It showed Lord Fauconberg paying £40 0s 10d for Old Byland and Thomas Franckland paying £2 5s for Wethercote and that situation continued until 1747 when Frederick Franckland paid £3 0s 1d and as the facts suggest that the Francklands were a special kind of tenant it is tempting to assume that it was still case in 1772 when Wethercote was missing from the list of farms assessed for repairs and the lack of records make it impossible to recognize any tenants with certainty though the John Cossins who died at Wethercote in 1783 and John Barkewr whose daughters who were born there in 1818 and 1822 may have been tenants.
The next record to show a Wethercote tenancy is Henry Scott’s survey of 1846 which shows William Kirk at the farm and details in the population census of 1851 suggest that he may have been there in 1826 as he was from Kilburn where his eldest daughter was born in 1817 and his eldest son was born in Old Byland and a rent roll of 1833 showed William paying rent of £20 7s which at first sight seems a low figure as it was a fifth of what John Lawn was paying for Mount Pleasant but 19 years later William Lancaster was paying £35 13s for a farm [late Kirk] which was Wethercote where the rent apears to have been lower than that of other farms.
Mary Sigsworth the widow of Barnabas was the tenant in 1881 and as he was present at a boundary perambulation in 1860 it is possible that they were at the farm in that year and the family tenancy continued after Mary’s death as her son Thomas was still there in 1901 but left some time between then and 1909 when Christopher Bosomworth had 223 acres which he purchased from the Wombwell estate in 1912 and still owned the farm in 1934 when Fenwick Hill was his tenant, sllling it two years later to Doctor Roberts of Husthwaite in 1936. Ten years later he sold it to two brothers Austin and Alfred Bell and as Terry Bell is still at the farm in 2004 the family have been there 58 years.
MOUNT PLEASANT FARM
Because the early rent rolls do not name the farms it is not possible even to speculate about the names of tenants before John Lawn who held 156 acres in 1846 but as he was born in Rievaulx in 1797 and he married Tamar Johnson at Hawnby church in 1824 and their eldest son Stephen was born in Old Byland in 1830 John’s tenancy at Mount Pleasant may have started between those dates.
He still had the tenancy in 1851 but his son was the licensee at the Board Inn in 1879 and the tenant at Mount Pleasant was Stephen Hunton who was there until 1894 when Thomas Ellis became the tenant and started a family tenancy that has lasted 110 years.
After 1914 Thomas’s son Fred ran the farm until he went to Australia and when the Old Byland estate was sold in 1924 Thomas’s third son Herbert was the sitting tenant and purchased the farm. His son Francis Edmund still owns the farm in 2004 and wife Mabel and son Ian are the only people who can trace their Old Byland ancestry back to the early 19th century and through Francis Edmund’s grandmothers side back to the late 17th century
