Division, sedition, oppression, obedience
‘Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves’
Hammered into the horizon of Arundel, West Sussex, are the twin stakes of power in old England: the cathedral and the castle, the silhouettes of Church and state.
On Christmas Day 1066, William the Conqueror stood at the head of the table and carved up England like a turkey. Each of the gathered lords had been promised a slice, and to Roger de Montgomery William gave estates in Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Cambridgeshire, Shropshire and the majority of Sussex, an area defined as the Rape of Arundel. Roger’s job was to fortify the south flank of England, which was deemed to have had quite enough of French invasions, and so up went castles in Dover, Carisbrooke, Lewes, Bramber and Arundel.
I approach Arundel from the station and watch the turrets of the castle rise high above the rooftops. The town is picture-postcard pretty. With a lazy river, steep winding roads, it’s all Narnia lamp-posts, ye olde franchise pub signs, antique shoppes and, when I head up the hill, a large window displaying an oil portrait of Winston Churchill. It is a tourist’s vision of England.
At the top of the high street, the road meets the castle walls, twenty foot tall, crenellated and turreted, with a grand gate whose motto reads Sola Virtus Invicta (‘Virtue Alone is Unconquered’). Like many of the aristocratic aphorisms plastered onto their buildings, even in translation it is hard to tell what this actually means. I follow the wall west along the street. I pass the priory and then the cathedral, built in 1868 in a style meant to look 400 years older, and soon enough I’m leaving the town behind, following a grass verge alongside the A-road. The wall has shrunk from castle fortification to a more amenable flint wall, low enough for me to stretch my fingers over.
When China opened its gates to the West in 1978, the England football team was too busy to accept their invitation to a three-week tour of the country. So, sort of second best, they sent West Bromwich Albion. The climax of the media circus that accompanied them was the team trip to Changcheng, China’s Great Wall, and the televised interview with midfielder John Trewick. When asked for his opinion on the wall, he responded with a flash of socio-political insight that remains to this day the most pithy surmise of all border studies: ‘When you’ve seen one wall, you’ve seen them all.’
From the nineteenth-century flint wall in front of me to the Israeli West Bank barrier, whose 440-mile-long, eight-metre-high extent combines concrete, razor wire, steel fencing, ditches, tank patrol lanes, an ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile air protection, a subterranean extension to block tunnelling attempts plus constant military monitoring from guards, snipers and drones, walls are all the same.
First and foremost, a wall is a technology of division. Its presence alone creates a simplistic binary logic that imposes the idea that one side is separate from the other, and moreover, that both sides are opposed to the other. It is both a universally understood command, do not enter, and the technology to enforce itself – the wall says no, and backs it up with a blank, stony face that will not engage in dialogue. A wall looks like authority; it implies its own inherent legitimacy. To demolish a wall seems so much more violent than to build one, even though the wall is itself a destruction of the links between societies that existed before its erection.
Walls look like order; but more often than not a wall stands at the precise fulcrum of an imbalance in society. Most walls are only necessary as a means of defending the resources of those that have them from those that lack them. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.
But for all their rigid simplicity, the message of walls is rather more fluid and paradoxical. They underline the strength of what lies within while simultaneously reinforcing the perceived threat of what lies without. They project power as much as protect it. They guard their territory, conceal it, and at the same time announce its presence, exposing its vulnerability. The longest wall in English history was built by the Romans, not just to defend their territory, but to impose it. Hadrian’s Wall allowed the Romans to control and monitor movement either side of the wall, to collect taxes on traders that passed through it, and to announce the constant threat of expansionism. In The Great Wall, Julia Lovell discusses the walls that were precursors to China’s 13,500-mile monster, swinging far out into the Mongolian steppes, noting that some of these walls ‘look less land-protecting than land-grabbing, designed to enable Chinese states to police peoples whose way of life differed from their own, and to control lucrative trade routes.’
As far as their physical properties go, walls just don’t work. Most walls are breachable, most fences are broken somewhere. The longer the wall, the harder it is to defend. Think of China’s Great Wall, and the image of the Badaling stretch comes to mind, all gleaming local stone and iconic watchtowers. But this section is only eight miles long, a minuscule fraction of the Great Wall’s totality. Elsewhere, the wall is made of mud, sticks, grass, sand, and at some points is tacked together with sticky rice. Most of the wall is not a wall, but a scar on the ground surrounded on both sides by a wild, indistinct expanse. But we never hear of this wall; we rarely glimpse it. Because this would breach its most fundamental strength: the Great Metaphor. When the Badaling wall was repaired in the 1950s by Chairman Mao, its purpose was not to defend China against the nomads of Mongolia, but to reinforce a vision of China, both inside and out: he wanted to make China great again. ‘I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.’
When Donald Trump was voted into power, his words were all that counted. The cost of the wall, its colossal impracticability, the vast infrastructure required to support its intent, none of this registered in the light of its one radiant power: the idea. When he came to power he had already built a strong, reliable wall where it counted most: in the heads of his voters.
