Quarrel with the King (5 page)

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:

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

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 tempta
tion 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 fa
thers 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.

This system of obligation and dominance, even as early as the twelfth century, had started to evolve. The work duties of the villeins had often been changed into money payments, threepence or sixpence for “all autumn work.” These villages were not designed to be self-sufficient but to produce, in the grain, a crop that could be sold for cash. Cash played a part in a complex picture of partly “customary” labor—the obligations entered into in the far distant past—and wage-based labor. Some men were paid particular rates for particular jobs; others were taken on for a year or half a year; some simply had rent-free holdings in return for work.

The Black Death in 1348 and 1349, which killed between a third and a half of the population of England, changed the balance of this world. Entire villages died. In some, lone men were found still alive among houses full of the dead. The relationship between lord and villein shifted. Too much land and a shortage of labor meant vacant holdings, decayed tenements, and collapsing rental values. The bargain
on which the ancient communities had worked—land in return for duties—was no longer worth making. After 1350, those with labor to offer found themselves in a suppliers' market, and the age of compulsory labor on the lord's land was largely, although not entirely, over. From then onward, people occupied their houses and lands by what became known as “copyhold”—literally a written copy of what they had agreed with the lord, or in fact with his steward, as written down in the manor records. Until the end of the seventeenth century, this was the dominant form of tenure on the Wilton estate.

The copyhold manor sounds such a dry and legalistic term, but is in fact the label for an intriguing social experiment, lasting two hundred years or so, in the villages of rural England. It occupies a middle ground, which we would hardly recognize today, between the tight and oppressive lordly control of the early Middle Ages, which came to an end with the Black Death, and the almost equally oppressive regime of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against which Cobbett and others would rail, where the sheer financial dominance of the landlords had erased any rights of the ordinary people. The sense of mutuality in community relationships, which was the dominant note in the copyhold manor, was never stronger than from about 1450 to about 1650. It is at least an interesting coincidence that the second half of that period was almost precisely the time when the fashion for the pastoral, for the Arcadian vision, was most central to English culture. Was pastoralism—like the modern environmental movement—the expression of a world realizing that something real and valuable, which previously had been taken for granted, was now under threat and disappearing from under its nose? If imagination is the cousin of memory, then are the dream worlds of Renaissance England in fact the reassembled fragments of a remembered existence that people's fathers and grandfathers might have considered normal?

The copyhold system was, of course, both good and bad. The ten
ancy was usually given for three lives, sometimes to a man, his wife, and a son; a man, his sister, and her husband; a man and two sons; or a widow and her son and daughter. It gave security to the farmers and allowed them to invest in improvements that a short lease could not allow. Land and buildings were only rarely let to single individuals; the lease for three lives, if to a man, his wife, his sons, meant that the terms of the lease would extend to whichever of these was the last to die. No one, in other words, would be ejected from their house and farm on the death of a husband or a father. Leases for three lives meant that the maintenance of the social fabric was built into the economic structure of the place.