A tenement, a reversion and three lives

The property at the centre of this quarrel was a substantial one: a tenement nominally of a yardland and a half, together with half of the closes called Oldelands: in the 1611 survey, it is described as some ninety-two acres of orchards, meadow, pasture and arable, with common for a hundred sheep and ‘rother beasts without number’.¹ It was held by copy of court roll of the manor of Stalbridge Weston, ‘for term of one, two or three lives, in possession or in reversion’. Around 1553, at a manor court held by his steward John Sterre, Richard Duke granted the reversion of it to Joan (by the time of the suit the wife of John Dibbyn of Berwick St John in Wiltshire, yeoman). The grant was to Joan alone, and is known only from the Dibbyns’ own bill, for reasons that will become apparent.² The sitting lives were William Locke and John Locke; Joan’s turn would come when theirs ran out. Copyhold reversions were long-term investments: you paid now and waited, sometimes decades, for other people to die.

Exit the Lockes

About 1571–73 William Locke died, and the machinery of manorial custom began to turn. His widow Johan claimed the tenement for as long as she remained a widow, her ‘widow’s estate’ or free bench under the custom of the manor, and was duly admitted. John Locke, the other life, then bargained, sold and surrendered his interest to John Dibbyn by deed. So far, so orderly: on the Dibbyns’ arithmetic the widow’s estate was the only thing standing between Joan and her twenty-year-old reversion.

A very quiet wedding

Then, said the Dibbyns, the widow remarried — and this is where the story earns its Chancery bill. Her new husband was William Wattes, and by the custom of the manor her remarriage ended her widow’s estate on the spot. The catch, said the Dibbyns, was that the wedding ‘was had pryvelye betwene’ the couple: as private, that is, as a wedding can be, held in the presence only of Thomas Wattes, Robert Crewe, Andrew Geere and William Snowke — the groom’s brother and friends, every one of whom then declined to admit the marriage had happened. A widow who stayed officially a widow kept the tenement; a widow known to be Mrs Wattes lost it. The Dibbyns entered on the strength of Joan’s reversion; the Wattes party, they said, ‘wrongfully entered … and expelled and put out’ the Dibbyns in their turn.³

‘In bag, box or chest’

Worse, the one document that proved Joan’s title, the copy of court roll of the c.1553 grant, had come ‘by casual means’ into the defendants’ hands. The bill’s lament here is a joy: the Dibbyns did not know the date of their own copy, ‘or whether the same be in bag, box or chest, sealed or unsealed, locked or unlocked’, and the ‘ancient homagers’ of the manor who might have remembered the grant were ‘for the most part dead’. Without the copy there was no suing at common law: a court of law wanted the copy itself produced, and the copy (allegedly) was in the defendants’ keeping. That is why the Dibbyns went to Chancery, which could make the defendants answer on oath — the court for people whose evidence was in someone else’s chest.³

The defence: deny everything

The answer of William Wattes and his co-defendants is an equally fine specimen of the genre. The bill is ‘untrue and uncertain’, devised ‘of mere malice’ to put the defendants to ‘great charges and expenses’. There was no such grant to Joan. John Locke’s sale to Dibbyn was a spiteful contrivance ‘more of malice … than for any advantage’. Then the denial that mattered: Johan Locke ‘hath not espoused or taken to husband the said William Wattes’, the allegation being ‘most slanderously and untruly alleged’; she remained a lawful widow, lawfully possessed. The Dibbyns filed a replication maintaining every word of their bill, and there the surviving paperwork stops.⁴

