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Three old properties look out onto the Stocks Tree and fountain in the heart of the village of Langcliffe.  The one now known as the Old Vicarage is well known to have been the home of the Paley family. Mount Pleasant Farm has a doorhead on which the initials LRM (for Richard Lawson and his wife Margaret) are accompanied by the date 1681. But the third building, Manor Farm, now divided into a house and cottage, is more discreet. Clearly old - mullioned windows and blocked in window surrounds can be seen as well as the more modern sashes - it is evident there is much history within it which is not apparent from the village centre.

The house itself really faces west, away from the rest of the village. This frontage, or what remains of it between two later projecting extensions, shows the original windows of the 17^th century building. The interior of the house has an inglenook fireplace, exposed beams (some decorated with a painted design) and carved pendant kingposts in the roof space. The doorhead datestone proclaims that the house was built in 1678 by CLI.

Who were L and I C? What was their connection with the manor of Langcliffe that the property should become known as Manor Farm?

The Giggleswick Parish Register transcripts for the appropriate period reveal the burial in 1692 of Isabella Carr, wife of Leonard Carr, gentleman, of Langcliffe. Leonard himself was buried in 1696. He is referred to in various documents as ‘Mr.’ and ‘gentleman’, indicating a relatively wealthy man. He must indeed have been of some standing to build a house with such splendid detailing, rather more than the ordinary yeoman farmer might aspire to.

What follows is the story of the Carrs’ and others’ involvement with the property which came to be known as Manor Farm. It is a story which has ‘probables’ and ‘possibles’ due mainly to the numbers of people sharing similar names. There will be inaccuracies and omissions to be corrected, but the broad outline is clear (summarized in the Appendix below).

A will of the period shows that Leonard was the son of William Carr of Langcliffe who died in 1674. There were three William Carrs in Langcliffe listed for the 1672 Hearth Tax (six years before the new house was built). Leonard’s elderly father was probably the wealthiest one, having three hearths, the others only one apiece. The Paleys and Armisteads also had three hearths but only Josias Dawson and Lawrence Swainson had more. In his will of 1673, William made provision for his other three children but to Leonard, his eldest son, he left his whole estate within Langcliffe, together with three parts of Langcliffe Mill and a turbary on Cappanahill, and he also left a new house and shop in Settle which Leonard was at the time occupying. William, Leonard’s father, was described in his will as a merchant, and in another document as a merchant adventurer (a member of a powerful trading organisation dealing mainly in cloth), and was obviously a man of substance. He was in fact a Newcastle Merchant Adventurer, and it appears that Leonard was admitted to the Association also, by patrimony, in 1670.

Leonard was one of a large clan of Carrs. His greatgrandfather is likely to have been Thomas Carr who married Agnes Paley in 1581. Thomas may have acquired his property in Langcliffe as a result of the share-out of the manor after 1591. Sir Arthur Darcy had obtained the Manor of Langcliffe after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-9, and after it had been passed to members of his family, leased to Henry Billingsley (later Lord Mayor of London) and other complex transactions, former manorial tenants or their heirs gradually acquired their own property and land. James Carr of Stackhouse was the last survivor of a group of feoffees, or trustees, who bought Langcliffe manorial rights in 1591. So, by some route, the land on which stood the principal farm of the manor and the Mill had come into Carr possession.

The 1670’s, ten years after the restoration of Charles II, were a time of increasing prosperity, when all over Craven there were new stone houses being erected in place of the old wattle, rubble and thatch structures, and when local fashion was to have decorated and dated doorheads to show a certain status. So having come into his Langcliffe inheritance, Leonard together with his wife Isabella built a handsomely detailed three-celled two-storeyed house befitting a gentleman farmer of excellent local standing, a merchant owning also property in Settle and a major share in the local mill, and a sometime member of the Giggleswick Select Vestry. The house comprised the housebody, parlour, kitchen, buttery and several other chambers including servants’ and maid’s chambers. The value of Leonard’s property in Langcliffe relative to others in the village may be judged by a valuation made in 1692. This placed Leonard (at £15.5.10) second only to Christopher Dawson (£16.16.8) and if the mill valuation is added, greater than Dawson.

