CHAPTER IV
There were innumerable rising families like the Pastons in the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though none was so careful of its letters. Opportunities for able men in the law and in trade were seized daily and the new families of merchants and lawyers hardly gave a backward glance at the farms from which all ultimately came. They wished to be gentlemen, squires, and knights. If they lived in the country it was in a country house suited to their dignity rather than in a farmhouse, though a home farm might serve to supply their table. The rhythm of country life went on with little change, dependent as ever on the uncertain English weather. The women of the ordinary farming household found plenty to fill their days. If daughters did not marry they could be employed at home with profit. But the high death-rate in the Middle Ages and on almost to within living memory greatly reduced the number of unmarried and unoccupied women. Childbirth slew many women whose husbands needed another partner. Tuberculosis was an ever-present scourge. Described as ‘a decline’, it carried off girls and women of every class. Smallpox was endemic. Such manorial court rolls as have survived from the seventeenth century reveal a rural society in which women were playing their parts much as they had done four hundred years before.
The surviving court rolls of the manor of Sonning in Berkshire cover twenty-one years in the reigns of James I and Charles I1. The last entry was made in October 1636. When the first entry was made in October 1615 the manor was in the hands of the crown. James I had given it to his son Charles, Prince of Wales, before 20 April, 1619, when the first court was held in his name. In 1628 the crown sold the manor to two London merchants, Thomas Newman and Thomas Chamberlain, in whose names, as lords of the manor, the court was thenceforward held. The manor of Sonning in the seventeenth century still covered a large area in east Berkshire, stretching north across the Thames into Oxfordshire, to include what is now Sonning Eye and Dunsden. From Dunsden on the Chilterns to Sandhurst on the Bagshot Beds was a good fifteen-mile ride. The modern parishes of Dunsden, Sonning, Woodley and Sandford, Ruscombe, Arborfield, Wokingham (outside the town), and Sandhurst, as well as a number of little places not separate parishes, were within the jurisdiction of the manor court. It is worth looking at the rolls to see how women stood in this wide-stretching manor on the eve of the civil war.
In the manor of Sonning, as generally elsewhere, it was customary for the widow of a copyhold tenant to remain in occupation of his land until she married again or died. Her holding under these conditions was described as her ‘widow’s estate’. A new grant of a piece of copyhold land was normally made for the term of three lives. It often happened that the widow of the first of the three prospective tenants survived the other two persons named in the copy. The widow’s estate must have caused bitterness among those who were kept out of tenancies by long-lived widows. When the crown sold the manor of Sonning a solemn entry was made on the court roll setting out the customs which had been agreed in the Exchequer chamber in Queen Elizabeth’s day after differences of opinion between the queen and her customary tenants. Two of these customs deal with the problem of the widow’s estate. ‘The first wife of any customary tenant deceased is to enjoy her widow’s estate and noe other’. If ‘a widow not named in the copy’ marry again ‘though shee be licensed by the Lord to marry without the forfeiture of her estate if shee doe marry her estate is determined’—that is, ended—‘any such licence by the lord to the contrary notwithstanding’. In the court held on 17 April 1619 it was reported that Anna Paine, widow, who held ‘two messuages and one virgate and a half of land called Heathlands was lately married, since the last court, to Edric Baker, for which she has forfeited her widow’s estate in the premisses, and that Sara Hamlin daughter of John Hamlin is the next tenant of, and in, the premisses’. The fact that remarriage meant the loss of her farm must have kept many widows from taking a second husband.
The position which widows held within this great manor appears on the surface of the rolls. On one court day in October 1631 widow Kent was ordered to scour the watercourse in Sheephouse lane sufficiently by All Saints’ Day next so that the water may pass without stop, on pain of 5 shillings. It was reported that John Symonds, a copyhold tenant of the manor, had died since the last court seised of a yardland and a half and it was adjudged that Alice, his wife, shall have her widow’s estate therein. Later in the proceedings Alice Symonds, widow, relict of John Symonds, came, did fealty, and was admitted tenant to the land her husband had held according to the custom of the manor. Another widow, Ruth Adams, relict of Thomas Adams, lately died, also came the same day and did fealty to hold the customary land of which Thomas, her husband, died seised. On the same day Elizabeth Breach, widow, was sued by William Buckeridge for a debt of 20 shillings. William was awarded damages of 6 shillings and 8 pence. There were few court-days which did not produce an entry of some sort about a widow. For example, she may want and be awarded, three loads of timber for necessary repairs, as was Elizabeth Chambers, widow, on 19 April 1619; or she may be instructed, as were ‘widdowe Webbe and William Webbe her sonne’, to remove wood from ‘his Majesty’s waste which straighteth his highnes way and passage of cattell’; or she may be ordered to remove undesirable tenants from her house as was widow Holton of Reading, who was charged in October 1631 to remove from her house in Winnersh widow Bassett and all her family. The last appearance of a widow upon the rolls was always the curt note of her death followed by the name of the next tenant who at last entered upon the land.
