Quarrel with the King (22 page)

It was all a cause for anxiety. Thomas Wilson found “great alteracions almost every year, so mutable are worldly things and worldly mens affaires.” Those who were best sited to take advantage of the boom, particularly in the south of England, and particularly those who were sitting on a copyhold rent that had been fixed when prices were much lower, were outstripping those in the rest of the country who might have thought themselves socially superior.

Everywhere, though, there are signs of this world breaking down, of communality disintegrating and the authorities attempting, often brutally, to shore it up. The roads were awash with men, women, and children who had fallen out of the social network of manor, village, and town. The vagrancy statute of 1598 had ordained that any rogues, vagabonds, or sturdy beggars over the age of seven who were found “begging, vagrant, wandering or misordering themselves” were to be whipped and sent back to the parish of their birth. Overpopulation, recurrent food crises, repeated cyclical collapses in businesses, such as the cloth trade, that were dependent on fickle foreign
markets, the influx of the poor from the margins of the British Isles: all put immense strain on the conventional distinction between the impotent or God's poor (the old, young, or crippled) and the impudent or Devil's poor, who were considered capable but lazy. In a recession, or in a situation of chronic underemployment that lasted from decade to decade, there was little that whipping would do to address the real problem.

The scurf of unwanted humanity blew around the lanes and streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Upright citizens, closely held within the confines of their customary manor or the chartered town, regarded this flotsam with disgust, as masterless and ruleless. They “have not particular wives, neither do they range themselves into Families: but consort together as beasts.” Sometimes a vagrant woman was spared punishment if expecting a child or her body was crippled or ill. But the level and extent of punishment remains disturbing.

In Devizes, in April 1609, five men and a woman charged with petty larceny were sentenced to be publicly whipped in the market place “till their backs do bleed and then discharged.” The next year, Thomas Elye was “burnt in the hand” with the letter
F
to mark him as a felon. A poor woman called Agnes Spender was whipped for deserting her child. Benjamin Salisbury was burned on his left shoulder with the letter
R
to mark him as “an incorrigible Rogue.” In January 1617, William Farret and Elizabeth Longe were whipped “by the Tythingman until their backs doe bleed, and this to be done at the comon metinge place under the Elme in Wylye neere the Church.”

The story of William Vennice, a husbandman or small farmer of Barford St. Martin, just below the beautiful reaches of Grovely Wood, can stand as an example of how life could go wrong in the Arcadian valleys. “Omitting and forgetting my prayers unto the Lord,” he told the justices in the spring of 1627, he

Vennice brought the statement of his neighbors in Barford as witness that he and Joan—or Jane: the names were interchangeable—had even been to Salisbury to get themselves a marriage license from a justice there. But he didn't win his case. Joan had given birth to a child, his, and the court told him he had to give her ninepence a week until the child was ten. Joan refused to marry William Vennice and was sent to a House of Correction for a year. William “shallbe well whipped on his naked back from his girdle upward until his body doe bleed and that the Tythingman of Barford do yt or cause yt to be done without delaye within a fortnight after Easter next.”

If anyone still imagines that cruel and unusual punishments were not a part of English life in the early seventeenth century, they should read the case of a widow called Katherine Peters brought before the Wiltshire justices in 1623. She and a woman called Alice King, whose sister Joan King also lived in Barford St. Martin, were accused of stealing some washing that had been laid out to dry on an orchard hedge on July 16 of that year. Katherine Peters's accusers said she admitted to stealing the holland sheet and the tablecloth, which they later found in her basket. She said she had found them lying under the rabbit warren fence. When the case came to trial, Peters refused to plead and so was sentenced to the punishment known as “de peine forte et dure.” She was

Katherine Peters's infant son was taken from her before her punishment and death, and lived as a charge on the parish until 1641, when he turned seventeen.

