Quarrel with the King (19 page)

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.