Rating related to land and buildings but the rating lists did not cover every single piece of land in Louth. Churches and chapels were exempt from rating and so were not referred to. In a few cases it is possible to identify other exclusions, for example in R1823 the grammar school and the almshouses in Schoolhouse Lane (the same building comprised both), the parish workhouse in Padehole and the prison (except the governor’s apartment). Apart from these deliberate exclusions it is unlikely that any substantial buildings were omitted because the valuers failed to notice them. Market tolls were rated.
The databases follow the street names used in the printed lists, but these sometimes did not coincide with the names commonly used at the time, still less with the names used today. Further information about this is given on the Streets page. Two town plans can be downloaded from the home page of this website. The rating lists contain many field names but the use of these was inconsistent and it is only occasionally that fields can be identified with certainty.
Accuracy of the Listing of Ratepayers
In principle a rating list ought to show all occupiers of rateable properties, but the three valuations were spread over periods of weeks and this led to omission and duplication. The absence of individuals from the list does not prove their absence from the town, as is illustrated by the following examples.
Business partnerships: Even prominent businessmen may appear to be absent because the property that they occupied was partnership property. For example, both John Booth Sharpley and Michael Plaskitt were later active in the affairs of the town but R1823 shows neither as a householder, only a house and other premises occupied by the firm of Sharpley and Plaskitt; and Charles Bowmar, a partner in the prosperous firm of Campbell, Bowmar and Ranshaw, was not listed in R1838 at the trade premises, because they were a partnership asset, or at the house where he lived, because he was a lodger.
Incomplete names: Many of the records omit forenames or give only initials. This is particularly a problem relating to female occupiers. Where they had common surnames, this could make them unidentifiable. For example R1838 had three women called “Mrs Wilkinson”, probably all widows, and two more called “Widow Wilkinson”; it is doubtful whether these records really did relate to five different women.
Simple omission: William Earl, tailor, appeared in directories both before and after 1851 and was shown in the 1851 census as living at the north end of Aswell Lane, next to the Turks Head, where he was in 1838; but R1851 did not list him anywhere in Louth and showed his former house and shop occupied by someone else. The 1861 census showed Earl occupying a house in the southern half of Aswell Lane. Presumably what happened was that he was in the process of moving in the period when R1851 was being compiled and was not recorded either at his old address or at his new one.
Duplication: In the previous example William Earl might have been recorded at both addresses instead of neither. There was a likelihood of some duplication. R1838 listed 1,740 names of individuals but 128 of these (ie about 7.4%) appeared more than once. Fortunately there is a good basis for comparison: the Vestry poll of 1834, when well over half the ratepayers voted and slightly under 5% of names were duplicated (54 out of 1086). Voting at this poll was closely scrutinised and we can be confident that the voters with the same names were indeed different people; to take the extreme example, the five men called William Smith were respectively a cooper, a brick-maker, a wool-comber, a barber and a tailor. It is therefore probable that R1838 does contain a small number of duplicate references to individuals.
Identifying the Landowners
Even a brief look at one of the rating lists will shows a pattern of ownership very different from today’s. The percentage of owner-occupied houses was small and private landlords often owned groups of adjoining houses.
The rating lists usually gave only the surnames of landowners. Where, as often, these were commonly occurring names, the identification of the individuals is difficult. The main alternative sources of information are the lists of parliamentary electors, and especially that for 1832 but these are of no use if the proprietor was a woman and so could not vote. The land tax assessments for 1832 also provide some help.11. Land tax records provide an unreliable guide to most matters: see Donald E Ginter A Measure of Wealth (1992). The land tax records for Louth are held in Lincolnshire Archives in the Quarter Sessions records. As records of ownership and (sometimes) occupation they occasionally give information not available from other sources. Sometimes information can be found in sale particulars in the Mercury and Chronicle.
The best clue to ownership can sometimes be proximity. For example, R1838 showed six tenanted houses in Eastgate, all owned by “Foster” followed by a seventh owned and occupied by George Foster, 22. He voted as a joiner in the Vestry poll in 1834 and he qualified as a parliamentary elector in 1832 as the owner of freehold houses in Eastgate; but the trade directories did not list him. (380417 – 380423), who very probably was the owner of the other six. The houses appeared in OS1889 as “Foster’s Buildings”. Other examples of this in R1838 are Edward Arliss (380668), a brick-maker, whose bricks were doubtless used for the the series of houses that he owned, and Elias Fields (381919) in Upgate. However some owners owned a scattering of properties in different parts of the town.
Another source of information may be an earlier list. For example in R1838 the name “Rashdall” appears only in relation to a large house in Eastgate (380618). R1823 shows this house (230423) occupied by Lucy Rashdall. With her full name she can be identified from other sources as the widow of a solicitor, a man that lived only briefly in Louth. By 1838 she had moved to Cheltenham.
One problem is that a rating list may not always use the same surname to mean the same proprietor. It is probable that in R1838 “Ansell” always meant the Misses Ansell (or perhaps only Elizabeth, the elder sister), because there were no other Ansells in the vicinity; but there were so many Wilsons in town, that it is unlikely that the proprietor “Wilson” always meant the same person.
The most prominent landowner in 1838 was the Borough Council, which with its property is dealt with separately: see Corporations and Corporation land. Second only to the Council was the Church of England in the somewhat curious form of the impropriator. Under the law of the medieval church tithes were paid to maintain the parochial clergy; but in many parishes most of these tithes were taken (“impropriated” or sometimes “appropriated”) by someone else. In Louth the tithes had been impropriated by the Prebendary of Louth, an ecclesiastical official based in Lincoln. Under a long-established system the right to collect tithes could be leased at low rents for long periods, often expressed not in years but for the duration of the lives of named persons. These leases often involved a lump sum payment (“fine”) taken at the outset for the sole benefit of the then impropriator.
The enclosure of open fields often led to the replacement of tithes by allocations of land. This had happened in Louth in 1805,33. For details see Robinson 1979 pp 79 – 85; also Gurnham 2007 pp 117–9. when the prebendary, Rev Thomas Orme,44. Orme (c 1745–1814) was also headmaster of Louth Grammar School and vicar of three parishes: see Goulding Old Boys p 67. received about 470 acres of agricultural land. Orme benefited little from this, as the tithes had been leased in 1789 by a previous prebendary55. In 1840 the then prebendary received only £14 pa; see Lincolnshire Correspondence of John Kaye Bishop of Lincoln 1827-53 p 184. and were held by William Hutton, a landowner living in Gate Burton, near Gainsborough. Hutton was dead by 1823 but the lease passed to members of his family. R1823 showed the impropriator with 480 acres (perhaps a re-measurement of what was allotted in 1805) but also showed land owned by two or three other Huttons. R1838 seemed to confuse the impropriation lease with other Hutton land but the total acreage was probably unchanged, because the R1851 figure accorded with that of R1823. At some date in the 1850s the lease must have come to an end, because in 1859 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sold some of the land.66. Advertiser 12.3.1859.