ANCIENT COMMUNITIES AND THE THREAT OF MODERNITY
What was happening beyond the gilded viciousness of court? As Pembroke and Buckingham battled for the soul of England, what was the reality in the Pembrokes’ Wiltshire chalkstream valleys? And to what extent did this sophisticated dispute—between the Pembroke vision of an ancient organic community and the Buckingham ideal of a modern, efficient, centralizing state—reflect a conflict and tension within the body of England?
It so happens that a great deal can be known about the Pembrokes’ world, the world that surrounded the family in the great Van Dyck portrait, because in the early 1630s Philip Herbert, who in 1630 succeeded his brother as the fourth earl, had his estates meticulously surveyed. No map survives, even if one had been made, but a set of enormous written documents were preserved from those surveys, recounting the names, family relationships, and tenancies of hundreds of people in the chalkland valleys. An extraordinarily detailed picture emerges from them: the shopkeepers, millers, clothiers, smiths, “husbandmen,” cheats, and laggards who were the earl’s tenants and dependents; the houses, yards, and barns these people occupied; the earl’s “Lands, Woods, Meddowes and pastures,” the marshes, orchards, warrens, “lawns,” bottoms, bowers, breaches, hedges, coppices, crofts, furzes, lanes, moors, and ditches that made up the estate; the farm animals that were such intimate co-occupants of these places; and the extent to which the great estate, with its own manorial courts, its own police system, its own punishments, and its own deeply embedded hierarchies, was its own, self-reflective world. It is, in other words, the foundation of the whole Pembroke enterprise, the “country of lands and mannours,” as John Aubrey described it, for which, over the generations, the Pembrokes had been striving against the centralizing power.
In Broad Chalke, for example, the village arranged on either side of the Ebble, where John Aubrey would later delight in its tunable bells, there were thirty-six copyhold tenants in September 1631. The first to be named were Thomas Randoll, fifty-seven, and Avice, who was two years younger and was probably Randoll’s sister. They lived together, in a single-storey house of four rooms, with storage lofts over the rooms, but it was not an isolated dwelling. The house was surrounded by a “4-room” barn, a stable, a cow-house and “other houses fit for husbandry.” It was, in other words, a small farmyard, just off North Street on the north side of the village, above the line of clay where the springs bubble up and run down through the meadows to the river. The Randolls had kept everything in good repair, as they were required to, and next to the buildings they had a backyard, called “a backside,” a small orchard, and a vegetable garden. Below them, on the wet ground by the river, they had a half-acre “close of meadow or pasture” called the East Close—a small hedged field that they would either have kept closed for hay, to be cut and made in July, or, if they had calves or a thin “rother,” a cow due to go out to grass, they would have grazed them here in the spring. “It is the pasture lards the rother’s sides,” Shakespeare’s Timon says, “the want that makes him lean.” Above the house and yard stretched the open fields in which the Randolls had their arable strips: fourteen acres in the East Field, ten acres in the Middle Field, and eleven acres in the West Field. On these fields, after the barley and wheat harvest had been taken, and on the fallow fields, the Randolls had the right to pasture three horses, four cows, and a calf. Above that, on the chalk, they could keep eighty sheep with the village’s communal flock.
Everything was fixed. There was no idea that the enterprise should grow or change. This was how it was, an ingeniously interlocked system that had been like this for a long time, and no one could see why it should not continue like this forever, just as it seemed to have come out of a distant past “time before mind.” Their father, John Randoll, had entered into this agreement with the Pembrokes in 1596 and had named Thomas and Avice as the two other “lives” in the copy. The Randolls were entirely secure here for as long as they lived. In 1596, John Randoll had given the earl twenty pounds as entry money to the property, quite a high “fine” as it was called, the equivalent of the annual stipend for a vicar, and had agreed a rent of eighteen shillings a year, about the annual wage of a servant girl, or the price of about ten turkeys. In effect, the copyholder bought a lease on which the rent was both low and fixed as long as the three named people remained alive. It is a measure of life expectancy in early modern England that three lives were thought to be the equivalent of twenty-one years. The Randolls had done well: in 1631 they were thirty-six years into their copyhold and still going strong.
The rest of the village repeated much of this pattern: the copyholders occupied neat small farmsteads lined out between the arable fields and the wetland by the river. The house of the old lady Goody Dewe was here, from whom Aubrey would later hear about Edward VI getting lost while hunting. She lived on the south side of the river with her husband, Bartholomew (sixty-six years old in 1631), and their two sons, Thomas and John, their house one room smaller than the Randolls’, but otherwise similar in all its arrangements and appurtenances.
