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‘Some banglyng about the customes’: Popular Memory and the Experience of Defeat in a Sussex Village, 1549–1640

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2014

ANDY WOOD
ANDY WOOD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Durham, 43 North Bailey, Durham, DH1 3EX, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article deploys a body of remarkably detailed witness statements to interrogate the nature of popular memory and social conflict in Petworth, Sussex. These depositions are located in two specific contexts: a struggle between the tenants of Petworth and the ninth earl of Northumberland (1591 – 1608) and the broader pattern of resistance and negotiation in the village between the ‘commotion time’ of 1549 and the calling of the Short Parliament. The essay presents a micro-history of local struggles over land, rights and resources and the findings open up questions within the recent historiography of early modern social relations, undermining the notion that authority was flexibly negotiated between ruler and ruled. Instead, it locates negotiation within social structures that gave a powerful advantage to the gentry and nobility. In this respect, the essay builds upon the return in social history to questions of economic inequality and imbalances of political agency.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

Notes

1. For a fuller analysis, see Paterson, A., Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago, 1994), pp. 79–83Google Scholar.

2. More fully discussed in Wood, A., The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter one.

3. Mark Hailwood has recently suggested that the literature dealing with popular politics and social relations is starting to separate into ‘optimists’, who emphasise agency and the negotiation of authority, and ‘pessimists’, who emphasise structural inequalities and the difficulty of successfully asserting popular agency: see Hailwood, Mark, ‘Alehouses, Popular Politics and Plebeian Agency in Early Modern England’, in Williamson, F., ed., Locating Agency: Space, Power and Popular Politics (Newcastle, 2010), pp. 67–8, 69–71Google Scholar.

4. For recent work on social memory as agency, see Jones, B., ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Autobiography, Community Publishing and Working-Class Neighbourhoods in Post-War England’, Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 355–74Google Scholar; S. Sandall, ‘Custom, Memory and the Operations of Power in Seventeenth-Century Forest of Dean’, in Williamson, Locating Agency, pp. 133–60; Fracchia, J., ‘Hora: Social Conflicts and Collective Memories in Piana Degli Albanesi’, Past and Present, 209 (2010), 181–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haemers, J., ‘Social Memory and Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century Ghent’, Social History, 36, 4 (2011), 443–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. The story of the dispute up to 1609 is well told, although not without a few factual errors and some slips of transcription, in Jerrome, P., Cloakbag and Common Purse: Enclosure and Copyhold in Sixteenth Century Petworth (Petworth, 1979)Google Scholar. For a 1659 summary of the dispute, see West Sussex Record Office, PHA 6368. This essay seeks not to reiterate Jerrome's narrative but by re-reading some of his sources and adding some others draws out the implications of the dispute for the study of custom and popular memory in early modern England.

6. Walter, J., ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’ in Braddick, M. J. and Walter, J., eds, Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 123–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8. For the region, see Brandon, P., The Sussex Landscape (London, 1974)Google Scholar. For the economy of the neighbouring Kentish Weald, which had similar characteristics to the Sussex Weald, see Zell, M., Industry in the Countryside: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. On the clothiers, see West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 149r-51r.

10. Over the past twenty years, the literature on custom has become very rich. The best starting point is Thompson, E. P., Customs in Common (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

11. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fols. 50r, 64r.

12. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fol. 65r.

13. This represents one local corrective to the generalisation that ‘For the poor migrant . . . custom came to be regarded not as cohesive but rather as a restrictive ideology’. Hindle, S., On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), p. 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. For ‘petty rights’, see Shaw-Taylor, L., ‘Labourers, Cows, Common Rights and Parliamentary Enclosure: The Evidence of Contemporary Comment, c.1760–1810’, Past and Present, 171 (2001), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. See, for a later date, Short, B., ‘“The Art and Craft of Chicken Cramming”: Poultry in the Weald of Sussex’, Agricultural History Review, 30 (1982), 17Google Scholar.

16. For the wide variation in copyholders’ right to wood, see Hoyle, R., ‘Redefining Copyhold in Sixteenth-Century England: The Case of Timber Rights’, in Hoppenbrouwers, P. and van Bavel, B., eds, Landholding, Land Tenure and Land Markets in North-West Europe, c.1200–1850 (Brepols, 2004), 250–64Google Scholar. I am currently writing a study of fuel rights in early modern England.

17. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fol. 267r.

18. Leconfield, Lord, Petworth Manor in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1954), pp. 27–36Google Scholar, is a fair summary of all this.

19. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5450, fols. 1r-34r, 135r-6r, 218r.

20. Leconfield, Petworth, p. 55.

21. Leconfield, Petworth, p. 56; West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5450, fols. 63r-75r, 92r-108r, 120r.

22. Batho, G. R., ‘The Finances of a Stuart Nobleman: Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, 1564–1632’, Economic History Review, 2nd. Ser., 9, 3 (1957), 441Google Scholar.

23. Harrison, G. B., ed., Advice to his Son (London, 1930), p. 83Google Scholar; Leconfield, Petworth, p. 50; Batho, ‘Finances’, 440–1.

24. Leconfield, Petworth, pp. 51, 98–9.

25. de Fonblanque, E. D. B., ed., Annals of the House of Percy, 2 volumes (London, 1887), II, 195–6Google Scholar.

26. This may explain Elizabeth's subsequent refusal to visit Petworth House: see Batho, ‘Finances’, 448. For the dim view that Elizabeth took of aristocrats who failed to maintain harmony with their tenants, see Kershaw, S.E., ‘Power and Duty in the Elizabethan Aristocracy: George, Earl of Shrewsbury, the Glossopdale Dispute and the Council’, in Bernard, G. W., ed., The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992), pp. 266–95Google Scholar.

27. See The National Archives, STAC5/N1/16.

28. De Fonblanque, Annals, II, 196–7.

29. Jerrome, Cloakbag, p. 109.

30. Jones, W. J., The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford, 1967), p. 264Google Scholar.

31. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 6366.

32. For the Midlands Rising, see most recently, Hindle, S., ‘Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607’, History Workshop Journal, 66, 2 (2008), 21–61Google Scholar. For Star Chamber cases in which enclosure riots were alleged to have been inspired by the Midlands Rising, see the National Archives, STAC8/18/19; National Archives, STAC8/15/13; National Archives, STAC8/311/3; National Archives, STAC8/245/15.

33. It is widely recognised by historians that, of all early modern English court proceedings, those at Star Chamber were the most exaggerated.

34. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fol. 85r.

35. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5450, fol. 18r.

36. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7421.

37. Hill, C., ‘The Many-Headed Monster’ in his Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England (London, 1974), pp. 181–204Google Scholar. Elite perceptions of popular politics deserve further study.

38. Harrison, Advice, p. 75.

39. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 6371. Women sometimes engaged in riot because of the widespread popular belief that they could not be sued for such actions. For an example, see National Archives, STAC8/184/24.

40. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5558-67. For poaching, see Manning, R., Hunters and Poachers: A Cultural and Social History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 6368.

42. Leconfield, Petworth, p. 63.

43. Leconfield, Petworth, p. 45.

44. Batho, ‘Finances’, 442.

45. The tenants’ demands are neatly summarised in Jerrome, Cloakbag, pp. 51–4.

46. MacCulloch, D., ‘Kett's Rebellion in Context’, Past and Present, 84 (1979), 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 193r-272r.

48. Manorial custom in many Sussex manors favoured the youngest son. See for instance West Sussex Record Office, Cowdray 1306, fols. 29r-30v; West Sussex Record Office, Lavington/2, fols. 31r-2r; West Sussex Record Office, Add MS 2275, fols. 38r-44r.

49. For the growing importance of documentation to the maintenance of customary rights, see Fox, A., ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in Griffiths, P., Fox, A. and Hindle, S., eds, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 89–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, A., ‘Custom and the Social Organization of Writing in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 9 (1999), 257–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fol. 265r. For the role of Earl Thomas in the loss of the customary book, see West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fol. 186r.

51. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 199r-200r.

52. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 201r-2r.

53. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fol. 205r-6r.

54. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fol. 209r.

55. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 193r-272r; West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5450, fols. 169r-183r.

56. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7423. My emphasis.

57. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fol. 88r. My emphasis.

58. For the best discussion of this subject, see Fentress, J. and Wickham, C., Social Memory (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

59. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fol. 15r.

60. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fols. 39r-40r; see also fol. 122r.

61. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 149r-51r.

62. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 204r-5r.

63. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 152r, 165r.

64. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 151r-152r.

65. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fols. 24r-5r.

66. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fols. 23r-41r; West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5450, fols. 156r-183r; Leconfield, Petworth, p. 59.

67. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 5449, fol. 123r.

68. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 147r-8r.

69. West Sussex Record Office, PHA 7362, fols. 266r-7r.