Quarrel with the King Read online

  So mudless is this spring water that the rivers remain entirely clear as they move over their pale beds. The banks are spotted with kingcups, and there are islands of white-flowered watercrowsfoot in midstream. The hairy leaves of water mint grow on the gravel banks, coots and moorhens scoot between them, and if you wade out barefoot into the shockingly cold water of the river, the small, wild brown trout flicker away in front of you, running from your Gulliver-in-Lilliput intrusion. Among the trout are the pale bodies of the graylings, called Thymalus thymalus because their flesh smells of the wild thyme that grows on the downland turf, and which in the seventeenth century were known here as “umbers,” shadow-fish, their silvery grayness scarcely to be distinguished from the most beautiful river water in England.

  This was ancient country, drenched in continuities. In common with the rest of southern England, it looked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much as it had for at least a thousand and maybe two or three thousand years. There would have been differences in details: woods had grown up where fields had been before; fields had been cleared where trees had once clothed the landscape. There were more people and more houses. But the villages, as ever, were made of the materials the land could provide. Wheat straw–thatched the roofs, cut not with a scythe but more carefully and more slowly with a sickle—a smaller, neater tool but justifiable in economic terms because it would guarantee a good length in the roofing material: longer straw made dryer roofs. In the walls, the oak frames were infilled with hazel panels, made with exactly the same technique as the hurdles used to enclose the sheep in the folds, the young pliant wands woven between the uprights or “sails” (the wattle), smeared with mud and straw (the daub), and then painted with limewash. Occasionally, for the walls, a mixture of chalk, or “clunch,” blocks would be used, quarried from the hill and then mixed with brick from the valley clays. All of this one can still see in the houses of these valleys. Nothing would have come from more than a mile or two away. This was an immutable pattern, the intimate folding of men, their farming, and their habits of life on to the opportunities and constraints the landscape offered them.

  The high chalkland would have been nothing without the river valleys. Settlement needs water, and the dew ponds on the downs—in fact, enormous clay-lined dishes to catch the rain—provided water good enough for sheep but desiccating to human taste. Each sip seems to leave a residue of chalk in your mouth. The spring-fed valley water is different, as bubblingly restorative as any in England, marvellous to lie in on a hot summer afternoon, your back on the pebbles, the water dancing around your head and shoulders. The Arcadian world of the Pembrokes’ Wiltshire valleys relied for its existence on the constant and mutually supportive relationship of these two environments, the high chalkland and the damp wet valleys, each providing what the other lacked.

  The same system of land management, and the virtually immobile social structure it created, had persisted across the centuries. It was, apart for some alterations at the margins, a profoundly conservative and unchanging world. Farming patterns and social relationships had lasted here essentially unchanged from before the ninth century. This extraordinary continuity, even as the world was revolutionized around them, became the dominant fact of the Pembroke estates. This was the old world. Its ancient methods looked like a version of Arcadia. And it was a world the Pembrokes were intent on protecting.

  Its roots stretched back into the Dark Ages, perhaps to the moment when the Viking armies were threatening the well-being of much of the Midlands, East Anglia and Wessex, perhaps before then, when violence was still endemic among the Saxon chieftains and their war bands. The documents are thin on the ground, but it seems certain that the system of the manor emerged from a world of violence and the need for protection within it. A warlord offered land and defense, a villein—a man of the village—supplied in return labor and loyalty.

  This was certainly how the landowning class of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the history of what they owned. John Norden, the preeminent surveyor of the early seventheenth century, a professional and a devout Christian, conservative in his ideals, first published his Surveiors Dialogue in 1607. It was a popular book that went through three large editions, and was the leading text on the meaning of land, its duties and rewards, in early modern England. With it, Norden was voicing the accepted nostrums of the society he was addressing.

