For each manor court, the bailiff drew up a list of the heads of households in the village that should attend the court. In some cases the list distinguishes freeholders, and residents in Great Crakehall and Little Crakehall. In principle, each list includes every family in the village, and all landowners and property-owners, whether or not they lived in the village. They are therefore a very valuable source of information for family history, and also for studies of changes in the population of the village.
It is clear that some lists were first copied from the previous court, then alterations made to take account of those who had died, removed from the village, or newly arrived. Sporadically, the clerk also mentioned occupations, possibly to distinguish people with the same name. I have transcribed these notes where they appear.
Note that some double entries can appear because a person was entered for each qualifying property. Thus a person may appear twice, once as a freeholder and once as a tenant; or once as a tenant in Great Crakehall and once as a tenant in Little Crakehall. There may, of course, be two different people with the same name.
It is also important to note that not all freeholders lived in the village. They can only be identified by comparison with other documents.
Non-resident property owners need to be taken into account, together with those marked as dead or removed, in calculating the total number of families in the village.
I have transcribed the names as written. Some of the documents are fair copies of a list made at the manor court, probably as people entered and gave their names. A few may have made a rough attempt to write their own names. The clerk’Äôs spelling of names is casual in some lists - a single surname may be spelled in several different ways. In other call rolls the clerk seems to have tried to put names into a standard form. This needs to be taken into account when searching for particular surnames.
It is obvious that in some cases the clerk wrote down a surname more or less as he heard it pronounced - he wrote Hauxwell as Haxwill, Braithwaite as Brathwitt, Hodgson as Hodghon and Sedgwick as Sigwith, for example. This makes it difficult to identify for certain the surnames written as Callvett ( perhaps Calvert), Catter (perhaps Carter), Dindill (perhaps Dinsdale) and Willison (perhaps Wilson).
Click on the date to see the corresponding call roll
1673 Does not distinguish freeholders or places
1736 Does not distinguish freeholders or places
1761
1773
1786
1808 Does not distinguish freeholders
1813 Does not distinguish freeholders
1832