But this triumph contained the seeds of its own decline. The end of the seventeenth century was difficult. The weather, which had also been atrocious in the 1640s, entered a bleak spell in the 1690s with a series of pitiably poor, starvation harvests. Revenues and rents from land began to be depressed. The growth in population slowed. On top of that, the new government that had come in with the Dutch William III was now militarizing fast. Between 1689 and 1714, the Royal Navy became the biggest in Europe. In 1692 a land tax was imposed at four shillings in the pound, a 20 per cent tax on gentry incomes. A government which had looked as if would be the embodiment of landholding England became instead the government of a combination of the Whig aristocrats, the commercial interests of the City of London and its growing Atlantic empire.
In the century to come, which would belong to the merchants and the great Whig oligarchs, the nature of the gentry began to divide into an old Tory world view and a new Whig one. If there is a hinge in gentry history, this is it. The Tory squires of the 1690s belonged to a world that was palpably continuous with the thought patterns of Sir William Plumpton and the old Throckmortons. After them, gentry culture conceived of itself, at least in part, as something that was out of kilter with modernity. That was one of the things the duel between Oliver le Neve and Sir Henry Hobart on Cawston Heath was about.
The squire was starting to become yesterday’s story. His belief in inherited virtue, in the whole idea of transmission from a semi-feudal past, was looking fragile in the face of the new ideas of educated virtue, of virtue to be acquired not by inheritance but by learning and good behaviour. ‘A man of polite imagination’, Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, enjoyed ‘a kind of property in everything he sees.’2 That is not what the landowners of Norfolk would have thought. They knew all about property but, for these voluble and scarcely polished squires, learning was something of a foreign country. It is true that Oliver le Neve owned a copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but it was a rare flower amidst a bookshelf filled with Peppa – A Novel, Muse’s Farewell to Popery, Britain’s Glory, Ladies’ Travels into Spain and The New Art of Brewing.
The squire was becoming a slightly laughable figure. The man of honour was slipping into the lovable, old-fashioned, uneducated Tory, who could not quite keep up with the badinage of the coffee house or the London club and who remained happily unaware that everyone around him was laughing at his accent, his clothes, his wig, his ideas, his whole marinaded, antiquated roast-beef self and his obsession with hunting and shooting.
Why so much about hunting? In part, it was inherited behaviour. The hunt was gentry communality, jointness, what they did, who they were, the sort of thing they had always been. As that, it was also an act of dominance, of lordliness, ownership, nostalgia, control and removal from the world of an earned living. It was a form of play-warfare in which the enemy was absent. It was also a stimulus to the blood, a source of adrenaline, the seventeenth-century substitute for a skiing holiday, an escape from the house, from the wifely ‘bridle’ – a term le Neve’s friends use – and the stir-craziness of being too long at home. ‘I am longing much for a little libberty,’ Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy confided to his brother-in-law le Neve in February 1698, when his father had been ill, ‘for I have bin A Prisoner this thre weeks or more.’3
I wonder if there wasn’t something else in play here too. These Tory squires, knowingly or not, were on a downward trend. The focus of value in England was moving away from land and land ownership towards an increasingly dynamic and urban market. The last decade in which any part of England remained self-sufficient and did not grow crops for sale, or derive its food from elsewhere, was the 1680s. The medieval vision of integrated, rural communities, each a ‘little commonwealth’ as the great Jacobean surveyor John Norden had called a manor, was now over.4 Throughout the seventeenth century rural rents had been dropping; London property was increasingly valuable.
But the world of hunting was the squire’s province. You could dragoon and whip a pack of beagles in a way that the electors of Norfolk would never allow. You could live a fantasy life when out with your friends all day on horseback in a kind of toy theatre and as a nostalgic dream of significance. When your credit (financial or otherwise) was looking thin or your tenants found it difficult to pay their rents, it may have been the only consolation there was.
