Tithe Applotment Books
Published in Features, Issue 4 (July/August 2019), Volume 27By Fiona Fitzsimons
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Irish Church Act (1869), which disestablished the Church of Ireland. As the State church, the Church of Ireland was an arm of the government at local level. Its basic administrative unit was the civil parish. All the people of the State were required to support the established church with tithes, paid in kind (agricultural produce or services) or in cash.
In 1823 an Act of Parliament converted tithes to a cash payment charged on land, to be applied uniformly to both pasture and tillage. Payment was calculated using the average price of wheat and oats sold in the parish in the seven years before 1 November 1821. The measure by which the tithe rate was calculated and the timing of its introduction were badly judged, as agricultural prices had collapsed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Each parish had two tithe commissioners, one elected by the rate-payers, the other nominated by the diocese. Between 1823 and 1837 the commissioners carried out a national survey at parish level and used it to set the tithe. They set down the evidence in Tithe Applotment Books (TABs) and certified it as an accurate record. Almost all the books include correspondence and some have maps. There is a subset in the collection that survives not as books but as handwritten responses on printed questionnaires.
The information recorded is fairly uniform and includes the townland name, names of tenants, the size of the holding (acres, roods and perches), its valuation and the tithe paid. As with all manuscripts, diligent researchers will find many occasions when the commissioners digressed from the job at hand and recorded other evidence, some of which can be very useful to family and social historians.
In 1825 the tithe commissioner for the parish of Aghnameadle, Co. Tipperary, included the names of all chief tenants, as well as the tenant on the land. In April 1829 the tithe commissioners for the united parishes of Castlekyran, Loughan and Lurgan (counties Meath and Cavan) occasionally recorded the names of previous tenants. In the townland of Ardaman, Laurence Fannan occupies lot 4, ‘formerly [held by] James Darby’, while at lot 9 George and Henry Power occupied a smallholding described as ‘formerly Thomas Brady’.
The collection comprises more than 2,500 manuscript volumes, describing every rural parish in Ireland. They don’t, unfortunately, record the urban parishes. The corresponding urban records that were made—Ministers’ Money—have not survived.
Above: ‘The Massacre at Gortroe’ (near Rathcormac, Co. Cork), where twenty protesting locals were killed on 18 December 1834 in one of the many ‘battles’ of the Tithe War. (NLI)
In the 1830s a popular movement united in opposition to paying tithes in what became known as the Tithe Wars. Legislation in 1833 and 1838 transferred payment of tithes from tenants to landlords. The TABs were transferred to the Corporation of the Commissioners of Church Temporalities in Ireland, and after 1881 to the Land Commission. After 1940, the Land Commission deposited the TABs in the Public Records Office. Records of the TABs for the island of Ireland are available on Ancestry. Records for the Republic are published online by the National Archives and Familysearch.org. If you still prefer to research the analogue way, records for Northern Ireland are on microfilm in PRONI and can be viewed by visitors.
Fiona Fitzsimons is a director of Eneclann, a Trinity campus company, and of findmypast Ireland.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.