Prosecutions for Depopulation in Northamptonshire following the Inquisition of 1607 Preamble: The Midland Rising of 16071 In early June 1607 a crowd of about one thousand gathered at Newton, near Geddington, to destroy hedges and fences recently erected by Thomas Tresham. The protesters, ‘fellows who term themselves levellers’ were, allegedly, armed not only with stones but also with bows and arrows, pikes and long bills. Despite the fact that disorder had been brewing for several weeks since the Mayday festivities, and that early warning of exactly such troubles as these had already been flagged up by the Oxfordshire anti-enclosure rising of 15962, the county militia under Lord Lieutenant Thomas Cecil, Earl of Exeter, was surprisingly ill-prepared; local gentry were therefore obliged to assemble a makeshift defence force from their own household servants and clients. This private army was commanded by Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, deputy lieutenant of the county, and Sir Anthony Mildmay of Apethorpe, a grizzled veteran of the campaign against the Northern Rising back in 1569. By 8th June, Montagu had hanged two of the rebel leaders. The rioting at Newton was the culmination of almost six weeks of disorder across Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, now collectively termed the Midland Rising. The long-term context of this rebellion was high population growth, consequent land scarcity, and inflation driven by poor harvests. The growing problem of poverty created by these pressures was compounded in 1593 when the Tudor regime relaxed its restrictive laws against enclosure of the open fields and common lands on which the livelihood of the landless poor depended. Although the laws were restored in 1597, the gentry of the heavy clay-lands of the midlands had already seized the opportunity to convert their estates from growing grain to sheep pasture. Many open-field communities saw rapid and sometimes complete enclosure in the decade or so before 1607, including Cotesbach (Leics); Ladbroke, Hillmorton and Chilvers Coton (Warks); and Haselbech, Rushton and Pytchley (Northants). Each of these places saw the gathering of large crowds of ‘levellers’ and ‘diggers’ in May and early June 1607, sometimes as many as five thousand, protesting against enclosure. The rising culminated at Newton, the site of one of the most notorious episodes of oppressive enclosure in the Midlands. Thomas Tresham of Newton had flouted laws and proclamations against enclosure for decades. As early as 1564, long before the tillage laws were suspended, 650 sheep were grazing in the parish. In 1597/8, Tresham was prosecuted in Star Chamber for depopulation and sheep farming. By 1607, the whole parish was under grass and had been leased out to graziers, probably having been completely enclosed in the mid-1590s. In about 1599, Tresham also purchased the estate at Pilton from his cousin, the equally notorious enclosing landlord Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton, and destroyed five farms in the process of converting 135 acres of arable to sheep pasture. Following the battle at Newton, Sir Edward Montagu recorded the names of 143 men who sued for pardon under the terms of a royal proclamation of 24 July 1607. Sixty- two (43%) of those who sought pardons were labourers and a further fifty-five (28%) were craftsmen. The vast majority, then, were landless, and they mainly came from forest communities. Seventy-eight (55%) came from larger villages such as Weldon (36 rebels), Corby (29 rebels), and Benefield (9), but there was a 1 Details in this section are summarised from the article ‘The Battle of Newton-field and the Midland Rising of 1607’: by Professor Steve Hindle, University of Warwick, 2006 2 ‘A Rising of the People? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, John Walter, Past and Present, No. 107. (1985), pp. 90-143. significant minority from the town of Kettering (27 rebels), a distribution similar to that found in the Leicestershire part of the Rising where the townsmen had a major role to play in fermenting discontent in the countryside. Enclosure, they insisted’ was carried out not ‘for the benefit of the Commonalty’ but only for the ‘private gain’ of those who had ‘depopulated and overthrown whole towns and made thereof sheep pastures, nothing profitable for our commonwealth’. The response of the authorities to the rising was entirely characteristic of its attitude to popular protest in Tudor and Stuart England. The first priority was repression. The trial of the rebels at Northampton saw three categories of defendants arraigned before the presiding judge Sir Edward Coke: the first group was indicted for high treason in levying war against the crown; the second for felony in refusing to obey the royal