The Story of England, page 36
After a similar bequest to her second daughter, Elizabeth, she then turns to her neighbours:
I give to Alice Chapman’s children Anne Wood and William Wood 6s and 8d equally to be divided between them and to be paid them at the age of 16 years. I give also to Alice Chapman’s children Margaret and Thomas 3s 4d between them and to be paid them at the age of sixteen years. I give also to John Clarke 26s 8d to be paid within one year after my decease and 20s among his children to be paid within four year after my departure. I give to Thomas Clarke one half acre of barley and to the children one ewe and a lamb or 5s in money. I give to my two godchildren 6d apiece. I give to Margery Gourde my Sister 12d. I give to Luse [Lucy] Greene my sister 12d and one sheet or 2s. I give also to Alice Poole half a strike of malt, half a strike of mylne corne. I give also to Thomas Martin, Thomas Papennere, John Wright and Richard Heywood every one of them one tolfoot of mylne corne. All the rest of my goods unbequeathed, my funeral expenses being discharged, I give to Laurence my son whom I do make my full executor of this my last Will and Testament. I will that Richard Sharpe and Robert Brian be supervisors to see this my will performed, and they to have for their paines 6d apiece. These being witness Nicholas Decon, Hugh Sothel, John Clarke, with others.
The passing of the old order
Elizabeth’s funeral was held in the churchyard of St Wilfrid’s towards midsummer in 1580. We don’t know how she died, but as most medical cures offered by the village doctor would have been ineffective in relieving pain, it is likely that if she went through a long illness she experienced months or even years of suffering – a time to contemplate her impending death. Like all religious women of her class the art of ‘dying well’ was an important life lesson to be learned. You could even read self-help manuals on how to ‘learn to die’ like Thomas Becon’s Sick Man’s Salve of 1561. With the old certainties no more, an enlarged personal Christian strength and resolve had to be cultivated. Pious women especially were held up as ‘comfortable testimony of godly resolution’.
Her children and close family would have attended her through her last days. But one of the more profound effects of the Protestant Reformation was in the long term to sever the relationship between the dead and the living. Though many traditional beliefs and customs took a long time to fade away, the new Protestant orthodoxy enshrined in the Kibworth vicar’s funeral service was that dead Protestants were now beyond the reach of prayer. Most of the traditional Catholic intercessionary rituals after burial were swept away. Familiar customs that were second nature to the villagers in Henry VIII’s day – trentals, masses, dirges and prayers for the dead – were resolutely set aside. In Elizabeth’s own mind perhaps there still lingered the old familiar prayer which vicar Peyrson had recited for the older generation of the village (it survives in his own words) committing ‘my soule into the handes of Almyghtye God my Creator and Redemer, to Our Blessed Ladye, Most Purest Virgyne, and to all the Holy Companye of Heaven’. But the church ceremony for Elizabeth and her family would have been very different from the pre-Reformation rituals performed by ‘the ghostly fathers’ like Peyrson for Katherine Polle or for Tom and Agnes Colman.
In the old days, as Elizabeth’s older neighbours would have remembered well from their own parents’ funerals, the procession entered the church with the coffin while ‘Sir’ William sang psalms before the great wooden crucifixion above the chancel arch, and wished the soul Godspeed on its journey while sprinkling the body with holy water and censing it with incense:
Almighty and everlasting God we humbly entreat thy mercy, that thou wouldst commend the soul of thy servant, for whose body we perform the due office of burial, to be laid in the bosom of thy patriarch Abraham; that when the day of recognition shall arrive, she may be raised up, at thy biding, among the saints of thy elect.
There over her coffin he and his curates and the village chaplains would have sung the ‘masse and dyrige by note accordyng to the use and custome of the sayd churche and every prest and clerke of the sayd churche …’ And at the end, while candles shimmered around the gilded image of ‘Our Lady of Kibworth’, as had always been done, ‘the great bell shalbe ronge for the space of 6 oures accordyng to the custome of a knell.’
