In the 1570s, in conversation with their parish minister, William Harrison, the old men of the Essex village of Radwinter looked back over their lives. One of the things they remembered was a substantial increase in prosperity and material wealth. Evidence of better living standards, they told Harrison, was to be found in improved housing conditions, enhanced domestic heating, superior household furnishings and the wider availability of consumer durables. These increased living standards had come at a cost. The old men felt that over their lifetimes, social relations had been transformed. Communal values had decayed: there was less hospitality and charity, and lordship had become more oppressive.Footnote ¹ The elders of Radwinter were not alone in their assessment of changing times. The sense that the Tudor century witnessed both improved living standards and increased social conflict was manifest elsewhere, helping to shape early modern men and women's sense of themselves and their communities as separate from a receding medieval past. In this respect, memory became a bearer of a historically distinct sense of self, place and community.Footnote ²

The memories recorded by William Harrison represent a remarkable source, presenting the historian with almost direct access to popular memories of structural and cultural change at a key moment in English economic and social history. Depositions presented to central courts adjudicating in customary disputes also drew upon the memories of such older folk. These sources are more heavily mediated than Harrison's account of the memories of the Radwinter elders, not least because witnesses were presenting their memories concerning issues that were often delicate and contentious. But three bundles of remarkable depositions survive from the Sussex village of Petworth in which ordinary people speak with often startling clarity about their memories of a world they had lost. In the opinion of the witnesses, a world of plebeian prosperity, social harmony and good lordship had been swept away by the oppressive behaviour of their lords, the Percy family. They explained these views to a commission appointed to hear their evidence on the behalf of the Court of Chancery in 1592, in the course of a protracted struggle between Henry Percy, the ninth earl of Northumberland, and his copyholders.

The story of the Petworth inhabitants’ struggles with the Percys ends with their defeat. Yet from the evidence of that dispute, it is possible to retrieve something of the ways in which social memory could be deployed as a resource by poorer and middling people, allowing them to find a political voice in which they could make claims to rights and resources. That the tenants were ultimately defeated has some importance for the recent historiography of early modern popular politics, suggesting that celebratory accounts of plebeian agency need to be set against more pessimistic stories.Footnote ³ The depositions also enable us to gain access to the ways that social memory could act as an enabling force for ordinary people, underwriting their actions and legitimating their resistance.Footnote ⁴ The story of the Petworth struggle therefore makes it possible to tell a story of a village conflict featuring both popular defeat and popular agency. It thereby seeks to capture something of the structural imbalances within which this agency was asserted. In order to comprehend these issues, we must briefly recapitulate Petworth's history of estate policy and social conflict.

Over the years between the 1549 rebellions and the summoning of the Short Parliament, the tenants and cottagers of Petworth came into conflict with their lords over land, rights, custom and resources.Footnote ⁵ Their protests took a variety of forms, such as petitioning, litigation, grumbling and riot which have been seen as characteristic of early modern popular politics.Footnote ⁶ These protests spanned several generations and involved repeated accusations of riot. Moreover, in one case (1549) the riots formed part of a much wider popular rebellion, while in another instance (1607) it was alleged that the rioters had been inspired by the rebellion that took place that year in the Midlands; a third (1640) occurred at the start of a decade that saw not only civil war and political revolution, but also widespread rural protest in which the enclosure of common land was a key issue.Footnote ⁷

When the Percys took Petworth House as their main residence in 1557, the adjacent village was a characteristic Wealden community, with an economy based upon mixed farming, textile production and the iron industry.Footnote ⁸ Like many Tudor villages, there were few freeholders. Almost all the tenants were copyholders, with tenure set by the custom of the manor. The enclosed fields were surrounded by commons and woodland. Although some copyholders were wealthy clothiers, most worked small farms, combining farming with weaving.Footnote ⁹ The manorial customs which regulated common rights and defined copyhold tenure therefore underwrote both individual household economies and the small polity of the village. Custom grew from the daily lived experience coupled with habits, beliefs and knowledge that were, or at least seemed to be, passed down the generations. Rather than making some appeal to abstract rights, claimants to custom justified their claims with reference to their immersion in their local world. Ingrained in a precise sense of place, and written into a specific landscape, their sense of the local past grew from shared experience, learnt patterns of behaviour and collective wisdom.Footnote ¹⁰

