Free Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson Page A

population of England, now at about 2.75 million, had increased by some 35 percent over the previous century. The cost of living had risen by 50 percent in the previous fifty years. In 1545, the harvest had been catastrophicand the economy was still reeling from the aftereffects. The rich, gathering up the pickings from the dissolution of the monasteries, were getting richer, and the poor, their numbers burgeoning against a static food supply, were getting poorer.
    On May 25, 1549, the crisis hit home. A Norfolk gentleman, John Paston, wrote to his cousin the Earl of Rutland:
    there is a great number of the commons up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir William Herbert’s park that is about his new house and divers other parks and commons that be inclosed in that country.
    It was the people of Washerne taking their revenge. They threw down the new oak palings that Herbert had set up to enclose the deer and exclude the people, and slaughtered what deer they could catch. For three weeks they occupied the ground on the other side of the Nadder from Herbert’s new house. They may not have known quite what they were taking on, since in those weeks, as they attempted to rebuild their houses on the old sites—there was a mistaken belief widespread in England that any man who could build a house and light a fire in the course of a day had the right to remain in it—Herbert was away in Wales. There, from his Glamorgan estates, drawing on the “affinity”—the band of his tenants who could be relied on to fight for him when summoned—he marched them back into Wiltshire. Approaching Wilton, he attacked his invading Washerne tenants as if they were an enemy and “slew to death divers of the rebels.” News of Herbert’s fearsome response reached the young king, who recorded in his journal how the men of Washerne had created trouble and chaos and how “Sir William Herbert did put them down, overrun, and slay them.”
    The park where Sir Philip Sidney would within thirty-five yearswander with the dreams of Arcadia in his head was now restored to wholeness, and if you stand on the lawns outside Wilton House today, staring across the elegance of the park and its gentlemanly accoutrements, you are looking at one of the heartlands of Arcadia: a stretch of landscape in which the people who claimed some rights over it were murdered so that an aesthetic vision of otherworldly calm could be imposed in their place. It is an early, miniature, English version of the clearances on the great Highland estates in Scotland or even of the National Parks in the wilder parts of America: calm, beautiful, and empty landscapes, not because God made them like that but because the people who belonged there were driven off, killed, or otherwise dispensed with.
    It is worth pausing for a moment to consider exactly what was done here in the service of Arcadia. Remember the dog chains in the old armory, the bills and pikes, the halberds with which you could spike a man and then cut him. Almost certainly Herbert would have used a sword on his tenants. The favorite and usual strokes in the sixteenth century were not fencing-like thrusts—a slightly later, European development—but rather more woodmanlike slashing and severing: the cutting of the head from the shoulders, the cutting off of an arm or a leg, and the slicing stroke down through the head. This could be dramatic. There are records throughout the Middle Ages of sword cuts leaving the severed halves of the head hanging down to left and right on either shoulder. Sometimes the sword was smashed into the head with such violence that it cut down through a man’s torso to his hips, with his body folding apart like a carcass in an abattoir. Skeletons from medieval battles, unearthed and examined, often have multiple wounds: both legs cut off, sometimes apparently from a single sweeping blow with a sword; parts of the skull cut away