Back to Earth: Steady Hands at Last (1611–1662)

The Thornhull Purchase (1611)

Robert Cecil in 1610 was a physically frail man, already showing signs of the illness that would kill him in 1612.¹History of Parliament: House of Commons 1558–1603, ‘CECIL, Robert (1563–1612), of the Savoy, London and Theobalds, Herts.’ https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/cecil-robert-1563-1612 At 46, Cecil was by his own account in ‘the winter of my age’, dying of cancer. Despite pulling in vast sums from his multiple offices, he was haemorrhaging money on building Hatfield House and would die deeply in debt. The last thing he needed was another manor to manage when he could turn it into cash instead.

Within a year of Charles’s death, Cecil sold Weston. In November 1611, an enfeoffment transferred the manor to George Thornhull, a gentleman from an established Dorset family (spelled Thornehull in the feoffment and several subsequent records),²Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/455: Feoffment, 26 Nov 1611. and George held his first manorial court in December 1611.³Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612. He was around 25. The 1623 Heraldic Visitation of Dorset,⁴John Paul Rylands (ed.), The Visitation of the County of Dorset, taken in the year 1623 (London: Harleian Society, 1885), p. 91, Thornhull pedigree. recorded while George was still alive, traces the Thornhull pedigree back to 1272. They were not newcomers.

The enfeoffment specifically included ‘that parcell of pasture, Common or waste ground called or knowne by the name or names of Fornehill alias Thornehill.’ George was taking the opportunity to settle, once and for all, the ownership of the land that had been at the root of the riot thirty-three years earlier.

But Cecil

reserved unto the said Earle of Salisburye, his heires and assignes, All that coppice woodes, woodye ground or wood called Frith woode alias Frith Coppice contayninge by estimacion twoe and twentie acres or thereaboutes scituatt and beinge in Weston alias Stalbridge Weston aforesaid in the said County of Dorset, and nowe beinge in the tenure, use or occupacion of John Dackombe, Esquier, or of his assignes, Togeather with free libertie of accesse, ingresse, egresse and regresse to and for the said John Dackombe, his heires and assignes, and his and their servantes, workemen, Cartes, plowes, Carriages, horses, Oxon and Cattell from tyme to tyme and att all seasonable tymes in the yeres into and from the same in, by and through the usual wayes and grounds heretofore used thereto att the free will and pleasure of the said John Dackombe, his heires and assignes.

In other words, he was keeping the most valuable timber rights, and ensuring that his right-hand man could manage the property.

For George Thornhull, the carve-out of Frith Wood must have reduced the price he paid for the manor, although he may have been unhappy not to get such a valuable resource. For his tenants, the impact would be much longer lasting. Firstly, the easement permitting ‘carts, ploughs, horses, oxen, and cattle’ to traverse the manorial grounds at ‘any seasonable time’ represented an ongoing threat to the arable land and pasture that would be damaged by the passage of heavy timber carts pulled by oxen, especially during wet months. Secondly, the tenants had historical rights of common in the woods, specifically the taking of certain timber resources. Those rights didn’t vanish just because the woods belonged elsewhere. Throughout the manorial court rolls that survive from 1663 to 1716,⁵The National Archives (TNA), C 116/60: Court book of Stalbridge Weston manor, with ‘Antioch’, 1663–1716. we see them asserting their right to ‘have wattling and spars’ from Frith Wood – wattling to construct hurdles to fold (pen) sheep, and spars to secure thatching, both essential in the agricultural economy of the day. Reading between the lines, they were finding their rights hard to enforce – if the owner of the woods didn’t answer to the manor court, what remedy did they have, other than simply turning up and taking what they were due and hoping not to get caught?

After 75 years of being shuffled between speculators, royal clerks, feuding families and great officers of state, Weston finally had a lord who knew the ground. The Thornhulls were Stalbridge parish gentry, rooted in the county since the thirteenth century – not a speculator in Devon, a litigant in Star Chamber or a politician in London. For the tenants, this might – might – have been an improvement. A landlord from a neighbouring manor was at least someone who understood the soil and the customs of the place, someone who might notice if the bailiff was being particularly unreasonable. Then again, it might have made no difference at all. A landlord is a landlord, whether he lives five miles away or fifty; the rents still had to be paid.

