- Sallowmoor: The Burning Families
- Combe Ashby: The Village at the Mouth
- Hazelrigg: Four Centuries and No Judgement
“A burn is eight days. It is not eight days of work and one of watching, it is eight days of watching, and the watching is the work, and there is nobody to send for if it goes.”
Sallowmoor: The Burning Families
Four charcoal families upon the western hangers, some ninety souls in all, in the trade the belt calls a sort apart. They hold no land, they stand upon no Clearance Roll, they pay the Woodmote for the cut, and they pay for nothing besides. Yet they are the only people in the belt who can say what is in the hangers at night, and the reason is plain enough: after dark they are the only people in them.
It is not a village as the valleys use the word. Four hearth-grounds, a store, and a row of huts on the moor above the wood, held from spring to autumn and standing cold and mostly empty the winter through. In that season the families go down to whatever parish will have them, and are counted there, if they are counted at all, as somebody else’s poor.
The work governs everything about them. A burn is a stack of cordwood, turfed, earthed, and fired from a central flue, and it must be held at a heat that chars the wood and does not consume it; it runs eight days, and it cannot be left by day or by night. A stack that breaks through burns to ash within the hour and ruins a fortnight’s labour with it. Therefore a Sallowmoor family is unreachable for a week together, nine times in the year, and the parish has never worked out how to count them, has never been obliged to, nor much wishes to.
Their standing is exactly as low as their knowledge is valuable. A burner is up at three in the morning, nine times in the year for thirty years, in a wood nobody else enters after dark. He knows which rides are walked and which are not, which beasts move and when, what the two Grimsdell places sound like from four hundred yards, and whether anything has been in a combe that should not have been. The verderers acknowledge as much in private, nor has it ever been regularised.
What regularising would mean is the thing neither side wants. A burner entered on the Roll is a man the Woodmote could require to report, and therefore a witness in the wood’s business, whose usefulness is finished in about a season. Cecily Gerrard has said as much in a presentment that was minuted and not acted upon: that she would rather have four families who will tell her things than ninety people who are obliged to.
Their own discipline is short, and it is kept absolutely. A hearth is never moved onto ground that is not on a family’s turn, which is the rotation observed by people the Woodmote does not license. Nothing is cut for a burn that a woodward has not marked, and the burners hold to that more strictly than the licensed cutters do, for a burner accused of waste has nothing to fall back upon. And nobody burns in the two combes. That is not a rule anybody has stated, nor has it ever been broken.
For a company the burners are the best informants in the hanger country, and the easiest to lose. They will talk at the hearth, at night, to a man who has brought something and is not out of either town. They will stop, and stop for good, if what they said reaches a verderer: not because the verderer would punish them, but because the arrangement that keeps them off the roll depends wholly upon their standing outside the wood’s formal business. A company that burns that trust has shut the hangers against itself, and against the next three companies through.
Combe Ashby: The Village at the Mouth
“We walk the bounds and we watch a new grave and we do not draw after dark, and I will tell you all of it and gladly. You have asked me four times now about the combe.”
A hanger village of two hundred at the mouth of a combe, and the place the combes are named for. It keeps the fullest customary practice in the wood country, and it is the parish an antiquary is sent to when he would see the observances performed rather than described: the bounds walked, a new grave watched, the well not drawn after dark. Its people will discuss the whole of it freely. The combe itself they will not discuss at all.
In every other respect the village is ordinary, and the ordinariness is the point of it. Two hundred people, coppice and a little arable, a resident incumbent who is well liked, a school of sorts, and a place on the Woodmote’s plan like any other wood village. It is no strange place, nor does it think itself one. Therefore the one silence it keeps stands out.
The combe is not entered. It is not fenced, it is not marked on the Woodmote’s plan, no riding is cut into it, and it is one of the two. Beasts graze to within about forty yards of the head of the hollow and go no further unless they are driven, which is the single most quoted observation in the hanger country, and is the sort of thing a visitor takes for coincidence for about a week.
