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The Birtwhistles of Craven and Galloway
John Birtwhistle (1714-1787): Early development of the business The Skipton Parish Registers describe John Birtwhistle’s father, Thomas, variously as a yeoman and a “badger” (a travelling salesman), and it may have been the profession of “badger” which influenced the son to take up a career which involved considerable travel. When Thomas died intestate in 1735, his wife was granted his estate. This estate will have included the house Thomas inherited from his father, William Birtwhistle, whose probate inventory of 1715 described the property in which John Birtwhistle is likely to have been brought up. The family home had two ground floor rooms, a parlour doubling as a bedroom and two chambers above, one with a bed and the other containing household goods; a property typical of a yeoman farmer of the time. For a man whose grandson would handle hundreds of thousand cattle, the grandfather’s involvement in pastoral farming at the time of his death was slender - he had only two cows and two stirks ( young male cattle). John Birtwhistle was described as a yeoman in 1740, when he witnessed the sale of an inn in Long Preston, but he was possibly already buying Scottish cattle by 1741, the year in which he married Janet Shearer in Falkirk. There is a record of him buying property in Falkirk in 1756, and the Birtwhistle family were to own a property in the town until 1800, when his son, William, sold a house and a yard on the south side of Falkirk High Street to a relative of his mother, physician Alexander Shearer. Thomas Pennant described Falkirk as “a large ill-built town supported by two great fairs for black cattle from the Highlands, it being computed that 24,000 head are annually sold there”, and Roy’s military map (1747-55) shows the Tryst where the Falkirk cattle fairs were held, several miles to the south of the town near Gardum Moss. There is a record of the British Linen Bank providing John Birtwhistle with an advance of £2000 in Falkirk in 1767, presumably to buy cattle at the Tryst. It is possible that John Birtwhistle’s idea of establishing a large cattle fair in Craven came from seeing similar fairs in Falkirk and, for several decades from 1745, he hired the 732 acre Great Close at Malham from the Listers of Gisburn Park, who had a summer residence overlooking Malham Tarn. Writing retrospectively in 1786, Malham schoolteacher Thomas Hurtley related the story of John Birtwhistle’s Great Close fairs, where 5000 Scottish animals were on the close at any one time, and 20,000 over a summer. Because Hurtley’s account was published four decades after the event, some historians have questioned its veracity, but an article in the Dalesman gives us more confidence in the accuracy of the elderly schoolmaster’s account. A Professor Hodgson related in the Dalesman in 1984 how he had purchased a copy of Hurtley’s book, only to find a handwritten account by a contemporary of Thomas Hurtley inside which described how the book had been published. Unable to get his book published, Hurtley had been summoned to Tarn House, the country mansion of Thomas Lister, who had “procured him more subscribers and superintended the publication…had the plates drawn and engraved at his own expense……he (Hurtley) never saw his book again”. A record in the archives at the Yorkshire Archaeological Society in Leeds shows that John Birtwhistle was still hiring the Great Close from Thomas Lister in the year of publication, and other YAS records show considerable business dealings between the two men. No one will have known John Birtwhistle’s business activities on Great Close better than his landlord, improving our confidence in Hurtley’s estimate of 5,000 cattle on the close at one time and 20,000 in a year - around 20% of the cattle coming into England from Scotland at the time.
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