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| ISBN-13: | 9780300212358 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/28/2015 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
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THE GARDENS OF THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS
By MARGARET WILLES
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Margaret WillesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18784-7
CHAPTER 1
Finer Points of Husbandry
In March 1609 plague struck the village of Upton-by-Southwell near Newark in Nottinghamshire. Upton was by all accounts a typical agricultural community of the period, and the plague, sadly, was an intermittent threat. What is unusual, however, is that the churchwardens' books for the period have survived. As a result, we get a rare glimpse of the inhabitants of the village, and the kind of gardening and husbandry in which they were involved.
Upton, with a population of about 300 to support, was unenclosed at this time, with five great fields, three of which were cultivated in a yearly rotation of wheat, barley and fallow. Strips belonging to the villagers were marked out by stones and pegs. The meadows were used for winter feeding and summer pasture for the villagers' animals. Waste and woodland provided fuel and turf for roofs. A village bull was bought annually from Newark, and the old one was either killed or sold on to avoid inbreeding. A common plough was probably used for ceremonial on Plough Monday and for villagers who could not afford one of their own. The churchwardens undertook the administration of poor relief to residents, drawing on the rates as laid down in the 1601 Poor Law. Some of these monies were derived from beastgate, a charge on the right to graze on the common pasture – twopence per head of cattle, threepence for a score of sheep.
One of the poorest households in Upton was that of a cottager, William Beacocke, scourer of drains and dykes. Sanitation for the village was provided by the Common Issue, an open drain that ran through the main street, into which refuse was poured from all the households. Beacocke lived in a two-roomed cottage with his wife and four children. One room served as the hall, with a table for food and trestles for dressing hemp which was then spun and woven. There is no mention of a bedstead in the records, so the family probably slept on straw paliasses, though they did have pillows and pillow bere cloths. Beacocke was landless, meaning he did not hold strips in the common fields, but had a yard adjoining his cottage, with a 'hovel-house' (sty), a heap of manure, hens, sows and three pigs. In the March outbreak he and his whole family, apart from his wife, died in an epidemic that killed nearly one-third of the population of Upton. Beacocke's possessions at his death were valued at a total of £3 9s 2d.
Another victim of the plague was Gabriel Birch, whose estate in the same valuation was put at £19, more than five times that of Beacocke. Birch held two small strips in the open fields, twenty sheep in common pasture, a heifer, and a sow and two pigs in his yard. He leased his house, which had a store chamber over the parlour, and through his common rights was not entirely dependent on his wages. A third household was that of a husbandman, Thomas Cullen, who died in 1628. His house was much bigger than those of Birch and Beacocke, consisting of ten rooms, three of which were set aside to store grain and food. He probably also had a live-in labourer. He is known as 'Goodman' Cullen in the records, a sign that he was not a tenant farmer, was able to buy his own property and perhaps enclose his strips: in good times, he could become a yeoman farmer. No mention is made of what land he had attached to his house, but his inventory mentions a 'stocke of bees' valued at five shillings. Cullen served at one time as a churchwarden, so may have been able to read and write. As the editor of the records notes, he would have been limited in his travel, perhaps journeying as far as Nottingham.
Although the resources of the three men are very different, they all had land adjoining their dwellings, where they could keep their domestic animals, for husbandry and gardening were inextricably intertwined at this time. The term 'yard' now has a connotation of limited space in Britain, but in North America can still mean a substantial garden. In other records gardens were also known as garths or closes. In 1589 Elizabeth I issued an act requiring new cottages to have at least four acres of land attached. This legislation was primarily intended to restrict the growth of inferior houses that were springing up on the outskirts of London, but it does give an indication of the amount of land considered as adequate to sustain a household. However big the area of the yards of Upton, they would have been used to grow vegetables and fruit, and Cullen's bees needed flowers. The honey taken from the hives would be used for sweetening food and in brewing. Beacocke's meagre possessions included a 'fracket', a leather bottle used for carrying beer while working in the fields, so his yard may have included barley as he had no strips in the common fields. The most educated member of the village community was the vicar. His income was partly derived from tithes, a penny levied on every garden in the village, along with one-tenth of all hay, poultry, eggs, pigs and fruit trees.
A bird's-eye drawing of Wilton in Wiltshire contained in a survey of the estates of Lord Pembroke in south-west England, made around the year 1565, gives an idea of what Upton might have looked like. Because a market was held in Wilton, it had the status of a town, but its population was similar to that of villages like Upton. The cottages and houses in Wilton all have their gardens with vegetable plots, orchards, thorn hedges and courtyards for keeping their animals.