The £100 ending

No decree survives in the file, but this case has something better: a visible ending. In 1574, the year of the replication, John Dibbyn paid Gregory Sprint and Christina, the new lord and lady of Stalbridge Weston, £100 for a copyhold of a tenement of a yardland and a half with the Oldelands. The description matches the disputed holding exactly, and the 1611 survey settles it: the Dibbyn holding ‘granted in 1574’ is described there in the bill’s own words (one tenement of 1½ virgates, and half of the enclosure called Oldland), while the reversion of the same holding, regranted in 1606 by the Freke consortium to Jerome Dibbyn and Elizabeth, John’s daughter, for a £140 fine, is identified in the Somerset Heritage Centre records as Frith House. The tenement the Dibbyns fought for is Frith Farm, and the family were still on it a generation later. In other words, whatever Chancery thought, Dibbyn ended the argument the reliable way: he bought a fresh copy of the very tenement from the new owners, at a price steep enough to make the point that the paperwork mattered. A £100 fine was serious money, and buying a fresh copy of a tenement you already claimed by right was not routine business: this was the purchase of peace after a lawsuit. For Sprint and Christina, newly in possession and chronically short of money, it was also a very welcome piece of business.¹

And the fresh copy itself survives, among the Weston muniments. An extract of court roll records John Dybbyn senior coming into open court and taking from Gregory Sprint and Christian his wife the tenement of one virgate and a half, with half of all the closes called Oldland, ‘which Johana Locke, widow, lately held and forfeited into the lords’ hands’, for the lives of himself and his sons Jerome and John, at a fine of £100 paid in hand, with admittance and fealty, signed by Gregory and Christian Sprint themselves. Forfeited is the manor’s word for how the widow’s estate ended. But the same entry still calls her ‘Johana Locke, widow’, which is not how a clerk describes a woman just proved to be Mrs Wattes. She may have lost the tenement for some cause the roll does not give; more likely she was bought out, and forfeited was the tidiest word available. We will never know. And a family which had once lost its title ‘in bag, box or chest’ took no chances the second time: their new copy carries the lord’s and lady’s own signatures, and it is still legible four and a half centuries on.¹

Whether Joan Dibbyn ever forgave the four wedding guests is not recorded.

Why this case matters to local historians

Dibbyn v Wattes is Stalbridge Weston’s copyhold system in action: reversions granted for cash, widow’s bench, surrender and admittance, and the absolute primacy of the written copy — lose it, and your title went with it. It supplies the manor’s steward c.1553 (John Sterre), a cluster of tenant surnames that recur at Weston for the next century, and the full identity of the £100 grant of 1574: Frith Farm, alias the disputed tenement: the Manor History’s ‘probably Frith Farm’ and this lawsuit turn out to be the same story. And it shows the Wattes family — bailiffs, capital-messuage tenants and, in 1607, hosts to litigious lords — already at the centre of village affairs, and already good at looking after themselves.

It also seats the case inside a very small ring of neighbours. Christine Snowke (the 1562 grant’s own styling, though she was married to Thomas Jeanes) held the matching 1½-virgate holding; a Snowke and a Wattes witnessed the quiet wedding of 1573; Jeaneses, Snookes and Kembers fill the deposition roll of 1607; and the Kembers were still holding their piece of Oldland in 1701. Between the Wattes at the manor house, the Dibbyns at Frith and the Snowke–Jeanes–Kember network on the rest of Oldland, the cast of Weston’s lawsuits is one set of intermarrying neighbours, litigating in rotation.⁵

Part 2 — People and Places

People

The plaintiffs

John Dibbyn, yeoman, of Berwick St John, Wiltshire — some fifteen miles from Weston, on the far side of Shaftesbury. An outsider with local investments; buyer of John Locke’s interest, and finally of the 1574 copy at £100, taken for the lives of himself and his sons Jerome and John junior. His wife Joan held the c.1553 reversion in her own right: the suit is at bottom about her property, pursued in the usual form under her husband’s name. The John Dibbyn who took the £100 copyhold of 1574 and the plaintiff here are the same man: the 1611 survey carries the holding back to the 1574 grant in the bill’s own terms, and the 1606 reversion names Jerome Dibbyn and Elizabeth, John’s daughter, as the future lives.¹

The Lockes

William Locke (d. c.1571–73) and John Locke — the two sitting lives on the old copy; Johan Locke, William’s widow, who held by free bench: the widow the Dibbyns said had quietly become Mrs Wattes, and who swore in her answer that she was no such thing. The £100 extract records her estate as forfeited, while still calling her a widow; whether she ever remarried, the records never settle. The Lockes stayed at Weston long after: a William Lock of Stalbridge Weston proved his will in 1657 (PROB 11/270/495).⁶

