document

Social History, 2013

Vol. 38, No. 1, 26–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2013.755329

Andrew Hopper

Social mobility during the English Revolution: the case of Adam Eyre*

Adam Eyre was a yeoman on the margins of gentility who resided in the upland parish of Penistone, twelve miles north-west of Sheffield. He is well known to social historians because the diurnal he wrote detailed his daily activities and expenses between 1647 and 1649. Historians have considered him a provincial whose world was focused on his immediate neighbourhood, a locality as bleak and remote as any in northern England. Eyre has been used in a limited way as an exemplar of the yeomanry in order to inform debates about authority and status, often without close attention to his local surroundings. Those familiar with Eyre’s diurnal may be surprised to learn that in the 1650s this Pennine farmer became a civil servant in the Strand, styled himself a gentleman of London, and undertook the second largest single purchase of crown land in Yorkshire for a staggering £5966 7s 6d. These discoveries suggest that social historians’ past understandings of Eyre have not only been too heavily based on his diurnal, but have also divorced him from his civil war context. Eyre served the parliamentary cause as a captain of a troop of horse in northern England during the first civil war and as a minor bureaucrat in the interregnum regimes that followed. This article will trace Eyre’s involvement in parish affairs and his journey through the civil war, republic and Protectorate. His experience invites a reassessment of how far the ‘chief inhabitants’ and parochial gentry of rural parishes remained constrained by their home locality during the English Revolution.

Eyre’s diurnal detailed his activities, travels and expenditure. Its dual purpose was to record his material accounts and spiritual deliberations. The regular practice of such selfreflection ‘certainly served some individuals as a means of easing tensions in their lives’, soothing their injured honour.1 The diurnal has proved an extremely popular source

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

among twentieth-century historians. The marital disagreements it divulged enhanced its attractions to social historians such as Keith Wrightson and historians of the family such as Ralph Houlbrooke.2 Wallace Notestein used the diurnal as an exemplar of yeoman life, while Eyre’s troubled marriage even merited a mention in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic.3 Historians have used the diurnal to illustrate the price of goods, the obligations of godparents and the practice of hiring servants.4 Eyre’s recording of his reading habits continues to inform historians of literacy and print culture.5 There has even been an attempt to compare quantitative changes in Eyre’s patterns of sociability with those of Samuel Pepys.6 While these studies have illuminated the socio-economics of domestic life with some success, there are many further untapped primary sources relating to Eyre. These demonstrate how his social and political worlds were transformed drastically, with the experience of civil war wrenching him in directions that would have been unthinkable in 1640.

Much though not all of the diurnal was painstakingly transcribed by the Victorian antiquarian H. J. Morehouse for the Surtees Society in 1875.7 Morehouse’s ancestor, William Morehouse of Shepley Hall, had been an acquaintance of Eyre, and the original diurnal had passed through his hands before it was received by the Tolson Memorial Museum at Ravensknowle in Huddersfield in 1947. Until now, historians have only cited this printed edition, which led Ralph Houlbrooke to conclude wrongly in 1988 that the manuscript had vanished. In fact it had been deposited, conserved and rebound by the West Yorkshire Archive Service at Kirklees only the year before.8 The original manuscript commands attention because it contains miscellanea absent from or only calendared in the Surtees edition such as rents, the hiring of servants, records of Eyre’s book-lending, a list of herbs and remedies, and notes relating to the Long Parliament’s Committee for Plundered Ministers. A further manuscript copy of the diurnal, now in the British Library, was made by the great Yorkshire antiquarian Joseph Hunter in 1857.9 This article will utilize the diurnal, but for the first time it will also research beyond it to

address why Adam Eyre took up arms for parliament and how the consequences of his allegiance impacted upon his social status, self-fashioning, local standing and familial relations.10

LOCAL CONTEXT

A newer, more thorough understanding of Eyre ought to begin with a study of his home environment, where the experiences of the revolutionary 1640s were by no means humdrum and everyday. His predecessors were from Crookhill in north Derbyshire and had been a noted and armigerous Roman Catholic family. Adam Eyre’s father Thomas moved to Yorkshire, having married one Ellen Ramscar, and settled at Hazlehead, in Thurlstone township, in the large moorland parish of Penistone that comprised over 22,000 acres.11 Hazlehead stands in the Upper Don valley at around 750 feet above sea level, adjacent to the wooded, rocky precipice leading down to the Don which Eyre termed ‘the Rocher’. In 1877 H. J. Morehouse considered the house was windswept, ‘singularly bleak and cold’, with ‘a cold and dreary prospect’.12 There, with the aid of a handful of servants and labourers, Eyre maintained a farm that in January 1649 included two horses, 27 cattle and 102 sheep.13

