The building of a new church in the late 1780s may have been influenced or at least helped by the appointment of the Rev Robert Montgomery, as incumbent of the parish in July 1787. He was a cousin of Alexander Montgomery of Bessmount, who had begun to play an important role in parish affairs some time earlier and lent the parish £100 to finance the new build.
It was decided at a vestry meeting how this sum was to repaid –
It was enacted that the sum of one hundred pounds be levied off the parish of Tyhallan at twenty pounds a year including this present year as a fund towards building a new church & that Alexander Nixon Esq & the Rev Robert Montgomery are appointed to receive subscriptions & proposals for the building of the said new church. (16 October 1787).
Alexander Nixon was a grandson of Alexander Montgomery and succeeded his grandfather at Bessmount, taking the additional surname of Montgomery.
However, the £100 provided by Alexander Montgomery was not sufficient to build the church and on 9 May 1789, a memorial was sent to John (Hotham, 9th Baronet) Bishop of Clogher by the Rev Robert Montgomery, stating that the parish church –
having been in so ruinous a state, the parishioners agreed to pull it down & to build a new one, at a little distance from the situation of the old one. That the said new church is considerably advanced, being covered in and partly glazed. That the money voted by the parish, together with the subscriptions made for the purpose, are all expended. That the parishioners are very poor. – And that it would require the sum of £185 to finish the work completely. (Clogher Diocesan Registry, RCB Library).
He asks the Bishop to recommend the premises to the Trustees and Commissioners of the First Fruits ‘in order to obtain the necessary assistance’. The Board of First Fruits was the body which provided funding for the building of churches and their repair at this time. Samuel Lewis in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) records that the church was built at a cost of £277, defrayed by parochial assessment. It would seem from this document that the new church was built close to the old church but not directly on the same site. This backs up the belief that the old church was to the south of the present structure right on top of the hill, perhaps on the old ecclesiastical site.
By 1791, it is evident that the vestry was not happy with ‘Samuel Wilson and Robert Herst the persons who built the Church’ as it had not been ‘executed in a workmanlike and sufficient manner’ and that a law suit was to be instituted against them to oblige them to finish their work. (25 Apr 1791). The minutes do not reveal the outcome of this enactment but in 1793 Robert Herst was paid the balance for his building of the reading desk, pulpit, clerk’s seat and communion table rails.
The church, rectangular in shape and measuring 74×27 feet, appears to have been ready for use before the Rev Robert Montgomery resigned in 1792, as an undated petition from the parish to the Bishop of Clogher for the consecration of the new church is signed by Rev Robert Montgomery, John Campbell and William Henderson, churchwardens, and John Stockdale, James Johnston, Matthew Swift and Thomas Johnston.
The vestry minutes of the late 1780s and early 1790s, besides referring to the interior works done by Robert Herst, also record the coppering of the roof over the east window, the building of piers, the putting up of gates and the enclosing of the churchyard. John Duffy, a tailor, made curtains, James Harlan made window shutters and Mr Dunlop was paid £1.2.0. for a plan of the church. A commission of three persons, Edward Richardson, Leslie Kirk and William Mitchell, was set up to supervise the erection and allocation of the seating. Those who had seats in the old church were to be accommodated as nearly as possible to a similar place in the new church. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Counties of South Ulster 1834-8 (Vol. 40) state that the seats were sold for £50.8.0. appropriated to finishing the church, which suggests no funding from the Board of First Fruits was received.
The distribution of the seats was recorded at a vestry meeting held on 2 November 1792. The prominent families of the district Lucas, Maxwell, Montgomery and Richardson occupied the front rows while ‘the seat next to the high one’ belonged to the Graham family of Coolmain. Other families with designated seats were the Johnstons, Williamsons, Garlands, Simpsons, Steels, Hannas, Hargraves, Quins, Stockdales, Campbells and Grahams. A single seat on one side was allocated to ‘Mr Rice’ of Leitrim, who must be an ancestor or relative of James Blayney Rice of Leitrim, founder of the Fenians in Monaghan in the 1860s.
The minutes of the early years of the nineteenth century regularly refer to the building of a wall to enclose the churchyard. A new registry book was purchased in 1806 which still exists today and slates were bought for the roof. On 2 November 1792, it was proposed that a spire be added to the church and a fund was opened for subscribers. However, there is no further reference to this proposal and it was not until 1824 that it was agreed to approach the Board of First Fruits for the loan of £200 to build a tower or belfry onto the church.
