Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Reformation, custom and the end of medieval England
- 2 Custom and popular memory
- 3 Rights, resources and social alignments
- 4 Topographies of remembrance
- 5 Textual and verbal ways of remembering
- 6 The politics of popular memory
- Epilogue.
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
5 - Textual and verbal ways of remembering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Reformation, custom and the end of medieval England
- 2 Custom and popular memory
- 3 Rights, resources and social alignments
- 4 Topographies of remembrance
- 5 Textual and verbal ways of remembering
- 6 The politics of popular memory
- Epilogue.
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
‘Wordes of comon’: conceptualizing orality and literacy
On 10 April 1678, the sixty-year-old yeoman Thomas Pearse gave evidence concerning the boundaries, customs and history of Exmoor Forest. Like Richard Parrott of Audley, Thomas Pearse was an insider. He had been born and lived all his life within a mile of the forest, dating his ‘remembrance’ of it from the age of ten. The thrust of Thomas’s evidence was to insist upon the status of Exmoor as a forest rather than a mere chase. He gave an account of how, back in 1632, his father having been summoned to take part in the perambulation of the forest by the forest officials had sent the fourteen-year-old Thomas in his place. Together with the deputy forester and other men of the locality, young Thomas treaded the bounds, their route beginning at a stone called Hookedstone, which separated the forest from Withypool common. The route took them past a succession of meerstones, an oaken post (vanished by 1678), heaps of earth and stone, trees and rivers. Thomas noted that although there were a few spots where cultivated fields reached close to the forest bounds, ‘for the most part the bounds of the forest are distant a mile or two or more from the said enclosed lands, the commons … lying between.’
Thomas Pearse experienced the boundary markers as components within an historical landscape: heaps of earth and stone had, he thought, been thrown up ‘in ancient time’. The boundaries comprised an ‘ancient and true [set of] boundaries’. Place-names acted as self-evident mnemonics: Sadlerstone, which separated the forest from Linton common, had ‘something [of] the shape or figure of a saddle’; Hoareoake had been the location of an ancient oak, long gone by 1678. In his mind’s eye, Thomas saw a living landscape: four years after Hoareoake had fallen down in 1658, ‘there was a young oak set at or very near the place where the old oak stood’.
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- The Memory of the PeopleCustom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England, pp. 247 - 286Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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