STAC 8/11/13: Attorney General v Weston, at the relation of Charles Brooke

_{All quotations from documents in this file are lightly modernised from the originals.}

One acre of trouble

Between the mansion house of Callew Weston and the house where the Widow Wattes lived (very probably the ‘capital messuage’ of Stalbridge Weston, the lawyers’ name for a manor’s chief house or more simply, its manor house) lay about an acre of rough ground with a highway running through it.¹ People called it the Greene, or the Old Way. The mansion house stood within a bowshot of it (a furlong, by another witness’s guess), and the widow’s own ground came up to its edge.

Whose ground it was depended on whom you asked. Tenants of both manors used it: John Chamberlain put his horse out there while Thomas Wattes put his oxen, ‘without denial each of other’, and nobody could say how that arrangement had begun: it was simply the custom. The sharing had been less peaceable within living memory: before the fields of Stalbridge Weston were enclosed, its lords impounded any Callew Weston beasts found on the Greene; by 1607 the two sets of tenants grazed it side by side.

Part of the Greene had once been a bowling place. It stopped being one when Sir William Weston’s servant John Hendy dug it up to make a ‘rundle’: a circular ring, cut down into the ground, in which Sir William’s horses were trained. The tenants lost their green so that a knight could school his horses, and witnesses were still complaining about it in 1607.²

It was the sort of shared, useful space every community had, right up until two proud men needed it to be something more.

The two proud men were in no state to be reasonable. Charles Brooke of Templecombe had just buried two brothers in one plague summer and inherited the Cobham gamble: a Crown purchase his brother had barely finished paying for, which Charles then had to pay for all over again. Into the bargain he had lost his man on the ground: Thomas Wattes, tenant and sometime bailiff of Stalbridge Weston, was buried in 1606, leaving his 72-year-old widow Joane in the manor house.³ Across the Greene sat Thomas Weston, esquire, of Callew Weston, of a family which had pointedly refused to pay Stalbridge Weston’s 10s chief rent for some twenty years. Each side needed the Greene to prove something: Brooke, that Callew Weston was a tenancy of his manor, unpaid rent and all; Weston, that his holding was an ancient manor of its own and owed the Brookes nothing. If there was a spark beyond that standing quarrel, the file does not show it; the first move it does show is Brooke’s.

The cottage

On or about 13 October 1606, Thomas Browne, a husbandman of about fifty, arrived on the Greene with two helpers, Henry Folliatt and Thomas Hooper, and a load of timber. Browne already lived in a cottage on Brooke’s waste (the manor’s spare, uncultivated ground); Brooke had arranged to move him to a new one: on the disputed ground, under the Westons’ noses. Thomas Weston came and forbade the work, saying he would not suffer a cottage on his ground. The builders answered that Mr Brooke had set them on and would ‘bear them out’, and kept building. They got as far as posts, side-pieces and rafters: a skeleton, with nothing yet you could call a wall or a roof.⁴

A few days later, ‘in the dawning of the day’, Weston’s servants William Sheppard and Henry Sharpe pulled down the frame and hauled the timber to Weston’s house with a team of oxen. Their total armament was one ox-goad. The timber was stored, not burnt, and Browne was told he could fetch it whenever he liked. Joane Wattes, who had contributed rafters to the cottage herself, watched them work, and later swore there was neither violence nor a threatening word.⁵

The letter

Weston then did something nobody in the quarrel had yet tried: he wrote a letter. Having lopped (‘shrouded’) a tree on the Greene to make his point, he sent a letter to Brooke, carried by the weaver William Turner, explaining what he had done and inviting Brooke to bring an action at common law to try the title. It was a tidy plan. A court would decide who owned the acre, and everyone could stop carting timber about at dawn.