The architectural historian, Kevin V. Mulligan, describes the church as a small roughcast hall of three bays with a neat apsidal chancel and a tower of standard design. He writes that the interior remains eighteenth century in feeling, an intimate cubic space with a deep coved ceiling and thickly moulded cornice. The gallery, with fluted Tuscan columns, was added by J.F Johnston in 1844. (The Buildings of Ireland South Ulster Armagh, Cavan and Monaghan, 2013).
The gravestone within the Church tower wall
There is an old gravestone that was set within the wall of the church tower almost a hundred years ago. The inscription reads ‘Here lyeth the/ body of John/ Williams who depa/rted this life February/ the 14th 1723 aged 70 years’. The brass plaque underneath records that it was removed from the churchyard for its better preservation in 1927 by Sir William Whitla and his brother Meredith, direct descendants of John Williams. Sir William and Meredith Whitla were first cousins of the artist Alexander Williams whose family had played a part in parish life during the eighteenth century. They lived in the townlands of Groves and Lappan. John Williams, who died in 1723, was the great-great-great-grandfather of the Whitlas and Alexander Williams.
A new militia force was created in Ireland under the Militia Act (1793), each county to provide one regiment. For the first time Catholics were allowed to become members of the force. The militia numbers were extended under another act of 1809 due to the Napoleonic wars taking place on the Continent at this time. Under its civil obligations each parish was responsible for recruiting a quota of men for the militia regiment. Vestry meetings in the years 1807, 1810 and 1813 refer to the raising of men from the parish of Tyholland for the Monaghan Militia. The number to be raised seems to have varied between two and eleven men. A cost was to be levied on the parish, some of which was to be given to each recruit as an enticement to join up. The militia in Ireland was disbanded in 1816, after the Battle of Waterloo, until 1855 when it was reassembled at the time of the Crimean War.
Two Acts of Parliament passed in 1823 and 1832 provided for the conversion of tithes into a fixed monetary charge on land. The Tithe Applotment Books now in the National Archives, were created as a result of these acts. Their purpose was to assess the amount of tax that occupiers of agricultural holdings should pay as tithes to the Church of Ireland. The Tyholland volume is dated 1832 and can be accessed on line. To give a couple of examples, for the townland of Leitrim 41 names are recorded and for Kildoagh 17 names. The acreage of each farm is given and the amount of tithe to be paid. As these books predate Griffith’s Valuation they are an important source for both genealogists and local historians.
The first of these acts the Tithe Compensation Act of 1823 exercised the minds of the parishioners of Tyholland in 1824. Following the passing of this act, a tithe vestry was set up in Tyholland of which Alexander Nixon Montgomery was the chairman. His report to 22 attendees on 10 November 1824 detailed the acrimonious disagreement the tithe vestry was having with the incumbent, Rev Charles Crookshank, about the sum to be paid to him. The minister wanted £500 in lieu of tithes and the vestry wanted him to consider £400 due to the fall in the price of grain. Rev Crookshank wrote letters to the Bishop of Clogher (Robert Tottenham Loftus 1822-1850) and Henry Gaulburn, Chief Secretary (1821-1827) to the Lord Lieutenant. Montgomery’s report refers to ‘unwarranted aspersions and erroneous statements’ made by Crookshank in these letters and there is also mention of the activities of his tithe manager, Terence Lamb. Peadar Livingstone in his book The Monaghan Story (1980) refers to the Rev Crookshank sending out his proctors to collect tithes in 1831 when they were met by a ‘huge and armed mob of farmers’. A few years later Lewis refers to the tithes of Tyholland amounting to £350 so the parishioners seem to have certainly secured a reduction in the amount of tithes to be paid.
These acts regarding the payment of tithes came at a time when mass opposition to tithes and parish cess was rising: both were resented by the majority of the population who did not belong to the Established Church, yet were obliged to pay for it, as well as maintaining their own churches and clergy. Opposition escalated in the 1830s into the Tithe Wars, until the Tithe Commutation Act 1838 resolved the issue to a large extent, by creating a new system whereby the landlord paid the tithe and the tenant paid an increase in rent. Parish cess was abolished under the provisions of the Church Temporalities Act of 1833 and brought the civil functions of vestries to an end. The second vestry book for Tyholland begins in 1828 just when these new acts were coming into effect.
The content of the first vestry minute book demonstrates how the activities of a small rural parish vestry during the era of the Penal Laws and their aftermath, firmly established the active presence of the Established Church in the locality, initially renovating the church building in its prominent position, with support from local land owners willing to pay for prominent seats within the building and having burial plots within its grounds and later by the erection of a new church building. It also reflects the important role the parish played in some aspects of civil administration at local level – the maintenance of roads, the care of the Poor and orphans, the raising of militiamen and the reform of the tithe system. The succeeding vestry minute books and other records will no doubt reveal much about the history of this parish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.