  After the departure of the Romans, Norden told his audience of gentlemen, the country was left as

  a very Desert and Wildernesse, full of woods, fels, moores, bogs, heathes, and all kind of forlorne places: and how-soeuer wee finde the state of this Island now, Records do witness vnto us, that it was for the most part a vniuersall wildernesse, until people finding it a place desolate and forlorne began to set footing here, and by degrees grew into multitudes; though for a time brutish and rude.

  In that wild time, when life was lawless, there was mutual benefit to be had in community. The arrangement was originally voluntary on both sides.

  In the beginning of euery Mannor, there was a mutuall respect of assistance, betweene the Lord who gave parcels of land…and the tennants of euery nature, for ayding, strengthening and defending each other:

  But time passed and what had begun as a voluntary arrangement stiffened into the “custom of the manor.” Both service to the Lord and the rights of the tenants had become obligatory “and either, in right of the custome due to the other, constraineth each other to do that which in the beginning was of either part voluntary.”

  Central to the system was the idea of balance and mutuality in community. In Norden’s pages you can hear the discussions of the English ruling class before the Civil War, the vision of what they still saw as the organic integrity of the manors they owned and controlled. Norden derived the word manor itself from the French verb mainer—to keep a place in hand, or in check. Control was the essence of good management, but in harness with control and discipline was the idea that the landlord’s own life, that of his family, his “posterity,” the lands they held, the lives of those who lived on their lands, were all part of a single, organic whole.

  It is, in this ideal and moralized world, a picture of a profoundly hierarchical community, deriving its security and well-being from the natural relationship of parts. “And is not euery Mannor a little common wealth,” Norden asked, tapping big political issues in the use of that phrase, “whereof the Tenants are the members, the Land the body, and the Lord the head?” That organic analogy worked in detail. Above all, the land’s bodily nature needed to be attended to:

  If it be not fed with nutriture, and comforted and adorned with the most expedient commodities, it will pine away, and become forlorne, as the mind that hath no rest or recreation, waxeth lumpish and heauy. So that ground that wanteth due disposing & right manurance, waxeth out of kinde: euen the best meddowes will become ragged, and full of unprofitable weedes, if it be not cut and eaten.

  This idea of organic health, and of balance as the source of that health, runs unbroken from the farming of the fields to the management of the country. It is an undivided conceptual ecology that can take in the workings of the physical body, the court at Whitehall, the family, the village, the land itself, the growing of crops, the transmission of well-being to the future, the inheritance of understanding from the past, and above all the interlocking roles of nobility, gentry, and commonalty. It is the ideology of an establishment concerned with keeping itself in the position of wealth and power. There is not a hint of democracy, let alone radicalism, but it is a frame of mind that also sets itself against any form of authoritarianism. The workings of the medieval and post-medieval community depend at their heart on a balance of interests, contributions, and rewards. It is what, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was called, quite consciously, a “common wealth”: well-being derived from a life lived and considered in common. The custom of the manor was not to do with the regulations of the state, or with individual freedom. It was a dee
ply conservative premodern and pre-market system that recognized no overriding rights of the individual or of national interest. It believed, to an extent the modern world can scarcely grasp, in the rights of the community as a living organism.

  Again and again in The Surveior’s Dialogue, Norden emphasized the point. Good decisions in the management of land were “the meanes to enable the Honourable to shelter the virtuous distressed.” Increasing revenues from a manor allowed the tenants to be treated well. This was a form of obligation, just as, in a family, duty was owed both ways:

  As children are bound to their parents by the bonds of obedience, so are the parents bound to their children by the bond of education; and as servants are bound to their masters in the bond of true service, so are the Masters bound to their servants in the bond of reward. In like manner, tenants being bound unto their Lords in the bond of duety, so are Lords bound vnto their Tennants in the bond of loue.

