Cider in manorial and tithe records

Manorial accounts were compiled to demonstrate that an official had handled the lord’s resources properly. They record quantities received and issued, and money spent — on press repairs, on hoops and staves for casks, on labour at harvest. Cider appears in them as a commodity being administered, which is why they are good evidence of quantity and poor evidence of anything qualitative.

Tithe material is different and unusually informative, because tithe was contested. The question of whether cider, or the fruit that made it, was subject to tithe generated disputes that had to be argued in detail, and the resulting depositions describe local practice at length in order to establish what was customary.

Probate inventories, which become common from the sixteenth century, list a dead person’s goods with valuations. A farmhouse inventory naming a mill, a press, hogsheads and a quantity of cider in the cellar is direct evidence of production at that holding in that year, and the valuations give a sense of what the equipment was worth relative to the rest of the farm.

A tithe dispute forced people to describe what normally went unrecorded. Witnesses were asked what had customarily been done in the parish, for how long, and by whom, and their answers were written down at length. Because the point at issue was often whether cider counted as a titheable product of the land or as a processed good, the depositions frequently address exactly how the cider was made and by whom.

These documents also capture disagreement, which is analytically useful. A dispute records two accounts of local practice, and the gap between them is evidence about how contested and variable custom actually was — something a single administrative account conceals.

The limitation is that a dispute is by definition an unusual event in an unusual parish. Generalising from litigation to normal practice requires the same caution as generalising from court records to ordinary behaviour in any period.

They cannot tell you what the cider was like. No medieval document describes strength, sweetness, clarity or flavour in terms that can be converted into a modern description, and attempts to reconstruct medieval cider as a sensory experience are speculation dressed as history.

They rarely tell you what fruit was used. Varieties are almost never named before the seventeenth century, and where a document distinguishes fruit it is usually by a broad category such as sweet or sour rather than by cultivar.

They also under-record small-scale production. A cottager pressing a few bushels appears in no account, and the smaller the operation the less likely it is to be visible. The documentary record systematically shows the top of the production structure and misses the bottom of it.

Taken together the material establishes several things firmly. Cider and perry were being made in quantity in western England from at least the twelfth century. Production was concentrated in a recognisable geography that has changed remarkably little. Presses and mills were significant items of farm capital, valuable enough to be itemised and maintained.

It also establishes that cider was routinely part of what a farm or estate provided to the people working on it, which is the deep root of the later practice of paying agricultural labour partly in cider. That practice is visible in medieval allowances long before it becomes the documented and eventually legislated system of the nineteenth century.

What the record does not support is any statement about a golden age, a decline or a revival before the seventeenth century. The evidence is too patchy, and its patchiness follows the survival of documents rather than the fortunes of the drink.