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[Bee’s note: this article is still a work-in-progress, but is enough of a decent draft, I think, to share with you here if anyone is interested in helping me with further research.]

Calder Abbey surrendered on 4 February 1536. Its last abbot, Richard Ponsonby, rode away with a pension of twelve pounds a year. Holm Cultram followed in 1538, though its parishioners fought for their church. They argued, successfully, that the abbey building was not only their place of worship but their only reliable defence against Scottish raids. The Crown kept the church standing. It seized everything else. [1]

What the Crown took from Gilcrux was substantial. From Calder came the rectory, the great tithes and the mill. From Holm Cultram came its separate property in the parish, including the grange and associated land it had held since around 1240, when the rector of Gilcrux had granted the abbey a house and lands on the eastern edge of the parish. Part of that land had been leased to Calder Abbey, meaning both houses had a foothold in the parish before the Dissolution ended both. [2] The grange still has a shape you can trace. Grange Farm sits on the eastern parish boundary today, its fields running to what was once an unenclosed moor. [3]

Nearly three centuries of Cistercian land management ended in a matter of months. The monks had been, in their fashion, consistent landlords. They kept the same obligations across generations, the field boundaries unchanged, the extraction steady and unremarkable. Their replacements brought something different.

The manor did not pass cleanly to a single new owner. The Crown seized Calder’s rights in Gilcrux in 1536 but did not hold them for long. Under Philip and Mary, the manor was granted to Alexander Armstrong, on condition that he provide five horses, well caparisoned, whenever summoned within the county of Cumberland. [4] Land for military service: the feudal formula, still functioning in the middle of the sixteenth century.

Two pieces of former monastic infrastructure mattered above all others. The rectory – the right to collect the great tithes, that ten percent tax on the village’s grain – had passed from Calder to the Crown and now moved through lay hands in quick succession. A landlord, rather than a monk, now collected the harvest tithe. I suspect the mill was the other lever. The lord’s mill in Gilcrux, formerly Calder’s, remained the only place tenants could grind their grain. Whoever owned it held a practical grip on the village’s daily life that no amount of legal argument could loosen.

By 1632, the manor had consolidated under Thomas Dykes of Warthole. [5] Warthole lies adjacent to Gilcrux, and the Dykes family connection to that land runs deeper than the date suggests. The Manor of Warthole (Wardhall) had itself been held by Calder Abbey before the Dissolution, and the Dykes family had been established there since at least the fifteenth century. When Calder surrendered in 1536, the Crown seized assets in both places at once. The Dykes, already rooted next door, were well placed to consolidate when the moment came. The two neighbouring manors came together in Dykes hands by 1632, and the family would hold them for nearly three hundred years, until the early twentieth century.

The feudal system did not collapse on a particular date, then. It dissolved by degrees, obligation by obligation. On a day in 1673, Robert Bewley counted £45 into Henry Thomas’s hand and became the owner of half a tenement in Gilcrux. [6] The agreement they signed tells you where things stood. Robert would pay six shillings rent yearly. He would provide one day’s shearing labour at harvest. He would haul six loads of coal from the village pit, or three from the next pit if none were available nearby. East Croft and Long Croft would each have their hedges split between the two men, each responsible for building and maintaining his half. This was not feudalism. Robert Bewley owned his land; he was not bound to it. He had paid good money. But the old obligations hadn’t gone, they’d been rewritten. The manor court’s world, set down on parchment and now wearing the clothes of commerce with pound signs attached.

If I’ve got this right from the documents I’ve seen at Whitehaven Archive Centre, Robert Bewley was not just a yeoman farmer making a purchase. He served as High Constable of Below Derwent, the ward office responsible for local levies, the coordination of village constables, and the administration of Quarter Sessions business across a broad stretch of Cumberland.

There’s a headstone leaning against the wall at St Mary’s in Gilcrux. Its face is wearing smooth. The names will be lost soon, but for now you can still read some of it. To the memory of … the wife of Thomas Bewley … beneath a carved angel with a magnificent head of hair. The name Bewley keeps surfacing in the records.

Robert Bewley died in 1686. The parish register gives him the honourific ‘Mr’, a small but precise mark of status. [7]

Robert Bewley’s widow Anne appears in the records in 1687, when their daughter Anne was baptised. Robert had been buried in December 1686, which means Anne arrived after her father’s death, a posthumous child. By 1722, another Robert Bewley serves as churchwarden (probably the grandson of the 1673 Robert; the registers don’t make the relationship certain). He appears repeatedly in church transcripts through the 1730s and 1740s. His children are baptised: Elizabeth, Robert, Ann, Thomas and George. Not all of them appear in later records. Some names are baptised, never married. On November 14, 1749, a Robert Bewley put his name to the church terrier alongside the vicar William Walker and the other chief inhabitants of the parish. [8]

A church terrier was a formal record of a parish’s landholdings, glebe, tithes, and income. This particular one also included an inventory of church goods (the chalice, surplice, prayer books, two small bells, and other items), a combined document that the bishop required from every parish. It listed what it called White Book Tithes, the precise rates at which the church extracted its living from the village. Three pence for a milch cow and her calf, if you kept fewer than five. Five cows cost two shillings and sixpence – double the rate per animal, a tiered structure that penalised larger herds. A fallow cow, twopence. A shy-milked cow (one giving little milk) a penny. Every foal, twopence. Every swarm of bees, twopence. Hemp and flax garths (the small plots where families grew fibre for linen and rope) tithed at twopence yearly. Wool, lambs, geese and pigs paid in kind. At Easter, every household surrendered eggs, not fewer than four, or their cash value. Each communicant in the household paid at a rate recorded in the terrier; the house itself owed twopence.