There were signs of optimism. A fifteen-year-old boy, William Lawes, and a ten-year-old, John Penn, were both named as lives on copyholds. There can have been no expectation there of an early death. And there was no sense that women were excluded from the system. Widows continued to have unassailable rights in their properties after their husbands died; and a pair of sisters, Anna and Mary Fish, occupyied one ten-acre farm on the north side, off High Lane. Anna was married, but her husband had no part in the tenancy, and it was Anna herself who would become a member of the “homage,” or jury, of the manor court.
It isn’t difficult to imagine how beautiful a place Broad Chalke must have been on a summer day in the 1630s. Its interlocking of private property and common interest, the sheer neatness of the relationship of downland fields, meadow, river, and village, laid like a tapestry sampler across the dip of the valley, the presence of the animals as an extra layer of life in the village. “A farme without stocke,” John Norden had said, “is like a piece without Powder, or a Steeple without bells”: all of that exudes a sense of health and coherence. “About Wilton and Chalke,” Aubrey mused in his memory, “the downes are intermixt with boscages that nothing can be more pleasant, and in the summer time do excell Arcadia in verdant and rich turfe and moderate aire…. The innocent lives here of the shepherds doe give us a resemblance of the golden age.” There was a real financial basis for this sunny view of life in the downland villages. Between 1540 and 1640 inflation affected all goods—the price of timber tripled, building materials went up two and a half times, metals doubled in price, and textiles went up by 150 percent. But at the same period, prices for farm produce in southern England rose by a factor of four or five. It was a good time to be in farming.
The Pembroke estate made sure that through an increase in entry fines it relieved the tenants of some of that profit, but the three-lives copyhold meant that the fixed annual rents were very soon out of date. In 1631 one old widow, Anne Witt, was living in a four-room house in Broad Chalke, with the usual barn, cowhouse, orchard, and garden, and thirteen and a half acres of arable strips, according to an agreement made by her now-dead husband seventy-one years before, in 1560. Anne Witt was paying a very low, uninflated eleven shillings, sixpence rent a year. The village as a whole in the 1630s was undoubtedly experiencing a wave of well-being on which tenants and landlords both rose.
From the list of possessions made upon householders’ deaths, one can begin to visualize the way in which these copyholders lived. In the Pembrokes’ village of Wylye, on the north side of the Grovely ridge, one of the copyholders, William Locke, died in February 1661. At the time of his death he was eighty-two. As with the other copyholders, his house, with three rooms and lofts above them, was on the street side of his backyard, which was surrounded on the other sides by a barn, a cowhouse, and stable, and a separate kitchen. Much later buildings are now on the same site, opposite the Bell Inn, but are arranged exactly as those in the seventeenth century.
The bay size of the Lockes’ timber buildings, constructed probably using small oak trees roughly adzed to shape, would have been about fourteen feet square. Both house and barn would have been single-storey thatched buildings about forty-two feet long and fourteen feet wide. Less room was devoted to human habitation than to buildings designed to keep the farm enterprise going. But the Lockes were clearly living in comfortable conditions, even with some pretension to them. The house had a room called the “hall,” with a dining table and a side table, three chairs, three joiner-made stools, and a pair of cushions. William had six tablecloths and two dozen napkins with which to make the room elegant; as well as six pewter dishes; two candlesticks, also in pewter, which can take a high polish; two saltcellars; and sixteen silver spoons. In the smallest possible way, there is a dignity of self-possession here, of a man and his family conceiving of themselves as living an honorable life. Upstairs were two bedrooms, plenty of sheets and pillowcases, blankets, pillows, bolsters and hangings for the beds, and a rug, a good set of towels, and two chamber pots.
Alongside these best rooms were the harder-working parts of the farmstead. It was a crowded and busy place. In the cowshed was a cow and a bullock. Three pigs lived in the stable and five shillings’ worth of poultry pecked their way about the yard. There was a haystack here—the winter food of the stalled cow and bullock—with some peas stored with it, two woodpiles—one very large, worth ten pounds, and one small—and a stack of timber, maturing, which had been cut into planks and posts. There was also a “wheat-rick” in the yard, the corn still in the ear, waiting to be threshed on the threshing floor in the barn and then stored in the “old garner”—the granary, which was also somehow within the barn. Threshing equipment, ladders, sacks for flour and winnowings, “and some other baggs” were all kept here, too, along with the barley, part of it threshed when Locke died, part still waiting to be threshed.
