First, I want to thank Steven Hobbs, the Wiltshire County archivist, for his time and expertise, and for the patience he showed while I was researching this book. His enthusiasm for discovering key documents in the enormous and marvellously rich collections he has under his care never flagged. It has been the greatest of pleasures to work with him.
The staff of Cambridge University Library, the National Archives, the House of Lords Journal Office, the British Library, Hatfield House, and Sheffield Archives have all been equally generous and professional with the documents in their care.
In Wiltshire, Alison J. Maddock and John Chandler both steered me toward important changes of view, and Rosalind Conklin Hays, the co-editor of the Wiltshire collection in the Records of Early English Drama series, generously made available her preliminary transcriptions from the Wiltshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, in particular the libel sung by Jane Norrice of Stoke Verdon (A1/110/1631E no 151), which appears here on Chapter 8.
The volumes published each year by the Wiltshire Record Society, including the key document for this book, Surveys of the Manors of Philip, earl of Pembroke and Montgomery 1631–2, edited by Eric Kerridge in 1953, have been invaluable, none more than the brilliant act of research and editorship performed by Dr. Joseph Bettey in his Wiltshire Farming in the Seventeenth Century, published by the Record Society in 2005. There is no more remarkable account of rural England on the cusp of the medieval and the modern. For membership details and past volumes, please contact the Honorary Secretary, Wiltshire Record Society, c/o Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, Cocklebury Road, Chippenham SN15 3QN, England
At Wilton House itself, the Earl of Pembroke, Chris Rolfe, Ros Liddington, Nigel Bailey, David Colgrave, and Charlotte Spender have all gone well out of their way to help me, and I am very grateful to them all.
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Paula Henderson, Susan Koslow, the late Sir Oliver Millar, Alistair Laing, Barbara Ravelhofer, Robert Sackville-West, Alexandra Samarine, and Kim Wilkie have all in their different ways set me on better and truer paths.
I am grateful, as ever, to Caroline Dawnay, Zoe Pagnamenta, Hugh van Dusen, Vera Brice, Jane Beirn, Helen Ellis, Sammia Rafique, and above all Susan Watt for making the complex and drawn-out task of writing books like this into the pleasure it has been.