Kim Jong-un has a similar wall. In 1989, his dad announced that South Korea, in league with the Americans, had erected a concrete wall, twenty-six foot high, twenty foot thick, stretching 160 miles across the border. In North Korea the wall is a widely recognised reflection of the South’s reluctance to unify. But Google Maps doesn’t register it, even by satellite. And the most intriguing thing about the wall is that it is pure propaganda: it doesn’t exist. Or, more accurately: it exists only in the mind.
Following the fall of the 101-mile-long Berlin Wall, the Germans began speaking about a Mauer im Kopf, a wall in the head, a mindwall. Without the actual presence of the wall, it was still perceived by the residents of Berlin; like a phantom limb, it continued to trigger the brain. A study published in 2005 found that Germans repeatedly overestimated the distance between cities that had been in opposite halves of their once divided country, while those who opposed the reunification exaggerated the distances even further. The wall had gone yet, to this day, its gulf persists.
The road is busy and fast, and I’m dithering about where to climb over the wall running alongside it. With no real path, there are no other pedestrians and I’m already self-conscious, tramping with my rucksack. Even to veer off the road and approach the wall seems like breaching a taboo. There is a moral mindwall, centuries in the making, which prevents me from stepping out of line. But I pick my point, wait for the best moment and duck in. Down the ditch and up to the wall. I toss my bag over, jump, and use the flint to get a foothold. I swing my leg up, hook my heel on the lip of the wall and hoist my waist onto the top. And jump.
The ground is padded with yellowing leaves. I have landed in a strip of woodland that mutes the noise of the road from the castle grounds. I make my way through the trees, break cover and sneak across pastureland that is a time capsule for the largest land grab in English history: the enclosures.
To the north, there are still ruts and rivets in the earth which, from satellite view, are clearly relics of the open field system that would have characterised England in the Middle Ages. Small strips of land farmed communally, on rotating crops, they were surrounded by large areas of tillage, rough pasture for cows and pigs. But by the time Arundel Castle was built, the English landscape already belonged to sheep. The Romans had set up a large wool-processing plant in Winchester around ad 50 and its wool was among the most prized in the empire. In 1275, Edward I introduced the first tax on the export of raw wool and, twenty years later, the barons sitting in Parliament had declared wool ‘half the value of the whole land’.
Wool was power and sheep were the reason landlords evicted the smallholding and tenant farmers from their properties. With fields enclosed and the country depopulated, a new mindscape was placed upon the land. ‘Enclosure’ is the name given to the systematic privatisation of land on which commoners held customary rights of use, a sometimes-legal and sometimes-illegal process that began in the early thirteenth century and reached its zenith in the eighteenth. The first Act of enclosure came in 1235, with the Statute of Merton: under pressure from the barons, Henry III gave the lords of the manor the right to assert private rights of ownership over areas of land that had previously belonged generally to everybody and exclusively to nobody. The land, and the wealth it generated, became a patchwork of privatised interest. Each section of the grid was dedicated not to the interests of the community, but to the most profitable use its owner could find for it.
The English were simultaneously hedged out of their land and hemmed into a new ideology that valued the land and their labour in terms of private profit. But these hedges, walls and fences, so easy to uproot and bypass, were fortified by a moral prohibition that stemmed from the other great shepherds of England, the Church.
Property has always been sacrosanct, and some scholars claim the idea of sacred ground to be the very origin of the property concept. Thomas Nail, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver, has written on how property first evolved not with sedentary agriculture, but earlier, when nomads needed a place to bury their dead. Marked by huge stone boulders called megaliths, these boneyards became places to which nomads would return, to pay homage to their ancestors. Palisades went up around the sacred earth, to ward others off, giving birth to the notion of territory as area (a line around land), rather than a vector (a line through land).
Shrines and temples evolved out of these graveyards, and soon they were built without the need for the dead beneath them. They were positioned to root astrological mechanisms to the earth, to mark moments of coalition in time and space, such as the solstice at Stonehenge. With these new temples came a new sense of who this space was for. Their boundary stones marked a division between those who believed and those who didn’t, ‘unifying the identity of the believers and dividing them from the non-believers’.
Though Christianity arrived in Britain long before Augustine’s mission in 597 bc, it took centuries for it to become anything other than a minor sect. It was Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and later King of the Anglo-Saxons, who in the ninth century introduced chapels into the landscape, seeing the pagan invasion of the Vikings as retribution for a slack devotion to God. But it was when William the Conqueror seized England that Christianity truly took hold of the land. William not only built castles, he also built cathedrals, churches and monasteries, using them all to create a new centralised order on the land.
The wall I climbed to get into Arundel Castle’s grounds was put up by the 11th Duke of Norfolk, known as the Drunken Duke. But the moral obedience it still commands was engineered by another son of this castle, twenty generations before, who was responsible for strengthening the link between Church and state: His Grace, the Most Reverend Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel.
Inspired by John Wycliffe’s translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible in 1382, a small band of men and women had been preaching a smorgasbord of heresy. Having read the word of God for themselves, these Biblemen, or Lollards, believed in a number of edicts that challenged the authority of the Church. They believed that the bread held aloft in church services did not turn into Christ’s actual living body, but was simply symbolic of it. They believed that the Pope in Rome should have no say over the secular affairs of England. They believed that priests should abstain from all worldly goods, instead placing great emphasis on denying them the property they owned. In short, they believed that every English man and woman had the right to a personal relationship with God, unmediated by the centralised power of the Church.