This sense of the busy, small-scale farm enterprise invaded large parts of the house, too. The hall was flanked by the buttery on one side (barrels, five pounds of lard, a meat safe, a cheese press, three flitches of bacon, a flagon, and “other small things”) and the brewhouse (a furnace, vats, pails, bowls, iron bars, hooks, and halters), a place in which more washing was done than any beer brewed. Unmentioned, but certainly here, were the willow baskets in which the washing was taken to the line to dry, perhaps out in the vegetable garden or in the orchard beyond it
The kitchen had all the equipment needed for cooking over the wood fire: chains, hooks, pots, kettles, skillets, spits, forks, frying pans, dripping pans, “and other lumber.” In the loft above it, which must have been warm and dry, the Lockes kept their wool equipment: a pair of scales, some “liden waits” and “one pair of way beames,” ninety pounds of wool worth four pounds, ten shillings, as well as still more “other lumber.” The state of attics in the seventeenth century was not very different to that in any other period.
Beyond this dense concentration of carefully gathered, materially significant, and valuable objects—no mention of a book, a painting, or a musical instrument—was the land: a vegetable garden, an orchard, a set of little closes, and the twenty-seven and a half acres in the common fields. Only ten acres of wheat was sown in them when William Locke died in February. A third of the land had been left fallow, as usual, and the barley for the other third, once it had been threshed in the barn, would be sown by Locke’s heirs in the spring, as usual. Locke had three pounds’ worth of hay “in the fields,” his contribution to the communal hay stack on which the communal flock was feeding during the winter, and “two dozen of hurdells” with which to fold the sheep on the arable (tillage) that would soon begin to sprout. It is a depiction of an exactly ordained life, of a rootedness.
Of course this is not the whole story. The village was both a sustaining and a fierce, demanding, exclusive, and excluding organism, but what was here undoubtedly feels good. The poorer families are scarcely mentioned. Some families right in the middle of the village were sharing these small houses and barns, which can’t have been easy. Ralph Street and his son John, farming a mere three acres, lived in “a dwelling house, sometimes called the stable.” There was a tiny cottage of two rooms, with a little garden and orchard, right out on the eastern edge of the village, called the Hermitage, for which the annual rent was four shillings, the price of a dozen candles. Strikingly, and unexplainedly, this is the earliest known figurative use of hermitage in English (the next was in 1648). Was it a joke? There are certainly other half-jokes in seventeenth-century Wiltshire place-names. Out on the open ground on the other side of Broad Chalke was a cluster of houses called “Little London.” The seventeenth-century hovels belonging to the landless laborers who lived here have gone now, but judging from equivalent places in Wiltshire, called sardonically Little Salisbury, Ireland, Scotland, or Cuckolds Green, this would have been the living place of the poorest of the poor, Broad Chalke’s own slum, single-roomed hovels of only ten or twelve feet square, some even ten feet by eight, in which families would attempt to maintain their lives. The floors were often no more than straw on mud. Transient laborers and their families, often, as the place names imply, from the poorer margins of the British Isles, clustered at the edge of these elaborately instituted villages like dogs at a camp.
Although necessary and tolerated as the source of casual labor for those copyholders who were too old or infirm to do the farmwork themselves, villages such as Broad Chalke loathed and despised the slum dwellers existing on the margins of their pretty villages. Hundreds of petitions were made by parishioners to have these sheds and their contents removed, often “by reason of the soyle”—the dung—“for the said Cottage so built doth stand unto a watercourse, which watercourse runneth into a well which is used by the most parte of all the Inhabitants to fetch there water. And further the Children [living in the hovel] have a Loathsome decease called the White Scurfe which is infeccious.” Villagers often wanted such human styes pulled down, but this example, from a 1628 petition of the parishioners of Melksham, in the north of Wiltshire, is significant not only for the villagers’ policing the village’s physical and moral health, but also for the proper procedure they went through to do so. They didn’t simply demolish the house but also applied to the justices to agree to let this sick, poor family have another house in a better place:
That is the manor working as it was meant to, as a social organism that nurtured the weak while carefully protecting the communal resources and well-being of the village itself. It was a quality of rural life that George Herbert would also celebrate in the 1630s.
