Accounts describing the exploitation of common land by members of early modern England's landowning elite have generally focused on enclosure, and there is now a substantial body of literature debating its nature, chronology, and impact.Footnote 1 A much smaller body of studies, however, suggests that landlords might also make use of common resources, particularly areas of manorial waste, in other ways. R. B. Manning showed that some carved out tenancies and built cottages upon the waste to let to new tenants at commercial rates; and Keith Lindley suggested that, in some Fenland areas, wealthy landowners exploited the commons by putting large numbers of animals out to graze.Footnote 2 Over-exploitation of communal resources by manorial lords, particularly in the early sixteenth century, has been identified as a common source of popular grievance.Footnote 3 Overall, however, this is an under-explored area, worthy of further investigation not least for the light it sheds on the nature and use of common land in early modern society, and the associated politics of common right. All attempts at exploiting common land, whether by enclosure or by other means, had the potential to give rise to local political dispute. Studies of agrarian protest, which have generally focused on anti-enclosure movements, have debated the leadership of riot, identifying it variously with the gentry, yeomen, artisans, and subsistence farmers.Footnote 4 This debate has, however, been misleading insofar as it has been based on generalized conclusions from the findings of specific local and regional case studies. The gentry's role in the politics of common right was unpredictable. The varying uses they themselves made of common land, coupled with changing local circumstance, led them to form alliances with different groups to defend different interests at different times. As other studies have suggested, the politics of common right generated precisely these kinds of shifting and complex alliances based on temporary alignments of interest. The opponents of enclosure in one set of circumstances might become its supporters in another.Footnote 5
Exploring the different uses made of common land by members of the landowning elite also adds to our understanding of seigneurial behaviour and the nature of relations between early modern landlords and their tenants. This study shows that gentry landlords exploited common land as a commercial resource. As such, it provides support for the observation that the practice of capitalist farming and the exploitation of common right were not mutually exclusive.Footnote 6 Landlords viewed the resources of the commons as a potentially valuable supplement to their income, and were willing to devote significant resources to its exploitation. Successful wealth creation in this mould might involve the injection of financial capital, but, even more so, it required knowledge of law, local custom, and histories of land use, and might also involve the exertion of political power. As the study below suggests, late sixteenth-century landlords were largely successful in overcoming local opposition, whether this took the form of legal action or riot, and were able to encroach upon the commons with a degree of impunity. They were in a powerful position when it came to negotiating relations with their tenants. The relationship between landlords and tenants was not, however, solely one of aggressive exploitation and resistance and nor can tenants be treated as an undifferentiated body. The evidence on which this study is based suggests that, in some cases, landlords looked particularly to their established, wealthier tenants as a source of information relating to local custom and agrarian practice. As such, senior tenants might provide valuable support to seigneurial authority.
I
The case study offered here provides a good opportunity for studying both the multiplicity of uses that might be made of common land as well as the varieties of local politics which they might engender. Enfield, situated in Middlesex, some ten miles north of London, was made up of eight manors, all part of the Duchy of Lancaster, although only one, Enfield manor, was held directly by the crown and generally administered by a crown-appointed farmer.Footnote 7 The lordship of another, Durants, was held and resided in by the Wroths, one of the longest-established gentry families in Middlesex.Footnote 8 Lordship in the other manors passed fairly rapidly from one owner to the next, often ending up in the possession of newly wealthy London merchants. The farming inhabitants of Enfield, as elsewhere in the Lea Valley, combined arable with animal husbandry, and wealthier farmers supplied the London markets with foodstuffs. Opportunities were greatest for the tenants of large copyhold farms: while the prices of arable products and livestock more than doubled in the course of the period, average levels of rent increased only very slowly, if at all.Footnote 9 Alongside farming, others in the area made their living in the connected malt and carrying trades. By ancient and special privilege, Enfield men were free from paying tolls on goods taken into London, a right they hotly defended as it gave them an advantage over competitors in neighbouring townships.Footnote 10 For the poorer members of the community, however, conditions were less favourable. The local population was rising rapidly, depressing wages and increasing pressure on resources. A report commissioned by the privy council early in 1603 found evidence of severe overcrowding in the area, with ‘inmates’ packed into barns and poor men squatting on the waste. The report estimated that 157 new cottages had been built in Enfield since 1590, many made by converting barns and outhouses, each housing on average two or three families.Footnote 11
All of the three main types of common land identified by agrarian historians existed in Enfield: open field arable, common meadow, and common waste.Footnote 12 In addition, residents had rights of access and pasture in the royal forest of Enfield Chase. Access to the resources of the Chase was shared by the residents of all the manors which lay upon its borders, a system of intercommoning which existed in other areas of forest waste, and which could produce tense relations, even conflict, between neighbouring communities.Footnote 13 Royal oversight of the Chase in the late sixteenth century was negligible; the corrupt practices of the woodward, John Banks, were well known in the area from the 1590s, but not acted upon by the crown until 1609.Footnote 14 Fitting the pattern of the crown estates more generally, the reign of James I brought new vigour to the administration of the Chase, not least because of the forest's value as a royal hunting ground. James's efforts to empark the forest set in train a series of struggles between the local community and central government which stretched, arguably, into the 1650s when Enfield was the site of a Digger colony.Footnote 15 These later conflicts are beyond the scope of this article, which focuses on a period in which the crown's relatively lax oversight of its estates encouraged local residents to encroach upon the Chase with expectations of impunity. Access rights to the Chase were ill-defined and, as such, the subject of local negotiation and argument.
