THE WORLD THE PEMBROKES ACQUIRED
England in the sixteenth century was less a single state than a gathering of separate countries, each full of intense local loyalties and habits of being. Deep communality and tight local networks lay at the heart of the country. Each landscape was a world in itself, and the fifty thousand acres or so of Wiltshire lands and manors the Herberts acquired from the crown in the 1540s were then, and remain today, among the most desirable in the kingdom. The Herberts had landed in the best that England could offer. Even though the Herbert paradox was in play—they only possessed their estate because the crown had granted it to them—this was to become their country, the place where their most rooted loyalties lay. The story of their relationship to the crown cannot be understood without the picture behind it of the world they had now acquired. Their lands and manors were the counterpoint to the cynical realties of the struggle at court. The realities of an owned estate can explain conservative rebellion. The lands themselves are the vision behind the great Van Dyck painting.
Early on a summer morning—and you should make it a Sunday, when England stays in bed for hours after the sun has risen—the chalk downland to the west of Wilton slowly reveals itself in the growing light as an open and free-flowing stretch of country, long wide ridges with ripples and hollows within them, separated by river valleys, with an air of Tuscany transported to the north, perhaps even an improved Tuscany. Seventeenth-century scientists thought the smoothness of the chalk hills meant they were part of the sea floor that had appeared after Noah’s flood had at last receded. It was old, God-smoothed country and pure because of it.
This morning, you will have it to yourself. At first light, the larks are up and singing, but everything else is drenched in a golden quiet. Shadows hang in the woods, and the sun casts low bars across the backs of the hills. You will see the deer, ever on the increase in southern England, moving silently and hesitantly in the half-distance. It is a place of slightness and subtlety, wide and long-limbed, drawn with a steady pencil. Above the deeper combes, on the slopes that the Wiltshiremen call “cliffs,” the grass is dotted with cowslips and early purple orchids. Gentians and meadow saxifrage can still be found on the open downland. Chalkhill Blue butterflies dance over the turf. Fritillaries and white admirals are in the woods. The whole place, as Edward Thomas once described the shape of chalkland, is full of those “long straight lines in which a curve is always latent…”
This feeling of length—slow changes, a sense of distance—is at the heart of the Wiltshire chalk. It is not a plain, because everywhere the ground surface shifts and modulates, but it is nowhere sharp. It is full of continuity and connectedness, a sense that if you set off in any direction you would have two or three days’ journey before anything interrupted you. This, in other words, is a place that feels like its own middle, the deepest and richest of arrivals.
John Aubrey, the great seventeenth-century gossip and antiquarian, whose family rented a farm in one of these valleys, called his treasured country “a lovely campania,” a perfect Champagne country. There is no marginality; instead, settlement, rootedness, stability, removal from strife and trouble. “The turfe is of a short sweet grasse,” Aubrey wrote of the place he loved, “good for the sheep, and delight-full to the eye, for its smoothnesse like a bowling green.” The most delicious things here were the rabbits, “the best, sweetest, and fattest of any in England; a short, thick coney, and exceeding fatt. The grasse is very short, and burnt up in the hot weather. ’Tis a saying, that conies doe love rost-meat.” The rabbits’ tastiness was a sign of the country’s beneficence.
These wonderful lands—the chalk downs and the lush watered valleys of the rivers that run between them—spread over eighty square miles, were the core of the Herbert estate. Every element of the perfect life is here. High on the chalk ridge just to the west of Wilton is the great royal hunting ground of Grovely Wood, set up as a forest by the Saxon kings, so old that it formed no part of the system of parishes that were created around it before the Norman conquest. It is one of the twenty-five hunting forests mentioned in the Domesday Book, the precious reserves in which the king alone had the right to kill game. Grovely—its name perhaps a memory of the patches of rough woodland growing here when the Saxons first arrived—is still thick with bluebells and wood anemones in the early summer.
From the top of the downs, long droves descend into the valleys of the rivers that cut through the chalk tableland. Honeysuckle and wild clematis drape themselves across the hedges. The sun breaks into the droves past the thorns that are thick with mayflower. Cow parsley is just sprouting in the verges, the wheat and barley still a dense green in the fields beside you. It doesn’t matter which river valley you choose: the Ebble, or the Nadder, or the Wylye. Each of them will still greet you like a vision of perfection, the perfect interfolding of the human and the natural that is at the heart of the Arcadian idea. The chalk streams (all three of them still have the Celtic names they had in pre-Roman Britain) emerge in bubbling springs all along the valley sides. The water that has percolated down through the chalk hits a layer of clay and comes to the surface. Along that springline, below the arable fields but above the floodable valley bottoms, are the villages. Their emergences are beautiful, soft, weed-rimmed places where the water erupts in shallow mushrooms and riffles. It is as if the water is simmering in the pools before making its easy way down to the main rivers that slope off to the east.