Brooke did not see it that way. On reading the letter he ‘grew choleric’, wished he might meet Weston on the Greene, and, when someone unwisely asked what he would do there, said he would ‘cut his throat’. Turner, who had been a servant of old Sir William Weston in his time, hurried home to warn Sir William’s son. Brooke rode straight to Weston’s house and demanded him; Weston, forewarned and sensible, was not at home to visitors. Riding back through the Greene, Brooke saw the cut tree and swore ‘it should cost him his life but he would have it away’.⁶

The tree

Next morning Brooke’s servants — Isaac Hayward, one Rayer, and later Sandall, wearing a short sword — set about cleaving the tree where it lay. Mrs Weston came out to forbid them; they answered that their master would save them harmless. So she went to the Widow Wattes’s house, where Brooke was at dinner with his company, and fetched him to the tree in person. He told her he would take ‘no forbiddance’, and the tree left the Greene that afternoon in two wains. For good measure Brooke announced he would set the cottage up again at his own cost, and dared Weston to pull it down a second time.⁷

The quarrel finished, as these things did, before the justices of the peace at Sturminster. Brooke threatened to make Weston ‘spend a thousand pounds’, later improved to making him ‘spend his manor of Weston’. The justices, who knew Weston ‘to be a man of civil reputation’, at first declined to act, then bound him to his good behaviour anyway. The man who had threatened throat-cutting was not bound over; the man who had written a letter was.⁸

Riot, or housekeeping?

A riot, in law, was a precise thing: it took three or more people, gathered together, using or threatening force to do something unlawful. The Sturminster justices did not send the case to Star Chamber. Brooke started again at Westminster, procuring an information in the Attorney General’s name, filed in February 1607. It duly describes a riot: ten or more persons armed with swords, daggers, forest bills (long-handled woodland blades) and piked staves, violently destroying a dwelling house and felling trees on his manor. The depositions describe two unarmed servants dismantling an unfinished frame by daylight, at their master’s direction, on ground their master believed his own, and storing the timber for its owner to collect. Two men and an ox-goad fall short of a riot not only in spirit but in arithmetic. Star Chamber existed for the first version; the witnesses, inconveniently, kept describing the second.⁹

And they kept doing it on both sides. The riot’s supposed victims deposed for Brooke: Joane Wattes, who had given rafters towards the cottage, swore there was neither violence nor a threatening word, and Thomas Browne, whose house it was, said the same; it was left to Joane to add that he had never actually lived in it. Deposing for Weston, William Wattes conceded that Callew Weston’s tenants had had no common on the Greene until the enclosure, which was very nearly Brooke’s whole case about the ground. The witnesses, unlike the litigants, had to go on living with their neighbours — and with the facts.

Underneath the pantomime lay a real question: what exactly was Callew Weston? Brooke’s witnesses remembered Hugh Weston sitting in the Stalbridge Weston manor court as a freeholder and paying his 10s chief rent until Sir William stopped paying somewhere around the 1580s. On that reading Callew Weston was simply a freehold held of Stalbridge Weston, and the Greene was Brooke’s waste.

Weston’s answer reached further back. Robert Bishopp, a gentleman of Mere who had searched the family’s deed-chest after Sir William’s death, deposed to thirteen ancient deeds, offices and court rolls running from Henry III to Elizabeth. They showed Callew Weston as a manor in its own right: copyholds granted at its own court, a freehold called ‘Gengers’ held of it by Robert Thornhill at 2s 6d a year, and the manor itself held not of Stalbridge Weston at all but of ‘Mr Carrant’ — by a pair of gloves, or a penny.¹⁰

The irony is that the question about the Greene already had a written answer, and neither side produced it. At the hockday court at Stalbridge in the eighth year of Henry VIII (1516/17), Dan John Meere, abbot of Sherborne (‘Dan’, from the Latin dominus, was a monk’s courtesy title), and Hugh Weston of Callew Weston had settled exactly this quarrel: ‘a way callyd hold way & all other ways adjunnyng’ was divided between the two manors, the abbot taking ‘haufe the woode & hauffe the pasture’.¹¹ A hockday court sat at Hocktide, in the second week after Easter. The agreement survives twice, both copies among the Weston family’s own muniments (now at the Somerset Heritage Centre): endorsed in English on a thirteenth-century deed, and enrolled in Latin on the abbey’s court roll of 1515–16, styling the abbot ‘lord of this manor’ and Hugh ‘free tenant, of Calloweweston’. The enrolled Latin is the more precise: the tenants of both shall graze the way called Eldewey in common, and the ‘shides’ of the trees growing there — the split wood, the lop and fell — shall be divided, half to the lord and his tenants, half to Hugh and his.

