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‘Sitting on his Penny Rent’: Conflict and Right of Common in Faversham Blean, 1595–1610*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Stephen Hipkin
Stephen Hipkin
Affiliation:
Department of History, Canterbury Christ Church, University College, Canterbury, UK.
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Extract

In October 1606, London merchant Bevil Lewes proffered a bill of complaint in Star Chamber alleging assault, repeated riot and destruction of property in ‘a great wood and certain lands’ near Faversham in Kent purchased in December 1602 from the local magistrate Sir William Lovelace. His story of tribulations at the hands of ‘inhabitants there, being men of their own disposition contentious and not willing to live answerable to your majesty's most sound and wholesome laws’, recounted one episode in a struggle which began in 1595 and involved at least half a dozen attempts at unilateral enclosure before finally subsiding after May 1609, following Lewes's dispossession and descent into a mire of debt litigation. None of the enclosures survived longer than a few months, one lasted barely a week, and another, by dint of pre-emptive riot, was never completed at all. Defendants confirmed that fences, hedges and ditches were destroyed on four occasions, usually under cover of darkness, and that in 1606 a farmhouse under construction was demolished and crops on the ground were flattened. Bevil Lewes alleged two further rounds of hedge-breaking and property destruction that year, and an earlier riot involving the burning of a timber house-frame. Between 1596 and 1610 allegations of assault, riot, trespass, property destruction and perjury generated litigation in Common Pleas, King's Bench and Chancery, five bills of complaint in Star Chamber, and indictments and convictions at the county sessions and assizes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2000 , pp. 1 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

Notes

1. Public Record Office, London (hereafter PRO) STAC 8/194/4 (Lewes v. Parris et al.), 25 (bill); Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone (hereafter CKS) U275 T33/11/1. The case is noted very briefly in Clark, P., ‘Popular Protest and Disturbance in Kent, 1558–1640’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 29 (1976), 369.Google Scholar

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4. CKS U275 T33/II/I,3,/12/3, 10, 11, 13, 14; U1107 T102; QM/SB 827/3; Lambeth Palace Library, London (hereafter LPL) ED 2006, m. 3; PRO E 326/12266; E 318/33/1862 m. 2.

5. PRO C 66/858, mm. 23–4; PROB 11/50/72, /59/121–2, /69/223–4; STAC 5/L11/34 (Lovelace and Dudley v. Rolfe), /L23/23 (Lovelace and Dudley v. Rolfe), /L42/11 (Lovelace and Dudley v. Rolfe), /L47/14 (Lovelace and Dudley v. Rolfeet al.), /S44/31 (Sondes v. Sutton et al.), 8/194/4, 25 (bill); C2/Eliz.I/C24/21 (Corpus Christi College v. Sondes),/Jas.I/L9/53 (Lassels v. Sondes). Hasted's account of the history of the ‘Ville of Dunkirk' is not entirely accurate, Hasted, E., The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, Vol.IX (East Ardsley, 1972 edn.), pp. 2–7.Google Scholar

6. Everitt, A. E., Continuity and Colonization: The Evolution of Kentish Settlement (Leicester, 1986), pp. 45–7Google Scholar; Hasted, , History of the County of Kent, Vol. VII, pp. 2–3Google Scholar; Chalklin, C. W., Seventeenth-Century Kent: A Social and Economic History (Rochester, 1978), p. 9; LPLTD 25.Google Scholar

7. The population size of Boughton and Hernhill had not altered much by the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1801 it stood at 1,243 (884 in Boughton and 359 in Hernhill), Reay, B., The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990), p. 11.Google Scholar

8. Dobson, M. J., Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 135–9, ch. 6 esp. pp. 327–36, 344–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasted, , History of the County of Kent, Vol. VII, pp. 2, 19Google Scholar; Reay, B., Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 75–8, 91.Google Scholar Dobson's analysis of 24 whole-marsh parishes in south-eastern England discloses precisely the same trend and chronology. For similar developments in the Hoo peninsula see MacDougall, P., ‘Malaria: Its Influence on a North Kent Community’, Archaeologia Cantiana 95 (1979), 257–8.Google Scholar