Adam was born in 1614, and along with his brother, Joseph, he abandoned the religion of his forefathers to embrace the highly Reformed religious culture of his home parish. This aided his integration with Penistone’s leading families such as the Bosviles of Gunthwaite, Micklethwaites of Ingbirchworth, Riches of Bullhouse and the Wordsworths of Water Hall, all of whom were strongly puritan before 1642.14 Adam cemented his local position in 1640 by marrying Susannah, the daughter of Godfrey Mathewman of Eden-tree Head, another puritan landowning family in the neighbouring parish of Kirkburton.15 Eyre was also mentioned at the Pontefract quarter sessions that year, paying what was due from James Tufton for having fathered an illegitimate child upon Mary Turner of Penistone.16

Penistone’s vicar before the civil wars was Matthew Booth who was investigated in 1632 for not wearing the surplice.17 Peter Soothill served as vicar from 1635, while Timothy Broadley was presented by the royalist Sir William Savile in 1642. A long struggle over the benefice followed in which Eyre became personally embroiled. In 1648,

Henry Swift ‘came in by the consent of the parish’ and remained for forty years thereafter.18 Like many of its neighbours in the clothing districts further north, Penistone had developed chapelries owing to the distance of the outlying townships from the parish church. One of these was Denby chapel, three miles north of the parish church, built in 1627 by the puritan esquire, Godfrey Bosvile of Gunthwaite. Their first minister was Charles Broxholme, who had enjoyed the patronage of Bosvile’s stepbrother, the notorious puritan Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, and his wife. From 1629 Broxholme was repeatedly prosecuted in the Court of High Commission – a powerful tribunal used by Charles I’s churchmen to enforce ecclesiastical discipline – for giving communion to those who would not kneel. Suspected of not wearing the surplice or making the sign of the cross at baptism, he was fined forty shillings and suspended for nonconformity in 1632. He was replaced by Daniel Clark, a preacher from the Reformed, Godly powerhouse of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Clark married Bosvile’s daughter and was presented to the neighbouring parish of Kirkburton by the House of Commons in 1643.19 Eyre would cross the parish boundary to hear Clark preach in 1647, and noted Clark’s attendance at an exercise at Penistone in October 1648, where he ‘preached and railed mightyly’.20

The Bosviles were Penistone’s leading gentry family, with Godfrey becoming MP for Warwick and a parliamentarian colonel in that county. Beneath him were the local office-holders, the network of ‘mere’ or ‘parochial’ gentry such as William Rich, Ralph Wordsworth and Adam Eyre, who did much to control parish life from their large farmhouses at Bullhouse, Water Hall and Hazlehead.21 Men of similar standing were at the forefront of the parliamentary cause not only in Penistone and the districts around Sheffield, but further north throughout the clothing districts at the heart of the West Riding.22 Eyre rallied to parliament in part because he had been conditioned by years of puritan sermons, but also because he was defending his home locality from cavalier incursions, fighting alongside many of his friends and neighbours who were commissioned under parliament’s northern generals, the Fairfaxes.23 One prosopographical study has argued that over a third of Fairfax’s West Riding captains were ‘nongentry’, drawn from the middling sorts, some of whom mortgaged their own land to raise troops.24

MILITARY CAREER

There has been little attempt to uncover Adam Eyre’s civil war activities because the ‘little parchment covered book’ which contained his journal of military service now appears to have been lost.25 Yet something can be pieced together of his martial experiences. Eyre may have been among the thousand or so parliamentarians, most of whom were from Penistone and Kirkburton parishes, who pillaged Emley on 21 January 1643, taking fifty-five sheep from the parson and killing many deer in the park. When three hundred royalist cavalry from Wakefield attempted to dislodge them on 23 January, the parliamentarians repelled them with their musketry.26 Eyre was almost certainly in arms by the time royalist forces under Sir Francis Wortley returned from Staffordshire to threaten Penistone in spring 1643. Penistone’s inhabitants sent to Sir Thomas Fairfax at Bradford for aid on 20 April, but he advised them to seek help from Rotherham or Sheffield.27 Penistone responded by garrisoning its parish church, allegedly even procuring artillery. The inhabitants were probably led in this by Adam and his brother Joseph Eyre, alongside William Rich of Bullhouse and George Shirt of nearby Cawthorne, who was soon commissioned as Joseph Eyre’s lieutenant.28 It is likely that these men were among Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax’s army that was destroyed on Adwalton Moor near Bradford on 30 June 1643. Thereafter, Penistone was unable to hold out, and by 22 July a royalist garrison was established by Sir Francis Wortley at Wortley Hall in the neighbouring parish of Tankersley. Wortley’s men established an outpost in the tower of Penistone’s parish church, where they remained until spring 1644, thus propelling Eyre’s parliamentarian neighbours such as Philip Bray westward into Cheshire.29 Oliver Heywood later recalled how Wortley’s soldiers ‘from thence roved up and down the country robbing, & vexing many honest people’.30