In 1592, giving evidence to the Court of Chancery, the shearman Thomas Edsawe described a village whose internal workings were, by the harsh standards of the 1590s, fairly relaxed. Distinguishing the inhabitants of ancient cottages from those of newly-established dwellings, he noted their collective poverty, observing that ‘the cottagers . . . kept little or noe Cattell horses or beastes’, but adding that if ‘they were of abyllytye’ and did own a few beasts, then the copyholders allowed them pasture on the common. This was a sign, as Edsawe saw it, that even the inhabitants of the newly established cottages ‘had the greater favour of the Ten[a]ntts’. Edsawe observed that this was not a matter of customary right, but only of the favour of the tenants. In contrast, ancient cottages came with pasture rights.Footnote ¹¹ The attitude of the tenants to the new cottagers was, as he saw it, one of ‘gentleness’:

In past times, Edsawe said, the lord had been similarly kind to the poor. Upon the death of a tenant, the lord had a right to a heriot, that is, to one of the deceased's animals or, failing that, to some other valuable item. But as Edsawe remembered, if the estate of a deceased ‘poore man’ was so small that he had not owned any animals, then the lord declined the opportunity to claim anything else. Here was the nub of the copyholders’ case. Charity and reciprocity still underwrote social relations within the village. But the Percys had fractured the values of good lordship: where once the lord had shown decency to ‘poore men’, now he trod them down. In this analysis, in the Petworth of the 1590s, custom drew poorer and middling villagers together, while at the same time forming a contested terrain with their lord.Footnote ¹³

From the perspective afforded by hindsight, many customary entitlements might seem trivial: historians sometimes call them mere ‘petty rights’.Footnote ¹⁴ This is to miss both the diversity of the customary economy and the unity of its conceptual underpinnings. Rights to feed livestock like sketchier entitlements such as nutting, gathering berries or collecting firewood were a fundamental part of a system of rights. The assertion of custom was essential to the material welfare of both the poor cottager and the slightly wealthier smallholder. Common right allowed copyholders to maintain mixed farms, combining small-scale arable production with some geese, hens, pigs, donkeys, goats and cattle.Footnote ¹⁵ In Petworth, all the tenants’ livestock save geese and goats could be fed upon the commons. Possession of a cow meant that the poorest household enjoyed milk, cheese and butter. Most families kept pigs, which in the autumn were fattened on acorns in the woodland through the customary right called pannage. Although they were not entitled to cut down living trees, copyholders could take fallen wood for fuel and repairs and also had rights to underwood (fern, twigs and bracken), which could be converted into charcoal and sold to iron smelters.Footnote ¹⁶ Many of these entitlements were small in themselves, but they built into a composite whole, a system of resource allocation which allowed even the poor to maintain independent households.

In mid sixteenth-century Petworth, life had been regulated by the court leet. In 1592, the seventy-two year old Richard Lindars explained that in those days two large courts were held each year at which ‘ther wer[e] fouer substaunciall wise men of the tenants chosen by the homage or the Steward and those were offycers’.Footnote ¹⁷ In theory, the leet was answerable to the lord, but in reality it was more or less autonomous. The leet administered manorial custom, fining tenants who overgrazed or encroached upon the common. Sometimes, it gave consent, subject to the authority of the lord, for a pauper to build a cottage on the common.Footnote ¹⁸ Most importantly, the leet had oversight of the maintenance of manorial custom. As lex loci, customary law defined relations of production and exploitation. It grew from the collectively shared traditions of a locality: the ‘common report of the neighbours’ which lay ‘beyond the memory of man’. Under customary law, the lord had his rights too: on his demesne (land held by the lord for his own use) the Petworth copyholders provided an unpaid labour force in the harvest season. The lord could fell trees and dig for iron ore anywhere he wished save for on the very limited reserve of freehold land. For an entrepreneurially-minded seigneur who was sufficiently insensitive to local opinion, the Petworth estate therefore presented a variety of potential sources of revenue. Herein lay the roots of the bitter conflict in the manor.

