Chapter 3
Richard Carew on Cornish Commons: Farming, Fishing and Mining “in Wastrell” (1602)
Richard Carew et les communs de Cornouailles : agriculteurs, pêcheurs et mineurs « in wastrell » (1602)
p. 59-71
Résumés
Through a fresh reading of Richard Carew’s 1602 The Survey of Cornwall, this chapter analyses questions related to the use of common resources by fishermen, miners, and farmers in sixteenth-century Cornwall, highlighting the particularity of this county compared to the rest of England (the region was seen as a distinct nation, with its own laws, languages, standards of measurement, etc.). Through a study of Carew’s writing, the chapter first looks at the local meanings of the terms “wastrell” and “enclosure”, as well as the customs and habits associated with their usage, before examining the political metaphors and allusions Carew uses in his discussion of the sea and its resources (a question which was of particular significance to the Cornish, as the principal economic activities of the time were fishing and mining).
Mobilisant l’œuvre de Richard Carew (The Survey of Cornwall, 1602), ce chapitre analyse les problématiques relatives à l’usage de ressources communes par des pêcheurs, mineurs et agriculteurs dans le contexte des Cornouailles pendant la Renaissance, mettant en évidence la singularité de ce comté vis-à-vis du reste de l’Angleterre (la région est considérée comme une nation séparée, disposant de ses propres systèmes de mesure, lois, langues, etc.). Au travers de la poésie de Carew, le chapitre aborde à la fois les significations locales associées aux termes “wastrell” et “enclosure”, et les us et coutumes associées à leur usage, ainsi que les métaphores politiques et les allusions utilisées par Carew pour signifier la mer et ses ressources.
Texte intégral
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.1
1Due partly to the seminal work of Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, the ideal of the commons as opposed to private ownership has received renewed attention in recent years from those seeking a more socially just and ecological form of land management. In La part commune. Critique de la propriété privée, Pierre Crétois ascribes to John Locke and his Second Treatise of Government (1690) the concept of absolute property, which consists in being able to do as you wish with what belongs to you.2 If, as Locke claims, work offers you a natural right to appropriate things, resources may be privatised, and given the absolute nature of property, damage caused by their usage is not taken into account. In British history, the privatisation of property is epitomised by the enclosure of the commons, a multi-secular process crowned by the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century and highlighted by Karl Marx in his search for an empirical mechanism that could explain the change from a feudal economy to a capitalist one. According to Marx, the numerous private acts of Parliament in favour of enclosure deprived many English peasants of a living, forcing them to swell the ranks of an urban proletariat. Likewise, Edward Palmer Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, retraces the transition from a “moral economy”, based on customary rights of usage and reciprocal obligations between landowners and tenants, and a market or “political economy” in which exchange value replaces the multi-variegated exchanges that previously governed rural communities.3 Historians now doubt that enclosure played more than a subsidiary role in the general structural transformation of the British economy which led to the creation of a proletariat.4 Nonetheless, the heinous effects of enclosure remain uppermost in our minds, not least because of the forceful poetical denunciations of Oliver Goldsmith and (especially) John Clare. Even though it is universally agreed that enclosure led to land-improvement and increased crop-production, the confiscation of the commons still has a bad press.
2In this chapter I am going to focus my inquiry on just one moment of the enclosure movement and on just one English county or shire. I have chosen as my primary source The Survey of Cornwall by Richard Carew, first published in 1602 and the fruit, according to the author himself, of several decades’ intermittent research. The Carews were an ancient family of landed gentry from South-East Cornwall (Antony): Richard (1555-1620) and Thomas (1594-1640), the Carolingian metaphysical poet, were cousins. Richard Carew was made justice of the peace in 1581, and High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1586. As Queen’s deputy for the Militia, he was answerable to Sir Walter Raleigh, the then lieutenant general of Cornwall, to whom he dedicated his Survey (it is thought they were close, for Raleigh named one of his sons Carew). As a stalwart representative of the landowning class, Carew’s attitude to the enclosure of commons can hardly be expected to be neutral. What is more, “he was accounted among his Neighbours the greatest Husband, and most excellent Manager of Bees in Cornwall”.5 If his proficiency in apiculture might perhaps have rendered Carew susceptible to the virtues of communal life (the hive as Commonwealth), his interest in husbandry seems to have made him aware above all of the agricultural disadvantages of the open field system. To some extent, then, we shall have to read between the lines of the Survey to gain a clearer idea of what was going on.
