1. English Reports (C.P.), 126:32-39; King, P., “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions in England 1750–1850,” Past and Present 125 (November 1989): 116–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarKing, P., “Customary Rights and Women's Earnings: The Importance of Gleaning to the Rural Labouring Poor 1750–1850,” Economic History Review 44 (1991): 461–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Times 13.6.1788; Norwich Gazette 21.6.1788; Cambridge Chronicle 21.6.1788; Chelmsford Chronicle 9.6.1786, 13.6.1788; Bury and Norwich Post 17.5.1786-7.6.1786 and 18.6.1788-17.9.1788; Northampton Mercury 2.8.1788; Ipswich Journal 20.5.1786, 3.6.1786, 14.6.1788; Annals of Agriculture 9:13-15, 164-67, 636-46; ibid. 10:218-27.

2. Burn, R., A New Law Dictionary (London, 1792)Google Scholar; Wharton, J., The Law Lexicon or Dictionary of Jurisprudence, 4th ed. (London, 1867), 426Google Scholar; ibid., 10th ed. (1902), 347. See also Williams, T. W., The Farmers Lawyer (London, 1819), 207Google Scholar; Clark, G., Memoranda Legalia; or an Alphabetical Digest of the Laws of England (London, 1800), 217Google Scholar; Tomlins, T. E., The Law Dictionary (London, 1820)Google Scholar; Williams, T., Every Man His Own Lawyer (London, 1812), 553Google Scholar; idem, An Abridgment of Cases Argued and Determined in the Courts of Law during the Reign of George III (London, 1798), 1:205–7Google Scholar; Dixon, H., A Treatise on the Law of the Farm (London, 1858), 244Google Scholar; Blackstone, W., Commentaries on the Laws of England, 18th ed. (London, 1829), 212–13Google Scholar; Theobald, H., The Law of Land, 2d ed. (London, 1929), 151Google Scholar; Law Reports (H. L. App. Cas., 1904): 476; see also ibid. (H. L. App. Cas., 1882), 8:156; ibid. (Ch., 1891), 2:703, ibid. (Ch., 1901), 2:400-401.

3. Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters, (London, 1975), 241.Google Scholar

4. Thompson, E. P., “The Grid of Inheritance,” in Family and Inheritance, ed. Goody, J., Thirsk, J., and Thompson, E. P. (Cambridge, 1976), 340.Google Scholar

5. Sugarman, D. and Rubin, G., eds., Law, Economy and Society: Essays in the History of English Law 1750-1914 (Abingdon, 1984), 33Google Scholar; King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions”; Malcomson, R., Life and Labour in England 1700-1780 (London, 1981), 144Google Scholar; J. L., and Hammond, B., The Village Labourer (London: Longman, 1978), 67–69Google Scholar; Thompson, “The Grid of Inheritance,” 340-41; Snell, K., Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1985), 179–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussions of gleaning (mainly post-1788) see also Bushaway, B., By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880 (London, 1982), 144Google Scholar and Morgan, D., “The Place of Harvesters in Nineteenth-Century Village Life,” 57, in Village Life and Labour, ed. Samuel, R. (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Searle, C., “Custom, Class Conflict and Agrarian Capitalism: The Cumbrian Customary Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 110 (February 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. English Reports (C.R), 126:32-39. Minor extra detail is contained in Williams, An Abridgment of Cases 1:205-9.

7. Tim worth's population in 1801 was 149. The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Suffolk 2:692.

8. Although the English Reports provide a distorted view of these cases, this narrowly denned legal source has been virtually the only evidence used to discuss their characteristics. We need an interdisciplinary history of law and material society in order to understand legal history, and this article is intended as a contribution toward such a history. Sugarman and Rubin, Law, Economy and Society, 123.

