Quarrel with the King (6 page)

But the system's conservatism was also a brake. The entire system was presided over by the memory of how things had always been done. Wisdom was essentially proverbial: what was known was good; what was strange was bad. Anything inherited was to be held on to; anything innovatory to be looked at with suspicion. The real story of this ancient form of life was not freedom but imposition, the restrictions on the individual that the workings of the community required. No modern surveillance society could match the reality of a chalkland village in which work patterns, sexual habits, the ability to sell and trade, and forms of inheritance and friendship were all closely supervised, not by the distant lord of the manor but by the other villagers themselves. The all-seeing eyes of neighbors deeply familiar with “the custom of the manor,” that inherited habit, monitored every inch and second.

Whether and where you could collect sticks for firewood, the thickness of the hedge around your garden, the suitability of your chimney for fires, the state of your roof, the dirtiness of the path up to your door, the ringlessness of your pigs' noses, the size of your back room, the clothes your wore, the way you spoke in public, the amount you could drink, your behavior in church: on every conceivable issue, the
village could police the habits and trangressions of its inhabitants, and having “presented” the offenders, could sentence and punish them. Village stocks and ducking stools were both the symbols and instruments of control. Right up until the seventeenth century, villagers guilty of theft or adultery were beaten in English villages “until their backs were bloody.” Wilton had its own “cage, pillory and stocks.” The tumbrel and “cucckingstool” (“a chair in which scolds were sat down to be dunked [
demergebantur
] in the river”) were kept in the little “parrock” (an enclosure fenced in with hurdles) belonging to a townsman called Richard Hatchett.

The village was never more vigilant than on the question of land—its boundaries, uses, and access. Common land was not common to anyone: it was common to the few villagers who had rights over it. Others were excluded. The great open fields were not open in any democratic sense: their individual strips, even if reallocated each year among the villagers, were individually named and individually owned, marked, and policed. You could be had up for trespassing on them just as much as on any enclosed land. Acres of parchment were devoted to precise and enforceable rights to and exclusions from wood, marsh, and moor.

Why so tight? Because most of rural England, from the Middle Ages onward, spent most of the time under stress. There was a desperate shortage of fertility: farming systems could only just sustain the human populations that depended on them. If for every grain sown the average return was between three and four grains, one of which had to be kept as seed for the next year, the land was an asset to be cosseted. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt the habits that, so far at least, had allowed the village to feed its people. Poverty bred fear, fear bred conservatism, and conservatism shut out strangers.

This, in many ways, was the reality of the lands the Herberts had acquired, a reliance on rules inherited from “a time beyond which the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary,” not because those rules stemmed from a golden age but because the risk that changing them would dissolve the system on which survival depended. Communal memory was the arbiter of life. The “custom of the manor” from “time out of mind” was both a moral duty and a set of practical requirements. There was to be no private dealing of which the court and village did not know the details. The manor court, which in its different forms could deal with petty crimes and with all property transactions and transfers, was to be the place in which grievances were to be aired and arrangements made, because only in the openness of those courts, which all copyholders could attend, was communal well-being—common wealth—to be found.

The closed-circuit supervision of one's neighbors' prying eyes ensured that people would not cut down their timber trees, sublet their land for longer than a year, or sell any part of it except in open court. They had to maintain their buildings. If they did not, they would be warned three times, at six-month intervals. On the third time, a stake would be driven into the ground by the front door (said to be the origin of an asset being “at stake”). If nothing had been done by the fourth time, the property would be forfeit. Then the “customary tenant”—the expression means “the holder of the land by the custom of the manor”—would be driven out of his “tenement,” the “held thing.” Although there were freeholders in these villages, they were only free of the labor and money dues that the copyholders owed to the manor. They were not free of the custom of the manor itself. And if they failed to observe the rules of the village, or committed treason or a felony, they, too, could be deprived of their freehold. In that sense, no one, except the lord of the manor, owned anything here. They, as tenants, merely held their tenements. Survival was conditional on obedience. It was a system about as far from the modern conception of the individual and his rights, let alone a welfare state, as it was possible to get.

Estate management, health and safety issues, antisocial behavior, the highways, property law, animal health and welfare, environmental health, planning permissions, local taxation, police issues, rights of way, agricultural practices, land rights and infringements, supervision of property held in common: every one was dealt with by the lord's steward and a jury, or “homage,” as it was significantly called, of twelve of the copyholders. The village was not merely an economic unit; it embodied and enacted almost every conceivable dimension of social and political life. This, not England, was a man's country, and political consciousness penetrated to the very depths of village England, a constant and constantly honed practicing of a set of political rules that felt like the frame of life. Economic management, a deal between the members of a community, and moral policing all came together in an arrangement that was essentially corporate. Privacy in such a world was not only scarcely available, but it would also have seemed wrong.

That “custom of the manor” represented an equilibrium of interests between tenant and landlord. The landlord, in fact, could impose only what the tenants would agree to. The way, for example, in which the area of each holding was measured was more responsive to the reality on the ground than to some abstract, imposed rule. Rent was dependent on acreage, but an acre in 1630s was not the precisely defined unit it is today. An acre was simply the area of ground that a plough could cover in a single day. If the ground was heavy, the acre would shrink to match the conditions; and if the soil light, the acre would expand. Everyone knew this, no one would think of altering it, and the conditions of the agreement were all deeply familiar.