At Broad Chalke, in addition to those copyholders, was a single tenant of the demesne farm—that is, the land the lord in the Middle Ages used to keep for himself. In 1631, he was Anthony Browne, a gentleman, John Aubrey’s great-uncle, the source of endless stories which his great nephew would greedily write down. His deal with the Pembroke estate was not by copyhold at all, but by indenture, a modern rental agreement, which was an almost purely financial transaction between him and the earl. In 1601, he and his wife had bought the lease, which was to run for the rest of his life, for forty pounds. On top of that, he had to provide the lord every year as rent thirty quarters, or very nearly a ton each, of wheat and barley, slightly less of oats, twenty-four geese, twenty-four capons, which were castrated cocks, and one hundred pigeons. By a separate contract, for which he had to pay rent of twenty pounds a year, he had some extra bits of grazing and the “warren of conies,” whose meat Aubrey would come to love so much—the highly profitable fat rabbit farm—on the downland to the south of the village.
Here, already, is a sign of the transitional nature of these arrangements. The key money to be paid upon getting into the lease was a straightforward amount of cash; the annual rent was meant to be in kind. But instead of the pigeons, cheeses, capons, and rabbits, Browne in fact gave the earl thirteen pounds, fourteen shilling, eightpence a year. Only the grain he owed continued to be paid in kind. The wheat, barley, and oats would have gone to the earl’s barns and granaries at Wilton: ten quarters filled a cart, and so every August, seven or eight cartloads would have made their way out of Anthony Browne’s yard at what is now Manor Farm in Broad Chalke, across the Ebble at a wide ford, into the northern part of the village, past the farmyards of the Laweses and Randolls and then up the long, dusty, white chalk track, climbing three hundred feet to the top of the downland ridge, before dropping to the valley of the Nadder at Burcombe, and turning east through South Ugford and Bulbridge, joining the tens and maybe hundreds of others creakingly bringing the rent to the lord’s store at Wilton.
It was part of the agreement between the earl and his tenants that in delivering rent in kind “to the Capital mansion house of His lord at Wilton,” they should take “meat, bread, & drink, at the Lord’s cost whensoever they come.” The summer carts gathered outside the barns, the carriers and laborers from the downland villages sitting on them in the midday sun, the refreshments provided by the earl’s men, overseen by the steward or more likely his deputy: all of this was a perfectly real financial relationship in action in the early seventeenth century, but it was also a Virgilian scene, working to the rhythms of Arcadia.
Something else is also in play here. The same document, preserved in the Pembroke papers, that describes the meat, bread, and drink that will be given to those bringing the rent to Wilton also says that the tenants of the land “out of their Benevolence, or good will, shall every year carry Houseboote [timber for repairs] & Fireboote [firewood]” to Wilton’s capacious stores. “Benevolence” and “good will” are, of course, code for no payment. This is another imposition for which a free lunch would have been scarce recompense. Arcadia continued to have steel in its core.
Browne had a very pleasant setup in Broad Chalke: a house with fifteen rooms, a big barn next to it, a cowhouse, stable, and pigeon house, a carthouse, a garden, and a one-acre orchard. He had 34 acres down in the valley, much of it sweet, rich, grass-growing meadow, about 270 acres in the arable fields, of which a third was left fallow each year, 80 acres sown with wheat, and 100 with barley; and the right to keep 1,200 sheep in the communal flock up on the downs. This was a serious enterprise on a different scale from that of the copyholders.
But this was more than just business: this was the also the working of a community, and Browne would have found himself intimately entwined in the life of the copyholders around him. Manor Farm in the seventeenth century was surrounded by a positive nest of obligations and duties inherited from the Middle Ages, the obligations owed by custom, time out of mind, to the lord’s farm, of which Browne was now the tenant.
First, in June or early July, the copyholders had to wash and shear a thousand sheep and then mow and make the hay in the meadow down by the Ebble called Long Meade, which was four and a half acres in extent. At harvest time, in high summer, late July or August, the “customary tenants” had to find thirty reapers, for a day, to cut and bind Mr. Browne’s corn. Most of them would have “found” themselves to do the work. They then had to find thirty carts and wagons plus the teams of horses or oxen to pull them, to carry the corn from the fields and into the barns.