9. Dobson, , Contours of Death, pp. 383–98, 459–75.Google Scholar

10. The plight of the ‘harvest-sensitive’ is explored in Walter, J., ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England’, in Walter, J. and Schofield, R. (eds.), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 75–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasted, , History of the County of Kent, Vol IX, p. 3; CKS QM/SB 85, 325, 1346; PRO SP 16/175/81; PC 2/40/956. The 1596 conspiracy is discussed in Clark, ‘Popular Protest’, 375–6. Eighty-four burials were recorded at Boughton-under-Blean and Hernhill between August 1630 and April 1631.Google Scholar

11. Canterbury Cathedral Archives (hereafter CCA) U3/221/1/1. New surnames appear in the baptism register of Boughton-under-Blean at the rate of 3.6 per annum in the 1580s, 4.1 per annum in the 1590s, 3.6 per annum in the 1600s, 2.9 per annum in the 1610s and 3.6 per annum during the early 1620s.

12. LPL TC 29; Comm. xiia/22, ff. 357–9. Figures exclude freeholdings held by institutions.

13. Chalklin, , Seventeenth-Century Kent, pp. 58–9Google Scholar; Baker, A. R. H., ‘Field Systems of Southeast England’, in Baker, A. R. H. and Butlin, R. H. (eds.), Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 391–2, 401–2, 408–9Google Scholar; Hipkin, S. A., ‘The Structure of Land Occupation in the Level of Romney Marsh during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Eddison, J., Gardiner, M. and Long, A. (eds.), Romney Marsh: Environmental Change and Human Occupation in a Coastal Lowland (Oxford, 1998), pp. 155–60Google Scholar; Zell, M., Industry in the Countryside: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 10–11; LPL ED 1808–1832; TC 29, ff. 1r, 18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Chalklin, , Seventeenth-Century Kent, pp. 58–9; LPL TC 29; ED 281, 1168–1171, 1173–1175, 1796–1798, 1801, 1804, 1806, 1808, 1809–1834. Two hundred and forty wills survive for the parishes of Boughton-under-Blean and Hernhill for the period 1570 to 1640, CKS PRC 32/31–52; U88 M1; U390 M36/1–2. Exceptionally good evidence currently under investigation shows that leaseholders and their sub-tenants overwhelmingly occupied the 23,500 acres comprising the level of Romney Marsh during the mid-seventeenth century.Google Scholar

15. Of the 806 acres approximately 600 acres lay in Boughton parish, 145 acres in Hernhill and 60 acres in Graveney parish. LPL TD 25; Mss. 737 (John Parker's Memoranda Book), ff. 15v, 16–18; PRO C66/1102, m.8; CCA DCc/Reg/v.3/U5/337, f. 80, /U6/49. I am grateful to Sheila Hingley, librarian of Canterbury Cathedral Archives, for drawing Parker's Memoranda Book to my attention.

16. LPL Mss. 737, ff. 19–24, 113v-114. Entry fines, generally modest, are occasionally but not invariably noted.

17. PRO PROB 11/84/15; LPL Mss. 737, ff. 15, 19–24, 29r, 113v-114; Commxiia/22, ff. 354–6.

18. General observations are based on analysis of a sample of 120 probate inventories for the parishes of Boughton-under-Blean, Hernhill, Selling and Chilham for the period 1580–1620, on the indications in the 1570 survey of Boughton manor and the 1608 survey of Faversham manor. CKS PRC 10, 11, 21, 27, 28; LPL TC 29; CKS U390 M36/1–2.

19. Between Michaelmas and the end of December 1596 1,061 quarters of wheat were shipped to London from Faversham, more than from any other port in Kent or Essex. 800 quarters of malt and 56 quarters of oats were also shipped from Faversham to the capital, PRO SP 12/261/30. For the growing importance of the region in supplying the capital see Fisher, F. J., ‘The Development of the London food market 1540–1640’, reprinted in Carus-Wilson, E. M. (ed.), Essays in Economic History, Vol. One (London, 1963), pp. 135–151.Google Scholar

