‘Sitting on his Penny Rent’: Conflict and Right of Common in Faversham Blean, 1595–1610

Abstract

In October 1606, London merchant Bevil Lewes proffered a bill of complaint in Star Chamber alleging assault, repeated riot and destruction of property in ‘a great wood and certain lands’ near Faversham in Kent purchased in December 1602 from the local magistrate Sir William Lovelace. His story of tribulations at the hands of ‘inhabitants there, being men of their own disposition contentious and not willing to live answerable to your majesty's most sound and wholesome laws’, recounted one episode in a struggle which began in 1595 and involved at least half a dozen attempts at unilateral enclosure before finally subsiding after May 1609, following Lewes's dispossession and descent into a mire of debt litigation. None of the enclosures survived longer than a few months, one lasted barely a week, and another, by dint of pre-emptive riot, was never completed at all. Defendants confirmed that fences, hedges and ditches were destroyed on four occasions, usually under cover of darkness, and that in 1606 a farmhouse under construction was demolished and crops on the ground were flattened. Bevil Lewes alleged two further rounds of hedge-breaking and property destruction that year, and an earlier riot involving the burning of a timber house-frame. Between 1596 and 1610 allegations of assault, riot, trespass, property destruction and perjury generated litigation in Common Pleas, King's Bench and Chancery, five bills of complaint in Star Chamber, and indictments and convictions at the county sessions and assizes.