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New House Farm With
the Sneyd family dominating the Parish of Wolstanton in the way
that we have seen, when we also try to recover some fragments about
the lives of the tenant farmers and the agricultural labourers and
all their families, not surprisingly we must return to the Sneyds.
These were the only people, apart from the Parish Vicar, who kept
an abundance of written documents that, taken together, form a mosaic
picture of the lives of the whole community in this pastoral landscape
- and with the Vicar being a Sneyd too... And
so it was with one principal question among others in mind that
I first approached the Sneyd Archive at Keele University to see
whether I could discover some real evidence against Charles Barlow
- did the Reverend Edward Sneyd leave behind any journals, any correspondence
or even any appointment books after his death and internment in
the family vault at Keele? Of
all the people who played a part in the events surrounding Sarah
Smith’s death, Edward I believe, was the one person who could
have left a written personal recollection of those dark November
days. But then again, if he had left an account behind, the mystery
of the gravestone would have been solved long ago. So
it was no surprise to discover that there remain no such journals.
The Sneyd Archive, in fact, contains barely a trace of Edward. The
most prominent document with his name on it is as a joint complainant
along with his brothers and sisters in a settlement dispute with
their widowed mother, Anna Marie. Regrettably, the Sneyds only seemed
to take up the practice of writing diaries in the nineteenth century. Yet,
as the principal source of income for the Sneyds derived from land
rental, one thing they were very good at was keeping detailed records
of their land ownership and all the financial transactions with
their tenants. The first breakthrough occured when I was leafing through a large, heavy volume entitled, ‘Book of Reference to the Manors & Estates Belonging to Walter Sneyd esq. of Keele in the County of Stafford.’ and stopped at page 103 [15] when I read the line, ‘Charles Barlow, New House. Letter D’. Written below is a list of sixteen fields with evocative names like ‘Upper Withymoor’, ‘Well Meadow’ and ‘Little Sweet Field’. The total acreage of New House Farm is put at 84 acres, 3 rods and 8 perch. The letter ‘D’ referred, of course, to an accompanying map but, sadly, along with the loss of the map also comes the loss of the volume’s date. The Keele archivists date this important Sneyd Estate Survey to 1794 - the year after Lt Col Walter Sneyd (1751-1829) inherited the Sneyd titles from his father Ralph VI. So
here he is again! Charles Barlow has a page all to himself in the
survey as the leasehold tenant of New House Farm. Aged fifty-eight
and now thirty-one years after Sarah Smith’s death the man
appears to be prospering - but where is this farm whose name keeps
cropping up in the archive record? In
1830, the Sneyds again undertook a comprehensive survey of all their
land and, learning the lesson that maps can become separated from
their books of reference, this time the maps were hand drawn on
the opposite page to the field listing [16].
It is perhaps the most fascinating document in the whole archive.
Not only does it allow one to recreate the physical landscape of
the Sneyd empire (by matching the maps, with their complex field
patterns, to cartographically accurate maps of the area) it also
provides a snapshot of who all the Sneyd tenants of the day were
as well as detailed notes regarding the ownership of all neighbouring
property and land. The
remarkable thing that happens when one joins up all the farm maps
comprising the Bradwall Park Estate - New House [16a-b],
Red Street [17], Peakock’s Hay,
Chatterley, Chesterton [18], Bradwall
Farm [19] and a small farm referred
to as ‘A Farm adjoining New House Farm’ [20]
(referred to on later maps as ‘Field House’) - one discovers
that the land of New House Farm drops into the north-west contours
of Bradwall Park as snuggly as a jigsaw piece (see the fold-out
map). The thatched brick homestead of New House Farm was little
over half a mile away to the north-west of Bradwall Hall - with
all its drawing rooms, family rooms, kitchens, servants’ quarters
and estate workers’ quarters. If
Charles lived at New House around the time that Sarah and her father,
mother and brother worked on the estate at Bradwall Park, there
is a good chance that Charles could have come across the Smith family
on an almost daily basis if he’d been at all interested in
courting young Sarah. All he would need to do would be to stroll
across the ‘Barnfield’, up the rising slope of the ‘Sweet
Field’ and step over the fence into Bradwall Park itself. A
thin tract of Oak and Ash woodland ends at this very point and so
they could have used this as a trysting place. By
1830 New House Farm had passed into the care of a man called John
Dale and, although it is thirty-five years later on, not a great
deal has changed at New House Farm. The field names have remained
the same and the acreage is measured just down from 84:3:8 acres
to 83:3:20 acres (see Appendix III). But
the leasehold of the farm hadn’t passed on to Charles’
son and heir, John Barlow (b. 1768) - who would have been aged sixty-two
in this year - or indeed to Charles’ grandson John (b. 1802)
who would have been in his prime at the age of twenty-eight. But
more of that later. First
of all, can we look any further back in time and try to discover
when exactly Charles Barlow came to live at New House? We know from
the duplicate Parish Burial Register entries that Charles and his
family were in residence here back in 1778 - the Reverend Edward
Sneyd made sure of that. Back
in the 1770s, the task of surveying the tenanted properties and
land belonging to Ralph Sneyd VI in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme
and beyond was entrusted to a Mr Thomas Breck, his land agent. Sometime
in 1772 - the exact date is not recorded - Mr Breck arrived at New
House Farm one day and, together with Charles Barlow, the tenant,
went on a complete tour of the 63 acre farm, as it was then measured.
