This marvellous presentation was given to the Thursley History Society by Sean Edwards in 2013. His talk was introduced by Peter Clake
Sean covered these areas in his presentation and talk:
THURSLEY HISTORY SOCIETY MEETING, 24 January 2013:
THE THURSLEY TITHE MAPS
PETER CLAKE: WHAT ARE TITHES?
Peter Clake opened proceedings with a brief talk putting Sean’s talk into its wider historical context. The tithe was a system that had existed for over a thousand years in England before the Thursley Tithe Map of 1849 was produced. Originally it was a payment of one tenth of yearly profits from farming made by parishioners in the locality to support their local parish church and clergy. At first the payments were ‘in kind’, consisting of grain, wood, vegetables and other products. Tithe barns were built to accommodate them.
Over the centuries some changes were made in the system – the most important being the substitution of money payments for payments ‘in kind’ in some areas. Also, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, much church land passed into lay control and local lords of the manor took on the tithe rights.
However the system was still functioning in the early nineteenth century and Thursley’s tithe map of 1849 was a direct consequence of the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. This Act laid down that a money payment should be made in all parishes. It also appointed Tithe Commissioners to go round the country and get up to date evidence of the boundaries, acreage and the state of cultivation of each tithe area.
This extensive survey led eventually to the drawing of official maps for each parish and the Thursley Tithe Map of 1849 gives us valuable insight into our area, as we were to learn from Sean’s talk.
SEAN EDWARDS: A WALK THROUGH TIME
CRITCHET FIELDS
Sean explained how his interest started in 2005 from a reference to the ‘Critchet Fields’ somewhere in Thursley, mentioned in Walter de Gray Birch’s Cartularium Saxonicum (188593) as being part of the bounds of the Bishop of Winchester’s manor in 1150 AD. This meant a trip to the Surrey History Centre in Woking to see the Tithe Maps and their associated Apportionment of the Rent-Charge in lieu of Tithes volume. The maps gave only numbers but no names, which had to be found from the unindexed volume by a dip-stick approach – timeconsuming. But the reward was the wealth of information serendipitously revealed. The Critchet Fields were found running along Smallbrook Valley north of Brook Cottage, with the Upper Critchet Field being just below the Cricket Pavilion, prompting a bad joke about the origin of cricket in Thursley. In fact the name probably derives from the Saxon ‘Crudan Sceat’, meaning Cruda’s nook of land.
BEAN LAND
Other parts of Thursley looked at included the core of the village, Punch Bowl Farm, and the ‘Tweedsmuir Camp’ site, previously ‘Bean Land’. Field beans were probably grown there since their persistent roots help to protect against erosion on slopes in winter. Old photographs from the Thursley History Society archives provided lovely images from 1901, pre-Tweedsmuir and post-bean, including of the now-drained canal and ruined stone bridge. Much had evidently been well-kept parkland with the canal as a feature, where Thursley ladies in boaters elegantly desported themselves.
DVDs AND WARPED LAYERS
The publication in 2011 of the Tithe Maps and Apportionments on DVD, encouraged further work on the tithe maps from both Thursley and Elstead – present day Thursley includes parts of both 1849 parishes. Comparing the 1849 map with present Ordnance Survey maps showed both the astonishing accuracy of the tithe maps on a small scale, but a fairly large drift across distances – and also some lack of communication between the Thursley and Elstead mappers along the Smallbrook mutual boundary. The combined tithe maps were overlaid (as a Photoshop layer) onto one of several existing layered maps of Thursley that Sean had been working on, and re-sized and rotated to fit as well as possible. But the large-scale drift meant that when some parts were aligned, then other parts were fields adrift. So the tithe map layer was then ‘warped’ in Photoshop, like a stretchy table-cloth, area by area, so it aligned overall. The tithe map layer was then accurately redrawn.
This layering – like overlaid acetate sheets – allowed direct comparisons between the tithe map and modern day maps. It also allowed comparison with the other layers, including geology, local names, footpaths, maps from other periods, and so on – 30 layers in the main mapset, with other layered mapsets at different scales. For maps of different dates, it allows fading from one time to another – a “walk through time”.
The present extent of the transformed tithe map is from north of the Truxford Kink, south to include the habitations in the Punch Bowl. It extends east from Pitch Place, to beyond the old Red Lion pub. A similar sized extension to the north-east includes the Hammer Ponds. Further extensions are ongoing.
THURSLEY COMMON
Sean also showed his first Thursley mapping in 1967/8 (now digitized and incorporated as a layer), of 26 acres of the boggy vegetation of the Common; this required 6,000 triangulated points using an old army ‘pill-box’ prismatic compass. In 2006 he found that GPS made mapping of the big fire easier. Computers now enable accurate measurements – for example the fire, allowing for outliers and inliers, covered 565 acres.
THE TOLL HOUSE
We then looked closer at a few areas, including the old Toll House on the London/Portsmouth road. By comparing all available maps, the site of the toll house could be located to within a metre or so. It had stood on the north-bound side of the road, but the pre-tunnel A3 was moved further to the west and the site buried under the layby on the south-bound carriageway where the dualling ceased. When the tunnel was built, the road moved back east, with the site returning to the edge of the north-bound, just as it had started. The site, somewhat disturbingly, is almost exactly where the Bestival coach left the road on 10 September 2012, and for which no explanation has yet been confirmed. Photos were shown of our vice-president Michael O’Brien standing just above the site, with the oak tree that was hit, behind him.