Charity is one of the greatest of virtues, but charity exercised by force of law is not charity at all for, like all goodness, the source of charity is the spirit. This is aptly illustrated by the new attitude towards the poor in the parish of Winterstoke. The Cistercians had regarded an opportunity to exercise charity as an occasion for thankfulness and for this reason the porter at the Abbey gate acknowledged a knock with the words ‘Deo Gratias’ before greeting the arrival with the blessing ‘Benedicite’. Now, however, the homeless, the needy and the sick were brusquely turned away; indeed, the more desperate and pitiable their plight the more unseemly the haste with which they were hustled beyond the parish boundary for fear that they would become a charge upon the Poor Rate. Circumstances beyond their control forced the villagers of Winterstoke to adopt this callous attitude; to harden their hearts and ‘pass by on the other side’. For the increase in the number of dispossessed who became vagrants upon the roads of England was so great in the period which followed the dissolution that no small community like that at Winterstoke could possibly afford to play the good Samaritan. To do so would have been to risk an inundation of immigrants far beyond the capacity of any country parish to support.
It is easy for us to imagine the splendours and the mannered graces of the Tudor and Elizabethan worlds in which Richard Hanmer and his son Henry moved on their successful and flamboyant way. We have been made familiar with that romantic aspect of sixteenth century England but not with the miseries upon which much of that splendour was based. It is more difficult for us to picture the ragged, motley crew of so-called ‘sturdy beggars’ who could each day be seen plodding over St. John’s Bridge, and who, like the gypsies of to-day, were forever being ordered to move on. This nomadic army was the consequence of the agrarian policy adopted by the great Tudor landlords which was tersely but eloquently summed up in the contemporary couplet:
Commons to close and kepe
Poor for bred to cry and wepe.
The changes which occurred on the Winterstoke estate compose a typical illustration of this policy and its effects.
Of all people, Richard Hanmer was the last to underestimate the value of the ‘golden hoof’. To provide him with additional sheep-walks, a greater acreage of arable land was laid down to pasture than had ever been the case in monastic days, while his larger tenants followed their landlord’s example. In consequence, at a time when there was no lack of labour, much less labour was required. In addition to this laying down of arable, much rough grazing land on which the villagers had enjoyed rights of common pasturage was enclosed and reserved for Hanmer’s privileged flocks. That the villagers were not deprived of their common land altogether was not so much due to their landlord’s scruples as to the good counsel of Stephen Folliot. Aware of the intransigent temper of the tenantry, this shrewd steward advised his arrogant master that it would not be wise for a new broom to sweep too clean. So the villagers retained an acreage of common pasture and, like the larger tenants, they continued to enjoy the right of estover in the woods of High Hanger and Great Ketton. But this loss of common pasture impoverished the villagers in two ways. It necessarily reduced the stint of livestock which each could carry on the reduced area of grazing, and this in turn affected the fertility of their arable strips which they manured by stock folding. In this way both the landless and the landed labourers on the Winterstoke estate were impoverished, while there was no longer any ‘land room’ in which the community could expand. Landless labourers were forced by the all-conquering sheep to seek other employment; small freeholders and copyholders could only secure an adequate livelihood if they could find some supplementary occupation. Their plight was aggravated by a great increase in the price of corn and other basic commodities for which the break down of the old medieval organization was responsible.
Early in the fourteenth century, Winterstoke had been granted by royal charter a weekly market and an annual three-day fair on the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (June 24th). These fairs and markets were held in and about the churchyard of St. Cenodoc and were, until the dissolution, governed and regulated by the jurisdiction of the Abbey. This government had two main concerns: to maintain the ‘Assize’, that is to say, the quality of all that was offered for sale, and to fix prices at a just level. To this end prices were posted in the market and Officers of Assize appointed—Searchers of Leather, Tasters of Bread and of Ale—to guard against deceitful workmanship or adultery, and those who broke the Assize or took ‘excess of gain’ were fined. The worst sin of the medieval market had been that of ‘engrossing’, of seeking to profit by buying up a commodity to create a scarcity and then selling out at a high price. Hence the practice of buying to sell again was forbidden unless the buyer performed some work upon it before reselling. For example, a man who bought corn could sell it again as flour but not as corn. After the destruction of the Abbey, the Winterstoke market continued to be held as before, but under conditions of commercial anarchy in which sorely-needed supplies either never reached the market at all or soared to prices beyond the reach of the poor. For Richard Hanmer, a man whose power lay in ‘excess of gain’, was unlikely to apply those spiritual sanctions in restraint of trade which, in his view, would represent the restrictive and reactionary shackles of a bygone age. Yet things came to such a pass that the local justices did make an attempt to preserve the old order by regulating prices and preventing engrossing. We find them complaining that: ‘A nomber of wycked people in condicions more lyke to wolves or cormorants than to naturall men did most covetusly seeke to holde up the late great pryces of corne and all other victualls by ingrossinge the same into their private hands, berganynge beforehand for corn and in some parts for grayne growinge and for barlie before yt be made mawlte and for butter and cheese before yt be brought to ordynarie markettes for to be bought for the poorer sort.’ But such strictures proved vain. Although the attempts of the justices to regulate the corn trade and to prevent the laying down of too much arable to pasture were backed by the force of laws, secular authority was unable to prevent this disintegration of the old economy. It was to prove equally powerless to regulate the growth of the new commercial and industrial England which was coming to birth. It was a painful birth, occasioned by the irresistible pressure of necessity.