When William Harrison wrote his Description of England, published in 1577, he devoted one of his chapters to explaining the nation's social hierarchy. 'Of Degrees of People in the Commonwealth of England' starts confidently: 'We in England divide our people commonly into four parts, as gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen and artificers or labourers'. The villagers at Upton would have fitted into the third and fourth categories, with the wonderful catch-all phrase of 'the lower orders'. The term 'working class' was not coined until the end of the eighteenth century, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. But even within his chapter Harrison began to waver, noting that yeomen were usually farmers, or 'at leastwise artificers'. Shortly after he ranked all artificers among the fourth and last sort. Craftsmen he found really difficult to categorise, while farmers could be wealthy men, or just owners of smallholdings like Gabriel Birch and Thomas Cullen.
William Harrison had an unusually broad experience of the society of Tudor England. Born the son of a London citizen, probably a merchant venturer, he gained a good education before becoming chaplain to Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham. His patron set him up with a living at Radwinter in Essex, a rural parish, albeit relatively close to London and therefore catering for its markets. Harrison was interested in gardens, and his patron had one of the most famous, at Cobham in Kent. Harrison cultivated his own in Essex, which he described as more than 300 feet in length, containing over 300 plants, 'no one of them being common or usually to be had'.
Harrison tells us relatively little about the gardens of the lower orders. The main thrust of his argument was that things had gone downhill with the civil strife of the fifteenth century, and had only recently been rescued by the arrival of the Tudors on the English throne. Thus he writes:
Such herbs, fruits, and roots also as grow yearly out of the ground of seed have been very plentiful in this, in the time of the first Edward and after his days; but in the process of time they grew also to be neglected, so that from Henry the Fourth till the latter end of Henry the Seventh and beginning of Henry the Eighth there was little or no use of them in England, but they remained either unknown or supposed as food more meet for hogs and savage beasts to feed upon than mankind.
Harrison was delighted to report that with the good times of the sixteenth century, these foodstuffs – 'melons, pompions [pumpkins], gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirrets [species of water parsnips], parsnips, carrots, cabbages, navews [rape], turnips and all kinds of salad herbs' – were being cultivated again by 'the poor commons'.
Even this brief foray into the vegetables and salads on dinner tables of all levels of society is an exception to most accounts of gardening in England at this period. German travellers arriving in the kingdom in the 1590s, for instance, extolled the wonders of the gardens of the Queen and of the circle that surrounded her. So in order to catch a glimpse of what the gardens of 'ordinary' people might be like, it is necessary to turn to books of husbandry which also covered horticulture. Sir John Fitzherbert's Boke of Husbandry, first published in 1533, was based upon classical traditions of writing on estate management, aimed at landowners, although it does contain glimpses of more modest households. Much more pertinent to the common people – both men and women – were the books written by Thomas Tusser. Like William Harrison, Tusser was well educated and had an aristocratic patron, William Paget, but the political upheavals that took place in England in the reign of Edward VI caused him to leave Paget's household and embark on a farming career in Suffolk.
His first manual of husbandry, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first appeared in 1557. This was developed and enlarged five years later, with the addition of 'a hundred good poyntes of huswifery', and further expanded in 1573 as Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, United to as many of Good Huswifery. Tusser's books were popular and long-lasting, going through eighteen editions between 1557 and 1599, with more appearing in the seventeenth century. Indeed, a copy of 'prime Tusser' is mentioned by the poet John Clare as being part of a cottager's tiny library in the early nineteenth century.
Tusser's books are arranged as a calendar, helping the husbandman through the various months of the year. In his 1573 edition, he shifted the start of the year from August to September as that would be the point when changes of tenure occurred, on 26 September, the feast of St Michael:
At Mihelmas lightly new fermer comes in, new husbandrie forceth him new to begin.
His books are printed in blackletter, or Gothic, which we would find difficult to read compared to Roman, but apparently the opposite pertained in sixteenth-century England. They are written in simple verse, a style that Sir Walter Scott pointed out was comparable with the old English proverb, where the rhyme and alliteration made it easier for even the unlettered to remember the information offered. It is not easy to assess the level of literacy in Tudor England, but it has been estimated that one-third of the population in London could neither read nor write, with a higher proportion in the countryside, and the figures were always higher for women. Even if they were able to read, comparatively few 'ordinary gardeners' could have afforded Tusser's books, but they are invaluable in giving us a glimpse of their way of life.
Tusser is principally concerned with agriculture, ploughing, threshing, and the care of animals, but interwoven with this is his advice on gardening, particularly for women. This is a significant departure for, although women of every level of society below the aristocracy had clearly been cultivating their gardens for centuries, there is little recognition of this in books and accounts. Moreover, the role of women gardeners continued to be largely overlooked in the future, William Lawson's Country Housewife's Garden, published in 1626, being a rare exception. Tusser, then, could be regarded as a pioneer of feminism. In his 1562 edition of A Hundreth Good Pointes he provides 'a digression from husbandrie: to a point or two of huswifrie':
Now here I think nedeful, a pawse for to make;
to treate of some paines, a good huswife must take.
For huswifes must husbande, as wel as the man:
or farewel thy husbandrie, do what thou can.
In Marche, and in Aprill, fxrom morning to night:
in sowing and setting, good huswives delight.