proclamation, read twice to them at Newton, ordering them to disperse; and the third for the misdemeanour of ‘unlawful assembly and throwing down hedges and ditches’. The crown’s second priority was the redress of the grievances that had provoked the Rising. The privy council had debated whether or not to wait before initiating proceedings against enclosing landlords, but by August 1607 royal commissioners were appointed to gather evidence concerning the scale of illegal enclosure and depopulation across the midlands. Although the returns of the commissions are incomplete, they demonstrate how severely Northamptonshire had been affected by the behaviour of self-interested landlords: over 27,000 acres3 had been enclosed since 1578 (almost a third of all the land identified by a commission which had extended through seven counties), resulting in the destruction of over 350 farms and the eviction of almost 1500 people across eighteen villages. The findings of the commissions were used as the basis for prosecutions in the court of Star Chamber of those landlords who had enclosed their lands illegally. Several leading Northamptonshire gentlemen were convicted – among them Thomas Tresham of Newton, convicted of enclosing four hundred acres and destroying nine farms in Newton. Although the scale of his fine is uncertain, survivors of the battle of Newton-field would doubtless have felt vindicated by his humiliation, even if they did not benefit from the re-conversion of his estates from pasture to arable. By the early seventeenth century the crown’s enclosure policy had become tarnished by the needs of finance, and the fines of 1607 were effectively a tax on enclosure. Analysis of the subsequent prosecutions for depopulation Sixteen Northamptonshire vills were identified as wholly or partially depopulated in 16074. In the light of the preceding section, it is plain that these prosecutions were the actions, not of a diligent and vigilant government determined to stamp out enclosure, but of a parliament and monarchy badly rattled by the widespread use of civilian force in the Midland revolt of June 1607 (and with the serious anti-enclosure rioting of the Oxfordshire Rising in 1596 also still very fresh in their memories), and urgently needing to redress the balance of grievances against the poor. 3 In Northamptonshire’s total area of approximately 583000 acres, this amounts to roughly 4.6% of the land in the county. It is certainly a significant proportion of the total land area – and all the more so when it is recalled that the Inquisition concentrated on identifying recently enclosed former ploughland, and the figures in their returns ignored enclosure of pasture and wasteland – though it is relatively small when compared with the more substantial Parliamentary enclosures of the late 1700s. 4 The records are contained in two contemporary documents held at the National Archive, reference E163-17-8, transcribed by the author. The vills named in the documents are East Haddon, Farthinghoe, Gayton, Great Houghton, Hanging Houghton, Kelmarsh, Maidwell, Newton*, Onley and Barby, Paston, Pilton, Pytchley*, Rushton*, Stoke Doyle and Titchmarsh. (* As stated earlier in this article, Newton, Pytchley and Rushton were all the scenes of anti-enclosure rioting in May/June 1607). The following analysis was based on comparisons of parish-register details over the period 1570-1625 for the group of 16 communities singled out in the prosecutions following the 1607 Inquisition. In addition, as a crosscheck, parish registers were also examined for several vills adjacent to those where depopulation had been prosecuted, in which no recent depopulation was recorded by the 1607 Inquisition. Villages where prosecutions for depopulation were brought There are no surviving 1570-1625 registers for the vills of Barby, Kelmarsh, Maidwell, Newton, Onley, Paston, Pytchley, or Titchmarsh cited in the 1607 prosecutions. For Hanging Houghton the registers are combined with those for Lamport, so that for this village also analysis is impossible. However, for the other 7 vills an analysis of population growth can be made from the parish registers. Almost all vills in the group where depopulation was alleged exhibit (as expected) a significant long-term increase of population during the period 1570-1625, as measured by the relatively crude metric, calculated from parish registers: average population growth rate = S [(annual total baptisms) - (annual total burials)] / (no. of years) Average rates of increase over the period 1570-1625 vary between about 2.5 persons/year and 4 persons/year for East Haddon, Farthinghoe, Gayton, Great Houghton, Pilton and Stoke Doyle. Therefore in all these cases, enclosures could not have been simply due to prior depopulation, since the communities were all growing.