Never a squire of £500 a year
But Richard Fowler of Abbey cwm-hir.’
The figure here mentioned would represent a fairly well-endowed squire of that period in a normal county.
To illustrate the intimate association of trade and land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a stray example or two may seem beside the mark. But here at any rate, culled almost at random from one of my notebooks, is John Groves, the first of his name to be squire of Mickleton in Gloucestershire. He was a Yorkshireman who had made money by trade in London. He died in 1616 in his 103rd year, just after his portrait had been taken, a work of art which makes him look extremely wide awake! His son remained as a haberdasher in London and married a squire’s daughter. Their son became squire of Mickleton as well as a prominent Bencher of the Temple, and incidentally the father of nineteen children, the eldest of whom married a grocer, obviously with the family blessing; the second daughter, a judge’s son; while the eldest son succeeded to Mickleton. The pedigree of the Sandys family, founded by a North-country lad who became an archbishop, for long one of the most prominent in Worcestershire and afterwards ennobled, reveals a grocer and a haberdasher at the very zenith of its fame. Bishop Percy, of ballad renown, was a recognised cadet of the great Northumbrian House. His father was a grocer in Worcester, and the beautiful half-timbered house he occupied in Bridgnorth still stands.
And what, again, of these swarms of younger sons and their careers? In Elizabeth’s time the land produced less than a third of the grain per acre that it does to-day, when, some urban critics of British agriculture may be surprised to hear, our figures lead the world. There could have been no princely portion for the younger sons from an estate of, say, 2000 acres. What did they do? There was no Army or Navy, nor often, for the poor man, any Bar. The Church, for a clever youth, held great opportunities, but in the seventeenth century could hardly have commended itself as the snug and gentlemanly provision it became later. Nor am I forgetting that many squires’ sons became a sort of upper servants in the households of great nobles. But the custom died out, I think, during the Tudor period. Nor again must the small expeditionary forces from time to time dispatched by the Crown or led by adventurers to the Continent be overlooked. But the supply of commissions must have been limited, and in any case the job was but a temporary one. Unlike the Scotch and Irish, each stimulated by quite different but equally cogent reasons, the Englishman does not figure much as a soldier of fortune in foreign armies, while of the Colonies a word or so later. But in the meantime we may well ask ourselves, why this search after showy and romantic careers for the younger son of olden days? He had plenty of ordinary prosaic openings at home, and took them as a matter of course. It is quite certain that his sisters and his cousins and his aunts did not hold up their hands at the notion of trade, for half of them were allied, or prospectively allied, to it. It was deemed a fortunate thing if, through kinship or interest, an apprenticeship offered in the house of a big tradesman in London. Not a few, indeed, of the famous London apprentices we hear so much about were country gentlemen’s sons. More found occupations in their own district, in such lines, for instance, as the great Severn trade, with its boat-loads of caps and crockery, butter and cheese, iron and Virginia tobacco, passing back and forth between Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Worcester, Gloucester, and Bristol, and the squire himself very often took a share in such ventures. Others became millers, maltsters, tanners, glovers, or even shopkeepers in the country towns. Some rented farms, which meant a very different existence for them and their wives from that which would be entailed by a similar proceeding in the same class of life to-day. Most of my own generation, I fancy, grew up with a hazy notion that Cromwell was a plebeian because he was a country brewer or the like. There are, perhaps, plenty of well-informed adults even now who do not realise that he was not merely of a landed family but of a wealthy and powerful one which had sumptuously entertained King James at Hinchingbrooke, though originally sprung from plain Glamorgan squires. For the son of a younger son, Cromwell, alias Williams, seems to have been exceptionally well endowed. Attorneys and surgeons too occur fairly often in family records, or as marrying squires’ daughters, and parsons of course are well in evidence. Simple arithmetic precludes the possibility of more than one eldest son in the matrimonial market for each family of girls. Some of their marriages would, I feel sure, surprise those who vaguely imagine that things in this particular were not merely as now, or as yesterday if you like, but ‘more so.’
