But he had covered his tracks, or had his tracks covered for him, well enough. What evidence there was in this microdot of England is slight and fragmentary. You could not say that silence hangs over the beginnings of this farm, about four hundred years ago. More, the fuzz of what has happened since obscures the shapes and muffles the signals.
Even so, there is something about this searching for another, this listening out for the lingering presence of someone else’s acts and motivations, which is curiously intimate. I am not saying that this is a haunted place, only that understanding can persist across time, that sometimes, perhaps because I have come to know the wrinkle of field and wood here as closely as he would have known them, I can imagine, at least, that there is a sense of understanding between me and the man who made this farm. His person is in the fine grain of here. In some ways, this place is his mind.
In the East Sussex County Record Office in Lewes, I made my way back through the documents. In the 19th century the farm had belonged to the Fuller estate at Brightling, originally brought together by John Fuller, known to history as Mad Jack, a rabid Tory Member of Parliament, sugar-and-iron millionaire, folly-building eccentric, patron of Turner, buried in Brightling churchyard in a pyramid where he is said, erroneously but appropriately, to be sitting down to a final gargantuan dinner at a cast-iron table.
At Perch Hill in 1832, a man called Edward Goldsmith was his tenant, and stretching back through the 18th century was a string of tenants, none of them more than a name. In the late 1770s, there’s a Mr Carter, in 1771 a Mr Harrison, in 1724 a Thomas Noakes, in 1719 a John Baker. In 1711, a John Taylor lives at ‘Pearchill’ and he is already there in 1694. The farm was then valued at £9, the poorest farm in the parish. Perryman’s, the Wrenns’ farm on the other side of Leggett’s Wood, was valued at £19 and Park Farm, down by Bateman’s on the good alluvial land, at £34.
Here and there in the sale documents, there is slightly richer description. When Jack Fuller first bought it in 1820, there was a house (ours), a cottage (probably Shirley Ellman’s), a barn (on the site of ours) and a coachhouse, a stable, 20 acres of wood, 40 of meadow and 40 of pasture – almost exactly what is here now.
All of the eighteenth century farmers were tenants. The owners of Perch Hill were a variety of professionals: a London lawyer, a ‘chirurgeon’ of Rye, an apothecary of Tonbridge, a tailor of Wittersham in the Isle of Oxney, and other men whose status fluctuates in different documents between ‘yeoman’ and ‘gent’. The ancient picture of a man and his family living on his own smallholding had not been the case at Perch Hill since the end of the 17th century.
Before then, what is called ‘Perchfield house’ is distinguished from ‘Perchfield lands’ and from another, historically separate holding called ‘Flemmings’. These intriguing terms must mean, first, that the fields at Perch Hill were in use and known as that before there was a house there. Two of our fields running down to the Dudwell are still called ‘Great Flemings’ and ‘Hollow Flemings’, probably belonging at some stage to a man called Fleming. It was a common surname in England throughout the Middle Ages.
That name remains part of the Perch Hill landscape as the documents drive back into the seventeenth century. In July 1650, a shopkeeper in Dallington, John Goodman, sold to Henry Goldsmith, gent of Burwash, ‘a house & pieces of land called Perchfields and Flemmings in Burwash’. I thought for a long time this was as far as I was going to get, but the archivists in Lewes have pushed the story back still further. In 1603 a yeoman in Burwash called Henry Weston gave Perch Hill to his son Thomas on the day of his marriage to a girl called Agnes. The father kept ‘other lands called Flemmings’ for himself but gave Thomas and Agnes ‘a messuage called Perchhowse and a barn and lands called Perchfieldes, to the said messuage adjoining and belonging’. There is no doubt these buildings were our buildings: the document describes their precise relationship to Willingford Lane and to the lane that goes past Shirley Ellman’s house and down to Bateman’s, then called ‘Perch Lane’.
