In a recent wander along the river bank of the Thames at Windsor I came across the footbridge from the town. A busker was playing on its crown to the stream of humanity crossing the short distance from the south bank to the north. Tagging myself onto the back of a gaggle of tourists I followed them over and suddenly realised that I was now in Eton. Seeing the historical buildings on its high street piqued my interest. Of course it is the site of the famous English public school, but it was its picturesque streets, with shops occupying old buildings of various designs and sizes, that drew me in that day.

I often find myself wondering about the buildings around me; I want to travel back in time to understand who owned them and more about the locality that I am in. A great way to research back to the start of Queen Victoria’s reign is using TheGenealogist and its Tithe Records collection. With a mobile phone and a connection to the internet I can access these 19th century ownership and occupier records to see what they reveal as I walk down the lanes and thoroughfares. Sometimes I may use my computer to take a look at the maps and records before I visit a place to get a sense of what I may find when I get there. Tithe records cover the majority of the country, generally that part that had not been enclosed by this time. The tithe apportionment books list the owner and the occupier of each plot, as well as measurements for the plot, and the linked maps show us where each holding was so are very useful for family historians.

It had been in the late 1830s that the country underwent the massive survey of land when the government undertook a review of the tithes that were being paid to the church and other recipients. The resulting tithe apportionment documents and accompanying maps from that period allow us to explore the fields, woods and houses in our ancestors’ home villages and towns.

Alternatively, if you are in a particular area, as I was in Eton, you can use the Locate Me facility on the site’s Map Explorer to jump to your location. With my mobile phone in my hand and logged into the Diamond subscription, I opened up this nifty map tool and chose Tithe from the record sets on offer. As I wandered down the high street I could see the historic Victorian plots identified on the road as each piece of land liable to tithes was depicted on a map of the town and given a plot number, unique within that parish. Following the link to the apportionment books from the maps revealed details of the owners and occupiers.

By George!
The first historical building that I had come across was what appeared to me to be a coaching inn and if this was the case then I wondered if it would have been recorded as such in the tithe records from the Victorian period. From clicking ‘Locate Me’ on the mapping tool, the building in front of me appeared to be plot 21 on the tithe map. By switching to a modern map on the Map Explorer I could see that The George public house was marked on today’s map so I was confident that I had found the right records and could now flip between modern street maps, satellite maps and the Victorian tithe map.

A click on the pin revealed that the landowner of The George Inn had been called Granville Penn – a surname very much linked to American history, so warranting further investigation later. First, however, I wanted to find out what I could about the old inn that I was standing in front of. I could see that the occupiers of the George Inn were listed as Robert Davis and William Wilson when the survey had been done. A link from the transcript opened the page of the accompanying apportionment book and revealed that the building had even then been ‘The George Inn, House, Stables & Yard’. Scrolling to the head of the column recording the amount of rentcharge apportioned revealed that the tithe payments went to the Provost of the College of Eton. In most cases the rentcharge would go to the vicar, or rector of the parish, but this was an example of a lay person or body that had become entitled to the rights sometime in the past. This particularly occurs where former church lands had become the property of secular landowners after the dissolution of the monasteries.

I continued rambling up the High Street of Eton, checking here and there the records of several other buildings. Up near the church, the old tithe map had been annotated with the name The Christopher Inn, and yet I knew I had passed a Christopher Hotel opposite Tangier Lane on my way up the High Street. Today the old inn building is St Christopher’s House, a part of Eton College, and I guessed that the business had moved some years back. A search online for the history turned up that the coaching inn had indeed been originally situated next to the college on Baldwin’s Bridge. First mentioned in documents between 1546 and 1548, it had been forced to move when its building had been acquired from the Crown in 1842 by Eton College in exchange for some of their lands in London. The then headmaster, Dr Hawtrey, was against renewing the lease because since the opening of the railway and the behaviour of the resulting visitors to the town, The Christopher had become ‘riotous and demoralising’ for the boys of his college. Eton College turned the old inn into the Christopher Tap where senior boys were permitted to drink beer, cider and have food. The new Christopher Inn moved down the High Street to its present site where it had stabling for 17 horses; and the hotel remains there to this day. commonwealthwalkway.com