In the maritime counties, particularly the western ones, the sea no doubt attracted many a younger son. The Newfoundland fisheries, long before our North American Colonies were founded and for over a century afterwards, were of enormous importance to Devonshire, for this was a Mediterranean as well as a home trade. It is said that a third of the eligible manhood of the county disappeared thence in April to return in November, while squires with loose cash became part owners in ships, and their sons frequently sailed in them. The constant wars in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their chances of loot and land, must also have attracted a good many young gentlemen. But of the hundred and odd English purchasers of estates in the six Plantation counties of Ulster the outlay was too large for the ordinary younger son, so far as one can judge from the list of planters, the particulars concerning them and the prices paid, as given in the Government survey of the day.[2]
The American Colonies and the West Indies, particularly the former, figure as the favourite dumping-ground of the seventeenth-century younger son with the historian, when skimming briefly over these social trifles. The Americans themselves too, with a natural and venial yearning for decorative ancestors, work the younger-son tradition for all it is worth, and paint him when they get him as a much more important person than he really was. The New Englanders may be excepted, for they are a precise people and have worked out their genealogies carefully to the original Pilgrim father (using that term in a general sense) with more regard for him as a sturdy pioneer than as a possible armiger. He was generally, in fact, of respectable middle-class family. The theocratic atmosphere of New England was not calculated to attract the offspring of squires or the like. The southern colonies are, of course, their traditional goal. Captain John Smith, virtual founder of Virginia, took out seventy such with gent marked against each of their ill-fated names on his invaluable chronicle. They died to a man, poor fellows, and the only gleam in their brief and melancholy story is when the indomitable captain led out batches of them to fell trees and they swore so roundly at their blistering hands that a bucket of water down the neck was decreed for every oath, after which ‘all was merriment and good humour.’ The next ‘Supply,’ including more of them, also died off. But a great many younger sons undoubtedly went to Virginia when the colony settled down to prosperity, and a great many of other sorts too. After the Civil Wars, ex-Royalists of all ranks and grades flocked there, most of the more important to return, naturally, at the Restoration. In conning the lists of these early settlers and then taking stock of those who ultimately came out on top as men of property and in a sense founders of families, it is interesting to speculate from their names, difficult enough with English ones, what various sources they came from. In the hard struggle of early colonial life the common men had probably rather the best of the younger son. An early governor of Virginia writes home with a touch of irritation, ‘Everybody here wants to be a gentleman,’ and the colony was assuredly run till the Revolutionary war in the interests of those who either were so by birth or became so through prosperity. With a few notable exceptions, most of the older and leading colonial families bear names of undistinguished sound to an English ear.
English tastes do not run much to genealogy, at any rate in any logical or accurate form. Hence no doubt the hardy superstitions and make-believes that flourish among us. What exacts most respect and consequently most desire is assured position, including the money to maintain it. That of a squire qua squire still receives ungrudging recognition, allowing, of course, for political asperities. The rustic on the estate may sniff a little at a brand-new one, but outside story-books he does not care two straws whether he is the third or the tenth of his line. The Southerners, and indeed Americans generally, have developed of late an astounding passion for ancestry. There is more patter, and upon the flimsiest grounds, about ‘blue blood,’ ‘high breeding,’ ‘patrician bearing,’ ‘cavalier stock,’ and suchlike stuff, in some modern American novels, good and bad, about modern American life, than in a whole year’s output of fiction in Old England. But outside the State Historical Societies a delightful naïveté is the prevailing note; and this is not strange, perhaps, with an extremely sentimental people, who, as regards the Southern States, have, unlike the West Indies, been absolutely out of touch with English social life and its subtleties since immigration there virtually ceased, about 1700 A.D.[3]
With regard to our national indifference to exact genealogy and the modern American craze for glittering forebears, I will hazard the relation of an incident which struck me at the time as a most entertaining and significant illustration of both. Now some dozen years ago the ancient town of Shrewsbury celebrated the battle of 1403 by a series of festivities. These included a banquet given to a hundred or more notabilities of the town, and county and other guests, of whom the writer was one. Another was a genial person who had come all the way from South Carolina (or Georgia) in the character of a lineal descendant of the great Norman, Roger de Montgomery, who eight hundred years before had built Shrewsbury Castle. There are probably thousands of lineal descendants of the mighty Roger, just as there are thousands of legitimate descendants now living of even greater men than he, to wit the Plantagenet and other kings of England.[4] But our ingenuous friend from the States had not gone to work this way at all. His name merely happened to be Montgomery, and to many South Carolinians that would be quite enough, though it may well seem incredible to an Englishman, rather hazy though he may possibly be about such things, that the twentieth-century bearer of an ordinary place-name like Kent, Chester, or Durham should on that account assume descent from the twelfth-century Norman who held one or other of those counties as his fief![5]
Our American visitor, however, a quiet and modest person, was taken at his own valuation, which I am positive was quite sincere. Perhaps the company took it vaguely for granted that he had traced his descent through orthodox sources. But I do not think this picturesque appeal interested them enough to provoke criticism of any kind even in a county where long pedigrees and old families are unusually numerous. Even the association of the modern surname with the mediæval barony did not seem to strike anyone or to arouse suspicion, probably because they were Englishmen and cared (in detail) for none of these things, though many descendants of other Marcher barons bearing famous local names were present. The stranger, however, had come all the way from South Carolina, as he piously, almost pathetically believed, to represent the American branch of the early Norman rulers of Montgomery and builders of Shrewsbury Castle. It was enough that he was a guest, and above all an American, and presumably an entertaining orator. So of course he was put on the toast list, where, unhappily, he belied his nationality. But the humour of the situation seemed quite lost upon the company. A hundred faces looked serious, and subsequently bored. But then they could not know, as I had cause to know, the daring of an unsophisticated American when on the war-path for an ancestor. A distinguished writer on mediæval history sitting next to me was shaking with suppressed mirth, and probably a clerical antiquary or two were enjoying themselves, but on the whole I feel sure the joke was missed.