3As a case study, the example of Cornwall cannot be easily extrapolated. There are several reasons for this. For one, “[t]he English open-field system was not widely adopted in Cornwall, though villages here and there, particularly in the north and east of the county, were remodelled during Mediaeval times”.6 Parts of West Cornwall still lie in a mesh of stone walls that date from Neolithic times; these tiny fields presumably allowed farmers to concentrate their livestock in a single place in order to break up the ground in lieu of ploughing. Secondly, from the Bronze Age onwards, Cornwall was a major purveyor of tin and a nexus of trade, which made it less reliant on agricultural self-sufficiency (tin was exchanged for grain). Indeed, the Second Book of the Survey opens upon the supposedly civilising effects of the tin trade. According to Carew, the first inhabitants of Cornwall “resembled those whom our stories affirme Brute [Brutus] to have found here at his landing, huge of body, rough of living, & savage of conditions”, and he goes on to translate the Latin verses communicated to him by his “Countreyman M. Camden, now Clarentieulx”:
This was the Titans haunt, but with
No plenty did abound,
Whom beasts raw hides for clothing serv’d;
For drinke, the bleeding wound;
Cups, hollow trees; their lodging, dennes;
Their beds, brakes; parlour, rocks;
Prey, for their food; ravine, for lust;
Their games, life-reaving knocks.
Their Empire, force; their courage, rage;
A headlong brunt, their armes;
Combate, their death; brambles, their grave.
The earth groan’d at the harmes
Of these mount-harbour’d monsters: but
The coast extending West,
Chiefe foyson had, and dire dismay,
And forest fury prest
Thee, Cornwall, that with utmost bound
Of Zephire art possest.
But afterwards, the Cornishmen, through the conversation of forraine Marchants trading into their countrey for Tyn, by the testimony of Diodorus Siculus; grew to a larger measure of civility, then others their fellow, but more remoted Ilanders. From which civility, in the fruitful age of Canonization, they stepped a degree farder to holines, & helped to stuffe the church kalender with divers Saints, either made or borne Cornish.(p. 58)
The jingoistic note (the Cornishmen’s greater “civility” and “holiness” in relation to the other British Islanders) brings us to a third reason for not generalising the fate of the commons in Cornwall to the rest of Renaissance England: up to the reign of Edward VI, the Cornish were considered a separate “nation” from the English, possessing their own weights and measures, their own laws and their own idiom (like Welsh or Breton, Cornish belongs to the Brythonic branch of Celtic languages). When Edward III recognised Scottish independence in 1328, he
[…] confirmed that Cornwall was a separate territory from England and was to be ruled by his son, and not by himself. This resulted in the setting up of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1337 when many of Cornwall’s day-to-day activities came under the control of officials, usually Duchy notables, at Lostwithiel.7
Tin production, for example, was administered by the Stannaries (from the Latin stannum, “tin”) whose charters (dating from 1197)
[…] confirmed the already ancient privileges of the tinners “of digging tin, and turfs for smelting it, at all times, freely and peaceably and without hindrance of any man, everywhere in moors […] just as by ancient usage they have been wont to do”.8
When Henry VII suppressed tin production (in addition to raising taxes to finance a campaign against Scotland), the Cornish entered into rebellion twice in the same year (1497), the second time behind Perkin Warbeck. Only in 1508 was tin production allowed to resume legally. Then, in 1549 the Prayer Book Rebellion was occasioned by Catholic religious loyalty and protest at the enforcement of English rather than Cornish (although, as Archbishop Cranmer slyly remarked, they no more understood Latin, the previous language of prayer, than they did English).9
4This was not the only cause of the rebellion, however:
A contemporary writer reported that “it was generally agreed amongst them [the Cornish], that no inclosure should be left standing but that all lands should be held in common”. In June 1549 the king issued a proclamation in support of the landowners, after “[…] a great number of rude and ignorant people […] plucked down many hedges [and] disparked their parks […]”. In July he enacted under martial law that no one was allowed “to pluck down any hedge, pale, fence, wall or any manner of enclosure […]”.10
For all three reasons, then – the relative absence of open field villages, the importance of the tin trade and “national” difference –, the focus on Cornish commons in 1600 can only pretend to a minor level of historical exemplarity. Instead, I shall use the singularity of the situation in Cornwall as a means of investigating customary rights relating to broadly three types of commons: the topsoil, the bedrock, the sea. And I shall end with the consideration of certain “immaterial” cultural commons to which Carew gives special attention (guary miracles and church-ales).