So mudless is this spring water that the rivers remain entirely clear as they move over their pale beds. The banks are spotted with kingcups, and there are islands of white-flowered watercrowsfoot in midstream. The hairy leaves of water mint grow on the gravel banks, coots and moorhens scoot between them, and if you wade out barefoot into the shockingly cold water of the river, the small, wild brown trout flicker away in front of you, running from your Gulliver-in-Lilliput intrusion. Among the trout are the pale bodies of the graylings, called Thymalus thymalus because their flesh smells of the wild thyme that grows on the downland turf, and which in the seventeenth century were known here as “umbers,” shadow-fish, their silvery grayness scarcely to be distinguished from the most beautiful river water in England.
This was ancient country, drenched in continuities. In common with the rest of southern England, it looked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much as it had for at least a thousand and maybe two or three thousand years. There would have been differences in details: woods had grown up where fields had been before; fields had been cleared where trees had once clothed the landscape. There were more people and more houses. But the villages, as ever, were made of the materials the land could provide. Wheat straw–thatched the roofs, cut not with a scythe but more carefully and more slowly with a sickle—a smaller, neater tool but justifiable in economic terms because it would guarantee a good length in the roofing material: longer straw made dryer roofs. In the walls, the oak frames were infilled with hazel panels, made with exactly the same technique as the hurdles used to enclose the sheep in the folds, the young pliant wands woven between the uprights or “sails” (the wattle), smeared with mud and straw (the daub), and then painted with limewash. Occasionally, for the walls, a mixture of chalk, or “clunch,” blocks would be used, quarried from the hill and then mixed with brick from the valley clays. All of this one can still see in the houses of these valleys. Nothing would have come from more than a mile or two away. This was an immutable pattern, the intimate folding of men, their farming, and their habits of life on to the opportunities and constraints the landscape offered them.
The high chalkland would have been nothing without the river valleys. Settlement needs water, and the dew ponds on the downs—in fact, enormous clay-lined dishes to catch the rain—provided water good enough for sheep but desiccating to human taste. Each sip seems to leave a residue of chalk in your mouth. The spring-fed valley water is different, as bubblingly restorative as any in England, marvellous to lie in on a hot summer afternoon, your back on the pebbles, the water dancing around your head and shoulders. The Arcadian world of the Pembrokes’ Wiltshire valleys relied for its existence on the constant and mutually supportive relationship of these two environments, the high chalkland and the damp wet valleys, each providing what the other lacked.
The same system of land management, and the virtually immobile social structure it created, had persisted across the centuries. It was, apart for some alterations at the margins, a profoundly conservative and unchanging world. Farming patterns and social relationships had lasted here essentially unchanged from before the ninth century. This extraordinary continuity, even as the world was revolutionized around them, became the dominant fact of the Pembroke estates. This was the old world. Its ancient methods looked like a version of Arcadia. And it was a world the Pembrokes were intent on protecting.
Its roots stretched back into the Dark Ages, perhaps to the moment when the Viking armies were threatening the well-being of much of the Midlands, East Anglia and Wessex, perhaps before then, when violence was still endemic among the Saxon chieftains and their war bands. The documents are thin on the ground, but it seems certain that the system of the manor emerged from a world of violence and the need for protection within it. A warlord offered land and defense, a villein—a man of the village—supplied in return labor and loyalty.
This was certainly how the landowning class of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the history of what they owned. John Norden, the preeminent surveyor of the early seventheenth century, a professional and a devout Christian, conservative in his ideals, first published his Surveiors Dialogue in 1607. It was a popular book that went through three large editions, and was the leading text on the meaning of land, its duties and rewards, in early modern England. With it, Norden was voicing the accepted nostrums of the society he was addressing.
After the departure of the Romans, Norden told his audience of gentlemen, the country was left as
a very Desert and Wildernesse, full of woods, fels, moores, bogs, heathes, and all kind of forlorne places: and how-soeuer wee finde the state of this Island now, Records do witness vnto us, that it was for the most part a vniuersall wildernesse, until people finding it a place desolate and forlorne began to set footing here, and by degrees grew into multitudes; though for a time brutish and rude.
In that wild time, when life was lawless, there was mutual benefit to be had in community. The arrangement was originally voluntary on both sides.
In the beginning of euery Mannor, there was a mutuall respect of assistance, betweene the Lord who gave parcels of land…and the tennants of euery nature, for ayding, strengthening and defending each other:
But time passed and what had begun as a voluntary arrangement stiffened into the “custom of the manor.” Both service to the Lord and the rights of the tenants had become obligatory “and either, in right of the custome due to the other, constraineth each other to do that which in the beginning was of either part voluntary.”