Elizabeth’s funeral though was an altogether starker affair, in a whitewashed church with a Protestant minister in sober black. A version of the committal survived to 1549 – without holy water or incense – but reference to the soul was finally removed under Edward VI in 1552 and was never officially reinstated in the Church of England. The soul went straight to its reward, needing no intercession, commendation or committal. All that was committed was the body to the earth. One bishop’s set of rules for funerals in the 1570s inadvertently reveals the continuing pull of the old country rituals at this time:
no superstition should be committed in them wherein the papists infinitely offend; as in masses, dirges, trentals, singing, ringing, holy water, years’, days’, and month-minds, crosses, pardon letters to be buried with them, mourners, de profundis sung by every lad that could say it, money for the dead, watching of the corpse, bell and banner, and many more that I could reckon.
The Protestant Reformation thus radically revised not only the rituals but the process of salvation itself: as one might say, its conceptual geography. Where do souls go now? The question was of great personal moment in an age tormented by religion: no less an intellect than Hamlet will later frame it, deftly catching the public anxiety. The prayer book of 1552 and its Elizabethan successor which vicar Beridge used at Elizabeth Clarke’s funeral assert that the soul of the elect will immediately live in the Lord, ‘delivered from the burden of the flesh … in joy and felicity’. Instead of petitioning God for favours, he simply rejoiced that ‘it hath pleased thee to deliver this Elizabeth our sister, out of the miseries of this sinful life.’
So the trental of masses paid for by her fellow villagers for almost a thousand years to help the soul through Purgatory was a thing now of mere ‘childish superstition’. Inevitably such things were so ingrained a part of religious practice that it took several decades of preaching, discipline and punishment to draw them to a close. Though ‘not permitted by the laws of this realm’, funeral feasts still persisted in Kibworth as elsewhere; provisions for obits and prayers for souls are still found in local wills in the thirty years before Elizabeth’s death and even after. Anniversaries and communions for the dead may have survived, and of course belief in ghosts took much longer to be done away with. We don’t know whether Elizabeth’s children cast the prohibited flowers on her coffin; though many vicars up and down the land, including perhaps Beridge, made concessions to their parishioners’ feelings as they helped them adjust to ‘the revolution of the time’.
With Elizabeth’s funeral we leave our sketch of the impact of Henry’s Reformation on Kibworth: fifty years in the life of a community about which we can tell little from the official sources. But these last testaments of the villagers give us in their own words a few precious clues to the changes they were living through. In a sense, though, it is the old imperatives of the community which are most vividly revealed in these documents: the continuities of farming life in Kibworth; the importance of land, family and inheritance; the strong links with neighbours and their children; even the care of the poor. But also detectable now, as the old communally organized world is gradually transformed, is the growth of new ideas about property, wealth and individualism which would shape a different future for the people of Kibworth – and, of course, the people of England.
15. A Century of Revolution
The heavy snows of the first years of the seventeenth century provide us with images as vivid as those from the eighth century or the early fourteenth. In London the Thames froze over, and the bitter winters have left their trace in poetry of the time in images of ‘wind fanned snow’. On frozen and rutted roads travel proved especially difficult. The main road north to the Trent was notorious as ‘one of the worst kept roads in the kingdom’, impassable in winter, and when wet ‘loaded with mud to the footocks’, so that wagons must be ‘dragged on their bellies’. Travellers in the East Midlands remarked that it was so hard to get them properly repaired that an entirely new road system ‘as Romans did of old’ might be the answer: ‘so heavy the loads, and so numerous the carriages that a great number of horses are killed each year by the excess of labour.’ Daniel Defoe noted on his travels a little later that the road beyond Northampton through Harborough to Leicester, which ran through Kibworth, was ‘perfectly frightful to travellers … where there is no provision for repair, and in some seasons dangerous’. The winter of 1606–7 was the worst: the poet John Marston, who travelled this road through Leicester to write a masque for an aristocratic house party near the city, describes noble ladies on their struggling carriages, their hair shining with ‘glittering icicles all crystalline, … periwigged with snow, russet mantles fringed with ice, stiff on the back’.
