The History of Myddle

"Gough was a Shropshire yeoman who teetered on the edge of gentility, he died in 1723. For some reason, he collected these memoirs of his village — Myddle —which are part antiquarian, part local interest, part a document with a purpose. One of the things he does is write a list of all the law suits Myddle won against neighbouring villages, which is a very seventeenth- and eighteenth-century way of looking at your local community: this is a profoundly litigious society. His psycho-geography is very interesting because he thinks about the village in a particular way, he thinks about the church and where each family’s pew was in the church. He goes around each pew and says “this family sat here, this is their story.” It’s not just their genealogy, it’s all about their sexual exploits, or the crime they’ve been involved in, who were good guys, and who were terrible puritans or terrible drunks. There are running themes, such as the idea that drink can ruin people, but it’s also full of these wonderfully gossipy descriptions of his neighbours, such as someone who’s got“good gear in his breeches.” It’s full of stories we would never see had Gough not written them down. One of my favourite is this guy who’s a petty thief. His big thing is hedge breaking, he likes to go round and pick bits of wood out of people’s hedges. This is really quite annoying, but not the sort of thing you want to have your neighbour hung for. He buys this new oven, and the way his neighbours decide to get back at him is they get a piece of wood and they bore a hole in it and fill it full of gunpowder and plug it. Then they stick it temptingly into this hedge. Of course, this guy trots along and sees this piece of wood sticking out and goes “fantastic, I’ll have that for my new oven.”He takes it back to his house and puts it in the oven, and it blows up. He’s last seen running around saying “fire, fire,” but he’s fine, and doesn’t completely change his ways. It’s really interesting that this is another way of dealing with troublesome neighbours without using the legal system. As historians we are always using legal records, and we see people when they come into contact with the state quite often—the state means the law courts—but there must have been loads of people who were dealt with by village communities in ways which we’d call vigilante, but which were essentially quite sensible responses in a world where the legal system was difficult to use and was incredibly harsh. Theoretically, someone could be hung for quite a small amount of theft. Villagers actually don’t want that. They want to play a joke on people. “Fact is not just the physical things that happen, fact is also the way things are represented, the stories people tell.” There’s another wonderful story from Gough. Another petty pilferer, who is described as a “very silly fellow,” so probably has some kind of mental illness. He’s involved in stealing odds and ends, but then he gets involved in a more serious crime. He is stealing chickens and taking them to a guy in Shrewsbury to sell them, so it’s organised crime, but in a very Shropshire way. So this really annoys the neighbours and they haul him in front of the courts where he’s convicted of stealing a number of chickens, which should theoretically qualify him for the death penalty, but the judge says to the jury “go away, you must find him guilty, but think very carefully about the value.” The jury bring back the value, they find him guilty but they say that the chickens were worth 11 pence, which makes it a misdemeanour rather than a felony. Gough has this wonderful, vivid description, he says “at which the judge laughed most heartily and says he’s glad chickens are so cheap in this part of the world.” This guy learns his lesson a bit, Gough says he never completely stops pilfering stuff. It’s a description we would never see looking through legal records, of someone who is faced with the full harshness of english law, and yet the way it actually works on the ground is people mitigate it and try and work out ways of using it to give someone a lesson rather than having them killed. He picks the parish for a reason, and the parish church for a reason, as those are centres of people’s cultural worlds. It’s quite clear that things like the poor law are very influential. When he talks about the law suits his parish has won, they’re usually over settlement, they’re about people who Myddle claims they don’t have responsibility for and other parishes claim it does. In that respect the poor law is encouraging people to draw these mental boundaries around the parish. But it is interesting how mobile Myddle is. Lots of people leave and go to London, Gough isn’t quite in contact with them, but he still hears stories about them, and some of them return. One of the striking and powerful things about Myddle — he’s recording this at a fifty year distance — is the number of people he talks about going away to fight in the civil wars. Most of them are young men, they mostly don’t come back. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England is increasingly mobile."