There is no doubt that women were often copyhold tenants in their own right. The changes made in the tenancies of farms and cottages in one court-day shows how often this could come about. On 20 April 1626 thirteen tenancies were before the court. It should be remembered that the tenants of customary land could dispose of it in no other way than by coming before the court and surrendering it into the hands of the lord, who thereupon gave it out to the new tenant. A ‘heriot’, consisting of his best beast, fell due to the lord from the retiring tenant and a fine, varying in amount with the value of the land, was paid to the lord from the new tenant. Apart from two tenants who were genuinely ending their connection with their former tenement, every one of these cases was a family arrangement, enabling the holder of the land, probably the last tenant of a former lease for three lives, to acquire a new copy in which two members of his family were joined with him in the tenancy. John Whitlock, gentleman, surrendered two acres of arable land in Wokingham and, with his daughters, Eleanor and Prudence Whitlock, received it back so that the three of them should hold it successively for the term of their lives and the life of the longest living of them. Henry Hellier resigned a messuage and half a virgate called Thedderings at Wokingham and, with Anne, his wife, and Henry, his son, received it back on the same terms. Richard Binte resigned a messuage and two virgates at Eye and Dunsden and, with Richard Binte, his son, and Anne Binte, his daughter, received it back on the same terms. William Button made two separate surrenders, one of a messuage and three-quarters of a virgate at Eye and Dunsden and the other of a cottage and two-and-a-half acres of arable land at Eye. With William Button, his son, and Jane Button, his daughter, he received both back on the same terms. The men who were thus surrendering their land and receiving it back were responsible for paying both the heriot and the fine.
When a man had the names of his wife and son put into his copy to be the holders of the land successively after him, as Henry Hellier did in 1626, he was making it possible for his widow to hold in her own right as a copyholder. Such an arrangement indicates a real equality between husband and wife. Since a wife could by ancient custom count on enjoying her widow’s estate in the tenement of her husband it was not strictly necessary that her name should be in the copy. The land was, in any case, hers for life. The insertion of the name of Anne Hellier in the copy made it possible for her to continue to hold the land after her second marriage. Her second husband would have been bound by custom to do fealty for his wife’s land. He could not exclude her son by Henry Hellier from entering the land on his mother’s death, but until that happened the land would have remained in the possession of Anne Hellier and her second husband. Leases like this, complicated as they may seem, were by no means unusual in the manor of Sonning. The traditional outlook of the Anglo-Saxon peasant had changed little through the years. Farmers’ wives were still holding their own in rural society despite the rigour of the common law.
Not all the women who appear on the rolls were copyhold tenants of the manor. At Sonning, as elsewhere, there were freeholders who formed a kind of rural aristocracy. They, like all others, were subject to the jurisdiction of the manorial court. In April 1631 a manorial jury presented that Anne Lewen, who was obviously a freeholder, ‘hath sworne that her Ant Binfeld and her servant did fish and lay her ginns in the creek lying towards Paterlake strand and out of the Thames … and that she hath knowne it fortie yeeres and the said fishing as aforesaid for fifteene yeeres together’. Anne Lewen was claiming the right to fish as the heir of half her Aunt Binfield’s land. Two of Anne Binfield’s former servants came and testified that they had fished the water. Roger Breach ‘had dwelt with the said Anne Binfield some halfe a yeare about fiftie years since when he had fished with Anne Binfield’s brother with nettes, but never with any ginn or weeles’. Joseph Winter dwelt with Anne Binfield some twenty years together about fourteen years since in which time he did now and then fish the corner of the creek and sometimes people would rob his ‘weeles’ and sometimes he would rob theirs. He also said ‘that sometyme he did take in his Dame’s right some of the bulrushes growing upon the same rushbedd’.
Although the farmers’ wives in the manor of Sonning were in a strong position this was due to customary law and the force of tradition rather than to any conscious thought about the proper relationship between man and woman. Since the Reformation and the establishment of the royal authority over the Church a real effort had been made by leading churchmen to impress on the mass of the population the moral rules which should govern society. They brought fresh energy to the ancient courts through which the medieval Church had tried to control the morals of the laity. But it was through exhortation rather than judgments in court that they attacked the relationship between men and women in marriage. A set of twelve homilies, or sermons, was published by the authority of Edward VI in 1547 with instructions to all ‘parsons, vicars, curates, and all others having spiritual care’ to read and declare one every Sunday to their parishioners ‘plainly and distinctly in such order as they stand in the book’. When the parsons had been once through the homilies they were to go back and read them through again in the same order1. In 1562 Queen Elizabeth reissued Edward VI’s homilies, and repeated his instructions to ministers to begin at the beginning and go straight through the book. But she added a further twenty-one homilies which were preceded by an ‘admonition to all ministers ecclesiastical’ advising them ‘prudently to choose out such homilies as be most meet for the time, and for the agreeable instruction of the people committed to your charge’. If the homily appeared too long for one reading the minister might divide it and read part in the forenoon and part in the afternoon2. The eighteenth homily in this edition was a sermon ‘Of the state of matrimony’1. Edward VI’s advisers had come no nearer treating of matrimony than a long sermon in three parts against ‘Whoredom and Adultery’2.