Common land in Enfield was used in a variety of, sometimes competing, ways. Manorial lords, looking for a share in the growing profits enjoyed by their tenants, but often finding themselves unable to raise rents set at customary levels, sought in many cases to extinguish common use-rights to areas of waste and open field through processes of enclosure, in order to bring them under their own direct cultivation or, in some cases, to convert them to pasture. Manorial lords and substantial tenant farmers might also find other, entrepreneurial uses of common land, including parts of Enfield Chase, as a site on which to build new cottages or to graze large numbers of animals.Footnote 16 The leaders of the local carrying trade used common land in order to graze their horses.Footnote 17 For others, particularly the poorer members of local society, common land offered important sources of subsistence, a site for fuel-gathering and the grazing of animals.Footnote 18
II
Opposition to both the enclosure and exploitation of common land in Enfield took many forms, and included use of direct action, violence, and riot. Central to the strategies of those seeking both to defend and exploit common land, however, was the use of law. As residents within the duchy of Lancaster, the people of Enfield had recourse to the equity court of Duchy Chamber. In all, some thirty-seven cases were brought to Duchy Chamber by Enfield residents between 1558 and 1603; of these, twenty-five concerned the regulation of common land. Like other equity courts, Duchy Chamber followed English bill procedure, by which complaints, answers, interrogatories and depositions were taken down in writing before the court sat.Footnote 19 Material of this kind constitutes a rich source for the social historian. Its use, nonetheless, dictates a degree of caution. Court records are not straightforward windows onto reality, but are rather representations of that reality created by the different parties involved in legal proceedings. This does not invalidate their use; in fact, it is precisely what makes them so interesting and so valuable.
As Garthine Walker suggests, legal records are ‘multi-vocal’: they contain within them ‘the speaker's agenda, popular ideas, plus the anticipation of how the law will act and needs to be accommodated’.Footnote 20 In the case of equity court material, an extra ‘voice’ might be added, that of the clerks and petty lawyers who wrote down people's complaints and answers, editing their words and shaping them to conform with accepted legal formulae. Their presence is most tangibly felt in the written depositions taken from witnesses, usually either in Westminster or by commission in the countryside. Given in response to set lists of questions called ‘interrogatories’, resembling to some extent a modern questionnaire, these were not intended as verbatim records of the witnesses’ speech, but were instead taken down in legalistic English, giving the bare bones of deponents’ statements with few superfluous details. This does not render them necessarily unreliable; there is no reason to imagine that the clerks would have fabricated or concealed evidence. But, clearly, they provide only part of the story. The exact words, nuances, and full meaning of deponents’ statements are lost forever.
When people approached the courts, whether in person or in writing, they did so playing socially approved roles, and speaking through socially determined rhetorical schemes. They were actors in a forum which dictated certain forms of address and modes of self-representation. Complaints or pleadings, the first stage of legal proceedings, tended to be written in the language of supplication. Many plaintiffs emphasized their poverty before the court, claiming that if redress were not soon given they would be utterly destitute. This may perhaps have been designed to play to elite perceptions of the ‘worthy’ or ‘deserving’ poor, suitably deferential, and helpless save for the support of their father-like betters.Footnote 21 A very different image of the poor might be evoked by landlords bringing cases against anti-enclosure protestors. Then it was usual to stress the threat they posed to the social order, pointing to their riotous proclivities, arguing that they were ‘lewde’, ‘mean’, ‘seditious and trayterous’, invariably identified with the lowest in society.Footnote 22 The answers of those accused in these proceedings often also followed established rhetorical schemes. It was usual, for instance, for defendants to accuse plaintiffs of bringing their suit solely to ‘vexe and trouble’. By the mid-sixteenth century, an accusation of vexatious litigation had become the standard formula with which nearly all answers in Duchy court proceedings began. Playing to widespread anxieties that litigation threatened neighbourliness and amity, these accusations stressed the plaintiffs’ quarrelsome nature and argued that their suits were ‘untrue, maliciouslie devised & set forthe onlie of malice’.Footnote 23
The absence of anything that can easily be identified as the ‘truth’ in legal records has worried some historians, and methodologies have been suggested for its recovery.Footnote 24 By contrast, Tim Stretton argues that the absence of truth need not be a problem. It is, he writes, possible ‘to look not at the truth in each case, but at contemporary representations of the truth’; ‘it is both interesting and instructive to see how people fought their cases, the lines of argument they pursued and which kinds of facts they chose to emphasize’.Footnote 25 Going to court was not separate from local negotiations over land use; it was a part of those negotiations. It was a strategy consciously adopted by both landlords and tenants as a means of putting pressure on their opponents and so furthering local objectives.Footnote 26 Gaining a judicial decision was rarely the main reason for starting a case; for many, ‘the formal articulation of complaint and conflict’ may have been more important.Footnote 27 Of the thirty-seven cases brought before the Duchy court by Enfield residents between 1558 and 1603, only seven reached final judgement. Most cases were brought in order to ratify local agreements, to justify and receive official approval for actions already taken, or to embarrass local opponents.
