great territorial family, from the gutter to affluence in the course
of less than 100 years; to show how plain "Williams" gradually and
secretly became "Cromwell"--because the new name had about it a
flavour of nobility, however parvenu; to show how the whole of their
vast revenues depended upon, and was born from, the destruction of
monastic system, and to show by the example of one Thames-side family
how rapidly and from what sources was derived that economic power of
the squires which, when it came to the issue of arms, utterly
destroyed what was left of the national monarchy.
The new _régime_ had, however, other features about it which must not
be forgotten. For instance, in this growth of a new territorial body
upon the ruins of the monastic orders, in this sudden and portentous
increase of the wealth and power of the squires of England, the
mutability of the new system is perhaps as striking as any other of
its characteristics.
Manors or portions of manors which had been steadily fixed in the
possession and customs of these undying corporations for centuries
pass rapidly from hand to hand, and though there is sometimes a lull
in the process the uprooting reoccurs after each lull, as though
continuity and a strong tradition, which are necessarily attached for
good or for evil to a free peasantry, were as necessarily disregarded
by a landed plutocracy. There is not, perhaps, in all Europe a similar
complete carelessness for the traditions of the soil and for the
attachment of a family to an ancestral piece of land as is to be found
among these few thousand squires. The system remains, but the
individual families, the particular lineages, appear without
astonishment and are destroyed almost without regret. Aliens,
Orientals and worse, enter the ruling class, and are received without
surprise; names that recall the Elizabethans go out, and are not
mourned.
We are accustomed to-day, when we see some village estate in our own
country pass from an impoverished gentleman to some South African Jew,
to speak of the passing of an old world and of its replacement by a
new and a worse one. But an examination of the records which follow
the Dissolution of the monasteries may temper our sorrow. The wound
that was dealt in the sixteenth century to our general national
traditions affected the love of the land as profoundly as it did
religion, and the apparent antiquity which the trees, the stones, and
a certain spurious social feeling lend to these country houses is
wholly external.
Among the riparian manors of the Thames the fate of Bisham is very
characteristic of the general fate of monastic land. It was
surrendered, among other smaller monasteries, in 1536, though it
enjoyed an income corresponding to about £6000 a year of our money,
and of course very much more than £6000 a year in our modern way of
looking at incomes. It was thus a wealthy place, and how it came to be
included in the smaller monasteries is not quite clear. At any rate it
was restored immediately after. The monks of Chertsey were housed in
it, as we have already seen, and the revenues of several of the
smaller dissolved houses were added to it; so that it was at the
moment of its refoundation about three times as wealthy as it had been
before. The prior who had surrendered in 1536, one Barlow, was made
Bishop of St Asaphs, and in turn of St. Davids, Bath and Wells, and
Chichester; he is that famous Barlow who took the opportunity of the
Reformation to marry, and whose five daughters all in turn married the
Protestant bishops of the new Church of England. But this is by the
way. The fate of the land is what is interesting. From Anne of Cleves,
whose portion it had been, and to whom the Government of the great
nobles under Edward VI. confirmed it after Henry VIII.'s death, it
passed, upon her surrendering it in 1552, to a certain Sir Philip
Hoby. He had been of the Privy Council of Henry VIII. Upon his death
it passed to his nephew, Edward Hoby; Edward was a Parliamentarian
under Elizabeth, wrote on Divinity, and left an illegitimate son,
Peregrine, to whom he bequeathed Bisham upon his death in 1617. It
need hardly be said that before 100 years were over the son was
already legitimatised in the county traditions; his son, Edward, was
created Baron just after the Restoration, in 1666. The succession was
kept up for just 100 years more, when the last male heir of the family
died in 1766. He was not only a baron but a parson as well, and on his
death the estate went to relatives by the name of Mill, or, as we
might imagine, "Hoby" Mill. It did not long remain with them. They
died out in 1780 and the Van Sittarts bought it of the widow.
Consider Chertsey, from which Bisham sprang. The utter dispersion of
the whole tradition of Chertsey is more violent than that perhaps of
any other historical site in England. The Crown maintained, as we have
seen to be the case elsewhere, its nominal hold upon the foundations
of the abbey and of what was left of the buildings, though that hold
was only nominal, and it maintained such a position until 1610--that
is, for a full lifetime after the community was dispersed. But the
tradition created by FitzWilliam continued, and the Crown was ready to
sell at that date, to a certain Dr. Hammond. The perpetual mobility
which seems inseparable from spoils of this kind attaches
thenceforward to the unfortunate place. The Hammonds sell after the
Restoration to Sir Nicholas Carew, and before the end of the
seventeenth century the Carews pass it on to the Orbys, and the Orbys
pass it on to the Waytes. The Waytes sell it to a brewer of London,
one Hinde. So far, contemptuous as has been the treatment of this
great national centre, it had at least remained intact. With Hinde's
son even that dignity deserted it. He found it advisable to distribute
the land in parcels as a speculation; the actual emplacement of the
building went to a certain Harwell, an East Indian, in 1753, and his
son left it by will to a private soldier called Fuller, who was
suspected of being his illegitimate brother. Fuller, as might be
expected, saw nothing but an opportunity of making money. He redivided
what was left intact of the old estate, and sold that again by lots in
1809; a stockbroker bought the remaining materials of a house whose
roots struck back to the very footings of our country, sold them for
what they were worth--and there was the end of Chertsey.