9. I have been unable to find any detailed documents among the records of the Court of Common Pleas in the Public Record Office apart from brief one-line entries in PRO Ind. 6552 and 6554 and CP 40/3785. Contemporary newspapers and law reports record legal arguments at length but offer only fragments about the disputes themselves.

10. PRO Ind. 6552; Ipswich Journal 3.6.1786; Bury and Norwich Post 15.5.1786; English Reports (C.P.), 126:34; Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds FL641/9/1.

11. Ipswich Journal, 3.6.1786; Chelmsford Chronicle, 9.6.1786. For the nature of gleaning conflicts in this period see King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.”

12. Bury and Norwich Post 7.6.1786. The quote is from James Thomson's “Seasons” written in the late 1720s, which advocated that the farmers “fling from the full sheaf… the liberal handful” to the gleaners.

13. A growing number of prosecution associations were in evidence in the three hundreds around Timworth during the 1780s, but no resident of Timworth or of the neighboring parishes of Ingham or Culford appear in their printed subscription lists. Bury and Norwich Post 28.12.1785, 19.4.1786, 6.10.1790.

14. Bury and Norwich Post 17.5.1786.

15. Lofft, who later distanced himself from the gleaners, probably helped Manning considerably in 1786. Five years earlier he had inherited estates near Timworth and became a justice of the peace, Dictionary of National Biography; “Particulars Relative to the Life of Capel Lofft esq” in The Monthly Mirror (June 1802 and the following volume). Lofft trained as a barrister and wrote various legal works as well as poetry and political tracts. In 1780 he was a founding member of the Society for Constitutional Information. Bury and Norwich Post 24.5.1786, 31.5.1786.

16. Chelmsford Chronicle, 9.6.1786; Ipswich Journal, 3.6.1786; Bury and Norwich Post 31.5.1786; SRO Bury St. Edmunds FL641/7/1.

17. Ipswich Journal, 3.6.1786.

18. SRO Ipswich, B105/2/48, 9.10.1786. Unfortunately, no record survives of the outcome or the context in which the assault occurred. For gleaners’ use of assault accusations see King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.”

19. Bury and Norwich Post 7.6.1786. Steel was the fourth largest ratepayer in Timworth 1786-87 and had considerable holdings in Ingham. SRO Bury St. Edmunds FL594/3/26, 641/7/1; “Survey of the Estates of Culford, Ingham, and Timworth… the Property of Marquis Cornwallis” 1793 shows Steel's homestead just over the Timworth/Ingham boundary.

20. The Monthly Magazine and British Register 4 (July-December, 1797), 432-33Google Scholar. For Lofft's debate with the poor-law writer Thomas Ruggles see, Annals of Agriculture 13-15, 164-67, 636-46; ibid. 10:218-27; Gilbert, J., The Law of Evidence, ed. Lofft, C. (London, 1791), 11:508–12Google Scholar. On the legal costs, see PRO Ind. 6554. The thirty-five pounds did not include the Houghtons’ own legal costs, which would have been large. Two barristers had been briefed and had pleaded on their behalf. It remains unclear how much they received from Capel Lofft or from other sources. Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors refers to a “benevolent association” that “supported the right, agitating for it, and defraying the expenses of litigation,” Notes and Queries, 12th sen, 9:113.

21. English Reports (C.P.), 126:32; Bury and Norwich Post 18.6.1788.

22. Bury and Norwich Post 17.9.1788. This was the final paragraph of a series of articles in the paper, which had reported in detail each of the judges’ arguments. 27.8.1788, 3.9.1788, 10.9.1788.

23. Bury and Norwich Post 18.6.1788: “The trial was not instituted by the plaintiff with a view of totally excluding the poor from the exercise of this custom, but to prevent their gleaning barley and other soft corn.”

