Quarrel with the King (20 page)

Needless to say, there was an argument on the other side. Copyhold, with its elaborate burdens, its binding of the copyholder to an unending series of mutual, community-based duties, was thought by many to be full of encumbrances. It was innately conservative. Even the surveyor John Norden complained of the old yeomen that “they only shape their courses as their fathers did,” spending their lives in “a plodding kind of course.” In this light, the tenurial fetters of copyhold were not the means of maintaining a community but a way of hampering the freedoms of freeborn individuals. Both landlord and tenant could see it that way and, in many parts of the country, although not on the whole on the Pembroke estates, there was steady drift away from copyhold to a straightforward leasehold, a pure money arrangement, one in which each participant was a player in the rental land market and in which any notion of community came as an optional add-on, not as an integral part of how and where people lived.

In the Pembroke valleys, there are clear signs that community was continuing to work. A statute passed in the reign of Elizabeth had required that any new house should have four acres of ground attached to it, a way of guaranteeing a means of self-sufficiency and of no burdens encroaching on the charity of the village. This was all very well, but it meant that the poor, particularly in an era of land hunger, were unprovided for. There was not enough land to go round, and if there was not enough land, there could be no more houses. The poor were driven on to the roads and into the cities, where they would beg. A steady stream of petitions was made to the justices for such cases. In Ramsbury, where the Pembrokes had one of their smaller houses, a petition came to the justices at the quarter sessions in 1639:

It is a sign of the system working well that the earl and his steward had agreed to provide Lionel Ounter with a piece of ground, but a house could not be built on it without the permission of the justices of the peace. The villagers of Ramsbury wrote to them that spring:

It remains an intriguingly integrated system: royal justice hears an appeal by a village committee (acting according to the custom of the manor) on behalf of a poor homeless man, for whom the lord of the manor has provided a plot of ground, all framed in the language of obedience and hierarchy, even with certain phrases mimicking the language of the litany (“in most humble wise” “his bounden dutie”). This is not what a market-based system would have done.

One of the central points about custom as a governing principle of village life was that it should be agreed between the copyholders of the manor, gathered as the “homage.” Custom did not have to be of any great age. Custom was simply what the village did as a village. As long as those of the homage considered that something might be a custom of the manor, then it could become one. Customary tenure was in that way not pure conservative rigidity but an adaptive organic system.

In 1632, the people in the Pembrokes' manor at Wylye decided that they wanted to introduce the newfangled technique of the floated meadow, and they did so using the instruments of communal decision making they had inherited from the Middle Ages. The floating of meadows was a method by which river water was led out over the lowlying grass fields next to the banks, bringing enriching silt down on to the meadows and a seed rain of various grasses to thicken the sward. The comparative warmth of the flowing river water, at something like fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, would keep the grass growing when the frost would stop it in an unfloated meadow. The costs of setting up the sluices and channels, the gates, banks, distributor channels, and flow systems for these meadows were high: fourteen shillings an acre up front and then a maintenance payment of two shillings an acre thereafter, “the same to be paid at the feasts of St Thomas the Apostle and the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary yerely by even and equal proportions.” The flooding of the meadows provided an early bite for the sheep, more hay in summer, making a bigger flock possible, which could manure a larger extent of arable ground. Because of such obvious advantages, large stretches of the valleys of the Ebble, Nadder, Wylye, and Avon rivers were converted into water meadows in the seventeenth century, with much of the work encouraged by the earls of Pembroke and their stewards, who recognized of course that the value of the estate itself, as well as the incomes of the copyholders, would be increased by the improvements. But the decision to make those improvements could only be made communally, because the land of every tenant in the village would be affected by them.

So at Wylye an agreement at the manor court was made on September 10, 1632,

As smoothly as the clear waters of the Wylye itself, the ancient community of the manor at Wylye was sliding on to an enriching, technological, and modern future.