By this time Eyre, or his brother Joseph, was certainly engaged for parliament, as Colonel John Bright reminded Sir Thomas Fairfax in March 1644: ‘S[i]r, Capt[ain] Eyer & his men who is both active & faithfull, be in great distress of money, being of my lords Regiment & in all your service of Cheshire. My humble request is yt he may have the same incouragm[en]t all other men his valour deserving itt.’31 This suggests that Adam or Joseph captained a troop of horse in the cavalry regiment of Lord Fairfax, and had served under Sir Thomas Fairfax at the battle of Nantwich on 25 January 1644. Eyre’s friend and neighbour, William Rich, was also commissioned as captain in the regiment of Colonel Lawrence Parsons on 22 June 1644.32 It is therefore most likely that Rich and Eyre were

among Sir Thomas Fairfax’s cavalry which were badly mauled at Marston Moor. Eyre may also have participated in the siege of Pontefract castle in 1645, as his diurnal referred to ‘my old chamber’ at the Bull, in Pontefract.33

Of those who served under Eyre, the diurnal mentions John Shaw as his quartermaster, Richard Barber as his corporal, and one Ralph Wordsworth as his soldier.34 These were all Penistone men, but Eyre’s Derbyshire cousin, Robert Eyre of Cockbridge, also served him as a trooper before later being commissioned quartermaster and cornet to another troop in Lord Fairfax’s regiment, under Robert’s cousin, Captain Adam Baynes of Knowsthorpe.35 By the beginning of Eyre’s diurnal in January 1647 Eyre and his men had been disbanded. Eyre was to devote considerable effort thereafter in pursuing their arrears, but remained uninvolved in the Northern Association’s mutiny at York against its commander, Sydenham Poyntz, in July 1647.36 In September 1648 Eyre considered returning to military service as captain of Colonel Mauleverer’s dragoons, but nothing appears to have come of the idea.37

PARISH AND HOUSEHOLD GOVERNMENT

After his withdrawal from soldiering, Eyre played a key role in the government of his parish, his local standing enhanced by his military service. Lacking children of his own, he devoted much time to his wider family, cousins and kinfolk.38 He mediated, albeit not always successfully, in disputes between his neighbours.39 He borrowed and lent books to his friends and neighbours, many of which were religious works by writers such as William Dell, Richard Laurence and John Saltmarsh, favourers of Independent congregations rather than coercion into a new Presbyterian state church.40 Eyre lent Ralph Wordsworth The Countrey Justice by Michael Dalton during Wordsworth’s tenure as chief constable of Staincross wapentake.41 Eyre also read William Lilly’s prophecies, Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.42 Between 1644 and 1647 he also lent books to Francis Morton of Spouthouse, whose recent large-scale deer poaching in New Park had so outraged the ultra-royalist Sir Francis Wortley.43 He bought books during journeys to London, but also closer to home