24. Arthur Young, in praising the flock masters of the Bury neighborhood, stressed that in sand districts such as Timworth, “[t]he discrimination between good and bad farmers depends entirely on this point; good ones consider everything as subservient to sheep,” Young, A., General View of the Agriculture of the County of Suffolk (London, 1813), 57Google Scholar. On undersowing, see Morgan, “The Place of Harvesters,” 57. It is also possible that barley was considered to be more vulnerable to pilfering by gleaners because, before carting, it had to lie cut in the fields for a longer drying period than wheat.

25. Holderness, B. A., “East Anglia and the Fens,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5, 1640-1750: Regional Farming Systems, ed. Thirsk, J., 197239Google Scholar, especially Table 7.1, indicates that in Breckland parishes more than forty-two percent of sown arable land was under barley while only twelve percent was planted with wheat. Worlledge's pattern was not therefore atypical. SRO Bury St. Edmunds FL594/3/26 lists him as plowing 265 acres.

26. Bury and Norwich Post 18.6.1788.

27. King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.” One judge, Henry Gould, supported the gleaners’ case, and Lofft tried to argue optimistically that it was “far from a novelty in our legal history to find the opinion of a single judge acquire at length a decided preponderancy.” Annals of Agriculture 10:218.

28. Property offenders prosecuted at the Suffolk assizes averaged sixteen per year during the period 1777-82 and thirty-three for 1783-85. PRO Assize 33/6-7 (not-found bills excluded). For rising indictment rates in other counties see King, P., “Crime, Law and Society in Essex 1740-1820” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, 1984), 35, 62Google Scholar; Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986), 214–35Google Scholar; Hay, D. “War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts,” Past and Present 95 (May 1982): 121–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The proportion of capitally convicted offenders actually hanged on the Norfolk Circuit was fifteen percent during the period 1780-82 and forty-four percent for 1783-85. Prosecution association formations followed the same pattern as in neighboring King, Essex. P., “Prosecution Associations and Their Impact in Eighteenth-Century Essex” in Prosecution and Police in Britain, ed. Hay, D. and Snyder, F. (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar (Blackburne hundred association formation notice), Bury and Norwich Post 27.4.1787.

29. The assize gaol books (PRO Assize 33) contain little information about the place where the offense was committed, but the Bury quarter sessions records (SRO Ipswich B105/2/47-8) suggest that Worlledge was virtually the only resident of the Timworth area to be indicted there in the later 1780s. On the “moral panic” see King, “Prosecution Associations.”

30. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/7/1. Between 1758 and 1774 the Timworth poor rates never rose above £30 per year, averaging £20, but between 1775 and 1778 they rose rapidly, averaging £80 in 1777-78. By the early 1780s, they had fallen back to between £50 and £60. In 1785-88 the average was £58. In 1796 and 1801 bad harvests led to rates of over £100 and £200 respectively. General Suffolk poor-rate expenditure rose twenty-one percent between 1776 and 1783-85 and just over 100 percent between the early 1780s and 1803. Parliamentary Papers 13 (1803 1804): 498-99Google Scholar.

31. Gentleman's Magazine, monthly wheat prices: July 1780 to July 1784 averaged 5.46 shillings. From July 1784 to July 1785, the average was 5.0 shillings. On August 25, 1785, the Suffolk farmer William Godwin recorded that “the last 7 weeks remarkable for heavy storms… Bury and several places whole fields of turnips washed up by the roots… we have had rain every day the seven weeks.” SRO Ipswich, HD365/1.

32. SRO Ipswich, 27.8.1785. Judging by the larger rise in barley prices that crop seems to have been harder hit.

33. Ibid. 2.9.1785 records “at least one comb per acre of the standing wheat were blown out, beside oats and barley.” Godwin also recorded the local turnip crop had suffered badly. On turnips’ importance see Young, General View, 57.

34. The late harvest may also have cut down the period available to the gleaners between crop clearance and the date on which sheep owners were permitted to put their animals onto the stubbles (shack day). J. T. Munday, An Eriswell Notebook, (typescript SRO Bury St. Edmunds E.b.2. In nearby Eriswell, sheep often had precedence over cattle or hogs and in order “that shack-day should provide really good bite for sheep no one was allowed to use a rake in stubble, neither the cultivator nor a gleaner.” For Essex gleaning conflicts see King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.”