Central to the system was the idea of balance and mutuality in community. In Norden’s pages you can hear the discussions of the English ruling class before the Civil War, the vision of what they still saw as the organic integrity of the manors they owned and controlled. Norden derived the word manor itself from the French verb mainer—to keep a place in hand, or in check. Control was the essence of good management, but in harness with control and discipline was the idea that the landlord’s own life, that of his family, his “posterity,” the lands they held, the lives of those who lived on their lands, were all part of a single, organic whole.
It is, in this ideal and moralized world, a picture of a profoundly hierarchical community, deriving its security and well-being from the natural relationship of parts. “And is not euery Mannor a little common wealth,” Norden asked, tapping big political issues in the use of that phrase, “whereof the Tenants are the members, the Land the body, and the Lord the head?” That organic analogy worked in detail. Above all, the land’s bodily nature needed to be attended to:
If it be not fed with nutriture, and comforted and adorned with the most expedient commodities, it will pine away, and become forlorne, as the mind that hath no rest or recreation, waxeth lumpish and heauy. So that ground that wanteth due disposing & right manurance, waxeth out of kinde: euen the best meddowes will become ragged, and full of unprofitable weedes, if it be not cut and eaten.
This idea of organic health, and of balance as the source of that health, runs unbroken from the farming of the fields to the management of the country. It is an undivided conceptual ecology that can take in the workings of the physical body, the court at Whitehall, the family, the village, the land itself, the growing of crops, the transmission of well-being to the future, the inheritance of understanding from the past, and above all the interlocking roles of nobility, gentry, and commonalty. It is the ideology of an establishment concerned with keeping itself in the position of wealth and power. There is not a hint of democracy, let alone radicalism, but it is a frame of mind that also sets itself against any form of authoritarianism. The workings of the medieval and post-medieval community depend at their heart on a balance of interests, contributions, and rewards. It is what, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was called, quite consciously, a “common wealth”: well-being derived from a life lived and considered in common. The custom of the manor was not to do with the regulations of the state, or with individual freedom. It was a deeply conservative premodern and pre-market system that recognized no overriding rights of the individual or of national interest. It believed, to an extent the modern world can scarcely grasp, in the rights of the community as a living organism.
Again and again in The Surveior’s Dialogue, Norden emphasized the point. Good decisions in the management of land were “the meanes to enable the Honourable to shelter the virtuous distressed.” Increasing revenues from a manor allowed the tenants to be treated well. This was a form of obligation, just as, in a family, duty was owed both ways:
As children are bound to their parents by the bonds of obedience, so are the parents bound to their children by the bond of education; and as servants are bound to their masters in the bond of true service, so are the Masters bound to their servants in the bond of reward. In like manner, tenants being bound unto their Lords in the bond of duety, so are Lords bound vnto their Tennants in the bond of loue.
That last word recurs. Tenancy is not a matter of rent, or at least not only of rent; it is, Norden says quite explicitly, a love structure. The relationships within a manor, he tells the landlords, must be “in a mutual manner, you to be helpful vnto them, and they louing unto you. And by this meanes, should your strengths increase far more by their loue then by your lucre, & their comfort grow as much by your fauour as doth their groanes vnder your greediness.” There was, Norden warned his gentlemen readers, “no comforte in a discontented people” and discontent in them came from avarice and indifference in their landlord. His own well-being, as the head of the body, was utterly dependent on their well-being as its limbs. Extortionate rents and the application of raw market principles would destroy the lord as much as the people.
These questions, and their implications of bodily and moral balance, would, on a far larger scale, become the central concern of seventeenth-century England. Did the king owe the same duty of care to the kingdom as the earl owed to the inhabitants of these ridges and valleys? Was his authority as bound up with love as Norden’s paragraphs imply? Did he in fact derive that authority from the people he ruled? Was rule a form of duty? These questions, lurking in the ambiguities of lordship, would lead to civil war, and in that civil war these Arcadian ideas were ranged on the side of Parliament and the ancient constitution and against a king and his ministers, who were seen to have broken the ancient bonds of love and duty. Conservatism was at the heart of Arcadia as it was of the English revolution.
This old, inherited mutuality in social relationships was mirrored by a carefully interfolded relationship to the land itself. The whole system of the chalkland manors depended on people adapting the way they farmed to what the land could tolerate and what the land could offer. On that basis, the manors were divided into three layers: at the top the wide grazing of the open downland; in the valley floor, the lush damp meadows and marshes; and between the two, on the valley sides, the arable fields and woods. Throughout the Middle Ages and in the centuries that followed, sheep were grazed by day on the downs, and in the evening were led downhill along the droves to the arable fields to manure them; in effect, they were used to transfer the nutrients from the chalk on to the arable land. They also served the purpose of fixing the seed corn into the tilth.