What follows explores the ways in which landlords in Enfield made use of common land; the ways in which they justified their actions; and the types of political response that their actions engendered. There were three main ways in which landlords in Enfield sought to exploit common land: by over-charging the commons; by building new tenements on areas of wasteland; and by enclosure. These will each be explored in turn.
III
Common resources in early modern society were organized communally; a variety of institutions and by-laws existed to prevent their over-exploitation by imposing stints upon use. Certain wealthy landlords in Enfield claimed to be free from those restraints, subject to no communal law or scrutiny. In response, accusations of ‘overcharging’ the commons were levelled by local juries and by Duchy officials. The two biggest offenders in this regard were Ralph Waller, a Middlesex magistrate and lord of the manor of Oldford, and William Kympton, lord of Hadley and, originally, a London alderman. Waller was accused of overstocking Enfield Chase in 1560 and 1563; Kympton was accused of doing the same on three occasions, twice in 1581–2 and again in 1588.Footnote 28 A tenant of Enfield manor estimated in 1588 that Kympton was then keeping somewhere between 80 and 200 sheep on the Chase. One man said that although he did not know how many beasts Kympton ‘of right oughte to kepe’, he felt certain that the Chase was being overcharged.Footnote 29 This last statement reveals a degree of uncertainty on the part of the deponent; he could not explain how local stinting regulations operated and was unable to state just how many animals any one individual was allowed to pasture. It was exactly this lack of certainty that men like Waller and Kympton hoped to exploit.
Both men made similar defences against the accusations, combining reference to historical records as well as local memories as a means of justifying their actions. In doing so, both men evoked the language of custom, legitimizing their claims with reference to local history and tradition. Historians have tended to emphasize the role of custom within plebeian political culture where, it is claimed, it provided an important means by which rights could be defended against predatory landlords and employers.Footnote 30 The evidence presented here reminds us that the language of custom was drawn upon in almost equal measure by the wealthy.Footnote 31 Its deployment was a targeted bid to gain legal ratification of practices beneficial to one's interests. The equity courts would give protection and support to practices claimed as customary provided they were not judged ‘unreasonable’, did not contradict the laws of God or nature, had not been legislated against in parliament, and had been practised consistently ‘since time whereof the memory of man is not to the contrary’.Footnote 32 In 1563, Ralph Waller argued that the lord of Oldford manor had ‘used tyme out of memorie of man’ to have the right to common all manner of beasts on the Chase ‘without nomber’. To prove this, he claimed he was ‘redy to shew forthe sufficient matter in wryting under Autentique seales for and concerninge the comenscement of the said usages’. As well as written evidence, he claimed he was able to produce oral testimony which would ‘prove the usage of the same as farr as any mann can remember’.Footnote 33 Kympton went further, arguing that he and all his tenants had the right, ‘tyme wherof memory of man doth not demur to the contrary’, to pasture ‘all manner of beastes & cattell commonable sanz nomber’.Footnote 34 In a later case, Kympton claimed the same rights of pasture, but for himself alone.Footnote 35 It is possible, therefore, that in the earlier case, his claim that not only he, but also his tenants, could graze unlimited numbers of beasts was a form of bargaining tool, a means of exaggerating his hand in order to strengthen his position, or possibly he was hoping for his tenants’ support in his action. His proof, he said, rested on the evidence of an ‘awncient graunt made of the said common of pasture by king henry the thyrd to the then Abbott of Walden & to his successors lordes of Hadley’.Footnote 36
There is no record of Kympton's case ever reaching a final judgement, suggesting that settlement was reached outside of court.Footnote 37 In the case of Ralph Waller, the court found in his favour in early 1565, decreeing that the lords of Oldford were to have ‘common pasture without number in the chase of Enfield’, and to enjoy the same ‘without lett, interruption, challenge, contradiction or controllement of her majesties officers’. The judgement was to hold ‘untill better matter be shewed to this court for the disproff of thinterest and title of the said defendent’.Footnote 38 The matter was to come up again, many years later, in 1623–4, when Ralph Coningsby had succeeded Waller as lord of Oldford. Then, the court overturned its earlier ruling, declaring that Coningsby had no right to pasture animals without number. His right to graze animals was henceforth to be stinted to a degree ‘proportionable’ to the number of beasts his own lands would ‘winter and keepe’.Footnote 39 That Coningsby had fallen foul of the strict laws governing hunting on Enfield Chase, having ‘wrongfullie’ hunted and killed the king's deer, may have turned the court against him. The court explained its decision to overturn its earlier judgement differently, declaring that if overcharging were tolerated it would place an unbearable burden on local resources. In this, it may have been responding to the escalation in the local population, which was placing increasingly heavy demands on the commons.Footnote 40
