Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson Page B

moor.
    Why so tight? Because most of rural England, from the Middle Ages onward, spent most of the time under stress. There was a desperate shortage of fertility: farming systems could only just sustain the human populations that depended on them. If for every grain sown the average return was between three and four grains, one of which had to be kept as seed for the next year, the land was an asset to be cosseted. Nothing could be allowed to disrupt the habits that, so far at least, had allowed the village to feed its people. Poverty bred fear, fear bred conservatism, and conservatism shut out strangers.
    This, in many ways, was the reality of the lands the Herberts had acquired, a reliance on rules inherited from “a time beyond which thememory of man runneth not to the contrary,” not because those rules stemmed from a golden age but because the risk that changing them would dissolve the system on which survival depended. Communal memory was the arbiter of life. The “custom of the manor” from “time out of mind” was both a moral duty and a set of practical requirements. There was to be no private dealing of which the court and village did not know the details. The manor court, which in its different forms could deal with petty crimes and with all property transactions and transfers, was to be the place in which grievances were to be aired and arrangements made, because only in the openness of those courts, which all copyholders could attend, was communal well-being—common wealth—to be found.
    The closed-circuit supervision of one’s neighbors’ prying eyes ensured that people would not cut down their timber trees, sublet their land for longer than a year, or sell any part of it except in open court. They had to maintain their buildings. If they did not, they would be warned three times, at six-month intervals. On the third time, a stake would be driven into the ground by the front door (said to be the origin of an asset being “at stake”). If nothing had been done by the fourth time, the property would be forfeit. Then the “customary tenant”—the expression means “the holder of the land by the custom of the manor”—would be driven out of his “tenement,” the “held thing.” Although there were freeholders in these villages, they were only free of the labor and money dues that the copyholders owed to the manor. They were not free of the custom of the manor itself. And if they failed to observe the rules of the village, or committed treason or a felony, they, too, could be deprived of their freehold. In that sense, no one, except the lord of the manor, owned anything here. They, as tenants, merely held their tenements. Survival was conditional on obedience. It was a system about as far from the modern conception of the individual and his rights, let alone a welfare state, as it was possible to get.
    Estate management, health and safety issues, antisocial behavior, the highways, property law, animal health and welfare, environmental health, planning permissions, local taxation, police issues, rights of way, agricultural practices, land rights and infringements, supervision of property held in common: every one was dealt with by the lord’s steward and a jury, or “homage,” as it was significantly called, of twelve of the copyholders. The village was not merely an economic unit; it embodied and enacted almost every conceivable dimension of social and political life. This, not England, was a man’s country, and political consciousness penetrated to the very depths of village England, a constant and constantly honed practicing of a set of political rules that felt like the frame of life. Economic management, a deal between the members of a community, and moral policing all came together in an arrangement that was essentially corporate. Privacy in such a world was not only scarcely available, but it would also have