After Isabella’s death, Leonard married again in 1694, a Martha Steward of Badsworth, near Wakefield. It is likely that she was a house servant and he married her for care and respectability in old age, as he died two years later. His will makes provision for Martha, both a lump sum of £20 and £15 a year during her lifetime. There were other monetary bequests to family and friends including John Paley and the Swainsons. Even his parish apprentice Agnes Cort was remembered with a bequest of £3. No direct descendants are mentioned and his remaining estate and chattels were left to his nephew William Carr. A probate inventory of Leonard’s goods and chattels was made and gives a good idea of the rooms in the house and other buildings and their contents.

This William Carr was the son of Leonard’s brother Thomas. William was a minor at the time of Leonard’s death, having been baptised in 1682. Thomas died probably in 1699 but the law required William to have two ‘tutors, curators or governors’ until his majority at 21 years of age (in 1703).

In due course, in 1705, William married Gracia (Grace) Claphamson, and presumably they were resident at the farmhouse in Langcliffe. A daughter Catherine was born, followed by other daughters and sons including William the male heir, although it is difficult to say with certainty from the Parish Register how many children in total, as there were other William Carrs in Langcliffe, Giggleswick and Settle.

In 1718 a trust settlement was made by William to secure the continued use of the house and land for his descendants – he conveyed the estate to two trustees who would hold it for his use while he lived, then to the use of his heirs. Provision was made for the house to be divided at its north end by construction of an ‘upright wall next the fire’, the smaller northern part to accommodate Grace in possible eventual widowhood. This is how Manor Farm is now divided into house and cottage. The land and buildings belonging to the farm were also to be apportioned between the two parts of the divided house.

Deeds of the period show that William had other property interests in Settle. He also owned two further dwellinghouses in Langcliffe, occupied at various times by Robert Wilson, Henry Lawson, Roger Gorman and William Bradley. There was farm land attached to both the main house and these two other houses.

During the late 1600’s and early 1700’s there were problems at the water corn mills in the area. Profits for the millers were down in the mid 1600’s because of the disturbed times and ownership changes. A group of four partners rented several mills in the area and closed Langcliffe mill so that local residents had to grind locally grown corn at the Settle mill where they also increased the multure, or toll payable to the miller. This was not to the liking of Samuel Watson at Knight Stainforth who in 1652 brought an action against William Carr, the owner of Langcliffe Mill and the four tenants of the other Giggleswick parish mills. As Lord of the Manor of Knight Stainforth he claimed a quarter of the Langcliffe water corn mill (later known as Langcliffe Old Mill) sited near the Langcliffe/Stainforth boundary – perhaps this was the one part not left to Leonard in William Carr’s will of 1673. Anyway, Samuel Watson lost his case and was, due to "one Carr", imprisoned in York Castle where he famously became a Quaker.

Difficulties continued as more grain was being carried to Settle from elsewhere and sold in the market – the milling of this was not tied to the Settle mill. Much, including barley for brewing, was being sent to Carr’s independent mill in Langcliffe and he encouraged this by ‘greasing palms’ in Settle. So in 1720/1, Benjamin Ferrand, who currently held the tenure of the Settle mills, brought an action against the Settle innkeepers who brewed their own beer and arranged their own barley milling. It isn't known what was the outcome of this, but in any case the writing was on the wall for the water corn mills locally with the new turnpike road facilitating transport of grain into the area in the mid-1700’s, followed by the industrial revolution.

The early 1700’s were times of insecurity in trade and disastrous financial speculation, and with the troubles in corn milling as well, times were probably hard for William at this period; in fact he was getting into debt. One hopes that the William Carr of Giggleswick who in 1723 had a bastard child (Joshua, baptised at Linton) by Mary King and paid the overseer of the poor at Grassington for her confinement and upkeep was not the husband of Grace. If he were, it would be yet one further expense he had to face. He may still have been paying the annual amount due to Martha, Leonard’s widow. He may have been paying Giggleswick School fees for one or more sons. So in 1728 he, together with the co-owner Charles Nowell of Cappleside, a kinsman, sold Langcliffe Mill and about 1.5 acres of land by the mill, together with everything belonging to it, to Benjamin Ferrand, of St. Ives, Bingley, for £120. The tenant at the mill, John Fisher, was transferred to Ferrand. (Later, in 1792, Benjamin Ferrand, the son of the previous Benjamin, sold the site of the mill, by then being then referred to as ‘Langcliffe Old Mill’, and the 1.5 acres, as well as two further mills in Settle and Giggleswick, to William Sutcliffe of Settle, surgeon and apothecary and son of the well known local apothecary Abraham Sutcliffe, for £1,300, and in 1793, Robert Salmon of Hollingbourne, Kent, bought the site of the Langcliffe Old Mill for £400, and it began its new life as a paper mill).