35. “Survey of the Estates of Culford, Ingham, and Timworth”; Copinger, W. A., The Manors of Suffolk (Manchester, 1910), 1:329Google Scholar; Roumieu, J., Past and Present: The Three Villages of Culford, Ingham and Timworth (Bury, 1892)Google Scholar. Cornwallis also owned most of the neighboring parishes of West Stow and Wordwell. A Concise Description of Bury St Edmunds and Its Environs, 60, 89-92, 211, 317. (See also Clive Paine's forthcoming volume on the Culford estate.) Cornwallis had three houses but preferred Culford to his other nonmetropolitan residence at Brome Hall near Eye. See letter heads in Ross, C., ed. Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis (London, 1859), 1Google Scholar.

36. Ross, , Correspondence 1:111Google Scholar; Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. “Cornwallis”; Seton-Karr, W. S., Rulers of India: The Marquess Cornwallis (Oxford, 1890)Google Scholar.

37. It often took a year or more to get a response from Cornwallis about estate matters during his time in India, but his letters to his brother, the Bishop of Lichfield, who oversaw his estates in his absence, showed a passionate interest in Culford, which he referred to as “that place of which I am so fond.” Kent Archives Office, Mann (Cornwallis) MSS, V.24.C.1.

38. Stokes, E., The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959), 26, 82–83Google Scholar; Smith, V. A., The Oxford History of India, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1981), 534–36Google Scholar; Guha, R., A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Paris, 1963), 13.Google Scholar

39. Guha, A Rule of Property, 168-93; Stokes, The English, 26; Dunbar, G., A History of India, 4th ed. (1949), 392Google Scholar; Seton-Karr, Rulers, 193; Griffiths, P., The British Impact on India (London, 1952), 170–71Google Scholar; Muir, R., The Making of British India 1756-1858 (Manchester, 1915), 184–91Google Scholar; Moorhouse, G., India Britannica (London, 1983), 73Google Scholar. The permanent settlement was laid down as policy for Cornwallis by Parliament and by the court of directors.

40. Cornwallis was “in the habit of running down frequently for a week to Culford” between 1783 and his departure for India in May, 1786, only a week or so before the first gleaning judgment was reached. Much of his time was spent in London although he was abroad on a diplomatic mission during September and October, 1785. Ross, , Correspondence 1:14 and c. 7Google Scholar; KAO, U.24. C.I.

41. Many volumes of Cornwallis's official correspondence survive, but little relates to his dealings with his tenants. Neither the accounts sent by his lawyer Vernon nor his extensive correspondence with his brother mention either of the gleaning cases. Nor did the various family members who wrote to him about political events, family gossip, and other legal cases. Ross, Correspondence; KAO, V.24.C.1; PRO 30/11/137-39, 142, 147, 154, 156, 212, 270, 275, 277, 280, 288. The case may be mentioned in India-related correspondence, but I have not been through all the files of petitions for patronage, which Cornwallis seems to have kept separate. When the Earl of Iveagh's Elvedon Hall manuscripts become available, further information may come to light although the catalog at the National Register or Archives (4134) suggests that material for the late 1780s is sparse.

42. KAO, V.24.C.1, 24.1.1787, 17.2.1787.

43. Thirsk, J. and Imray, J., Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century (Suffolk Record Society, 1958), 18Google Scholar. Postgate, M. R., “Field Systems of East Anglia” in Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles, ed. Baker, A. and Butlin, R. (Cambridge, 1973), 283Google Scholar; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL594/3/26; ibid. E3/10/18.5; Raynbird, The Agriculture of Suffolk, 4; Roumieu, Past and Present: The Three Villages, 61-62; Young, General View, 5; SRO Bury St. Edmunds T64/1, 2—the 1840 Tythe map schedule.

