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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
Without the habit of conceptualising space, a traveller going to war or work could not link his separate impressions to the nature of his route as a whole . . . [A] man could not visualise the country to which he belonged; a landowner, unable to "see" his properties as a whole was not concerned to concentrate his scattered holdings by sale or exchanges.(1)
According to its epilogue, Arden of Faversham tells us "the truth of Arden's death."(2) That "truth" refers not only to the homicidal machinations that lead up to the murder of Arden, but also to a certain relationship between the killing and the land: "Arden lay murdered in that plot of ground / Which he by force and violence held from Reede; / And in the grass his body's print was seen / Two years and more after the deed was done" (AF, Epilogue, 10-13). The murderous actions taken against Arden mirror the "force and violence" with which he withheld the "plot of ground," and the bloody print seen in the grass attests to the indignation of both Reede, who earlier cursed his landlord, and the land itself. The epilogue reminds us that in the late sixteenth century land is not solely thought of in terms of its utility or its fungibility, its status as a commodity; here the land speaks an ethics of ownership that has its origins in feudalism. What I shall argue, though, is that in Elizabethan England, thanks to changes in a variety of social and material practices, and to technological innovations such as those that revolutionize estate surveying, the meaning of the land begins to undergo a profound transformation. Arden of Faversham takes sides in an Elizabethan struggle over the cultural function of land, a struggle in which older conceptions of property as social office are troubled by emergent ideologies and technologies that imply a radically different view of what it means to be a landowner.
I
Let us begin with that "plot of ground." Returning from Shorlow, Arden is met by the ocean-bound Dick Reede, who confronts him as follows:
My coming to you was about the plot of ground Which wrongfully you detain from me. Although the rent of it be very small, Yet will it help my wife and children, Which here I leave in Faversham, God knows, Needy and bare.
(AF, 13.12-17)
In reply, Arden, who states he "dearly bought" the land, angrily asserts that if Reede continues to "rail on [him]," he will "banish pity" from his actions (AF, 13.19-27). Then follows Reede's curse, also a request beseeched of God:
That plot of ground which thou detains from me . . . Be ruinous and fatal unto thee! Either there be butchered by thy dearest friends, Or else be brought for men to wonder at, Or thou or thine miscarry in that place, Or there run mad and end thy cursed days.
(AF, 13.32-38)
This curse is one that Reede shall "leave with [his] distressful wife; / [His] children shall be taught such prayers as these" (AF, 13.51-52). Interestingly, though, Arden is not murdered on the contested land; he is only later dragged to the plot of ground necessary for the maintenance of Reede's family.
What we see here is land positioned variously in relationship to intersecting feudal, religious and familial discourses. In banishing pity, Arden rhetorically casts off the mantle of the beneficent lord, the model for whom might be found in this "popular eulogy" for the third Earl of Huntingdon:
His tenants that daily repaired to his house Was fed with his bacon, his beef, & his souse. Their rents were not raised, their fines were but small, And many poore tenants paid nothing at all. No groves he enclosed, nor felled no wood, No pastures he paled to do himself good. To commons and country he lived a good friend, And gave to the needy what God did him send.(3)
Even in this paean to the generous lord, one who fulfills the moral responsibilities of his office by providing, father-like, for his tenants, we see in references to enclosure and to the felling of woods an alternate, more instrumental conception of the land--a conception in which the social relations at the center of the above verse are marginalized. Of course, it is social and familial relations that Reede insistently foregrounds, first by appealing to the image of his "needy and bare" wife and children, and then by promising that they will regularly curse Arden's name. The bitter "prayers" Reede says his children will utter echo ironically religious discourse epitomized by a tenant's prayer regarding his landlord in The Book of Private Prayer, a text issued by Edward VI in 1553:
We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy [God's] tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands . . . after the manner of covetous worldlings . . . but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.(4)
The prayer transposes feudal relations onto the heavenly sphere, arguing that landlords should be kind to tenants in the hopes that they will be treated well in the afterlife by God, the Lord upon whom they are dependent. For landlords to act as "covetous worldlings," to deny the reciprocal social relations that constitute the feudal ideal, to "banish pity" as Arden does, is for them to run the risk of losing their "everlasting dwelling places." Greed causes the mismanagement of their heavenly estates.
Reede ends his curse with his children's prayers; he begins it by wishing that Arden be "butchered by [his] dearest friends," a wish that largely comes true, and one whose enactment is spatially inscribed. Arden is murdered not only by dear friends, but in his own home. The curse of the tenant insinuates itself into the domestic and social spaces--the house and friendships--of the pitiless landlord.
What I have been trying to suggest is that Arden of Faversham and the various ideologies sketchily adduced here see land as fully implicated in a range of social practices and relations. And yet, the shadow we saw cast over the above eulogy, that of instrumental conceptions of the land, also stretches over both the culture and the play, and while that shadow may be dramatically dispelled by Arden's death, the culture cannot so easily shrug off its effects. With that in mind and before returning to the play, I want to talk about changes in Elizabethan land management practices and in estate surveying, both of which have the potential to destabilize the social relations we saw delineated above.
II
Keith Wrightson tells us of the "fundamental contradiction between the realities of an individualistic agrarian capitalism and the ethics of traditional social obligations which so often surfaced in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."(5) In such a situation, he argues, what is crucial for the maintenance of social order is
the whole world of regular personal contact, at work, after church services, in the streets. . . . What was vital in this daily social intercourse was the regularity of direct face-to-face contact both between comparative equals and between superiors and inferiors. Indeed in the latter case, individual demeanour in direct personal interaction was of singular importance, for it could simultaneously reinforce consciousness of the bond of personal identification and the reality of social differentiation upon which the whole structure of paternalism and deference rested.(6)
In manorial relations, this paternalism necessitated on the part of the tenantry a loyalty analogous to that of children to their father, a loyalty that could even take the form of armed service in the name of the lord. Increasingly, however, such relationships of fealty had begun slowly to erode. The reasons for this are multiple; one involves the formation during the Tudor era of the nation-state, an ideological construct that required a consolidation of authority in which, as texts such as The Homily on Obedience make clear, feudal or manorial loyalties are carefully circumscribed by, and shaped within the parameters of, loyalty to crown and country. Another reason, however, is the shift in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries toward a more unabashedly economic relationship between lord and tenant. Speaking of the 1590s, Lawrence Stone says that
this decade saw the last of the age-old habit of regarding land not only as a source of money, but also as a means of obtaining military aid and outward signs of loyalty...
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