A Parcel of Old Deeds
By C. HENRY WARREN
THE deeds of Thurstons Farm, loaned to me by its present owner, Mr. Harold Jackson, arrived straight from the solicitor's office, tied up in a brown paper parcel, huge and bulky. The obvious thing to do was to open it on the floor and examine the contents there. And it was as well that I did so, for most of the yellowing parchment documents were fully three feet square and stiff from the centuries. The smaller ones, admittedly, were in scrolls, secured with pink tape; but the larger ones required a knee to keep them down. All were written with a quill in the florid script of their day.
I have known Thurstons well ever since that day, a dozen years ago, when I gave a hand with the harvest. Of course I did not realise it at the time, but I can see now that it was much more than corn I was harvesting: I was in the way, in fact, of acquiring an interest, amounting to affection, in a three-hundred-acre arable farm which still seems to me almost the perfect example of what such a farm should be, as self-supporting as the times will allow, continuous in tradition, neither spurning the old nor over-favouring the new, and where the farmer, as shrewd as he is human, ma Y truly be said to serve the land he loves. And the loan of this old bundle of deeds, tumbled out on the floor before me now and still thick with the dust of a market-town office, was only the last of numerous privileges and pleasures that have resulted from that fortunate harvest.
All the history of the tenure and husbandry of Thurstons was here, if one had but the patience and the knowledge to decipher it. The oldest document went back no further than 1691. In that year, as the tattered scrap of parchment, written in Latin, declared, Thomas Davy, the owner, was admitted to the Manor of Ridgewell. But Thurstons, when Davy took over, was already old. Indeed, according to the Court Rolls (of the Borough of Colchester), one John Thurston was farm- ing there in 1418, and there is a specific reference in 1534 to the " rentale of Thurstons." If nothing else, then, the name of his farm has served to keep John Thurston's memory green for more than five hundred years.
What is more, there is a field on the farm that carries the tale of Thurstons still further back. The name of that field today is Butneys. The first hint I had that there was history in the name was when we were traving up the Little Joss wheat in it; but it was not until long after that I learned how once a Norman family named Boteneye had a house there, whose foundations can even now be seen from the air, these six hundred years later.
Many farmers have worked Thurstons in its time, but the Davy family seem to have worked it longest. Thomas Davy, who was admitted to the Manor of Ridgewell in 1691, may well not have been the first of them; and there was still a Davy in residence in 1767, the date of a bill of sale that has got tucked in among the deeds. This bill, on the back of which. in faded ink, is drawn "An Eye Sketch of the Estate," reveals that the farm was underlet at "£90 a Year and two capons "; was "well watered and mounded, and very improvable ' ; and was 167 acres in extent. Adjoining land must have been added from time to time, indicative possibly of prosperity, for, by 1835, when another bill of sale announces that Mr. Charles Prachett was in occupation, the extent was 200 acres and the yearly rental E150. Today the extent is some 300 acres.
"Particulars of the Lands," as given in this second bill of sale, show that none of the fields on Thurstons has since changed its name. Among the names worth mentioning are:— Calves Pightle, Little Bigg and Bigg Fields, Heydown, First Much and Further Much Fields, the Hoppett, Oxleys, the aforesaid Butneys, Great and Little Hop Grounds, Mill Field, Cozick Croft and Old Churchyard.
Field-names are notoriously rich sources of local history, and it seems to me that these of Thurstons are as rich as any. Hop Grounds, for instance, remembers the day when Essex was as much a hop-growing county as Kent and Herefordshire are today. First Much and Further Much, I suspect, are there to remind us of the time when, on every farm, "muck was the master of money." Mill Field, one of the highest fields on the farm, suggests that the present count of four windmills to be seen from a favourite point of vantage was once at least five. As for Cozick, Hoppett and Pightle, these are all good old English words for small plots of land, tiny enclosures, words that are brothers to the dialect that may still be heard in them when the older farmhands come hedging and ditching.
But for me the most interesting field-name in these deeds is the Old Churchyard, by which it is known even now. This field is an acre in size (God's Acre) and includes a small, deep pond in which, say the natives, buried bells may be heard pealing at midnight. It is situated exactly at the juncture of four parishes, remote even from the nearest cottage, and its only use today is as an outlying stack-yard to save the corn being brought all the way in from distant fields. The first reference to it in the Thurstons deeds is in 1835, by which time it already appears as Old Church Yard. Nor did I get any • help from the parish records. In the end, however, I came to the conclusion that it must have been the burial-ground when this locality was smitten by the Plague, the custom being for adjacent parishes to select a central site and erect a chapel there. One old farm-hand remembered clearing out the pond and coming upon some rough stone slabs : were they tombstones or remains of the chapel ? And I used persist- ently to hear of thyme having been found there, a possible sign, of course, of human -habitation. In any case it seems quite likely that this field-name is the only remaining record, legends apart, of a disaster that must have shattered the peace of this quiet neighbourhood and brooded over it like a doom.
As I rummaged among these crackling parchments, scattered over the floor, I was reminded again and again what a lot of intimate social history must be hidden in farm deeds all over the country. Happily their importance is at last being recog- nised, and efforts are being made to call them in to the county's Record Office. These Thurstons deeds, for instance, could reveal to the eye of the specialist far more than I could ever get out of them. Perhaps one day they will have the attention they deserve. Meanwhile, before they were returned to the dusty oblivion of the solicitor's office, there was just one more scrap of information I could not resist copying out.
Included with an indenture dated 1833—the days of high farming in England—there was a signed declaration by Charles Pratchett to the effect that he would undertake to keep Thurstons Farm in such and such a condition and to work the land in such and such a way. Among other things it was laid down that he should "well and sufficiently manure one fourth part of the arable land and one third part of the pasture land every year; never grow more than two successive crops of white corn, and crops of wheat never oftener than once in three years; shall every fourth year clear summer fallow or sow winter tares, turnips, or rape seed thereon and feed the same off by sheep; shall not cut, lop or top any of the shaws of hedges . . . of less than seven years' growth nor suffer them to grow beyond eleven years without cutting, lopping or topping; and shall not heel, fell, cut down, top or wilfully damage or destroy any trees, woods or undergrowth." What changes, in little more than a hundred years, English husbandry has seen ! I think I shall suggest to Mr. Jackson that this particular declaration be framed and hung over his office desk. He is too thorough a farmer to need the lesson it contains, but it might do something to ameliorate his annoy- ance as, week after week, ever new directives are tucked into his letter-box from Ministry officials in remote control.
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