among country people, than the strange ignorance which they exhibit of
the _history of themselves_. I do not allude to those unpleasant
secrets which we should be very sorry indeed for our next-door
neighbours to be acquainted with, nor to any such matters as our
experience or memories of actual facts could bring to our minds; I mean
something very much more than that. Men and women are not only the
beings they appear to be at any one moment of their lives, they are not
single separate atoms like grains of sand. Rather they are like
branches or leaves of some great tree, from which they have sprung and
on which they have grown, whose life in the past has come at last to
them in the present, and without whose deep anchorage in the soil, and
its ages of vigour and vitality, not a bud or a spray that is so fresh
and healthful now would have had any existence.
Consider for a moment--Who are we, and what do we mean by _Ourselves_?
When I meet a ragged, shuffling tramp on the road (and I meet a good
many of them in my lonely walks) I often find myself asking the
question, "How did that shambling vagabond come to his present
condition? Did his father turn him out of doors? Did his mother drink?
Did he learn nothing but lying and swearing and thieving when he was a
child? Was his grandfather hanged for some crime, or was his
great-grandfather a ruffian killed in a fight?" And I say to myself,
"Though I do not know the truth, yet I am sure that man was helped
towards his vagabondism, helped to become an outcast as he is, by the
neglect or the wickedness, the crimes or the bad example of his fathers
and forefathers on one side or the other; for if he had come of decent
people on both sides, people who had been honestly and soberly brought
up themselves, as they tried to bring up their children, yonder dirty
tramp would not and could not have sunk to his present self, for we and
ourselves are what we come to, partly by our own sins and vices, but
partly (and much more than some like to believe) by the sins,
negligences, and ignorances of those whose blood is in our veins.
My friends, it surely must be worth our while to know much more than
most of us do know about _Ourselves_.
Being convinced of this, and believing, moreover, that to most of us
nothing on earth is so interesting as that which most concerns
ourselves at any period of our existence, I resolved, when I was asked
to address you here this evening, that I would try to give you some
notion of the kind of life which your fathers led in this parish a
long, long time ago, and so help you to understand through what strange
changes we have all passed, and what strange stories the walls of our
houses, if they could speak, would have to tell, and on what wonderful
struggles, and hardships, and dangers, and sorrows yonder church tower
of yours has looked down, since, centuries ago, it first rose up, the
joy and pride of those whose hands laid stone on stone.
When I came to think over the matter, however, I found that I could not
tell you very much that I was sure of about your own parish of
Tittleshall, but that it so happened I could tell you something that is
new to you about a parish that joins your own; and because what was
going on among your close neighbours at any one time would be in the
main pretty much what would be going on among your forefathers, in
bringing before you the kind of life which people led in the adjoining
parish of Rougham six hundred years ago, I should be describing
precisely the life which people were leading here in this parish where
we are now--people, remember, whose blood is throbbing in the veins of
some of you present; for from that dust that lies in your churchyard
yonder I make no doubt that some of you have sprung--you whom I am
speaking to now.
Six hundred years ago! Yes, it is a long time. Not a man of you can
throw his thoughts back to so great a lapse of time. I do not expect it
of you; but nevertheless I am going to try to give you a picture of a
Norfolk village, and that a village which you all know better than I
do, such as it was six hundred years ago.
In those days an ancestor of our gracious Queen, who now wears the
crown of England, was king; and the Prince of Wales, whom many of you
must have seen in Norfolk, was named _Edward_ after this same king. In
those days there were the churches standing generally where they stand
now. In those days, too, the main roads ran pretty much where they now
run; and there was the same sun overhead, and there were clouds, and
winds, and floods, and storms, and sunshine; but if you, any of you,
could be taken up and dropped down in Tittleshall or Rougham such as
they were at the time I speak of, you would feel almost as strange as
if you had been suddenly transported to the other end of the world.
The only object that you would at all recognize would be the parish
church. That stands where it did, and where it has stood, perhaps, for
a thousand years or more; but, at the time we are now concerned with,
it looked somewhat different from what it looks now. It had a tower,
but that tower was plainer and lower than the present one. The windows,
too, were very different; they were smaller and narrower; I think it
probable that in some of them there was stained glass, and it is almost
certain that the walls were covered with paintings representing scenes
from the Bible, and possibly some stories from the lives of the saints,
which everybody in those days was familiar with. There was no pulpit
and no reading desk. When the parson preached, he preached from the
steps of the altar. The altar itself was much more ornamented than now
it is. Upon the altar there were always some large wax tapers which
were lit on great occasions, and over the altar there hung a small lamp
which was kept alight night and day. It was the parson's first duty to
look to it in the morning, and his last to trim it at night.
