Once you’ve explored the main family history sources, it’s worth investigating the records that survive for the towns and boroughs where your ancestors lived. Local records can reveal a lot about their lives, documenting their trades, involvement in community affairs, notable achievements or misdemeanours, and even the allotments they cultivated. 

The records for the Borough of Saffron Walden contain a fascinating insight into allotments in the 1830s and 1840s. As with many places across the country, “spade husbandry” was introduced as a form of poor relief, with unemployed men being offered a piece of land to grow food for their families and provide an income at a reasonable rent. The 1830s was a period of instability in rural communities with poor harvests and increased mechanisation meaning food prices and unemployment rates were high and wages were low. This led to the Swing Riots where arable workers in the south and east of England destroyed threshing machines and set fire to haystacks in protest of these conditions. Saffron Walden’s Justices of the Peace were concerned enough about disturbances to call upon certain householders “to act as Special Constables for the prevention and suppression of any tumult, riot or felony” in the area (catalogue ref: D/B 2/QSS5/34). 

Saffron Walden set up an Allotment Committee in 1829 and the surviving records include committee minutes (D/B 2/PAR9/5 and D/B 2/PAR9/6), allotment rent accounts which record the names of people cultivating plots (D/B 2/BRL5/71), and maps of the fields with allotment plots marked out and numbered so they can be linked to the rent accounts, allowing individual plot holders to be identified (D/B 2/BRL5/72). The minutes also contain maps of the allotments and have been digitised so can be viewed on Essex Archives Online.

The Allotment Committee managed several fields provided by local landowners and charities such as Lord Braybrooke, and the banker and philanthropist Wyatt George Gibson among others. Two such fields were Turners Field and Warners Field. Both fields have been identified on Saffron Walden’s tithe map of 1848 (D/CT 378B) – marked in green with Turners Field on the left. Turners Field is recorded as “Next Windmill Hill Road” on the tithe apportionment, but the owner is the Trustees of the Turners Charity and the shape of the plot corresponds to the shape of Turners Field as drawn in the account books and allotment plan. There are still allotments on this site. 

Allotments were primarily assigned to men such as John Cornell who is recorded in a rent account book as working a 30-rod plot in Turners Field and a 40-rod plot in Warners Field, however, there is a note that he died in 1838 and that the plots were taken on by his widow. In Warners Field, John Auger had a 20-rod plot and there is a note that he was killed in 1840 with the plot being taken over by his widow, so women and children were likely involved in cultivating the plots. The fact that widows took on the plots shows how important they were to the household. 

In Warners Field, Charles Byatt had a plot until 1840 when he is recorded as a “rate payer” and the plot was taken over by Richard Barker. At one point the plot was “all potatoes” which went against the rules stipulated by the Allotment Committee.  

It looks like a survey was carried out in 1838 and the rent accounts have been annotated with the crops being grown. Oats and barley are the most common crop along with potatoes and a very few carrots and turnips. 

The first extant minute book concerns the provision of fields for the allotments, digging wells, drawing up the rules and regulations and the assignment of allotments for cultivation. There are lists of men with the number of children in their family together with the number of rods they were offered and whether they were accepted, and later applications for allotments or additional rods. It also contains the signatures or marks of the plot holders, depending on whether they were able to write their name, and includes their address.  

The survival of both committee records and plot-by-plot rent accounts is particularly valuable, allowing researchers to connect named individuals with specific pieces of land and, in some cases, the crops they grew. 

The committee’s concern with productivity and proper cultivation echoes wider contemporary attitudes towards agriculture. One of the final pages records the following quotation: 

“To judge of a Nation we have only to throw our eyes in the Markets and the Fields. If the Markets are well supplied, the Fields well-cultivated, all is right. If otherwise we may say, and truly say, these people are barbarous or oppressed”. (Samuel Rogers, Italy: A Poem. London: T. Cadell, 1830)