Following the execution of Thomas Percy in 1537, the manor of Petworth passed to the Crown. In the late 1530s, Henry VIII enclosed 120 acres around Arbor Hill, upon which he built a banqueting house.Footnote ¹⁹ The enclosing fences and possibly the house itself, which was no longer standing by the 1590s, were destroyed during the large scale insurrections in 1549. When the Percys were reinstated as earls of Northumberland in 1557, they were required to dwell far away from their northern power base. The seventh earl, Thomas Percy, removed himself to Petworth. At that time, the parkland around the House comprised a rabbit warren and the 105 acres of the Little Park.Footnote ²⁰ Immediately, Earl Thomas commissioned a survey of the manor and started to look for ways to raise revenue and to expand his park. The following year, the court leet consented to the emparkment of Arbor Hill. Around this time, the tenants’ only written account of their customs, the customary book, was lost as will be discussed later. A second survey followed in 1575, after which 200 acres of woodland called Outwood was also taken into the Park. The tenants had hitherto enjoyed common rights in Outwood and in return for its enclosure they extracted from Earl Thomas the rights of pannage in two other woods called Outlanes and Middlecarr.Footnote ²¹ Custom codified all this. The property neither of the tenant nor the lord, custom emerged from compromise as much as conflict, establishing ground rules which seemed reasonable to all.

In the last decades of the sixteenth century, as inflation bit into their rent rolls, lords of manors across England began to look at ways in which they could increase revenue from their estates. The Percys were at the forefront of these developments. Like Earl Thomas, so his grandson Earl Henry employed surveyors and cartographers to map his lands, enabling him to gain a clearer view of how more money could be squeezed from the manor.Footnote ²² Recognising that copyholders’ rents were fixed by custom, the ninth earl continued the policy begun by his grandfather of converting alienated copyholds into leasehold, the rents of which could be increased at his whim.Footnote ²³ Although it would reap long term benefits, the steady conversion of copyhold to leasehold could not generate an immediate source of revenue. Earl Henry therefore turned to more immediate means of raising money: leasing rights to extract and smelt iron; enforcing his monopoly on milling; increasing tolls upon land transactions by raising entry fines to copyhold land and racking fines for leasing such land; enclosing commons; exploiting woodland; and leasing demesne land at increased rents. By the 1590s, the trees of Outlanes and Middlecarr had been cut down, destroying the ecological basis for the pannage rights that had been granted by Earl Thomas. The ninth earl made an immediate profit from felling the timber of Petworth, its sale bringing him £1,115. The rapid expansion of iron working proved even more damaging to the local environment.Footnote ²⁴

While ultimately successful, the earl's estate policies, epitomising what historians have labelled fiscal seigneurialism, entailed a protracted conflict with the copyholders and cottagers. On 29^th July 1592, the ninth earl wrote to the Lord Keeper, Sir John Pickering, complaining that the tenants and cottagers had ‘renewed theire secrett and riotious pulling downe in the night season . . . my Pales and Inclosures, as well as those and in Questeon before you in the Chainciry . . . as of my owne Freehold and Demesnes, no whit Touched by the said Controversie’.Footnote ²⁵ The Petworth inhabitants combined riot with petition and litigation. In August 1591, while Queen Elizabeth was staying with Lord Montague at Farnham (Sussex), the copyholders presented her with a petition criticising Northumberland.Footnote ²⁶ That autumn, the tenants entered a petition of complaint against Earl Henry at the court of Chancery. They funded this action by collecting a legal fund, known as a common purse. In 1593, the earl launched a counter-suit in the Court of Star Chamber against his leading opponents, the most prominent of whom was a copyholder called William James.Footnote ²⁷ In his complaint to Star Chamber, Northumberland accused his tenants of riot, suggested that the collection of their common purse constituted a criminal act and claimed that his opponents had uttered ‘words of disgrace, discredit or scandall’ against him, including that he had ‘dealt dishon[or]ablie or extreamelie or against his honor wth ys or some of ys’. In answer, the tenants and cottagers claimed that they had no idea who had destroyed the earl's enclosures, observed that raising a common purse was not illegal and stated that no ill words had been spoken against him. The testimony of the weaver James Barton was the closest that any witness came to the likely truth. He stated that it had been said in the village that the earl had dealt ‘extreamely’ with the copyholders. Upon being asked who had spoken these words, Barton responded tactfully that ‘hee doth not nowe p[er]fectley remember’.