To a fourteenth-century clergyman, a Lollard was a vagrant in the moral landscape of England. ‘Lollard’ was a catch-all term that encompassed ‘heretics, sceptics, anticlericals, rioters, rebels, felons, eccentrics, lunatics and outsiders of all kinds’. Arundel, like any estate agent who sees himself being written out of a deal, saw them as a direct threat to the relevance of his organisation. His response was to persuade the king to pass his law, unambiguously titled ‘On the burning of heretics’. The law gave the Church the power to identify heretics and have the local state authorities arrest them. They were delivered to the Church, which could now handle the torturing, trial and burning of these mendicants themselves, without the red tape of government intervention. Lollard towers, essentially private torture chambers, sprang up beside churches and in abbey grounds, legitimised by this new law. The Church’s word was now backed not only by God, but by the state. If the Pope, bishop or clergyman pointed the finger, the sheriff or justice of the peace had to respond. Heresy was redefined as sedition.
No one in England had been burned for two centuries, but Archbishop Arundel now began a spree that was to continue after his death, with twenty-five committed to the smoke in the next eighty years. Unlike many of his followers, Wycliffe escaped the flames but in 1428 his body was exhumed, by order of the Pope, and burned in public. The contemporary chronicler Fuller wrote:
They burnt his bones to ashes and cast them into the Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; and they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which now is dispersed the world over.
This may have been the Church’s biggest mistake. The Lollards had been a small, disunited band of heretics whose beliefs were only amplified by the paranoid reaction of the authorities. But now the word was out. And a hundred years later its flame was to be rekindled.
At every junction of footpaths, there are NO RIGHT OF WAY signs blocking the forested routes. There is no fence, no bear trap, no shotgun tripwires, ditches, moats or army of weaponised men. Just the silent expectation of compliance, and the feeling that someone is watching. As Proverbs 15:3 says, ‘The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.’ These signs conjure a spell, words that trigger my conscience and change the chemicals in my blood. Out of nowhere I feel as if I’m doing something wrong.
In the Tudor era, obedience to God and the state was taught from a young age. If you didn’t learn the Church’s catechism by heart, you were excommunicated, which not only served to damn your soul to hell, but, on a more practical level, ostracised you entirely from your community – it was against the law to do business with or even talk to someone excluded from the flock of Christ. You were homeless, hungry and isolated, with hellfire waiting. The first four commandments of the Bible demand obedience, and the fifth, obedience to one’s father and mother, was interpreted rather liberally as ‘to honour and obey the king, and all that are put under authority under him; to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters; to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters.’
In the late sixteenth century William Perkins’ best-selling The Foundation of Christian Religion Gathered into Six Principles elaborated on the teaching of the Bible, giving specifics to the lowly multitudes. It said, ‘all were admonished to obedience because every higher power was the ordinance of god’. Every higher power: from father, to magistrate, to king, from priest to bishop to pope. Some tracts tackled disobedience directly, such as A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion, published a year after the Northern Uprising of 1569. Here, the law of the land was expressed in a prayer, sedition recited as heresy.
But these commands to obedience were also imposed outside of the mind. In the sixteenth century London was dominated by the physical presence of the Church. The clergy were the biggest landowners and biggest employers of the city; their power over their parishioners was as practical as it was spiritual. London had more churches than any other city in Europe and more than sixty stocks, whipping posts and cages reminded Londoners of the punishment of overstepping the line. London was resolutely tamed, a flock of 40,000 sheep – with one notable exception.
Aged just twenty-nine, in a small rented room in east London William Tyndale spent a year translating the New Testament into English. Though some English translations were still in circulation, any further translation had been specifically banned in 1408 by Arundel in his Constitutions of Oxford. At the time, the English language was the lowly cousin of the courtly, flamboyant French and legislative Latin, used mainly by the rude oiks of the land. English was coarse Anglo-Saxon, tribal, barbaric, and to recreate the divine scripture into English was to soil it, to rub its nose in the mud. But however offended the clergy were by this debasement, the real threat was to their personal livelihoods: the Bible was the very foundation upon which the Church legitimised its power. To open up the word of God to the commoners was to de-privatise its interpretation and expose the flimsy premise of many of the Church’s ordinances.
Neither the Church nor its clergy paid any tax. Instead, like the state, they received it: every common man was required to pay a tithe (one-tenth) of his earnings to the local parish, and work on its lands without wage. Every time the life of a commoner wandered into the Church’s domain, it was tapped for cash – fees for masses, dirges, hallowings, indulgences, rent rolls, legacies and penances. At a funeral, priests could demand mortuaries for their services, a part of the dead man’s land inheritance. All this, every last coin in the Church’s coffers, was based upon a letter that St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, in which he interpreted the laws of Moses for them. He explained, ‘Ye ploughman should plow in the hope of sharing in the crop. If we have sown spiritual things amongst you, is it too much if we reap material things from you.’ The line of Moses’ legislation he was referring to: ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out grain.’