The villagers of Winterstoke were more fortunate than many of their fellows elsewhere. They were not forced to join the ragged throng upon the roads because there were other sources of employment to which they could turn. They had long been accustomed to make up cloth for their own use, and now necessity drove them to make up cloth for sale. This soon plunged them into bitter conflict with the long established Guilds of Weavers in Coltisham and Church Ambling, the first of many similar clashes between the new economy and the old which could not be reconciled. The organization of the Guilds was medieval. They endeavoured to equate supply with demand by regulating entry into the trade. They maintained a standard of quality by laying down rules and terms for apprentices and journeymen so that a man might not become a master weaver until he was in very truth the master of his trade. They saw in the cheap country-made cloth which began to flow into their towns from Winterstoke and other rural parishes a grave threat to their time-honoured and carefully-ordered system. They were right. The weavers of Winterstoke, on the other hand, saw in the Guilds a restrictive monopoly whose concern it was to prevent poor and honest men from obtaining a livelihood in the best way they could. They were right also. The real wrong lay in the new landlordism and the new agrarian policy as represented by the first Earl of Winterstoke, but even if the contestants realized this, such august merchant princes were above attack.
Some of the cloth produced at Winterstoke may well have been up to the high standard of the Guild weavers, but whatever its quality its price had to be cut. For whereas the Guilds produced according to demand, the village weavers produced from necessity and a demand had to be created. Markets had to be found, but the villagers were not in a position to find them,
nor would the Guilds help them. Some intermediary was needed. He came in the shape of the very character that all medieval economists had fought against: the engrosser, the ‘middle-man’, the man who bought cheap to sell dear. So hard a bargain could he drive with the hard-pressed country weavers that he could sell their cloth in the towns at prices well below those fixed by the Guilds and still clear a handsome profit. An Act passed by the government of Henry VIII prohibited the making of cloth for sale except in certain specified towns where the industry was under Guild control, but it became a dead letter. Pressure was too strong. In this, as in other trades, the Guilds were ultimately defeated and forced out of existence, but the fruits of victory did not go to the new producers. As the cost of living soared, as fewer and fewer families could afford to live on and by the land, so more and more turned to this trade or to that, impelled by the stern necessity to produce or to starve. The more overcrowded a trade became, the more the astute merchant was able to profit by the abject buyer’s market which was thus created, always provided—and this is the vital point—that he could find a market for the goods he bought. In an England which was soon to abandon as impossible any attempt to regulate local supply in accordance with local demand, the scapegoat of the old world would become the key figure of the new. The economy of Winterstoke was no longer that of a self-sufficient community trading in its surpluses. It was becoming more and more expansive and of that expansion the merchant, operating at first in a steadily widening orbit at home and in Europe, and later in every corner of the globe, was the agent and the arbiter.
Although the opposition of the Weaving Guilds was ineffective, it was sufficient to cause many of the domestic workers in Winterstoke to turn from weaving to ironworking and coal-getting, trades which, in middle England, were free from Guild control. Although they did not know it, these men had the future on their side. For the cloth trade eventually melted away to the North of England to leave Coltisham and Church Ambling quiet country towns, rich in the substantial memorials of past prosperity, but playing little part in this story of industrial revolution.
It was in the narrow valley of the tributary Lob that the Winterstoke iron trade became concentrated, for when Richard Hanmer built his great house he had banished the small bloomeries and forges from its vicinity, including the ‘water bloomery’ on the Wendle. The latter had been converted to a corn-grinding mill as an adjunct to the home farm which occupied the site of the Abbey. It is unlikely that a visitor to Winterstoke in the last years of the reign of the first Elizabeth would attach any particular significance to the contrast already apparent between the north and the south banks of the river. But we who in spirit may now journey back there through time, burdened with the knowledge of things past or passing or to come may savour the drama of that contrast.