The topsoil
5In sixteenth-century Cornwall, as in much of the country, common land was part of estates bequeathed by the Crown (or a superior peer) to lords of the manor:
Everie tenement is parcell of the demaynes, or services of some Manner. […] That part of the demaines, which appertaineth to the Lords dwelling house, they call his Barten, or Berton. The tenants to the rest hold the same either by sufferance, Wil, or custome, or by convention. […] The customary tenant holdeth at Wil, either for yeeres, or for lives, or to them and their heires, in divers manners according to the custome of the Mannour. […] The ordinary covenants of most conventionary Tenants are, to pay due Capons, doe harvest journyes, grinde at the Mill, sue to the Court, discharge the office of Reeve and Tithing-man, dwell upon the Tenement, and to set out no part thereof to tillage, without the Lords licence first obtained.
(p. 36-39)
6But whatever the type of tenancy by which plots of land were held within a manor, they came with assorted appurtenant rights, e.g. grazing (for cattle, sheep, geese), collecting firewood or cutting turf for fuel, mowing meadows for hay, foraging for pigs (pannage), gleaning, berrying, etc. Such traditional rights naturally restricted the use owners could make of their land; hence, their efforts over several centuries (with an acceleration after the dissolution of the monasteries) to enclose pasture commons in order to achieve exclusive rights of use.
7As a landowner, Carew takes it upon himself to justify future acts of despoilment by equating agricultural poverty with the open field system:
[Husbandmen] in times not past the remembrance of some yet living, rubbed forth their estate in the poorest plight, their grounds lay all in common, or onely divided by stitch-meale: little bread-corne: their drinke, water, or at best, but whey: for the richest Farmour in a parish brewed not above twyce a yeere, and then, God wotte what liquor: their meat, Whitsull, as they call it, namely, milke, sowre milke, cheese, curds, butter, and such like as came from the cow and ewe, who were tyed by the one legge at pasture: their apparell, course in matter, ill shapen in maner: their legges and feet naked and bare […].
(p. 66-67)
The division by “stitch-meal” is a reference to the parallel strips of land typical of the open field system: a stitch was usually about one furlong, i.e. one furrow-long (200 m) in length and one chain (20 m) in width, comprising one acre in area. In Cornish, they were known as lyln or lene, meaning a strip of land. Robin Menneer points out, however, that
Land held in stitchmeal did not necessarily mean that the associated village had the classic open-field system. A piece of land shown as being a stitch may indicate merely a small enclosure owned or tilled by someone other than the farmer within whose land it was situated.11
Be this as it may, Carew certainly feels that enclosure is a necessary condition for improving the productivity of the soil:
The middle part of the Shire (saving the inclosures about some few Townes and Villages) lieth waste and open, sheweth a blackish colour, beareth Heath and spirie Grasse, and serveth in a maner, onely to Summer Cattel. That which bordereth upon either side of the Sea, through the Inhabitants good husbandrie, of inclosing, sanding, and other dressing, carrieth a better hue, and more profitable qualitie. Meadow ground it affoordeth little, pasture for Cattel and Sheepe, store enough, Corne ground plentie.
(p. 6)
What are we to understand by the words waste and inclosure, here? Does enclosing waste land in order to increase its fertility always involve suppressing (or buying) the ground rights and common rights in order to enjoy absolute rights of property? For Carew, enclosure seems to mean little more than staking out land for tillage:
The Husbandman finding profit herein, is encouraged to bestow paines and charges, for enclosing and dressing of waste grounds, which therethrough afterwardes become also good for pasture.
(p. 21)
However, it should not be forgotten that the term wastes was used to designate the pasture commons, such as those upon which
The Devon and Somersetshire grasiers, feede yeerely great droves of Cattell in the North quarter of Cornwall, and utter them at home […].