It’s pretty clear, then, why the Church was so anxious not to have this leaked. The entire wealth of the Vatican, its landholdings and power across Europe, was propped up by a wildly creative interpretation of a single sentence written by Moses 3,000 years before Tyndale was born. To cap it all, most scholars now agree that Moses didn’t even write these laws.
At the time, Bibles were kept locked in the tabernacle of the local church, behind the altar, on sacred, interdicted ground. Both the Church and state claimed its legitimacy from deep inside this spiritual keep. And the Bible’s Latin was the final mystical wall that prohibited access to the common man. The word ‘translate’ stems from the Latin meaning ‘to carry over’, an etymology that implies some kind of line. What Tyndale did, however, was not so much carry the word of Christ over the intellectual wall of Latin as to blow the safe.
Working in complete secrecy, alone in his bedsit, Tyndale knew the act of translation alone would be hugely damaging to the authority of the Church. With printing presses now all over Europe, his work would be read by far more people than Wycliffe’s. But it was the specific words that Tyndale chose that would be the Church’s greatest undoing – and his. Thomas More declared the most seditious changes a mistranslation, saying: ‘Tyndale did euyll in translatynge the scripture in to our tongue … he chaunged comenly this worde chyrche in to this word congregacyon and this worde preste into this word seynour, and cheyte in to loue.’
Wycliffe had made his translation from the Latin Vulgate, which was the standard version used by all churches across Europe since the fourth century. But the author of the Vulgate, St Jerome, had already bastardised the Greek text with some convenient mistranslations that suited his sponsors at the Vatican. Until Tyndale, the Greek ἐκκλησία had been translated into the Latin ecclesia, meaning ‘church’. Rome’s interpretation of this word extended from not only the building of God and all its property, but to all its levels of bureaucracy, from clergy right up to the Pope himself. The English word ‘church’ itself comes from the Greek word κυριακός, a term that specifically denotes property: ‘belonging to the Lord’. When Tyndale translated ἐκκλησία more accurately as ‘congregation’, he simply elided the church. With this one change, the entire structure of organised religion was placed on the level of any small gathering of devout followers, reading text from the Bible in a blank room. The hierarchy was smashed; this was anarchy.
But when Tyndale translated the Greek word ἀγάπη from the Vulgate’s ‘charity’ to the Germanic ‘love’, he released Christ’s teaching from all its artificial financial matrices, the grid that linked a place in heaven to how much coin you could spare. It removed the Church’s right to tithes, legacies and its banks of gold and silver. In what must surely be simultaneously the most romantic and pragmatic use of a word in the history of the English language, Tyndale threw down the walls of intellectual property, levelled the moral ground and proclaimed, 500 years before the Beatles: all you need is love.
The sun is low on the horizon, sending long diagonal shadows across the woodland floor. I have come to the end of the duke’s property, back on to the Right of Way, to find it blocked by a locked gate. I double back, head south and pass pine plantations, rows of half-grown Christmas trees and stacks of piled timber. Estates of this size almost invariably curtain the industrial endeavours of their interiors with a thin line of deciduous trees, masking the monocultures of their land use with a postcard-pretty veneer; this belies the historic repurposing of the land from common wealth to private profit, and gives their walls an aura of natural order, as if the estates are more private garden than factory floor.
The light is dimming, and the earth is rutted with 4x4 tracks and knotted with lumps of grass and mossy, rotten branches. The forest is alive with the last moments of the day, lines of crows glimpsed through the treetops, three deer pause in the track ahead of me, and then, for a brief moment in the gloom, it seems as if the forest floor is surging away from me, pouring up the steep slopes to the pink stain of the setting sun. My eyes focus, the world quickly rights itself and among the leaves I see it is not the earth streaming from me, but countless camouflaged pheasants.
I come up to a wooden gate, pass through its broken fence posts and see a dot of warm orange light through the black poles of the trees. The track runs uphill alongside a house, which seems to be your archetypal shack in the woods, the setting for an HBO thriller about a guy in a vest with bodies in his freezer. There’s a forecourt of dead machinery, drapes of ivy hanging from exposed warehouse girders. I turn on my torch.
It was always the plan to have a small fire before I left the woods, so seeing a shallow dip twenty yards off the path, just like my dell back home, writhing root systems exposed by subsidence, I find some kind of cover from the windows of the HBO house. This will be my first fire on a duke’s land. In English civil law, this should be no different from my fires on the farmer’s land in West Berkshire, or anywhere else, and, as I’m laying the twigs, I’m struck for the first time that I haven’t a clue what a duke’s power really consists of. But with that mass of castle stone due west of me, hidden behind the valley, I feel a greater sense of trepidation. There seems to be something primal at play, some sort of inherited fear. As the Bible says: ‘I will put my laws in their hearts; I shall inscribe them on their minds’.
Tyndale, of course, got what was coming. His translation of the New Testament was arguably the single most dramatic de-privatisation of power in the history of England: he had turned the sheep of the Church’s flock into independent, self-determining freethinkers, with their own interpretation of God’s will. It was an act that undermined the centralised power of the state as much as the Church. For this, he was chased through Europe, betrayed by an associate who needed the cash and sentenced to death: garrotted, and burned at the stake.