1610s–1650s
Steadiness
The Oglanders
Nunwell, Isle of Wight
Sir John Oglander was in love with his own life: with his vision of the past and his long line of ancestors stretching back into it; with his own role as the guardian of his family’s wellbeing in the troubled seventeenth century and on into ‘futor Adges’; and with Nunwell, the Oglander house and lands at the eastern end of the Isle of Wight, the matrix of his being, to whose health and happiness he dedicated year after year.
His deep attachment to Nunwell and the Isle of Wight is intriguing because although he was born here in 1585, the family left in 1588, after his mother had been frightened by the sight of the Spanish Armada sailing up the Channel.1 They kept the property but went to live on the mainland, settling on land they owned in Sussex. Only in 1609, when his father died and John was twenty-four, did he return to the Isle of Wight. This late return to a place John Oglander thought of as home may be at the root of his passionate attachment to Nunwell.
He is more knowable than anyone in these stories, largely because of his extraordinary notebooks, his ‘Bookes of Accoumpts’, the surviving leather-bound volumes written between 1620 and 1648, which have been treasured by the Oglander family ever since.2
At heart they are no more than a steady calculation, quarter by quarter, of what he spent and what he owed, what he lent and what was owed to him, what income he could expect and what, in total, he was worth. But he was too active and too curious to stick merely to figures and over the years the notebooks gradually filled with all the multifarious contents of his mind. The result was a real-time depiction of a man’s life and priorities, a portrait of a member of the seventeenth-century gentry alive in that moment, jumping from one subject to another, from one pre-occupation to the next, from memories to plans, regrets to delights, enemies to friends, events to principles.
Page after page reveals him as a man buoyed up with love for his wife, Frances, always called Franck, the daughter of a Surrey gent, and their children. He was a deep conservative with a powerful sense of duty, a man who loved the gentry (or at least the idea of them more than the individuals he knew) and loathed the aristocracy for their self-indulgence, a near-Puritan Royalist with a flickering, scatterbox, magpie-ish way of thinking, entranced by the past (he was an amateur archaeologist), loving continuity but dreading mutability, fascinated by himself, and all this sewn in among his calculations of profit and loss.
It was, at its simplest level, a world held to account.3 To take one year at random, before Christmas, John Curtis, Oglander’s butler, was paid fifteen shillings and sixpence for goods he had bought on his master’s behalf. Labourers, carpenters and sawyers all received their wages. Oglander had bought ten pounds of ‘Malligoe raisins’ for Christmas, the fruit perhaps shipped in from Malaga, a sign of the Isle of Wight’s multiple connections to the wider world. His hop garden at Sandham, now Sandown, on the east coast of the island, was dug and his ancestors’ tombs in the church at Brading, just the other side of his park, were mended. His son Richard, who was a mercer in Pater Noster Row next to St Paul’s in London, had sent him some paper, some medicine and ‘this Booke’ in which the accounts were being written, for all of which John had paid him twelve shillings.
The getting and spending carries on, into January, with presents at New Year for his wife, daughters and nieces and charity for the poor, dinners in Newport, some new locks and the staves and hoops with which his men could make some barrels. There were repairs to his horse harness, and he dispersed money for French wine (although he did not like it very much), for a barr
el of butter to be sent to Richard in London, for a messenger to take £5 to his son John who was a don in Oxford, and for quite a lot of cheese, meat and fish.
There was a large staff at Nunwell (their attic bedrooms are still there, good, well-lit, habitable rooms, looking out on the chalk downs to the south or the ancient, warty oaks on the other side). As well as John Curtis, the butler (his wages were £4 a year), there was a coachman called William (paid the same), a bailiff called Baby, the shepherd Henry Reade (£5, the same as the cost of a coach to London4), three other men, called John Deal, Thomas and Ralfe, two chambermaids, a ‘cook maid’ and an undercook maid, and a ‘milke mayde and wash mayd’, called in the accounts ‘the 2 Janes’, who were paid £2 10s. each for their year’s work.
