Postscript
I
n 1787 the first act to enclose an area of wetland and grassland, known as Otmoor, just northeast of Oxford, was lodged. Legend had it that “Our Lady of Otmoor” rode a circuit 'round the moor while an oat sheaf was burning and gave the area within it to the people of Otmoor in perpetuity. Consequently, any moves by local landlords to enclose the land met with strong opposition from the villagers. Matters finally came to a climax on September 6, 1830, when around one thousand people walked the seven-mile circumference of Otmoor in broad daylight, destroying every fence in their way.
The Riot Act was read to them, and the Oxfordshire Yeomanry was summoned. The rioters, however, refused to disperse. Several were arrested, and forty-one were transported to Oxford Jail. The prisoners' arrival in the city happened to coincide with the famous St. Giles Fair, and the crowd turned into an angry mob and helped those charged to escape. At a later trial the judges showed mercy to the recaptured Otmoor men. The longest sentence handed down was two months' imprisonment.
Though the villagers held out for their rights for many years, the land was finally enclosed from 1835. More recent threats to the natural area included a government proposal in 1980 to route a motorway across Otmoor. A major campaign resulted in the adoption of an alternative route.
Since 1997 much of Otmoor has been made a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds nature reserve, with many acres being returned to marshland. It is also home to a large population of rare insects and plants.
Glossary
Chapter 1
chainman:
Still known in modern surveying by the same name, this is the surveyor's assistant, who originally took charge of the measuring chains.
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circumferentor:
Toward the end of the eighteenth century the formerly popular circumferentor was being replaced by the theodolite as the surveyor's instrument of choice.
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measuring chains:
These were the surveyor's basic tools of measurement. Made of thick steel wire, they usually came in a two-or four-pole (thirty-three feet or sixty-six feet, respectively) format. This would then be subdivided into fifty links for the two-pole or one hundred links for the four. In a four-pole chain, each link would therefore be equal to 66/100 feet, or 7.92 inches in length.
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The Lady of Brandwick:
Many people of the seven Oxfordshire towns, around an area of wetland known as Otmoor, fueled the story that the Virgin Mary had ridden the circuit of the moor and given the land to the villagers, possibly before the Norman Conquest in 1066.
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Bastard William:
William the Conqueror, who invaded England and established Norman rule from 1066, was often called William the Bastard.
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Chiltern:
An area formed from a chalk escarpment, covering the counties of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.
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turners:
Craftsmen skilled at turning wood on a lathe. The first reference to a turner making chairs in the Chilterns dates to before 1700 and is found in the parish register of High Wycombe in the 1680s. They were later known as bodgers.
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pit sawyers:
In order to cut tree trunks lengthwise, they were placed over pits known as sawpits. Balanced on smaller logs, the trunks were attached to them with iron hooks called dogs. Cutting was done with a two-man saw. The man on top was known as the “top dog,” while the “under dog” stood in the pit and would be unfortunately covered with all the falling sawdust.
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gin traps:
Used mainly by gamekeepers, these cruel devices were banned in the United Kingdom only in 1958.
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seventeen thousand acres in just over a sennight in Virginia:
In 1750, John Buchanan, the deputy surveyor of Augusta County, reported that his party had surveyed eight tracts totaling seventeen thousand acres in just fifteen working days.
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enclosure:
Between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, landowners began fencing off land previously available for common use. During the eighteenth century, enclosures were regulated by Parliament; a separate Act of Enclosure was required for each village.
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Euclid:
Euclid of Alexandria was a Greek mathematician who is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. He lived around 300 BC.
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mariner's black spot:
Although now in popular culture thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island,
published in 1883, the black spot might owe its origin to the historical tradition of Caribbean pirates showing an ace of spades to a person condemned as traitor or informer.
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sawpit:
Several depressions can still be found in Chiltern woodlands, indicating disused pits.
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a murder of crows:
According to an old folktale, crows will gather to judge the capital fate of another. Their appearance was also thought to be an omen of death by some.
Chapter 2
Bethlem Hospital:
Bethlem Royal Hospital, to give it its full name, was originally founded in 1247 but did not begin to treat the insane until the fourteenth century. In 1676, the hospital moved from the site of what is now Liverpool Street station, London, to a magnificent baroque building designed by Robert Hooke, at Moorfields. The hospital moved to its third site in 1815 and now forms part of the Imperial War Museum.
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elaborate carvings:
A detailed description of Bethlem in 1786 is given by Sophie von La Roche, a European lady who kept a diary of her travels.
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Newgate Prison:
The prison had to be completely rebuilt following the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reopened in 1782.
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Primum non nocerum
:
Translated as “first do no harm,” the phrase does not appear in the Hippocratic Oath but in the Hippocratic Corpus, a body of work containing around sixty medical treatises.
Chapter 3
hanging:
During the eighteenth century there were fifty-six public executions at Oxford Castle, for crimes ranging from sheep stealing and arson to spying.
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Amersham:
A day's ride northwest of London, the Chiltern town was a natural resting place for men and horses. By the late 1770s there were no fewer than seventeen licenses granted to innkeepers and alehouse keepers.
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Tyburn:
The site of London's gallows was moved from Tyburn to Newgate in 1783. Executions were carried out outside the prison.
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clustered 'round the dead men's feet:
The death sweat from a hanged person allegedly had the power to cure scrofula, a form of tuberculosis.
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the High:
Locally the main street in Oxford is often known as the High.
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the Jolly Trooper:
Now known as the Bear, the inn is one of Oxford's oldest, but the present building, just opposite Bear Lane, was built in the early seventeenth century as the residence of the coaching inn's ostler. It was converted into a separate tavern, the Jolly Trooper, in 1774.