Just three years after Tyndale’s execution, the Church relented to public clamour and the Bible was sanctioned into English, a copy sent to every church to be made available to anyone who wanted to read it. Private property was translated into public use. Today, 80 per cent of the standardised James I Bible is Tyndale’s work. This includes the Lord’s Prayer, which means that we have Tyndale, somewhat tragically, to thank for the words: ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’
The wood is silent and I am tense. The crackle of the fire seems excessively loud. Every time something shuffles in the dry leaves, I twitch, and whenever an owl hoots, it feels as though it’s snitching on me. I am crouching by the flames, warming my hands, telling myself that I’d hear the crunch and crash of footsteps through the bracken long before they got to me. I look up to the path, and beyond it, to the horizon of trees on the opposite valley slope. It seems unnaturally bright. The sky in winter flashes deep blue before turning to black, but this light is brighter. I stand up, unsure of myself. Slowly, I realise the line is not the horizon, but the crest of the slope I’m on, that the light is not the setting sun but something much closer; with the barely audible tread of tyres on the wet byway, the headlights of a truck pass before me.
I am waiting with my friend on the right-hand side of a stone gateway. We are sitting on the empty plinth, as large as a kitchen table, taking in the view. To our left is the main road and a large field dominated by a massive gnarled oak. Beneath its boughs lie herds of white deer, albino reds, with two stags on their feet, keeping guard. In the far distance, there are more herds, black fallow, slowly passing their muzzles over the grass. Before us there is an expanse of cricket pitch stripes, lines of perspective that lead to a confectionery-box manor house, huge but tiny, snug amid the trees. This is Boughton House, known to its tourists as the English Versailles, and it is the seat of the Dukes of Buccleuch, Britain’s largest landowning dynasty.
Before us, not a mile away, beneath two acres of roofing, are masterpieces by El Greco, Van Dyck and Gainsborough; there are pieces by André-Charles Boulle, cabinetmakers of France, there are Mortlake tapestries, a puckle gun, a rare Pettelier sconce and, according to one guide book: ‘Ralph’s highly important oriental rug collection.’ Ralph, the 1st Duke, who from his portrait looks like a chubby glam-rock star, was the self-appointed master of the wardrobe for the royal estates, a seventeenth-century Svengali of haute couture. As such, the palace is a warehouse of luxury goods, a gilded lily, a peculiarly kitsch vision of heaven on earth. And their family motto, with the vapid insouciance of a luxury perfume brand, is simply: I Love.
Behind us runs the Right of Way that will lead us into the duke’s land and we are sitting on the wall of his ‘seat’, an 11,000-acre private estate. A few minutes ago, a 4x4 appeared to our right, doing a conspicuously slow crawl of surveillance down one of the tracks, turned and drove resolutely out of view. Now another is driving towards us from inside the estate while the original one, as yet unseen, is creeping up behind us. We are being pincered. A middle-aged woman rolls down the window and asks us what we’re doing. She’s cheerful and so are we, and she’s halfway through telling us that I’m afraid you’re on private property when she is interrupted by the man behind us. Standing on the footboard of his chugging engine, a man, perhaps sixty, liveried in standard gamekeeper gilet and cords, tweed cap, takes another tone entirely, giving it the what the hell do you think you’re playing at. You can’t be up there …
Perched on the wall, we’re caught on a line in between two approaches, a caricature of gendered debate, one aggressive and one calm. The man wins, because he’s shouting. We apologise to the woman, as if it’s we who interrupted her, turn from the view and get down from the wall. We’re right by his side, and he’s still shouting. He’s very angry, sputtering like his engine, threatening to call the police. He runs out of things to shout, returns to the truck and takes our picture with a digital camera attached to his dashboard. We smile for posterity, and he drives away.
We continue east, to a Right of Way that leads us beyond the wall, 200 yards into the duke’s land, then stops, like a jetty. Before us, out of bounds, is a small redirected river that runs towards several artsy water features in front of the main house, and a little hump bridge and a gate whose sign forbids us access. We hop the gate, cross the bridge and walk out into the expanse of grassland, decorated by ancient, thick-trunked, twisting oaks. The sheep lift their heads and stare, indignantly, still chewing, until one turns, runs, and the whole flock follows, streaming up the slope.
In The Gentle Art of Tramping, the Edwardian journalist and traveller Stephen Graham describes a ‘trespasser’s walk’:
You take with you a little compass, decide to go west or east, as fancy favours, and then keep resolutely to the guidance of the magnetic needle. It takes you the most extraordinary way, and shows what an enormous amount of the face of the earth is kept from the feet of ordinary humanity by the fact of private property.
This estate is over thirty times larger than Hyde Park, and reserved for a single family. We don’t have a compass, but we do have a pencil-ruled line on a map printed from the duke’s website. We’re heading north-east to a strange little deserted manor house I want to see, just outside the duke’s declared perimeter. The sky is cobalt crystal blue, the leaves on the ground like a children’s sponge painting in acid yellows and greens, and, even though it’s just past noon, the shadows of the trees are long.