Read in that context, the 1607 depositions fall into place. The shared grazing ‘without denial each of other’ is the agreement still working, ninety years on, as half-remembered custom. So is the file’s otherwise baffling obsession with trees: both houses kept jealous count, because each was entitled to exactly half of them. Katherine Cole burning the loppings of Hugh Weston’s ash trees in her chamber; the windfall tree Hugh conceded after checking his deeds; Sir William’s carried-away elm; the lopped tree of 1606 that began the final round — every tree story in the depositions is the 1516 division, still being scored. And always over cut or fallen wood, never a standing tree, which is exactly what the agreement halved.

A fifty-fifty split was also the one outcome neither litigant wanted in 1607, which may be why both copies stayed in the very chest of muniments Robert Bishopp searched for his thirteen deeds. Star Chamber was asked to choose between two absolute claims to ground that ninety years earlier had been carefully halved.

What became of it

We do not know who won. Star Chamber’s decree and order books were lost in the seventeenth century, so for this case, as for nearly every other suit in the series, the pleadings and depositions survive and the judgment does not.¹² Events supplied a verdict of sorts. Within three years Charles Brooke was dead, and Stalbridge Weston passed with the rest of the wreckage to Robert Cecil. The Westons, meanwhile, stayed exactly where they were: still at Callew Weston fighting the rector over tithes in 1654, and still there in 1729 when the will of Mary Weston, widow, of Callew Weston, was proved.¹³

Why this case matters to local historians

As law, STAC 8/11/13 settled nothing we can detect. As evidence, it is a new window into Weston at the turn of the seventeenth century. Twenty or so villagers step out of the record with names, ages and occupations; the fields of Stalbridge Weston turn out to have been enclosed within living memory; a bowling green appears, and is destroyed to build a horse-training ring earlier than any other we have found documented in England; and the house where the Widow Wattes lived resolves, very probably, into the old manor house of Stalbridge Weston itself. All of that is set out in Part 2.

Part 2 — People and Places

People

The principals

Charles Brooke, esquire, of Templecombe — lord (for a term of years) of Stalbridge Weston, brother and heir of Duke Brooke. Choleric, indebted and litigious; the throat-cutting threat is reported by the man who delivered Weston’s letter to him. The case was brought within a year of his brothers’ deaths.

Thomas Weston, esquire, of Callew Weston — chief active defendant; ‘seised’ of Callew Weston for about five years (so from c.1602), son of Sir William Weston kt (d. 1596) and grandson of Hugh Weston, gent. Preferred letters to riots; bound over anyway.

William Weston, esquire, ‘of Weston’ — named first among the defendants as ringleader, described as Thomas’s brother, and then never appears again: no answer, no deposition, no mention by any witness. Either a pleading fiction to thicken the ‘riot’, or a brother whose part vanished with the lost paperwork.

The Weston women — Thomas’s wife (never named) faced down Brooke’s work-party twice and fetched Brooke from his dinner to be forbidden properly; ‘old Mrs Weston’, almost certainly Sir William’s widow, held a tenement in Callew Weston. Neither is given a Christian name anywhere in the file — a familiar gap.

The Wattes family — and the old manor house

A Michael Wattes was bailiff of the manor in 1535; the William Wattes to whom Richard Duke granted the capital messuage in 1556/7 was probably his son; the people of the 1607 case are the generation after that. Thomas Wattes (d. 1606) kept up the family trade as bailiff, summoning Hugh Weston to court and taking his 10s chief rent, and his widow Joane Wattes (72; d. 1608) was still living at the family house at the time of the case. The ‘Widow Wattes house’, as the depositions call it, is where Brooke based himself and dined on the day of the tree; she and her husband had ‘always maintained a gate’ at one end of the Greene: less a neighbourly habit than a quiet claim to the ground on Stalbridge Weston’s behalf.