In all, the Nunwell wage bill for these thirteen people came to £40 a year, an amount of money vertiginously smaller than what Oglander gave his eldest son, William, who received an annual allowance of £160. Every year Sir John also gave his beloved wife, Franck, £40 and his unmarried daughter, Bridget, £30. Each year the Oglanders spent nearly £700 on themselves, or about £180 for each dependent member of the family, something approaching sixty times the average annual income of their servants and employees. There can be no doubt that Nunwell was a kind of community but one in which the social difference between members was extreme.
The Oglanders did not want for anything. ‘Suckinge pigges’, a pound or two lost at cards, prawns and lobsters, herrings, bass and soles, salmon and mullet, ‘a Hollan chese’, ‘tulip roots’, ‘ffrench wyne’, ‘Pamflett bookes of newes’, payments to a man called Crocker for ‘the Image’ and ‘ye making of ye statue’5 – for about £11 he was designing and then carving the wooden effigies of Oglander, his father and his son George for their chapel in Brading church: the expenses were unending. For the whole year, Oglander spent £668 5s. 11d.
Looking at the total, he reflected as usual on just how much the gentry life was costing him: ‘I confes I must Come to a Lower rate or else my smale ffortunes will not holde owt.’6 The income to pay for it all – despite his anxieties, revenues usually hovered around £800 a year – came largely from the rents of farms which the Oglanders owned, many of them recently bought. Sir John worked 120 acres directly with his own employed labour but about 2,000 acres were let out, including valuable grazing land on the marsh beyond Brading and land in Hampshire. Those farm rents were topped up with the rent from a windmill and a watermill, with the rents from houses and cottages, the death duty or ‘heriot’ – usually the value of their best beast – payable on the death of a customary tenant, the sale of timber (mostly oak at £2 a tree, but some elm), spiles and faggots from the coppice wood (at £4 15s. the acre) and ‘wyndfalls’ from other trees, the wheat, barley, peas and oats he had grown and stored himself, the fat lambs from his flock of some five hundred ewes, the herd of ‘ffattinge Cattell’ he bought in as heifers and steers to grow on, as well as small quantities of his own hops, butter, cream, straw, hay and geese.7
It was a variegated system. ‘Keep howsbandri and grownde enough to finde thy house,’8 he told his descendants, using ‘finde’ to mean ‘provision’. The household at Nunwell produced its own beer, bread, beef, mutton, butter, cheese, bacon, pork, rabbits and pigeons,9 as well as veals, wheat, wood and ‘rent capons’, chickens which formed part of the rent on some of his leases. He kept ‘all sorts of powltery with Convenient howses for them’ as well as bees, from whose honey they made mead, ‘which with a Hogshed of strong beare or 2 and a Runlett of Sacke will serve the without ffrench wyne’. Every year the Nunwell staff made ‘a Hogshead or 2 of sydor and a barrel of verges’, a bitter, vinegary juice made with crab apples. Partly for this reason, Oglander advised planting apples and crabs in every new hedge they made, mixed in with the quickthorn. The Nunwell girls made their own candles with ‘cottonweeke’ – wicks bought in London. If a new plough was required, the timber was cut, seasoned and ‘hewed’ at Nunwell. Most of the hauling and the ploughing on the lighter land were done by oxen which Oglander bred himself.
At the centre of this complex, interlocking mechanism, tucked under the downs and sheltered by them from the raw south-westerlies coming in off the Channel, was the house at Nunwell itself.
Before 1609, the family had been living away on their lands in Sussex. On his father’s death the young John Oglander returned to the family’s ancient estate at Nunwell to find it in a decrepit condition. He kept hold of the Sussex land but rebuilt much of Nunwell in brick and the local Bembridge limestone, with a handsome hall and parlour, with plastered ceilings and chambers over them, heated by simple, efficient stone fireplaces, the rooms lined in oak wainscot, and with a beautiful oak staircase, its treads now a pale, worn, long-washed grey.