But there is a further surprise. To the description of the house and its situation, the document adds ‘with garden belonging’. An Elizabethan garden at Perch Hill! What a life-enhancing discovery that was! There would have been vegetables and a pig or two and a beehive but maybe rosemary, pansies, marigolds, columbines, violets and sweet Williams as well. The Elizabethans loved roses. Ophelia and other Elizabethan heroines mention all these flowers. But even that was not quite the beginning. The deed selling this place in 1581 had survived in the papers of the Fuller estate. ‘Pearchefield’ and ‘Flemmyng’ were already bound together, with only 27 acres in all – the smallest of Wealden smallholdings – but with ‘tenements’ mentioned in the deed, meaning there were buildings here. Perhaps this was the Ur-moment, the point at which the first oak frames were erected here, the first thatch laid (the marks of the ropes binding the thatch to the rafters can still be seen in the attic), the first fires lit, the first nights slept, the first children conceived under the roofs of Perch Hill. It felt like yesterday, an embracing of the past.
Only one further document pushes this time-line deeper into the medieval Weald. On 15 November 1419, the seventh year of the reign of Henry V, a Burwash man gave his son Richard ‘a piece of land called Swetyngecroft’. That name had already dropped from view four hundred years ago but Weald historians have established, from tracing the holdings of the neighbours mentioned in the grant, that Swetyngecroft was Perch Hill itself. There were no buildings here six hundred years ago, but at least an identity and an ownership. The name itself has some obscure hints in it. ‘Croft’ is clear – in Old English a small enclosed field. ‘Swetynge’, which was a medieval surname, could mean either ‘sweating’ or ‘sweet little thing’. So what was the Perch Hill croft: Mr Swetynge’s field; or a sweet, darling little place; or one demanding hard physical labour; or one maybe that sweated itself, oozing water, its springs seeping from the clay underlayers in rushy clumps and reedy patches? It could be any or all of them.
The story confirms something. This farm is right out on the edge, the worst land where the border between the parishes runs, which no one would have bothered with unless forced to, no more than marginalia, the periphery not the main. One of our fields is called, rather enigmatically, Toyland, and the little wood next to it the Toyland Shaw. But that, I came to realize, is a mishearing of something said in widish Sussex. It wasn’t Toyland but Tyeland, part of the tye land, an Old English word meaning a common, of so little intrinsic value that it could be left to supply the common needs. And that too lies at the heart of the farm’s name. Perch Hill has nothing to do with fish, nor being perched up high, but simply the hill where you would go to cut your perches, the old word for a good stout stick or pole. A parrot’s perch and a perch as a unit of measurement are both more specialized derivatives of that older and more general meaning. ‘The tame Hoppe,’ Henry Lyte wrote in his Niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes, published in 1578 as this farm was coming into being, ‘windeth it selfe about poles and perches.’ So this is where we live: Stick Hill, part of the medieval commons, out on the edge and stuck away, well and truly in the sticks.
All this was inching us towards my man. Knowing this edginess of the place, you could start to smell the quality of the man who first decided to live here. He was not part of the establishment, nor in line for some major inheritance which he only had to outlive his father to receive. He was, perhaps, a younger son who needed to make his way. There would have been those dissuading him but he wouldn’t listen. What other choice did he have? The lottery of the cities where you were more likely to die young than do well? Or paid employment somewhere, a ceiling imposed on your prospects and your life? Neither would do. Here, on the boundaries of the parish, there was rough, poor land which could, with work, be turned to use. It had not been wildwood for a long time but no one had ever called it home. There were more people about than anyone could remember. It was time to do something new and here in a small way was a
new world to conquer. That was Perch Hill: a fragment of America embedded in the wood. Its creator was a colonist.
Who knows how it went to start with? You can only look to the fields. Those around the house, including the Toyland, have the wriggliest of boundaries. They can only have been quickly cut, fitting around existing lumps or immovably big trees and then ossifying in position. The Long Field, which slivers down between the stream and the Middle Shaw, is not now as long as some of the others and so its name must record an earlier state, when it was indeed the long field in a group of tiny wood-cut enclosures. The Target Field beyond it is almost as round as the name might suggest and that too makes it feel early. Where they meet the wood on all sides, an old bank and ditch, dug by our man, still marks the boundary between them, the crucial separation of stock from growing trees. Only on the good corn ground on Beech Meadow would he have planted his first crops and there, in fact, is the mark of many centuries of ploughing: a lynchet, a thick belt of soil built up against the downhill hedge.