Already Enclosed

In December 1611, George Thornhull had a rental⁶Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456: Rental of Stalbridge Weston Manor, with court proceedings, c.1558–1612. drawn up for the manor, detailing the tenants and the terms of their tenancies. It’s always good to know what you own.

That rental tells us something important. There were twenty-three holdings (plus Callew Weston), all but one including a dwelling, and entry after entry describes enclosed land – closes of meadow, arable and pasture – not strips in open fields. Richard Lane held eight closes totalling 35 acres. William Snooke had a close of pasture near Stert and two more called Hungerhill and Redland. The Gawtrell family held four closes called Oldlandes at 14 acres. William Wattes occupied the capital messuage with closes called Graze Close, Downes and Lyes and others, running to roughly 180 acres. The open fields of medieval Weston, where tenants’ strips had lain intermingled across communal furlongs, had largely given way to private closes bounded by hedges and ditches.

The field names preserve the ghost of what had been there before. Snooke’s close near Stert takes its name from a ‘stert’: the pointed end of a furlong where the strips tapered to fit irregular ground. Overlandes, appearing in several entries, describes land that once lay above or beyond the main open fields. Holdings are still reckoned in virgates, half-virgates and farlingates, units that only made sense when land was scattered across multiple furlongs. But the actual ground described in each entry consists of discrete, hedged closes. The old accounting survived; the old landscape did not.

None of this should surprise us. The dramatic enclosures that dominate popular accounts – parliamentary commissioners with measuring chains, entire communities uprooted – belong to the chalk downlands, where open fields were structurally essential and survived until Parliament dismantled them. But Weston sits in the Blackmore Vale, sometimes called the ‘cheese’ country as opposed to the ‘chalk’. Heavy clay soils, waterlogged half the year and baked hard the other half, were never suited to intensive communal arable farming. This was pastoral country. The rigid open-field system of the Midlands never took deep root here, and what enclosure happened was gradual, piecemeal, and probably unremarkable to the people living through it. A close carved from the waste here. A few strips consolidated by agreement there. George bought a manor already transformed. The process had happened under the Dukes and the Brookes, driven not by any lord’s grand scheme but by the simple economic logic of the Vale. In the chronically wet clay of the Blackmore Vale, a well-hedged close was worth more than a dozen scattered strips.

Enclosure did not wipe out common rights, though. The 1611 rental shows that common grazing survived alongside the new closes. Some copyholders were allocated specific rights of common pasture: 25 sheep for the Snookes and Carters, 50 for the Lanes and Gawtrells and Toogoods, 100 for the Dybbins and Michael Snooke, and a remarkable 180 for the Jenes family and 200 for Wattes. Some entries also allowed grazing for rother beasts and other livestock sans number – without fixed limit (which was not the free-for-all it might sound, but as many as the tenant could overwinter on their own holding). But this was not open access. The rights were attached to specific copyholds, recorded in the court rolls and enforced by the manorial court. How well they held up in practice is another matter.

William Snowke: A Farthingdeal Man

To see what all this meant in practice, take William Snowke. His entry in the 1611 rental records one tenement and a farthingdeal of ground (a quarter of a virgate, the smallest standard unit of landholding) comprising a little dwelling house with garden, orchard and backside of about half an acre; two little closes of meadow at around 2 acres; a close of pasture near Stert of 12 acres; two closes called Hungerhill and Redland at another 12 acres; a close called Innocks at 2½ acres; a close next to the backside of 1½ acres meadow; and a close at Rewethornes of about 2 acres. Roughly 32½ acres in all, plus common pasture for 25 sheep and ‘the rest’ without number. He paid 15s 3¼d rent and 2 hens, and his best beast was owed as heriot on death.

That holding tells a story. The close names – Hungerhill, Redland, Stert, Rewethornes – are the working vocabulary of someone who thought about land field by field, not in the abstract. Hungerhill speaks for itself: thin soil on a slope, farmed because it was there rather than because it was any good. Redland may point to reddish soil, or (more likely in this country) to hrēod, reedy ground. The 12-acre pasture near Stert would have been his best ground for grazing, and the meadow closes provided the hay that kept animals alive through winter. This was a mixed holding spread across seven separate closes rather than gathered in one block. William walked between his fields; he did not stand in one place and survey them.