The parish church was too small for the population of Rougham, and the
consequence was that it had been found necessary to erect what we
should now call a chapel of ease--served, I suppose, by an assistant
priest, who would be called a chaplain. I cannot tell you where this
chapel stood, but it had a burial-ground of its own. [Footnote: Compare
the remarkable regulations of Bishop Woodloke of Winchester (A.D.
1308), illustrative of this. Wilkins' "Conc.," vol. ii. p. 296. By
these constitutions every chapel, two miles from the mother church, was
bound to have its own burying-ground]
There was, I think, only one road deserving the name, which passed
through Rougham. It ran almost directly north and south from Coxford
Abbey to Castle Acre Priory. But do not suppose that a road in those
days meant what it does now. To begin with, people in the country never
drove about in carriages. In such a place as Rougham, men and women
might live all their lives without ever seeing a travelling carriage,
whether on four wheels or two. [Footnote: It is, however, not
improbable that when the Queen came into Norfolk, the eyes of the
awe-struck rustics may have been dazzled by even such an astonishing
equipage as is figured in Mr. Parker's "Hist. Domestic Architecture,"
vol. ii. p. 141.] The road was quite unfit for driving on. There were
no highway rates. Now and then a roadway got so absolutely impassable,
or a bridge over a stream became so dangerous, that people grumbled;
and then an order came down from the king to the high sheriff of the
county, bidding him see to his road, and the sheriff thereupon taxed
the dwellers in the hundred and forced them to put things straight. The
village of Rougham in those days was in its general plan not very
unlike the present village--that is to say, the church standing where
it does, next to the churchyard was the parsonage with a croft
attached; and next to that a row of houses inhabited by the principal
people of the place, whose names I could give you, and the order of
their dwellings, if it were worth while. Each of these houses had some
outbuildings--cowsheds, barns, &c., and a small croft fenced round.
Opposite these houses was another row facing west, as the others faced
east; but these latter houses were apparently occupied by the poorer
inhabitants--the smith, the carpenter, and the general shopkeeper, who
called himself, and was called by others, the _merchant_. There was one
house which appears to have stood apart from the rest and near Wesenham
Heath. It probably was encircled by a moat, and approached by a
drawbridge, the bridge being drawn up at sunset. It was called the Lyng
House, and had been probably built two or three generations back, and
now was occupied by a person of some consideration--viz., Thomas
Middleton, Archdeacon of Suffolk, and brother of William Middleton,
then Bishop of Norwich. This house was on the east side of the road,
and the road leading up to it had a name, and was called the Hutgong.
In front of the house was something like a small park of 5-½ acres
inclosed; and next that again, to the south, 4 acres of ploughed land;
and behind that again--that is, between it and the village--there was
the open heath. Altogether, this property consisted of a house and 26
acres. Archdeacon Middleton bought it on October 6, 1283, and he bought
it in conjunction with his brother Elias, who was soon after made
seneschal or steward of Lynn for his other brother, the bishop. The two
brothers probably used this as their country house, for both of them
had their chief occupation elsewhere; but when the bishop died, in
1288, and they became not quite the important people they had been
before, they sold the Lyng House to another important person, of whom
we shall hear more by-and-by.
The Lyng House, however, was not the great house of Rougham. I am
inclined to think _that_ stood not far from the spot where Rougham Hall
now stands. It was in those days called the Manor House, or the Manor.
And this brings me to a point where I must needs enter into some
explanations. Six hundred years ago all the land in England was
supposed to belong to the king in the first instance. The king had in
former times parcelled it out into tracts of country, some large and
some small, and made over these tracts to his great lords, or barons,
as they were called. The barons were supposed to hold these tracts,
called fiefs, as _tenants_ of the king, and in return they were
expected to make an acknowledgment to the king in the shape of some
_service_, which, though it was not originally a money payment, yet
became so eventually, and was always a substantial charge upon the
land. These fiefs were often made up of estates in many different
shires; and, because it was impossible for the barons to cultivate all
their estates themselves, they let them out to _subtenants_, who in
their turn were bound to render services to the lord of the fief. These
sub-tenants were the great men in the several parishes, and became the
actual lords of the manors, residing upon the manors, and having each,
on their several manors, very large powers for good or evil over the
tillers of the soil.
A manor six hundred years ago meant something very different from a
manor now. The lord was a petty king, having his subjects very much
under his thumb. But his subjects differed greatly in rank and status.
In the first place, there were those who were called the free tenants.