All the ingredients of a self-contained world were here – shelter, wood, grass, water and corn. For almost a year I had been reading these things nearly every day, scanning them for the hints they might offer, what they might tell me of the lives that had shaped them and the lives they had shaped in return. There was a community here of another kind. We had become neighbours with the dead.
But what about the life of those first men here? Search as you might, there is no autobiographical account in English of a farmer’s life in 16th-century England. Diaries were not kept and destinies went unrecorded. But I came across someone else that winter who, for the time, had created a miracle of self-description. He was a Frenchman, a Norman, and not quite of the right class – he might have lived in Bateman’s rather than Perch Hill – but his mentality seemed to match these fields and woods.
Gilles Picot de Gouberville was the seigneur of the small village of Mesnil au Val in Normandy in the middle of the 16th century. In every aspect of his life, except one, he was completely ordinary, conducting an existence which in its enclosure and untroubled stability was utterly typical of his time. One thing only marks him out. Between 1549 and 1562 – that is between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-one – Gilles de Gouberville kept a journal every day, writing between ten and thirty lines, usually in the evening. He never missed a day, whether ill, tired or busy, and he never revised what he wrote. His diary, of which a couple of studies have been published, is the only surviving, non-literary, unsentimentalized and undistorted depiction of the life of a rural village in 16th-century Europe. Nothing in English can match it for the pristine, unmythologized quality of the life it depicts. This is rural existence in Europe before the urban began to distort it, a written portrait of an unwritten world.
Again and again, Gilles says simply, ‘Spent all day at home,’ ‘Here at home,’ ‘Here in the house.’ His French editor doggedly counted the phrase ‘I did not leave the house’ 3,310 times in the thirteen years, or on more than two-thirds of the days he records.
Gouberville has only an approximate idea of time. Things happen ‘at some time in the morning’, ‘towards the end of the day’, ‘a little later on’. The clock had yet to become the master of the working life. Gilles had one, but he kept it upstairs so few people saw it. When someone asked him for it, he gave it away.
Gilles plods on day by day in the long rhythm of rural existence. The hay has to be in before the rain, the wolves driven from the flocks, the boars from the oats, the herons and wood-pigeons into the nets. Everything is externalized, as though the conception of an internal private existence has not yet been invented. There is no intimacy, no self-consciousness beyond the fact of the journal itself, no feelings expressed, no sorrow or pain. The account is consistently modest and opaque. Although Gilles’s life is surrounded and enmeshed with those in the village, he has no wife and no legitimate children. There are hints that he has an affair and possibly a child with a woman in the village, but that is not clear, and few women appear by name.
There is, however, a profound social fluidity to the way he lives. The farmhouse door is no barrier, but a thoroughly permeable membrane through which the village ebbs and flows. The people of Mesnil could visit Gilles even in his bedroom and he, with no great ceremony, sometimes came down to meet them still wearing his nightshirt, standing at the kitchen door or sitting at the kitchen table with them in front of the fire. On occasions, he wakes up to find villagers standing patiently by his curtained bedside, waiting for him to open his eyes so that he can tell them what he wants done. One day, in the summer of 1556, before he gets up, he buys a couple of pigs from a neighbour while still in bed.
His stone-flagged kitchen is the focus of village life. It is the only constantly warm room. In winter he gets dressed in front of the fire. That is also where he makes and receives any payments that are due. He occasionally sleeps there too and when convalescing, after several days in bed upstairs, he does so wrapped up in the warmth of the kitchen, where his neighbours come in for hot drinks or dinner.
