In December 2015, data website TheGenealogist, in partnership with The National Archives, completed the first stage in its historic digitisation of tithe records for England and Wales. This is one of most important projects to be undertaken by any genealogy company in recent years and will provide a wealth of detail about your ancestors, rich and poor, and the way in which they lived. Many family historians focus on using records that relate directly to their ancestors such as birth, marriage and death certificates, parish registers and census records. While these records were created specifically to record details of the population, tithe records were created primarily to put an end to an out-of-date tax on agricultural output. You might think that this is not the best source from which to learn more about your ancestors, but that could not be further from the truth!

The tax in question, known as the tithe, was an ancient levy on agricultural output: a tenth of any profit made from crops, livestock and also products such as eggs and milk was taken by the church and, from the mid-16th century, also by secular land owners who had bought land previously owned by the church before the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Although now in the hands of laymen, the right to levy tithes went with the land, and this right could also be sold on as a separate commodity. These secular tithe owners are referred to as ‘lay impropriators’. By the 19th century tithes were a headache for all concerned: the tithe owners, the tithe payers and also the government. Tithe was an outdated from of tax in many ways and much resented by those who had to pay it.

In many places it was still paid ‘in kind’, which meant the tax was not collected as a cash payment, but by handing over a proportion of the farmer’s livestock or crops to the tithe owner each year. He then had to find somewhere to store them. Many tithe owners built large barns for this purpose and some of these survive today. Most people resented having to pay a tax to lay impropriators, while tithes paid to the Church of England were resented by those people who belonged to other(Nonconformist) churches. By the early 18th century, long years of war with France and a series of disastrous harvests meant the economy was in a sorry state and farmers were hardest hit. Meanwhile, the government was trying to encourage them to introduce new farming methods, which would result in greater agricultural output and which would help feed the growing population. Few could afford to make these improvements, however, and many of those who could refused to do so when their profits would be drained by the unfair tithe system. This growing resentment contributed to a series of riots across the country but worst in the South East. Ever fearful of social unrest, the government identified tithe payments as a major course of the problems. Between 1817 and 1836 there were a number of failed attempts to pass bills to change the tithe system through parliament but this was only finally achieved in 1836 when the Tithe Commutation Act was passed. The act changed the tithe system forever, abolishing all payments in kind and replacing them with a much fairer system of tithe rent charges based on the seven-year average value of wheat, barley and oats to avoid hitting farmers hardest when harvests were poor.

The Project

TheGenealogist's massive tithe project began in 2014 and is the only project to include all tithe maps for England and Wales. There were over 12,000 maps and their accompanying schedules to be filmed. The original records are held at The National Archives in Kew and county record offices. The first step was to scan the microfilm copies of both types of records make them available to the public as soon as possible. Apart from filming the records, transcriptions of the schedules also had to be made in order to create a searchable index. Generally speaking, each schedule contains hundreds of entries relating to the various plots of land that made up each tithe district – over the whole collection there are 14 million entries. Each entry had to be linked to a pin pointer on the tithe map to enable the plot to be easily located on the map with a simple mouse click. While tithe maps were not produced to standard specification they do have certain things in common. All are large-scale maps and the great majority use colour to help depict features in the landscape, such as houses (pink), outbuildings (grey) and watercourses (blue). They also indicate boundaries, roads and paths and of course individual plots of land while some maps depict woodland and hop gardens. The maps cover not just rural, but also urban areas, since tithes date back to the tenth century when few towns had developed. The next stage of TheGenealogist's project involves scanning the original colour tithe maps. This can only be done once each map has been assessed by TNA’s conservation team and any necessary conservation work has been carried out. The first of these will be released this year starting with Surrey, Northumberland and Westmorland. TheGenealogist is funding the conservation process and so helping to preserve these maps for posterity.