IV
The problems created by the rise in population were not alleviated by the actions of local landlords. Many sought to take advantage of the growing population by using wasteland as a building site for new tenements. Occasionally they built with the consent of their tenants, but this was only given when new cottages were intended to house ‘poore and ympotent people’, a practice enshrined in the 1601 Poor Law, but which appears to have been happening in Enfield from an earlier date.Footnote 41 When cottages were built with more mercenary intentions, to be inhabited by rent-paying newcomers, the established tenants were likely to object. Complaints about the erection of new cottages first appear in the early 1580s and had been taken up by Duchy officials by the end of that decade.Footnote 42 The erection of new tenements was resisted by local residents for two reasons, both related to the protection of common land. First, it encouraged newcomers to settle in the area, many of whom demanded to be allowed to participate in common grazing rights. Secondly, building a new cottage occasioned the enclosure of small parcels of wasteland to serve as gardens, so further reducing the acreage of common land per head of population.Footnote 43
Amongst the names of those presented for building new cottages, that of William Kympton, lord of Hadley, again stands out.Footnote 44 Kympton had made his money through mercantile activity in the City of London and it may be for this reason that he was so ready to pursue what entrepreneurial opportunities he could. He did not, however, explain his activities in these terms, nor in this instance did he make recourse to the language of custom. Called in 1589 to provide the court with evidence, he said he had built only four new cottages and that these were occupied by longstanding local residents. He was providing housing, he argued, for key members of the local community, including the vicar of Hadley, the parish clerk, and the village blacksmith.Footnote 45 Later investigations by Duchy officials suggested that Kympton was not being entirely honest, finding that he had built at least ten new cottages and subdivided several older tenements.Footnote 46 Kympton had tried to downplay the scale of his building activities before the court. He also tried to argue that other landlords in the area were far worse offenders than he, and that he was being made a scapegoat for their offences. In particular, he pointed to the extensive building works undertaken by the lord of South Mimms, where at least twenty new cottages had been built in the past ten years.Footnote 47 It was not uncommon for landlords to justify their actions in this way. If their estates were to remain economically viable, they argued, it was necessary for them to behave as their neighbours behaved. They represented themselves before the courts as existing on the very edge of survival; it was unjust to persecute them simply for seeking to maintain their estates as economically viable units.Footnote 48
The Duchy court does not appear to have come to a decision in Kympton's case. Rather than punishing the builders of cottages or seeking to curtail their actions, the court began in general to focus on preventing the occupants of new tenements from exercising grazing rights. In 1603, it was ordered that the inhabitants of any tenement built within the previous twenty years were to have no access to the Chase or any other wasteland for any manner of beast. Two years later the ban was extended to the occupants of cottages built within the previous thirty years.Footnote 49 The court did not punish landlords for building new cottages; nor did it seek to prevent them from building more in the future. Instead, the court placed sanctions on the occupants of new tenements, many of whom were very poor. Responsibility for enforcing the new sanctions was given to the manorial courts. Jurors, representative of the more substantial and established tenantry, were keen to defend their own grazing rights and so likely to be harsh on newcomers. Surviving presentments drawn up for inspection by Duchy officials show that local jurymen were indeed enforcing the new regulations with vigour. As Steve Hindle argues, it was through processes of exclusion such as this that the boundaries of entitlement and belonging in early modern society were defined. A statement was being made about who did, and who did not, qualify for full community membership.Footnote 50
V
More controversial than overcharging and erecting new cottages were attempts mainly by manorial lords to enclose parcels of common ground. To enclose land was to take it out of communal organization, henceforth to be owned and farmed ‘in severalty’, generally marked out by a fence or hedge. Prior to 1558, enclosure in Enfield and the neighbouring parishes had proceeded piecemeal. The first recorded enclosure took place in 1490 when John Wroth successfully enclosed about thirty acres in the open fields of Durants manor.Footnote 51 In neighbouring Edmonton, enclosure was also recorded in the 1490s, pushed forward by Sir Thomas Bourchier and his bailiff, Nicholas Boone. The Edmonton tenants brought an action against Bourchier to the Duchy court. On that occasion, the chancellor, Sir Reginald Bray, ordered the tenants to lay open the fields again by force, which they did.Footnote 52 Despite this, David Pam has calculated that some 400 acres of open field were enclosed in Edmonton between 1485 and 1530.Footnote 53 Opposition to enclosure in the area was persistent and a tradition of protest is clearly discernible. As Amanda Jones has shown, anti-enclosure riots in the Lea Valley in 1548 began a wave of protest which served to precipitate the uprisings in East Anglia the following year.Footnote 54