(p. 24)
8If we are to believe Carew, transhumance would be unnecessary if more of the common “wastes” were enclosed:
What time the Shire, through want of good manurance, lay waste and open, the Sheepe had generally little bodies, and course fleeces, so as their Wooll bare no better name, then of Cornish hayre, and for such hath (from all auncientie) beene transported, without paying custome. But since the grounds began to receive enclosure and dressing for Tillage, the nature of the soyle hath altered to a better graine, and yeeldeth nourishment in greater aboundance, and goodnesse, to the beastes that pasture thereupon: So as, by this meanes […] Cornish Sheepe come but little behind the Easterne flockes, for bignes of mould, finenesse of Wooll, often breeding, speedie fatting, and price of sale, and in my conceyte equall, if not exceede them in sweetnesse of taste, and freedome from rottennesse and such other contagions. As for their number, while everie dweller hath some, though none keepe many, it may summe the totall to a jolly rate.
(p. 23-24)
Pasture land is conceived here as belonging to the cycle of arable land. Carew is referring to the traditional Cornish practice of sowing wheat in the autumn, reaping it the following summer, sowing and harvesting oats in the spring and autumn of the year after that, before giving the “close” (hedged field) seven or eight years ley. It was during the near-decade that the field lay fallow that it could be used for pasture (and benefit from “manurance”). Again, Carew’s text is not precise enough for his reader to ascertain whether these closes were the exclusive property of individual landowners or whether, in conformity with the customary rights of usage pertaining to tenants, commoners could pasture their sheep in them. The fact that “everie dweller hath some [sheep], though none keepe many”, seems nevertheless to suggest that they pastured them in the enclosures.
The bedrock
9Tillage and livestock farming in Cornwall still remained very much geared to subsistence in Carew’s day. As mentioned above, the principal economic activities of the time were fishing and mining. In consequence, the question of the ownership of the sea and subsoil was particularly important to the Cornish. The county had long been famed for its alluvial and hard rock tin deposits. Cassiterite (tin oxide) was both streamed and worked with pick-axes along lode-veins. These works, writes Carew, lay either “in severall, or in wastrell, that is, in enclosed grounds, or in commons”.
In Severall, no man can search for Tynne, without leave first obtained from the Lord of the soile; who, when any Myne is found, may worke it wholly himselfe, or associate partners, or set it out at a farme certaine, or leave it unwrought at his pleasure. In Wastrell, it is lawfull for any man to make triall of his fortune that way, provided, that hee acknowledge the Lordes right, by sharing out unto him a certaine part, which they call toll […]. When a Myne is found in any such place, the first discoverer aymeth how farre it is likely to extend, and then, at the foure corners of his limited proportion, diggeth up three Turfes, and the like (if he list) on the sides, which they terme Bounding, and within that compasse, every other man is restrained from searching.
(p. 13)
No hedges or walls: just turf and twig for title-deeds in stacks stencilled from the sod. Is that to say that this portion of bounded common land is now “in severall”? Or does it have an intermediary status in common law? And what can be said of the ore under the topsoil? Is this a particularly blatant example of the privatisation of the commons in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, or does it illustrate the difference between possession and ownership?
10Carew tells us that the discoverer is “bound” to renew these “bounds” once every year, “as also in most places to bestow some time in working the Myne, otherwise hee loseth this priviledge” (p. 14). The mine once established, “looke how many men doe labour therein, so many Doales or shares they make thereof, and proportionably divide the gaine and charges” (ibid.). The adventurers thus enjoy equal shares in the mine-works, though they must also make allowance for the “Lord of the soyle” by allowing him “to place one workman in everie fifteene for himself, at like hand with the adventurers, if hee be so disposed” (ibid.).
11The far west of England little resembled the Far West of later Gold Rush fame. Tin production, however adventurous in spirit, was given a legal framework:
The Tynners of the whole shire are divided into foure quarters, two called Moores, of the places where the Tynne is wrought, viz. Foy moore, and Blacke moore: the other, Tiwarnaill and Penwith. To each of these is assigned by the L. Warden, a Steward, who keepeth his Court once in every three weekes. They are termed Stannery Courts of the Latine word Stannum, in English Tynne, and hold plea of whatsoever action of debt or trespasse, whereto any one dealing with blacke or white Tynne, either as plaintife or defendant, is a party. Their maner of triall consisteth in the verdict given by a Jurie of sixe Tynners, according to which the Steward pronounceth judgement.
(p. 18)
12Court decisions were thereby based on verdicts from juries composed of local miners rather than landowners or tradesmen. As Carew shrewdly observes, this situation weighted court pronouncements in favour of Cornishmen rather than foreign merchants or “upcountry” adventurers.