In 1594, Chancery ruled in favour of the tenants on all matters save the enclosure of the commons and woods, which they proposed to investigate more fully. Yet the tenants’ victory was far from complete. Pulling strings, the earl again wrote to the Lord Keeper saying that he was willing to deal leniently with the tenants, but that he did not think that they would take anything from him with any gratitude.Footnote ²⁸ The underlying logic of this seemingly placatory gesture was revealed in 1598 when, after four years of prevarication over the issue of the enclosures, Chancery ordered the tenants to make submission to the earl in return for what the first historian of the Petworth struggle calls ‘tacit concessions’.Footnote ²⁹ This quasi-legal expedient was deployed by the Chancery judges in cases where, having ruled in favour of poorer litigants, they were uneasy about the effects of such a ruling upon the authority of a lord.Footnote ³⁰ In a further statement of his authority, the earl had William James pressed as a soldier and sent to the war in Ireland.

The message was clear: the tenants could gain as many legal rulings as they liked, but the odds remained stacked against them. In effect, the earl's connections within ruling circles, combined with his obstinate refusal to allow the enforcement of the Chancery decree, his stereotyping of the tenants as riotous and disorderly and the threat implied in his use of his own magisterial power against William James, had trumped the tenants’ almost complete success at Chancery. Even the earl's imprisonment in 1605 on charges of involvement in the Gunpowder Plot did not impair his ability to coerce his tenants. By that time, William James had returned from Ireland and had been entrusted by his neighbours with a second legal case against the earl. Although he was subsequently to revert to his neighbours’ cause, James was at first intimidated into betraying his neighbours. In 1608, the tenants petitioned the Lord Chancellor for support against Earl Henry. This fell on deaf ears. In the same year, the earl lodged a new complaint at Star Chamber.Footnote ³¹ Northumberland claimed that William James, described as ‘a most contentious spiritt’, and his confederates had spread the rumour that he was an oppressor of the common people, ‘By wch practises and wicked meanes there is raysed a gen[er]all slaunder and ymputacon of dishonor’ against him. Most aggressively of all, the earl alleged that, inspired by the rising of the previous year against enclosures in the Midlands counties, James had led rioters ‘saying that then was the tyme to followe the example and p[ro]ceedings of the said [Midlands] Rebells’.Footnote ³² Northumberland detected in all this not merely an attack upon his own lands and reputation but upon the estate of nobility itself. Noting that whereas he was a ‘noble men and an Earle in degree and blood’ and that his opponents were ‘evill disposed p[er]sons’, he warned that if they were not stopped, their criticism of him would bring about a wider critique of England's governing elite, causing ‘dishonor & slaunder of the nobility and greate psons of. . . [the] Realme’.

Northumberland was not simply engaging in the kind of hyperbole characteristic of complaints to Star Chamber.Footnote ³³ Despite the fact that they were speaking to a commission made up of local gentlemen, some of the Chancery witnesses of 1592 were unable to disguise their hostility to their noble lord. The shearman Thomas Edsawe estimated that, since the enclosure of part of the commons, the cottagers and tenants could maintain less than half the number of animals on their reduced commons as once ‘theire Auncestors or predecessors before the said Pettworthe common and Otewood common were inclosed by this mans father’ (my emphasis).Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps Edsawe's lip curled as he spoke the words. This was, it is important to note, a shearman talking about one of the richest noblemen in the realm, yet Edsawe referred to the noble earl not as his grace, his honour, his lordship but, contemptuously, as ‘this man’. It was not only Edsawe who looked upon the Percys’ proceedings with open hostility. When it was the turn of the sixty-eight year old husbandman John Wiltshier to give evidence, he described the gossip that still circulated in the locality concerning the selfish motives that had driven Earl Henry to enclose Outwood twenty years before:

In 1608, the joint testimony of Nicholas Alderton, Thomas Sturt, Joseph Sturt, Christopher Hamblyn and William Myles was even more explicit, describing the ‘Earle and his officers’ as ‘their dangerous adv[er]saries’.Footnote ³⁶ If this was how the commons of Petworth spoke about the Percys when giving public testimony before a panel of gentlemen, what did they say to one another in the privacy of their alehouses, fields and homes?