As each of the sixteen fields was visited, Mr Breck would have estimated
the acreage and also assessed the value per acre of each before,
finally, noting the present useage and discussing with Charles how
he would be rotating the fields between pasture, arable and fallow
land. Given the technology of the day, it is unlikely that Mr Breck would have taken his nibbed pen and ink bottle with him into the field - perhaps he had a copy of the last farm survey with him and referred to this while checking the present extent and condition of the farmland while making a mental note of any significant alterations. Most
likely, once the tour was complete Charles would invite his important
guest back to the farmhouse and offer the man some hearty refreshment
before he got down to the task of writing up the results of the
survey while all the particulars were still fresh in his mind. It
took four pages of a small unbound notebook of stiff vellum pages
loosely stitched together to complete [21]. Interesting to note that nowhere does the name of New House Farm appear in this notebook - all the pages of this and the other eighteen notebooks compiled during these years are listed according to the tenant and not the property - though there are indications of the various districts in which the tenants’ farms are located on the title pages. But that it is New House Farm cannot be in doubt - the names of the fields, though evolving subtly as they are subdivided or added to from neighbouring land, are clearly identifiable from the 1794 and 1830 surveys. The
most significant difference between the 1772 survey and the two
later surveys is the subsequent addition to the farm of a section
of woodland, referred to as the ‘Rough’ due north of the
farmhouse which, along with a doubling of the size of the ‘Long
Field’ and some minor uprating of the usable areas of the other
fields, would take the total farm acreage from 63 to 84 acres. But
the important thing that Charles was waiting to hear as the visit
drew to a close was the result of Mr Breck’s calculations -
the ‘Number of acres’ multiplied by the ‘Value per
Acre (shillings)’ giving the ‘Yearly Value’ of each
field before arriving at the grand total of £53.2s.6d. This
was then the precise amount of rent and land tax that Charles would
be required to pay, in two installments, each year until the next
survey. When
he was not conducting his land surveys, Mr Breck could often be
found at Newcastle’s bustling agricultural market amongst the
throngs of cattle and sheep, the hay wagons and the grain merchants
and farmers haggling with one another while sharing the choice local
gossip of the day. Twice
yearly - at Michaelmas (the Feast Day of St Michael - 29 Sept) and
Lady Day (the Feast of the Annunciation - 25 March) - Ralph Sneyd’s
tenants would arrive at Newcastle market laden with produce and
livestock, conduct their business and, with a pocketful of cash,
seek out Mr Breck to pay their rent and their land tax. Between
1772 and 1803 Mr Breck kept detailed records of all these transactions
in a collection of large folded sheets of paper each one bearing
the title ‘An Account of Rents owed belonging to Ralph Sneyd
esq. chiefly due at Michaelmas 1772.’, or whichever the
year and season it happened to be. There were 85 individual tenants
in total who dealt with Mr Breck in this way, while a further 45
tenants dealt directly with Ralph Sneyd. And
so it was on November 2 1772 that a man by the name of Thomas Steele
approached Mr Breck, stuck his hand in his pocket and counted out
a handful of cash on behalf of Charles Barlow. And Mr Breck dutifully
recorded the transaction, ‘Received of Thomas Steele for
Charles Barlow, on account. Taxes etc allowed: £1.10s.2d.
Received by Thomas Breck: £22.10s.101/2d.’ [22].
Nothing
unusual in that by itself - Charles was a month behind in paying
his rent - perhaps he couldn’t make it into town and entrusted
the money to a friend. But when I discovered that Thomas Steele
turned up again four days later and conducted the following transaction
with Mr Breck I was startled, ‘Received of Thomas Steele
for Samuel Smith. Received by Thomas Breck: £2.0s.0d.’
[23] Not only was this the first
record of Samuel Smith I had discovered in the Sneyd Archive, to
discover that Sarah’s brother and Charles Barlow were linked
by their acquaintance to Thomas Steele and that both clearly trusted
the man set my mind racing. And
there on the next sheet headed, ‘An Account of Rents owed
belonging to Ralph Sneyd esq. chiefly due at Lady Day 1773.’