William Wattes, gentleman, about 60, is Thomas’s brother — Thomas’s will says so, naming him overseer — and so, like Thomas, a son of the 1556/7 grantee. He is the sitting tenant of the capital messuage, at whose house the manor court met, and he cannot be the grantee himself: a man of sixty in 1607 was a boy of ten when that grant was made. The clincher is Thomas’s legacy to a nephew Richard, who is exactly the Richard named with his sister Elizabeth, children of William, as future tenants in the reversion William secured in 1592/3 (fine £86 13s 4d, Christian Sprint and Duke Brooke among the consenting parties: the litigation’s cast list moonlighting as conveyancers) and standing unchanged in the 1611 survey. On age alone he is also the William Wattes, yeoman, whose will was proved in 1622, dead at about 75 and one rung down in style from the deposition’s ‘gent’. He managed the neat trick of deposing for Weston’s defence while walking to the Greene in Brooke’s company. A man determined to still have good neighbours when the dust settled. He was also, very probably, an old hand: thirty years earlier a ‘Mr Willyam Wattes’, on age most likely this one, had been accused in Chancery of quietly marrying a copyhold widow (see A Very Quiet Wedding).¹⁴

One holding, one house, in all likelihood: every record we have seen gives the Wattes family a single holding in Stalbridge Weston (the capital messuage, later broken up), so ‘the Widow Wattes house’, where Brooke quartered himself, and ‘this deponentes howse’, where William says the manor court was kept, are best read as the same establishment: the old manor house, with the extended family under one roof — and the obvious place for the lord of the manor to dine.

The deponent census

Star Chamber took its evidence in writing. Each side drafted questions (interrogatories), and commissioners put them to witnesses locally (here at Sherborne in May 1607), recording each witness’s name, age, parish and occupation on oath before their answers. That clerical habit is what makes the file a census as well as a lawsuit. Sixteen witnesses and answering defendants appear below, with approximate birth years running from the 1520s to the 1560s. ‘Prosecution’ marks those who answered Brooke’s interrogatories (the suit ran in the Attorney General’s name, but Brooke was the moving party); ‘Defence’ marks those who answered Thomas Weston’s:

Name	Age	Occupation / status	Side and principal evidence
Ranfe Horsey	—	gent; commissioner	Prosecution. Knew the manor 50 years; took rents under Duke Brooke; Hugh Weston a freeholder, rent refused 20 years.
Joane Wattes	72	widow, Stalbridge	Prosecution. Eyewitness to the pulling-down (no violence); gave rafters to the cottage; kept the gate on the Greene.
John Chamberlain	74	clothier, Stourton Caundle	Prosecution. Shared use of the Greene c.1589 — his horse alongside Thomas Wattes’s oxen.
Thomas Jeanes	65	yeoman; sometime bailiff	Prosecution. As bailiff, summoned Hugh Weston to court and demanded the 10s chief rent (refused: ‘there was not so much due’). Went to sell a wind-blown tree-top from the Greene (c. March 1606) and found Thomas Weston had already thrown it over his hedge; told that Sir William had taken trees there before, retorted ‘the more wrong he did unto the tenants’ — and was told he would not have said so much to the father.
Robert Kember	60	husbandman	Prosecution. The fallen-ash story c.1571–73: Hugh Weston checked his deeds and conceded the tree.
Michael Snook	60	yeoman	Prosecution. Chief rent by report; Browne built his first house at his own cost.
Thomas Browne	50	husbandman	Prosecution (and the tenant at the centre). Rent on the new plot was to be a capon a year; saw the dawn demolition, ‘no violence nor threatening words’.
William Wattes	60	gent, Stalbridge Weston	Defence. Before the enclosure of Stalbridge Weston’s fields, Callew Weston’s tenants had no common on the Greene and their beasts were impounded; present with Brooke’s party on the day.
Katherine Cole	78	widow; former Weston servant	Defence. Knew the Greene 60+ years as ‘Mr Weston’s Greene’; burnt Hugh Weston’s tree-shrouds in her chamber when she lay in childbed.
John Cuffe	60	husbandman; former Weston servant	Defence. Hugh Weston stopped Sprint’s man Henry Tucker setting gate-posts on the Greene and had the holes filled in.
John Gerrard	57	weaver, Stalbridge	Defence. Named the Callew Weston tenements; watched the tree-cleaving and the two wains; the rundle spoiled the bowling green.
James Galley	43	gent, Stalbridge	Defence. Dined with Brooke at the Wattes house; itemised Brooke’s ten-man tree-carrying party (two armed).
Robert Bishopp	43	gent, Mere (Wilts)	Defence. Read thirteen ancient deeds and court rolls, Henry III–Elizabeth: Callew Weston an ancient manor held of ‘Mr Carrant’ by a pair of gloves or a penny.
William Turner	39	weaver; former Weston servant	Defence. Carried the letter; reported Brooke’s ‘cut his throat’; the rundle dug by Hendy for horse-training.
Bartholomew Bartlett	60	husbandman, Callew Weston	Defendant and deponent. Felled the lopped tree with Sheppard; cottage had no walls, windows, doors or covering.
Sheppard & Sharpe	—	servants to Thomas Weston	Defendants. The dawn demolition team: oxen, one ox-goad, timber stored for Browne to reclaim. Deposed 2 May 1607.