The defendants — the Wattes circle

William Wattes — the bridegroom: ‘Mr Willyam Wattes’ in the bill. Two Wattes are candidates. The elder William was granted the capital messuage of the manor by Richard Duke in 1556/7; but the wedding follows William Locke’s death ‘within twoo yeres nowe laste paste’, so c.1571–73, by when the elder was in his mid-forties at the youngest, and likely older.⁷ His son, another William — about twenty-five at the wedding, later the sitting tenant of the capital messuage, a witness aged about sixty in the Star Chamber case of 1607, and dead, as a yeoman, in 1622⁸ — is the likelier ‘Mr’ to be marrying a copyhold widow with his brother beside him. The elder, if a widower still living, cannot quite be excluded; either way, the village establishment in person. Thomas Wattes — wedding witness and co-defendant: the younger William’s brother, and later bailiff of the manor; he died in 1606. William Snowke — wedding witness; Snookes were still holding Weston land well into the next century. Robert Crewe and Andrew Geere — wedding witnesses and co-defendants, otherwise unknown. Both surnames read consistently across bill, answer and replication.

Offstage

Richard Duke — lord of the manor 1546–72, granting reversions for cash through his steward John Sterre. Gregory Sprint and Christina — the new regime, monetising the dispute’s conclusion in 1574. Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, the bill’s addressee, which alone dates the suit before 1579.

Places

Frith Farm and Oldland — the disputed tenement, identified via the 1611 survey and DD/WHh/452: nominally 1½ virgates, in practice some ninety-two acres (two orchards and backside, c.2 acres; four closes of meadow or pasture, c.20 acres; fourteen closes of pasture or arable, c.70 acres), with common for a hundred sheep, rother beasts without number, and a goad of wood within the coppice hedge.¹ The bill’s ‘moiety of the closes called Oldelandes’ matches the survey’s ‘half of all the enclosure, meadow and pasture called Oldland’. But no single neighbour held the other half. The Sequence of Transactions shows the rest of Oldland parcelled across the manor: the Snowke–Jeanes tenement of 1562 had ‘Ouldland in Shortland adjoining Foreyate’, John Maudeslye’s 1606 grant took ‘Hoopers hill and Oldlandes’ (30 acres), the Gawtrell holding of 1608 (four closes, c.14 acres) passed to John Loader in 1650, and the Kembers held ‘certain lands called Oldlands’ with their ferlingate tenement from at least 1661 to 1701. Dibbyn’s half was simply the largest share of a tract everyone had a piece of.⁵

Oldland, alias Overland — the two names are, for one holding at least, demonstrably the same ground. The Snowke–Jeanes parcel appears as ‘Ouldland in Shortland adjoining Foreyate’ in 1562, ‘Oldlands in Shortlands next Foregate’ in 1655 and ‘Overlands near Foregeate’ in 1697: one name drifting across 135 years. The caution is the pair of grants made the same day in October 1574 (Dibbyn’s ‘half of Oldland’ beside Michael Snowke’s ‘certain ground of Overland’), which shows both forms in use side by side; so either two names for one tract, or two adjoining tracts whose names eventually merged. Overland was a real term of art in the west of England, with two connected senses: land outside the ancient tenements of a manor, carrying no common rights; and a rented parcel with no house upon it. Weston’s Oldland parcels answer both descriptions: houseless closes tacked onto assorted holdings across the manor.⁹ Oldland has a pedigree of its own: the dictionaries’ old land is arable lying fallow, or ley ground left in grass beyond two years. The word is Old English in origin, with a parcel called ‘þe oldelond’ on record in Kent by 1434.¹⁰ So the two forms need not be corruptions of one another: the same closes could honestly answer to both, old land by husbandry and overland by tenure, and by the seventeenth century the words had settled into a name rather than a live legal category.⁵

Berwick St John — the Dibbyns’ home parish in the Wiltshire chalk country beyond Shaftesbury. Copyhold reversions were bought at a distance as investments, and this is a documented example: Weston land held speculatively by a Wiltshire yeoman’s wife for twenty years.

