by Joan Clarke
Not long ago some old papers referring to Yealand Conyers, were kindly lent to the Mourholme Society for examination. The papers seemed, at first, as dry and uninteresting as any other legal document, but gradually it became plain that they were, in their legal way, telling the on- going story of a house in Yealand Conyers from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. The house passed through many hands. If there ever had been a time when it had been the home of one family over generations, that time had gone by the eighteenth century. This house, was as repeatedly mortgaged, sold and remodelled as any modern house.
The story begins in 1726 when Joseph Robinson, yeoman, decided he wanted to have his ‘customary holding’ converted to ‘fee simple’, that is he wanted to own the holding absolutely and not as a tenant of the Lord of the Manor. Other ‘customary’ tenants had gone the same road before him. By long custom and usage they all but owned their property anyway, since they could sell it or hand it on to their heirs just as they chose. The Lord of the Manor had to give formal consent, but as far as is known never refused it.
The lordship of Yealand Manor had been held for two centuries by the Middleton family of Leighton Hall, but the last male heir, Sir George Middleton, died in 1772. The estate passed to two co-heiresses, whose husbands were in difficulties both financial and political (one at least went out with the Old Pretender in 1715). The estate was sold and so was the lordship. The tight grip of the Middletons came to an end and tenants took the opportunity to convert to fee simple. Some of their names can be found in manuscripts held in Lancaster Central Library1. It seems likely that this freedom was at least one factor in a gradual change of land ownership in Yealand Conyers. In the seventeenth century much of the land had been held by these small so-called ‘tenant’ farmers. From the beginning of the eighteenth century more and more of the land was bought by a few large owners, often incomers who had made their money in Lancaster or elsewhere. They did not necessarily farm the land themselves. Some did, others were more interested in having a pleasing estate where they could live the life of a country gentleman. In either case their land was worked by leasehold tenants and by farm servants and agricultural labourers who were dependent on wages for they no longer had land of their own. The story of Joseph Robinson’s house and land illustrates something of this.
In 1726 Joseph Robinson paid an agreed sum to Charles Gibson, a gentleman of Preston who had bought the Lordship, and had his property converted to fee simple. The dwelling house that went with the land is not given a name and it is not, at this stage in the story, possible to identify it. From the described property one can assume that it was a fairly substantial holding with :- ‘ … One Dwelling house, two Shops, one Barn & Shippon, One Turfhouse, edifices, buildings, Outhouses … One Orchard one Garden … ‘. There were nearly four acres of land attached, consisting of a close called ‘Ploumrum’, a ‘dale’ (a share in what was, or had been, common town land) in ‘Footeron’; also two other dales which both lay in ‘ … the common town feild called Hungryslack commonly called the White field’. And finally there was a ‘mossdale’ in the White Moss in Yealand Redmayne, identified merely as adjoining the mossdale of John Waller. Ploumrum has not so far been identified. Footeron would have been land adjoining that bit of the main road running by the school which is still known as Footeran Lane2“. Over the centuries the old medieval strip-holdings had gradually and silently been ‘enclosed’ and passed from the township to private hands. The use of the term ‘common town field’ suggests that this process had not been completed yet – or at any rate that some land was still remembered as having been part of the old open field.
Joseph had perhaps over-stretched himself for a document of 1729, only three years after he bought the holding, shows him mortgaging it. He used it as security to raise a loan of £60 from a fellow yeoman, Robert Jackson of Arnside. After that it seems Robinson never got clear of debt. Even the interest was still unpaid in 1739 when Robert Jackson’s patience finally ran out. A new deed was drawn up, an ‘indenture tripartite’, between the unfortunate Joseph Robinson, Robert Jackson and a new player in the game, Henry Godsalve, a Lancaster grocer. Godsalve was prepared to advance to Joseph Robinson £65, enough to pay off all he had borrowed. He was even prepared to make a new loan of £20. Robinson was thus enabled to pay Robert Jackson at last, but his property was still not his own; Henry Godsalve now held it as security.
Joseph Robinson could not pay off this new loan any more than the old one. Henry Godsalve died, but his sister and heir, Ellin, had married Abraham Rawlinson, a merchant of Lancaster. Fortunately for Robinson, the Rawlinsons were not hard-hearted. The next indenture, drawn up in 1746 shows a sympathy unexpected in a legal document. Joseph Robinson, it records: – ‘having a wife & seven small children to support hath not been able to pay the yearly growing interest of the said Eighty five pounds’. It is then revealed that Ellin and Abraham are related to Robinson and ‘out of Compassion to … Joseph Robinson’s Circumstances and with a Charitable regard and Friendly respect to him & family have … agreed to … abate & forgive him forty five pounds … ‘
That still left forty pounds unpaid and Robinson had to borrow this from John Dawson, a gentleman of Warton, but Joseph Robinson had now been in debt for 17 years and John Dawson was taking no chances with him. The deed that Robinson signed gave John Dawson the power to sell the holding, at the best price he could get, recoup himself and give any remainder to Robinson. In fact John Dawson did not sell the property until 1756 when it went for £90. So there would have been no residue for Joseph Robinson, anyway. Moreover, by then, he had borrowed so much from Dawson that the debt stood at £102. It seems he had tried to improve his position by taking on new work, for in this document he is described not as a Yeoman, but as ‘a serge-weaver and wool-comber’. It was to no avail. Dawson sold the property off in lots. Who bought the land is not known, but the dwelling house and its immediate, gardens and outhouses went to Philip Adlington of Yealand Conyers, another serge weaver, for £55. The only land that still went with the house was the mossdale in White Moss. What happened to Joseph Robinson and his wife and seven children has not been discovered.