Mr Breck records that, on 12 April 1773, Thomas Steele again made
his way to Newcastle and made the following transaction, ‘Received
of Thomas Steele for Barlow & Smith (remainder of). Taxes etc
allowed: £5.7s.4d. Received by Thomas Breck: £25.3s.91/2d.’
[24] Charles
Barlow and Samuel Smith appear to be linked by more than the trusted
acquaintance of Thomas Steele - were they also partners in a joint
rental agreement with Ralph Sneyd? Nearly ten years after Sarah
Smith alleged that a man with a name not dissimilar to Charles Barlow
had murdered her with half a pint of poyson! When we go on to examine Mr Breck’s Rent Account records for Michaelmas 1773 however, it is Charles himself who makes his way down to Newcastle market on 28 January 1774 and - three months behind - hands over a half yearly payment plus tax which Mr Breck records with the following entry, ‘Received of Charles Barlow for Steele’s. Taxes etc allowed: £1.0s.71/2d. Received by Thomas Breck: £23.11s.41/2d.’ [25] We know already from the 1772 New House Farm survey that the tenant is identified as ‘Charles Barlow’. Not ‘Charles Barlow and Samuel Smith’ or ‘Charles Barlow and Thomas Steele’ or any other combination of these three men. So it is worth examining this particular record in closer detail and remember that Mr Breck was accustomed to record transactions according to the tenants' names rather than names of properties. The
pedantic Mr Breck’s specific use of an apostrophe in 'Steele’s'
actually means that Charles is not paying ‘on behalf’
of Steele, but that he is paying rent on a tenancy formerly in Steele’s
name. But what of the two previous Rent Account documents of November 1772 and April 1773 which clearly link the three men in some kind of joint rental agreement? Bearing
in mind that in none of Mr Breck’s Rent Account documents between
the years 1772 and 1784 are there any records of the names of properties
(he is only concerned with cash payments by his employer’s
tenants), in order to determine where the land is that formed the
arrangement between Steele, Barlow and Smith, we need to examine
the rent payments themselves. We know that the Annual Value of New House Farm was established in 1772 as £53.2s.6d (including about £3 Land Tax) and a quick check of the cost of the three men’s joint rental agreement for each half year is as follows (minus Land Tax). November 1772 - £24.10s.101/2d, April 1773 - £25.3s.91/2d, and then from January 1774 it is Charles Barlow alone who makes the payments on behalf of no-one but himself - on this occasion £23.11s.41/2d. On September 19 1774, Charles makes another payment of £23.11s.41/2d and the next record is from March 10 1776 when Charles again pays the sum of £23.11s.41/2d. In 1785, Mr Breck finally records the names of the larger farms after the tenants’ names on an account summary for the whole year, ‘Charles Barlow, New House. Rent due by Lady Day: £50. Taxes: £3.16s.4d. Cash Received: £46.3s.8d. [26] Give
or take a few bob here and a few bob there and, noting that the
Annual Value of none of the other farms comes as close to matching
New House, we can conclude that from at least November 1772 through
to at least April 1773, Charles Barlow, Samuel Smith and Thomas
Steele had a joint interest in the various fields of New House Farm
worth £50 a year plus around £3 Land Tax. Let
us assume, for the moment, that this is ‘Samuel Smith, husbandman’[6
- p18], the brother of Sarah and not the father (or indeed, not
another Samuel Smith entirely*) - after all, the two men would have
shared a similar age - then these extraordinary documents make a
number of things clear. They establish a direct link between Charles
and Sarah’s brother and make it abundantly clear who the junior
partner was if they did indeed share an arrangement. For when, in
November 1772, Charles pays a total of £22.10s.101/2d, Samuel
pays a mere £2. Perhaps Charles had taken over the leasehold
of the farm - as the 1772 Estate Survey makes clear - and was subletting
a number of fields to Samuel? Clearly we need to delve further back to a time before Charles Barlow was first recorded in the Sneyd Archive on 2 November 1772 to see if we can pick up the traces of this leasehold arrangement. The earliest record of Thomas Steele occurs in the 1750 Sneyd Estate Survey where he is listed as the tenant of 37 acres somewhere in the sprawl of smallholdings in the district of Chatterley, which borders the northern edge of Bradwall Park and New House Farm. Where exactly this land is found is uncertain but it is worth pointing out that, in spite of Charles locating New House in Red Street (the duplicate Burial Register entries, pp 22-23), the farm is often listed as part of the Chatterley area in the Sneyd archives. Five
years later, in the 1755 Lady Day Rent Accounts, the land agent
of the day records the following, ‘Received of Thomas Steele
for his own and Venables.’ The next record takes us to
precisely six months before the arrangement between the three men
for, in the 1771 Michaelmas Rent Accounts, Mr Breck records, ‘22
April 1772, Received of Thomas Steele, Half Year, Taxes Allowed
£1.10s.2d. Received by Thomas Breck: £16.11s.0d.’ Exactly
six month later, when Thomas Steele goes down to Newcastle market
to pay his next rent to Mr Breck both Charles Barlow and Samuel
Smith have entered the picture for the first time. In these six
months, had Thomas Steele decided to move and prepared for his departure