Acts of enclosure required justification; enclosers had to exonerate themselves of charges of covetousness and uncharitable dealing. The Duchy court was an ideal forum in which enclosing landlords might justify their actions, seek official ratification, and the possibility of punishing local opponents. The most common means of justifying enclosure was by situating the action in a historical context, arguing that the land had always been enclosed and lay open only through the negligence of previous landowners. So John Holt, a landowner in Enfield, explained he ‘did inclose and renewe the auncient boundaries’ of certain fields in the area; and in 1585, Henry Middlemore, the crown farmer of Enfield, similarly denied any innovation, declaring that he had repaired an ancient enclosure in the manor. As evidence for this claim, he pointed to a line of ancient trees along one side of the fields which he said were the remains of an earlier boundary marking the extent of the enclosed land.Footnote 55 Local jurors were likely to be sceptical of such claims. John Holt, for instance, was presented before the manorial court at Enfield and fined the costly sum of £40.Footnote 56 Beyond the formal setting of the court room, local men might also resist such claims through more direct action. The hedges put up by Henry Middlemore in 1585, for instance, were torn down and sheep put into the fields ‘to use the common there as alwaies was’.Footnote 57 Several men denied that the trees around the field were anywhere near so old as Middlemore had claimed, one witness, aged sixty-six, claiming that many had grown up within his ‘verie remembraunce’.Footnote 58
Troublesome juries could significantly hinder landlords’ attempts to enclose land. One way of dealing with jurors was to present them before the Duchy court, demanding that their decision be reversed and that they be punished. John Holt in 1567 argued that jurors had acted ‘against the lawes of this Realme’ in fining him for ‘the inclosinge or renewinge of the boundarie’ of certain fields in Enfield. Such matters, he claimed, were ‘not inquirable’ in the manorial court.Footnote 59 Jurors tended to respond to such claims by arguing that they had acted according to their duty, saying that ‘by theire Othes they were bounde to fynde and present’ all enclosures of land within the manor. They tended not to see the extent of their jurisdiction as in any way limited; it was their duty ‘to enquire of all suche thinges as are eyther nusans, hurtfull or offencyve to any of the tenants or inhabitants’, including ‘any enclosery’ and ‘all such persons as at any tyme should make any enclosery’.Footnote 60 It was in the interests of local landlords to claim that the role of juries was limited, circumscribed by seigneurial demand and local custom; jurors, on the other hand, wanted the court to believe that they had wide-ranging discretionary powers, and a duty to their neighbours to investigate all manner of offences.
Another way in which landlords might proceed was through local negotiation, seeking to enclose land with the consent of their tenants. Enclosure by agreement has featured prominently in agrarian historiography, and historians have suggested that many enclosures in the sixteenth century were achieved with the consent of the tenantry and may not have been as controversial as often supposed.Footnote 61 The evidence for Enfield is somewhat scanty; local negotiations, conducted mainly through face-to-face conversations, have left little trace in the historical record. The major example of enclosure by agreement that survives in the Duchy records dates from 1547. The tenants of Durants manor and their lord, Sir Thomas Wroth, had been in dispute over Wroth's attempts to enclose several fields traditionally farmed in common. For ‘thapeasing thereof and for unytie and quietnes therin’, the manorial court had met to settle the matter and had decided ‘in the full open Courte’ to allow Wroth to enclose the fields in question. In return, Wroth promised to pay a yearly sum of six pence to each of his tenants ‘to bee Imployed and bestowed in such dedes of Charitye as [they] shal thincke most expedient’. The agreement was ratified in the Duchy court, following a fictitious suit of trespass brought by Wroth against his tenants. The fact that the tenants did not fight the accusation of trespass made public their acknowledgement that the land in question was now Wroth's private property to which they had no rights of access.Footnote 62 Despite this agreement, however, it is clear that the Durants tenants were not united on this issue. Three years after the ratification of the enclosure agreement in the Duchy court, a group of seventeen men broke down the fences surrounding the fields and put sheep on the land. While no statement by these men appears to survive, it is clear that they were not, or at least no longer wished to be, party to the enclosure agreement. Perhaps the case supports R. B. Manning's view that the phrase ‘enclosure by agreement’ was often ‘deceptive’, used to paper over divides within a community, a means by which enclosure might be justified rather than a straightforward description of local circumstance.Footnote 63