References

1
The 1574 grant and its later history: Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh/456 (the 1611 survey/rental of Stalbridge Weston: the Dybbin holding granted 1574 — one tenement of 1½ virgates, half of Oldland, c.92 acres in all); DD/WHh/452 (grant in reversion, 26 September 1606, by Sir Thomas Freke kt, John Boden and William Younge, gentlemen, farmers of the manor, to Jerome Dybbin and Elizabeth Dybbin, daughter of John, fine £140 — identifying the holding as Frith House); DD/WHh/440 (extract of court roll, under the sign manuals of Gregory and Christian Sprint: admission of John Dybbyn senior to one tenement of 1½ virgates and half of Oldland, forfeited by Johana Locke, widow, fine £100 — the court dated the 14th of a damaged month in the sixteenth year of Elizabeth [1574], though catalogued as 14 September 1586). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
2
The National Archives (TNA), C 2/Eliz/D11/42: Court of Chancery, Six Clerks Office, Dibbyn v Wattes. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C5698890 — short title: plaintiffs John Dibbyn and his wife Joan; defendants William Wattes and others; a tenement and lands held of the manor of Stalbridge Weston, granted to plaintiff Joan by Richard Duke esquire, lord of the said manor. ↩︎
3
C 2/Eliz/D11/42: bill of complaint (marginal date 1573). ↩︎ ↩︎
4
C 2/Eliz/D11/42: joint and several answer of William Wattes, Johanne Locke, Thomas Wattes and others; replication of John Dibben and Johan his wife (marginal date 1574). ↩︎
5
The Oldland/Overland parcels and the neighbour network: the 1611 survey (DD/WHh/456), the 1662 schedule and the manor court rolls — grants of 15 October 1562 (Christine Snowke, wife of Thomas Jeanes), 14 October 1574 (John Dybbin; Michael Snowke), 26 September 1606 (John Maudeslye), 13 April 1608 (William Gawtrell), 15 April 1650 (John Loader), 4 April 1661 and 26 June 1701 (the Kembers), 9 May 1655 (James and Mary Weston to Thornhull) and 24 September 1697 (William Thornhull). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
6
TNA, PROB 11/270/495: will of William Lock of Stalbridge Weston, Dorset, proved 4 December 1657. ↩︎
7
Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/WHh series: grant of the capital messuage, Richard Duke to William Wattes, 15 February 1556/7; and see the STAC 8/11/13 case page, ‘The Wattes family — and the old manor house’. ↩︎
8
TNA, PROB 11/140/251: will of William Watts, yeoman, of Stalbridge Weston, made 9 June 1619, proved 21 September 1622 (transcription at 1622 William Watts Yeoman). ↩︎
9
Overland as a term of art: Oxford English Dictionary, overland, n.1 — a historical term of the south-west, covering land held by a distinctive feudal tenure and, in later use, rented land without farm buildings. The dictionary’s illustrative sources say it best: the Cheddar Moor enclosure commissioners (1801) defined overlands as ‘all lands whether open or inclosed, which do not, nor at any time heretofore did belong to auster, or ancient tenements, and for which no right of common in the moors or on the hill have been allowed’; Marshall’s west Devon glossary (1796) has ‘a parcel of land, without a house to it’, and Elworthy’s West Somerset Word-book (1888) agrees. Victoria County History, Somerset VIII, Westonzoyland (former demesne arable ‘let either in small parcels of overland or plots of over 20 a.’; ‘some tenants also held substantial amounts of overland, possibly former demesne’); Somerset III, Huish Episcopi (‘overland rents’ payable on recovered meadow and pasture, the term in use by 1302); Somerset VI, Creech St Michael (the 1780s rectory estate distinguishing ‘the great tithes of overland’ from tithes on ‘place lands’ — land with a homestead attached). ↩︎
10
Old land: Oxford English Dictionary, old land, n. — an English regional term, Old English in origin, for arable lying fallow or left in grass as an old ley, and for ground newly broken after lying idle. Among the dictionary’s sources: a parcel ‘ycald … þe oldelond’ at Wittersham, Kent, in 1434, and East Anglian ‘olland’ for old leys into the twentieth century. ↩︎