| The Origins of the tithe custom The Different Types of Tithe that evolved
over the centuries
The Great Tithe Commutation Act of
1836
The Tithe Surveys of the Country
The Tithe Map and Apportionment
The Tithe Survey of Swansea
A view of Swansea in 1838 using
the Tithe survey |
To find detailed information about
Swansea’s past can often be quite difficult. The further back in time one wants to
study, the harder it can be to unearth useful or interesting material. Some landscapes in
Britain have a almost timeless quality remaining apparently unchanged for hundreds of
years; whereas other localities undergo complete transformation within living memory. the
Swansea of the past is not only remote in time but is so unlike its present form that in
many ways it is a different place in another world. The town’s past is only open to
us as snapshots through documents, paintings or other such sources. In the absence of
living memory we must rely on observation and interpretation to answer our questions. The
view we get of our past is dependent on the nature of the source we use; the camera may
not lie, but an artist may have been more subjective in his work. Equally, written sources can also vary greatly in their scope and
reliability. A historian must build up as complete a picture as possible from the
snapshots of information available before coming to a conclusion (if a conclusion is
possible!). In the history of Swansea there is one source which is of considerable value
to anyone who has an interest in the past.
The tithe survey for the parish of Swansea gives us a window
through which we can look at the town in the 1830s. At that time Swansea was still largely
rural, untouched by large scale port improvements or urban sprawl. A Swansea poised to
enter the years of commercial and industrial expansion which transformed the town into a
centre of national and international commerce. The tithe survey gives us a last look at
the rural town which was Swansea for the first seven hundred years of its life. The
generation of Swansea inhabitants born in the years of the tithe survey grew up and worked
in a town which rapidly became an industrial and commercial centre; with the fields of the
past being built over to provide space for housing, railways, and factories. As more and
more people left the land to work in the new industries which developed in the port and
the lower Swansea Valley, the town quickly expanded its built up area north and west
transforming the rural environment into an urban one.
The tithe survey for Swansea parish is one of over eleven
thousand such surveys which examined in intimate detail the landscape of three-quarters of
England and Wales. The surveys are the earliest large scale investigations into the
boundaries of fields, woods, roads, and streams and the occupation and ownership of land
in England and Wales. The surveys have been described as the most complete record of the
agricultural landscape made at any time. In the following pages the reader will find a
guide to the peculiarities of the tithe surveys and how to use them. The particular
relevance to the history of Swansea will be discussed in some detail. The general aim of
this guide is to make the survey more accessible to all those who have an interest in or
enjoy the past. The reader should also bear in mind that the Swansea survey is but one of
many thousand such surveys and much of what follows can also be applied to those other
surveys. |