The free tenants were they who lived in houses of their own and
cultivated land of their own, and who made only an annual money payment
to the lord of the manor as an acknowledgment of his lordship. The
payment was trifling, amounting to some few pence an acre at the most,
and a shilling or so, as the case might be, for the house. This was
called the _rent_, but it is a very great mistake indeed to represent
this as the same thing which we mean by rent now-a-days. It really was
almost identical with what we now call in the case of house property,
"ground rent," and bore no proportion to the value of the produce that
might be raised from the soil which the tenant held. The free tenant
was neither a yearly tenant, nor a leaseholder. His holding was, to all
intents and purposes, his own--subject, of course, to the payment of
the ground rent. But if he wanted to sell out of his holding, the lord
of the manor exacted a payment for the privilege. If he died, his heir
had to pay for being admitted to his inheritance, and if he died
without heirs, the property went back to the lord of the manor, who
then, but only then, could raise the ground rent if he pleased, though
he rarely did so. So much for the free tenants.
Besides these were the _villeins_ or _villani_, or _natives_, as they
were called. The villeins were tillers of the soil, who held land under
the lord, and who, besides paying a small money ground rent, were
obliged to perform certain arduous services to the lord, such as to
plough the lord's land for so many days in the year, to carry his corn
in the harvest, to provide a cart on occasion, &c. Of course these
burdens pressed very heavily at times, and the services of the villeins
were vexatious and irritating under a hard and unscrupulous lord. But
there were other serious inconveniences about the condition of the
villein or native. Once a villein, always a villein. A man or woman
born in villeinage could never shake it off. Nay, they might not even
go away from the manor to which they were born, and they might not
marry without the lord's license, and for that license they always had
to pay. Let a villein be ever so shrewd or enterprising or thrifty,
there was no hope for him to change his state, except by the special
grace of the lord of the manor. [Footnote: I do not take account of
those who ran away to the corporate towns. I suspect that there were
many more cases of this than some writers allow. It was sometimes a
serious inconvenience to the lords of manors near such towns as Norwich
or Lynn. A notable example may be found in the "Abbrev, Placit.," p.
316 (6°. E. ii. Easter term). It seems that no less than eighteen
villeins of the Manor of Cossey were named in a mandate to the Sheriff
of Norfolk and Suffolk, who were to be taken and reduced to villeinage,
and their goods seized. Six of them pleaded that they were citizens of
Norwich--the city being about four miles from Cossey.] Yes, there was
one means whereby he could be set free, and that was if he could get a
bishop to ordain him. The fact of a man being ordained at once made him
a free man, and a knowledge of this fact must have served as a very
strong inducement to young people to avail themselves of all the helps
in their power to obtain something like an education, and so to qualify
themselves for admission to the clerical order and to the rank of
free-man.
At Rougham there was a certain Ralph Red, who was one of these villeins
under the lord of the manor, a certain William le Butler. Ralph Red had
a son Ralph, who I suppose was an intelligent youth, and made the most
of his brains. He managed to get ordained about six hundred years ago,
and he became a chaplain, perhaps to that very chapel of ease I
mentioned before. His father, however, was still a villein, liable to
all the villein services, and _belonging_ to the manor and the lord, he
and all his offspring. Young Ralph did not like it, and at last,
getting the money together somehow, he bought his father's freedom,
and, observe, with his freedom the freedom of all his father's children
too, and the price he paid was twenty marks. [Footnote: N.B.--A man
could not buy his own freedom, Merewether's "Boroughs," i. 350. Compare
too Littleton on "Tenures," p 65, 66.] That sounds a ridiculously small
sum, but I feel pretty sure that six hundred years ago twenty marks
would be almost as difficult for a penniless young chaplain to get
together as L500 for a penniless young curate to amass now. Of the
younger Ralph, who bought his father's freedom, I know little more;
but, less than one hundred and fifty years after the elder man received
his liberty, a lineal descendant of his became lord of the manor of
Rougham, and, though he had no son to carry on his name, he had a
daughter who married a learned judge, Sir William Yelverton, Knight of
the Bath, whose monument you may still see at Rougham Church, and from
whom were descended the Yelvertons, Earls of Sussex, and the present
Lord Avonmore, who is a scion of the same stock.
When Ralph Red bought his father's freedom of William le Butler,
William gave him an acknowledgment for the money, and a written
certificate of the transaction, but he did not sign his name. In those
days nobody signed their names, not because they could not write, for I
suspect that just as large a proportion of people in England could
write well six hundred years ago, as could have done so forty years
ago, but because it was not the fashion to sign one's name. Instead of
doing that, everybody who was a free man, and a man of substance, in
executing any legal instrument, affixed to it his _seal_, and that
stood for his signature. People always carried their seals about with
them in a purse or small bag, and it was no uncommon thing for a
pickpocket to cut off this bag and run away with the seal, and thus put
the owner to very serious inconvenience. This was what actually did
happen once to William le Butler's father-in-law. He was a certain Sir
Richard Bellhouse, and he lived at North Tuddenham, near Dereham. Sir
Richard was High Sheriff for the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk in
1291, and his duties brought him into court on January 25th of that
year, before one of the Judges at Westminster. I suppose the court was
crowded, and in the crowd some rogue cut off Sir Richard's purse, and
made off with his seal. I never heard that he got it back again.