The sea
13Something of the same egalitarian spirit that we observe in the doling out of mine-shares is to be found in the way Cornish people harvested marine resources. The most extreme case mentioned by Carew is certainly that of the way all those participating in the massacre of porpoises distributed their catch:
The Porposes are shaped very bigge and blacke. These chase the smaller schoels of fish from the mayne sea into the havens, leaping up and downe in the water, tayle after top, and one after another, puffing like a fat lubber out of breath, and following the fish with the flood, so long as any depth will serve to bear them; by which means they are sometimes intercepted: for the Borderers watching untill they be past farre up into some narrow creeke, get belowe them with their Boats, and cast a strong corded net athwart the streame, with which, and their lowd and continuall showting and noyse making, they fray and stop them from retyring, untill the ebbe have abandoned them to the hunters mercy, who make short worke with them, and (by an olde custome) share them amongst all the assistants with such indifferencie, as if a woman with child bee present, the babe in her wombe is gratified with a portion: a poynt also observed by the Speare-hunters in taking of Sammons.
(p. 32)
14Interestingly, given the materially difficult task of appropriating the sea and its resources, political metaphors and allusions are never so uppermost in Carew’s text as when he deals with maritime pursuits. “Of Eeles there are two sorts”, he tells us,
[…] the one […] bred in the salt water, & called a Conger Eele, which afterwards, as his bignes increaseth, ventreth out into the maine Ocean, & is enfranchised a Burgesse of that vast common wealth […].
(p. 31)
When evoking the alimentary resources of the seashore, he is reminded of a recent episode of the French wars of religion:
Of shell fish, there are Wrinkles, Limpets, Cockles, Muscles, Shrimps, Crabs, Lobsters, and Oysters. Nature hath strowed the shore with such plenty of these shel-fishes, as thereby shee warranteth the poore from dread of starving: for every day they may gather sufficient to preserve their life, though not to please their appetite, which, ordinarie with us, was miraculous to the Rochellers in their siedge 1572.
(ibid.)
The poor were also allowed to “forage” ship-wrecked goods: Carew mentions in passing
[…] the wrackes proceeding from [boats], to their great dammage, and the finders petty benefit, to whom, he that injoyeth the Admirals right, by the common custome alloweth a moytie for his labour.
(p. 28)
This custom might seem to give credence to the later reputation of the Cornish as “wreckers”, deliberately lighting deceptive beacons to guide ships onto the rocks and seize upon their spoils.
15The Survey is interspersed with flights of poetry, most of which are inspired by… fish. The five quatrains (composed of iambic pentameters and envelope rhymes) which Carew devotes to the salmon as it returns to its spawning ground conjure up a monarch forever beleaguered by cunning rebels and treacherous regicides:
NOW to the Sammon, king of fish, a trice,
Against whose slate, both skill and will conspire,
Paine brings the fewell, and gaine blowes the fire,
That hand may execute the heads device.
Some build his house, but his thence issue barre,
Some make his meashie bed, but reave his rest:
Some give him meate, but leave it not disgest,
Some tickle him, but are from pleasing farre.
Another troope com’s in with fire and sword,
Yet cowardly, close counterwaite his way,
And where he doth in streame, mistrustlesse play,
Vail’d with nights robe, they stalke the shore aboord.
One offers him the daylight in a waze,
As if darknesse alone contrived wiles:
But new Neptune, his mate, at land, the whiles,
With forked Mace, deere school’s his foolish gaze.
Poore Fish, not praying, that are made a pray,
And at thy native home find’st greatest harme,
Though dread warne, swiftnesse guide, and strength thee arme,
Thy neerenesse, greatnesse, goodnesse, thee betray.(p. 30)
The third and fourth stanzas refer to a way of taking salmon at night. A “waze” is a rush-light with which one fisherman (in the water) entices the unwitting fish. His companion on the shore or riverbank wields a trident with which, “new Neptune”, he spears his royal prey. Such poetic empathy for the victim is reminiscent of Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the “sobbing deer” episode, but to what extent Carew’s feeling is sincere is a moot point. Calling salmon the “king of fish” is primarily a way of honouring its succulent flesh, as well perhaps of assuring readers that the author will always side with the Crown, should rebellion break out again in Cornwall.