In the minds of congregations starved of intellectual interests these homilies, written by masters of English rhetoric, must have brought new and vital interests. Many English villagers, who had never before been stimulated to thought, took to the new teaching with a fervour which created the dissenters of the seventeenth century. Such folk formed the backbone of Cromwell’s New Model Army but they were also a problem to his Government. The homily on the state of matrimony forced even the people of remote villages to consider the relations between husband and wife. The homily begins by stating the divine purpose of matrimony, ‘instituted of God to the intent that man and woman should live law-fully in a perpetual friendship, to bring forth fruit, and to avoid fornication’. After dwelling a little on the horrors of fornication, quoting from St. Paul ‘Neither whoremongers, neither adulterers, shall inherit the kingdom of God’, the author points out how the devil will try to sow discord between man and wife. ‘How few matrimonies there be’, he says, ‘without chidings, brawlings, tauntings, repentings, bitter cursings, and fightings’. He points out that it is ‘a miserable thing to behold, that yet they are of necessity compelled to live together, which yet cannot be in quiet together’. He adjures married folk to pray to God to govern their hearts and then turns to address the husband in the words of St. Peter. ‘You husbands deal with your wives according to knowledge, giving honour to the wife, as unto the weaker vessel’. ‘The husband’, he says, ‘should be the leader and author of love, in cherishing and increasing concord: which then shall take place, if he will use moderation, and not tyranny, and if he yield something to the woman. For the woman is a weak creature not endued with like strength and constancy of mind; therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of the mind, more than men be; and lighter they be, and more vain in their phantasies and opinions’. It is not a token of womanish cowardice for a man to remember these things, for ‘a woman must be spared and borne with, the rather that she is the weaker vessel, of a frail heart, inconstant, and with a word soon stirred to wrath’.
The author then turns to the woman: ‘What shall become her? Shall she abuse the gentleness and humanity of her husband, and, at her pleasure, turn all things upside down? No, surely: for that is far repugnant against God’s commandment: for thus doth St. Peter preach to them “Ye wives be in subjection to obey your own husbands”. To obey is another thing to control or command, which yet they may do to their children and to their family: but as for their husbands, them they must obey, and cease from commanding, and perform subjection’. A woman should endeavour in all ways to content her husband, do him pleasure and avoid what may offend him. Even so, ‘it can scantly be, but that some offences shall sometime chance betwixt them; for no man doth live without fault, specially, for that the woman is the more frail party’. Women should therefore readily acknowledge their fault ‘not only to avoid strife and debate, but rather in respect of the commandment of God, as St. Paul expresseth it in this form of words: “Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: for the husband is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the church”. Here you understand that ye should acknowledge the authority of the husband, and refer to him the honour of obedience’. Women must obey their husbands ‘as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord’. The author admits that it is upon the women that the grief and pains of matrimony fall, for they ‘relinquish the liberty of their own rule’. They have to bear children and bring them up. But the woman is again exhorted to obey her husband and take heed of his requests. She is reminded that the cap which she wears upon her head signifies that ‘she is under covert or obedience of her husband’. The husband is again exhorted to bear with his wife even if ‘she is a wrathful woman, a drunkard, and beastly, without wit and reason’. He is reminded that beating will only make her worse and that he will have a great reward if ‘where thou mightest beat her, and yet for the respect and fear of God thou wilt abstain and bear patiently her great offences’.
A single reading of this homily from the pulpit of the village church would have assured every married man in the congregation of his right to demand obedience from his wife. Since ministers of religion were exhorted to choose the homily which fitted the occasion it is very likely that the homily on matrimony was often chosen for reading. It would certainly be suitable when any married couple in the village were known to be on bad terms or any wife was reported to be a scold. Men who had not ever considered the basis of the relationship between man and wife were now forced to think of it. Male authority was driven home with all the authority of the Church. Nor is the homily on the state of matrimony the only one which inculcates the husband’s authority over his wife. In the sermon against excess of apparel wives are reminded of what Tertullian said, ‘Let women be subject to their husbands and they are sufficiently attired’1. Nor were there lacking preachers in the succeeding generations to press home this teaching in the village churches.
A famous preacher of the early seventeenth century, William Whately, vicar of Banbury, wrote two tracts on marriage which were extremely popular in the lifetime of their author. The first, entitled A Bride-Bush; or a direction for married persons; plainly describing the duties common to both, and peculiar to each of them, by performance of which, marriage shall prooue a great help to such, as now for want of performing them doe find it a little hell. First printed in 16192, this tract was reprinted in 1623, at Bristol in 1768, at London in 1805, and translated into Welsh at Llanrwst in 1834. Such popularity may have been in part due to the belief forcibly expressed that marriage was dissolved and annihilated by the adultery or wilful desertion of either party, so that the innocent party could lawfully make another contract. These views caused the court of High Commission to summon Whately before it and he solemnly recanted in the 1623 edition. He again set out his former position and the grounds for his abandonment of it in the preface to his second tract on marriage, published in 1624, A Carecloth; or a TREATISE of the cumbers and troubles of marriage: intended to advise them that may, to shun them; that may not, well and patiently to bear them’3. It might be suspected that Whately himself was unhappily married, but it was far otherwise: ‘hee married the daughter of one Master George Hunt, the sonne of that tryed and prepared Martyr John Hunt … who was condemned to be burnt for Religion, but was saved from the execution thereof by the death of Queene Mary’4. Whately concluded the Care-cloth with a prayer to God to be made more obedient to Him than others ‘because thou hast made my Matrimonie more easefull to me than many others’. He admits that such has been God’s ‘goodness to me that this yoke hath been verie easy to mee, and my comforts have been as great, my crosses as few, as I could well expect in marriage’1.