In return, Browne had obligations toward the community. First, there was the vicar. He was to get “6 akers of the best wheate which he can make choice of out of 80 akers.” One can imagine that scene well enough, the parson touring the fields, Mr. Browne, perhaps, guiding him toward the slightly less than best, the parson knowing already exactly where the best was to be found. Once he had made his choice, Mr. Browne had to “reape and carrie the same home into his Barne for him.” After the harvest and up until Martinmas, on November 11, Browne then had to provide the vicar with grazing for sixty lambs, then weaned from their mothers, for free. He had to give eight bushels of wheat to the chief forester of Cranborne Chase (from whom he received two acres of wood each year, for firewood and with which to make sheep hurdles, cut from the earl’s coppices in the chase), and Browne’s note says that he was meant to pay more wheat and barley to the underforester “Which Corne hath been demanded but hath never been paid by me hitherunto.”
While the customary work was being done by the tenants, Mr. Browne, standing in for the lord of the manor, effectively acting for him in this tiny community, gave meat and drink to the reapers while they were doing their hot days’ work in the fields. More meat and drink was provided for the men carting the sheaves back to the barns. While they were cutting the grass and making the hay down in Long Mead, Browne gave the reapers a ram and eleven gallons of beer to be divided among them. The ram, in many of the chalkland villages, had a strange custom attached to it. The animal would be placed in the middle of the field, the tenants around the edge. If it remained quietly there, they could keep it. If it escaped or wandered off, it remained the lord’s. What was this? An entertainment? A piece of theater? A dramatization of the potency of lordship and the impotence of tenancy? In the Surveior’s Dialogue, John Norden had his freeholder, while discussing the virtues of freehold, tell the surveyor, “It is a quietnesse to a man’s minde to dwell upon his owne: and to know his Heire certaine. And in deed, I see that men are best reputed that are seized of matter of inheritance: Leases are but of base account.” But dwelling upon one’s own was not available to the vast majority of the population. Maybe the lord’s escaping ram, a taunting form of largesse, was a means of telling the copyholders exactly where they stood.
Browne also had to provide the customary tenants with good food at Christmas. A quarter of beef (which meant what it said: a quarter of an animal) was to be shared out among the tenants on St. Thomas’s Day, December 21. On the same day, he had eighty-four pounds of wheat baked into bread and distributed to his neighbors, plus sixteen gallons of barley baked into “horse bread” for their animals, and a large expensive cheese (costing four pounds, sixteen shillings) cut up and distributed around the village. Two one-year-old pigs, called “Composition Piggs” by Browne, meaning that they were payment instead of tithes owed to the church, were given to the parson every year.
In his own accounts, Browne calculated his yearly income from the meadow grass, the wheat and barley, and the sheep at about £272, and his annual costs at £127, but he gave no monetary value either to the work he received freely from the copyholders or to the food and supplies he gave them each year. All of that was beyond money, merely the mutual obligations of an ancient community, each part reckoned intuitively to balance the other. And he wrote a note to this effect in his papers:
This was the nature of the Wilton universe. It was, for the beneficiaries, a model of conservative wholeness, a set of economic, agricultural, and social arrangements that reflected the ideals of Arcadia itself: full at least of the possibilities of an integrated society; with no expectation that anyone would do any better than any other; with a level of mutuality that urban, commercial, and courtly life could scarcely tolerate (but nevertheless longed for); and that instituted the lord of the manor as a king in his own domain.
It was a system that provided the political classes with a metaphor for the country: England itself was a manor, with the principle of inherited and customary law at its heart; where its sovereign lord, according to the ancient constitution, was powerful only in response to the law as it had been handed down and only in consultation with the representatives gathered not in the manor court but in parliament; where a tyrant would ignore that mutuality but a king would recognize it as the identifying quality of this society.
This was the ideal and these the principles to which figures as diverse as Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, John Norden, George Herbert, the Pembrokes, and the gathering of poets whose lives and writings they supported at Wilton had all appealed. It was “a countrey of lands and Mannours,” one of the limbs of the body of England.
In many ways, even in the 1630s, the system was operating at full strength. The copyhold, the customary terms on which families held their properties from their landlords, came to be seen as such a valuable commodity, a meal ticket for thousands of yeoman families, that again and again in the inventories you find “the iron-bound chest,” the chest with four locks, “the stronge chist,” “the greate chiste,” which stood in the copyholder’s bedroom and was the first thing to be saved in case of fire or flood. The wattle-and-daub walls of the houses themselves could easily be broken through with sledgehammer or axe, but these defended boxes shielded the papers on which entire families relied for their existence. Robert Furse, a Devon yeoman, had written a long account of his family and their belongings in the 1590s, telling his descendants that what he had set down “will be to those that come after you, gret quyttenes perfyt knowledge, and a trewe menes to understond all there evydenses and tyteles.” Quite as much as the elaborate devices of the cultural élite, these copies and the strongboxes in which they were held were the vehicles of the culture, the means by which an organized past was transmitted to the present, a dam against the mutability they all felt and all feared.
