented to someone else – that was a different matter.

Frequently, there was an additional clause in the agreement that specified the date when the tithes were extinguished in favour of the rent-charge:

As the instrument of commutation is a restatement of the original agreement these signatures do not normally appear in it, although of course they were attached to the original agreement sent to the Tithe Commission [see above].

This clause, which appears in many of the commutations, is redolent with significance and highly symbolic. It makes it clear that the tithe, that ancient payment, commanded by God, was henceforth abolished- by man. Gone was all trace of the Levitical tradition with its implied obligation to maintain the structure of the church and provide alms to the poor; the tithe-rent charge was simply another form of property to be bought and sold.

The next part of the agreement comprises certain information that was required by the act- what were known as schedules. The first of these schedules listed the total area of the parish, together with all the areas of land subject to tithe in the parish. Most apportionments include phrases such as, “contains by estimation” or “contains by admeasurement” or by “statute measure” xy or z acres. This might be thought to indicate that the area in one parish was guessed at in some cases and measured in others. In fact there appears to be no significance to these different terms, at least in so far as Martin’s commutations are concerned, for he uses the word estimation in parishes where we know he was involved in surveying. In a footnote Whalley notes that in the agreement the commissioners expected only estimated quantities and his only advice was that it was best to ensure that the total area of the separate quantities listed should add up to the stated gross quantity for the parish. A fairly elementary precaution one would think. Despite this the measurement at Rampisham seems remarkably accurate.

The areas that had to be listed included the arable lands, meadow, pasture, orchard, woodland, hops, glebe land and any land that was exempt from tithe, or the monetary payments that were sometimes made in lieu of tithing in kind.

The next part of the schedule listed all moduses, prescriptive payments, customary payments and exemptions from tithe.

Next comes a decleration and the calculation of the amount of wheat oats and barley discussed earlier.

Now I John Martin of Evershot in the County of Dorset having been duly appointed Valuer to apportion the Total Sum agreed to be paid by way of Rent Charge in lieu of Tithes amongst the several lands of the said Parish of Rampisham Do hereby apportion the Rent Charge as follows :

Gross Rent Charge payable to the Tithe Owner in lieu of Tithes for the Parish of Rampisham in the County of Dorset Two hundred and eight Pounds

Value in Imperial Bushels and Decimal parts of an Imperial Bushel of Wheat Barley and Oats : viz.

The Rampisham calculation was the only entry on an A3 page of the draft apportionment.

Following this comes the table of apportionment. There appears to have been no standard way of ordering the results. Sometimes the landowners were listed alphabetically, sometimes by size of holding but in the case of of Rampisham there appears to be no particular order other than that the first mentioned is Revd. Arthur Johnson – the lord of the manor.

A number of documents have survived from this commutation. The first is a book of particulars organised by plot number.

From the book of particulars.

The second appears to be his working draft; It is a simple note book in which he has written his own headings and in which he doodles as was his wont.

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In the view below we can see that he recorded not only the area of the land in ink but also it’s value, inserted in pencil. The next inked column although not titled is in fact the rent-charge for that plot. What the remaining pencilled column is for is not known, except that some entries have a second column repeating the rent charge to the right of this one.

That this is a working document is shown by various deletions and pencil additions.

The final draft, presumably the one that was shown to the ATC and the landowners was produced on a printed form and mimics the final instrument. There is no practical difference between them. At the end of the instrument is a summary page.

As a landowner Martin himselfhad to pay 5s rent-charge.

In total the Instrument of Apportionment took up thirty three pages and at the end was signed by John Martin and then sent to London. There the Tithe Commission examined it together with the ATC report and then attached their seal to the document with the following endorsement :

“We the undersigned Tithe Commissioners for England and Wales do hereby confirm the within written Apportionment In testimony whereof we have hereunto subscribed our respective names and caused our Official Seal to be affixed this third day of July in the year of our Lord One thousand eight hundred and forty”

William Blamire Rd [Richard] Jones

Aftermath

The commutation work could not all be completed at once and there is some evidence that parishes were prepared to wait for Martin to be come available whilst still availing themselves of his services. At Winterbourne Monkton for example we find him valuing the tithes in 1838,

As the agreement was not made until 1839 it suggests he was still valuing the tithe in the old manner. This would not be a surprise for there were no monetary compositions or moduses in the parish and until the agreement was made the tithe would still have to be valued.

At Wytherstone the commutation was not undertaken to 1840 but again Martin was there valuing the tithes in 1838.

The 1845 diary has a number of entries relating to payments to him from individual landowners that are specifically related to the commutations. They are almost always referred to as commutation rate or expenses and typical of such payments is this one from the Abbotsbury commutation in 1845,

We know from the tender he submitted at Corscombe that he charged a flat rate of a shilling per acre to commute a parish and the obvious thing would be to divide the total money due to the landowners in proportion to their holdings. Hawkins’ rent charge in the instrument of apportionment was £12 18s and the payment made to Martin is just over a half of this and this too is typical, in that these payments are often close to the rent-charge or half the rent-charge, but never exactly the same.

Whilst it is not clear which bank he paid this money into it was probably his own, the Wilts and Dorset Bank. In this example from Burton Bradstock, the amount Mr Roberts paid was close to the rent-charge – £25 10s 0d- but again not exactly the amount.

Sometimes the money paid him bore no relationship to the rent-charge,

Mr Udalls rent-charge was a mere 5 shillings. On another occasion the money he received came close to the rent-charge but the figures still don’t quite add up. Nathaniel Templeman owned some fifty acres in Belchalwell and one hundred and eleven acres in Gobson Common, Child Okeford. Martin commuted both parishes and at commutation in 1840 Templeman owed £17 7 0d rent charge on his acres in Belchalwell and 19 shillings on his acres at Child Okeford [thanks to a modus] making a total of £18 6s 0d. Templeman had died during the commutation and his agent paid Martin £18 8s 0d. The amount from each parish is clearly not in proportion to the rent-charge and it is not clear how these figures come to add up.

At Holy Trinity Dorchester Mr Coombs, the agent for Mr Wood the Rector, paid £3 12s 0d expenses as the costs of apportionment fell to the landowners not the rector so why he should have paid this is unusual and the reason not known.

If the rent-charge at Child Okeford was apportioned on the various qualities of the land in different amounts then it is probable that he charged his fees in the same way. We simply cannot be sure.

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