at Wakefield.44 Such reading facilitated sociability with the Godly of the parish. Yet despite the display of a coat of arms in the parlour at Hazlehead and Eyre’s hiring of servants, he was not above manual labour himself.45 He cut wood in the Rocher and laboured by sowing oats and seeds, mending walls and laying weirs with his workmen.46 Eyre became important in parish affairs through his instrumental role in gaining control of Penistone’s vicarage for a clique of Godly parish elites during the late 1640s. As Penistone was quite a poor living, worth only twenty-six pounds per annum, in July 1646 the Long Parliament’s Committee for Plundered Ministers, tasked with augmenting its clergy’s incomes, ordered Penistone augmented by fifty pounds per annum drawn from the royalist William Blythman’s sequestered rectory of Wath.47 With this money, Eyre, William Rich and Ralph Wordsworth, among others, hoped to attract a Godly, preaching minister. Consequently they sought ways to dismiss the incumbent, Christopher Dickinson, whom they claimed had intruded himself into the living during 1644. On 16 February 1647 Eyre recorded that Dickinson ‘came to speake with mee about staying with us, and I told him the truth; whereupon he was angry with mee, and left mee in a fury; then I came home’.48 On 27 February the parishioners offered Dickinson forty pounds to leave.49 When Dickinson refused, the parishioners promoted a petition to the West Riding’s Committee for Plundered Ministers for his removal. On 18 March a ‘certificate’ was drawn up against Dickinson, accusing him of being an idle preacher, a drunken alehouse haunter, and a former chaplain to the royalist Colonel Fitzherbert of Norbury. Three days later Eyre went to Water Hall to procure signatures against Dickinson. Headed by the parochial gentry, seventy-seven parishioners signed. The next day Eyre undertook to take the certificate to London to procure the MP Godfrey Bosvile’s aid in dismissing Dickinson.50 On 5 April, Eyre’s neighbours petitioned that Blythman’s composition might be amended so that the money could be paid directly to trustees who included the Bosviles, Adam Eyre, William Rich and Ralph Wordsworth.51 Eyre returned on 15 April with copies of Blythman’s composition and an order for articles to be examined against Dickinson before the standing committee of the West Riding, who were to report back to the Committee for Plundered Ministers.52 On 4 May Eyre tried in vain to persuade Dickinson to resign, but the minister goaded him by forecasting that he would remain Penistone’s vicar while Eyre would be turned out of his estates. Consequently, Eyre travelled to York to have the articles examined against him.53 Dickinson was allowed to stay until midsummer but was ordered to preach no more. He evidently blamed Eyre, as on 24 May Eyre noted: ‘Dickinson called me a cozener in presence of both the arbitrator and bondsmen.’ This included many of Eyre’s friends and

neighbours.54

The trouble encountered in Dickinson’s removal seems to have inclined Eyre and the parish elite towards Independency at a time when many of the West Riding ministers further north were aggressively Presbyterian.55 Just before the certificate against Dickinson was drawn up, Eyre had been pondering the arguments for Independency and reading tracts by John Saltmarsh.56 On 5 June 1647, when a man came from Mr Copley of Sprotborough proposing a new minister, ‘Capt. Rich and I promised for our parts to do nothing prejudiciall to him, but did conceive that the major part of the elecion rested in us’.57 In January 1649 Adam Eyre, alongside William Rich and Ralph Wordsworth, invited the Godly preacher, Henry Swift, to become vicar of Penistone, where he remained for the next forty years.58 In 1666 the parish’s disobedience towards the restored Church of England led Oliver Heywood to rejoice that ‘the publick liberty of ordinances is maintained at Peniston now near 4 years after our black Bartholomew day’.59 An Independent, Congregationalist tradition persists in the parish to the present.

While Eyre mediated in the quarrels of others, he was content to accept the arbitration of his neighbours when embroiled in disputes of his own. The greatest of these was with his own lieutenant, Edward Mitchell, a yeoman of Thurlstone who came to lodge with him at Hazlehead on 5 September 1646. The arrangement was designed to ease Eyre’s financial problems by Mitchell paying rent, and Eyre sold Mitchell some of his goods for eighty pounds shortly thereafter.60 Mitchell brought his wife with him and the two couples soon became too close. A quarrel erupted over the conditions of Mitchell’s lease, while by June 1647 Eyre’s monetary problems reduced him to such straits that he offered to sell Mitchell half of Hazlehead for £450. Yet the deal was not struck as Eyre’s neighbour, Francis Haigh, offered Eyre a loan of £200, while Eyre complained that Mitchell had given out ‘yt neither my wife nor I should have ought to doe in the house or ground, nor should come within the fold yate [gate], so peremtory and sawcy is hee growne’.61 That August Mitchell locked Eyre and his wife out of the house, for which Eyre reprimanded him, and when he recovered the key would not return it.62 In October, Mitchell was heard to utter in his cups that ‘hee should be undone by 2 theeves, vzt his landlord and Francis Haigh’.63 During December attempted mediation by William Rich and Ralph Wordsworth failed, leaving Eyre and Mitchell reduced to sending written notes rather than speaking to one another.64 On 11 January 1648, when Mitchell locked the house65 door once more and refused to send Eyre the key, Eyre broke it down and moved all the furniture in the ‘house, kitchen, and buttry, into the over parler’.66 Eyre now resided upstairs, with Mitchell dwelling separately in the rooms beneath him.