The lush valley meadows were the third part of the system. In the early spring, the grass started to grow there before there was any available on the down. There, too, in the summer, the big hay crops could be grown that would feed the animals in the winter, particularly the oxen of the manor’s plough team. Good valley grazing allowed the village to keep a larger flock, which meant that more arable ground could be cultivated, which meant that more grain could be grown. Although wool and meat were produced from the flocks, their essential product was grain, the stuff of life, the food on which people depended for survival. All was connected: chalk turf and valley hay, down and meadow, the digestive system of the sheep, and the well-being of men, women, and children.
Ownership of this means of production was not shared. Each farmer owned his own beasts, his own seed corn, his own house, his own garden, barns, and backyard. He also owned his own strips in the huge open, arable fields. But this assemblage of private property was managed in common. Sheep were owned by individual farmers but were grazed in communal flocks, tended by white-caped shepherds whose wages were paid in proportion by all those whose sheep they looked after. Flocks of several hundred sheep were usual on chalkland manors, and in many ways they dictated the shared nature of the farming. It was only practical to graze them together and to fold them together on the same arable field. Villages, as elsewhere in the Midlands and in the chalk country, usually had three open fields (sometimes two, occasionally four or more), of which one lay fallow every year. It was usually laid down in the custom of the manor that the folding of the sheep on to the fields should begin one year at one end, the next at the other. Only that way would the fertility delivered by the sheep be spread evenly across the strips from year to year. Each farmer had to provide winter hay for the sheep, and contribute his few pence toward the employment of a cowherd, hogward, hayward, and even a mole catcher for the manor. Those who failed to meet their obligations to the community would be denied “the fold”—that life-giving manure from the sheep—without which their land would not grow the grains on which they relied for their existence. It was a brutal sanction, but as the manor records show, not one the villagers were slow to impose.
The shepherd in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Wiltshire, far from being the careless lover of the Arcadian imagination, was one of the best paid and most responsible men in the village. In his hands was the critical job of safeguarding the communal flock that was the basis of the entire village’s survival. By the fifteenth century, he was earning ten or twelve shillings a year (for which one could rent thirty acres or more of arable ground) plus an allowance of grain, a lamb in the spring, a fleece at the summer shearing, a whole cheese, the milk of those ewes whose lambs had died, and the milk of all ewes on Sundays. He was allowed to keep some of his sheep in the lord’s pasture and was absolved from all communal duties. The shepherd was not the poorest of the poor, but even something of a village grandee.
A fascinating document in the Wiltshire records called simply “Concerning the Shepherd” describes the reality of life for a Wiltshire downland shepherd in September 1629. It consists of the requests laid down by the people of Heale, a small community in the valley of the Avon a few miles north of Wilton, his collective employer. They required of him
That in person he diligently Attende and keepe his flocke. That he absent not himself from them, but upon urgent and necessary cause, and then put the same to some sufficiente body, and not to Children either boyes or girles.
There is a hint there of independence and even truculence in their employee. He also had to keep the sheep out of the corn. Any damage done by the sheep to the growing crops will be docked from his wages “according as two other tenants not interested in the said damage shall value the same.” If a sheep died, he had to bring the carcass to the owner’s house, to prove he had not merely sold the sheep and was cheating his employers. He had to look after the communal hay rick on which the flock would depend in the winter. He was to prevent “wool-pickers”—and this is a measure of the poverty and tightness in these valleys—from coming to pick the tiny scraps of wool that caught on the hurdles around the fold at night. He must “mend the scabby,” carefully cut and destroy the blackthorn furze that always threatens to take over downland grazing, must drive “alien” sheep or pigs into the communal pound and not keep any except the community flock, a temptation to free enterprise he was to resist. If any of the community pay him in “naughty corne, the shepherd upon complainte to be righted by the lord of the mannor on the party soe offendinge.”
This was scarcely the Arcadian picture of ease and contentment. Its regulatory tightness was a symptom of real pressure on the resource. At the same time, the existence of the regulations, the communal management of a shared resource, and the expectation that they would be obeyed, that the shepherd should stay with his flock and not deputize except in emergency, that he should look after both animals and grazing—one can see in the presumptions behind those requests a version of the cooperative and even the authentic world of which the sophisticated would always dream. The regulations are evidence of communality working for real.