Kibworth Harcourt in 1609, from a Merton Estate map: it was still surrounded by the open fields
Kibworth suffered heavy losses from plague in 1605–6, then shivered through the long winter. Almost every house now had chimneys burning coal in bad weather. Taxed in the seventeenth century on the number of hearths, it was still normal for villagers to have two or three; many had four, and some like the Rays had as many as eight. At this time the village population was on the rise. The revival of population in England after the calamities of the fourteenth century continued apace during the first half of the seventeenth – from an estimated 4.1 to 5.3 million between 1601 and 1656. In Kibworth Harcourt there was a slow but steady increase, but development had not gone beyond the bounds of the village reached in the fourteenth century. In a beautiful map from this time of the open fields of Harcourt, held at Merton, the houses still lie behind the old hedge as they had for centuries, the tenements and gardens running back from Main Street. The Rays are in the former bailiff’s house; the Coxons are in Priory Farm; John Polle (the last of the male line of Polles) is on Hogg Lane, and Rob Brian (son of Elizabeth Clarke’s trusted friend) and Oswin are at the end of Hogg Lane by the village hedge.
For the parish as a whole the population had risen in Elizabeth’s reign from eighty-two taxable households in 1563, perhaps 500 people, to 444 registered communicants at church at the end of the reign. These were people over fourteen, which suggests an increase in population to about 600. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were nearly 200 households evenly divided between the two Kibworths and Smeeton, perhaps 800 people. These increases took place despite severe mortality from disease over the century. Typhus, influenza and plague continued to leave their mark, and the danger of bad harvests and famine was ever present. There were three great periods of mortality between the later years of Elizabeth’s reign and the 1690s. In the plague in the 1590s sixty-two men, women and children died; and there were even more heavy losses in 1605–6 with seventy-nine deaths. That summer alone thirty-three men and thirty-four women were buried in the churchyard, though the villagers were successful in protecting their children, only two of whom were lost. A last major outbreak in Kibworth between winter 1657 and summer 1659 caused fifty-seven deaths, among them sixteen children. But the community managed to cope with all this and avoided starvation in the years of the extraordinarily bad harvests of 1612 and 1639. Only in the 1698 famine year did the village see high mortality.
Rural revolt
The conditions of rural life in England were still as precarious as they had been in the fourteenth century. A string of bad harvests after bad winters and heavy rains brought the rural poor in the Midlands to their knees in the first decade of the century. There had already been sporadic violence in Midland towns against recent enclosures as avaricious landlords ploughed up the hedges and the common field strips for sheep farming. The old communal society of the Midland ‘champain’ lands was beginning to dissolve. In the first week of June 1607, major rural riots flared up across Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, with several thousand peasants and agricultural workers demonstrating against the enclosers. In Leicestershire rural revolt flared to the south of Kibworth at Cotesbatch, where crowds of workers tore out fences and hedges. These rural rebels called themselves ‘Diggers’, and as they marched the Diggers of Warwickshire sang songs brimming with workers’ patriotism:
From Hampton-field in haste
we rest as poor delvers and day labourers
for the good of the Commonwealth till death …
The Diggers had produced a written manifesto to put their case to the local authorities – the JPs and freeholders – portraying themselves in an almost Shakespearean image as one limb of the English body politic, still loyal to their king:
Loving friends and subjects under one renowned prince, for whom we pray long to continue in his royal estate … his most true hearted Commonalty … We as members of the whole, do feel the smart of these encroaching tyrants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty …
At Hill Norton 3,000 rebels gathered to protest against ‘the incroaching tyrants who grind the faces of the poor’. In response local JPs and gentry assembled armed bands and erected a scaffold in the centre of Leicester. On 8 June over the shire border at the village of Newton in Northamptonshire a crowd of almost 3,000 peasants was attacked by a private army raised by the local authorities. The rebels were easily dispersed, leaving fifty or so dead. The leaders were hauled off to Northampton, where they were summarily condemned to death, and hanged, drawn and quartered on a scaffold in the centre of town.