The Dukes of Buccleuch inherited this property through marriage with the Montagus, who had bought it from wealthy Calais wool merchants in 1528. The land was sold to them by St Edmundsbury Abbey, the final destination of the convoy of the martyred St Edmund, the very same route of Roger Deakin’s Cowpasture Lane. We are in Leicestershire, and that the abbey could own land over seventy miles away from its source demonstrates the reach of their interests. Edward Montagu was a lawyer from Hemington, Northants, who bought Boughton Castle, as it was then known, to consolidate his landholdings in the area. But several times through the Tudor dynasty, the family had found themselves on the wrong side of history, with one member doing time in the Tower of London. In 1605, there was another blow to the prestige of the family when Edward’s grandson, also an Edward, was stripped of his Lieutenancy and Justiceship of the Peace in the county. The Montagus were hanging on to nobility with their fingernails, so it was little wonder that, when King James called upon them for assistance, they came galloping.
In 1607, two years after the failed gunpowder plot, thousands of commoners took to the fields around us to protest enclosure. In what came to be known as the Midland Revolt, there were eleven uprisings, each with thousands of people, protesting the severe enclosure of the Midlands. The protests were carefully planned, their locations chosen strategically. Each commoner had been expressly urged: ‘Not to swear, nor to offer violence to any person, but to ply their business and make fair works.’
The protests may have been peaceful, but the sheer number of people caused alarm to the authorities. Though there was never any explicit statement of intent and complaint, many protesters were arrested carrying cheap prints of the Petition of the Diggers of Warwickshire, which argued against: ‘Incroaching tyrants who grind the poor so y they may dwell by themselves in theyr herds of fatt weathers [sheep] … onely for theyre own private gain … they have depopulated and overthrown whole towns and made thereof sheep pastures …’
The Midlands had been ravaged by enclosure. Their communal cornfields had been hedged and stripped to provide pasture for the sheep. The rents on their properties had spiked and their common rights, collecting wood for winter, allowing their pigs and cows to fatten on the pasture, had been removed. With nowhere else to go, many were now squatting on the side of the fields they had lived on a decade earlier. In an enquiry in the August following the revolt, royal commissioners had investigated the scale of illegal enclosure and depopulation in Rockingham Forest alone: 27,000 acres had been enclosed, 350 farms destroyed and almost 150,000 people across eighteen villages had lost their homes.
The protests were led by an enigmatic figure called Captain Pouch who had named himself after the small leather purse he carried with him. The pouch, he claimed, contained a magic substance that gave him the authority to destroy all enclosures from Northampton to the city of York. Alongside his magic charm, the man was well placed to spread sedition: as an itinerant tinker, travelling the length and breadth of the Midlands, he would have had many years before the Revolt to win the trust of locals, unionising the disparate people to one cause.
Pouch was adamant that the commoners were simply doing the king’s work for him. In 1593, the Tudor courts had relaxed the laws of enclosure, only to revoke this position four years later: each hedge that went up once again needed the approval of Parliament. Since the landowners in the Midlands were largely ignoring this repeal, the rebels were not protesting the authority of the state, but simply trying to enforce it. They argued that the land was being robbed from the commonwealth of England and fenced into private gain. They were defending England against thieves.
The revolt in Rockingham was not caused by Montagu, but by his neighbour Sir Thomas Tresham. By all accounts, Tresham was the Hoogstraten of Rockingham, a ‘most odious figure’, reviled by the nobility and commoners alike. Sir Thomas had by 1605 overseen the destruction of nine farms and 400 acres had been put to sheep pasture. But he was unable to help quash the revolt, because he had died two years before the Midland Revolt, ruining his remaining relatives with an £11,000 debt and disbanding his army of yeomen.
Edward Montagu was in a tricky position. As an MP, he had already stated the grievances of his Northampton constituency in Parliament, describing: ‘the depopulation and the daily excessive conversion of tillage to pasture’, a direct reference to his neighbour’s crimes. But when the call came from the king to deal with the rebels ‘with sharp remedie’ he had little choice but to obey. He rustled up a militia and met the rebels in a place called the Brand, in between his house and Tresham’s.
This crowd, however, was different from the rest of the revolt: they came primed for violence. The revolt was on its knees: Captain Pouch had already been arrested in Warwickshire, the contents of his pouch found to be nothing more than a lump of green cheese, and the other peaceful crowds around the Midlands had been dispersed with ease. By this time, it seemed that yet another revolt had been swept away, just like the Pilgrimage of Grace or Robert Kett’s rebellion earlier that century. But the commoners were desperate, still starving for the corn that had been cleared for pasture to feed to the sheep now occupying their fields. This time they had resolved to ‘manfully die’ rather than face another winter of starvation. A thousand local men, women and children turned out that day, some armed with weapons, some with tools; all resolved to claim back their land, whatever the cost. A letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury takes up the account:
Sr Anth. Mildmaay and Sr Edw. Montacute repaired to Newton, Mr Thos. Tresham’s toune, wheare 1000 of these fellowes who term themselves levellers weare busily digging, but weare furnished with many half pykes, pyked staves, long bills and bowes and arrows and stoanes. These gentlemen, fynding great bakwardness in the trained bandes, weare constrained to use all the horse they could make, and as many foote of their owne servants and fellowe as they could trust; and first read the proclamation twice unto them, using all the best perswasions to them to desist that they could devise; but when nothing would prevaile, they charged them thoroughlie both with their horse and foote. But the first charge they stoode, and fought desperatelie; but at the second charge they ran away, in which there were slaine som 40 or 50 of them, and a very great number hurt.