The system operated hard up against its limits. Animal diseases could devastate flocks, with no understanding among the villagers of where the disease might have come from or what to do about it. In the seventeenth century, the habit developed of feeding tobacco to ill sheep in half-magical attempts to cure them of the many disgusting diseases sheep are prone to. Up to a third of each year’s crop had to be held back for the following year’s seed corn. Fertility was always at a premium, and any opportunity to receive the dung, or “soil” as it was called, which should have gone to one’s neighbor, was always welcome. If someone was found to have done wrong or strayed outside the limits laid down by custom, punishment would be swift. In these ways, the manor could be seen either as a system of cooperative balance or, like a coral reef, a world of such intense internal competitiveness that its struggles and rivalries had been frozen into a set of symbiotic duties and obligations, the rivals in a clinch, by which life alone was sustainable.
Those obligations were all-pervading. Women and children were set to weeding the arable crops in the early summer. Husbands and fathers lived under a fearsome burden of communal work, or work done for the good of the lord of the manor. At the height of the Middle Ages, every year the villager had to thresh a bushel each (seventy or eighty pounds in weight) of wheat, rye, barley, beans, peas, and two bushels of oats; mow two swathes of a meadow; and reap, bind, and carry half an acre of it. Agreement after agreement specified the amount of dung each man had to carry from his own yard to the arable fields, the number of hurdles he had to make for the fold (a practiced man could make two and a half hurdles a day), and the regular amounts of money he had to contribute to the lord of the manor in return for his right to farm the land: nutsilver at the time of nuts, a rental penny at Easter, lardersilver at one or twopence a head, the substantial tax of tallage at six shillings, eightpence each, the threepence per head for the compulsory and customary drinking sessions called “scotales,” and the cock and three hens at Martinmas, in November.
This system of obligation and dominance, even as early as the twelfth century, had started to evolve. The work duties of the villeins had often been changed into money payments, threepence or sixpence for “all autumn work.” These villages were not designed to be self-sufficient but to produce, in the grain, a crop that could be sold for cash. Cash played a part in a complex picture of partly “customary” labor—the obligations entered into in the far distant past—and wage-based labor. Some men were paid particular rates for particular jobs; others were taken on for a year or half a year; some simply had rent-free holdings in return for work.
The Black Death in 1348 and 1349, which killed between a third and a half of the population of England, changed the balance of this world. Entire villages died. In some, lone men were found still alive among houses full of the dead. The relationship between lord and villein shifted. Too much land and a shortage of labor meant vacant holdings, decayed tenements, and collapsing rental values. The bargain on which the ancient communities had worked—land in return for duties—was no longer worth making. After 1350, those with labor to offer found themselves in a suppliers’ market, and the age of compulsory labor on the lord’s land was largely, although not entirely, over. From then onward, people occupied their houses and lands by what became known as “copyhold”—literally a written copy of what they had agreed with the lord, or in fact with his steward, as written down in the manor records. Until the end of the seventeenth century, this was the dominant form of tenure on the Wilton estate.
The copyhold manor sounds such a dry and legalistic term, but is in fact the label for an intriguing social experiment, lasting two hundred years or so, in the villages of rural England. It occupies a middle ground, which we would hardly recognize today, between the tight and oppressive lordly control of the early Middle Ages, which came to an end with the Black Death, and the almost equally oppressive regime of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against which Cobbett and others would rail, where the sheer financial dominance of the landlords had erased any rights of the ordinary people. The sense of mutuality in community relationships, which was the dominant note in the copyhold manor, was never stronger than from about 1450 to about 1650. It is at least an interesting coincidence that the second half of that period was almost precisely the time when the fashion for the pastoral, for the Arcadian vision, was most central to English culture. Was pastoralism—like the modern environmental movement—the expression of a world realizing that something real and valuable, which previously had been taken for granted, was now under threat and disappearing from under its nose? If imagination is the cousin of memory, then are the dream worlds of Renaissance England in fact the reassembled fragments of a remembered existence that people’s fathers and grandfathers might have considered normal?
The copyhold system was, of course, both good and bad. The tenancy was usually given for three lives, sometimes to a man, his wife, and a son; a man, his sister, and her husband; a man and two sons; or a widow and her son and daughter. It gave security to the farmers and allowed them to invest in improvements that a short lease could not allow. Land and buildings were only rarely let to single individuals; the lease for three lives, if to a man, his wife, his sons, meant that the terms of the lease would extend to whichever of these was the last to die. No one, in other words, would be ejected from their house and farm on the death of a husband or a father. Leases for three lives meant that the maintenance of the social fabric was built into the economic structure of the place.
But the system’s conservatism was also a brake. The entire system was presided over by the memory of how things had always been done. Wisdom was essentially proverbial: what was known was good; what was strange was bad. Anything inherited was to be held on to; anything innovatory to be looked at with suspicion. The real story of this ancient form of life was not freedom but imposition, the restrictions on the individual that the workings of the community required. No modern surveillance society could match the reality of a chalkland village in which work patterns, sexual habits, the ability to sell and trade, and forms of inheritance and friendship were all closely supervised, not by the distant lord of the manor but by the other villagers themselves. The all-seeing eyes of neighbors deeply familiar with “the custom of the manor,” that inherited habit, monitored every inch and second.