20. CCA DCb X.11.9, ff. 36r-43v, 67v-68v.

21. CCA U3/221/5/1, ff. 148–152; LPL TD 25; TC 29, f. 3r; PRO SP 12/261/30. CKS PRC 32/37/109, 140–1; 21/12/116, 331; U36 T474 (part 3); U301 LI; Zell, M., ‘A Wood-Pasture Agrarian Regime: The Kentish Weald in the Sixteenth Century’, Southern History 1 (1985), 78; Idem, Industry in the Countryside, pp. 92–4Google Scholar; Hipkin, , ‘Structure of Land Occupation’ pp. 156–7; Cf.Google ScholarBaker, , ‘Field systems’, pp. 409–11.Google Scholar

22. CCA U3/221/1/1, /5/1, /235/1/1; LPL ED 1808–1832; PRO STAC 5/S44/31, 2 (answer of John Sutton); Wrightson, K., ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Griffiths, P., Fox, A. and Hindle, S. (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 19.Google Scholar

23. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 24 (joint answer of ten defendants), 23 (answer of Richard Essex); CKS QM/SB 748.

24. The term ‘den’, originally denoting woodland swine-pasture, often appears, as in Denstroude and Bosenden, as an element in place-names within Blean forest. ‘Leaze’ meant ‘pasture’. Everitt, , Continuity and Colonization, pp. 122–3Google Scholar; Witney, K. P., The Jutish Forest (London, 1976), pp. 49, 98; CCA Mss. 1283/5, ff. 1v-47v; Lit. Mss. B5, ff. 33v. I owe these references to Mr K. P. Witney. LPL ED 2006, f. 3; PRO C66/858, m.24; E 318/33/1862, m.2; STAC 8/194/4, 24 (joint answer often defendants), 25 (bill); CKS U275 T33/11/1, /12/10.Google Scholar

25. CKS U390T36, 37/2,42/2;QM/SI 1601/2/5,1609/7/1–2; QM/SB 366, 827/3; PRC 28/7/256. At market prices during the 1590s a six-acre pasture holding in Boughton hundred would have cost in the order of £1. 5s. per annum to rent. Here indeed was the ‘yeoman of Kent, sitting on his penny rent’, A Kentish Garland I (1881), p. 139Google Scholar, quoted in Campbell, M., The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (London, 1983), p. 77.Google Scholar

26. CKS U275 T33/12/19; QM/SB 85, ff. 1, 3–4; LPL Mss. 737, ff. 15, 20r, 113r; PRO STAC 5/S44/31, 2.

27. PRO STAC 5/S80/40 (Sondes v. Hawkins et al.); C 2/Jas.I/L9/53, /C1/11 (Crayford et al. v. Lewes and Cockayne); CKS Fa/Ac 2; U275 T33/11/3. The agents administering Faversham Blean and lands in Waltham on behalf of Bevil Lewes's principal creditor after his dispossession in May 1609 reckoned to have ‘received clear profits’ of £2,454. 6s. 3d. by March 1622, suggesting roughly £200 per annum. Sondes, therefore, needed to intensify the exploitation of the land in order to make any significant profit from the estate.

28. PRO STAC 5/S80/40; CCA U3/221/5/1; LPL ED 1815–1827; CKS PRC 32/44/295. Comments on the ages of the organisers of the common purse are based mainly on examination of parish register and church court deposition evidence.

29. CKS U301 L1; U55 E71; U36 T474 (Part 3); PRC 32/36/82, /46/237, /52/318; LPL ED 1821;CCADCbX.11.6, f. 173v, X.11.13, f. 73v. Hawkins, Napleton and Siriac Jacob were all among the list of just eleven men assessed in Boughton hundred for the forced loan in 1596, Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford (hereafter SRO) D593/S/4/15/4. The Napleton family also became prominent in Faversham during the 1610s. Clark, P., ‘The Migrant in Kentish Towns 1580–1640’, in Clark, P. and Slack, P. (eds.), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700 (London, 1972), pp. 151, 162 n.2.Google Scholar

30. In addition there is much evidence of inter-vivos land and stock transfers in the wills of these men. CKS PRC 21/12/331, 28/6/11, /52, /7/606, 32/37/140, /39/280, /41/8, /237, /51/126; QM/SB 325; LPL ED 1822, 1823; TC 29, f. 6v; Mss. 737, ff. 15r, 19r, 20r, 113v; CCA U3/221/5/1.