[Footnote: Abbreviatio Placit. 284, b.]
And now I must return to the point from which I wandered when I began
to speak of the free tenants and the "villeins." William le Butler, who
sold old Ralph Red to his own son, the young Ralph, was himself sprung
from a family who had held the Manor of Rougham for about a century.
His father was Sir Richard le Butler, who died about 1280, leaving
behind him one son, our friend William, and three daughters.
Unfortunately, William le Butler survived his father only a very short
time, and he left no child to succeed him. The result was that the
inheritance of the old knight was divided among his daughters, and what
had been hitherto a single lordship became three lordships, each of the
parceners looking very jealously after his own interest, and striving
to make the most of his powers _and rights_.
Though each of the husbands of Sir Richard le Butler's daughters was a
man of substance and influence--yet, when the manor was divided, no one
of them was anything like so great a person as the old Sir Richard. In
those days, as in our own, there were much richer men in the country
than the country gentlemen, and in Rougham at this time there were two
very prosperous men who were competing with one another as to which
should buy up most land in the parish, and be the great man of the
place. The one of these was a gentleman called Peter the Roman, and the
other was called Thomas the Lucky. They were both the sons of Rougham
people, and it will be necessary to pursue the history of each of them
to make you understand how things went in those "good old times."
First let me deal with Peter the Roman. He was the son of a Rougham
lady named Isabella, by an Italian gentleman named lacomo de Ferentino,
or if you like to translate it into English, James of Ferentinum.
How James of Ferentinum got to Rougham and captured one of the Rougham
heiresses we shall never know for certain. But we do know that in the
days of King Henry, who was the father of King Edward, there was a very
large incursion of Italian clergy into England, and that the Pope of
Rome got preferment of all kinds for them. In fact, in King Henry's
days the Pope had immense power in England, and it looked for a while
as if every valuable piece of preferment in the kingdom would be
bestowed upon Italians who did not know a word of English, and who
often never came near their livings at all. One of these Italian
gentlemen, whose name was _John_ de Ferentino, was very near being made
Bishop of Norwich; [Footnote: At the death of Thomas de Blunville in
1236. John de Ferentino must have been almost supreme in the diocese.
The see was practically vacant for three years.] he _was_ Archdeacon of
Norwich, but though the Pope tried to make him bishop, he happily did
not succeed in forcing him into the see that time, and John of
Ferentinum had to content himself with his archdeaconry and one or two
other preferments.
Our friend at Rougham may have been, and probably was, some kinsman of
the archdeacon, and it is just possible that Archdeacon Middleton, who,
you remember, bought the Lyng House, may have had, as his predecessor
in it, another archdeacon, this John de Ferentino, whose nephew or
brother, James, married Miss Isabella de Rucham, and settled down among
his wife's kindred. Be that as it may, John de Ferentino had two sons,
Peter and Richard, and it appears that their father, not content with
such education as Oxford or Cambridge could afford--though at this time
Oxford was one of the most renowned universities in Europe--sent his
sons to Rome, having an eye to their future advancement; for in King
Henry's days a young man that had friends at Rome was much more likely
to get on in the world than he who had only friends in the King's
Court, and he who wished to push his interests in the Church must look
to the Pope, and not to the King of England, as his main support.
When young Peter came back to Rougham, I dare say he brought back with
him some new airs and graces from Italy, and I dare say the new
fashions made his neighbours open their eyes. They gave the young
fellow the name he is known by in the charters, and to the day of his
death people called him Peter Romayn, or Peter the Roman. But Peter
came back a changed man in more ways than one. He came back a cleric.
We in England now recognize only three orders of clergy--bishops,
priests, and deacons. But six hundred years ago it was very different.
In those days a man might be two or three degrees below a deacon, and
yet be counted a cleric and belonging to the clergy; and, though Peter
Romayn was not priest or deacon, he was a privileged person in many
ways, but a very unprivileged person in one way--he might never marry.
It was a hard case for a young man who had taken to the clerical
profession without taking to the clerical life, and all the harder
because there were old men living whose fathers or grandfathers had
known the days when even a Bishop of Norwich was married, and who could
tell of many an old country clergyman who had had his wife and children
in the parsonage. But now--just six hundred years ago--if a young
fellow had once been admitted a member of the clerical body, he was no
longer under the protection of the laws of the realm, nor bound by
them, but he was under the dominion of another law, commonly known as
the Canon Law, which the Pope of Rome had succeeded in imposing upon
the clergy; and in accordance with that law, if he took to himself a
wife, he was, to all intents and purposes, a ruined man.