20 CONTEXT 178 : DECEMBER 2023 Examples of exceptionally large barns which survive include Alciston (West Sussex), Frindsbury (Kent), Frocester (Gloucestershire), Middle Littleton (Worcestershire) and Tisbury (Wiltshire). Others have either burnt down, collapsed or blown down. Five barns were blown down in the storm of 1660 in just one parish, Sunningwell (now in Oxfordshire), but Thomas Baskerville, who wrote about them in verse, noted of four great barns, Coxwell, Cholsey, Cumnor, and Fitzharris in Abingdon: ‘These Barns stood up so stiff and stout/ No winds did hurl these four about/ In year of Charles Restauration/ A dreadfull wind did grieve this Nation.’⁴ Of the four, only Coxwell survives. Cholsey (Berkshire), which was the longest known at 303 ft (92 m), was demolished in 1815, and Cumnor in 1810. Fitzharris is undocumented. These great barns attract the popular designation ‘tithe barn’. Notably they were built by monasteries, or in Cressing Temple by the Knights Templar, a religious military order. One explanation for the name ‘tithe barn’ is that it seems to represent a folk memory, a popular understanding and resentment at losing a proportion of their crops to often wealthy religious foundations. Historically, it is a great simplification of a complicated set of legal requirements. Tithe is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘tenth’. While contributing a tenth of produce to support a priest has ancient origins, the official adoption of Christianity by Anglo-Saxon kings meant that by the early tenth century there were laws enforcing payment. It was not a simple or uniform tax. There were different customs from place to place as to what should be paid.⁵ Produce from the soil was naturally not the same everywhere, while the local landowner or lord of the manor often divided the tithes from his estate among several churches. The rectors or vicars of parish churches might collect all or only part of the tithes, while cathedrals and monasteries might collect other parts. Tithes were categorised as ‘great tithes’, the tax on wheat and barley, and ‘small tithes’, the produce of gardens, small sums of money paid by householders, and less valuable agricultural produce. Fiddly to collect, the small tithes were often assigned to the local vicar, while the great tithes were more valuable to the rector or monastery. When a monastery ‘appropriated’ the church and itself became the rector, thereafter collecting the tithes, the bishop tried to ensure that a vicar was instituted to look after the parish. Tithe was paid in kind, not money. Hundreds of years later, when parliament agreed an act in 1836 to commute all remaining tithes into money rents, tithes had already been commuted by agreement in some places, while in others they had been extinguished completely and the church compensated with land. Rent charges as determined as a result of the Tithe Commutation Act were finally abolished 100 years later, in 1936. Great Coxwell and the two barns at Cressing Temple illustrate the structure of monastic estates. The home farms were more important than the church which each also acquired, and were much larger than the land allocated to the local rector of the parish church. Great Coxwell was part of Faringdon manor, a large Domesday estate held by the king. In 1205 the manor was granted for the founding of a Cistercian monastery, but it very soon moved to a different site in the New Forest and became known as Beaulieu Abbey. In 1232 the abbey appropriated Coxwell chapel, becoming the rector; it added the rector’s land, some 50 acres, to the home farm of Coxwell manor, and gained the right to collect the tithes. A vicar was appointed who was allowed a small share of the great tithes, all the small tithes and a money payment of £2 a year. Beaulieu organised a grange in Great Coxwell to administer the Faringdon estate, and the great barn was built about 1300. Crops stored in the barn were principally wheat and oats, with some barley and rye. A certain amount of produce was consumed by the staff at the grange or farmhouse, but most was sold during the year in Stanway Tithe Barn was built by Tewkesbury Abbey in about 1370. As at Cressing Temple, there were originally two large barns. Johannes Kip’s engraving (1712) shows the second barn beyond the pond, and the roof line of the surviving one10. (Photo: Glyn Jones) ⁴ Baskerville, Thomas, edited by Jones, A (forthcoming) Journeys in Industrious England, Hobnob Press, Gloucester. ⁵ Jones, A (2000) A Thousand Years of the English Parish, Moreton-in-Marsh. 1⁰ Jones, A, editor (2021) Johannes Kip: the Gloucestershire Engravings, Hobnob Press, Gloucester.
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