It was clearly in the interests of enclosing landlords to discredit local opponents. One of the major ways in which they could achieve this was through an accusation of riot. English law assumed that hedgebreaking required force, and a riot was considered to have taken place when three or more people, armed or unarmed, gathered together to make threatening speeches and destroy an enclosure.Footnote 64 In 1585, the crown's farmer in Enfield, Henry Middlemore, denounced some fifteen of his own tenants as ‘evill and lewde disposed persons’ who in the night had assembled ‘in warlike manner’. The men, in Middlemore's account, proceeded ‘in moste ryotous and outragious manner’ to pull up several newly planted hedges.Footnote 65 The protestors themselves were understandably keen to clear themselves of these accusations. In answer to the court's interrogatories, several denied being in the area at all that night, providing alibis for their whereabouts. Significantly, in what may well have been a co-ordinated response, only two men admitted to having pulled up sections of the hedge, hence in effect saying that no riot had taken place. They were, they said, merely restoring the land to its former state, putting in their sheep ‘to use the common there as before’.Footnote 66 The Duchy court found in favour of Middlemore, and the two men who had admitted to pulling up the hedges were ordered to appear before the court where their punishment would be decided. Middlemore's tactic was successful: the court sanctioned his right to the ‘quiet possession’ of the lands in question.Footnote 67
A further means of justifying enclosure was provided in 1583 by John Wilford of Elsings manor. His argument, put crudely, was that he should be allowed to enclose because everyone else in the area was doing it. He informed the court that he had recently enclosed several acres of the open fields only to have his newly planted hedges pulled up by a group of local men. His complaint was unusual in that he did not seek to legitimize enclosure. In fact, he presented the act as unfair and potentially damaging to the financial interests of his neighbours. He claimed, however, that because so many of his neighbours had enclosed land, he had had no choice but to follow their lead. He argued further that the number of new cottages built in the area put unprecedented pressure on local resources. To protect his interests, it had been necessary for him to enclose several acres of land that he might exercise his grazing rights without interference from others. He had, he said, enclosed only so much land as was needed to support the number of cattle allowed to him by local stinting regulations, having ‘lefte in common pro rata as much and more accordinge to the quantytie of his said land as any other Lord or Tennant within the said Parrish’.Footnote 68 It was not difficult for his local opponents to counter his arguments. To justify enclosure ‘onlie for that (as he sayth) other men have done the like’ did not render the action legitimate. Examples of ‘other mens wrongs and injuries’, they said, only served to demonstrate why enclosure was unacceptable.Footnote 69
VI
Opposition to enclosure in Enfield came from many different social groups. Wilford's opponents in Elsings were Robert Brown, Edward Curtis, and John Wilson. These men, together with William Newman and John Spencer, were amongst the most active anti-enclosure protestors in the area. Their names appear repeatedly in the records of the Duchy court, sometimes as plaintiffs, often as defendants charged with riot. Several were also active in the 1570s and 1580s in trying to ‘overthrowe’ a government-sponsored scheme of river-widening which aimed to make the River Lea navigable between Ware and London.Footnote 70 In their petitions to the Duchy court, these serial-protestors tended to represent themselves as ‘the poor’, and to emphasize that they were reliant for their very existence upon the exercise of common right. This, they claimed, was threatened by the iniquitous practices of the local rich, who, being ‘well frended, of great wealth and good countenance and creditt’, were in a strong position to bully their poorer neighbours. They, themselves, were defending not only their own interests, but also those of other poor members of the community.Footnote 71 Their statements could be seen to display the availability of something approaching ‘class conflict’ as an organizing concept around which early modern plebeians might frame their understanding of the social order, suggesting a world view which pitted ‘rich’ against ‘poor’, a facet of early modern discourse which has received attention in the work of Andy Wood.Footnote 72
As Wood is clear to point out, such discourses were used creatively to justify different positions at different times. Curtis, Wilson, Newman, and Spencer were prominent members of the local malt and carrying trades. This may not have put them amongst the richest in local society, but it is equally unlikely that they were amongst the poorest. Certainly, their wider economic interests meant that they were not reliant on the use of common land as their main means of subsistence. Indeed, it appears that they they were making commercial use of the commons. The four men were presented several times by Duchy officials for overcharging the commons, and some tenants claimed that they grazed animals on the Chase on behalf of outsiders with no grazing rights at all in return for a fee. They were also accused of building new cottages on areas of wasteland, which they rented out to incoming settlers.Footnote 73 It would appear, then, that their protestations of poverty before the court were rhetorical exercises, designed simultaneously to win sympathy and to threaten their audience with the possibility of social conflict, rather than straightforward expressions of a world-view in which they, as defenders of the rights of the poor, found themselves battling against the unjust practices of the wealthy. Such claims to poverty, as John Walter has written, had a ‘menacing inclusiveness’ about them.Footnote 74