31. CCA DCb X.11.9, f. 37v; U3/221/5/1, f. 6v; CKS PRC 28/7/277, /502, 32/43/156, /44/293; SRO D593/S/4/6/18; PRO ASSI 35/55/4; LPL TC 29, f. 18r. Hamon Watson was a churchwarden at Boughton in 1587 and 1588.

32. Hartley, T. E., ‘The Sheriffs of the County of Kent, C. 1580–C.1625’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis University of London, 1970), p. 375Google Scholar; McGurk, J. N., ‘The Lieutenancy in Kent c.1580–1620’ (unpublished M.Phil, thesis, University of London, 1971), p. 196Google Scholar; SRO D593/S/4/19/24, /6/18, /19/34, /38/4, /39/10; Clark, P., English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent 1500–1640 (Hassocks, 1977), p. 260Google Scholar; Knafla, L. A. (ed.), Kent at Law 1602. The County Jurisdiction: Assizes and Sessions of the Peace (London, 1994), pp. xxiv–xxv. See Table 4. Religious antipathy may have to some extent influenced Sondes's perception of those in the vanguard of resistance to his plans for Faversham Blean, but apart from Thomas Hawkins and Edward Songer, no other known recusants were named by Sondes, though Florence Watson – Hamon's wife -remained loyal to her father's religion. Opposition to the enclosure of Faversham Blean united men of catholic and protestant persuasion. CKS PRC 32/50/200.Google Scholar

33. PRO STAC 5/S80/40; STAC 8/194/4, 3v (examinations book), 24 (joint answer of ten defendants), 25 (bill). Contrary to Lewes's later assertions the holders of woodleazes were adamant that ‘upon the right of the commons there was never any verdict or judgment against any of the said commoners or any others claiming by, from or under them’.

34. PRO C 2/Eliz.I/C24/21. During these years John Stampe, the attorney of Corpus Christi‘was constantly badgering the high sheriff of Kent to carry out writs’ against Sondes. Brooks, C. W., Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), p. 189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. PRO STAC 8/263/20 (Sondes v. Watson); /263/21 (Sondes v. Honifold).

36. PRO STAC 5/S44/31 (bill); CKS QM/Siq, m. 20; PRC 32/44/96–99. Sadly another Star Chamber case brought by Sondes against John Sutton (as principal defendant) – STAC 5/S19/31 – is now ‘missing’ at the PRO.

37. CKS PRC 17/55/317; 21/16/75; 28/5/259, /306; 32/41/66, /168, /46/159.

38. CKS PRC 28/7/104–5; 32/40/102v, /42/295.

39. John and William Clare were co-heirs of an estate valued at £28 in 1593. CKS PRC 32/37/102; QM/SB 85, f. 3.

40. CKS QM/SB 85, ff. 2–3.

41. PRO STAC 5/544/31,2.

42. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 25 (bill). The purchase price was probably at least £4,000, given that Sondes had leased Faversham Blean for £200 per annum less than three years earlier, and assuming the normal calculation of twenty years' annual rent. In 1622 Lewes claimed that his lands in Waltham and Faversham Blean were worth more than £7,000, which perhaps was not much exaggeration since in October 1635 Thomas Springett paid £3,600 for 1,072 acres of Faversham Blean lying to the north of the highway leading from Canterbury to London. PRO C 2/Jas.I/C1/11; CKS U275 T33/12/11.13, 14.

43. CKS U275 T33/11/1, T53/11/2; Q/SR4, m.2; PRO C 2/Jas.I/C1/11.

44. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 25 (bill); Sharp, B., ‘Common Rights, Charities and the Disorderly Poor’, in Eley, G. and Hunt, W. (eds.), Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill (London, 1988), p. 118.Google Scholar

45. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 24 (joint answer of ten defendants), 25 (bill).

46. Mason needed to be enterprising; he had three sons and eight daughters to support. CKS PRC 17/60/372.

47. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 25 (bill). Lewes concluded by claiming that ‘the like dangerous actions in burning a frame of a house upon the same grounds’ had happened before, ‘first when Sir Michael Sondes was owner (sic) of the said woods and sithence again when your majesty's said subject Bevil Lewes had purchased the same’.