Brooke’s men — Isaac Hayward, ‘Rayer’, Sandall (the one with the sword), Gregory Ryall, ‘Gowre’ and John Jeanes: named members of the tree-carrying party, otherwise unknown. And from the older generation the file preserves Richard Duke and his bailiff John Pond (Kember’s father-in-law), ‘Master Sprint’ and his gate-builder Henry Tucker, a Robert Thornhill holding ‘Gengers’ of Callew Weston, and the splendidly obscure overlord Mr Carrant.

Places

The Greene, alias the Old Way — about an acre of waste with a highway running through it, a gate at one end (maintained by the Wattes family) and the Callew Weston mansion house within a bowshot by one witness’s estimate, a furlong by another’s. Used in common by tenants of both manors after the enclosure of Stalbridge Weston’s fields; before that, Stalbridge Weston’s lords impounded Callew Weston beasts found there; so the enclosure, otherwise undated, happened within the memory of men aged about 60 in 1607. The name is older than any deponent knew: the 1516 endorsement calls it ‘a way callyd hold way’, and its wood and pasture were then already worth dividing.

The bowling green and the rundle — part of the Greene was a bowling place until Sir William Weston’s servant Hendy dug it up to make a ‘rundle’: a circular, excavated ring in which Sir William’s horses were ‘ridden and managed’: manège in the Renaissance sense, not stable admin. Datable to roughly the 1580s–90s, it is decades earlier than the documented riding house at Bolsover, and we have found no other documented outdoor horse-schooling ring in England so early. But we are local historians, not historians of horsemanship, and we offer the claim for correction rather than assert it. The word ‘rundle’ in this sense we have found nowhere else either.²

The Wattes house — on or hard by the Greene; Brooke’s base of operations, where he dined on the day of the tree. The depositions name it two ways: everyone else says ‘the Wyddowe Wattes howse’, while William Wattes calls it ‘this deponentes howse’, where the manor court was kept. Since the records show the family with a single holding (the capital messuage granted in 1556/7), the natural reading is one establishment: the old manor house of Stalbridge Weston, with the extended Wattes family under its roof and the manor court meeting in it. (The lord of the manor, when it suited him, dined there too.)

Callew Weston’s tenements — the depositions name Bassett’s Court (about seven acres, formerly copyhold), a house and backside held by Barnard Jeanes in right of Hugh Burden, old Mrs Weston’s tenement and Bartlett’s dwelling: a rare, if partial, tenement list of the smaller manor.

Offstage — Templecombe (Brooke’s seat); Shroton, alias Iwerne Courtney, where Turner delivered the letter — which happens to be Sir Thomas Freke’s parish, at just the period when the manor seems to have been farmed to Freke’s consortium; Sturminster, where the justices sat; Sherborne, where depositions were taken; Mere and Stourton Caundle, home to two witnesses.