Behind each of these tracts there must have been sermons actually preached at Banbury. Indeed, Whately states in his preface to the Bridebush that he brought together the ampler material he had collected because a sermon he had given on the subject had been printed without his authority. The fame of Whately as a preacher spread so far that ‘great wits’ and persons of many persuasions were drawn to cover the twenty-one miles from Oxford in order to hear him preach2. His sermons were so eloquent and so strongly delivered that he became known as the Roaring Boy of Banbury. Indeed, even today, the reader, far removed from the seventeenth-century habit of mind, can feel his sincerity and understand how his eloquent periods moved his hearers. ‘Had it not grown out of fashion’, he said, to preach without a text he would have taken none for his sermon, the Bride-bush, for the duties of married people have to be collected from many parts of the Bible but, since a text he must have, he chose St. Paul, Ephesians v. 23, ‘The Husband is the wiues head’3. When he came to print this sermon he printed also the plan by which he had framed it. He dealt with his subject under the three main headings: the duties of both husband and wife; the duties of the husband; and the duties of the wife. They must both be chaste, show due benevolence to each other, and love each other. They must attain love by living together and praying together. The effects of love will be to make them please each other. They must be faithful to each other and helpful, both in health and in sickness. They must have a good opinion of each other and keep each other’s secrets and do their duty by their family.
The duty of the husband is to ‘govern his wife and maintain her’. ‘Nature hath framed the lineaments of his body to superioritie and set the print of government in his very face, which is more sterne, and lesse delicate than the womans; he must not suffer this order of nature to be inuerted’. ‘It is a sinne for a man to come lower than God hath set him. It is not humility, but basenesse, to be ruled by her, whom he should rule4. Since authority lies in the husband it is lawful for the husband to correct and punish his wife, though Whately doubted if he should beat her as he can his slave. But he finally came to the conclusion that ‘only if she is intolerable’ then ‘he may launce his owne arme where it swelleth, and scrat his owne hand where it itcheth, though he make it smart after’. Nevertheless, he holds it to be ‘intollerable’ for a man to strike his wife in anger for ordinary weaknesses, ‘but if she raile upon him with most reproachful termes, if she will affront him with bold and impudent resistances, if she will tell him to his teeth that she cares not for him, if she will flie in his face with violence and begin to strike him, or break into unwomanly words or behaviour, let him bear awhile’, and admonish and exhort, and pray. If her father is still alive he suggests that the husband shall ask his aid. If all this is of no avail then he ‘must at last use the authoritie bestowed upon him by God. But for blowes, for strokes with hand or fist, nothing should drive an husband to them, except the utmost extremities of unwifelike carriage’1.
When it comes to the ‘wiues peculiar duties’ it is clear that obedience to her husband is considered the beginning and end of them. ‘Firstly she must acknowledge her inferioritie’. ‘Secondly she must carrie herself as an inferior’. ‘Where the woman stands upon termes of equalitie with her husband (much more if she account herselfe his better) the very roote of all good carriage is quite withered, and the fountain thereof utterly dried up: out of place, out of peace; and woe to those miserable and aspiring shoulders, which will not content themselues to take their roome below the head’. He concludes with this advice. ‘Whosoeuer hath the desire and purpose to be a good wife or to liue comfortably, let her set downe this conclusion within her soule: Mine husband is my superior, my better: he hath authoritie and rule ouer me’2. It may at least be gathered from all this rhetoric that the married folk around Banbury were sorely in need of advice, that husbands tended to beat their wives and that wives were ready to scold their husbands.
It is not easy to get into the minds of the country folk of the seventeenth century or to judge their reactions to the Church’s teaching. Many men, conscious that their families depended on their strength for bread, may well have felt pleasure in authoritative statements of their right and duty to lead and control. Others may not have thought much about it, and simply continued on their brutish way. When a diary or autobiography sheds light on a country family, it is always worth reading carefully to see how the womenfolk are dealt with. From this standpoint, none of these private records is more revealing than the autobiography of Adam Martindale (1623–86), a minister ejected from his living for nonconformity in 1662, who came from a yeoman family in south Lancashire1. While Adam was still a child, the whole family was shaken by the determination of his elder sister, Jane, to go off to London. A plague in London in 1625 had driven many people far into the country, and when the fugitives prepared to return home, Jane insisted on going with them. She had ‘her father’s spirit and her mother’s beauty’ and could not bear the restrictions of a yeoman’s daughter in the north.
