Quarrel With the King
“As Pembroke and Buckingham battled for the soul of England, what was the reality in the Pembrokes’ Wiltshire chalkstream valleys? And to what extent did this sophisticated dispute—between the Pembroke vision of an ancient organic community and the Buckingham ideal of a modern, efficient, centralizing state—reflect a conflict and tension within the body of England?
It so happens that a great deal can be known about the Pembrokes’ world, the world that surrounded the family in the great Van Dyck ...portrait, because in the early 1630s Philip Herbert, who in 1630 succeeded his brother as the fourth earl, had his estates meticulously surveyed. No map survives, even if one had been made, but a set of enormous written documents were preserved from those surveys, recounting the names, family relationships, and tenancies of hundreds of people in the chalkland valleys. An extraordinarily detailed picture emerges from them: the shopkeepers, millers, clothiers, smiths, “husbandmen,” cheats, and laggards who were the earl’s tenants and dependents; the houses, yards, and barns these people occupied; the earl’s “Lands, Woods, Meddowes and pastures,”MoreLess
It so happens that a great deal can be known about the Pembrokes’ world, the world that surrounded the family in the great Van Dyck ...portrait, because in the early 1630s Philip Herbert, who in 1630 succeeded his brother as the fourth earl, had his estates meticulously surveyed. No map survives, even if one had been made, but a set of enormous written documents were preserved from those surveys, recounting the names, family relationships, and tenancies of hundreds of people in the chalkland valleys. An extraordinarily detailed picture emerges from them: the shopkeepers, millers, clothiers, smiths, “husbandmen,” cheats, and laggards who were the earl’s tenants and dependents; the houses, yards, and barns these people occupied; the earl’s “Lands, Woods, Meddowes and pastures,”MoreLess
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