Loscoe Land Records

Compared to the richness of documents for Elvaston and Ockbrook, the paucity of material dealing with the manor of Codnor as a whole and Loscoe village in particular is striking. This may have something to do with the area's deterioration through coal-mining, with old fields used for spoil heaps, houses demolished after subsidence and few gentry families nurturing its past or keeping its archives for posterity. The bulk of the extant early land documents are those retained by mining investors who wished to prove their entitlement to minerals, and at least one of those records openly mentions the deliberate destruction of any documents that might have compromised such claims.

The Piggin family clearly owned land at Loscoe, and there is a field in the area (I do not yet know the precise location) called Piggin Piece. Documents from outside the area may prove to be the best source of information on the family landholdings at Loscoe. The Ockbrook Piggin family kept a great many documents, one of which in particular, not yet seen, may reveal how close their links with Loscoe were:

The earliest detailed map of the manor of Codnor, surviving in four copies at the Derbyshire Records Office, is the 1792 enclosure map, which mainly gives names of those in the community who were allocated blocks of what had formerly been common pasture land, but does not name the ancient closes or enclosed fields or indicate the locations of the earlier farms (mostly known locally as crofts). No Piggin received an allocation, so it seems likely the family had ceased to farm at Loscoe and Codnor by 1792, but this should of course be checked. Nottinghamshire Archives has a copy of the Heanor and Codnor enclosure act and award (Charlton papers, DD/CH/33/50).

The late Fred S. Thorpe reproduced this enclosure map (he does not say from which original) in his 1990, self-published, personally autographed book, The Heritage of Codnor and Loscoe, dividing the map into sections and writing his own notes on it. A small selection of Thorpe's maps can be viewed online in Google Maps by following the links below. The facsimiles are approximately at the places which they concern, but you will need to use Google Earth as a viewer if you wish to see the 1792 maps correctly rotated. Google Earth can make them semi-transparent, so that it is possible to see from the aerial photograph that many of the hedgerows still exist, more than 215 years later.

Kenneth Cameron's The Place-Names of Derbyshire (1959) obtains most of the Codnor field-names from an unidentified 1853 survey map, probably the Codnor & Loscoe Tithe Map 1854 (D2360/3/124a) or the Codnor & Loscoe map 1850 (D2526) at the Derbyshire Record Office (for a full list of the maps, in addition to that above, see a pdf summary catalogue). One of the fields thus named is Piggin Piece.

The following is a list of documents in the Charlton Papers at Nottinghamshire Archives which deal directly with the Heanor collieries, but may also have a bearing on early ownership of other land at Loscoe and Codnor. The Nottinghamshire Archives indexer noted (Catalogue Ref. 157 DD/CH): "Of particular interest is the series of Heanor (Derbyshire) colliery papers. Title to most of the minerals in the parish of Heanor was somewhat confused, chiefly because the wording of the 1615 Zouch grant of minerals (DD/CH/32/14) gave rise to later doubts about the exact extent of the property and how far rights in the commons were affected by ancient enclosures. Furthermore almost from the first, these minerals were owned in two half shares by the Charlton and Stanhope, later Mundy families, entailing joint action both for working the pits or taking legal means to prove title. A long series of suits and negotiations preceded a suit in the 1850s, which seems to have finally established the claim of Mundy and Charlton to the minerals, as distinct from surface ownership. These investigations led to a thorough historical search for all documents from 1086 onwards that concerned Heanor, and the whole provides a detailed picture of land ownership in the parish from the Middle Ages." I have not examined any of the 32 documents analysed below, but have only seen catalogue descriptions of them online:

Other sources of Loscoe area land records which are cited by Cameron include:

• Lugard: Assizes Translation
• Wolley Charters
• Bemrose Collection
• Middleton Collection
• Jackson Collection (ed. TW Hall)
• Master Manuscripts
• Belvoir Charters
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/searchresults.asp?fldLettercodeRef=STAC&fldClassRef=&fldSearchNumber=214126&fldInvert=0&SearchInit=6 Star Chamber records

Links

• Heanor and District Local History Society
• Codnor and District Local History & Heritage Website
• Winifred Waterall
• Margaret Allen
• Derby Library Manuscripts Department
• Chris Phillips Guide to pre-1600 sources