A family with six cows, two foals, a hemp garth and four communicants in the household would owe [Bee’s note: cow total to be verified against the full tithe schedule], fourpence for the foals, twopence for the hemp garth, sixpence for the communicants, twopence for the house, plus eggs and an item in kind at Easter. The church’s claim on a household’s production, calculated to the penny.

Then the terrier records burial fees. Ten pence to bury an adult.
“But for an infant, only six pence.”
Only. A forty percent reduction on death, if you died small enough.

The men who signed that document on November 14, 1749 had paid those fees themselves. Robert Bewley signed it knowing every clause from personal experience. Some of the children baptised in his family’s years in the village never appear in the marriage registers. The terrier doesn’t record their names. It records the rate.

Robert died in 1777, aged seventy-eight, still in the village.

Transcription of the verso [other side] of the 1749 church terrier. “It is observable that there are within the Parish of Gilcrux certain large parcels of Land belonging to Fretchville Dykes Esqr called by the Names of Grange Grassings & Gills for which there are no Tythes paid in kind, nor yet any Prescription in Lieu thereof, seemingly to the Injury of the Vicarage of Gilcrux &c”

William Walker, the vicar, is lodging a formal complaint against the Lord of the Manor, His language is carefully chosen. He doesn’t write that Dykes is injuring the vicarage, he writes “seemingly to its injury.” Grange lands were former monastic properties, and after the Dissolution of the Monasteries tithe obligations on such lands sometimes became murky. Dykes may well have had a legal argument on his side, or at least a long-standing custom he could point to.

I’d say the vicar’s complaint is really about money. The vicarage depended on tithe income. No tithes in kind, and no negotiated cash payment in lieu meant the vicar was losing income on what was substantial grazing land belonging to the wealthiest man locally.

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[1] For Calder Abbey’s surrender see: Knowles, D. and Hadcock, R.N. (1971) Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales. London: Longman. Available online at: https://archive.org/details/medievalreligiou0000unse_z5r1/page/n3/mode/2up Date last accessed Thursday April 30, 2026
[2] Newman, C.E. (2014) Mapping the Late Medieval and Post-Medieval Landscape of Cumbria, Vol. 1. Unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University. Newman notes that Holm Cultram acquired a house and lands at Gilcrux around 1240 from the rector of the parish, part of which was leased to Calder Abbey. Available to download online at: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/bitstream/10443/2556/1/NewmanCE2014%20%20v1.pdf Date last accessed Thursday April 30, 2026
[3] Newman (2014), ibid. Newman identifies a clearly definable set of fields at Grange Farm in Gilcrux on the eastern edge of the parish boundary, next to an outgang leading onto the former unenclosed moor.
[4] The grant from Philip and Mary to Alexander Armstrong, on condition of providing five caparisoned horses when summoned within Cumberland: Mannix, P. and Whellan, W. (1847) History, Topography and Directory of Cumberland. Beverley: Johnson & Carlisle. Available online via the University of Leicester: https://leicester.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16445coll4/id/78187 Date last accessed: Thursday April 30, 2026
[5] Winchester, A.J.L. (ed.) (2014) Cumbria: An Historical Gazetteer. Lancaster: Regional Heritage Centre/Cumbria County History Trust. Entry for Gilcrux township: “By 1632 had passed to Thomas Dykes of Wardhall in which family it remained until 20th century.” Online at: https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/gilcrux Date last accessed: Thursday April 30, 2026
[6] Bewley/Thomas Articles of Agreement, 1673. Cumbria Archive Centre, Whitehaven, Scotch Street. Date visited: Friday March 10, 2023
[7] Gilcrux Parish Register, burial of Mr Robert Bewley, 1686.
“1686/87. A true copie of all Baptismes, Marriages and Burialls that have happened in the parish of Gilcrux Anno Domini 1686 …. Mr Robert Bewley was buryed the 30th of December …. Ri. Murthwaite, Vic. of Gilcrux. Richard Fearon, Robt Bewley, decd, Churchwardens.”
[Bee’s digital copy of the transcripts.]
[8] Church Terrier, 1749. Photographed by Bee Lilyjones for gilcruxarchive.co.uk [soon to be deposited at Cumbria Archive Centre in Carlisle].

[If you’ve come across ‘White Book’ tithes before I’d love to hear from you. Contact Bee].