Detail was all. No one manor had rules identical to any other. Even neighboring villages in the same valley or on other side of the same chalk ridge, would have quite various habits and requirements. The customs of Great Wishford, in the Wyley Valley, and Barford
St. Martin, in the valley of the Nadder, were “set down in writing” in 1597; a copy of them survives among the Pembroke papers. They were set down jointly because both villages “ever had an old Ancient Custome” that gave them rights in the great old royal forest of Grovely on the chalk ridge that lay between them. Both villages could pasture “all manner of Beasts and cattle throughout all Grovely for all the year” (except “cattle of two Tooth and Goates, and pigs above a yeare old.”) “Ever out of mind,” villagers could collect fallen boughs twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. By “an ancient custom & time out of mind” on Holy Thursday every year, the men of Wishford could collect “One load of Trees”; on Whitsunday the men of Barford could do the same, but only “upon a Cart to be Drawn home with Men's Strengthe.” In addition, Lord Pembroke's ranger had to bring them every year, also on Whitsunday, “One fatt Buck, the one half to Wishford, and the other to Barford to make merry withal amongst the neighbours & the ranger is to have from each of the manors of Wishford & Barford one white loaf, one gallon of beer & a pair of gloves or 12d in money for the Whole.”

In Burcombe, on the Nadder just east of Barford, “the Custom of this Manor” constituted in effect a memory and inheritance of the duties required of the medieval villains. A sixteenth-century copy of the customs laid down exactly what work had to be done for the earl by each of the copyholders. Each small tenant (with a house and fifteen acres) had to plough and hedge half an acre of barley land for the farmer who had rented the lord's own demesne land; the larger tenants (with a house and thirty acres) had to perform twice that amount of work, with “the same Farmer giving to them their Breakfast.” At harvest time, the small tenants had to provide “one sufficient Reaper for one day” or three and a halfpence, the large tenants “one man and one woman for one day or 7d at the choice of the said farmer.” Together, the tenants of Burcombe had to “mow and cut down” the hay in the
seven acres of the meadow called Westmead (for which more breakfast was to be provided by the farmer), and then, when it had dried in the sun for a day or two, make it into stooks, small drying stacks of cut stems, for which the farmer would provide bread and cheese. Another four and a half acres of hay of Burcombe, which was still in the earl's hands for the horses at Wilton, had to be made by the tenants, for which the lord's bailiff would provide four shillings, four and a halfpence “for and toward the provision of their drink.” These were the customs which were “writ and Remember'd.”

These old remembered rights, sanctions, and duties were the living inheritance of the Middle Ages. When the castle at Wardour, a Wiltshire manor belonging to the Pembrokes' neighbors the Arundells, was blown up after a savage siege in the Civil War, all its records were destroyed. After the war was over, both tenants and the steward of the manor inspected the records of Shaftesbury Abbey, to which the manor had belonged in the Middle Ages, and copied out the medieval rules. There was no sense of incongruity in this. These were the rules, and their age was more a guarantee of their excellence than otherwise. Fifteenth-or fourteenth-century codes were to regulate the lives of the people of Wardour in the 1660s. This was normal. Nothing changed.

Everywhere you look in these customary regulations, the memory of the Middle Ages is there. Even in mid-seventeenth-century records, in a country where the worship of the saints and all the practices of the Roman Catholic church were meant to have been abolished for 120 years, the pattern of the year continued to be measured out according to the ancient saints' days. At Chilmark, a few miles west of Barford St. Martin, the common was to be closed off to the copyholders' animals from “Ladyday [March 25, New Year's Day in the seventeenth century, the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary] to the Feast of the Invocation of the Holy Cross [May 3],” when the tenants from both ends of Chilmark common were allowed the use of it
until “the Feast of St Martin the Bishop [November 11],” when it was again closed to them and opened to the animals of the neighboring village, until the following spring.

This Christian calendar calibrated the year, its ceremonies and associations miraculously twinned to the seasons. Candlemas, or the Feast of the Purification, on February 2, marked both the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the day on which winter was half over, and the day, forty days after the birth of Christ, when Mary was presented at the temple, the moment at which she also reemerged into the world. It was the time of transition, and the opportunity for bitter peasant prognostication:

Lady Day, on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation—the moment at which Christ was conceived—was also the beginning of the farming year, the first hint of spring, nine months before Christmas, and the seeding of the future. Easter, in April, marked the fullness of spring and the culmination of the Christian story, with the fertility of nature finally defeating the darkness of winter. On through the year, as custom after custom makes clear, the people of the chalklands lived in an environment where ancient and inherited signals provided the landmarks for their lives. At Rogationtide, in early May, as the arable crops were just sprouting, the whole village would offer prayers (
rogationes
) for those crops and for their animals, beating the bounds of the village, of individual fields, and even of individual strips within those fields, to establish in the minds of this and future generations exactly where those boundaries were. These weren't always certain, and be
sides, there was always suspicion that one or two leaseholders might try to encroach on the land of the customary tenants. In 1618, the tenants in the manor court at Heale, in the valley of the Avon, decided to lay down the law:

Beating the bounds wasn't some folksy, antiquarian community festival; it was a way of defining the means of survival. But it was also more than that. The land itself was the central mnemonic of people's lives, the map of who they were, the method by which the place and the social relationships within it were known. To plough an acre strip—each “a furrow long” and four rods (sixteen and a half feet) wide—would take a day. This was an arrangement that folded together land, body, property, and time. The body itself would have known immediately and by utter familiarity what an acre meant. The eye could estimate a furlong at a glance. Each strip had a name: Bere furlong, Peashill, Saltacre, Bracelet (probably after “bercelet,” meaning a sheepdog), Hatchet acre, Elbow acre, Pyked furlong (after the sometimes strange crooked outline of the strips), and so on. Inherited meaning was folded into the copyhold land like sugar stirred into a cake. No signs or signals were needed; it was simply known, part of what was, time out of mind.