Whether and where you could collect sticks for firewood, the thickness of the hedge around your garden, the suitability of your chimney for fires, the state of your roof, the dirtiness of the path up to your door, the ringlessness of your pigs’ noses, the size of your back room, the clothes your wore, the way you spoke in public, the amount you could drink, your behavior in church: on every conceivable issue, the village could police the habits and trangressions of its inhabitants, and having “presented” the offenders, could sentence and punish them. Village stocks and ducking stools were both the symbols and instruments of control. Right up until the seventeenth century, villagers guilty of theft or adultery were beaten in English villages “until their backs were bloody.” Wilton had its own “cage, pillory and stocks.” The tumbrel and “cucckingstool” (“a chair in which scolds were sat down to be dunked [demergebantur] in the river”) were kept in the little “parrock” (an enclosure fenced in with hurdles) belonging to a townsman called Richard Hatchett.
The village was never more vigilant than on the question of land—its boundaries, uses, and access. Common land was not common to anyone: it was common to the few villagers who had rights over it. Others were excluded. The great open fields were not open in any democratic sense: their individual strips, even if reallocated each year among the villagers, were individually named and individually owned, marked, and policed. You could be had up for trespassing on them just as much as on any enclosed land. Acres of parchment were devoted to precise and enforceable rights to and exclusions from wood, marsh, and moor.
Why so tight? Because most of rural England, from the Middle Ages onward, spent most of the time under stress. There was a desperate shortage of fertility: farming systems could only just sustain the human populations that depended on them. If for every grain sown the average return was between three and four grains, one of which had to be kept as seed for the next year, the land was an asset to be cosseted. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt the habits that, so far at least, had allowed the village to feed its people. Poverty bred fear, fear bred conservatism, and conservatism shut out strangers.
This, in many ways, was the reality of the lands the Herberts had acquired, a reliance on rules inherited from “a time beyond which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary,” not because those rules stemmed from a golden age but because the risk that changing them would dissolve the system on which survival depended. Communal memory was the arbiter of life. The “custom of the manor” from “time out of mind” was both a moral duty and a set of practical requirements. There was to be no private dealing of which the court and village did not know the details. The manor court, which in its different forms could deal with petty crimes and with all property transactions and transfers, was to be the place in which grievances were to be aired and arrangements made, because only in the openness of those courts, which all copyholders could attend, was communal well-being—common wealth—to be found.
The closed-circuit supervision of one’s neighbors’ prying eyes ensured that people would not cut down their timber trees, sublet their land for longer than a year, or sell any part of it except in open court. They had to maintain their buildings. If they did not, they would be warned three times, at six-month intervals. On the third time, a stake would be driven into the ground by the front door (said to be the origin of an asset being “at stake”). If nothing had been done by the fourth time, the property would be forfeit. Then the “customary tenant”—the expression means “the holder of the land by the custom of the manor”—would be driven out of his “tenement,” the “held thing.” Although there were freeholders in these villages, they were only free of the labor and money dues that the copyholders owed to the manor. They were not free of the custom of the manor itself. And if they failed to observe the rules of the village, or committed treason or a felony, they, too, could be deprived of their freehold. In that sense, no one, except the lord of the manor, owned anything here. They, as tenants, merely held their tenements. Survival was conditional on obedience. It was a system about as far from the modern conception of the individual and his rights, let alone a welfare state, as it was possible to get.
Estate management, health and safety issues, antisocial behavior, the highways, property law, animal health and welfare, environmental health, planning permissions, local taxation, police issues, rights of way, agricultural practices, land rights and infringements, supervision of property held in common: every one was dealt with by the lord’s steward and a jury, or “homage,” as it was significantly called, of twelve of the copyholders. The village was not merely an economic unit; it embodied and enacted almost every conceivable dimension of social and political life. This, not England, was a man’s country, and political consciousness penetrated to the very depths of village England, a constant and constantly honed practicing of a set of political rules that felt like the frame of life. Economic management, a deal between the members of a community, and moral policing all came together in an arrangement that was essentially corporate. Privacy in such a world was not only scarcely available, but it would also have seemed wrong.
That “custom of the manor” represented an equilibrium of interests between tenant and landlord. The landlord, in fact, could impose only what the tenants would agree to. The way, for example, in which the area of each holding was measured was more responsive to the reality on the ground than to some abstract, imposed rule. Rent was dependent on acreage, but an acre in 1630s was not the precisely defined unit it is today. An acre was simply the area of ground that a plough could cover in a single day. If the ground was heavy, the acre would shrink to match the conditions; and if the soil light, the acre would expand. Everyone knew this, no one would think of altering it, and the conditions of the agreement were all deeply familiar.