Cultural commons
16So far I have taken the commons to mean what most often they refer to in contemporary texts: common lands, and certain mineral and natural “resources” to which commoners and the poor had traditional rights of usage and appropriation. I shall end my own brief survey of Carew’s Survey by looking at what he says about the common “recreations” of Cornish people, which he divides into pastimes and feasts. His evocation of what is perhaps the most singular of popular pastimes is tantalisingly brief:
The Guary miracle, in English, a miracle-play, is a kinde of Enterlude, compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history, with that grossenes, which accompanied the Romanes vetus Comedia. For representing it, they raise an earthen Amphitheatre, in some open field, having the Diameter of his enclosed playne some 40. or 50. foot. The Country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear and see it: for they have therein, devils and devices, to delight as well the eye as the eare: the players conne not their parts without booke, but are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back with the booke in his hand, and telleth them softly what they must pronounce aloud.
(p. 72)
17He then breaks off his description (never to return to it) in order to relate a performance worthy of the mechanicals’ play in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Ordinary having whispered to one of the players, “Go forth man and shew thy self”, the latter
[…] steps out upon the stage, and like a bad Clarke in scripture matters, cleaving more to the letter than the sense, pronounced those words aloud. Oh (says the fellowe sofly in his eare) you marre all the play. And with this his passion, the Actor makes the audience in like sort acquainted.
(ibid.)
The situation continues crescendo in true farcical style: the prompter
[…] falls to flat rayling & cursing in the bitterest termes he could devise: which [the actor] with a set gesture and countenance still soberly related, until the Ordinary, driven at last into a madde rage, was faine to give over all.
(ibid.)
Carew concludes gleefully that though the interlude was broken off, the spectators were in no way frustrated, having enjoyed “a great deale more sport and laughter, than 20 such Guaries could have afforded” (ibid.). In the eyes of this English-speaking Surveyor of Cornwall, traditional pastimes conducted in a language now only spoken by the peasantry were at best ridiculous, at worst potentially seditious.
18Among the various types of feasts, it is the church-ale which receives the most attention from Carew:
For the Church-ale, two young men of the parish are yerely chosen by their last foregoers, to be Wardens, who deviding the task, make collection among the parishioners, of whatsoever provision it pleaseth them voluntarily to bestow. This they imploy in brewing, baking, & other acates, against Whitsontide; upon which Holydayes, the neighbours meet at the Church-house, and there merily feed on their owne victuals, contributing some petty portion to the stock, which by many smalls, groweth to a meetly greatnes: for there is entertayned a kinde of emulation betweene these Wardens, who by his graciousnes in gathering, and good husbandry in expending, can best advauce the Churches profit. Besides, the neighbour parishes, at those times lovingly visit one another, and this way frankely spend their money together. The afternoones are consumed in such exercises, as olde and yong folke (having leysure) doe accustomably weare out the time withall.
(p. 69)
19It is hard to imagine a more innocuous gathering than the one described. Nevertheless,
Of late times, many Ministers have by their ernest invectives, both condemned […] Saints feasts as superstitious, and suppressed the Church-ales, as licencious.
(ibid.)
Carew is certainly not of a puritanical bent, but he is advisedly cautious and, rather than defending the church-ales himself, he devises what is very likely a totally fictitious dialogue in order to present both sides of the question. The reader is thus invited to follow
[…] a conference that I had not long since, with a neere friend, who (as I conceive) looked hereinto with an indifferent and unprejudicating eye.
(ibid.)
This anonymous “friend” proceeds to unravel in profuse detail all the positive benefits appertaining to church-ales, such as:
[…] entertaining of Christian love, conforming of mens behaviour to a civill conversation, compounding of controversies, appealing of quarrels, raising a store, which might be concerted partly to good and godly uses, as releeving all sorts of poore people, repairing of Churches, building of bridges, amending of high wayes; and partly for the Princes service, by defraying at an instant, such rates and taxes as the magistrate imposeth for the Countries defence. Briefly, they tende to an instructing of the minde by amiable conference, and an enabling of the body by commendable exercises.
(p. 70)
To be on the safe side, Carew takes on the role of the religious objector: not only was “the very title of ale […] somewhat nasty”, but the feast itself had been
[…] corrupted with such a multitude of abuses, to wit, idlenes, drunkennesse, lasciviousnes, vaine disports of ministrelsie, dauncing, and disorderly night-watchings, that the best curing was to cut it cleane away.
(ibid.)