The restrictions upon her dress are described in a passage to which it is hard to find a parallel: ‘Freeholders’ daughters were then confined to their felts, pettiecoates and waistcoates, crosse handkerchiefs about their neckes, and white crosse-clothes upon their heads, with coifes under them wrought with black silk or worsteed. ’Tis true the finest sort of them wore gold or silver lace upon their waistcoates, good silk laces (and store of them) about their pettiecoates, and bone laces or workes about their linnens. But the proudest of them (below the gentry) durst not have offered to wear an hood, or a scarfe (which now every beggar’s brat that can get them thinks not above her) noe, not so much as a gowne till her wedding day’. Her family tried to prevent Jane from going to London, arguing that ‘she wanted nothing at home … and if she had a mind to be married her father was then in a good ordinary capacity to preferre her’. She said that she would get a place and ‘serve a lady, being ingenious at her needle’2. Although she went against her parents’ will she was given money to subsist on until she was settled, but unhappily she caught the plague and her money grew low. The only hint she gave her family of her straits was ‘in a gentle way she writ for a goose-pie to make merry with her friends; and a lusty one was immediately sent her, cased in twig work’. They also sent ‘money that the goose might swim without her cost’. Unfortunately the carrier took three weeks in going and coming and ‘her money was so near at end that she had thoughts to sell her hair, which was very lovely both for length and colour’. However, she was rescued by a young gentleman who had gone up to London in her company and had fallen in love with her. He was probably the reason for her going, although this did not strike her brother. They married and took the George and Half Moon outside Temple Bar. Her parents helped them furnish the inn and often sent them country produce for their table1. Their happiness was short. When Jane heard in the early spring of 1632 that her mother was sick and like to die ‘she bought an excellent swift mare’ and rode home as quickly as she could, but not in time to see her mother alive. She and her husband then decided to leave London and take an inn in Warrington. She went back, let the London house, and sent down her goods, but on her way down again she caught smallpox from children at an inn where she stopped for a drink. She died and was buried beside her mother in August 16322.
About this time Adam’s father met with a great disappointment ‘in the matching of mine eldest brother’. He could easily have got a wife with a fortune of £100 or £120 and indeed there was one that wanted to marry him who had £140 to her fortune, ‘was of very suitable years and otherwise likely to make an excellent wife. But when things were neare accomplishing, he on a sudden sleights her, and sets his affection upon a wild airy girle, between fifteen and sixteen yeares of age: an huge lover and frequenter of wakes, greenes, and merrie-nights, where musick and dancing abounded. And as for her portion, it was only forty pounds’. The whole family was against him, but ‘have her he would’. Adam has to admit that ‘she proved above all just expectation not only civill, but religious, and an exceeding good wife; whereas the other he should have had proved (as I have heard) as much below it’. But ‘the smallnesse of her fortune was a great prejudice to our family’3.
Of his own wife Adam Martindale says little directly, but it is clear that she was a woman of spirit and a good wife through difficult times. She was Elizabeth Hall, like her husband of a yeoman family and a Puritan. Her father was a freehold farmer at Droylsden, Lancashire. When some of her husband’s congregation secretly put up a maypole upon ‘a little bank where in times past the Sabbath had beene wofully profaned’ it was Adam’s wife who ‘assisted with three young women, whipt it downe in the night with a framing-saw, cutting it brest-high, so as the bottom would serve well for a diall-post’4. It was his wife who, as he says, ‘wrangled’ £10 out of the man who succeeded him in his living after he had been dispossessed in 1662. She also made the same man buy ‘a table, formes, and ceiling’ for about £4 more5. What provision he could make for his wife, Adam Martindale had made. He acquired from the lord of the manor of High Leigh a lease of a house there for three lives, those of his wife and his two eldest sons. Both boys died long before their mother. Writing in old age, Adam Martindale said: ‘They are both dead long ago, their mother (blessed be God) being yet alive, (long may she so continue).… It’—that is the house and land at Leigh—‘is but a little thing, yet I desire heartily to praise God for the helpe I have had from it in the time of my distresse, and such sure, (though meane) provision for my poore faithfull wife, (that hath suffered so much with me,) if she overlive me, as I hope she may’1. Elizabeth Martindale outlived her husband, but no more is known of her.
All but two of Adam Martindale’s children died before their father, some of them in infancy or childhood. Smallpox or a decline was generally the cause. Of the two daughters who survived him one was married to a tallow chandler. A disastrous fire destroyed his ‘work-house’ and Adam Martindale had to help the ‘young people’ as best he could2. His other surviving daughter, Hannah, had been seized with a painful fever at the age of ten which left her a cripple from the waist down3. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was ‘bred up at home to her booke and pen, and in Warrington and Manchester to her needle and musick, though the latter she loved not, and after forgot it’. She entered the service of a Mrs. Fleetwood at Penwortham and went from her to ‘young Mrs. Venables of Agden, who had too great an affection for her; for out of a loathnesse to part from her she concealed from us her falling in love with a fellow servant that was an unsuitable match for her, hoping that he only courted her as he had formerly others in the same place that kept the stores, for his owne ends’. Her parents took her away ‘first home, and then to Manchester to her grandmother’s … provided her a farre more lovely match, for persons, parts, goodnesse, and estate, and one that dearly loved her, but could not prevail’. She went into service in Staffordshire and on New Year’s Day, 1672, the servants who had served for one year having gone and the new ones not yet come, Elizabeth cooked a ‘great dinner’ and stepping in thin shoes out into the snow to cool herself she caught a cold from which she died. She ‘was so well beloved among the young women of the parish, that though she died almost a mile from the church, and the way very foule, they would not suffer any man to carrie her body a foote, but conveyed her on their owne shoulders to her grave’4.