It was not the richest of houses – several tons of wheat, peas or barley were habitually stored in the dry of the dining room,10 the tobacco in the damp of the cellar beneath11 – but far from the meanest. John Oglander had two wainscoted studies, one on the ground floor, one above the dining room, and his beloved wife, Franck, had her own closet or study which was plastered and hung with tapestries.12 It was a profoundly loved place, furnished with heavy, oak, melon-legged tables and tall-backed chairs, where Oglander could entertain his neighbours and accommodate his friends, nothing showy but comfortable and graceful. The house was a vessel for hospitality. ‘I always kept a good house, not much inferior to any in the Island’, he consoled himself in the misery of his old age. ‘I could never have donn itt without a most carefull thrivinge wyfe, whoe was upp before mee every daye and … woold not trust her mayd with directions, but woold wett her shooe to see itt all her selfe acted.’13
Around the house he had stables, a brewhouse, a malthouse and a bakehouse (with warm rooms above), fishponds, a twelve-acre rabbit warren14 and a vegetable garden, a bowling green and several barns, a chalk pit from which the chalk was spread on the arable fields (to no great effect) and a marl pit (which did more good.) He bred pheasants and partridges in an area that was fenced off with ‘pales’. He was not such a keen shot as his father, who had liked wildfowling on the marsh, but he enjoyed hawking with a goshawk or lanard in the summer. ‘I have been so foolisch as to bestowe more monyes then a wyse man woold have done’, he told his notebook, ‘in fflowers for ye Garden. It wase my Content, wearyed with studdye, to solace my selve in ye Garden and to see the spoourtes of natur how in every Several species she sheweth her workemanshipp.’15
Above all he loved his orchards, which he planted and replanted himself, adding as a side note at the corner of one page: ‘When my successors hereaftor reape ye ffrwyte of my labours, remember the ffounder.’16
In his own mind, he was never absent from his descendants’ thoughts, just as his own ancestors, who as minor gentry had certainly been at Nunwell since the twelfth century, were never absent from his.
This near self-sufficiency gave Oglander the independence he valued but it was also more than that. The interfolding of people, land, animals, food, housing and hospitality was in itself a model of the gentry’s idea of goodness. It was the oldest of systems, civilization attached to a particular place, a form of organizing the land which was also a way of organizing society, an interlocked complexity, which was intended to be both stable and long lived and to lie at the root of the honourable, just and hospitable life.
This unabashed continuousness coloured every aspect of his mind. There is no higher praise in his lexicon than the word ‘husband’, not in its narrowed modern sense of a man married to a woman, but in the larger sense of a man who knows how to tend, over time and cumulatively, to the wellbeing of those people, creatures and things which are in his care. ‘Ye family of ye Oglanders hath always bene good howsbandes’, he wrote in May 162017 and in his evaluation of his neighbours their ability to husband their resources was always the touchstone by which he judged their worth. His account books themselves are dedicated to that end: they are evidence of the careful monitoring of household, land, stock, money
, possessions, family and above all self which lies at the heart of husbandry.
When, near the end of his life, Oglander addressed his descendants, his ‘Good rules in husbandri’18 began by plunging into the realities of Nunwell life: ‘If ever you have a horse sicke and swell in his Bodie, presently [i.e. immediately] gett one to Rake him by thrustinge his arme unto his fundament and by giving him soomwhat to make him Purge.’19 He was deep down in the belly of the country – ‘hate London as to live there’,20 he told his ghostly audience, not as an opinion but an instruction – and in the way he wrote you can hear his Isle of Wight accent and manner. Barns, fields and trees were all ‘him’ and ‘he’, ‘fallow’ fields were ‘vallow’ and ferny grounds ‘vearnie growndes’. He was a gentleman, educated on the mainland, but there is no doubting he came from here, his whole existence endlessly attentive to just what Nunwell needed:
Sett young oakes and asches about thie growndes neare thie hedges and stake them that ye wind may have no force of them and bucsh them that the Cattell may not rubb agaynst them.
All foursye [furzy] boomie [?broomy] vearnie [ferny] growndes [grounds] your Cley maulme [marl] will also doo very well on them: for your cold cley grownd, Lime, Seasand taken at low water marke, piginsdounge [pigeons’ dung], pottsoyle [from the house], or ye fowld [the dung of the flock of sheep shut up on the arable ground].
The Gentry Page 12