The dialectics of Lent and Carnaval that runs like a thread through so many Elizabethan comedies is here being played out on the stage of a Cornish church-festival, but the roles are much the same. The fictive friend is appreciative of life’s simple pleasures, and employs gentle wit to point out the absurdity of Carew’s taking objection to the name of chuch-ale:
But if the name of ale relish so ill, whereas the licour itselfe is the English mans ancientest and wholesomest drinke, and serveth many for meate and cloth too [sic]; he was contented I should call it Church beere, or Church wine, or what else I listed.
(ibid.)
And he proceeds to counter the argument that because an activity can entail abuses, it should therefore be suppressed:
For to prosecute your owne Metaphore (quoth hee) surely I holde him for a sory Surgeon, that cannot skill to salve a sore, but by taking away the lymme, and little better then the Phisicion, who, to helpe the disease, will reave the life of his Patient from him.
(p. 71)
In his eyes, it is the very public nature of the event which serves as the best rampart against potential abuses:
[…] in these publike meetings, they are so presented to every mans sight, as shame somewhat restrayneth the excesse, and they may much the sooner bee both espied and redressed.
(p. 70-71)
an argument not so very different from that employed by Asper in defence of comedy, in the Prologue to Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour. Theatrical representations and public feasts, in as much as they are common to all, can thus be construed in opposite ways: they either serve to police social mores (the avowed goal of satire) or, on the contrary, provoke the contagion of affects that will later be theorised by Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics and to which both the Puritans and Antonin Artaud attributed the subversive nature of play(gue)-houses.
20However, the well-meaning friend has not yet played his trump card. His winning argument takes the form of royal example:
I would not altogether barre sober and open dauncing, untill it were first thoroughly banished from mariages, Christmas revels, and (our Countries patterne) the court […].
(p. 71)
Carew has nothing to reply to these arguments, which are more than likely his own. They are perfectly in keeping with the overall impression that we receive of the author from his Survey: that of a man faithful to his Monarch and anxious to show that the singularities of Cornish culture and history in no way detract from the land-owning classes’ allegiance to the Crown. Not for him to put into question the benefits of enclosure, but for his reader to glean the textual clues which help us ascertain their consequences for the commoners.
Bibliographie
Boyle J. (2003), “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain”, Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, no. 1-2, p. 33–74, online: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol66/iss1.
Carew R. ([1602] 1769), The Survey of Cornwall, London, E. Law and J. Hewett, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9878.
Crétois P. (2020), La part commune. Critique de la propriété privée, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam.
Menneer R. (2007), “Post-Mediaeval Hedges in Cornwall (1540-1840)”, Cornish Hedges Library, online: http://www.cornishhedges.co.uk/PDF/post-med.pdf.
Menneer R. (2009), “Mediaeval Hedges in Cornwall (AD 450-1550)”, Cornish Hedges Library, online: http://www.cornishhedges.co.uk/PDF/mediaeval.pdf.
Overton M. (1996), Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500-1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Sweet R. (1999), The English Town, 1680-1840: Government, Society and Culture, London, Routledge.
Thompson E. P. ([1963] 1968), The Making of the English Working Class, London, Penguin.
Wood A. (2007), The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Notes de bas de page
1Anonymous eighteenth-century song quoted by Boyle 2003, 33.
2Crétois 2020.
3Thompson [1963] 1968.
4See, for example, Overton 1996 and Sweet 1999.
5“The Life of the Author” in Carew [1602] 1769, xxxii. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. The use of Ramist letters has been systematised.
6Menneer 2007, 5.
7Menneer 2009, 10.
8Ibid., 7.
9Wood 2007, 214.
10Menneer 2007, 2.
11Menneer 2007, 7.
Auteur
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Jonathan Pollock
Université de Perpignan Via Domitia
Jonathan Pollock is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia. His publications include eleven books or edited volumes – including Qu’est-ce que l’humour ? (Paris, Klincksieck, 2001); Hétérologies: pour une dé-neutralisation de la critique littéraire et artistique (Perpignan, Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2006, with Paul Carmignani and Didier Girard); Déclinaisons: le naturalisme poétique de Lucrèce à Lacan (Paris, Hermann, 2010); Pratiques du hasard: pour un matérialisme de la rencontre (Perpignan, Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2012); and Cheminements de la pensée: l’infini, le risque, la parole, le lieu (Perpignan, Presses universitaires de Perpignan, 2021, co-edited with Arnaud Villani) – and more than seventy articles in different journals and edited volumes.

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