Adam Martindale’s children, both girls and boys, were helped into the world rather than made to take a course laid down by their parents. No member of the family was forced into a distasteful marriage. Adam Martindale was an exceptionally able man, who taught himself mathematics at forty well enough to teach it to others and to write a textbook on surveying. But he was still very near to the land, and his wife’s contribution to the family’s needs in 1670 was to ‘keep a little stock of kine as she had done formerly’1. Such a household, like countless others, was far too busy winning a livelihood to speculate on the relationship between man and woman. All their thoughts not directed to their daily problems went into religious meditation. The Puritan wife, well-versed in her Bible, would certainly have regarded her husband as the head of the house and have felt no resentment that the Church and the law held him to be her master.
Any woman might have been proud to serve Adam Martindale, whose attitude to wife and children is much that of a modern husband and father. But there was a grimmer side to the lives of many country-women though it is not often described by anyone who had seen it at first hand. The memoirs of her life, written by Mrs. Catharine Cappe (1744–1821)2, offer a glimpse of the ordinary free farmer’s wife in the middle of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Cappe was born at Long Preston in Craven, Yorkshire, where her father, the Reverend Jeremiah Harrison, had been the incumbent since about 1729. She describes the country-side as ‘insulated from the rest of the kingdom; not so much by its high mountains, as by its almost impassable roads’. She says that the inhabitants were ‘as uncivilized as their mountains were rude and uncultivated’. The free farmers at Long Preston were called ‘statesmen’; if they held a large farm ‘great statesmen’, and if a little land only, ‘little statesmen’3. Such people sent their daughters to a decayed gentlewoman in the village for instruction in reading and sewing, but they were much afraid that she might become a charge on the parish4. When visitors called on the wife of a great statesman they were invited to come in ‘and make free’. The hostess then dusted the chairs with the corner of her apron and desired her guests to be seated. She next takes a brush to sweep the floor, apologizing all the time that it was not done before their arrival. She then adjusts her own apparel, and not unfrequently goes through the whole ceremony of an entire change of upper garments, standing by her company with great unconcern, and relating the history of her family—when Thomas was born—where George goes to school—how fast he takes his learning, etc., etc. Her dress being finished she offers each of her visitors a glass of brandy, assuring them that “they are as welcome as if they were at home”, this being done, she fetches a chair and seats herself beside them’1.
This was a vivid childhood’s memory, but Mrs. Cappe noted that she ‘did not recollect a single instance in which any part of this ceremony was omitted, even so late as the year 1787’. Of the husbands of these hospitable ladies Mrs. Cappe has little that is good to say. In 1787 she, by this time married and living at York, went back again to Craven to sell some of the land at Preston which her father had acquired while he was vicar there. Her brother had died heavily in debt and it was necessary to raise money quickly. Fortunately Mr. Cappe went with her. ‘When I saw more of the temper and disposition of the inhabitants of my native village, I was both grieved and disappointed’, she writes. ‘Far from finding these statesmen adorned with the simplicity and possessed of the integrity, which one might have expected in their retired situation, they appeared fraught with cunning and intrigue; and seemed to make it a common cause to keep me in profound ignorance. Had I gone alone, they would infallibly have imposed upon me exceedingly, for added to all the rest, they have a supreme contempt for women; but the appearance and manner of Mr. Cappe, the knowledge on agricultural subjects, which I did not previously imagine he had possessed,—the questions he put to them, and the further improvements he suggested, inspired them with so much respect, that seeing me thus assisted, they gave up their designs, and it became practicable for me to treat with them on equitable terms’2. The wheel has indeed come full circle in rural society; the homilies have brought forth their inevitable fruit. The countryman has at last ‘a supreme contempt for women’.
