Quarrel with the King (21 page)

Henry Norrice, husband of the singer and composer Jane, when asked about his participation in the libel, said he knew nothing of it. It was all her work. And what can one say? Tantalizingly, it is not quite possible to make out who in Stoke Farthing Jane Norrice was teasing. Who lurks behind the nicknames? Who was the salty shriveled-up old dame called Lot's Wife “whom bitehard they do call”? There are three widows who were copyholders in Stoke Farthing at the time. Ann Penney and Eileen Bryne were both too rich and too big as farmers to qualify, and so maybe Lot's Wife was Margaret Savage, her “bitehard” nickname perhaps having some connection to her real surname? But the others soak back into the soil, and we are left with the wit and wickedness of Jane Norrice herself, quite independent of old Harry, possibly married before—she was also known as Jane Clinton—and with a gift for the sly dig and the startling punch line, entertaining all the like-minded others in Stoke Farthing on a cold Friday night in the tippling house in the village, sending up the proprieties, life leaking out from underneath the carapace of control and suppression within which an English village survived. Was she herself, I wonder, the fine wench at Buttwills, who “without tellinge yow doe already knowe”?

A few years later, just up the road, in Broad Chalke, another late-winter party fell afoul of the law. It, too, played games with the proprieties, teasing the structures of religion and government. A girl called Jane Lawes was examined on oath by one of the justices, who happened to be John Penruddock, of Compton Chamberlayne. She told him that

That was all, a dancing match, which may not mean a contest here, but simply a gathering, a dancing party in the mill, which apart from the church was almost certainly the largest-roofed space in the village. It had been a good party and had gone on all night, until after the candles had burned out, and it was then that others did not have quite such an innocent view of what happened. Joan Deane, another villager, was questioned on oath and she said that

A third girl was interviewed, Mary Randoll. She too had been

One more girl, Aves Gerrett, was to be questioned under oath, but under her name the record is blank. Thomas Wise was a shoemaker and a friend of Edward Targett, the miller, who was there with him that night in the dark upper room of the mill, along with Thomas Deane, a tailor from the village, and Henry Pen, a husbandman. Were they raping the girls? Were they playing? What kind of crying out was it? What exactly does “bishopping” mean? This was 1640, a moment at which religious tensions were running spectacularly high. Broad Chalke had a long and strong tradition of Catholicism, of families named and fined for decade after decade as recusants, but this is scarcely about church politics. It is surely something on the boundary, where teasing, drink, bullying, sex, and the physical dominance of men all intersect. These girls would have had to continue to live in the village, and their silence, their retreat into the candleless dark, is as articulate as any words uttered in court.

Nevertheless, throughout these Wiltshire villages, there are signs of strain and tension; of the underlying presence of cruelty and violence; of an inability to keep the wholeness of the vision whole; of shepherds not as calm philosophers but as anxious, unsocialized, curt, and peremptory outsiders; of these villages as organisms that could not quite keep their mechanisms properly oiled; of early-seventeenth-century England as a place of reluctant commitment; of the men increasingly unwilling to fulfill the unpaid tasks that the government of their manors, the parishes, and the county required of them; of a conflict between ambitious, developing landlords and those whose an
cient communal rights were threatened by the developments proposed. The great positive statements of a John Norden about the beauty of a communal world were made against a background in which that communal world was coming under strain. It was a time of technological improvement, of a modernizing market system, of a burgeoning population and an uncertain food supply, of an increasing number of vagrants and beggars, when there was a sense that the old structures were not holding up, that people were frantically on the move: a survey of Wiltshire inns in 1686 revealed more than twenty-five hundred beds available for travelers in the county. Even the small town of Wilton itself had room for more than fifty strangers to spend the night there. England had begun to shift.

 

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ncreasingly, a national market was eating away at local practices. But even at the highest level, the workings of the market itself were seen, quite explicitly, as the great enemy. The government, at its various creaking levels of administration, attempted detailed forms of control that would make any modern administrator blanch. The Privy Council, the most powerful political committee in the country, entirely appointed by the sovereign, was intimately involved with, for example, what bakers could and could not do. No one, the great lords of the Privy Council insisted, could be a baker or a miller unless they had been an apprentice baker for at least seven years. Only farthing, halfpenny, and penny loaves could be baked, the size of each set down. A baker could sell thirteenpence' worth for twelvepence—the baker's dozen—but only to victuallers and innkeepers. Outsiders who came to sell loaves where there was already a baker had to make their penny loaves three ounces heavier in order to protect the business of the local man. With the extra weight of bread he compelled to include, the incomer's margin would have disappeared and his business would have
been unviable. The fundamental basis of market behavior—a better product or a lower price—was ruled illegitimate. Spice cakes, which carried about them an air of the Middle Ages, popery, and wrongness, could be sold only on Good Friday—the ancestor of the hot cross bun—and at funerals, consistently the most conservative of all human ceremonies.

