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Volume XVI [Go Back]

A Survey of the Manor of Hitchin 1676 edited by Mrs Bridget Howlett

Documents produced by the owners of estates are by far the most voluminous records of English local history; manorial administration required accurate assessments of the rights and resources held. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a large increase in the production of manorial surveys. The 1676 survey of the manor of Hitchin is such a document providing a written description of the tenants' holdings in minute detail, far more than is given in the Parliamentary Surveys. As is common with such surveys, there is no map to accompany it: words alone were intended to suffice.

Hitchin is a large market town in northern Hertfordshire. In his History of Hertfordshire (1700), Sir Henry Chauncy wrote 'Hitchin is respected the second Town in this County for the number of Streets, Houses and Multitude of Inhabitants … '. It was surrounded by extensive open fields, meadows and pastures. The manor of Hitchin had been held by the Crown since before Domesday Book. It included the townships of Hitchin and Walsworth and extended irregularly into the neighbouring parishes of St Ippolyts, Offley, King's Walden and Kimpton. The 1676 survey is the record of a significant Hertfordshire manor.

The original document, a parchment roll of 25 membranes, is held at the Public Record Office (reference LR3/22/4). A copy was made in 1725 for Maurice Johnson, the antiquary and steward of the manor of Hitchin. Transcribed into a paper volume with other notes on the history of Hitchin, this is now in the care of Hitchin Museum (reference 7143). The survey was undertaken by the manorial court between April and June 1676, as Maurice Johnson noted in 1725, 'Tenn Years after it had been restored to the Crown and somewhat settled from those times of Confusion in the Grande Rebellion'. The proposed publication is a translation into English of the text of the survey from its original Latin thus making it accessible to a wider audience.

The text details both the land holdings in the common fields, pastures and meadows, acre by acre, and the houses, yards, shops, bulks, stallages, porches, breweries, tile kilns and mills in the town centre. It gives detailed descriptions of the holdings of 189 freeholders and 154 copyholders as well as the lord's demesne that comprised only the manorial mills. For most holdings it names the former tenant, frequently giving their relationship to the present tenant. It usually states who actually occupied the premises and rounds off with the amount of the quit rent payable annually to the lord. The survey ends with a description of the customs of the manor. An introduction to the volume will set the survey in the context of seventeenth-century Hitchin correcting previous interpretations of the manor's history,

The survey, therefore, provides a key description of an important seventeenth-century market town, which, in conjunction with other sources, could be used to analyse landholding in Hitchin over three centuries. This makes the volume of interest both to students of Hertfordshire history and more generally to those of the evolution of English market towns and agriculture in open field parishes.

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