Detail was all. No one manor had rules identical to any other. Even neighboring villages in the same valley or on other side of the same chalk ridge, would have quite various habits and requirements. The customs of Great Wishford, in the Wyley Valley, and Barford St. Martin, in the valley of the Nadder, were “set down in writing” in 1597; a copy of them survives among the Pembroke papers. They were set down jointly because both villages “ever had an old Ancient Custome” that gave them rights in the great old royal forest of Grovely on the chalk ridge that lay between them. Both villages could pasture “all manner of Beasts and cattle throughout all Grovely for all the year” (except “cattle of two Tooth and Goates, and pigs above a yeare old.”) “Ever out of mind,” villagers could collect fallen boughs twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. By “an ancient custom & time out of mind” on Holy Thursday every year, the men of Wishford could collect “One load of Trees”; on Whitsunday the men of Barford could do the same, but only “upon a Cart to be Drawn home with Men’s Strengthe.” In addition, Lord Pembroke’s ranger had to bring them every year, also on Whitsunday, “One fatt Buck, the one half to Wishford, and the other to Barford to make merry withal amongst the neighbours & the ranger is to have from each of the manors of Wishford & Barford one white loaf, one gallon of beer & a pair of gloves or 12d in money for the Whole.”
In Burcombe, on the Nadder just east of Barford, “the Custom of this Manor” constituted in effect a memory and inheritance of the duties required of the medieval villains. A sixteenth-century copy of the customs laid down exactly what work had to be done for the earl by each of the copyholders. Each small tenant (with a house and fifteen acres) had to plough and hedge half an acre of barley land for the farmer who had rented the lord’s own demesne land; the larger tenants (with a house and thirty acres) had to perform twice that amount of work, with “the same Farmer giving to them their Breakfast.” At harvest time, the small tenants had to provide “one sufficient Reaper for one day” or three and a halfpence, the large tenants “one man and one woman for one day or 7d at the choice of the said farmer.” Together, the tenants of Burcombe had to “mow and cut down” the hay in the seven acres of the meadow called Westmead (for which more breakfast was to be provided by the farmer), and then, when it had dried in the sun for a day or two, make it into stooks, small drying stacks of cut stems, for which the farmer would provide bread and cheese. Another four and a half acres of hay of Burcombe, which was still in the earl’s hands for the horses at Wilton, had to be made by the tenants, for which the lord’s bailiff would provide four shillings, four and a halfpence “for and toward the provision of their drink.” These were the customs which were “writ and Remember’d.”
These old remembered rights, sanctions, and duties were the living inheritance of the Middle Ages. When the castle at Wardour, a Wiltshire manor belonging to the Pembrokes’ neighbors the Arundells, was blown up after a savage siege in the Civil War, all its records were destroyed. After the war was over, both tenants and the steward of the manor inspected the records of Shaftesbury Abbey, to which the manor had belonged in the Middle Ages, and copied out the medieval rules. There was no sense of incongruity in this. These were the rules, and their age was more a guarantee of their excellence than otherwise. Fifteenth-or fourteenth-century codes were to regulate the lives of the people of Wardour in the 1660s. This was normal. Nothing changed.
Everywhere you look in these customary regulations, the memory of the Middle Ages is there. Even in mid-seventeenth-century records, in a country where the worship of the saints and all the practices of the Roman Catholic church were meant to have been abolished for 120 years, the pattern of the year continued to be measured out according to the ancient saints’ days. At Chilmark, a few miles west of Barford St. Martin, the common was to be closed off to the copyholders’ animals from “Ladyday [March 25, New Year’s Day in the seventeenth century, the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary] to the Feast of the Invocation of the Holy Cross [May 3],” when the tenants from both ends of Chilmark common were allowed the use of it until “the Feast of St Martin the Bishop [November 11],” when it was again closed to them and opened to the animals of the neighboring village, until the following spring.
This Christian calendar calibrated the year, its ceremonies and associations miraculously twinned to the seasons. Candlemas, or the Feast of the Purification, on February 2, marked both the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the day on which winter was half over, and the day, forty days after the birth of Christ, when Mary was presented at the temple, the moment at which she also reemerged into the world. It was the time of transition, and the opportunity for bitter peasant prognostication:
If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,
Winter will have another flight
But if it be dark with clouds and rain,
Winter is gone, and will not come again.