  That last word recurs. Tenancy is not a matter of rent, or at least not only of rent; it is, Norden says quite explicitly, a love structure. The relationships within a manor, he tells the landlords, must be “in a mutual manner, you to be helpful vnto them, and they louing unto you. And by this meanes, should your strengths increase far more by their loue then by your lucre, & their comfort grow as much by your fauour as doth their groanes vnder your greediness.” There was, Norden warned his gentlemen readers, “no comforte in a discontented people” and discontent in them came from avarice and indifference in their landlord. His own well-being, as the head of the body, was utterly dependent on their well-being as its limbs. Extortionate rents and the application of raw market principles would destroy the lord as much as the people.

  These questions, and their implications of bodily and moral balance, would, on a far larger scale, become the central concern of seventeenth-century England. Did the king owe the same duty of care to the kingdom as the earl owed to the inhabitants of these ridges and valleys? Was his authority as bound up with love as Norden’s paragraphs imply? Did he in fact derive that authority from the people he ruled? Was rule a form of duty? These questions, lurking in the ambiguities of lordship, would lead to civil war, and in that civil war these Arcadian ideas were ranged on the side of Parliament and the ancient constitution and against a king and his ministers, who were seen to have broken the ancient bonds of love and duty. Conservatism was at the heart of Arcadia as it was of the English revolution.

  This old, inherited mutuality in social relationships was mirrored by a carefully interfolded relationship to the land itself. The whole system of the chalkland manors depended on people adapting the way they farmed to what the land could tolerate and what the land could offer. On that basis, the manors were divided into three layers: at the top the wide grazing of the open downland; in the valley floor, the lush damp meadows and marshes; and between the two, on the valley sides, the arable fields and woods. Throughout the Middle Ages and in the centuries that followed, sheep were grazed by day on the downs, and in the evening were led downhill along the droves to the arable fields to manure them; in effect, they were used to transfer the nutrients from the chalk on to the arable land. They also served the purpose of fixing the seed corn into the tilth.

  The lush valley meadows were the third part of the system. In the early spring, the grass started to grow there before there was any available on the down. There, too, in the summer, the big hay crops could be grown that would feed the animals in the winter, particularly the oxen of the manor’s plough team. Good valley grazing allowed the village to keep a larger flock, which meant that more arable ground could be cultivated, which meant that more grain could be grown. Although wool and meat were produced from the flocks, their essential product was grain, the stuff of life, the food on which people depended for survival. All was connected: chalk turf and valley hay, down and meadow, the digestive system of the sheep, and the well-being of men, women, and children.

  Ownership of this means of production was not shared. Each farmer owned his own beasts, his own seed corn, his own house, his own garden, barns, and backyard. He also owned his own strips in the huge open, arable fields. But this assemblage of private property was managed in common. Sheep were owned by individual farmers but were grazed in communal flocks, tended by white-caped shepherds whose wages were paid in proportion by all those whose sheep they looked after. Flocks of several hundred sheep were usual on chalkland manors, and in many ways they dictated the shared nature of the farming. It was only practical to graze them together and to fold them together on the same arable field. Villages, as elsewhere in the Midlands and in the chalk country, usually had three open fields (sometimes two, occasionally four or more), of which one lay fallow every year. It was usually laid down in the custom of the manor that the folding of the sheep on to the fields should begin one year at one end, the next at the other. Only that way would the fertility delivered by the sheep be spread evenly across the strips from year to year. Each farmer had to provide winter hay for the sheep, and contribute his few pence toward the employment of a cowherd, hogward, hayward, and even a mole catcher for the manor. Those who failed to meet their obligations to the community would be denied “the fold”—that life-giving manure from the sheep—without which their land would not grow the grains on which they relied for their existence. It was a brutal sanction, but as the manor records show, not one the villagers were slow to impose.

  The shepherd in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Wiltshire, far from being the careless lover of the Arcadian imagination, was one of the best paid and most responsible men in the village. In his hands was the critical job of safeguarding the communal flock that was the basis of the entire village’s survival. By the fifteenth century, he was earning ten or twelve shillings a year (for which one could rent thirty acres or more of arable ground) plus an allowance of grain, a lamb in the spring, a fleece at the summer shearing, a whole cheese, the milk of those ewes whose lambs had died, and the milk of all ewes on Sundays. He was allowed to keep some of his sheep in the lord’s pasture and was absolved from all communal duties. The shepherd was not the poorest of the poor, but even something of a village grandee.

