Earlier this year I wrote about my fascination with a mysterious lost house I’d discovered through the 1802 Berkswell Enclosure map. The house, which I nicknamed ‘Garlington House’ after the field in which it stood, appeared on the map as a substantial three-bay building with a barn, situated at the end of a track from Waste Lane. By the time of the 1831 Ordnance Survey map and the 1839 Tithe Apportionment, all trace of it had gone. Today the track is an overgrown footpath leading to a field with a very promising house-shaped depression (the lighter area of grass on the photo below).

When I last wrote about Garlington House, all I knew was that it stood on land owned in 1802 by Catherine Barratt (nee Thompson, formerly Paynter) and in 1839 by Penelope Reader (nee Garner). Beyond that, all was mystery. Well, I’ve been digging (not literally, I’m not that lucky) and now there is just a little less mystery. Read on!

The key to the mystery was the Warwickshire Land Tax (£). The Land Tax is a key resource for my One-Place Study, because it uses Oldnall End as one of the divisions of Berkswell parish (along with Beech End and Nailcot End). Even better, the tax rate was so conservative that the amounts charged didn’t change between 1780 and 1830. This is crucial, because the Tax is basically just a list of names and amounts – there are no addresses or house names to help you match people and places. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time developing a MASSIVE spreadsheet that tracks plots and plot values, cross-referenced with the 1802 Enclosure map and the 1839 Tithe map.

So, I started searching the spreadsheet for a potential Barratt/Reader connection. First, I discovered William Reader (Penelope’s father in law) in 1810 taking over a plot taxed at £1 12 0, which was occupied in later years by his son Samuel (Penelope’s husband). Then I looked for a plot of the same value whose chain of ownership ran out in 1810. Bingo! I found a plot also taxed at £1 12 0 listed from 1773 to 1805 as belonging to Mr Moe’s Heirs. So it looked very much as if the Readers acquired this plot between 1805 and 1810, from ‘Mr Moe’s Heirs’. Even better, in 1805 the same plot was occupied by Thomas Barratt – Catherine’s second husband.

Who was Mr Moe? Well, this is the exciting part! He was the father of Catherine’s (first) mother in law, Elizabeth (Moe) Paynter. Elizabeth’s parents William and Mary (Love) Moe died in Berkswell in 1761 and 1762; I haven’t yet found a will for either of them, but it seems likely they left their property to their daughter Elizabeth. When she died in 1777, she left her property to her only son, John Paynter. When he died in around 1785, he left his property to his wife Catherine and their only daughter, Mary Paynter. So the ‘heirs’ named on the Land Tax are first Elizabeth, then John, then Catherine and Mary. The change of ownership to the Readers in 1810 fits with what we know about the Barratts, who sold off much of their inherited Berkswell property in 1810, retaining only Sunnyside House, on today’s Barratt’s Lane.

At last, we know how Catherine Barratt came to own Garlington house and its land in 1802. And we also know that it wasn’t her family home – the Land Tax tells us that the tenant from 1781-1800 was John White, who lived there with his wife Mary and their four children. Other records support our placing the White family in this corner of Oldnall End. The Warwickshire Flax Bounty (£) records John in 1790 leasing a field of 1A 3R 10P to his neighbour William Reader, who grew 30 stone of flax on it (the same William Reader who would purchase the estate in 1810). And (I like this one), when John and Mary’s eldest son James married in the neighbouring parish of Hampton in Arden in 1805, one of his witnesses was Richard Overton, almost certainly the same Richard Overton who lived at Field Cottage, at the top of the track leading to Garlington House.

So the mystery house has become a little less mysterious – but clearing up one part of the mystery has only raised more questions. My next objective is to tackle the ‘Moe mystery’ – who were the Moe family, how long were they in Berkswell (the only Moe records in the parish registers are William’s and Mary’s burials), and what more can we learn about their connection to my mystery house?