44. Holderness, “East Anglia and the Fens,” 206. Postgate, M. R., “The Field Systems of Breckland,” Agricultural History Review 10 (1962): 91Google Scholar provides the best overview of this complex system. A foldcourse was a strictly defined area of open arable lands, heathlands, and closes where grazing was the sole right of a particular flock irrespective of the ownership or occupance of the soil. See also Allison, K. J., “The Sheep-Corn Husbandry of Norfolk in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Agricultural History Review 5, pt. 1 (1957): 12–30Google Scholar; Simpson, A., “The East Anglian Foldcourse: Some Queries,” Agricultural History Review 7, pt. 2 (1958): 87–96.Google Scholar

45. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL594/3/26 (1760s) and “Survey of the Estates of Culford, Ingham, and Timworth”; Postgate, “Field Systems of Breckland,” 89 for a reference to farms let in Timworth “according as the shifts of the fields and enclosures shall then fall in course.”

46. Tate, W. E., “A Handlist of Suffolk Enclosure Acts and Awards,” Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History 25, pt. 3 (1951): 225–63Google Scholar, especially 240-47; Postgate, “Field Systems of Breckland,” 84-88; Dymond, D. P., “The Suffolk Landscape,” in East Anglian Studies, ed. Munby, L. M. (Cambridge, 1968), 17–26Google Scholar; Dymond, D., “Opposition to Enclosure in a Suffolk Village,” Suffolk Review 5, no. 1 (1980): 13–22Google Scholar; Turner, M., English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Folkstone, 1980), 46–48Google Scholar.

47. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, T 64/1, 2; Timworth Tythe Map 1840.

48. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL 594/3/26 and “Survey of the Estates of Culford, Ingham, and Timworth.” These two sources form the basis of the following analysis.

49. The area referred to on the 1760s maps as “the Green” had been divided into three fields by 1793, and, following Corn wallis's instructions, woods had been planted across land previously called “The Furlongs,” KAO V.24.C.1, 16.9.1790.

50. The closes and isolated enclosures on the 1760s maps represent nowhere near a third of the parish. The hundreds of strips shown on the 1760s maps are almost entirely absent on the 1793 estate plan, but this may reflect the fact that the later map was not designed to provide information on detailed tenancy divisions, rather than indicating a fundamental change in land organization.

51. Postgate, Field Systems of East Anglia, 288; Beresford, M. W., “Glebe Terriers and Open Field Leicestershire” in Studies in Leicestershire History, ed. Hoskins, W. G. (Leicester, 1949), 83Google Scholar; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, 806/1/156 (series), FL641/2-3. The Timworth terriers are available for 1760, 1763, 1777, 1783, 1791, 1794, 1801, and 1806.

52. The terriers of all three of Cornwallis's parishes—Timworth, Ingham, and Culford—show the same dramatic change between 1794 and 1801, but the 1801 Culford terrier also records the exact date of the exchange (which seems to have been formally completed on the same date in all three parishes) as December 19, 1796. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, 806/1/46.

53. In the 1784 Timworth terrier, the words “proposed to be” were inserted later and in a different hand. The document had originally read simply “the field glebes exchanged for inclosed lands.” Presumably the original intention had merely been to record an already worked-out, and possibly an already-completed, glebe exchange. Ibid., 806/1/186.

54. Ibid., FL641/7/1. Cornwallis made only minor changes among his Timworth tenancies during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. John Worlledge and James Steel continued to pay around a third and a twelfth respectively of the parish rates until Steel's death in 1799. Cornwallis was keen to avoid any oppressive actions against his tenants that, in his words, might “hurt my character in a neighbourhood whose esteem I have been so careful to cultivate,” and there is no evidence that he put Worlledge and Steel under pressure by raising rents dramatically after the enclosure. KAO V.24.C. 1, 20.8.1791.