48. CKS S/Rm/FS3, f. 27; U390 M36/2, mm. 14, 17; PRC 32/37/109; PRO STAC 8/194/4, 24 (joint answer of ten defendants), 25 (bill); Knafla, (ed.), Kent at Law, p. 157.Google Scholar Of the fourteen answering, eight came from Boughton-under-Blean, three from Selling, one from Chilham, Thomas Napleton was based in Hernhill and Peter Parris lived in Wrotham. Ten appended marks to their examinations, Peter Parris, Thomas Napleton and Christopher King provided signatures

49. Edward Broadstreet told workmen ‘that he did take the place where the plaintiff intended to build the same house to be the king's and that the plaintiff ought not to build there’, and William Whittall, a Chilham hempdresser, told Mason that he hoped ‘by the Grace of God it will be built with the bottom upwards’. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 2–19 (examinations book), 24 (joint answer of ten defendants).

50. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 5–7, 14–17 (examinations book).

51. CKS QM/SB 728, 744; QM/SI 1607/7/13.

52. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 23 (answer of Richard Essex). Essex moved from Harbledown to Boughton-under-Blean in 1604.

53. CKS QM/SB 748; QM/SI 1607/7/16; PRO STAC 8/194/4, 24 (joint answer of ten defendants).

54. CKS QM/SI 1609/7/1–5; QM/SB 827/1–3; PRO ASSI 35/51/6, m.44.

55. PRO C2/Jas.I/C1/11; C 3/317/30; C 24 (Cockayne v Lewes), Hil. 8 Jac., Pas. 9 Jac., Trin. 14 Jac.; C 78/247/7 (Lowe et al. v. Mynne), /410/5; PROB 11/153/193.

56. CKS U275 T33/12/3, 10, 11, 13, 14; U521 E2, ff. 146–7, 155; U1107 T102. In 1635 a ‘Tilekiln and other buildings and edifices thereunto belonging’ were also noted in Faversham Blean.

57. SRO D593/P/5/3/4/2/1–4, /S/4/11/10. Knafla, , Kent at Law, p. xxvGoogle Scholar; Hartley, , ‘Sheriffs of Kent’, p. 375; PRO C 2/Eliz.1/C24/21. Cf.Google ScholarFox, A., ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in Griffiths, , Fox, and Hindle, (eds.), The Experience of Authority, pp. 89–116.Google Scholar

58. Hindle, , ‘Persuasion and Protest’, 72–3, 75.Google Scholar

59. Thompson, , Customs in Common, p. 130Google Scholar; Manning, , Village Revolts, pp. 85–6.Google ScholarBeresford, M., ‘Habitation versus Improvement: The Debate on Enclosure by Agreement’, in Fisher, F.J. (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 40–69.Google Scholar

60. Clark, , ‘The Migrant in Kentish Towns’, p. 162 n.2; PRO STAC 8/194/4, 24 (joint answer of ten defendants).Google Scholar

61. Lambarde, W., Perambulation of Kent (1826), p. 9Google Scholar, quoted in Campbell, , English Yeoman, pp. 146–147Google Scholar; Baker, , ‘Field systems’, pp. 386–9, 401, 413.Google Scholar

62. CCA DCb, X.9.11, f. 122v.

63. Knafla, (ed.), Kent at Law 1602, pp. vii–xl; PRO STAC 8/194/4, 25 (bill).Google Scholar

64. I discuss these disorders in an article currently in preparation.

65. CKS QM/SB 85, ff. 1–4.

66. CKS Q/SR2, mm. 6, 8, /SR4, m. 5; Knafla, , Kent at Law, p. xxv. Sondes died in 1617. Cf.Google ScholarWrightson, K., ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Early Modern England’, in Brewer, J. and Styles, J. (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1983), pp. 21–46.Google Scholar

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68. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 6 (examinations book), 25 (bill); SRO D593/P/5/4/2/2.