Then there is also Radley: which begins as an exception, but fails. It
was a manor of Abingdon, and after the Dissolution it fell a prey to
that one of the Seymours who proved too dirty and too much even for
his brother and was put to death in 1549. It passed for the moment, as
we have seen several of these riverside manors do, into the hands of
Mary. But upon her death Elizabeth bestowed it upon a certain
Stonehouse, and the Stonehouses did come uncommonly near to founding a
family that should endure. Nor can their tradition be said to have
disappeared when the name changed and the manor passed to the nephew
of the last Stonehouse, by name Bowyer. But Bowyer did not retain it.
He gradually ruined himself: and it is amusing at this distance of
time to learn that the cause of his ruin was the idea that coal
underlay his property. Everyone knows what Radley since became: it was
purchased by an enthusiast, and is now a school springing from his
foundation.
Or consider the two Hinkseys opposite Oxford, both portions of
Abingdon manors; they are granted in the general loot to two worthies
bearing the names of Owen and Bridges: a doctor.
These were probably no more than vulgar speculators upon a
premium--"Stags," as we should say to-day--for a few years afterwards
we find a Williams in possession of one of the Hinkseys; he is
followed by the Perrots, and only quite late, and by purchase, do we
come to the somewhat more dignified name of Harcourt. The other
Hinksey, after still more varied adventures, ends up in the hands of
the Berties, obscure south-country people who date from a rich
Protestant marriage of the time.
Cholsey, again, with its immemorial traditions of unchanging
ecclesiastical custom, receiving its priests in Saxon times from the
Mont St. Michel upon the marches of Brittany, and later holding as a
manor from the Abbot of Reading, remains with the Crown but a very few
years. In 1555 Mary handed it over to that Sir Robert Englefield who
was promptly attainted by her successor. It gets in the hands of the
Knowleses, then of the Rich's, and ends up with the family of
Edwardes-seventeenth-century Welshmen, who, by a plan of wealthy
marriages, became gentlemen, and have now for 100 years and more been
peers, under the title of Kensington.
The mention of Sir Robert Englefield leads one to what is perhaps the
best example in the whole Thames Valley of this perpetual chop and
change in the holding of English land; that example is to be
discovered at Pangbourne.
Pangbourne also was monastic; and the manor held, as did Cholsey, of
Reading Abbey. In the race for the spoils Dudley clutched it in 1550.
When he was beheaded, three years later, and it passed again to the
Crown, Mary handed it (as she had handed Cholsey) to Sir Robert
Englefield. His attainder followed. Within ten years it changes hands
again. Elizabeth in 1563 gave it to her cofferer, a Mr Weldon. This
personage struck no root, nor his son after him, for in 1613, while
still some were alive who could remember the old custom and immemorial
monastic lordship of the place, Weldon the younger sold it to a
certain Davis.
Davis, one would hope--in that seventeenth century which was so
essentially the century of the squires, and in that generation also
wherein the squires wiped out what was left of the Crown and left the
King a salaried dependant of the governing class--Davis might surely
have attempted to found a family and to achieve some sort of dignity
of tradition. He probably made no such an attempt, but if he did he
failed; for only half-a-century later the unfortunate place changes
hands again, and the Davises sell it to the Breedons.
The Breedons showed greater stability. They are actually associated
with Pangbourne for over a century, but even this experiment in
lineage broke down, through the extinction of the direct line. In
1776, by a sham continuity consonant to the whole recent story of
English land, it passes to yet another family on the condition of
their assuming the name of Breedon--which was not their own.
All up and down England, and especially in this Thames Valley, which
is in all its phases so typical and symbolical of the rest of the
country, this stir and change of tenure is to be found, originating
with the sharp changes of 1540, and continuing to our own day.
Anywhere along this Berkshire shore of the Thames the process may be
traced; even the poor little ruined nunnery of Ankerwike shows it. The
site of that quiet and forgotten community was seized under Edward VI.
by Smith the courtier. Then you find it in the pockets of the Salters,
after them of the Lysons. The Lysons sell it to the Lees, and finally
it passes by marriage to the Harcourts.
The number of such examples that could be taken in the Valley of the
Thames alone would be far too cumbersome for these pages. One can
close the list with Sonning.