Across the Midlands many were shocked by the brutality of the retribution. On 21 June in Northampton a sermon was preached by Robert Wilkinson, who used the Diggers’ metaphor of the body politic to preach against all violence, including that of the rulers ‘who reformed wickedness with a greater wickedness’. The smell of burning was in the air, with prophecies of greater conflagrations ahead. Kibworth itself had so far escaped big enclosure battles; the amount of land still farmed as common fields and pastures almost 200 years later shows that it remained till the end an open-field village. But around it many other such villages had already gone, and across England the voice of the workforce, suppressed in Elizabeth’s day, was now clamouring to be heard, more vocal, more self aware and increasingly literate. The changing nature of the proletariat then, coupled with the changing nature of what they called ‘the middling sort’ – people who wanted more say in local affairs than a franchise based only on gentlemen of the shire – were developments that set the scene for the Civil War. And in the background of the revolutions of the seventeenth century was education.
A literate society
The sixteenth century had been an era of turbulence and change in England – in politics, religion, economy and society. The Reformation had broken down many medieval institutions that had served the community. But the Tudor period had also seen huge advances in education. During the reign of Elizabeth, 160 grammar schools had been founded, making England the most literate society the world had yet seen. After Henry VIII and his son Edward had dissolved the monasteries, and abolished guilds and chantries, the traditional institutions of charity and social welfare had found themselves pillaged by a rising gentry and middle class profiting from a spectacular property boom. In Kibworth there had long been a grammar teacher, possibly even some kind of ‘school’, which village tradition said had been founded in the time of Warwick the Kingmaker, during the Wars of the Roses. In the early days the ‘grammar school’ in Kibworth (like most village schools) consisted of nothing more than a chantry priest teaching children in the corner of the church nave, or in a private house in winter, but this arrangement had been financed by the rents from ‘school lands’ originally gifted by local farmers for a chantry. During the Reformation, as we have seen, these had been saved by the intervention of the Lord of the Manor of Kibworth Beauchamp, John Dudley, who, according to the Kibworth gentleman Robert Ray, shrank from grabbing lands ‘employed to so good a use as the maintenance of a school’.
Kibworth school’s surviving feoffment charter from 1595 provides the names of eighteen men then appointed to act as trustees. It is a telling testimony to the range of social classes working together on the school’s management: two knights, four gentlemen, nine yeomen and three husbandmen – a real mix of the Elizabethan ‘community of the village’ and all, presumably, interested in the provision of education for their sons and happy for them to share a classroom. The knights and gentlemen were largely from outside the village (and the involvement of eminent men from across the county testifies to the importance of the school in its wider region). Of the four gentlemen, only Robert Ray (grandson of Thomas, whose will we saw above (pp. 290–95)), was himself a Kibworth resident. Seven of the yeomen trustees were local: Thomas Fox and Richard Polle of Harcourt, John Iliffe of Beauchamp, and Zachary Chapman, Arthur Cloudesley, Richard Bryan and James Wright of Smeeton Westerby – all of them respected and respectable ‘swearing men’ who farmed their own land. The labourers were William Frisby and William Smeeton of Beauchamp and William Goode of Smeeton Westerby. It may seem surprising to find sixteenth-century farm labourers serving on the board of a grammar school, but a mark of the ‘community of the village’ in that time was the respect afforded to ordinary freemen in local society. They may not have all been literate themselves – half a century later a few of the school trustees still signed their names with a single initial – but they appreciated the value of literacy, and aspired to it for their children.