The tenants’ speech and behaviour offended the Earl of Northumberland. Like others of his class, he tended to feel that displays of plebeian assertiveness, unless crushed, inspired the many headed monster of popular rebellion.Footnote ³⁷ Later in his life, the earl was to warn his son, Algernon Percy, that ‘Envy will ever be hatched where multitudes are drawn together’.Footnote ³⁸ Perhaps the tenth earl had his father's advice in mind when, in 1640, Earl Algernon also took action in Star Chamber against a group of copyholders after their wives broke down enclosures on a piece of land which he had severed from one of their few remaining commons.Footnote ³⁹ The intervening years had seen a series of actions initiated in Star Chamber against local inhabitants for poaching within Petworth Park.Footnote ⁴⁰ Further legal action may have commenced around 1659, but if so, it led nowhere.Footnote ⁴¹

The Petworth dispute therefore ended in the utter defeat of the copyholders. The immediate consequence was the transformation of the local landscape, as the commons were gobbled up in emparkment and enclosure, woodland hacked down and copyhold land turned over in search of iron ore. By the time that a new survey was taken in 1610, an additional 821 acres had been added to the earl's parkland. As Leconfield observes, ‘No compensation seems to have been due to the tenants for its imparking’.Footnote ⁴² In that year, the surveyor calculated that the manor comprised 1,207 acres of parkland; the lord's demesne stood at 3,794 acres; individual copyholds amounted to 3,010 acres; of the manor's once substantial commons, a mere 340 acres now remained.Footnote ⁴³ As an example of fiscal seigneurialism, the ninth earl's administration of his Petworth estate was highly successful. By his death in 1632, the yearly revenue produced from the Percy estates stood at £12,750. As Batho notes, ‘Making every allowance for the fact that this was an era of rising prices, one has to reckon this a great achievement’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The evidence left by the Petworth dispute demonstrates very clearly how claims to custom could provide a legitimising language within which ordinary people might criticise their superiors while also advancing their own claims. In many instances, custom also had the potential to provide coherence to individual demands, grouping them under broader appeals to times past, long usage and local tradition. In their Chancery petition of 1591, the tenants demonstrated how this might work. They demanded that seigneurial fines, dues and rents be fixed at a reasonable level; that they should be able to lease their land without any restriction; that all woods growing on their copyholds should be theirs; and that they should each be yearly entitled to a load of fallen wood from the commons. They also wanted strengthened inheritance rights; the prevention of further damage to their land by iron mining; pasture rights in Petworth park; and pannage in what remained of Outlanes and Middlecarr. In resonant language, the tenants demanded the right to ‘enjoy such common in such as our ancestors tyme beyond the memorie of man have enjoyed the same’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Arising from an everyday confrontation, the Petworth copyholders’ demands do not have the programmatic quality of, for instance, the Norfolk rebel articles of 1549. But they are motivated by the same desire to establish what Diarmaid MacCulloch has called a ‘tidy world’ in which an autonomous tenantry lived a life largely free from lordly power.Footnote ⁴⁶

The deposition provided by one Chancery witness of 1592, a seventy-two year old husbandman called Richard Lindars, provides especially eloquent testimony as to the capacity of labouring people to mobilise social memory and customary law as overtly political resources.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lindars presented himself as the quintessential local man, explaining that he had been born in Petworth and had lived his life within three miles of the village. Being the youngest son, according to the custom of the manor, he had inherited his father's holdings.Footnote ⁴⁸ When his father instructed Lindars in the customs of the manor, he offered the young man some words of warning concerning the danger posed to those customs by the recent loss of a key document, the written account of their customs called the customary book, and its passage into the hands of Earl Thomas.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1592, Lindars still recalled his father's words that ‘the customes were not like to contynewe yf ther booke shoulde be loste’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Lindars saw things, events were to prove his father right. With the loss of the customary book, the seventh and ninth earls proceeded to enclose land, increase fines, cut down woodland, restrict copyholders’ remaining rights and to lease the mineral rights. Seeing the way that events were drifting, in the early 1570s Lindars surrendered his tenancy and left for the neighbouring village of Lurgashall. In 1592, he explained the reason for his departure as follows:

Richard Lindars not only provided compelling evidence as to the cause of the ‘banglyng about the customes’, his deposition also offers an articulate commentary upon the authority of local memory. Lindars explained that in all his seventy-two years, ‘and tyme out of mynd by auncient reporte until of late tyme wthin these eighteen yeares or thereabouts’, entry fines had been ‘reasonable’, and that this was ‘an olde custome and so the Tennts were fyned for tyme out of minde’.Footnote ⁵² As his father had predicted, the loss of the customary book led to the impoverishment of the hitherto assertive and prosperous tenants. In Lindars’ account, the cause of that impoverishment was that ‘theire common was abated theire fynes raised and the benefit of the underwoods growing upon there severall copyholds [were] taken from them’. The consequence of this was that they had fallen:

The past weighed upon Lindars’ mind. He argued that if the copyholders were returned to ‘theire auncient customes againe wch they had for thirty yeares agoe and so for tyme out of mynde before’, then they would ‘lyve as well as theire auncestors & p[re]decessors did’.Footnote ⁵³

Earl Henry's intervention in the local land market, imposing high fees on leases and sub-leases of copyhold land, earned Lindars’ censure. He observed how, whereas former arrangements for sub-letting had been loose and pragmatic, ‘especially if [the sub-tenant] were a poore man’, Earl Henry's new policies were strictly and harshly enforced.Footnote ⁵⁴ The implication was clear, that before the Percys took up residence at Petworth, dealings with the poor had been based on reciprocity and informal charity; but that, since their arrival, communal relations had been fractured. Throughout his testimony, Lindars returned to the same essential points: that lord and tenant had once respected one another, but that since the Percys had been re-established as lords, custom had become a battleground; that the ‘banglyng’ over the customs was a product of the Percys’ oppressions and had commenced with the ominous disappearance of the tenants’ customary book.

The Chancery depositions of 1592 suggest that the warning uttered by Lindars’ father that, with the loss of their customary book, ‘the customes were not like to contynewe’ was rather prescient. In particular, the depositions illuminate local perceptions of the ninth earl's financial expedients. Some witnesses spoke about the destructive effects of iron mining and smelting upon their own land and upon the commons and woods.Footnote ⁵⁵ Like Richard Lindars, other witnesses and petitioners also deployed the past as an ideological resource. The authors of the 1607 petition to Earl Henry asked for the return of ‘such auncient & laudible customes as o[u]r auncestors have longe and time out of mynd enjoyed’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The shearman Thomas Edsawe spoke in 1592 of how whereas once the ‘poore coppihoulder or cottager’ could maintain a few cows, ‘nowe they are not able soe to doe havinge the better parte of theire auncyent common taken awaye’. Edsawe grounded his claims in custom and memory: as he put it, the tenants possessed common rights according to their ‘auncyent use and custome’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In attributing such authority to the past, Edsawe spoke not just for himself: all of the tenants presented similar accounts of their memories of the village in past times. What the Chancery was presented with was the social memory of the village: the collective voice of the inhabitants was deployed as an integrative force, binding the locality together around a common stock of stories about the past.Footnote ⁵⁸

Early modern people were often tempted to see the present as inferior to the past. The Petworth witnesses presented just such a view. The husbandman Thomas Hollaway explained how, whereas in 1592 the inhabitants had only a few cattle, he remembered that he ‘hathe seene aboute fourscore head of cattell turned out in a morninge out of the hamlet of upperton into Upperton common and outwood before the same groundes were enclosed’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his description of the social changes he had witnessed, the eighty year old Richard Marten invoked memory, custom and conscience, explaining that whereas the tenants had once been prosperous:

The sympathetic Chichester gentleman William Bullaker agreed, describing how, in the time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, the copyholders included ‘men of great wealthe and not so muche as the meanest copyholder there but he was well hable to lyve and of pretye wealthe and kept his house and famylye in veary good and pleantyfull estate and sorte’. In contrast, Bullaker went on, ‘nowe at this daye . . . the case ys cleane altered as the poore people of the countrye neere abouts Petworthe doe vearye well knowe to theyr great greefe’.Footnote ⁶¹

Much had been lost, the 1592 witnesses said, with the destabilising and impoverishment of their community. Richard Lindars saw the immiseration of the copyholders as leading to the end of neighbourliness and charity, recalling how ‘wherea[s] theire predecssors were wealthy men & able to doe for theire frends of neede had beene . . . nowe Tennaunts cannot doe so’.Footnote ⁶² William Bullaker had been brought up in the village and remembered that whereas:

in 1591 he ‘hath seene of late that the greater number of the said coppyholders are but in veary bare and naked estate and carrye noe countenaunce att all in respect what theire predecessors dyd’.Footnote ⁶³ The reason for the immiseration of the copyholders was down to ‘Fines on admission to copyhold’. As Bullaker put it:

If William Bullaker saw the increase in fines as the basis for the copyholders’ reduced condition, some of his former neighbours felt that the enclosure of much of their former commons was to blame. The loss of the commons still rankled with the eighty year old carpenter Richard Marten. He emphasised his own embeddedness within the community, stating clearly that ‘he . . . well knoweth the parryshe and towne of Petworthe because he this deponente was borne there and brought up there all dayes of his lyfe’. In his narrative, Marten situated himself in a social world characterised by face to face social relations, emphasising that ‘he knoweth all the said coppihoulders and cottagers in Petworth or the moste of them’. A necessary condition for the endurance of this idealised community was access to their common land which, for Marten, was vested in long usage. He explained that:

Especially notable both in terms of their physical visibility and their impact upon the copyholders’ well-being were the enclosures erected upon the village's commons by the seventh and ninth earls.Footnote ⁶⁶ The asset stripping of the material environment was something which many of the witnesses of 1592 commented on as an assault upon their material conditions which they linked to the earl's recent enclosures. Readings of a changed landscape thereby interlocked with memories of a lost social world.

The day-labourer Ralfe Coates integrated these memories into an overarching narrative. In his analysis:

Fundamental to the former prosperity of Petworth, the old men of Petworth argued, had been the maintenance of neighbourliness and reciprocity. These values bound the villagers together and connected them to their lord. On all sides, it was remembered, social relations had been mediated by long established customary arrangements. William Bullaker recalled how, when the manor had been held by the Crown, the tenants had asked the Crown's officers to fix their entry fines at a specific level, rather than, as was then the practice, to allow them to fluctuate at between six and twenty-four months’ annual rent. As Bullaker remembered things, the Crown's surveyor had reassured the tenants, telling them ‘that they needed not to make any suche request sayinge they were the kings Ten[a]nts and were favorablye used and payed noe fynes but suche as were reasonable and easye’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Richard Lindars drew a similar picture, recalling how ‘in the begininge of his tyme’ the customary arrangements in the manor had been the basis of ‘much quietness and ease betweene . . . the lorde and the Tennants’.Footnote ⁶⁹

These bitter memories threw the tenants and cottagers of the 1590s into renewed conflict with their lord. Most notably, the Petworth dispute illuminates how social memory can define poorer people's sense of themselves and their communities, providing a form of empowerment. The tenants’ and cottagers’ memories of the world they had lost shaped their aspirations and informed their social ideals. Those ideals were defined by an appeal to custom which provided, albeit for a limited time, a renewed sense of collective agency. That the tenants and cottagers were ultimately defeated ought not to rob us of the significance of their vision of how their village should be ordered. In their depositions, the cottagers and copyholders of early modern Petworth provided a clear account of their local society, analysed the historical processes that had led to its formation and suggested the possibility that the small polity of their village might be ordered in a different way.