Sonning, which had been very possibly the see of an early bishopric,
and which was certainly a country house of the Bishop of Salisbury,
did not pass from ecclesiastical hands by a theft, but it was none the
less doomed to the same mutability as the rest. In 1574 it was
exchanged with the Crown for lands in Dorset. The Crown kept it for an
unusually long time, considering the way in which land slipped on
every side from the control of the National Government at this period.
It is still royal under Charles I., but it passes in 1628 to Halstead
and Chamberlain. In little more than twenty years it is in the hands
of the family of Rich. Then there is a lull, just as there was in the
case of Pangbourne, and a continuity that lasts throughout the
eighteenth century. But just as a tradition began to form it was
broken, and in the first years of the nineteenth century Sonning is
sold to the Palmers.
Parallel to the rise of the squires and their capture of English
government has gone the development of the English town system. And
this, the last historical phase with which we shall deal in these
pages, is also very well and typically illustrated in the history of
the Thames Valley. That valley contains London, which is, of course,
not only far the largest but in its way the fullest example of what is
peculiarly English in the development of town life; and it contains,
in the modern rise of Oxford and Reading, two of the very best
instances to show how the English town in its modern aspect has sprung
from the industrial system and from the introduction of railways. For
neither has any natural facilities for production, and the growth of
each in the nineteenth century has been wholly artificial.
The most recent change of all, with which these notes will end, is,
one need hardly say, this industrial transformation. It has made a
completely new England, and it nourishes the only civilised population
in the world which is out of touch with arms, and with the physical
life and nature of the country it inhabits, and the only population in
which the vast majority are concerned with things of which they have
no actual experience, and feel most strongly upon matters dictated to
them at second or third hand by the proprietors of great journals.
What that new England will become none of us can tell; we cannot even
tell whether the considerable problem of maintaining it as an
organised civilisation will or will not be solved. All the conditions
are so completely new, our whole machinery of government so thoroughly
presupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strong
attachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts at
reorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we do
answer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet even be guessed at.
But long before the various historical causes at work had begun to
produce the great modern English town, long before the use of coal,
the development of the navy, and, above all, the active political
transformation of our rivals during the eighteenth century, had given
us that industrial supremacy which we have but recently lost, the
English town was a thing with characteristics of its own in Europe.
In the first place, it was not municipal in the Roman sense. The sharp
distinction which the Roman Empire and the modern French Republic,
and, from the example of that republic, the whole of Western Europe,
establish between town and country, comes from the fact that European
thought, method of government, and the rest, were formed on the
Mediterranean: but the civilisation of the Mediterranean was one of
city states; the modern civilisation which has returned to Roman
traditions is, therefore, necessarily municipal. A man's first country
in antiquity was his town; he died for his town; he left his wealth to
his town; the word "civilisation," like the word "citizen," and like a
hundred words connected with the superiority of mankind, are drawn
from the word for a town. To be political, to possess a police, to
recognise boundaries--all this was to be a townsman, and the various
districts of the Empire took their proper names, at least, from the
names of their chief cities, as do to-day the French and the Italian
countrysides.
Doubtless in Roman times the governing forces of Britain attempted a
similar system here. But it does not seem ever to have taken root in
the same way that it did beyond the Channel. The absence of a
municipal system in the fullest sense is one of the very few things
which differentiates the Roman Britain from the rest of the Empire,
others being a land frontier to the west, and the large survival of
aboriginal dialects.
The Roman towns were not small, indeed Roman London was very large;
they were not ill connected with highroads; they were certainly
wealthy and full of commerce; but they gave their names to no
districts, and their municipal institutions have left but very faint
traces upon posterity.
The barbarian invasions fell severely upon the Roman cities of
Britain, in some very rare cases they may have been actually
destroyed, but in the much more numerous cases where we may be
reasonably sure that municipal life continued without a break
throughout the incursions of the pirates, their decay was pitiful; and
when recorded history begins again, after a gap of two hundred years,
with the Roman missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries, we
find thenceforward, and throughout the Saxon period, many of the towns
living the life of villages.
The proportion that were walled was much smaller than was the case
upon the Continent, and even the most enduring emblem and the most
tenacious survival of the Roman Imperial system--namely, the Bishop
seated in the chief municipality of his district--was not universal to
English life.
It is characteristic of Gregory the Great that he intended, or is
believed to have intended, Britain, when he had recivilised it, to be
set out upon a clear Latin model, with a Primate in the chief city and
suffragans in every other. But if he had such a plan (and it would
have been a typically Latin plan) he must have been thinking of a
Britain very different from that which his envoys actually found. When
the work was accomplished the little market town of Canterbury was the
seat of the Primate; the old traditions of York secured for it a
second archbishop, great London could not be passed over, but small
villages in some places, insignificant boroughs in others, were the
sites of cathedrals. Selsey, a rural manor or fishing hamlet, was the
episcopal centre of St. Wilfrid and his successors in their government
of Sussex; Dorchester, as we have seen, was the episcopal town, or
rather village, for something like half England. In the names of its
officers also and in the methods of their government the Anglo-Saxon
town was agricultural.
