What a tithe map records
Tithe mapping was created to support the commutation of tithes into money payments. For local history, the lasting value is the combination of mapped parcels with schedules naming landowners, occupiers, acreage and land use.
East and West Mersea records
The 1838 East Mersea tithe map and 1839 West Mersea tithe award list land and occupiers separately for the two parishes, reflecting their different settlement patterns and landholding histories.
Field names carry older history
Names on nineteenth-century maps can preserve much older terminology. Medieval and early-modern wills sometimes use place names that can later be matched, cautiously, to tithe-map parcels. Examples in East Mersea research include names such as North Acre, Streteland and North Hill.
Reading modern Mersea backwards
Roads, estates and bungalows can make the present town feel inevitable. The tithe maps show a different island of fields, marsh edges, lanes and scattered properties. Compared with modern mapping, they show old field boundaries beneath later roads, farms and housing.
Go further back
East Mersea manor map, c.1650 · Old Mersea place names.
Finding the tithe records
An earlier record of crops and tithes
A parish memorandum written by Charles Lind, West Mersea vicar from 1738 to 1748, records tithe arrangements for hops, cole seed, livestock, fees and even a duck decoy. The document predates the 1830s tithe maps by about a century and supplies names of farmers and crops that cannot be identified from the later maps alone.