The 1838 Tithe Apportionment
The Friends of Devon Archives have transcribed the Tithe Apportionment list of names and properties for the whole county. Follow this link to go to their website. Enter 'Chudleigh' in the Parish Search to view the list of all owners and occupiers.
Alternatively the Tithe Apportionment List can be viewed on microfishe at the Devon Record Office which contains more detail than that on the FODA website. A tithe map of the whole parish is kept at the Chudleigh Town Hall but is not easily accessible. Another copy, available to researchers is held at the Devon Record Office at Sowton, near Exeter.
In the autumn of 2011 Stephen Coombes, Chudleigh History Group member fully transcribed the whole of the Chudleigh apportionment book as part of the Devon Record Office project (see below). This is now in an easily searchable format and includes all 1863 plots that the parish was divided into. For each plot we have the owner, occupier, name, state of cultivation and acreage. If you would like a search undertaken please get in touch via our 'Contacts' page.
Detail of Tithe Apportionment Digitization Project
The tithe was an annual payment of an agreed proportion (originally one-tenth) of the yearly produce of the land, which was payable by parishioners to the parish church, to support it and its clergyman. Originally tithes were paid 'in kind' (wool, milk, honey, fish, barley etc). By 1836 tithes were still payable in most of the parishes in England and Wales, but the Government had decided on the commutation of tithes - in other words, the substitution of money payments for payment 'in kind' all over the country - and the Tithe Commutation Act was passed in 1836.
A survey of the whole of England and Wales was undertaken in the decade or so after 1836, to establish boundaries of land, acreage of fields, and states of cultivation, and parish or district tithe maps showing all plots subject to tithe were produced. When an overall value for the tithe in a parish or district had been determined, the tithe rent-charge had to be apportioned fairly among the lands of differing quality and various uses in the parish, and for this purpose a tithe apportionment linked to the map was drawn up.
The process of creating high-resolution digital copies of Devon's tithe maps began with the East Devon Parishscapes project in 2008, and by the end of 2009 all 510 maps held at the Devon Record Office (plus a few duplicates and extras) had been scanned. The DRO also purchased from the National Archives grayscale digital copies of the 472 tithe apportionments. It is planned to publish the digitized maps and apportionments on the Internet in 2011, so that they can be viewed without visiting a record office. A second stage in the process will involve 'stretching' the maps over a modern map, so that they can form a layer in a Geographical Information System and be used to demonstrate changed in the landscape over time. The third and final stage will link the apportionment details to each field on the map, thus making information about ownership, occupancy, acreage, and state of cultivation instantly accessible.