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73. Brooks, , Pettyfoggers and Vipers, pp. 107–11Google Scholar; Barnes, , ‘Star Chamber Litigants’, p. 18.Google Scholar

74. PRO STAC 8/259/29 (Sondes v. Denne); /263/22 (Sondes v. Denne et al.).

75. Barnes, , ‘Star Chamber Litigants’, pp. 18–20Google Scholar; Barnes, , ‘Due Process’, 228, 231–2, 248, 340–2Google Scholar; Guy, J. A., The Cardinal's Court: The Impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Hassocks, 1977), pp. 80–2Google Scholar; Jones, W. J., The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford, 1967), pp. 12, 178, 190–9, 314–17Google Scholar; Horwitz, H., Chancery Equity Records and Proceedings 1600–1800 (London, 1995), pp. 9, 12–15Google Scholar; Ingram, M. J. ‘Communities and Courts: Law and Disorder in Early-Seventeenth-Century Wiltshire’, in Cockburn, J. S. (ed.), Crime in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1977), pp. 110, 118–22Google Scholar; Baker, J. H. (ed.), The Reports of Sir John Spelman, Volume 2 (Selden Society, London, 1978), p. 84.Google Scholar

76. As we have seen, some of the rioters of 22nd May 1602 were prosecuted at county sessions.

77. PRO STAC 8/194/4, 2–19 (examinations book), 23 (answer of Richard Essex), 24 (joint answer of ten defendants); Guy, J. A., The Court of Star Chamber and its Records to the Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1985), pp. 21, 50Google Scholar; Guy, , Cardinal's Court, pp. 115–17Google Scholar; Barnes, , ‘Star Chamber Litigants’, pp. 21, 23Google Scholar; Barnes, , ‘Due Process’, 337–44. There is no evidence of commission of dedimus potestatem in either case, and the sworn examinations of defendants were recorded in the paper books used when proofs were taken in London.Google Scholar

78. CKS Q/SR 3, mm. 8, 14. For the involvement of women in riot see Clark, , ‘Popular Protest’, 376–7Google Scholar; Houlebrooke, R., ‘Women's Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War’, Continuity and Change, 1 (1986), 171–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manning, , Village Revolts, pp. 96–8Google Scholar; Hindle, , ‘Persuasion and Protest’, 57.Google Scholar

79. Read, C. (ed.), William Lambarde and Local Government: His “Ephemeris” and Twenty-Nine Charges to Juries and Commissions (New York, 1962), p. 141.Google Scholar

80. Baker, J. H., An Introduction to English Legal History (London, 1990), pp. 319–20, 341–2Google Scholar; Horwitz, , Chancery Records, p. 15Google Scholar, n.25; Guy, , Court of Star Chamber, p. 27.Google Scholar

81. Tawney, R. H., The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912), pp. 237–53Google Scholar; Thompson, , Customs in Common, p. 110Google Scholar; Wrightson, , ‘Politics of the Parish’, pp. 22–25.Google Scholar

82. As has been pointed out, any identification of capitalist farming as, necessarily, large-scale farming precludes small holders from participating in the development of rural capitalism, except by their disappearance. Croot, P. and Parker, D., ‘Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared’, reprinted in Aston, T. H. and Philpin, C. H. E. (eds.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 79–81Google Scholar; Thompson, , Customs in Common, p. 135.Google Scholar

83. ibid., (emphasis added).

84. There is a sense in which the focus of the Sharp-Lindley-Holmes debate on ‘leadership’ of resistance to enclosure in forest and fenland regions highlights the importance of this point in the process of missing it. Certainly Roger Manning's tabular analysis of the leadership of anti-enclosure riots (Village Revolts, pp. 322, 324, 326) is an exercise fraught with dangers. Steve Hindle's stress on the ‘unexplored intimacies of “proximate structuration” (‘Persuasion and Protest’, 75–7) offers a stimulating alternative approach, but one which in seeking to identify ‘shifting communities of common interest’ (my emphasis) risks underestimating the ideological tensions conditioning what he correctly identifies as ‘the very mutability of social configurations and interests’.

85. Thompson, , Customs in Common p. 133Google Scholar; Macpherson, C. B., ‘Capitalism and the changing concept of property’, in Kamenka, E. and Neale, R. S. (eds.), Feudalism, Capitalism mid Beyond (London, 1975), pp. 108–111Google Scholar; Baker, , ‘Field Systems’, pp. 386–9, 397, 401–5, 408–19, esp. 413, 415.Google Scholar