Getting from one close to another meant crossing other people’s land – by agreement, by custom, or by long habit. The map of Weston’s fields would have been threaded through with informal tracks and headland paths, each one a negotiation between neighbours. The court rolls record exactly this: in 1705, the jury confirmed that ‘the way to Ricksbed Mead is through the ground of George Snook called Lys’.⁷TNA C 116/60, Court book of Stalbridge Weston manor, court of 24 May 1705.

The Snowke family had been in Weston for generations. Snokes appear in both the 1513⁸‘Dorset Subsidy Roll (Tithing of Weston)’, Somerset & Dorset Notes and Queries 3 (1893–94): 192, 200. and 1525 lay subsidy rolls⁹TNA, E 179/103/120: Lay subsidy roll for Dorset, 1525., and in the 1539 muster¹⁰T. L. Stoate (ed.), Dorset Tudor Muster Rolls, 1539, 1542, 1569 (Bristol: the editor, 1978). Thomas Snoke turned out with six arrows. William’s successors in the tenancy were to be Joan Hardyn (then wife of John Hardyn) and George Snowke, William’s son, evidence of the standard copyhold practice of naming lives in succession to secure the family’s tenure. At 32½ acres he was comfortable but not rich: solidly in the middle band of Weston’s tenantry, above the cottagers with their half-acre plots and well below the Wattes family with their 180 acres and 200 sheep. The sort of man who got on with things.

Not everyone fared so well. Agnes Tyler, widow, held one cottage with a garden and backside of about half an acre, for 12d a year. Whether the half acre covered garden and backside together or just the backside alone is unclear, but either way it was a substantial plot for a widow with no closes and no common rights – productive ground that needed maintaining, not just a yard. The reversion went not to her own family but to Richard Lane and his sons George and Thomas – perhaps she was a childless widow whose cottage would revert to a neighbouring family on her death, or perhaps Lane was a son-in-law. We cannot tell. What we do know is that at the very first court George Thornhull held, in December 1611, Agnes was presented because her dwelling house was in decay in walling and roofing. She owed a shilling a year in rent and couldn’t keep her cottage standing. That was life at the bottom of the manor.

The Thornhull Years (1611–1662)

If the period between 1611 and the outbreak of civil war looks quiet in the Weston records, it is only because we have almost none. Elsewhere in the parish, things were far from peaceful. In 1618, Mervyn Tuchet, Lord Audley, enclosed a large area of ancient common land in Stalbridge to create a private deer park for his new mansion. The Weston copyholders opposed the enclosure¹¹TNA, C 2/JasI/C2/62: Earl of Castlehaven v Thornhill (1603–1625). and lost. Their failure cost them customary grazing rights they had exercised for generations. For tenants whose common grazing rights were already carefully rationed, as the 1611 rental shows, losing access to ancient common in the wider parish was a bitter blow.

The wider world was causing problems too. The cloth trade depression of the 1620s hit the West Country hard, and many Vale families who supplemented their income by spinning and weaving for the Dorset and Somerset clothiers lost that lifeline.¹²Eric Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). For the West Country putting-out system generally. From 1634, Charles I’s extension of Ship Money to inland counties added yet another levy on top of rents and fines already owed.¹³Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). And then came the war.

In 1642, George and four of his sons signed the Protestation Return at Woolland,¹⁴Edward Alexander Fry and George Samuel Fry (eds.), Dorset Records: The Dorset Protestation Returns Preserved in the House of Lords, 1641–2, vol. 12 (Dorset, 1912). five miles from Stalbridge, which suggests the family was living there rather than at Thornhill. Signing the Protestation was required of all adult males – the entire male population of Stalbridge parish including Weston signed, bar one solitary refusenik – so it tells us more about where George lived than where his sympathies lay. There is no indication in the surviving record of which side, if any, he took.

What is certain is that the war came very close to his door. Sherborne Old Castle, only a few miles from Weston, was garrisoned for the King, attacked by Parliamentarian forces in September 1642, retaken by the Royalists in early 1643, and besieged again and finally taken by Fairfax’s army in August 1645. On 8 October 1644, Charles I himself spent the night at Stalbridge with his troops, marching from Sherborne to Blandford. Richard Symonds, a trooper in the King’s Lifeguard who kept a diary of the army’s movements,¹⁵Richard Symonds, Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army during the Great Civil War, ed. Charles Edward Long (Camden Society, new ser. 13, 1859), p. 229. recorded the King lodging at ‘Stawbridge, the faire house of the earl of Cork’. For Weston’s residents, the King’s army quartered next door meant something very concrete: troops needed supplies, horses needed fodder and someone had to pay for it all.