Copyhold’s place in the law was an underpinning of the continuity people craved. The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, saw the situation of the copyholder as a form of freedom guaranteed by law:
This approaches a kind of Arcadian center: a version of freedom which was dependent not on rights but on duties and in which anyone’s good was dependent on everyone’s good. People were essentially not individual but social. Although many manors, including the Pembrokes’, allowed the lord to set the entry fine at whatever level he wanted, there is no strong evidence that the Pembrokes abused this position. In fact, the ideology to which the world of Sidneyism had attuned them would certainly have set their minds against exploiting their copyhold tenants, even if the ruinous costs of life at court brought pressures on them to do so. One sign that they did not is the astonishing level of debt one seventeenth-century Pembroke after another was prepared to enter into. With annual incomes approaching £25,000 through most of the century, none of them died owing less than £40,000.
Needless to say, there was an argument on the other side. Copyhold, with its elaborate burdens, its binding of the copyholder to an unending series of mutual, community-based duties, was thought by many to be full of encumbrances. It was innately conservative. Even the surveyor John Norden complained of the old yeomen that “they only shape their courses as their fathers did,” spending their lives in “a plodding kind of course.” In this light, the tenurial fetters of copyhold were not the means of maintaining a community but a way of hampering the freedoms of freeborn individuals. Both landlord and tenant could see it that way and, in many parts of the country, although not on the whole on the Pembroke estates, there was steady drift away from copyhold to a straightforward leasehold, a pure money arrangement, one in which each participant was a player in the rental land market and in which any notion of community came as an optional add-on, not as an integral part of how and where people lived.
In the Pembroke valleys, there are clear signs that community was continuing to work. A statute passed in the reign of Elizabeth had required that any new house should have four acres of ground attached to it, a way of guaranteeing a means of self-sufficiency and of no burdens encroaching on the charity of the village. This was all very well, but it meant that the poor, particularly in an era of land hunger, were unprovided for. There was not enough land to go round, and if there was not enough land, there could be no more houses. The poor were driven on to the roads and into the cities, where they would beg. A steady stream of petitions was made to the justices for such cases. In Ramsbury, where the Pembrokes had one of their smaller houses, a petition came to the justices at the quarter sessions in 1639:
It is a sign of the system working well that the earl and his steward had agreed to provide Lionel Ounter with a piece of ground, but a house could not be built on it without the permission of the justices of the peace. The villagers of Ramsbury wrote to them that spring:
It remains an intriguingly integrated system: royal justice hears an appeal by a village committee (acting according to the custom of the manor) on behalf of a poor homeless man, for whom the lord of the manor has provided a plot of ground, all framed in the language of obedience and hierarchy, even with certain phrases mimicking the language of the litany (“in most humble wise” “his bounden dutie”). This is not what a market-based system would have done.
One of the central points about custom as a governing principle of village life was that it should be agreed between the copyholders of the manor, gathered as the “homage.” Custom did not have to be of any great age. Custom was simply what the village did as a village. As long as those of the homage considered that something might be a custom of the manor, then it could become one. Customary tenure was in that way not pure conservative rigidity but an adaptive organic system.
In 1632, the people in the Pembrokes’ manor at Wylye decided that they wanted to introduce the newfangled technique of the floated meadow, and they did so using the instruments of communal decision making they had inherited from the Middle Ages. The floating of meadows was a method by which river water was led out over the lowlying grass fields next to the banks, bringing enriching silt down on to the meadows and a seed rain of various grasses to thicken the sward. The comparative warmth of the flowing river water, at something like fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, would keep the grass growing when the frost would stop it in an unfloated meadow. The costs of setting up the sluices and channels, the gates, banks, distributor channels, and flow systems for these meadows were high: fourteen shillings an acre up front and then a maintenance payment of two shillings an acre thereafter, “the same to be paid at the feasts of St Thomas the Apostle and the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary yerely by even and equal proportions.” The flooding of the meadows provided an early bite for the sheep, more hay in summer, making a bigger flock possible, which could manure a larger extent of arable ground. Because of such obvious advantages, large stretches of the valleys of the Ebble, Nadder, Wylye, and Avon rivers were converted into water meadows in the seventeenth century, with much of the work encouraged by the earls of Pembroke and their stewards, who recognized of course that the value of the estate itself, as well as the incomes of the copyholders, would be increased by the improvements. But the decision to make those improvements could only be made communally, because the land of every tenant in the village would be affected by them.
