Ganthwaites

A settlement of four households and under thirty people on Gant Fell, keeping sheep and in every ordinary particular an upland family; they appear in the tithe book from its opening, marry within the upland and bury at Harrowgate.

Ties

• attend the March Muster and pay tithe to Harrowgate Priory
• the priory has taken the pact-family view in writing

At the table

The March cannot agree what they are. To the priory they are an ordinary pact family, which is to say a family keeping terms with a power of the place, whose concord, or agreement, is of great age. In the upper dale it is said the terms have changed them. Some few hold that they were never a family at all. Between the three no evidence decides. Something is left by them on the fell four times a year; some two hundred acres of theirs carry no stock; from the house a bell rings each day at dusk; the hill they never discuss. Parties on their ground are turned off it with courtesy, and for hard passages in foul weather the family is hired.