The road to Eton Wick
From the pleasant pale blue building I continued on my walk. Soon I was leaving Eton along a main road with flat open pasturelands to my left. Some 30 minutes later I had arrived at the village of Eton Wick and consulting TheGenealogist’s Tithe Records on the Map Explorer found a familiar landowner name – our old friend Granville Penn. There are in fact two links to different apportionment books on this plot, one of which is an altered apportionment from September 1921 which showed the landowner to be His Majesty the King, per pro the Commissioner of Woods. Changes in ownership and the way land was divided up may be recorded in altered apportionments that were, until 1936, laced up with the original and after this filed separately in IR91 at The National Archives.

Sometimes, however, these change of ownership records were not formally made until several years had passed and, in many cases, no formal record was made at all with informal and local agreements perhaps having been entered into between tithe owners and landowners. Researchers should also note that many parishes actually have no altered apportionment at all.

As I stood in Granville Penn’s one-time field at Eton Wick I looked back at Windsor Castle glinting in the sunshine on the horizon. The altered apportionment map could be consulted by clicking the reference AA2 in the transcript on TheGenealogist showing that several plots became part of the land acquired for the Commissioner of Woods.

Returning to the original tithe map, however, I could see marked over the road that the Three Horseshoes public house had once stood there. Around the corner I found an old house on the common and the Tithe Apportionment Records told me that this was owned by the Trustees of the Eton Poor Estate and consisted of a house, yard, orchard and garden. While much of its garden appears to have been built over, the house has survived through to today.

But what of Granville Penn, the landowner who had caught my attention? On returning from my walk I opened TheGenealogist again and I quickly found him recorded in several of the Peerage, Gentry & Royalty records on the website. With a surname such as Penn I wondered if he was from the family that had established the State of Pennsylvania in 1681 and The Pedigree Register Volume 1 1907–1910 quickly confirmed this for me.

The record revealed his relationship to William Penn the founder of Pennsylvania, who had been born in London, 14 October 1644. William and his second wife, Hannah Callowhill of Bristol, had among other children Thomas Penn. This son, born in 1701–2, married Lady Juliana Fermor in August 1751; she was the fourth daughter of Thomas, 1st Earl of Pomfret. Together they had seven children, and the youngest of whom was Granville Penn who would succeed his older brother John in 1834 to the lands of the family estate of Stoke Park, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. So now I knew that Granville was the grandson of the famous Penn who had been granted the North American colony and that he only became the landowner with holdings in Eton and Eton Wick by surviving his other siblings.

Granville Penn is also recorded in the 1841 census at his country seat of Stoke Park, Stoke Poges along with his wife and grown up children in their 30s and 40s. He is in his 70s, his wife, Isabella, in her 60s and one son is named after his father continuing the Granville Penn name. A search of the death records on TheGenealogist reveals that Granville Penn senior died in 1844. The Education Records provided me with his entry in Alumni Oxonienses and this refers to a list of his works being published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, which alerted me to him being a man of letters. From this lead I next chose to search for him in the Occupational records on TheGenealogist and so discovered his entry in the Concise Dictionary of National Biography. This told me that he had been a ‘clerk in the war department and his published works included a number of competent translations from the Greek, and many theological and semi-scientific works’.

Alumni Oxonienses
When Penn died at Stoke Park on 28 September 1844, he left to his son and his heirs £3,000 per year for 500 years out of a perpetual annuity of the £4,000 that had been granted to the Penn family by an Act of Parliament to compensate for losses sustained in America. This can be found in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) will that I discovered also on TheGenealogist.

As I have shown in this walk from Windsor to Eton Wick, looking at the history of land and buildings as I passed, the records and resources that TheGenealogist provides its subscribers can be accessed on the move on a mobile, or on a computer at home. From a coaching inn to a meadow sold to the Crown in the 1930s, historical records can be used to tease out the stories of the characters from the past who had once owned or occupied land or buildings all around you. {