One method of ensuring that people did not behave as rational economic beings was the public informer, a mainstay of Tudor and early Stuart economic and social policy. Food supply, farming methods and timings, moneylending, the terms on which an apprentice worked: all of these were subject to government control, but the government had no inspectorate. The tax system was radically out of date, inefficient, and corrupt. It could never have paid for an army of inspectors, and so it encouraged people to set up as freelance informers for profit. There were even “informing syndicates,” usually with managers in Westminster, where the courts were, and agents in the regions where people were offending against the rules of the regulated market. About two-thirds of those cases brought to court from Wiltshire were the product of professional informers or their subagents working the Wiltshire markets.

A grisly tour was made of Wiltshire towns and villages in the autumn of 1605 by one Roger Cawdrey of London, yeoman, who ended up with a fat collection of indictments at the Exchequer Court when he got back in November. The crown was usually happy to split the fine with the informer, a 50 percent commission on the job, and Cawdrey had a long list of Wiltshire men and women whom he had discovered offending against the drink regulations: John Jaggard of Highworth had been selling claret and sack and allowing it to be drunk in his dwelling house, where he had no license. Many Pembroke tenants and others were guilty: William Smith for the same offense, John Chamberlyn for the same offense, John Lewis, the same; William Barratt,
the same, John Bull, the same, John Parry, John Holliday, Thomas Roffe, Robert Phipps, another John Chamberlyn, John Smith of Wilton, Christopher Whitacre, William Akklen, Robert Blackborne: every one of them had been selling a few drinks to their neighbors and passing travelers. Roger Cawdrey had presumably dropped in for a glass or two, got them chatting, discovered they had no license, and then dropped the bombshell.

Even straightforward attempts to make a commercial living fell afoul of the rules and the informers. Cawdrey had trapped one Richard Crowder, who had been “engrossing” grain, that is buying up wheat at three pounds an acre, barley at forty shillings an acre, and peas at thirty shillings per acre, in the hope that he might be able to sell it a little later at a profit. That was not allowed, and Crowder was to appear in front of the Exchequer Court unless he paid Cawdrey what was due.

People were summonsed for owning more than twenty acres of land and working as a clothmaker; for buying live oxen and other cattle and selling them in Westminster; for claiming to be a wheelwright without having been an apprentice; for buying wool and reselling it as raw wool instead of making it into yarn for the weavers; for buying and selling butter and cheese; for not going to church; for lending someone fifty pounds at too high a rate of interest (19 percent when the usual rate was more like 8 percent); for selling loaves an ounce light, pints a drop or two beneath the king's standard, or making a corner in firewood. Anyone found “engrossing” foodstuffs would suffer two months' imprisonment at the first offense and forfeit the value of the goods; six months and a fine worth twice the value of the goods at the second offense; at the third, imprisonment at the king's pleasure and forfeiture of everything the would-be merchant owned. Cawdrey and many like him were still at work in 1611, but the government came to dislike the system, and in 1624 it was made illegal. By then, there had been hundreds of cases every year since the mid-sixteenth century.

This strain, and the attempt to control behavior that was bubbling up from the deepest levels of society, was symptomatic of a deep shift in the way the country was working: away from any kind of self-sufficiency and toward a growing reliance on the market. The closed world of the manor was coming apart, but government control and the ideology that directed it were taking time to adapt to changing realities. Increasingly, people were breaking the rules. At the quarter sessions in Salisbury in January 1634, several men—including William Penny, one of the earl's copyholding tenants at Bower Chalke, near Broad Chalke—were “presented” for marketing offenses both in Wiltshire and in Dorset. They were trading in sheep, but the offense was described to the judge as if it were a sin against the Holy Ghost:

The court papers, as so often, contain no record of what the justices decided, but it is clear that the real wickedness for the seventeenth-century Englishman was working the market. Making a corner in wheat, or even failing to sell at a low price and waiting for a higher, was a criminal offense. “Forestalling” (buying by private treaty before grain reached the market) and “regrating” (buying at one price and selling at another), the foundations, in other words, of simple market behavior, were not only frowned upon but thought to be morally offensive. In 1630, all justices were sent a copy of a Book of Orders that described the price at which everything was to be sold. Those who hoarded “pinched the guts of the poore to fill and extend their own courses, taking advantage by the dearth of corne to make it more deare.” The Book of Proverbs had made it clear: “He that hoardeth corne the people will curse him; but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it.” In case after case, informers told the justices of “Private barnes,” secret stores, places in which the spirit of communality had been broken.

Among the commodities flooding on to the market was land itself. Sale of crown lands under Elizabeth had raised £817,359. In the first six years of his reign, James I squeezed another £426,172 out of the royal estate, all of it pouring onto the land market. John Norden in 1607 had never known so much land passing from hand to hand, a symptom, it was thought, of the end of martial behavior among gentlemen. “The gentlemen which were wont to addict themselves to the warres,” Thomas Wilson wrote in 1600, “are nowe for the most part grown to become good husbands [farmers] and knowe well howe to improve their lands to the uttermost as the farmer and countryman, so that they take their fermes into their handes as the leases expire,
and eyther till themselves, or else lett them out to those who will give most.” That final phrase has the air of a death knell about it. “Those who will give most” are not those whose ancestors have tilled the ancestral acres, nor those whose first concern is the well-being of the community, but those for whom the relationship to the land is founded on money and the market.