So at Wylye an agreement at the manor court was made on September 10, 1632,
As smoothly as the clear waters of the Wylye itself, the ancient community of the manor at Wylye was sliding on to an enriching, technological, and modern future.
Happiness finds it difficult to make its way into the records, but for all that, an undoubted and even rather subversive note of well-being and gaiety flows through these valleys. There was unlawful drinking and playing at quoits, game playing on the Sabbath, dancing, and music. Particularly in the upstream villages of Broad Chalke and Fovant there remained a high proportion of Roman Catholics, repeatedly listed as not going to church, and even of one man, in 1636, Edward Lucas of Fovant, a gentleman, for keeping a schoolmistress in his house (Sarah Overton, a spinster) for at least three months, “in order to teach his children Popery.” The fact that so much of this starts to appear in the court records in the seventeenth century may be a symptom of an increasing puritan confidence in taking to court the minor delights and naughtinesses that until then had gone unpunished. When, after the Civil War, the Parliamentary Committee for Sequestrations came down to these valleys to discover who had been on the king’s side and who, therefore, might have their property confiscated, all kinds of informants came creeping out of the woodwork to snitch on the ways in which their neighbors had been going in for unnecessary delight and even “injoiinge itt.” The vicar at Bemerton, Dr. Thomas Lawrence, did “permit William Bowlton to play upon his Instrumt (beinge a Treble[?]) at his the sd Doctors Howse and did pmit dauncinge on the Saboth day in his presence and hee did not forbid itt.” Edward Poore, described as a yeoman, had seen him “dauncinge and bowlinge and kittlinge upon the Sabioth daues at Bemerton.” Kittling means “tickling” in Scots, but probably means “playing at skittles” here. The priest, they all said, liked to do this with his children.
There is one piece of evidence, apparently almost unique from these valleys, of a song written and sung by a spirited young woman from a house next to the Ebble in March 1631, which describes that other, unspoken life below the level of official arrangements of what people bought, owned, sold, earned, and spent. It is almost the only equivalent of that world of jokes and laughter, storytelling and amusement that filled the parlors and drawing rooms of the great house at Wilton. In Stoke Farthing, a hamlet just downstream from Broad Chalke, a carpenter called Thomas Holly, one Saturday afternoon, saw Edward Penney, the son of the man who had the demesne farm, a big place with a separate room for the servants to live in and two huge ten-bay barns, coming toward him. Penney gave him “a certeyne writting in paper wch was made in verce.” Holly could neither read nor write himself and he took it to John White, one of his neighbors, a thirty-two-year-old husbandman—a proper member of the homage, who according to the earl’s surveyors, kept his house in good repair—to tell him what it said. White read it out to Holly and to two other of their neighbors, the old Walter Whitemarsh and the big farmer himself, John Penney, who hadn’t been able to read it himself. The homage of the village was, informally and ad hoc on a Saturday afternoon, gathering to deal with a small crisis. (Only one of them could read, but the ability to read gave him no particular status.) Walter Whitemarsh tooke “the certeyne writting in paper” away from John White and kept it himself.
Clearly the meeting had decided to do something about it because ten days later, the document was produced before the justices in Salisbury. The author of the verses had been identified. She was the thirty-eight-year-old Jane (or Joan) Norrice, the wife of Harry, and the copyholder herself of a very small farm in Stoke Farthing, with an acre of orchard and garden and sixteen acres of arable land in the common fields. The farm wasn’t in good repair, and the Norrices were clearly hovering on the margins of the respectable community, and this “certeyne writting in paper” did Jane Norrice’s standing no good at all. The fact that this poor, small, middle-aged woman farmer could write verses and sing them meant nothing. The power of the manor, translated into court Latin in Salisbury, was disturbed that she, Jane Norrice, “made, fabricated and wrote in the following English words from her own ill will a false, scandalous and obscene libel.” The poem is in fact a funny account of how the tiniest of chalkstream villages had wickedness going on underneath its proper surfaces:
