Always a mainstay of Teesdale?, Teesdale Mercury

Always a mainstay of Teesdale?

Nov 28, 2007

The archives and some of the archaeological digs indicate that sheep have roamed the moors of Teesdale as long as people have lived in the dale.

However, sheep in the distant past looked a bit different from how they do today. For one thing, they were much smaller and skinnier than our Swaledale breed – about the size of largish dog. I don’t think they would have won any prizes at Eggleston Show. They are supposed to have had a slight resemblance to the Soay Sheep that you sometimes see on rare breed farms or in places like Bede’s World.

So for many centuries flocks of sheep were part of the economy of the dale. They weren’t alone on the moors though. They shared the fells with many more animals than are there today.

In the days before the trees and scrub largely disappeared from the fells, deer were commonly seen and hunted – and wild boar still inhabited the wooded areas. It is difficult to imagine the moors even wilder and with fewer boundaries than there are today but that does seem to have been the case.

Teesdale was very sparsely populated really right up to the 18th century. So when the monasteries were founded, back in the 12th century, it’s perhaps not surprising that the monks soon acquired land there. Why on earth did they want poor quality land instead of rich fertile land? Well, fertile land was mostly all taken by the wealthy landholders but there was plenty of spare moorland. And moorland was just the right sort of land for sheep to graze – hundreds of them! There are still signs of the monasteries’ presence in the dale – preserved in the place names. There are a couple of Shipleys – meaning sheep clearing and then there are Friarhouses in Baldersdale and Monks Land near Middleton.

The monasteries didn’t just graze sheep on the moors. Rievaulx Abbey held Stotley near Middleton and Stotley was a stud farm – the name actually means a clearing for horses. Bernard Balliol granted lands to Rievaulx and the gift charter of 1161 reads, ‘in the horse pasture they shall have folds for lassoing horses’. It sounds a bit like the wild west doesn’t it? And it wasn’t just horses that were on the moors with the sheep – there were lots of cattle as well.

As well as the monasteries, many of the local magnates and lords had vaccaries or cattle ranches up on the moors. The Eure family, for instance, had one of these vaccaries at Briscoe in Baldersdale. Then villagers often had rights to graze geese on the moors and a bit further up the social scale, others were allowed to establish rabbit warrens. The moors must have been fairly swarming with livestock and wild animals in the Middle Ages.

The sheep were bred for their wool and their meat – although there can’t have been much flesh on them – and for their milk. I wonder if the cheese made from ewe’s milk was as sought after as Cotherstone cheese is nowadays? 

Anyway, in 1393 the law fixed the maximum prices that could be charged for food and drink. Wheat bread, for instance, cost 1 penny for 4 loaves and a fat goose cost 4 pence. Mutton had a higher value than a goose, a sheep’s carcase costing 1 shilling and 8 pence and a lamb worth 8 pence, the same price as a gallon of best red wine.

The 14th century was a hard time for the people of Teesdale. There had been appalling weather, disease among the sheep and cattle plus the constant threat of attacks from the Scots.

In 1340 there was an appeal to the authorities for a reduction in tax. This petition was based on the tithes that were paid by the parishioners to the rector of Romaldkirk. The plea stated that in normal times, the rector received 7 sacks of tithe wool valued at £30 and 200 lambs valued at £5. In 1340, the tithe had reduced to one sack of wool because most of the two-year-old sheep had died and the rector only received 40 lambs valued at £1. Cattle weren’t mentioned at all and tithe from crops was given as £26 – and that mainly from hay rather than corn.

This document shows that in Romaldkirk parish, admittedly a very large parish, 2,000 lambs were born in a normal year and 70 sacks of wool were obtained from the sheep. Considering that comparatively few people actually lived in the parish during the Middle Ages this is by any reckoning a huge number of sheep. It is often said today that there are more sheep than people living in Teesdale. Judging by this tax return things don’t seem to have changed much over the past 700 years do they?

First published in the Mercury November 21, 2007