The Bitter Mead and the Raddlecot Marsh

The Bitter Mead and the Raddlecot Marsh: Carnalls and Chamberlains in the Acland lands

These evocative names for pasture and meadow land, dating back to the Domesday Book, are linked to several members of our story – Martha Chamberlain in Broadclyst, Charlotte Monfries in Caerphilly, and now John and Thomas Carnall in Silverton.

Little and Great Bitter Mead, along with Pretty Mead and Colly Marsh, were the names of land-plots in the Outer Yard estate of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, who paid a tithe (one-tenth of the land value) to support the local church and clergy.* The tithing hamlet for the estate was Silverton, a village 5 miles north of Broadclyst, where John Carnall (b. 1819) and his son Thomas (b. 1845/1846) were born.

The medieval open fields around both Broadclyst and Silverton had by the 1840s become fragmented into plots of a few acres or even less, which were farmed as arable land or left fallow as pasture. John Carnall, who lived to be one of the oldest tenants on the estate, farmed mainly arable land, with an orchard and some pasture – although ‘Bitter Mead’, ‘Colly Marsh’ and ‘Waterleat’ (where the stream from the Silverton mill passed across his land) do not sound very productive. He had also a smaller plot called ‘Alders’, next-door to Colly Marsh, where the alder wood needed to build farm sluice gates and water pipes was abundant (the wetter the ground, the stronger the tree becomes) and some holdings on land owned by the Earl of Egremont, Lord of the Manor of Silverton until his death in 1845.

Thomas farmed the Acland lands around Broadclyst, in the lost medieval settlement of Luzwell Brookhill & Stiles and also at Higher Newland, with arable, meadow and pasture. He also had holdings in East and West Raddlecot Marsh, some furze and coppice, underwood and brake land – land once fertile but through neglect become thistle and bramble unfit for cultivation. ‘Newland’ also implies that it may have been land of lesser quality ‘taken in’ or ‘enclosed’ in the 1830s, when several additions to local acreage took place.

John Carnall and his wife Sarah (b. 1810 in Bradninch, 3 miles east of Silverton) had an elder son, Abraham (b. 1844), so their marriage must have been in the early 1840s, when Sarah was in her early 30s (unless she was a widow when she married or there are earlier infant deaths). Thomas married Martha Chamberlain (Charlotte’s fourth sister, b. 1832), on 15 May 1869, at St Martin’s Church in Caerphilly, with Charlotte and James Laurie Monfries among the witnesses. Their first child, John Laurie J[?ames] Chamberlain Carnall, was born in Silverton in 1870, but was living with Martha, Thomas, and Thomas’ parents-in-law in Broadclyst at the 1871 census. John Chamberlain was also an Acland tenant, leasing his cottage, garden, some arable land in Little Gedisfield and a heath plot from Sir Thomas; we cannot locate the former on an estate map so it may also have been a derelict settlement still keeping its name but having lost all its dwellings.

Thomas became a prosperous farmer, and by 1891 an estate bailiff; he made his home with his three children (John, Sydney George, b. 1873 and Emma, b. 1874), in South Molton, on the edge of Exmoor, first at 8 North Street and then at Little Bray House in Charles, a hamlet outside the town, also Acland lands.

*The Tithe Apportionment records show what tithe payment was due, listed by parish, landowner, estate, plot name and type of cultivation: after the Reformation, when many lands were no longer held by the church and passed into the hands of private landowners, the requirement to pay the tithe was inherited with the land. The Commutation Act of 1836 made it possible to pay the tithe in cash rather than in farm produce, as had been the previous requirement, and tithe maps were drawn up in the 1840s to show what payments were due. The 1881 Kelly’s Directory gives the Acland tithe payment as £495, some £60,00 today.

Thanks are due again to Kelly’s Directory, Graham Parnell for details on the Carnall family and John Ayshford, a Carnall descendant, for permission to post on his family’s history. and to BARBARA