In 1729 a request for a legal opinion was made concerning William’s trust settlement arrangements, and it is stated that he had contracted many debts, his creditors were calling for their money, and he had prevailed upon Thomas King of Skellands, Kirkby Malham, and Charles Nowell to pay these on his behalf. He needed to provide security for this loan, which he had done with the two smaller Langcliffe properties. He then, in 1731, mortgaged his main farmhouse, its outbuildings and fields, to Richard Lawson. The mortgage was transferred in 1738 to Charles Nowell, and yet again in 1741 to John Cookson of Wakefield, a Doctor in Physick, probably a relative of the local Cookson family.

A further deed of 1744 links the names of William and Grace Carr, Charles Nowell, John Cookson and others with that of ‘William Carr of Slaidburn, Clerk, only son and heir of the said William Carr’. This William, the son, was probably the William Carr who attended Giggleswick School and was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge, at the age of 19 in 1735, matriculating the next year and obtaining his BA in 1739/40. The Slaidburn Parish Register shows a Mr. William Carr, clerk, marrying Ann Blezard in 1748 (followed by the baptism of yet another William in 1749). He probably was not the Rev. William Carr who in 1740 was headmaster at Slaidburn Grammar School but was the curate noted in the Register in 1754.

By 1747, William Carr, (Grace’s husband and father of William of Slaidburn), was no longer living in the main Langcliffe house, when all the Langcliffe properties and a turbary at Kirkby Malhamdale were signed over to John Cookson. A year later, Cookson sold them on to Daniel Taylor, also a Doctor of Physick, of Boar Lane, Leeds. Grace died in 1756 and her burial was recorded in the Giggleswick register. It must have been about this time or earlier that the cottage was divided off from the larger part of the farmhouse, and an extension built on to it to the west. It may well be that William and Grace had been living in this cottage for the last few years. A fireplace of early eighteenth century style is found upstairs in the cottage extension, and an oven was built by the fireplace in the main house at this period.

There is no record in the Giggleswick Parish Register of William’s burial. However, his and Grace’s son William moved on from Slaidburn to become Vicar of Mitton in 1760 and the church register there records the burial of a William Carr, Gentleman, in 1766. Records of later property transactions referred to below indicate that he finally relinquished contact with the Langcliffe lands at some time between 1764 and 1767. The Vicar himself died and was buried in Mitton in 1771, and his tombstone may be seen in All Hallows’ churchyard inscribed ‘His Abilities Integrity & Attention to the Duties of the Function entitle his Memory to the just Tribute of grateful Respect’. Presumably when he died his wife Ann (Blezard) left Mitton and returned to Slaidburn, where the death of an Ann Carr is recorded in 1775.

On his marriage to Elizabeth Pease (a member of a prominent Leeds family) in 1751 Daniel Taylor made a trust settlement concerning his property including that in Langcliffe and Kirkby Malhamdale. (Elizabeth Taylor was recorded as being ‘in possession’ at some period before 1767). He died soon after, in 1753, and it appears that the property passed jointly to William Atkinson, clothdrawer, of Leeds, and Dr. Anthony Foster, an apothecary of Otley. In 1775 William Atkinson’s widow and daughter sold their half-share to Thomas Paley who was farming in Langcliffe - Thomas was the brother of Richard Paley, soap-boiler, of Leeds, who later founded the Bowling Iron Works in Bradford. Then in 1783 the late Anthony Foster’s son-in-law William Robinson (surgeon and apothecary of Ripon) and two unmarried daughters sold their half-share to Thomas Paley. Thus the Langcliffe Carr property came into Paley ownership.

Thomas (Lawson) Paley died in 1808 and his son George who succeeded to the Paley farm in Langcliffe died very shortly after. George’s brother John Green Paley then took over the farm. By 1841 he owned a large amount of the land in Langcliffe township as is shown in the Tithe documentation. The Tithe map for Langcliffe village centre shows what is now Manor Farm House and Cottage, Barn and yard as ‘house, barn, yard, etc.’, an area of 1 rood and 7 poles, and being John Green Paley’s, ‘in hand’. But he was a partner in the Bowling Iron Works and ultimately retired to Harrogate, and therefore became an absentee landlord, though still describing himself as ‘of Langcliffe’. His son, the Rev. George Barber Paley, and grandson, John Paley, lived in Suffolk, but similarly described themselves.

