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Background
Several medieval manors of various forms held lands in Swaledale and Arkengarthdale into post-medieval times. Their histories are often confusing and difficult to understand, and in many instances original records are sparse, as is the case with the manors of Grinton, West Grinton, Fremington, and Arkengarthdale.
Helpfully, some of the early histories of the manors that held land in Swaledale and Arkengarthdale have been researched, to varying degrees, and can be read in the Victoria County History of the North Riding of Yorkshire, vol. 1 (1914) online, here:
Manors of Grinton, West Grinton, Fremington, Healaugh, and Muker – Parishes: Grinton | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)
Manor of Arkengarthdale – Parishes: Arkengarthdale | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)
Lordship of Richmond – a survey in 1605 of the Lordship of Richmond, which was then administered by the superior Lordship of Middleham and held by the Crown, shows that it held lands in Arkengarthdale, New Forest, Hope, Crackpot, Healaugh, Reeth, and Harkerside (See Three Seventeenth Century Yorkshire Surveys, eds. Thomas Stuart Willan and Ely Wilkinson Crossley, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1941, reproduced by Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 132-144).
Swaledale manors of Healaugh and Muker
The Victoria County History (VCH) account of the longest-surviving of the Swaledale manors – those of Healaugh Old Land, Healaugh New Land, and Muker – explains how in 1635 they became united under the common lordship of Philip Wharton, the 4th baron Wharton, of Wharton in Westmorland. However, the VCH account of the descent of the ownership of the three manors from 1738 is not correct and might have been based on some deliberately misleading information. SWAAG member Will Swales has traced the true descent of the ownership, which is explained in an essay here: Swaledale manors and the Smith family – correcting the Victoria County History | Swaledale history (wordpress.com).
Records of the manors of Healaugh and Muker
The three manors of Healaugh and Muker owned extensive lands throughout the head and north bank of upper Swaledale, and some land on the south bank, in Harkerside. There are good records, which are held at the North Yorkshire County Record Office in Northallerton. They include a set of books for the three separate manor courts from 1686 to 1925, after which all Britain’s remaining manors became defunct because of the end of their archaic form of tenure, called copyhold.
Copyhold was a lifetime tenancy of property, granted by the lord and owner of the manor, who received from the tenant a modest annual rent. Copyhold tenure was passed on by inheritance, or it could be sold. In either case, the transfer had to be approved by the manor court, which accepted the surrender of the property ‘into the hands of the lord’ and then granted it to the new copyholder, on receipt of a one-off fee and a continuation of annual rents. The court books record all the transfers and are valuable to local historians because they identify the properties and name all parties involved.
The task of transcribing the books was started by Dr Timothy B Bagenal, a distinguished marine biologist, who had a property in Swaledale and became passionate about understanding and preserving the dale’s historic buildings. As part of his research, in 2009 and 2010 he completed transcriptions of books A to E, for the years 1686 to 1753. He took care to type every record exactly as it appeared in the original manuscript books, to create, effectively, facsimiles. He died in 2011, aged 85, and a few years later the project was restarted by a small group of SWAAG members, led by Judith Mills. This new phase of the project is a work still in progress. It does not attempt the intricate skill of creating facsimiles but focuses instead on easy-to-read transcriptions. All the transcriptions so far completed by Timothy Bagenal and by SWAAG members have been saved on this website as PDF files, which can be seen by clicking the link below.
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