It is no wonder that the ‘trained bandes’ were ‘bakward’. They were most likely well acquainted with the rebels, who would have been their neighbours from church and alehouse. In the twice-read proclamation, and ‘best perswasions’, it is perhaps fair to read reluctance in Montagu’s final actions. But he did charge his horses and when the captured rebels were tried, hanged and quartered, he saw to it that their limbs were displayed and taken on a macabre tour of the local towns and villages, steeped in vinegar and tarred at their wounds to slow the decay.
My friend and I have reached the north end of the duke’s property. The sun has set, and, without it, the air is cold. We had met a man in full camo-gear, high upon his tree seat, stalking deer. With his rifle in hand, he politely redirected us off the duke’s estate and out onto the road. We’re rushing, because it’s a full moon tonight and we want to be off the road to see it rise. We stop off in Brigstock and buy our supper from the Co-op. Sausages for the fire, a cheap cheesecake for the interim.
There are three miles to walk before our destination, Thomas Tresham’s abandoned manor house, now owned by the National Trust. With the strange name Lyveden New Bield, no one can be sure why it was built. Tresham’s main house is less than ten miles away, due west, and he barely had the finances to keep that going.
The house is faith manifested into architecture. Its footprint is cruciform; its ratios fetishise the trinity. The window that faces due east is a crucifix and meant to catch the light of the rising sun, so that every summer morning Christ’s cross shone in gold on the opposite wall. When Francis Tresham was implicated in the plot to murder James I and all his Parliament, the labourers downed tools and scarpered. It has been left, half finished, for over four centuries.
We cross the ring road that runs around the duke’s estate and climb a hill in the pitch black, rising to meet the moon, which, round, huge and cheesy yellow, is currently caught in the spindly twigs of the trees. We take the long road that opens out into flat windy countryside, and spot two large bonfires on the airstrip, with not a soul in sight. It is fireworks night, and the sprigs of light that flare and spritz along the long line of the horizon are quiet reminders of the crowds of people, miles away, hustled together for warmth, waving sparklers, drinking mulled wine, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the display above them. But they are a long way away, and when the flashes are gone we feel as though we’re the only two humans in the county.
Everything is still. The expanse of sky has muffled our conversation, and by the time we approach Lyveden New Bield we are already talking in whispers. We’re cold, tired and subdued, but the deserted manor is at the end of this gravel path; we’re almost there. We pass the shut-up tea shop and pause. There in the near distance is the ghost-house, like a heavy stone cross, fallen from the altar, lying supine on the grass. We approach it wordlessly, circle it and come to rest directly in front of its façade, under the only tree in the field. The moon is high in the sky now, and sends a flickering, silver screen projection onto the world below. It’s daylight bright and the shadow beneath the oak tree is as black as the sky above it.
I half remember a line written over a millennium ago by a poet soldier, keeping watch at an outpost on China’s Great Wall:
The long wall is propped up on yellow sands and whitened bones
We have inscribed our achievements on the mountains of Mongolia,
But the land lies deserted, the moon shines for no one.
I pull out my sketchbook and try to move my cold hand around the page. My friend sits and eats the cheesecake as if it’s a pizza. I abandon the drawing, to fill it in later, and devour my half. It’s understood that neither of us wants to get any closer to the house. We want to leave, light the fire, eat something that isn’t made entirely of sugar. But we’ve come all this way. So we get up stiffly, slide down the turfed moat, climb the facing slope and approach slowly. The house is so still it feels like it’s about to pounce. It emanates emptiness, the vast blackness of the sky seemingly concentrated within its walls. The windows are holes, gaping open, the roof long since rotted away. We step up onto a stone bench, peer in through the windows, and I feel a cold glass of water pour down my spine.
It’s time to go. My plan, hatched in the warmth of my bedroom, was for us to walk back into the duke’s land and camp in the ancient woodland of Geddington Chase, four miles away. Clearly, that’s not going to happen. We need the fire, its warmth, its light and, most of all, its mirth. So without looking back, we put the New Bield behind us, stumble round a couple of fields and make our way to Lady Wood. We crash through the fallen branches, phone torches on, sweeping the woods for a spot to camp in. We find a circle of trees, with two close enough for my friend’s hammock to hang between. We dump our bags and clamber around our spot collecting wood. As I pile the wood in different thicknesses, my friend sparks a tea light and places it in the centre of a circle he’s cleared out of the leaf litter. He layers thin wispy twigs on top and slowly I add finger-thick twigs, and then the arms, and then lean in a few legs. We have a fire.
My friend is a physics teacher, which means that even in places like Tresham’s half-built ghost-house any loose references to ‘energy’, especially in its spiritual sense, are strictly prohibited. If I mention energy and I’m not referring to a calculable quantity of kinetic or potential, it’s a D- for me, must try harder. We’ve roasted the sausages, smoked a joint, made a little home for ourselves, and he’s currently hanging from his hammock, like a cocooned butterfly, making estimates about how much energy our fire is using. I’m feeding the fire from a pile of collected wood, gently warming the underside of his arse as he swings in the air above me. On the ground, I’m freezing, wearing everything I have and cursing the total ineffectualness of foam roll mats, with every bit of me that touches the ground leaching heat.