55. “Sale Schedule, Cornwallis estates,” 1820s (privately held). SRO Bury St. Edmunds, E3/10/18.5 Worlledge's Ingham farm was rented at £780 per annum. His old farm was given to James Walton at £435 per annum. White, W., History, Gazetteer and Directory of Suffolk (Sheffield, 1844), 691.Google Scholar

56. Most breckland parishes were dominated by large estates carved up into sizeable tenancies. Postgate, “The Field Systems of Breckland,” 99. The Timworth overseers’ rate books (SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/7/1 and 9/1) indicate only four or five other families had sufficient holdings to appear even as minimal ratepayers.

57. The absence of any later seventeenth- or eighteenth-century manorial records or by-laws for Timworth makes it difficult to discuss the nature of common right in the parish. For an excellent discussion of customary right in this period, see Neeson, J. M., “Common Right and Enclosure in Eighteenth-Century Northamptonshire” (Ph.D. diss., Warwick University, 1977)Google Scholar. The foldcourse system remained important until enclosure in many breckland parishes. Young implies sheepfold reduced the value of common right of pasture in Barningham near Timworth. General View… Suffolk, 41-42. On the widespread abuse by sheepcourse owners of rights of commonage on heathland and waste, see Allison, “Sheepcorn Husbandry,” 23-25. On exclusive grazing rights given to the flock by one person in parishes just north of Timworth, see Postgate, “Field Systems of East Anglia,” 322. For references to foldcourses in late eighteenth-century Timworth see SRO Bury St. Edmunds, E3/10/18.5. On the central role of the foldcourse in Ingham and Timworth in earlier centuries, see Postgate, “Field Systems of Breckland,” 88; Simpson, “The East Anglian Foldcourse,” 94; SRO Bury St. Edmunds 1674/1-10.

58. When on two rare occasions they agreed to sell tiny pieces of freehold to a Timworth farmer, they made sure that “the common pasture and other rights of common in, upon and over the common pasture of Timworth” were not part of the sale and remained “reserved to Lord Cornwallis and his heirs.” SRO Bury St. Edmunds, E3/10/18.1 and 18.3.

59. Butlin, R.-A., “Some Terms Used in Agrarian History,” Agricultural History Review 9, pt. 2 (1961): 98–101Google Scholar; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, E3/10/18.1.

60. Neeson, “Common Right,” 52-60.

61. White's Dictionary described allotments set aside after enclosure to supply fuel to the poor in several of the parishes around the Culford estate, for example “Thurston,” 317, “Fornham,” 666, “Bardwell” and “Barningham,” 681-83, “Stanton” (fifty-four acres), 699, “Troston,” 704, but no such arrangements are recorded in any of the Culford estate parishes. Young, General View… Suffolk, 41-44; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, T64/1, 2. Reports of the Charity Commissioners, The Charities of the County of Suffolk (London, 1840), 344Google Scholar.

62. Ipswich Journal 3.6.1786. The charge in both the 1786 and 1788 cases actually specified “Trespass for breaking and entering the closes of the plaintiff” English Reports (C.P.), 126:32-34, but the implied reference to an enclosed piece of land cannot be taken as evidence in this case, for as Blackstone pointed out, “Every unwarrantable entry on another's soil the law entitles a trespass by breaking his close,… For every man's land is in the eye of the law inclosed… either by a visible and material fence, as one field is divided from another by a hedge; or by an invisible boundary existing only in the contemplation of law, as when one man's land adjoins to another's in the same field.” Blackstone, , Commentaries on the Laws of England 3:209-10Google Scholar. See also Gilbert, , The Law of Evidence (ed. Lofft, ), 2:505.Google Scholar

63. KAO V.24.C.1; ibid., 22.8.1792. See also ibid., 28.8.1791 for another example of his relative benevolence: his refusal to allow a local malster who was a tenant of his to use manorial privilege to gain a monopoly that would have been detrimental to the local farmers.