Philip Adlington had only had the house for five years when he sold it in 1753 to Joseph Hodgson, a butcher of Yealand Conyers. He did not do badly for he got £70 for it, more than the £55 he had paid. This document says nothing as to why Adligton was selling up, but it seems he continued his trade of serge-weaver for when Hodgson came to sell the house again in 1764 the new purchaser was specifically indemnified against any claim for dower that might be made by ‘Ann the wife of Philip Adlington late of Yealand Conyers but now of Skerton, serge weaver’.
The purchaser who bought from Hodgson’ the butcher was an Agnes Coupland, spinster of Kirkby Kendal. She paid £81 for it. Agnes Coupland was a Quaker. Among the documents is a copy of her will written in 1764, the same year as she bought the house. She is, she says ‘ … grown aged and under some bodily weakness, but of sound and disposing Mind and Memory‘. She makes various small legacies, amounting to £20, to friends and relations and donates £5 to ‘the Poor amongst my Friends the People called Quakers in Kendal … that is to say such who are Housekeepers & in Low circumstances’ (housekeeper at that time had the secondary meaning of house-bound according to the Oxford English Dictionary). The principal beneficiary was her nephew, John Huetson, or Hewetson, who is to have the house ‘lately purchase from Joseph Hodgson’.
If she hoped she had settled her nephew for life she was mistaken, for only four years later, in February 1768, John Hewetson, (now identified as ‘shoemaker’) raised a £60 loan, at £4-10s per cent per annum interest, on the security of the house. Once again it was John Dawson who found the money. On the back of the document are two notes. In March 1773, Mr John Dawson having died, John Hewetson has to pay back the loan (which with the interest had now reached £68) to Mr Edmund Dawson’ the executor. An earlier note, dated February 1773 makes it clear that John Hewetson had only been able to raise the money by selling his house to a Mr Bryan Grey of Lancaster, gentleman (dealing in property seems to have been one way gentlemen made their money).
Mr Grey did not live in the property himself. When he sold it in 1779 to James Sawrey of Yealand Conyers, the indenture mentions that at the time it was ‘in the quiet and peaceable possession of Judith Walmsley, widow‘, presumably as a tenant. Mr Sawrey paid £90 for the house and gardens. The property at last seemed to have found a prosperous owner. Although Mr Sawrey is called ‘merchant of Lancaster’ he apparently lived at least some of the time in his Conyers house for, according to the parish registers, three of his children were born in Yealand Conyers. The first, James, was born in October 1781, but sadly his burial is recorded for Christmas Day the same year. John was born in 1784 and Mary Ann in 1785; both survived as far as is known. How he managed his merchant business in Lancaster needs thinking about. Did he have another house in Lancaster, or was he, perhaps, an early commuter, though as this was before the railway came the journey, even with a good pair of horses, would have taken an hour or more.
Sawrey bought further property in Yealand Conyers – the Croft, the Snape, the Snape Plain and Boon Town which gives a more exact indication for his dwelling house. Snape Lane is still the name of the road running down from St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Conyers to the present A6, and Boon Town, later document show, was the land on the west side of the village street and included not only the weavers’ cottages and heckling shop immediately opposite, but also the land further up the hill where West Villa now is. To obtain these properties Sawrey paid out a further £840. He also set about building himself a house more suited to a gentleman than the old farm house that Joseph Robinson converted to fee simple in 1726. When Sawrey finally sold his property in 1791 to Mr Robert Waithman, a yeoman from Lindeth, his house is described as ‘that newly erected Messuage or dwelling house.’ It still has all the old outhouses the brewhouse and turf house, gardens and orchards, but now it has stables (obviously necessary for a gentleman needing to travel to Lancaster), but also an ultimate sign of gentility – an Asparagus garden. He also improved the property by opening a new well. Among the legal documents is a note detailing the cost of this in 1787 (£3- 5s-0d in all).
The estate was so enlarged and improved that Robert Waithman had to pay £960 for it. The only memento of the old days was that the estate still had attached to it the mossdale in the White Moss ‘adjoining … to a dale belonging to John Waller’. One would like to know if this was the same John Waller who had owned the moss sixty six years before, but the document gives no hint. The only thing Robert Waithman did not purchase was the pew in the north aisle of St Oswald’s, the parish church, which Sawrey had acquired when he first bought the estate. It would scarcely have been of use to Robert Waithman for the family were Quakers. It is now clear that the story being followed in the documents is that of the handsome Georgian house on the corner by the Catholic church, which many still think of as ‘Waithman’s’, though the Waithmans themselves called it ‘The Elms’. This is confirmed by a document of 1827 which describes the house as being on the east side and fronting on the Town Street and bounded on the south by Snape Lane.
The Waithman family kept the house for the next fifty years. They made money as flax- merchants, owning the big flax mill in Holme and they bought still more property in Yealand Conyers till, to judge by the will of Joseph Waithman, Robert’s son which was written in 1830 they owned between them the Elms and the Bower as well as West Villa and the weavers’ cottages and the heckling shop. All the same the documents give a hint that even the Waithman’s may have been over-stretching themselves In 1827 Joseph raised £3,000 on ‘two dwelling houses’ in Yealand Conyers. It was an ominous sign. In 1852 the Elms was on the market once again for Waithman and Co. had crashed to the tune, it was said, of fifty thousand pounds – but that is another story and one only partly told in the documents
Notes
- Lancaster Central Library, MSS 5712 & 5832 [This may now be housed in Lancashire County Archives in Preston] ↩︎
- For those interested in place- names Footeran most likely means a place below a boundary – which is exactly where it is, between Redmayne and Conyers. Mary Higham of the Lancashire branch of the English Place-name Society kindly supplied this information ↩︎
Published in Mourholme Magazine Issue 54 2005/6