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The Birtwhistles of Craven and Galloway |
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Introduction Despite the fact that the droving of
cattle significantly changed the physical appearance of northern Because of the extent and
longevity of their involvement in droving, the best such records would appear
to be those relating to the Birtwhistle family of Skipton. Over a period of
three quarters of a century, John Birtwhistle and three of his sons handled
an estimated 20% of the cattle coming into Nor is it only their droving
interests which are revealed in tracing the Birtwhistle family records over
three generations. We shall see that the wealth generated by the cattle
business enabled them to become important industrialists, the largest
investors in Skipton in the Leeds A son-in-law of John Birtwhistle was already a senior and highly successful
spy for the British government when he married Agnes Birtwhistle, John’s
daughter, in Skipton in 1778. His operations included spying against The evolution of farming in Craven The Parliamentary Enclosure of Long Preston, under which the Birtwhistles acquired one of their more important Craven holdings, brought arable farming to an end in the township; a method of farming practised in Long Preston since Anglo- Saxon times. Before discussing the Birtwhistles’ droving activities, it is worth considering first what is known about the agricultural practices in Craven which were displaced by the expansion of the droving trade in the middle of the 18th century. To do so, we shall consider the history of farming in Long Preston rather than another township, partly because Long Preston was the township in which the Birtwhistles’ largest Craven land holding was located, and partly because it is the Craven township for which we have the best information about early farming practices. At Domesday Ulf had three carucates of land in Long Preston, 24 oxgangs. Since an oxgang was the amount of land on which a subsistence farmer could support his family, this suggests a subsistence village of around two dozen farmers. The next meaningful records come from the end of the 13th century. As in the rest of England, there had been prosperity and a population explosion in Craven during the 13th century, leading to most cultivatable land being under the plough by the end of the |
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