by entering into separate gentleman’s agreements with Barlow
and Smith to sublet a number of his fields and then waited to formalise
the arrangement with Mr Breck in November? For sometime in 1772,
as we have seen, Mr Breck pays Charles his first visit at New House
Farm in order to survey the land and conclude the annual rental
charge for Charles, the new tenant. That
the 1772 survey puts the extent of the farmland at New House at
about 26 acres above Thomas Steele’s original plot at Chatterley
(63 acres to 37 acres) does not necessarily mean that there is no
common land to both. The archive record is replete with evidence
of tenants taking over neighbouring fields when they become vacant
or too costly for the original tenant to maintain. The
field boundaries had been set down over a thousand years before
(this can clearly be seen on the map on the inside back cover in
the way that the Roman road between Newcastle and Congleton cuts
right through the original field patterns of Field House, New House
and Bradwall Park. Instead of adapting to the new road - many of
these ancient field patterns are still in use today) and as time
and the communities working the land move forward, so too does the
pattern of ownership of these basic field units. We know beyond
doubt that Charles himself took the acreage of New House Farm from
63 acres to 84 acres between 1772 and 1794 - it is entirely possible
that when he decided to take over Thomas Steele’s 37 acres,
he asked Mr Breck about the possibility of taking over a number
of neighbouring fields at the same time. By
adding up the acreage of the New House Farm fields east of the main
road to Newcastle all except the three Clay Hills bordering the
Bradwall Park woods - we get a contiguous plot of farmland of 37
acres with the New House homestead nestling in the middle. All Charles
had to do, if this is the case, was take on the ‘Long Field’,
‘The Piece at bottom of Long Field’, the two ‘Walklate’s’
fields, the remaining section of the ‘Six Day Work’ field
and ‘Upper Withymoor’ - all on the western side of the
road - and the three Clay Hills from Bradwall Park and a sizable
new farm of 63 acres is born. If
this is the case then it may well be that Charles Barlow and Samuel
Smith had no relationship at all beyond taking over a number of
adjacent fields in the district of Chatterley previously tenanted
by Thomas Steele. If we follow the logic of this, then on 12 April
1773 [24 - p45] - six months after Barlow and Smith had entered
the picture - Thomas Steele made his final payment of any cash outstanding
on his leasehold (note the words ’remainder of’ for this
payment) shook hands with his former landlord’s agent and disappeared
off the Sneyd record - along with, it should be said, Samuel Smith. A few
tantalising clues are to be found in the Parish Registers regarding
Thomas Steele. On 21 December 1760, the Reverend Edward Sneyd records
the marriage of a ‘Thomas Steele, potter, and Elizabeth
Fellows’, both of Wolstanton Parish. The last record in
the Parish registers occurs just three months after Thomas Steele
paid his Michaelmas Rent for the last time as sole tenant - ‘Stephen,
son of Thomas and Elizabeth Steele was baptised January the 19th
1772’. Then the name, yet again, disappears off the record. How interesting, though, that this Thomas Steele should be identified as a potter in the Marriage Register for this was the very era that the whole skyline across the deep valley east of Wolstanton was being transformed by hundreds of distinctive bottle kilns rising above the town of Burslem. Indeed, in 1763 - the very year of Sarah Smith’s death - Josiah Wedgewood (1730-1795) had finally patented his revolutionary new ware and was beginning production at his first factory in the centre of Burslem. Could Thomas Steele have used his tenancy of New House not for farming but as a source of clay and coal before moving his trade to the neighbouring Parish of Burslem? Many years later the fields of New House Farm would disappear completely and in their place would appear Parkhouse Colliery and a brick and tile works. Copyright 2006 Jeremy Crick Sneyd
archive documents published with the permission |
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Estate surveys and rent payment records in the Sneyd Archive at Keele University |
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[Fig 15] |
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[Fig 16] |
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[Fig 17] |
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[Fig 19] |
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[Fig 20] |
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A map showing the farms that formed Bradwall Estate (except for Chatterley to the north) |
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[Fig 21] |
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[Figs 22, 23] |
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[Fig 24] |
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[Fig 25] |
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[Fig 26] |
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The map of New House Farm from the 1875 estate survey showing the brick and tile works which included a direct rail link to the main line. |
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The site of New House Farm today |
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