Quarrel with the King (32 page)

Another question emerges from that: Was the vitality of the chalkland valley communities dependent on a powerful overlord? Or could anything resembling the vivid communal life embodied in “the custom of the manor” have survived in a system that did not depend on hierarchy and dominance? Maybe not. Communities need to obey agreed laws, and those laws need to be imposed.

This, in the end, is surely the moral of the Pembrokes and their Wiltshire valleys. They were defending their own against an encroaching state. As individuals, they were clearly fallible, corrupt, self-seeking, vacillating, irresolute, irascible, and at times less than articulate. But their story is not about individualism; it is about their joint belief in a version of the communal, in which principles both of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded. That is a strange pairing to modern minds. We think that hierarchy is bound to be domineering, and that mutuality cannot have hierarchy as one of its elements. The virtue of the Arcadianism this book has described was that, in an evolved and balanced way, it understood how to accommodate these contradictory principles.

It is important, of course, to recognize that those who were most energetic in promoting this system were those who benefited most from it. Did the poor really like the stasis and exclusion of the copyhold manor? Probably not. The eruption of popular anger and violence in the Civil War might well be seen as the expression of a rage whose origins were in generations of oppression and denial that the old system had imposed.

Nor is it likely that the elite rural idyll was something the Pembrokes' tenants wholly subscribed to. George Herbert's description of his parishioners as a dumb and sullen lot, scarcely dancing their way to the fields or church, must have some truth in it. Arcadianism
didn't always feel Arcadian if you were a member of the caste. Nor, importantly, were the people of these valleys unreconstructed rustics, as Herbert and others were tempted to describe them. The streets of Salisbury, until controlled and cleared by the city authorities, were as chaotic and frightening and as full of importuning and sometimes aggressive beggars as the streets of Calcutta. Much of the valley of the Nadder, to the west of the city, was busy with traffic and distinctly suburban in character by the early part of the seventeenth century.

So, for all the communal ideology, there is a divergence between the wish-fulfillment ideals of the Pembrokes and the reality of ordinary lives. The examples toward the end of this book of all the stresses and strains in the run-up to the Civil War—the seeking for market solutions to chronic poverty, the disobedience of communal laws, and the ever-present sense of violence and abuse—all that may well have occurred earlier, but the evidence has not survived. Documents from the Tudor decades are much thinner on the ground than those from the early seventeenth century, particularly the quarter sessions records, which survive in quantity only from the beginning of the reign of James I. The dream of perfection undoubtedly sheltered in its heart both a systematic limit placed on the individual and his liberties and a natural human effort to escape and resist that limitation.

It was an exploitative world: How, except by exploitation, could the earls have paid for their luxuries from the rents and fines of their copyhold tenants? But it was also a world that in its ideals and practice was alive with a sense of jointness, of a joint enterprise between the different connected parts of the social organism. It lived above all in its gatherings: at the village courts, at the masques and tournaments, at the hay harvest and the wheat harvest, at the plays in the candlelit halls, at the great funerals, and eventually at the desperate hilltop meetings during the Civil War. It is a world that has entirely disappeared, but one whose virtues disappeared with its faults.

Manuscript Sources

SWINDON AND WILTSHIRE RECORD OFFICE

A1/110 Great Rolls of Wiltshire Quarter Sessions (1631E/151 for the libel sung by Jane Norrice of Stoke Verdon; 1642H/158 and 1646T/179 for marks of the illiterate villagers)

G23/1/40 A list of losses by the citizens of Salisbury, December 1644

P2/L/268 William Locke's Inventory, 1660

P5/1626/11 Probate inventory reused to record costs of parliamentarian soldiers quartered in Fisherton Anger, 1645

212B/7181 Final agreement on marriage of Charles, Lord Herbert, and Lady Mary Villiers, 1635

784/1 Parish Register of Odstock, Wiltshire, 1541–1745

1553/25 1563 Survey of “Terrae Pembrochianae”

2057/A1/2 Pembroke estate surveys and Wilton domestic accounts, 1630s

2057/F1/2 George Owen,
A Catalogue of all the Earls of Pembroke
, c.1625

2057/F1/14 Sermon delivered at the funeral of William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, 1630

2057/F2/1
Catalogue of the nobilitie of England
, 1628

2057/F2/36 Garter Statutes drawn up for 3rd Earl of Pembroke

2057/H1/1a Inigo Jones/John Webb drawings

2057/H5/1 Wilton House inventory and valuation 1683

2057/P1/49 Plan to accompany sale particulars of Pembroke estates at Bower Chalke, Broad Chalke, Stoke Farthing, and Bishopstone, 1919

2292/2 A transcript of a letter about the capture of Marlborough during the Civil War, mid-nineteenth century

SHEFFIELD ARCHIVES

EM1351–1362

Elmhirst Muniments: Executorship and Financial Papers of Sir Robert Pye

Articles of Agreement between the La. Dutchess of Buckingham and the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, 1635

HOUSE OF LORDS JOURNAL OFFICE

Main papers 10/14/7/3527 Pembroke dispute with Mowbray, July 1641

10/1/23 Summons to York from King Charles to E of Pembroke, May 1642

Note x.B.B. 108 Pembroke's draft apology, July 1641

10/14/9/3616 Assessment of estates, Feb 1643

10/1/130 Appointment as Ld Lieutenant Monmouth, July 1642

10/1/139 Letter re demands for money, Dec 1642

10/1/142 Servants to Oxford, Jan 1643

10/1/156 Cutting down trees and killing deer in Hyde Park, August 1643

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, KEW

SP 14 State papers domestic, James I

SP 16 State papers domestic, Charles I

SP 18 State papers domestic, interregnum

SP 25 Council of State papers

HATFIELD HOUSE

Accounts, general, 12/19

Bills, 247, 670

BRITISH LIBRARY

Sloane MS 4014 Thomas Moffet (or Muffet) illustrated manuscript volume of spiders and insects

Add MSS 40630 f 234 Wiltshire Committee for Sequestrations

Add MSS 30305 f 76 Letter to Sir Thomas Fairfax re Clubmen

Add MSS 34195 Pembroke's row with Maltravers

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