Mrs. Cappe’s description of a statesman’s wife in her home relates to a distant part of the country where life was always hard and labour often unrewarding. The domestic setting of a wealthy farmer of the same date in a long-cultivated eastern county is depicted in the life of George Crabbe with which his son prefaced the complete edition of his works in 1834. In September 1791 Crabbe took his family to pay a visit to Parham in Suffolk, where his wife’s uncle Mr. Tovell lived, whose ‘establishment was that of a first-rate yeoman of that period’. He possessed ‘an estate of some eight hundred pounds per annum, a portion of which he himself cultivated. Educated at a mercantile school he often said “Jack will never make a gentleman”, yet he had a native dignity of mind and manners, which might have enabled him to pass muster in that character with any but very fastidious critics. His house was large, and the surrounding moat, the rookery, the ancient dovecot and well-stored fishponds, were such as might have suited a gentleman’s seat of some consequence…. On entering the house, there was nothing at first sight to remind one of the farm: a spacious hall paved with black and white marble,—at one extremity a very handsome drawing-room, and at the other a fine old staircase of black oak, polished till it was as slippery as ice, and having a chime clock and a barrel-organ on its landing-places. But this drawing-room, a corresponding dining parlour, and a handsome sleeping apartment upstairs, were all tabooed ground, and made use of on great and solemn occasions only such as rent-days, and an occasional visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer. At all other times the family and their visitors lived in the kitchen along with the servants’. Mr. Tovell ‘occupied an armchair, or when he had gout, a couch drawn up to one side of a large open chimney. Mrs. Tovell sat at a small table, on which, in the evening, stood one small candle in an iron candlestick, plying her needle by the feeble glimmer, surrounded by her maids, all busy with the same employment’. ‘At a very early hour in the morning the alarum called the maids, and their mistress also; and if the former were tardy, a louder alarum, and more formidable, was heard chiding the delay—not that scolding was peculiar to any occasion, it regularly ran on through all the day, like bells on harness, inspiriting the work, whether it were done ill or well. After the important business of the dairy, and a hasty breakfast, their respective employments were again resumed; that which the mistress took for her especial privilege, being the scrubbing the floors of the state apartments. A new servant, ignorant of her presumption, was found one morning on her knees, hard at work at the floor of one of these preserves, and was thus addressed by her mistress: “You wash such floors as these? Give me the brush this instant, and troop to the scullery and wash that, madam! … As true as God’s in heaven, here comes Lord Rochford, to call on Mr. Tovell. Here take my mantle” (a blue woollen apron) “and I’ll go to the door”.’1
The family, as a rule, ate in the kitchen, ‘the heads seated at an old table; the farm men standing in the adjoining scullery, door open—the female servants at a side table, called a bouter’. Any chance visitors sat at the table with the family. After the meal was over, the fire made up and ‘the kitchen sanded and lightly swept over in waves, mistress and maids, taking off their shoes, retired to their chambers for a nap of one hour to the minute’. The cats and dogs slept by the fire and Mr. Tovell dozed in his chair. When the hour was over Mr. Tovell’s ‘tea equipage’, that is, the bottles, were placed on the table and all was ready for his boon companions to come in for an evening’s carouse. Mrs. Tovell and Mr. and Mrs. Crabbe retired to Mrs. Tovell’s own room when voices became raised in the pleasant talk over the bottles. The little boy, George Crabbe, thought too young to understand the talk of the ribald old men, stayed in the kitchen, as the servants did, and enjoyed the excitement of the evening. Looking back on those days he describes the household at Parham as ‘a primitive set’2, but to anyone who can remember the farm households of the end of the last century, or the beginning of the present one, there is nothing very remote in the Tovell establishment. By the end of the nineteenth century the best rooms were no longer unused by the farmer and his family. Nor were they so splendid as the heightened imagination of a child painted the rooms at Parham. But the head of the house still sat with his grog beside him and welcomed the arrival of a friend to share his drink and talk. His wife, in her afternoon cap, with his daughters about her were still plying their needles as Mrs. Tovell had done, but by the light of an oil lamp with a duplex burner. Servants were fewer, for daughters lived to grow up and could do the work of the house. Many farmers’ wives were still as little interested in literature as Mrs. Tovell, but like her they knew all too well who was the head of the house.
When all allowance has been made for the rise and fall of families and for the movement of country people into the towns, there remained in the country-side countless families which had gone on from century to century in much the same walk of life. They had often gone through the years on the same farm. Centuries of Bible teaching had driven home the wife’s subjection to her husband. Centuries of inherited practice had taught many a farmer’s wife how to get her own way. Yet until Parliament had been forced to take action and the full married women’s Property Act was passed in 1882 a man could use as his own any money inherited by his wife. Many families preserve the tradition of a little money inherited by a grandmother or great-grandmother and thrown away on horse-racing by her husband. It was not only the big race-meetings which attracted countrymen to risk their cash. ‘Cock fighting and trotting horses’, the temptation to which my own great-grandfather fell, could be enjoyed all over the country near at home. At the end of the nineteenth century a good wife was as essential to the farmer’s prosperity as she was in the Middle Ages. She played as important a part in the life of the farm community. The farmers’ wives in the manor of Sonning in those days always spoke of their husbands as ‘the Master’, or more often as ‘Master’. In one household the husband walked in from the fields and, as a matter of course, put his feet up one after the other into his wife’s lap for her to take his boots off. But in that same household it was the wife who had the last word in any question of policy.