Eyre intended a court of King’s Bench writ against Mitchell, probably for breaching the terms of his lease, but Mitchell pre-empted him on 18 January 1648, having Eyre indicted in his absence for ‘scandalous and malicious words’ at the Barnsley quarter sessions before the justice Darcy Wentworth, a man whom Eyre felt had obstructed payment of his arrears.67 Mitchell informed him that Eyre had said publicly at Hoylandswaine on 1 December 1647 ‘that the Parlmt was a company of blood suckinge Rogues and villaynes, and that there was one company of them the blood suckingest people that ever England had’. Although Mitchell had grudges against him, Eyre’s frustration at being unable to recover his pay arrears lends weight to Mitchell’s testimony. Eyre’s diurnal recorded that he made a day trip to Barnsley on 1 December, and Hoylandswaine, where the said words were supposedly uttered, was certainly en route. Furthermore, previously that year Eyre had responded with violence when Robin Wood, in the presence of Eyre’s friends among the parish elite, ‘said I durst not before him shew my face before Sir Thomas Fairfax, myne own generall’. That Eyre held a grudge against Fairfax is substantiated further by the accusation that his wife, Susannah, had said at Hazlehead on 6 January 1648 ‘that the Parlyamt, the best of them, and Fairfaxes were all Traytors and Rebells’.68 Punishments for such scandalous words against the parliament might include fines, the pillory or imprisonment, but enforcement was sporadic and juries were often lenient.69 Initially, Eyre responded to his indictment with fury, and was unable to procure copies of it until 28 January. However, Eyre soon grew ready for an accommodation, probably fearing that his ongoing dispute with Mitchell reflected badly on his honour and standing in the parish.70 Their differences were eventually settled by the arbitration of two neighbours on 1 February 1648, although arguments occasionally flared up between them subsequently.71

The diurnal’s recording of Eyre’s extravagant lifestyle and troubled relationship with his wife has invited comment from historians concerned with tracing changes in the meanings of family, kinship, hospitality and neighbourliness. Ralph Houlbrooke has pointed out Susannah Eyre’s important place in the household economy and how she curtailed her husband’s freedom of action.72 Keith Wrightson noted how obtaining his wife’s agreement and support was important to Eyre.73 More recently, Karl Westhauser suggested that Eyre enhanced his social status between 1647 and 1648 by withdrawing from public houses to dispense hospitality in his own home.74 However, Westhauser’s quantitative approach to Eyre’s ‘public house sociability’ misread the local context, failing

to address the fact that Eyre largely kept company with army officers and the parish elite in their homes, and in observance of the parochial custom of ‘ales’, rather than as a persistent ‘alehouse haunter’ among the parish poor at alehouses.75

Nevertheless, despite his Godly leanings, Eyre was prone to tobacco, bouts of heavy drinking and an ill-advised faith in his ability to win money at bowls. Such pursuits were much to his wife’s distaste. He even watched a football match between Penistone and Thurlstone and on occasion ‘played at bord-end with the soldiers for ale’.76 This compelled Wrightson to point to the ‘inconsistency between his religious beliefs and selfindulgent lifestyle’, which ‘seems also to have demanded resolution’.77 Eyre clashed with his wife over his extravagances and her refusal to extricate him from them. On 26 April 1647 he asked his wife if her father would give him £350 and in return he would sign over Hazlehead ‘to her for jointure’.78 On 20 May he proposed ‘if shee would furnish mee with 200 l. I would secure her all Hazlehead for her life, and shee should have the half of it for the present . . . and shee refused, unlesse I would release her land in Scholes, which I refused’.79 Matters came to a head on 8 June when Eyre wrote: ‘This morne my wife began, after her old manner, to braule and revile mee for wishing her only to wear such apparrell as was decent and comly, and accused mee for treading on her sore foote, with curses and othes . . . at diner I told her I purposed never to com in bed with her til shee tooke more notice of what I formerly had sayd to her’.80 On 31 July she would not let him go to bowls, and by 6 August he considered ‘whether I should live with my wife or noe, if shee continued so wicked as shee is’. On 11 August he bought her tobacco and gave her money, despite her having ‘kept ye Yates [gates] shut, and sayd shee would be master of the house for that night’.81 On 16 August Eyre may have been considering adultery. Having been drinking with a Holmfirth woman at Flockton, he acknowledged after words written in cipher that he was subject to ‘a great temptation’.82 On 5 October he returned home late at night to find Susannah had locked him out again. He complained again of his wife’s anger, inflamed further by her swollen leg on 2 October, 17 October and 20 November.83 On 19 December he remarked, ‘After I came home my wife was very unquiet and uncharitable also. God forgive her!’84 With considerable justification, Bernard Capp concluded the Eyres were ‘both obstinate people’, whose marriage was ‘correspondingly stormy’, and that the diurnal constituted ‘a sad chronicle of marital strife’.85

The couple completed a return journey to London between 6 September and 22 September 1647, during which time, despite Eyre’s religion and politics, his wife ‘procured a touch from the King for the evil’ at Hampton Court on 13 September in