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The Birtwhistles of Craven and Galloway
The “family accounts” Anna mentioned to her London friends would not have been household accounts, but of the Birtwhistle estate in Craven, and their tenants the daily visitors to whom Anna referred in another letter …almost every day some friend of “other days” comes from the villages near here to talk over schooltime stories and compare the present with the past. No doubt the tenants would have found it useful to have friendly relations with their new landlords, against the time when they might wish to renew their leases.
Figure 30 Skipton Parish church, whose bells disturbed Anna Vardill in 1819
In June 1823 John Purdie Birtwhistle filed a bill in chancery against his aunt, claiming a share of the estate she had derived from William Birtwhistle as heir- at- law. The survey of the estate provided for the court covers several large parchments at The National Archive at Kew, and contains valuable information about the details of the Birtwhistle estate in the previous century. Not only are the tenants in the various townships listed, but the details of the meadow and pasture held by each tenant also listed. That there was roughly nine times as much pasture as meadow confirms that the Birtwhistles were overwintering few cattle; the Craven pastures were used to feed animals in transit, while it was on their coastal holdings in Galloway and Lincolnshire that the cattle were fattened. The Leeds Mercury reported on the second of April 1825 that the Birtwhistle vs Vardill inheritance case at York concerned a case in international law. In the 19^th century English inheritance law was still determined by a 13^th century law which required a claimant’s parents to be married at the time of birth, unless there was a will, while in Scotland, inheritance law was blind to marital status. John Purdie Birtwhistle initially claimed that he was legitimate under English law - although his parents
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