64. Capel Lofft for example. Dymond, “Opposition to Enclosure,” 13-22; King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.”

65. The overseers’ records (SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/9/1) indicate that Worlledge took this office every third year in the 1780s and 1790s. The children of the Houghtons I have found records of are Mary (assumed to be John's child, ibid., FL641/4/2) born in 1762; Elizabeth born 1765 (ibid., FL571/4/3); John mentioned as their only son and heir in 1796 (ibid., E3/10/18.1); and possibly Ann Houghton mentioned in 1795 as having a bastard child publicly baptized in Timworth (ibid., FL641/4/2). The Mannings are even more difficult to trace. Although they are known to have had a child called Joseph, neither the registers of Timworth and the surrounding parishes nor the Suffolk section of the International Genealogical Index contain any reference to his birth.

66. The registers of the Church Gate Street Presbyterian congregation in Bury St. Edmunds record the birth of a John Houghton “son of Houghton” in 1740 (International Genealogical Index, Suffolk, s.v. “John Houghton”; SRO Bury St. Edmunds J558/2). John's father's occupation is not recorded, but his older brother Thomas was a shoe-maker in Bury and a regular member of the same dissenting congregation throughout the 1770s and 1780s. The eighteenth-century Bury Presbyterian records include two references to Benjamin Mannings and one to William Manning, shoemaker of Chevington. Nonconformist groups were particularly attractive to artisans, and although there is no clear evidence that Timworth had its own dissenting congregation before the early nineteenth century, the Compton census indicates that the parish had a much higher than average proportion of nonconformist families. Redstone, V. B., Records of Protestant Dissenters in Suffolk (Woodbridge, 1912), 67Google Scholar, notes a Timworth dissenters' meeting in 1825. The three major dissenting churches based in Bury St. Edmunds were only just over an hour's walk away. Ibid., 85; The Description of Bury, 56; Dymond, D. P., “Suffolk and the Compton Census of 1676,” Suffolk Review 111, no. 4 (Autumn 1966): 103–18Google Scholar.

67. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/4/2; ibid., 641/7/1.

68. Benjamin died in 1804 at age 79, ibid. 641/4/2. PRO Ind. 6552 describes him as a shoemaker. He probably did general laboring as well. Ipswich Journal 3.6.1786; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/4/2; ibid., 7/1. These records also include references to the deaths of two other young Mannings during the 1780s, at least one was probably Benjamin's daughter.

69. PRO Ind. 6552; SRO Ipswich B105/2/48; Bury and Norwich Post 7.6.1786; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/7/1.

70. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/4/2; ibid., E3/10/18.1; ibid., FL571/4/3; ibid., FL641/8/1; the Houghton's second child, Elizabeth, was baptized at Flempton in 1765.

71. Ibid., FL641/4/2. By the 1790s, John Houghton junior was also a shoemaker. Ibid., E3/10/18.1.

72. Ibid., FL641/9/1; ibid., E3/10/18.1; “Survey of the Estates of Culford, Ingham, and Timworth.”

73. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 166-79; SRO Bury St. Edmunds, E3/10/18.1; ibid., FL641/7/1. Daniel Clark was described “as an old man” in the burial register as he certainly must have been, for he had been married sixty years at his death in 1790. Ibid., FL641/4/2.

74. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, E3/10/18.1; PRO Ind. 6554.

75. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/7/1; ibid., FL641/4/2; ibid., E3/10/18.1.

76. Ibid., E3/10/18.2. The cottage and two roods owned by John Cage, shopkeeper, did not come into the Culford estate until Richard Benyon de Beauvoir bought it in 1828, but this was not in an open-field area.

77. Ibid., T64/1, 2; “Survey of the Estates of Culford, Ingham, and Timworth.”

78. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, 43/10/18.1, 3.