Happiness finds it difficult to make its way into the records, but for all that, an undoubted and even rather subversive note of well-being and gaiety flows through these valleys. There was unlawful drinking and playing at quoits, game playing on the Sabbath, dancing, and music. Particularly in the upstream villages of Broad Chalke and Fovant there remained a high proportion of Roman Catholics, repeatedly listed as not going to church, and even of one man, in 1636, Edward Lucas of Fovant, a gentleman, for keeping a schoolmistress in his house (Sarah Overton, a spinster) for at least three months, “in order to teach his children Popery.” The fact that so much of this starts to appear in the court records in the seventeenth century may be a symptom of an increasing puritan confidence in taking to court the minor delights and naughtinesses that until then had gone unpunished. When, after the Civil War, the Parliamentary Committee for Sequestrations came down to these valleys to discover who had been on the king's side and who, therefore, might have their property confiscated, all kinds of informants came creeping out of the woodwork to snitch on the ways in which their neighbors had been going in for unnecessary delight and even “injoiinge itt.” The vicar at Bemerton, Dr. Thomas Lawrence, did “permit William Bowlton to play upon his Instrumt (beinge a Treble[?]) at his the sd Doctors Howse and did pmit dauncinge on the Saboth day in his presence and hee did not forbid itt.”
Edward Poore, described as a yeoman, had seen him “dauncinge and bowlinge and kittlinge upon the Sabioth daues at Bemerton.”
Kittling
means “tickling” in Scots, but probably means “playing at skittles” here. The priest, they all said, liked to do this with his children.

There is one piece of evidence, apparently almost unique from these valleys, of a song written and sung by a spirited young woman from a house next to the Ebble in March 1631, which describes that other, unspoken life below the level of official arrangements of what people bought, owned, sold, earned, and spent. It is almost the only equivalent of that world of jokes and laughter, storytelling and amusement that filled the parlors and drawing rooms of the great house at Wilton. In Stoke Farthing, a hamlet just downstream from Broad Chalke, a carpenter called Thomas Holly, one Saturday afternoon, saw Edward Penney, the son of the man who had the demesne farm, a big place with a separate room for the servants to live in and two huge ten-bay barns, coming toward him. Penney gave him “a certeyne writting in paper wch was made in verce.” Holly could neither read nor write himself and he took it to John White, one of his neighbors, a thirty-two-year-old husbandman—a proper member of the homage, who according to the earl's surveyors, kept his house in good repair—to tell him what it said. White read it out to Holly and to two other of their neighbors, the old Walter Whitemarsh and the big farmer himself, John Penney, who hadn't been able to read it himself. The homage of the village was, informally and ad hoc on a Saturday afternoon, gathering to deal with a small crisis. (Only one of them could read, but the ability to read gave him no particular status.) Walter Whitemarsh tooke “the certeyne writting in paper” away from John White and kept it himself.

Clearly the meeting had decided to do something about it because ten days later, the document was produced before the justices in Salisbury. The author of the verses had been identified. She was the
thirty-eight-year-old Jane (or Joan) Norrice, the wife of Harry, and the copyholder herself of a very small farm in Stoke Farthing, with an acre of orchard and garden and sixteen acres of arable land in the common fields. The farm wasn't in good repair, and the Norrices were clearly hovering on the margins of the respectable community, and this “certeyne writting in paper” did Jane Norrice's standing no good at all. The fact that this poor, small, middle-aged woman farmer could write verses and sing them meant nothing. The power of the manor, translated into court Latin in Salisbury, was disturbed that she, Jane Norrice, “made, fabricated and wrote in the following English words from her own ill will a false, scandalous and obscene libel.” The poem is in fact a funny account of how the tiniest of chalkstream villages had wickedness going on underneath its proper surfaces:

The great wedding portrait of the Pembrokes at Wilton, painted by Van Dyck in late 1634 or early 1635. At the top left, the dead children of the family float on clouds. Below them, the three youngest brothers—William, John, and James—look up to that heaven. In the center, Lady Mary Villiers, the bride in white. Two steps above her, the boy she is marrying, Charles Lord Herbert, and his younger brother
Philip, with whom she is in love.

Holding center stage, Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, and his wife, Lady Anne Clifford. On the right, the earl's daughter Anna Sophia and her husband, the highly glamorous Cavalier Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon. Life for the Pembrokes would never again seem as complete.

The 50-year-old earl, looking tired and run down, and Lady Anne Clifford, his wife, aged forty-four. His left hand loosely holds the Lord Chamberlain's staff of office. Her gesture may signify that she cradles the ghost of a dead child in her arms.

The two young Herberts—Philip, aged thirteen, and harles, fifteen —both about to embark on a grand tour to Italy, dazzle in silks, a balanced pair of assertion and withdrawal.

The 12-year-old heiress, Lady Mary Villiers, daughter of the assassinated Duke of Buckingham, brought a £25,000 dowry to the marriage, the equivalent of 2,000 years of a Wiltshire shepherd's wages.

Anna Sophia Herbert and her husband, Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, both aged about forty-four. Anna Sophia holds the pearl of a living son, their heir, Charles Dormer, between the fingers of her right hand. He openly dabbles his fingers with hers.