MANOR FARM [continued]
that is now part of the house in the village known as Midnight Lodge. The tithe map showed that land south of Cow Close Wood that is now part of Manor Farm was held by Thomas Bradley of Stocking House. Walkington had the same tenancy in 1812 and the 1851 population census showed John Ransom as tenant of 24 acres known as Hagget Mouth which was an earlier name for Manor House.
By 1881 John Ransome’s land had grown to 72 acres and twenty years later the tenant was John Smedley but no acreage was recorded.and by 1909 the tenancy had been taken by Robert Wood who was farming 60 acres whose son Thomas Herbert was born at the farm in 1912 but John Bentley was there in 1924 and was followed by Charles Stephen Lawn and then by Harry Hawkins who was at the farm when it was purchased by John Hetherington in 1939.
The farm was then owned successively by two families, the Hutchinsons and Grays before it was bought in 1970 by the present owners Kenneth and Dorothy Garbut who have farmed there for 35 years but Ken’s connection with the village goes back much further as his grandfather was James Thompson whose family history was traced on an earlier page.
SCAWTON PARK
The farm probably owes its name to the park enclosed by the Malebisse family early in the 13th century but there is no record of a farm with that name in any of the early estate records.
The figures in the rent roll of 1770 suggest that Lancelot Belt was the tenant in that year and his son Thomas may have been born at the farm in 1746 followed by the births of Jane in 1754 and Richard in 1756. Lancelot was still at the farm in 1790 but by 1812 the tenancy had gone to Benjamin Smith who had married Eleanor Bradley the daughter of Thomas the tenant of Stocking House in 1774 where they apparently lived before moving to Scawton Park. When Eleanor died in 1813 Benjamin was 65 and six years later he married a young lady named Elizabeth when he was 71 and she was 19. When he died four years later his young widow married William Houlston who had been working as a servant at the farm.
He was listed as the tenant in 1839 and was living at the farm with his wife and two children Mary and Andrew job who took the tenancy after his father died in 1876. When Andrew Job died in 1898 his son William became the tenant and was at the farm in 1913 but William Leonard Houlston was the tenant in 1927 and was the last member of the family to farm in Scawton.
Dennis Blackhall was the tenant when the farm was purchased by Morrisons in 1939 and the land was purchased by the Redhead family of Hambleton in the 1970s when the dwelling ceased to be a working farmhouse.
MOOR HOUSE FARM
The name did not appear on the estate survey of 1694 but William Case and Edward King paid rent of £2 10s for the right to cut turf from that part of the moor towards Hambleton and John Southram paid rent of £10 for the same rights on two riggs and half of the moor. Casse was still paying rent for turbury in 1708 as was Thomas Skelton in 1719 and John Foster paid 6s 9d in 1721 for the liberty of putting sheep on Scawton Moor.