A poster of 1842 advertised two farms to be let. In 1871, during George Barber’s ownership, the three largest farming tenants were William Marchbank, Christopher Jackson and Thomas Maudsley. By 1894, on the death of John Paley, there were two large tenants, Samuel Preston and Christopher Jackson, and details of their occupation were listed. Samuel Preston occupied many fields and a garden, together with a house, barn and outbuildings of 1 rood, 7 poles. Christopher Jackson occupied various fields, a house and paddock, garden, and site of buildings. Preston’s acreage was 505 acres, and Jackson’s, 341 acres. Previously, in the 1885 Register of Electors both these farmers had had the address ‘Paley’s Farm’ (each comprising land and a tenement). But Preston’s (previously Marchbank’s together with Maudsley’s) was the tenancy including what is now the Manor Farm house. Many of Preston’s fields listed by name correspond with the old Carr field names given in previous deeds.

Some time in the early to mid-nineteenth century considerable work was done on the house. The east elevation to the Green was improved by the insertion of sash windows to the main house, and doors to both house and cottage. Some rebuilding to the south and east corner of the house is apparent. In 1878 work was done to the roof when, it is recorded, the date was written in some plaster. The second extension to the west side was probably made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It would be interesting to know by and for whom these various works were done.

John Paley left property in Bradford, Harrogate, Malham, Kirkby Malham and Langcliffe to his son George Arthur Paley. He was only twenty and still at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the time of his father’s death. The property was left in trust until 1900. Between then and 1921 George Arthur (by now living in South Africa) sold off various parts of the estate. In December 1920 the Manor Farm, named as such, was sold to Henry Dugdale of Cleatop Park for £3,250, the sale including the farmhouse with cottage adjacent, (in the occupation of a sub-tenant), and all outhouses, buildings, barns, stables, farm, and inclosures, pasture, meadow and arable land then ‘in the joint occupation of the Purchaser and Robert John Sutton or their under tenants’ and two other cottages, the present Bow and Arrow Cottages, adjacent to Paley’s Farmhouse. There had been a tenancy agreement for Manor Farm between Paley and Dugdale/Sutton in 1912. Robert Sutton was married to Louie, Henry Dugdale’s daughter, and in 1936 ownership was transferred to Louie.

Between 1945 and 1962 the property was farmed by Forsters and in 1962 Louie Sutton sold to William Towler. In 1964 he conveyed the farmhouse and yard to John and Mary Towler. The piece of land called the Croft was sold in 1966, a smaller barn in 1974 and the great barn in 1978, for houses. The original 17^th century Manor Farm property with its barns, gardens, orchards, fields and mill was now reduced to what is now the house and cottage and the old foldyard to the west side. Two further conveyances find the old Carr ‘Manor Farm’ house today in two separate residential ownerships, but more than three hundred years on, still standing close to the Paley and Lawson homesteads, all three a testament to the confidence and foresight of those yeoman farmers.

References:

Atkinson, H.B. (1922). Giggleswick School Register 1499-1921. Northumberland Press.

Brayshaw, T. and Robinson, R.M. (1932). History of the Ancient Parish of Giggleswick. Halton, London.

Harrison, B. and Hutton, B. (1984). Vernacular Houses in North Yorkshire and Cleveland. John Donald, Edinburgh.

Langcliffe Millennium Group. (2000). Langcliffe: Glimpses of a Dales Village. Hudson History, Settle.

Parish Registers of Giggleswick, Vols. 1 and 2. (1984 and 1986). Edited by R.W. Hoyle. Yorkshire Archaeological Society.

Peile, J. Biographical Register of Christ’s College, 1505-1905. (1910). Cambridge University Press.

Raistrick, A. (1950). Quakers in Science and Industry. Bannisdale Press.

Publications of the Surtees Society, Thoresby Society and Yorkshire Archaeological Society.

Bradford Central Library; Leeds Central Library; Skipton Library; Clitheroe Library.

North Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton.

West Yorkshire Archive Service offices at Wakefield (including Deeds Registry), Leeds (Sheepscar and West Yorkshire Archaeological Society), and Bradford.

Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York.

Appendix

MANOR FARM HOUSE, Langcliffe

 

   George Arthur Paley (1894)

Mary Slater    2001