Asked, the village gives the form of words the whole belt gives: that it has not been used, that it was not used when they came, and that they could not tell you why. Margery Ashby has kept the grave book these nineteen years and is the most forthcoming person in the parish upon every other custom it holds. Upon this one she gives that answer without varying a word, which is itself the measure of how old the answer is and how long the reason has been lost.
What the village does discuss is the watching of its dead, and it is the fullest form surviving in the belt. A new grave at Combe Ashby is watched for three nights, by two people, who are named at the burial, and who are not of the household; the vigil is kept not from the graveside but from the porch; and it ends at the third dawn in silence. The incumbent attends the first night and not the other two. He has never been told why, and he has stopped asking, which he describes as the only pastorally sensible course open to him.
The Wardens of the Quiet Ground keep a circuit through Combe Ashby, and Ashby is the one parish upon it that has never reported a lapse. Everything the village was ever obliged to do it does still: forty-one items on the Wardens’ list, verified twice in the decade for a century and a half. They hold it the best-kept parish in the High South. They have never asked it about the combe either.
For a company Combe Ashby is at once the most instructive village in the belt and the least productive. Everything a company would learn of how customary practice actually works is performed here, and will be explained to a stranger patiently. Yet the one thing a company will want to know is the one thing two hundred people have agreed, without ever agreeing it, not to say. A company that presses will be answered courteously four times. The fifth conversation does not happen.
Hazelrigg: Four Centuries and No Judgement
“My great-grandfather was in it and my grandfather was in it and my father was in it and the papers are all in the chest and they are all in order. We are not losing. We are not winning. We are farming.”
Ground taken out of the wood by licence in 4211 A.C., and litigated ever since. About a hundred and sixty people farm two hundred acres that the Woodmote maintains were never lawfully assarted, upon a grant the Crown made and the verderers say the Crown had no standing to make.
Narrow in substance, the quarrel has not moved in four hundred years. The Crown granted the assart in 4211, as part of a larger settlement of forest ground. The Woodmote’s case, then and now, is that the hangers are not forest in the legal sense, were never afforested, and are held under its own jurisdiction; whereby the Crown granted something it did not hold and could not grant. Hazelrigg’s answer is that it holds a Crown grant, that it has held it these four centuries, that it has farmed upon the strength of it, and that a grant which has been acted upon for four hundred years is a grant.
Four centuries of litigation have produced no judgement and a complete record, which is the belt entire in one place. The case is heard, adjourned and re-entered about once in a generation. Both sides’ papers are in perfect order. Neither will accept a settlement, for a settlement would concede that the question was ever open: the Woodmote cannot compound for ground it says was never lawfully taken, nor can Hazelrigg compound for ground it says it lawfully holds.
Hence the practical arrangement in the meantime, which is the belt at its most characteristic. Hazelrigg pays its tithe to Oxford and its pannage to the Woodmote and is content; and both bodies take the payments for proof of their own position. The Woodmote receives the pannage as an acknowledgement of its jurisdiction. Hazelrigg pays it as a neighbourly convenience, and enters it in the parish book as such, in a form of words settled by counsel in 4489, and not altered since.
What the village is actually like is not what the case suggests. It is prosperous, standing on the best-drained ground in the hanger country, and its people are less anxious about the litigation than any outsider expects. The case is a condition and not a crisis. The pleadings lie in the parish chest, with the registers, are consulted about once in a decade, and are shown to visitors with the same satisfaction another village would show a rood screen.
The regarders’ triennial riding goes not through Hazelrigg but round it, which stands in no instrument and has been the practice since about 4520. A regarder who entered would be inspecting ground the Woodmote says is wood, on behalf of a court Hazelrigg says has no writ there; and whatever he did next would be a decision. So the riding goes round. The riding book records the perimeter, and nobody has ever set the reason down in it.
For a company Hazelrigg is where to learn what the belt means by a record. Both parties will show a stranger everything. Both are certain the papers favour them, and neither has anything to conceal. The chest is opened willingly, and a company that reads the Hazelrigg pleadings through, which takes about three days, will understand more of how this country actually works than it will learn in a season anywhere else, and will understand besides why nobody in the belt expects a difficult question to be answered in his lifetime.