Christiana Watts: A Widow’s Petition

We know the name of at least one person who had to pay. On 12 November 1646, the Dorset Standing Committee¹⁶Minute Books of the Dorset Standing Committee, 1646–1650, ed. C. H. Mayo (Exeter: William Pollard, 1902), p. 107. (the Parliamentary county committee that ran local government during the war years) heard the petition of Christiana Watts of Stalbridge Weston. She held a tenement in the manor and was being charged for quartering (the cost of billeting soldiers) and contribution (the regular Parliamentary tax on property). The problem was that three men – Elnathan Atkins, William Grene alias Bryne of Henstridge, and Anthony Davadge of Keinton – had been receiving income from the same tenement but were not paying their share of the charges. Christiana was carrying the full burden alone.

The Committee sided with her. It ordered Atkins, Grene and Davadge to contribute equally to the costs, or appear at Dorchester the following Wednesday to explain why they refused. A widow in wartime Weston could petition the county authorities and be heard. She knew how the system worked, or had found someone who did. And the financial arrangements around manorial tenements were tangled enough that income could flow to people in Henstridge and Keinton while the occupier in Weston was landed with the bills.

Christiana was probably connected to the Wattes family who held the capital messuage in 1611. William Watts’s will of 1622¹⁷Will of William Watts, yeoman of Stalbridge Weston, 1622; summarised at https://stalbridgewestonmanor.uk/probate/1622-william-watts-yeoman-will-probate/. names an Elnathan Atkins as a grandchild – quite possibly the same Elnathan who was dodging his share of the charges twenty-four years later. It also names a Christian Watts as a granddaughter, though that cannot be the same person as our Christiana, who was already a widow by 1646. Perhaps she had been the wife of Richard Wattes, who succeeded to the tenancy of the capital messuage in 1622. The 1662 schedule records a ‘Christiana Wattes (widow)’ as a previous tenant of some holdings, confirming she survived the war years but had died or given up her tenancy before the manor changed hands, but there is no evidence revealing what happened.

The military disruption was matched by religious upheaval. In 1645, Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer and replaced it with a guide for extempore worship. The familiar liturgy became illegal. In Stalbridge, the rector John Douch was ejected¹⁸A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion, 1642–60 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948). from his living in 1649, replaced by Nathaniel Fairclough, who was in turn replaced by Richard Shute in 1656. Douch was legally restored in 1662, which suggests his parishioners were not much impressed with the alternatives.

George Thornhull died by 1657, when his will was proved.¹⁹C. Harold Ridge, ed., Index to Acts of Administration in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1655–1660, Part III: R–Z, Index Library, vol. 75 (London: British Record Society, 1953), p. 72, s.v. ‘Thornhull, George’. The manor passed to his surviving eldest son Edward, who inherited in a country that had been without a king for seven years, with a church unrecognisable from the one his father had known in his youth. The manor itself had endured four decades of rising fines, lost common rights, civil war on its doorstep and imposed religious change. Whether George’s tenants mourned him we have no idea – but they had at least been spared the chaos of the Brooke years.

1662: Continuity and Change

The Civil War and the Commonwealth period were hard on everyone financially, and shortly after Charles II’s return in 1660, Edward Thornhull prepared to sell Weston. A ‘Schedule of Land at Stalbridge Weston’²⁰Dorset History Centre, D-FRY/738: Schedule of lands, Edward Thornhull of Thornhill and William Whitchurch linen draper of Froome Selwood, Somerset, 26 May 1662. was compiled, and it gives us a detailed picture of the manor after fifty years of Thornhull ownership.

The patchwork of enclosed fields that George Thornhull bought is still recognisable, with the same field names. The tenants’ surnames have not changed much, although new generations have come onto the scene. And the holdings have been subdivided; there are now 39 holdings, on average half the size of 1611. The largest (75 acres) is held by James Weston (whose family holds Callew Weston). Common rights have tightened: they still only apply to specific holdings, but for many fewer sheep and for defined quantities of cattle, not the ‘without number’ provision of 50 years earlier.