79. James Andrews, Timworth's third-largest farmer, signed every terrier 1776-1806 as churchwarden. Burn, R., The Ecclesiastical Law, 4th ed. (1781), 365-66Google Scholar. “These terriers are of some weight… especially if they be signed not only by the parson and churchwardens, but also by the substantial inhabitants; but if they be signed by the parson only, they can be no evidence for him; so neither (as it seemeth) if they be signed only by the parson and churchwardens, if the churchwardens are of his nomination.” By 1824, imperfect terriers signed by churchwardens but not by other inhabitants were recorded in evidence. Ibid., 8th ed. (1824), 400.

80. No “inhabitants” signed the 1784 terrier. Houghton and Cage were the only inhabitants signing in 1791 and 1794. Thomas Cage's father, who died in 1791 before the terrier was made, had signed one previous terrier in 1777. He is the only other smallholder to have done so.

81. Dymond, “Opposition to Enclosure,” 13-22; Muskett, P., Riotous Assemblies, Popular Disturbances in East Anglia 1740-1822 (Ely, 1984), 41–42Google Scholar. Neeson, J. M., “The Opponents of Enclosure in Eighteenth-Century Northamptonshire,” Past and Present 105 (Nov. 1984), 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. Neeson points out that resisting villages were often diffuse rather than consolidated in their land ownership patterns. Neeson, “Opponents of Enclosure,” 131.

83. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/4/2; ibid., FL641/7/1; ibid., E3/10/18.3.

84. Ibid., Q/SH 102. Cornwallis's plan to block up the old Ampton to Fornham road, which ran through the middle of the “Home field brakes,” was finally fulfilled by building a new road to the north of the “Home field brakes” in 1797 and by obtaining a formal highway division order in April, 1798. Once again, the timing of these moves suggests that this was a problem area for Cornwallis until 1796.

85. It is even more difficult to link Cornwallis to the first case. There is no evidence that Benjamin Manning had any effective means of opposing the enclosure.

86. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Scott, J. W., “Political Shoemakers” in Worlds of Labour, ed. Hobsbawm, E. J. (London, 1984), 106–19Google Scholar. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rude, G., Captain Swing (Harmondsworth, 1969), 150–51Google Scholar, note a close correlation in 1830 between the number of shoemakers in a parish and the level of disturbances in 1830.

87. I have no precise figures for late eighteenth-century Suffolk, but only thirteen percent of Essex laborers and thirty-six percent of husbandmen signed rather than put a mark in 1748-1800. King, “Crime, Law, and Society,” 189. The equivalent figures for the diocese of Norwich 1580-1700 were fifteen percent and twenty-one percent (shoemakers thirty-five percent). Cressy, D., Literacy and Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. English Reports (C.P.), 126:33. For a discussion of the implications of this statement and of the broad attack on customary right it implies, see King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.”

89. Raynbird, The Agriculture of Suffolk, 282; Glyde, J., Suffolk in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1856), 350Google Scholar; “Reports of the Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture,” Parliamentary Papers 12 (1843): 227–33Google Scholar; “Reports from Commissioners, Poor Laws,” Parliamentary Papers 30 (1834)Google Scholar.

90. Cambridge Chronicle 13.8.1796; King, “Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions.” For an exceptional parish where the authorities did try to control gleaning after 1788, see SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL/506/1/13.

91. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, FL641/7/1.

92. Timworth's population was 149 in 1801, but was estimated at 169 in the mid-1790s. Young, General View… Suffolk, 308; ibid., 283 (1797 ed.). The population of Timworth rose again in the early nineteenth century. By 1821 it had increased to 210. Victorian County History: Suffolk 1:683-94. SRO Bury St. Edmunds, T64/1, 2 shows that the three cottages marked in the Home field brakes in 1793 had all disappeared by 1846.

93. Archer, J. E., “Rural Protest in Norfolk and Suffolk 1830-1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of East Anglia, 1981).Google Scholar