Falstone : Parishes and Townships
In the usual manner of county histories, volume XV of the Northumberland County History (NCH XV (1940)) discusses the history of North Tynedale primarily within the framework of ecclesiastical parishes and their constituent townships, following the example of all the previous volumes in the series and John Hodgson's History of Northumberland before that. Yet these 19th century parishes and townships were relatively recent creations in North Tynedale.
A township is conventionally defined as the territorial resource of a particular rural community. Their boundaries became fixed when the land appropriated to that community extended, as a result of colonisation, up to land belonging to neighbouring settlements. The term used to designate a township in medieval documents was vill, yet, as we have seen, there is no mention of a vill of Falstone, although it may have existed as a small territorial township focussed on the hamlet or farmstead beside the chapel.
The township of Plashetts and Tynehead, in which Falstone was situated and which features as a territorial unit in the Northumberland County History was one of twelve established in 1729 by Thomas Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, specifically to administer poor relief, taking advantage of the 1662 Poor Law Act which had enabled ‘every Township or Village’ in northern England to serve as a the unit for poor-rate assessment and collection (Charlton 1987, 98-9; cf. Winchester 1987, 27).
Each of these new townships was henceforth responsible for the maintenance of its own poor and setting a separate poor rate. Prior to 1729, the Chapelry of Bellingham had been subdivided into four wards for more convenient collection of the poor rate, but these wards had not set a separate rate.
Some of these townships may have been based on earlier territorial units, but several have names with a rather artificial character - West Tarset or Plashetts and Tynehead - indicative of institutions established by bureaucratic fiat. Thus the township of Plashetts and Tynehead did not evolve gradually to accommodate the collective labours of a medieval farming community, but, rather, was an early 18th century creation designed to facilitate the provision of poor relief.
The Poor Law Township, to use Winchester’s term (1978), is the form of township community most familiar today through in the works such as the Northumberland County History and Hodgson’s History of Northumberland, where, along with the parish, it provides the framework for the historical narrative of individual localities.
The boundaries of these territorial communities were mapped by the 1st edition Ordnance Survey in the mid 19th century and they have generally been presumed to have had a long and largely uninterrupted history stretching back in most cases to the townships of the medieval period. It was reasonable to assume that the medieval administrative vill was the direct ancestor of these post-medieval poor law township, and hence of the modern civil parish, since functionally they are somewhat similar, representing the most basic level of civil administration. However the actual line of descent is much more complex.
The administration of poor relief was originally established at parochial rather than township level, with the requirement of the Elizabethan Poor Law Act of 1601 that overseers for the poor be appointed in every ecclesiastical parish in England (Statutes 43 Eliz. I c.2; cf. Winchester 1978, 56). Following pressure in parliament to permit the subdivision of the huge ecclesiastical parishes in the northern counties into smaller, more convenient units, the 1662 Poor Law Act allowed ‘every Township or Village’ in northern England to become a unit for poor-rate assessment and collection with their own overseers (Statutes 14 Charles II c.12, s.21; (cf. Winchester 1987, 27).
Winchester has argued, on the basis of the arrangements he documented in the Copeland district of west Cumbria, that it was the territorial townships rather than the administrative vills which were most frequently adopted to serve as the new poor law townships. However in Northumberland north of the Coquet there was in any case relatively little difference between the medieval territorial and administrative units, and about three quarters of the townships identifiable in the 13th century may be equated with the poor law townships recorded by the Ordnance Survey.
The disappearance or radical alteration of the remaining 25% was the result of settlement abandonment or colonisation during the late medieval period and estate reorganisation in the post-medieval period (Dixon 1985, I, 80-4). The upland dales south of the Coquet were a very different matter. Redesdale and North Tynedale fell within the vast parishes of Elsdon and Simonburn respectively, the latter with a dependent chapelry at Bellingham which itself embraced all of upper North Tynedale. In Redesdale, six large ‘wards’ or townships are found, namely Elsdon, Otterburn, Woodside, Rochester, Troughen and Monkridge, plus the small extra-parochial township of Ramshope (Hodgson 1827, 82-3). The wards were almost certainly created in response to the 1662 act and presumably represent subdivision of the parish to facilitate the administration of poor relief. There is no indication that they existed at an earlier date. They are not recorded in the 1604 border survey, which instead lists a great number of ‘places’ or ‘parts of the manor’ within the constituent parishes of the Manor of Harbottle.
These places were in most cases no more than hamlets, groups of farms or individual farmsteads, the kind of small early territorial township found in upland areas. The twelve townships of upper North Tynedale established in 1729 by Thomas Sharp, were doubtless similar, though later, creations. The four wards which preceded them did not set a separate rate, unlike the six Eldon Parish wards, although they were probably reponsible for collection.
It is from these ‘poor law townships’, however ancient or recent their origins, rather than the medieval administrative vill, that the modern civil parish is directly derived in northern England. The Local Government Act of 1889, which established the civil parish, specifically stated it was to be ‘a place for which a separate poor rate is or can be made’ (Statutes 52/53 Vict. c.63 sec. 5). Today’s civil parishes, however, are generally somewhat larger than the preceding townships, in part as a result of more recent amalgamations.