If you read general histories of sixteenth century Europe, the air is agonized, fraught with crisis, tensed with growing shortages of food and land, with the sense of repression and the expanding state, focused on the terrors and adrenalin of religious war and imperial ventures. But here, in the virtually pre-literate world of the Cotentin peninsula, some sense of wholeness prevails. This small-scale gentleman lives embedded in the milieu of his everyday companions. His half-brother and -sister live in the house with him, his father’s illegitimate children, occupying a lesser but still intimate place in his life. Alongside them are his right-hand man, Cantepye, from whom Gilles is rarely separated, Arnoul, the secretary of the manoir, and La Joye, the lackey.
Outside this central knot, a wider circle revolves. The men who work on the tasks of farming life, the agricultural labourers, are named over and over again in the journal. They are not an undifferentiated mass, but individuals, known for who they are. Every summer the same reapers return for the harvest when more hands are needed, the same roofers, carpenters and masons return when repairs are needed to the mill or the roof of the manoir itself. A cooper lives and works in Mesnil and a blacksmith, Henri Feullie, who shoes the horses, puts bolts on the doors and makes hooks and sickles. When a new cart is needed it has to be ordered from further away, from the cartmaker Clément Ingouf who lives in the village of Montaigu. Every year for a few days, Thomas Girard, the travelling tailor, comes to stay at Mesnil, equipped with his cloth, his tape, his scissors, his needle and thread, to measure up Gilles and his household for suits of new clothes.
Gilles is clearly friends with people from a wide social background. There is no stiffness or formality in the way he deals with them. He is a particular intimate of a peasant farmer, Thomas Drouet, the sort of man who might have lived where I live now. Gilles is godfather to one of Drouet’s daughters. Gilles and Drouet often work together in the tree nursery, the most treasured part of the estate, where the seigneur carefully tends and grafts his young fruit trees. When Gilles is ill, Drouet spends the night in his lord’s bedroom to look after him; when Drouet himself has an attack of gout, Gilles visits him regularly at home.
Of course, Gouberville’s odd and inexplicable journal marks the ending of the world it describes. On the cusp of self-consciousness, it hints, for all its descriptions of social cohesion, at the profound isolation of the individual, the diarist alone with his diary, which is the defining mark of the urban civilization that was to come. People moan about suburbanization of the countryside now; its first tendrils were already apparent in the Cotentin in the 1550s.
Could I translate Gilles to the Sussex Weald? Or perhaps Drouet? Would my Drouet here have spent time with the seigneur up in Brightling, tending to him, easy with him, living that webbed life of which I too had discovered the remnants here now in the late twentieth century? It is impossible to say, too much of a guess.
I was nostalgic for Gilles’s life
, even if I knew he would have lusted after mine. I could see us standing at either end of a corridor 450 years long. We can hardly make each other out but we stare hard at this semi-familiar creature who is staring hard at us. I live an unimaginably cosmopolitan life compared with his; he is unimaginably embedded in his world; he is continuous with his own past; I feel only tenuously attached to mine; he looks at the level of comfort in my life in the way that we read of sultans and film stars; I look at his rootedness – he is like a human carrot – and long for the world in which I could give my clock away and could buy a pig in the morning when still under the blankets.
In my life, these social connections were not inadvertent and casual as they were for Gilles. I had to engineer them; I had to acquire the web he knew as normality. And so, for example, that winter I signed up for a course run by the local Farming and Wildlife people. Book early, their flyer said, because places are limited, so I did, before Christmas, and eagerly acquired the necessary kit: leather gloves with gauntlet-type cuffs that run back up the arm, a bill-hook, once the commonest of tools, some long-handled loppers and a smallish axe.
I imagined the others coming on the course preparing themselves all over East Sussex. Then I rang the organizer to check the details. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Nicolson,’ he said ominously. ‘The hedging course. Yes. You must have been reading my mind. I was just on the point of ringing. It’s been cancelled. You’re the only person who has applied.’
So much for the great revival of rural crafts. You spend your life thinking you are part of some widespread socio-cultural phenomenon only to find that everyone else has decided to pack up early and go inside for a cup of coffee. So I got in touch with a hedger off my own bat. Could he come here for a day? No problem. A gentle, definite voice. He’d come Sunday and be there at 8.30.
Smell of Summer Grass Page 12