Paradoxically enough it was the unmarried woman who suffered most through the teaching of the Scriptures about the subjection of the wife, for a good wife who loves a good husband is always willing to let him take the lead. Such rhetoric as William Whately and others of his kind poured forth from the pulpit inevitably had its effect on the attitude of all men to all women. The homily of the state of matrimony of 1562 hints at the independence which women must give up for the trials of marriage, but no teaching was directed to the praise or encouragement of independence in a woman, even in an unmarried woman. The only real hope of the farmer’s daughter was marriage. The unmarried woman was a burden on her family, a failure, since she had not caught a man to keep her. Farmers’ daughters were never well enough educated to get a living at anything else but farming. By the end of the nineteenth century it had long gone out of fashion for them to go into service as their predecessors had been anxious to do. Farmers despised the new profession of school-teaching and resented it because it was paid for out of the rates. One of my own great-aunts who ultimately became the head mistress of an infants’ school in London and is now many years in her grave, was helped by kind friends to learn enough to become one of the first students in a Church training college, but it was in spite of her parents rather than with their help. She had to do her share of the milking before she slipped away for lessons, and it was hard to get permission to go to college. Independence in a woman was only becoming when she had survived matrimony and graduated into a prosperous widowhood. All through the centuries the comfortably-off widow enjoyed the respect of all her neighbours.
The wives and daughters of farm labourers lived in the same atmosphere as the wives and daughters of their employers, but even at the end of the last century no labourer’s wife could look beyond the needs of the passing day. In past centuries their state had been far worse. In the remotest times to which our knowledge goes back women, married as well as unmarried, had taken a full part in the agricultural work of their village. Their wages—not much lower than those of men employed on the same tasks—are set down in wage assessments put out by Quarter Sessions. But women’s work was continually interrupted by the birth of children, of whom many in the labouring class, as indeed in every other class, died before maturity. No farm labourer’s wife can ever have felt well. The women were old long before their time. Even within living memory younger women and children were glad to earn a little money by stone-picking. Potato picking has always been and still is work for women or children.
Fifty years ago in the villages which had grown up in the ancient manor of Sonning the earnings of the labourer’s wife still formed an essential part of the family income. The work she did was generally washing, sewing, and cleaning for women better off than herself. The weekly wage of a farm labourer was generally 11 shillings with a house and garden; a gardener would get 12 shillings. If no house were provided 15 shillings remained the labourer’s wage up to the outbreak of war in 1914. House-rent was at most 4 shillings. Gardens had no fruit trees because the lady of the manor held that potatoes should be grown instead. Daughters were sent out to service at the earliest possible moment in order to get them properly fed. Well into the twentieth century many parents pleaded that girls should be allowed to leave school for service long before the statutory school-leaving age. An examination with a modest standard was devised to justify this. Church-going familes could expect presents of coal and blankets at Christmas and help in times of sickness and dire necessity. Many families in every village were brought up under such conditions. That the husband was provided with enough food to keep him at work, that children were often decently clothed, and that many of them lived to grow up was entirely due to the quality of the labourers’ wives.
Some of these women are still living today and their spirit is as indomitable in extreme old age as it was in what one of them persistently describes as ‘the good old days’. Her husband worked first on a farm and then on the roads. He never earned more than 15 shillings a week and she paid 4 shillings rent for her cottage which she still lives in today at the same rent. ‘Then I had a pig in the sty, and vegetables in the garden. Tea and sugar were cheap and we never wanted’. Women whose early years had been spent in ‘good service’ never forgot the lessons they learned in the homes of their employers. Nevertheless, in most villages there was at least one family which had sunk under the intolerable burden of life. Large families in cottages too small for decency often resulted in consumption and sometimes in incest and the appearance of more unwanted children. That incest was rare was due entirely to the good sense and courage of the farm labourers’ wives in thousands of indifferent cottages up and down the land. Every woman old enough to remember a village of the beginning of the present century can only rejoice that those days are gone for ever.
1 Manuscript in private hands, unpaged.
1 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, Oxford, 1844. ‘The Preface as it was published in the year 1547’, p. xii.
2 Ibid., p. 141.
1 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, pp. 446–58.
2 Ibid., pp. 108–23.
1 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in Churches, p. 279.
2 London.
3 Apparently not reprinted. My own copy was much read and corrected in ink. Religious verse was copied into blank spaces.
4 Prototypes, or The Primarie Precedent Presidents out of the Booke of Genesis, London, 1640, sig. a2.
1 Care-cloth, p. 85.
2 Wood, Athence Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss, London, 1815, vol. ii, col. 640.
3 Bride-bush, 1619, p. 1.
4 Ibid., pp. 97–8.
1 Bride-bush, pp. 107–9.
2 Ibid., pp. 189 ff.
1 The Life of Adam Martindale, ed. R. Parkinson, Chetham Soc., 1845.
2 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
1 The Life of Adam Martindale, p. 8.
2 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
3 Ibid., p. 16.
4 Ibid., p. 157.
5 Ibid., p. 172.
1 The Life of Adam Martindale, p. 118.
2 Ibid., pp. 232–3.
3 Ibid., p. 214.
4 Ibid., pp. 206–9.
1 The Life of Adam Martindale, p. 190.
2 See below, pp. 302–6.
3 Memoirs of the Life of the late Mrs. Catharine Cappe, 2nd ed., London, 1823, pp. 5–6.
4 Ibid., p. 16.
1 Memoirs of the Life of the late Mrs. Catharine Cappe, pp. 13–14.
2 Ibid., pp. 242–3.
1 Life and Poems of the Reverend George Crabbe, London, 1834, vol. i, pp. 142–4.
2 Ibid., p. 146.