F10

Collection

See also 356, R83, AF57, BA89, BF93. The records listed were found in the room once used for estate business at the stable yard at Moccas. They date mainly from the nineteenth century and seem to be part of what must once have been a far larger accumulation of material. Some additional material, listed in Appendix I and II were added later, salvaged from rubbish put for destruction. The Moccas estates lay within the parishes of Moccas, Bredwardine, Brobury, Dorstone, Monnington-on-Wye, and also contained properties in Clifford and Cusop. When Sir George Cornewall died in 1835, his heir Sir Velters was a minor. The estates were managed by trustees appointed under his marriage settlement and subsequent arrangements, but in 1837 receivers were appointed who acted in managing the finances of the estates until Sir Velters Cornewall came of age in 1845. They kept three distinct sets of accounts, one for the properties settled by the marriage settlement of 1815, one for Purchased Estates, that is property governed by a trust deed of 1816, and one for the Descended Estates, which comprised properties not affected by the trusts so set up. Included in the purchased estates was the estate in tithes arising from the old hundred of Ewyas Lacy (parishes of Rowlestone, Llanveynoe, Craswall etc.). In 1841 directions were given in Chancery that Ewyas Lacy tithes be accounted for separately, and this was done, even after the end of the receivership in 1845, when trustees continued to hold these estates until 1862 when they were handled by the owner of the Moccas Estates. The first part of the list therefore gives the accounts kept under the administration by receivers and trustees. Then the list describes the other estate records which are these created by day to day administration and also include records relating to the home farm and to household administration. The nucleus of the Moccas estates came by marriage into the Cornewall family, kin to the Barons of Burford, in the seventeenth century. Sir Velters Cornewall, who died in 1768, had no son, so the estate descended to his daughter Catherine, wife of Sir George Amyand, a wealthy merchant who later took the name and arms of Cornewall. Under the terms of her settlement further estates were purchased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The bulk of the material listed here date from the late eighteenth century and reflects how the injection of new merchant money led to expansion and improvement of the estates.