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an Act of Enclosure:
Originally, enclosures of land took place through informal agreement; however, during the seventeenth century the practice of enclosing land, that is, fencing it off, required authorization by an Act of Parliament. Most attempts by landlords went unchallenged, although some caused discontent and riots.
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compensation:
Although commoners were usually compensated for their losses, they were often given smaller holdings or inferior-quality land or allowed to remain only on the condition that they fence their allotment at their own expense.
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stint:
The fee for pasturing animals on common land to prevent overgrazing.
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set fire to a hayrick:
There are several reported incidents of arson attacks in protest at enclosures during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An anonymous letter sent to an Essex farmer in 1773 warned, “As soon as your corn is in the barn we will have a fire.”
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Eton:
Still arguably the world's most famous school, Eton College, Eton, near Windsor in Berkshire, was founded by King Henry VI in 1440.
Chapter 4
sack:
A sweet wine fortified by brandy.
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riots:
While social unrest was quite widespread at this time, opposition to enclosures, together with a number of other factors such as the rising price of grain, did not come to a head until after the Napoleonic Wars. In 1830 there were widespread riots in England, known as the Captain Swing Riots.
Chapter 5
Great Tom:
Housed in Tom Tower at Christ Church, the bell is the loudest in Oxford.
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Christ Church Anatomy School:
Built between 1766 and 1767, it is now usually known as the Lee Building and used as the Senior Common Room of Christ Church College.
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their faces blackened with soot:
It was very common for poachers to blacken their faces. The Black Act of 1722, which made poaching a capital offense, took its name from the practice.
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scalded with a red-hot iron or oil:
Until the sixteenth century, gunshot wounds had been treated this way in the belief that gunpowder was poisonous. A French barber surgeon named Ambroise Paré (c. 1510â1590) put paid to the practice but still recommended extraction, which carried on until the end of the eighteenth century and risked the infection of the wound and therefore death.
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blunderbuss:
An early form of shotgun. The word comes from the Dutch
donderbus,
which literally means “thunder gun.” It was often carried by coach guards for protection against highwaymen.
Chapter 6
coppicing in the coupe:
Coppicing is the traditional method of producing firewood or wood for fencing and furniture. The part of a woodland coppiced is called a coupe, but many other terms are used, such as “burrow,” “hagg,” “fell,” “cant,” “panel,” or “burrow,” depending on the locality.
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stools:
Coppice stools consist of the roots and stumps, which give rise to the coppice shoots, which are cut at regular intervals.
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London fires aglow:
By the eighteenth century Chiltern trees had become an important source of firewood for London and local towns.
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small beer:
Water was so often polluted that weak ale was frequently drunk by servants and even children.
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messuages:
An archaic term for a dwelling house and its surroundings.
Chapter 7
schnapps:
A type of distilled spirit made from fermented fruit, this remains a popular drink in Germany.
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matching pair:
Most pistols were made and sold in pairs.
Chapter 8
London hospitals:
Several hospitals were founded in the eighteenth century as a result of the growth of associational charities, such as the Lock Hospital in 1747 and the British Lying-In Hospital, established in 1749.
Chapter 9
bury man:
Archaic name for a gravedigger.
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bellman:
An ancient officer in some English towns, who also doubles as the town crier, as in Hungerford, Berkshire.
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as required by law:
Before 1801, villagers had to be informed of the intention to enclose by way of a notice posted on the church door.
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the bitter winter:
Following the Great Fogg (described below, under Chapter 10), temperatures in Europe in the winter of 1783â1784 were about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit below average for the late 1700s. The Laki eruption has been blamed for this, although new research points to other factors.
Chapter 10
fulling mill:
Fulling is the beating and cleaning of cloth in water.
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tenter frames:
Once the woolen cloth was finished and washed, it was stretched to dry on tenter frames, which were set in what were called racking closes. The phrase “being on tenterhooks,” meaning to be held in suspense, is derived from these structures.
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stocks:
Stocks were like huge wooden mallets that swung in an arc down onto the cloth contained in a wooden trough.
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a wooden cross:
A cross made of rowan and bound with red thread was used as a protective charm. Examples can be seen in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
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Great Fogg:
A deadly fog, now most widely attributed to the eruption of the Laki fissure in Iceland in 1783, covered the eastern half of England, killing thousands of livestock and contributing to the deaths of several thousand people. (See
The Devil's Breath,
the third book in the Dr. Thomas Silkstone series.)
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kiln:
Charcoal kilns contained a pile of wood, which was covered in bracken, followed by a layer of clay.
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cunning woman:
The term was most widely used in southern England and the Midlands to denote a healer or wisewoman or white witch.
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shew stones:
Polished objects engraved with magical names, symbols, and signs were often used as tools for occult research.
Chapter 11
commoners:
In this case the term refers to people who share rights over an area of common land in a particular locality.
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an elected council:
There were often courts that upheld the rights of villagers to graze their animals on the land, enforcing strict rules about when and how they did so.
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glean the grain:
One of the many perquisites of a commoner was the right to glean the grain, or gather what remained on the ground after the harvest.
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pannage:
The right to allow pigs to eat acorns and beech mast in the woods, usually applied during the autumn. Acorns are poisonous to other animals.
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bailiff:
An administrative officer.
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The Riot Act:
An Act of the Parliament of 1715, it meant that any group of twelve or more people held to be unlawfully assembled should disperse or face punishment. The act, from which comes the expression “reading the riot act,” was properly called “An Act for Preventing Tumults and Riotous Assemblies, and for the More Speedy and Effectual Punishing the Rioters.” It was not repealed until 1967.
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urine:
Known as seg, the urine was used to scour wool cloth at the clothier's premises.