Lady Day, on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation—the moment at which Christ was conceived—was also the beginning of the farming year, the first hint of spring, nine months before Christmas, and the seeding of the future. Easter, in April, marked the fullness of spring and the culmination of the Christian story, with the fertility of nature finally defeating the darkness of winter. On through the year, as custom after custom makes clear, the people of the chalklands lived in an environment where ancient and inherited signals provided the landmarks for their lives. At Rogationtide, in early May, as the arable crops were just sprouting, the whole village would offer prayers (rogationes) for those crops and for their animals, beating the bounds of the village, of individual fields, and even of individual strips within those fields, to establish in the minds of this and future generations exactly where those boundaries were. These weren’t always certain, and besides, there was always suspicion that one or two leaseholders might try to encroach on the land of the customary tenants. In 1618, the tenants in the manor court at Heale, in the valley of the Avon, decided to lay down the law:
Yt is also ordered by the Lord of this Mannor by the Consente of the tenants of this mannor that the homage shall between this and Witsuntyde next stake out all the Tenants’ lands of the Mannor, and that they shall then viewe what wronge the Leasehoulders have done to the Coppy-houlders in the feilde, and sett out and stake out the bounds, and shall presente the wrongs att the nexte Courte and by whom the same have been soe donne.
Beating the bounds wasn’t some folksy, antiquarian community festival; it was a way of defining the means of survival. But it was also more than that. The land itself was the central mnemonic of people’s lives, the map of who they were, the method by which the place and the social relationships within it were known. To plough an acre strip—each “a furrow long” and four rods (sixteen and a half feet) wide—would take a day. This was an arrangement that folded together land, body, property, and time. The body itself would have known immediately and by utter familiarity what an acre meant. The eye could estimate a furlong at a glance. Each strip had a name: Bere furlong, Peashill, Saltacre, Bracelet (probably after “bercelet,” meaning a sheepdog), Hatchet acre, Elbow acre, Pyked furlong (after the sometimes strange crooked outline of the strips), and so on. Inherited meaning was folded into the copyhold land like sugar stirred into a cake. No signs or signals were needed; it was simply known, part of what was, time out of mind.
The Pembrokes’ cousin, the poet George Herbert, who in the 1630s was the vicar of Bemerton, in the valley of the Nadder between Wilton and Salisbury, gave many overlapping reasons for beating the bounds in May: it was a blessing of God for the fruits of the field; it established “Justice in the preservation of the bounds”; it was a moment for “Mercie, in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution of largess which at that time is or ought be made”; and it was an act of charity and neighborliness, “in living, walking and neighbourlily accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if they be any.” For Herbert, these were the four dimensions of a village’s existence: metaphysical, legislative, personal, and social. The melding of communal action with communal need and communal belief that beating the bounds represented is the clearest of all demonstrations of the depth and multiplicity of meanings in which these places were steeped. Seen from an era of individual rights, the manor system may look like a nightmare of restriction and denial; from its own perspective, however, it was a deliberate and effective mechanism for a multidimensional life in which land was not a commodity but the matrix for existence.
The year rolled inexorably onward: Midsummer Night was celebrated on June 24, six months from Christmas, and holding up a mirror to it. Huge bonfires were lit, boys picked flowers, which they gave to girls, and the girls threw them into the flames to keep themselves free all year of agues and afflictions. The following day was the Feast of St. John the Baptist, the figure who represented not the redemption of the world but the heralding of a new version of it. August 1 was Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day, when the first wheat harvest of the year, baked into a loaf, was brought into church and tenants were bound to present a sheaf of the new harvest to their landlords. By August 24, Bartlemas, or St. Bartholomew’s Day (Bartholomew had been flayed alive and was the patron saint of butchers), all pigs’ noses were to be ringed; by Michaelmas, the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, on September 29, all animals were to leave the common fields; at St. Luke’s Day, October 18, all lambs are to be counted as sheep; and by Martinmas, the Feast of St. Martin, on November 11, the commons were to be cleared of grazing beasts.
This adds up to an extraordinarily complex map of life lived on the Herbert estates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These arrangements and patterns represent people’s relationship to the land, to history, to the passing of the year, to their neighbors, to livestock, to the growing and getting of food, and even to the universe of which nowadays we have no conception at all. These are the lineaments of the world we have lost. They also describe precisely the world that the aristocracy of England would consistently seek to defend, not only as their property but as the foundation of their existence, as their moral universe.
William Herbert’s relationship to this system was deeply ambivalent. He was a new man, who had made his own way in the world and had established himself and his family in a position of enormous wealth. At the same time, as he saw it, he was also heir to the great inheritance of his forebears, the medieval earls of Pembroke. This was the contradiction deep within him, one that would play itself out again and again in the story of this family. Was he a member of the ancient nobility, committed, like Norden’s ideal landlord, to the welfare of the people dependent on him? Or was he a ruthless self-seeker, dependent for his standing on his relationship to the crown? Was he a new-made man or the defender of old England against a rapacious modernity? Was he a part of the system or a disruption to it? And how, if these two positions came into conflict, would he behave?