There are about 24 or 25 dwellings in total, but only one cottage seems to have been built since 1611. Most of the growth comes from divided messuages. The Locke family’s house is planned to be split between two sisters, Joan’s daughters Jane and Mary, on Joan’s death. Jane will get the rooms over the Hall, half the garden, half the backside, the orchard and three closes including Pile Coppice. Mary will get the room next to John Carter’s house, a chamber within the Hall, a chamber over the Buttery, the other half of the garden and backside, and four closes including Scarrowhill and Stert Furlong. Each sister also received common of pasture for 20 sheep. Another messuage is already divided between Henry Snooke and Edward Hellier. In a small manor with too little land and housing to give everyone a separate farm, succession came down to dividing what already existed – a chamber here, a close there, half a garden apiece.

What we see is a manor of gradations rather than a clean split between rich and poor. At the top sat families like the Loaders, with multiple members and multiple tenements and leasehold farms running to 100 acres or more in total, or the Chamberlaines with 67 acres. In the middle were families like the Stones and the Brownes, with 20 or 30 acres. At the bottom of the landholding scale were cottagers with half an acre and no recorded common rights – people who must have had a trade or worked for wages on their neighbours’ land because their own holdings couldn’t support a family.

George and Elizabeth Hancocke: A Weaver’s Household

Elizabeth Hancocke was one of those cottagers. The 1662 schedule records her holding the tenancy on a cottage at 12d rent, with no land attached. Her husband George attended the manor court jure uxoris – in right of his wife. He was a weaver, and when he died in 1690 his probate inventory²¹Probate inventory of George Hancock, weaver of Stalbridge Weston, 1690; summarised at https://stalbridgewestonmanor.uk/probate/1690-george-hancock-weaver-inventory/. lets us see exactly what the couple had accumulated over a lifetime.

The total came to £28. His two looms and all the harness and tackle that went with them were valued at £2 10s – the tools of his trade and the most valuable single item he owned. He had £1 10s worth of woollen cloth, either finished or on the loom, and a box of linen worth £1. Downstairs, one flock bed with two flock pillows and a bedstead. Upstairs, two more bedsteads with beds and their furniture. In the hall: a cupboard, a table board, a form, four chairs and one joined stool. Brass and pewter at £1 10s. Three barrels, three tubs, two trenels and a pail. A mare and a hay rick. And ‘some other lumber things’ at 10 shillings, plus 5 shillings for ‘all forgotten goods’ – the appraisers’ catch-all for whatever they could not be bothered to list individually.

It is a modest household, but not a destitute one. The joined stool (as opposed to a plain board) hints at a small domestic pride; the brass and pewter at £1 10s outweighed most other categories. The mare was a working animal, not a luxury; George needed her to fetch yarn and deliver cloth. There is no mention of livestock beyond the mare, nor of crops or agricultural tools. This was a man who earned his living from the loom, not the land. His cottage with its half-acre gave him a roof and a garden, nothing more.

The reversion on the cottage was valued at £12 – nearly half the total inventory. That was Elizabeth’s security: the copyhold lease that would keep a roof over her head after George died. She outlived him by over twenty years, dying in 1711, her death recorded in the Stalbridge parish registers and the manor court roll of that year.²²TNA, C 116/60: Court book of Stalbridge Weston manor, with ‘Antioch’, 1663–1716. For two decades she held that cottage alone, paying her shilling a year. We do not know how she supported herself – perhaps spinning, perhaps parish relief, perhaps the kindness of neighbours. But she held on.

The 1662 Hearth Tax for Weston Tithing²³Irene Jones, The Stalbridge Inheritance: From Roman Times to the Late Eighteenth Century (Wimborne: The Dovecote Press, 2009), p. 89. shows 26 households, including those in Callew Weston and Antioch. Strip those out, and a cautious comparison shows 22 names appearing in both the Hearth Tax return and the 1662 schedule – close enough to suggest that the manor court’s records and the tax assessor’s list were counting very nearly the same people. It’s not obvious that anyone in the Weston tithing was recorded as a pauper, but even Bernard Chamberlaine only had 3 chimneys, and Elizabeth Hancocke doesn’t appear to have been charged.

The End of Thornhull Ownership (1662/63)

In 1662–1663, Edward Thornhull sold Stalbridge Weston Manor to William Whitchurch, a linen draper of Frome Selwood, Somerset. The manor passed out of Thornhull hands after half a century of settled ownership, and the cycle began again.