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It is a golden June evening after a day of great heat and the river slides smoothly and soundlessly between the massive piers of St. John’s Bridge. In this clear water the salmon lie, lazily breasting the slow current with effortless, sinuous movement as though swayed like the trails of waterweed by the eddies of the stream. Occasional ripple-rings flaw the surface as a fish sucks down a fly. The mill beside the bridge which has churned its tall wheel all day is silent now; nor is there any sign of life on the wharf beyond where two bluff-bowed barges lie at rest with their unbleached square sails furled. But there is a deep-throated murmur of voices from the Inn opposite, and a belated hay wain rumbles over the bridge. A smocked wagoner walks at the head of his straining team as the wagon creaks and sways along the dusty, rutted road past the medieval gatehouse of Winterstoke Place, past the cottages of wattle and thatch and the squat Norman tower of St. Cenodoc’s until it disappears round a bend in the road.
On the upper terrace of Winterstoke Place the second Earl is strolling with a mixed company of guests, enjoying the coolness and fragrance of the evening air, the men no less than the women as colourful as the peacocks that pace and flaunt upon the lawns. Time has already begun to mellow this great house. Looking at the long, gabled façade of sun-warmed stone it is no longer easy to distinguish by texture the first Earl’s work from that of his predecessor, Abbot Luttrell. Its appearance has been enhanced and dignified, also, by its setting of formal gardens which are now approaching the zenith of full maturity. These descend in a series of broad terraces from the south front: pleached alley and arbour; lawn of fine turf or camomile; beds of June flowers so strictly ordered by close-clipped box into intricate geometrical patterns of massed colour that they resemble the leaded lights in a window of stained glass. They look their best in this level, golden light of evening which lengthens the shadows of the yews and draws colour from the flowers even as the first dew fall draws out their scent. This, no less than the village street beyond the gates, is Shakespeare’s England as we have always imagined it; that street could be the home of the village players in The Dream, this garden the perfect setting for the courtship of Beatrice and Benedict or the pathetic antics of Malvolio. There is a ripple of laughter on the terrace and, listen! someone, the Lady Hanmer perhaps, is playing upon the virginals. Sounding softly through an open casement, the music is quickly dissolved and lost in the wide silence. The lady is playing a piece by William Bird, a simple, plaintive little tune strangely at variance with the vivid colour and richness, the abounding vitality and self-confidence of this Elizabethan world. For us this thin and melancholy music is prophetic. It is as though it sounded a lament for an age whose bright splendours were so soon to pass away. It is across the river, in the narrow valley of the Lob and in the woods of High Hanger and Great Ketton, that we must look for the birthplace of the more sombre world which was to come.
In woodland clearings and on the steeply-tilted common lands of the narrow valley, in crazy shacks or in more substantial cabins of timber and thatch a new population is establishing itself in defiance of the law prohibiting new building without an allotted acreage of ground. This new immigrant population have found new trades for themselves in and about the woods, but the living is hard and so long as the light lasts the work goes on. The outlines of both wooded hills are blurred by the blue smoke of many charcoal fires which hangs like strands of mist on the windless evening air. Beside each turf-covered pyre stands the burner’s shack, and throughout the short summer’s night the colliers will be watchful, ready, should a wind spring up, to move their wattled screens to shelter the windward air-vent from a draught which would cause the heap to flame and so destroy the charge. Although in the depths of these leaf-laden woods it is already twilight, the chock of the axe still echoes through the glades. The more sizeable felled timber will be reserved for building, but the smaller loppings are being cut into cordwood for the charcoal fires. Women and children are at work with barking knives, stripping the bark from felled oak for use in the tanner’s steeping pits.
From clearings along the lower slopes of High Hanger woods an increasing tonnage of coal is being drawn. It cannot be used for smelting iron, but the smiths use it on their hearths, while although the rich still prefer wood or charcoal there is a growing domestic demand for coal in the district which is supplied by water down the Wendle or by pack-horse over the hills. The old flat mines or footrills are partially worked out and no longer able to meet this demand so the miners of Winterstoke have followed the seams underground. Tunnels have been driven into the hillside, each spewing out an unsightly trickle of waste spoil down the cleared slope. At one point at the hill foot a vertical shaft sixty feet deep has been sunk to meet the fall or ‘dip’ of the seam. Here a patient horse, urged on by a ragged small boy, is plodding round and round the narrow hoof-churned circle of a gin hauling up chaldrons of coal from the depths. The same chaldrons are used to raise or lower the miners or for drawing water from the drainage sump at the shaft bottom.
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