With the advent of the Normans, as one might expect, municipal life to
some extent re-arose. But it still maintained its distinctively
English character throughout the Middle Ages. Contrast London or
Oxford, for instance, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
with contemporary Paris. In London and Oxford the wall is built once
for all, and when it is completed the town may grow into suburbs as
much as it likes, no new wall is built. In Paris, throughout its
history, as the town grows, the first concern of its Government is to
mark out new limits which shall sharply define it from the surrounding
country. Philip Augustus does it, a century and a half later Etienne
Marcel did it; through the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth,
the custom is continued: through the nineteenth also, and to-day new
and strict limits are about to be imposed on the expanded city.
Again the metropolitan idea, which is consonant to, and the climax of,
a municipal system, is absent from the story of English towns.
Until a good hundred years after the Conquest you cannot say where the
true capital of England is, and when you find it at last in London,
the King's Court is in a suburb outside the walls and the Parliament
of a century later yet meets at Westminster and not in the City.
The English judges are not found fixed in local municipal centres,
they are itinerant. The later organisation of the Peace does not
depend upon the county towns; it is an organisation of rural squires;
and, most significant of all, no definite distinction can ever be
drawn between the English village and the English town neither in
spirit nor in legal definition. You have a town like Maidenhead, which
has a full local Government, and yet which has no mayor for centuries.
Conversely, a town having once had a mayor may dwindle down into a
village, and no one who respects English tradition bothers to
interfere with the anomaly. For instance, you may to-day in Orford
enjoy the hospitality, or incur the hostility, of a Mayor and
Corporation.
On all these accounts the banks of the Thames, until quite the latest
part of our historical development, presented a line of settlements in
which it was often difficult to draw the distinction between the
village and the town.
Consider also this characteristic of the English thing, that the
boroughs sending Members to Parliament first sent them quite haphazard
and then by prescription.
Simon de Montfort gets just a few borough Members to his Parliament
because he knows they will be on his side; and right down to the
Tudors places are enfranchised--as, for example, certain Cornish
boroughs were--not because they are true towns but because they will
support the Government. Once returning Members, the place has a right
to return them, until the partial reform of 1832. It is a right like
the hereditary right of a peer, a quaint custom. It has no relation to
municipal feeling, for municipal feeling does not exist. Old Sarum may
lose every house, Gatton may retain but seven freeholders, yet each
solemnly returns its two Members to Parliament.
From the first records that we possess until the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the line of the Thames was a string of large
villages and small towns, differing in size and wealth far less than
their descendants do to-day. In this arrangement, of course, the
valley was similar to all the rest of England, but perhaps the
prosperity of the larger villages and the frequency of the market
towns was more marked on the line of the Thames than in any other
countryside, from the permanent influx of wealth due to the royal
castles, the great monastic foundations, and the continual stream of
travel to and from London which bound the whole together.
Cricklade, Lechlade, Oxford, Abingdon, Dorchester, Wallingford,
Reading, and Windsor--old Windsor, that is--were considerable places
from at least the period of the Danish invasions. They formed the
objective of armies, or the subject matter of treaties or important
changes. But the first standard of measure which we can apply is that
given us by the Norman Survey.
How indecisive is that standard has already been said. We do not
accurately know what categories of wealth were registered in Domesday.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, barbaric in this as in most other matters,
would have it that the Survey was complete, and applied to all the
landed fortune of England. That, of course, is absurd. But we do have
a rough standard of comparison for rural manors, though it is a very
rough one. Though we cannot tell how much of the measurements and of
the numbers given are conventional and how much are real, though we do
not know whether the plough-lands referred to are real fields or
merely measures of capacity for production, though historians are
condemned to ceaseless guessing upon every term of the document, and
though the last orthodox guess is exploded every five or six
years--yet when we are told that one manor possessed so many ploughs
or paid upon so many hides, or had so many villein holdings while
another manor had but half or less in each category; and when we see
the dues, say three times as large in the first as in the second, then
we can say with certitude that the first was much more important than
the second; _how_ much more important we cannot say. We can, to repeat
an argument already advanced, affirm the inhabitants of any given
manor to be at the very least not less than five times the number of
holdings, and thus fix a _minimum_ everywhere. For instance, we can be
certain that William's rural England had not less than 2,000,000,
though we cannot say how much more they may not have been--3,000,000,
4,000,000, or 5,000,000. In agricultural life--that is, in the one
industry of the time--Domesday does afford a vague statement to the
rural conditions of England at the end of the eleventh century, and,
dark as it is, no other European nation possesses such a minute record
of its economic origins.