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.

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.

In Greek and Roman Maps, O. A. W. Dilke follows the development of map-making skills, beginning in Babylonia and Egypt, through the contributions of Greek scientists and Roman administrators and surveyors, to the Age of Discovery. He provides examples of the full range of Greek and Roman maps, including town and building plans, itineraries and road maps, sea itineraries, and maps in art form. "It is an extremely useful book, packed with information, simply and succinctly expressed... there is no doubt that it was Greek theoretical thinking and a growing knowledge of geography, combined with the practical demands imposed upon the administrators of the Roman Empire, which led to the development and widespread use of maps more or less as we know them." -- Mary E. Hoskins Walbank, Echos du monde classique

This is a comparative study of the effects of local, regional and national changes of nine parishes in the Upper Eden Valley in north Westmorland during the Victorian years. The analysis of 65,000 records from these sources has given a rare, if not unique, insight into a series of rural parishes.