  A fascinating document in the Wiltshire records called simply “Concerning the Shepherd” describes the reality of life for a Wiltshire downland shepherd in September 1629. It consists of the requests laid down by the people of Heale, a small community in the valley of the Avon a few miles north of Wilton, his collective employer. They required of him

  That in person he diligently Attende and keepe his flocke. That he absent not himself from them, but upon urgent and necessary cause, and then put the same to some sufficiente body, and not to Children either boyes or girles.

  There is a hint there of independence and even truculence in their employee. He also had to keep the sheep out of the corn. Any damage done by the sheep to the growing crops will be docked from his wages “according as two other tenants not interested in the said damage shall value the same.” If a sheep died, he had to bring the carcass to the owner’s house, to prove he had not merely sold the sheep and was cheating his employers. He had to look after the communal hay rick on which the flock would depend in the winter. He was to prevent “wool-pickers”—and this is a measure of the poverty and tightness in these valleys—from coming to pick the tiny scraps of wool that caught on the hurdles around the fold at night. He must “mend the scabby,” carefully cut and destroy the blackthorn furze that always threatens to take over downland grazing, must drive “alien” sheep or pigs into the communal pound and not keep any except the community flock, a temptation to free enterprise he was to resist. If any of the community pay him in “naughty corne, the shepherd upon complainte to be righted by the lord of the mannor on the party soe offendinge.”

  This was scarcely the Arcadian picture of ease and contentment. Its regulatory tightness was a symptom of real pressure on the resource. At the same time, the existence of the regulations, the communal management of a shared resource, and
the expectation that they would be obeyed, that the shepherd should stay with his flock and not deputize except in emergency, that he should look after both animals and grazing—one can see in the presumptions behind those requests a version of the cooperative and even the authentic world of which the sophisticated would always dream. The regulations are evidence of communality working for real.

  The system operated hard up against its limits. Animal diseases could devastate flocks, with no understanding among the villagers of where the disease might have come from or what to do about it. In the seventeenth century, the habit developed of feeding tobacco to ill sheep in half-magical attempts to cure them of the many disgusting diseases sheep are prone to. Up to a third of each year’s crop had to be held back for the following year’s seed corn. Fertility was always at a premium, and any opportunity to receive the dung, or “soil” as it was called, which should have gone to one’s neighbor, was always welcome. If someone was found to have done wrong or strayed outside the limits laid down by custom, punishment would be swift. In these ways, the manor could be seen either as a system of cooperative balance or, like a coral reef, a world of such intense internal competitiveness that its struggles and rivalries had been frozen into a set of symbiotic duties and obligations, the rivals in a clinch, by which life alone was sustainable.

  Those obligations were all-pervading. Women and children were set to weeding the arable crops in the early summer. Husbands and fathers lived under a fearsome burden of communal work, or work done for the good of the lord of the manor. At the height of the Middle Ages, every year the villager had to thresh a bushel each (seventy or eighty pounds in weight) of wheat, rye, barley, beans, peas, and two bushels of oats; mow two swathes of a meadow; and reap, bind, and carry half an acre of it. Agreement after agreement specified the amount of dung each man had to carry from his own yard to the arable fields, the number of hurdles he had to make for the fold (a practiced man could make two and a half hurdles a day), and the regular amounts of money he had to contribute to the lord of the manor in return for his right to farm the land: nutsilver at the time of nuts, a rental penny at Easter, lardersilver at one or twopence a head, the substantial tax of tallage at six shillings, eightpence each, the threepence per head for the compulsory and customary drinking sessions called “scotales,” and the cock and three hens at Martinmas, in November.