It has proved harder to uncover evidence of the activities and attitudes of the local poor. They appear fleetingly in a case of 1589, evidence for which appears not in the Duchy of Lancaster files, but in Quarter Sessions records and the papers of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. On 7 July 1589, some twenty-nine women of Enfield were presented for having torn up hedges newly planted by Robert Wroth. The charge lists the women involved in the riot and gives details of their husbands’ occupations. Three of the women were widows, two were spinsters; five were the wives of maltmen and others were the wives of local craftsmen and traders, including the local shoemaker, butcher, and tanner. The remainder – nine altogether – were the wives of labourers, suggesting that the protests were the result of collaborative action between people of varying social status.Footnote 75 If the women had hoped to exploit what historians have learnt to call ‘the licence of the unruly woman’, they were to be disappointed.Footnote 76 Robert Wroth and Henry Middlemore, sitting as magistrates, sentenced all the women to imprisonment in Newgate gaol. While this article has so far focused on the ways in which gentlemen used the law as a means of furthering local objectives, this episode clearly demonstrates that they might also sometimes use coercive tactics. Twenty-four women were still in Newgate over a month later when their husbands petitioned Burghley for their release. Several of the prisoners, they wrote, were ‘greate with childe’ and likely to give birth any day.Footnote 77 As a note drawn up for Burghley shortly afterwards reveals, seven women did indeed give birth in prison, while a further six were ‘brought to bed’.Footnote 78
Wroth had used his position as magistrate to further his interests as landlord, a clear example of the ways in which political and social roles overlapped in early modern society.Footnote 79 Although Burghley investigated the women's condition, there is no indication that any action was taken against Wroth. Certainly, there is no indication that he was ordered to remove his enclosures; they were still there five years later when the commoners of Enfield petitioned Burghley.Footnote 80 While the episode reads as a clear example of the effective use of coercion by a rich and powerful man in conflict with the local poor, further investigation into Wroth's career reveals that landlords who, in one context, used force to overcome local opposition might, in another, become the chief supporters of their tenants’ rights. In the early 1580s, tenants of Edmonton, Hadley, and South Mimms twice petitioned the Duchy court to complain that their access to Enfield Chase was being impeded by the tenants of Enfield and Durants. Rights of way, they alleged, were being blocked, gates closed, and cattle impounded. The tenants of Enfield and Durants argued that that they, through their manorial courts, had the final responsibility for settling all matters concerning the Chase. The tenants of Edmonton, Hadley, and South Mimms denied this, arguing that in the past the ancient court of Roundhedge had settled these issues, as a body representative of all those communities who shared grazing rights on the Chase. The court of Roundhedge, they argued, had been allowed to lapse and ought of right to be revived. In its absence, the government of the Chase had fallen into near-anarchy: ‘sondrie waste, wronge and incrochements are dailie perpetrated’, they claimed, ‘which sometimes throughe ignoraunce of the said Tennauntes of Enfielde were ommitted and not presented’. Worse, the jurors of Enfield and Durants were partial in the exercise of justice, ‘willfullie concealinge’ offences committed by members of their own communities.Footnote 81
The charges were met by Robert Wroth as the lord of Durants. His response blended local history with the testimony of village ancients, combining written and oral evidence. The notion that a court of Roundhedge had ever met in Enfield, he argued, was of all the plaintiffs’ claims ‘the most dissonant and least consonant to reason’. He referred the court to a statute dating from the reign of Edward III, which, he wrote, ‘he would advise well the complainantes to digeste’ before making any similar claims in the future. That statute, combined with local custom, dictated that the tenants of Enfield in their court baron could present ‘all enormyties, offences & trespasses done by themselves and all others within the said chase’. Nonetheless, he understood how the confusion might have arisen. As he went on to say:
it were by tradition amongst the Elder sorte of the tennauntes & inhabitauntes of her majesties said mannor that the said place called round hedge is very nere where the Earle Mandevilles place was (called Camlot) and that the place called the round hedge is the Auncient place where the said Earle did use to keepe his courte Baron for the said manor of Endfild.