Bad behavior—or at least behavior that rubbed and worried at the tender edges of this fragile society—is what summoned the fiercest of reactions. At Broad Chalke in 1610, the leading men of the village decided they had put up with enough of “the Manifold & Continualle Misdemeanors of one Robt Came of our sayed parish.” Obsequiously, and in the language that the world of hierarchy required, they approached the Justices of the Peace. Robert Came had, in seventeenth-century terms, gone half mad. Instead of living quietly with his neighbors, conforming to the custom and requirements of the manor, he was now

They felt “dayly Mollested disquieted & disturbed” and started to lay out some of the details of the case “Omittinge others to avoyde tediousnes of troublinge your Worshippes Which are these that Followe.” Came had accused a woman of being a whore, and a neighbor of wanting to sleep with his wife (who was said to have been complicit in this); made speeches that he hoped would start a riot; accused another neighbor of theft; hit his uncle in the village street with a flail; torn up and then burned a hedge that belonged to old Bartholomew Dewe; and fomented arguments between neighbors. Worst of all he was the tithingman, the village policeman, and

Was this madness in the Broad Chalke tithingman? Or was it simply the human spirit breaking out of the overwhelming supervision, the instituted control system of the English village?

There is another case, just over the down from Broad Chalke in the valley of the Nadder, from a couple of years before, that makes much of this clearer. John Penruddock had heard this case, too. Marie Butler, a young unmarried woman from Barford St. Martin, courageously gave evidence about a terrifying night the previous winter. It was exactly the same time of year as the party in the mill at Broad Chalke,

Cruelty to and exploitation of the poor and the weak appears again and again in the records, often with poignant clarity. There is an undated appeal in the quarter sessions records from a Ramsbury pauper, Thomas Seald:

A note on Thomas Seald's appeal says: “Recommended to the overseers [of the poor—small-time parish officials] & on their neglect the
next Justice to bynd them over.” Royal justice again ensures, or attempts to ensure, that the community looks after its own. But there is no hint that Seald would get any charity until his own parish gave it to him.

John Bevin of Brokenburrough, near Malmesbury, came with an even more pathetic tale:

Perhaps the elegant denizens of Sidney's Arcadia might have dreamt of living in the trees that seem to speak of love. Attempting to do so over a Wiltshire winter in the street at Brokenburrough might have been a rather different proposition.

In 1631, John Dicke, a shepherd from Imber, had been thrown out of his house—the shepherd was not a copyholder and would have had no rights to any property once his employment had come to an end—and his “landlord having use for the house he dwelt in hath taken it into his own hands to make him a stable by wc meanes yr por Supplyant is dismist of a house & could not get any roome nor house in ye parish.” The landlord had evicted the shepherd not because he wanted to live in the building himself, nor for another employee, but to house his horse. Again, the community had stepped in: “the neighbours gave him a place to build a poor cottage but some enemies doth threaten to pull it down to the great spoyle and undoing of your Wor Supplyant.”

Inevitably the pressures of work and of coping with the stresses of the farming year would combine on occasions with sheer neighborly vindictiveness. In 1633, Robert Feltham, a Pembroke tenant at Fovant, wrote to his friend and ally James Hill, who was, at the time, with the Bishop of Salisbury on his regular tour of the diocese to check that the people were behaving as they should. The visitation was, of course, another chance for informers to reveal to the authorities just what their enemies had been doing wrong.

Feltham had got behind with his ploughing, the weather having been bad, and had been caught doing the work on a saint's day by a couple of churchwardens from the village. The wardens were under pressure themselves from a fourth villager, Hercules Candill, who had been thrown out of his pew in the church, the so-called Maiden Seat, and was angry about it.

This letter is a small model of the Wiltshire valleys at work. Church and church obedience are central to the workings of the society. Mutual supervision stimulates a habit of blackmail. The churchwardens would probably have let Feltham's indiscretion with the plough go—he was not the only guilty one—but a malicious desire for revenge in Hercules Candill disrupted the acceptance of failing within the village. Favors were called in, grudges worked out, obligations fulfilled, and pleading was the substance of life. Arcadia? Not exactly. This was undoubtedly an integrated society. These are not the complaints of an atomized, individualized loneliness, but the social stress is palpable. Here is something of the reality that Sidney's self-occluded gaze had drifted over in his daydream of perfection. It was Arcadia, but Arcadia for real, with all the drawbacks that communality must inevitably impose.