Hidden House History

5. 18th Century Housing

Step 1 – Estate records

Many houses were built as part of a larger estate, and consequently were leased out to tenants who had to pay rent on an annual or biennial basis. Many estate rentals survive, listing who rented property and how much they were to pay. If you are very lucky, you may find that an estate map was created to assist with the collection of rent, or perhaps as part of a wider survey linked to the profitable administration of the lands that formed part of the estate.

Many of these maps have specific keys that link plots of land or property with the name of the occupier. Where records survive, they are likely to be with the relevant county record office, as part of the deposited records of the family that owned the estate.

Step 2 – Land tax records

One form of taxation was based on how many people held freehold land in a parish, and consequently land tax returns were required to be filed on an annual basis in records known as quarter sessions – so named because they were compiled four times a year when local justices of the peace met up to administer local justice.

The records survive in patches from the 1700s until 1832, because land tax returns doubled up as a means of registering eligible voters when the electoral mandate was based on property holding. Where they survive, land tax returns often list the owner and occupier of a plot of land, and in many instances the land or house itself is assigned a name. The records are usually stored in the relevant county record office.

Step 3 – Title Deeds

Title deeds are the collected documents relating to the transfer of a property from one party to the next. As such, they contain a wide range of source material – legal paperwork generated by the conveyance, wills passing property from one generation to the next, marriage agreements settling land or houses on a bride or groom, sections of manorial documents, even family trees showing that someone is the next of kin and therefore rightful inheritor of a property.

Before the law changed in the 1920s, it was necessary to prove the right to own a property, and the chain of previous ownership, as far back as possible, hence long unbroken chains of documents in title deeds. However, after legislation was introduced to reduce the need to keep historic documents further back than 30 years, many old title deeds were simply thrown away. Where they survive, they tend to be in private hands – so track down the past owners of your house to see if they have any deeds – or deposited in the relevant county archive amongst the collected paperwork of estate agents, solicitors and family collections.

Step 4 – Court Rolls

Houses that are listed as leasehold were probably once referred to as copyhold before the 1920s. This means that the owner held them according to the custom of the manor in which they stood, and was given the property at a session of the manorial court, presided over by the lord of the manor’s steward. A written record of the transactions of the manorial court was created, known as a court roll. To prove that the property had been correctly granted to a customary tenant, they were given a copy of the relevant entry in the court roll – hence the name copyholder.

From the sixteenth century onwards, surviving court rolls are usually indexed by the names of the manorial tenants, and can run in an unbroken sequence from the late nineteenth century as far back as the thirteenth century or earlier, depending on the survival of records. The whereabouts of court rolls vary from place to place, but can normally be found deposited in the relevant county archive. However, other institutions such as the British Library and The National Archives hold extensive collections, and the best way of tracking down court rolls is through the Manorial Documents Register, also housed at The National Archives.

Don’t forget, you can always see what used to stand on your land by checking out the tithe apportionment records in Step 1.