He concluded with a plea to the court to preserve the ‘Ancient court baron’ of Enfield, that it ‘maye not in any sorte be defaced or the auctorite thereof by any newe Imagined & devised courts abridged or restrayned’.Footnote 82 As a whole, Wroth's answer is a robust and thorough defence of the Enfield and Durants tenants’ interests. It also shows the complex cultural world inhabited by the early modern gentry, in which a knowledge of the law and of literary history was combined with local memory. Crucially, Wroth, in one context the hammer of his tenants, in another had become their champion. Horizontal conflict between neighbouring communities had encouraged the formation of a vertical social alliance; a dispute over intercommoning rights had thrown to the fore the politics of place, rather than of social status.Footnote 83
VII
No farming region in early modern England was exactly like any other. Variations of ecology, local custom, and regulatory practices complicate attempts to generalize from the findings of specific case studies. In late sixteenth-century Enfield, landlords took advantage of lax royal oversight of the Chase to exploit the resources of forest waste. In the process, they came into conflict with groups of their tenants, who looked to the crown and its courts for redress. At the same time, the local system of intercommoning produced disputes between neighbouring communities, which could unite landlords and their tenants in opposition to their neighbours. These findings are consonant with those for other areas of wood-pasture in this period.Footnote 84 But, what conclusions of broader significance might be reached from this evidence? The case study presented here sheds light on an underexplored aspect of the sixteenth-century gentry's economic activity. For landlords seeking to increase the revenue from their estates, but who were either unable or unwilling to invest in costly, long-term technological or institutional innovation, the resources of the commons represented potentially rich pickings. Previous explorations of seigneurial behaviour have tended to focus on landlords’ efforts to enclose common land, a process that has been identified as key to the emergence of English agrarian capitalism. In Enfield, piecemeal enclosure was certainly one way in which landlords sought to exploit common land. In some cases, however, they appear to have decided that their interests were best served not by enclosing the commons (a potentially expensive and controversial procedure), but instead by ‘overcharging’ them with large numbers of animals, or by using them as a site on which to build new cottages.
While not, therefore, downplaying the long-term significance of enclosure, this study suggests that, in the late sixteenth century at least, the exploitation of common right and the development of commercial farming were not mutually exclusive. The exploitation of common land provided gentry landlords with a valuable opportunity to supplement incomes threatened by inflation. Some historians have argued that late sixteenth-century landlords, faced with this problem, pursued policies of defensive ‘seigneurial reaction’, seen as an essentially conservative response involving the thorough exploitation of traditional sources of revenue.Footnote 85 This study suggests, by contrast, that landlords acted in an innovative and resourceful manner, exploring available commercial opportunities. Rather than operating within a traditional framework, they used the language of tradition as a cloak with which to legitimize new practices.
These strategies required a significant input of resources, not only of wealth, but also of knowledge and power. The evidence of equity court records shows that landlords were able effectively to draw upon knowledge of the law, local history, and custom, and that they used their access to historical documents to legitimize their claims with reference to past practice and precedent. Landlords could also draw upon the resources of political power. Enfield's gentry landlords were able successfully to encroach upon the commons, overcoming local opposition effectively and in one case brutally. The relationship between landlords and tenants should not, however, be read solely in terms of conflict, as a battle between oppression and resistance, nor should we consider the tenantry to have been a homogeneous group defined by shared subordinate status. At times, landlords and their established, senior tenants appear to have worked together in order, for instance, to defend their shared rights when it came to disputes over intercommoning. Just beneath the surface of the material explored here, are hints of a more complicated relationship. As already noted, effective estate management required knowledge of local agrarian practice and custom; only some of this could be found in the historical archive. Ralph Waller, to support his claims to be allowed to graze limitless numbers of beasts, drew on a combination of written and oral evidence, the latter taken principally from his older tenants. Robert Wroth, too, drew upon documentary history, but also took account of the ‘tradition amongst the Elder sorte of the tennauntes’. More generally, going beyond the case study presented here, it is clear that the reliance of landlords upon their tenants for information was a crucial aspect of estate management. At the meetings of manorial courts and courts of survey, landlords received information from their tenants concerning local conditions; their rights and obligations; fines and other payments due to them; and the bounds and extent of their estates. In return, tenants received the authority to deal with a range of pressing problems, including the opportunity to discipline their poorer neighbours and rigorously enforce the rules governing entitlement and community membership.Footnote 86 Relationships between lords and their established tenants were clearly not always trouble-free, but when operating smoothly might be marked by a perhaps surprising degree of reciprocity.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the allocation and management of common rights were deeply political issues which could, and frequently did, give rise to conflict. Attempts to enclose or to over-exploit common land were met by varied responses coming from a range of different directions. Those most active in the defence of common right appear to have been relatively prosperous men of sound local standing, the same group who, in other contexts, might provide a support to seigneurial authority. While these men may have presented themselves before the Duchy court as representatives of the helpless poor, their use of common land was not for subsistence grazing but rather as the site for a range of commercial activities. Their interests might sometimes bring them into alliance with the local poor, sometimes with their gentry landlords. As such, the episode provides further evidence for Steve Hindle's claim that, while historians have tended to focus on those issues which created division between local elites and the poorer sort, this ought not to blind us to ‘the shared struggles in which both groups participated and the willingness of the more prosperous to defend their poorer neighbours in certain situations where their interests ran in similar directions’.Footnote 87 In addition, the evidence presented here demonstrates that the politics of common right did not only produce simple, vertical contests between rich and poor. Competition for the resources of common and wasteland could divide local society along both vertical and horizontal lines, creating both vertical and horizontal alliances. These alliances were shifting, unstable, and based on temporary alignments of interest.