To have in their gardein, or some other plot:
to trim up their house, and to furnish their pot.
Have millons [melons] at Mihelmas, parsneps in lent:
in June, buttred beans, saveth fish to be spent.
With those, and good pottage inough having than:
thou winnest the heart of thy laboring man.
He sets the housewife to work in September, encouraging her:
Wife into thy garden and set me a plot
with strawberry rootes, of the best to be got:
Such growing abroade, among thornes in the wood
wel chosen and picked proove excellent good.
Tusser then advises her to plant gooseberries, raspberries and roses. He often mentions a combination of 'respis' (raspberries) with roses, echoing their planting at Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire by Sir Thomas Tresham in the 1590s. Tresham was a notable and determined Catholic recusant, and is thought to have chosen the combination – red and white flowers, thorns and prickles – as a symbol of Christ's Passion, so Tusser may be harking back to a pre-Reformation custom.
The keeping of bees is included in Tusser's points. He addresses his advice on beekeeping to a 'good conie', or rabbit, a term of endearment for a woman. In September he advises:
Now burn up [smoke out] the bees that ye mind for to drive,
at Midsomer drive them and save them alive:
Place hives in good ayer, set southly and warme,
and take in due season wax, honie and swarme.
William Harrison explains in his description of England how mead was made from honey. He also describes, with a singular lack of enthusiasm, 'swish-swash', a drink 'made also in Essex and divers other places with honeycombs and water, which the homely country wives, putting some pepper and a little other spice among, call mead'.
Tusser instructs his beekeepers to:
Set hive on a plank (not too low by the ground)
Where herbe with the flowers may compas it round:
And bourdes to defend it from north and north-east
From showers and rubbish, from vermin and beast.
Beehives, often known as skeps, were woven from wicker into an inverted basket that could be placed on a flat surface. To protect the wicker from damp, an overcoat of straw, known as a hackle, could be added. To encourage the bees, blossom from fruit trees was recommended, along with violet, and herbs such as thyme, marjoram and rosemary.
In November he instructs that the garden should be properly dug over, composted using refuse from the privies and covered with leafmould. The following month he recommends protecting plants from frost, including covering strawberries with straw. The bees too should be protected, given water and a dish of rosemary branches put in the hive. A list of fruit trees and soft fruit to be planted or moved is provided.
But it is in March that he encourages the gardener really to get going, with lists of seeds and herbs for the kitchen, for salads and sauces, to strew in the house, and for window boxes and pots. These cover a wide range of the traditional herbs such as parsley, thyme and rosemary, and also flowers. Thus marigolds, primroses and violets are grown for use in the kitchen. Lavender, roses, violets and daisies are recommended for strewing around and sweetening the house. Window boxes and pots can include columbines, daffodils, eglantine roses, carnations, hollyhocks, snapdragons, pansies and lilies. These lists give us an idea of what the country gardens contained, including some colour and scent. He also specifies root vegetables to boil or to cook in butter. Echoing Harrison's list, he includes beans, carrots, cabbages, gourds, pompions (pumpkins), parsnips, runcevall (large) peas and turnips.
His advice for the garden dies down during the late spring and summer months, when attention has to be focused on tasks in the fields. But in August he counsels the provident gardener that seeds must be saved, and reminds us that this was a communal life, where shops and suppliers were available only to those with contacts in the larger towns and cities, above all, London:
Good huswifes in sommer will save their owne seedes
Against the next yeere, as occasion needs.
One seede for another, to make an exchange
With fellowlie neighbourhood seemeth not strange.
An idea of what the gardens of a Tudor or early Stuart agricultural community might have looked like is provided by the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton in Sussex. Using Tusser's books, along with other sixteenth-century texts, a garden has been recreated for Bayleaf Farmstead, a yeoman farmer's house dating from the 1540s. Three houses are from the Stuart period: Pendean Farmhouse, a yeoman farmer's house; Walderton, a village house; and Poplar Cottage, a landless labourer's dwelling (Plates I–IV). Although these houses are from southern England, and thus built of different materials from the Upton-by-Southwell dwellings, their gardens would have been similar in style and content. The plot that 'Goodman' Cullen might have had around his ten-roomed farmhouse can be brought to life by looking at the gardens of Bayleaf and Pendean.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE GARDENS OF THE BRITISH WORKING CLASS by MARGARET WILLES. Copyright © 2014 Margaret Willes. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Finer Points of Husbandry 8
2 Vital Remedies 33
3 Working Gardeners 64
4 A Passion for Flowers 90
5 Two Nations 113
6 Hard Times 141
7 Climbing the Wall 170
8 Sources of Inspiration 198
9 The Spirit of Competition 224
10 Revolutions in Taste 246
11 Digging for Victory in Peace and War 264
12 Homes and Gardens 289
13 Ancient and Modern 318
14 A Nation of Gardeners 341
Epilogue 370
Appendix 374
Notes 377
Select Bibliography 396
List oflllustrations 402
Acknowledgements 406
Index 408