We pick over the day. I bring up the moment with the strawberry-pink gamekeeper. His approach seemed so incongruous with our actions, disproportionate to our perceived crime. Was I rude? We were both civil in everything we said, but that wasn’t enough: what he seemed to expect was not civility, but servility. We weren’t humble enough, and, yes, that antagonised him.
In the aftermath of the Rockingham slaughter, those commoners who had not been murdered, maimed, arrested and hanged were called back to Boughton House, to make their mark on a register. They were not registering their names, as most couldn’t write, but their shame, making it official. In other revolts of the time, mendicants were forced to appear to registration wearing horses’ girdles around their necks. Others were branded on their cheeks, a sign for ever more of their moral sin, a scarlet letter burned into their flesh, the mark of Cain.
On a much lesser scale, this gamekeeper wanted us to acknowledge that what we were doing was shameful: eyes lowered, hats off, a sheepish acceptance of his authority. But like the wall we were sitting on, his authority came from a line drawn not by common consensus but by private considerations masquerading as a moral standard.
The Midland Revolt sparked an enquiry into enclosure in the area, which did lead to some landowners, including the Treshams, being hauled before the Star Chamber. They were fined for their excesses, a punishment that became not so much a deterrent to enclosure, but a randomised, sporadic tax on landowners that was rarely enforced.
But enclosure had only just begun. According to Peter Linebaugh, the Gandalf of Commons academia, at the end of the seventeenth century there were still twenty million acres of common ground in England and Wales. But, he writes:
between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million acres of land, about a quarter of cultivated acreage, to the politically dominant landowners. The Parliamentary enclosure made the process more documented and more public. It got rid of open field villages and common rights and contributed to the late eighteenth century’s crisis of poverty.
In 1621, James I made Edward Montagu a lord, in return for his ‘honest and faithful’ service to the Crown (plus the customary and unmentioned payment of a ten-grand bung). Six years later he was granted the rights to all the timber in Geddington Woods, and, fifty years later, was granted hunting rights. When the Boughton estate passed to the Buccleuchs, the 2nd Duke, known as Planter John, wanted to convert his entire estate to an extended garden of tree-lined avenues, and petitioned Parliament, saying, ‘This proposal is so apparently to the advantage of the commoners that any of them might be glad to embrace it.’ Sure. In 1795, the full enclosure of the commons was granted to the Buccleuchs, clearing the commoners from their newly extended estate. Workhouses were built in the surrounding villages to accommodate the commoners whose livelihoods were stripped for the duke’s aesthetic vision. Back in Arundel, in 1809, the Drunken Duke was granted full enclosure of his estate, allowing him to chop a third off the high street, and erect the wall I climbed.
The 18th Duke of Norfolk still resides at Arundel Castle, but also counts Framlingham Castle, Bungay Castle, Worksop Manor, Carlton Towers and Norfolk House in London among his residences. He owns 46,000 acres across the British Isles, which comprise a portfolio of sheep, forestry, shooting and equine recuperation. He’s doing all right. The Duke of Buccleuch owns over 270,000 acres of the British Isles, including their holiday homes Bowhill House, Drumlanrig Castle and Dalkeith Palace. The land he owns is more than twice the size of Birmingham, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester put together. The elegant final flourish of this land seizure comes from the Boughton estate which now sells firewood, once a common right, back to the commoners at £95 per cubic metre.
In 1754, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.’ But Rousseau was wrong. These men, women and children of Rockingham weren’t simple. In spite of the staggering, totalitarian assault on their free will, the moral enclosure ratified by the Church, they weren’t sheep. They were compelled. Their necks were stretched and broken, their guts were cut from their sides, their limbs were displayed on stakes before their friends and families. They were bled out, garrotted and roasted in man-made hellfire.
In 1963, Stanley Milgram ran a series of experiments testing how far his volunteers would go in administering apparently near-lethal electric shocks to an actor in the next room. The shocks were fake, and no harm was done. In his report of the experiments, Obedience to Authority, Milgram had surmised that his subjects were able to abandon their inherent humanity when subordinating their responsibility to a higher institution. However, in 1990, American Psychologist published a reinterpretation of Stanley Milgram’s experiments, saying, ‘what people cannot be counted on is to realise that a seemingly benevolent authority is in fact malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence’. Psychologists call this ‘conceptual conservatism’: the ability to maintain a belief long after it has been discredited by contradictory evidence.
The walls of England’s private estates, erected by our richest and most established families, the Arundels, the Buccleuchs, the Beauforts, Grosvenors, Lonsdales and Bedfords possess a grandeur and authority that has somehow overridden the violence and theft, the malevolence they enacted to build them. The wall presents itself as a blank statement of authority, and we obey it because we see it without its context. The mindwall has become so entrenched in our heads that it remains unchallenged and unquestioned. But its power comes not just from what it communicates to us, but from the secrets it conceals, the overwhelming evidence of the dark source of its power, hidden behind its curtains of brick and stone.