Church Commissioners for England

Descent of the estates The estates of the Dean and Chapter of Durham were inherited, after some trimming, from those amassed by the priory of Durham. The Dean and Chapter and the bishop of Durham were by far the largest landowners in the Palatinate of Durham (which included parts of Northumberland as well as the historic county of Durham). Land was the prime source of wealth for such institutions, who could rent it out for agricultural use (with a growing revenue from the mineral rights as quarrying and mining expanded) and as tenements in the larger villages and towns. By the nineteenth century the wealth of Durham was a prime target for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who had been established with the aim of making a more equitable division of the Church of England's income amongst its priests. Some of this wealth had been diverted to fund the founding of the University of Durham in the 1830s, but large areas of land and its income, as well as rights to minerals and tithes, were transferred to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in the 1850s, amid an accompanying flurry of legal disputes.

This division means that the collection complements both the Durham Dean and Chapter Muniments, where it is possible to trace the earlier history of some properties, and some property records of the University of Durham. Although the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were administering the property only from the mid-nineteenth century, there is often a bundle of earlier material (usually referred to as “old deeds”) filed with the records, and sequences of eighteenth century leases, which would have been required to prove rightful ownership.

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