The Mediæval Parish of Yateley

Parishes date back to before the Conquest but started emerging in the form we would now recognise after the Black Death. Tudor monarchs preferred parishes for administering local government, and started the trend to move civil jurisdiction from manors to parishes. Originally the Manor of Crondall probably consisted of a single parish. Later the existing Chapelries in the manor became five ecclesiastical parishes: Crondall, Yateley, Aldershot, Farnborough and Long Sutton. The first two were large in area and the others were compact.

In 1334 Yateley Chapelry included several other hamlets: Hawley, Minley, Blackwater, Cove and Southwood, extending to what we now know as Farnborough airfield and the northern end of Fleet Pond.

The ecclesiastical parish of Yateley was later divided into two tithings, the inner and outer. The inner tithing was roughly what wenow call Yateley, and the outer tithing was all the rest. In manorial and civil terms Yateley also consisted of tithings: Yateley and Hawley (consisting totally of copyholdings), but Cove was a freeholding. Minley, also a freeholding, was within the ecclesiastical parish of Yateley, but was included in a different hundred, the Hundred of Holdshot.

It is therefore important to distinguish between church and civil administration at specific points in history. Historical geography distinguishes between closed and open settlements. Closed settlements were the nucleated villages that we think of as typically English. The lord of the manor, usually resident in the village, dominated his local tenants.

Yateley was an open settlement, typical in upland areas or areas of lowland heath. Small hamlets grew up as dispersed settlements, where good agricultural land occurred, such as in Yateley itself, Hawley and Cove along the River Blackwater. All the rest of the parish, owned directly by the lord of the manor, was heathland known as waste of the manor. All the copyholders enjoyed rights of common over the waste‘. Open settlements such as Yateley often had a distant lord of the manor, so enjoyed much more freedom for the tenants, politically, religiously, entrepreneurially, and in the possibility for copyholders to move in and out of the parish.

Why did Mediaeval Yateley pay high taxes?

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