‘Only to Maintaine Their Right’
The Crown’s Legal Counterstroke and the Star Chamber, 1628–1631
Robert Coggan was shot dead on 15 August 1628. The Crown did not investigate his killing. Instead, it moved swiftly to secure the drainage works, silence the opposition, and settle the legal question of the Epworth commons in terms that favoured the Participants. What followed over the next three years was a co-ordinated deployment of every instrument of royal power — warrant, proclamation, attorney general, Exchequer, Star Chamber — against the commoners who had dared to resist.
It did not entirely succeed. The commoners fought back at every stage. And when they were finally brought before the Star Chamber in 1631, they said something that the records preserved for us: if they had rioted, it was ‘only to maintaine the[i]r right.’[1]
The Riots Continue
The warrants of August 1628 did not end the disorder. Between 20 and 24 September, rioters again assaulted workers, burned materials, and refilled ditches. In July 1629, further violence erupted. When Francis Thornhill, a pro-drainage Misterton gentleman, attempted to disperse the crowds by proclaiming a Privy Council warrant, the rioters ‘scornfully refused,’ making ‘a skoffe of all authority.’[2] The Isle was not pacified. It was temporarily quieted by proclamation and threat — and it was waiting.
The Exchequer Manoeuvre
While the Privy Council deployed warrants, Vermuyden and his powerful allies — Attorney General Sir Robert Heath, and Surveyor-General of the Exchequer Thomas Fanshawe, both energetic promoters of royal improvement projects — opened a second front in the courts.[3]
In autumn 1628, Heath filed an information in the Exchequer asserting the Crown’s right to enclose the Epworth commons. The framing was careful: it presented the king as the beneficent manorial lord who had generously permitted his tenants to graze on ‘uninclosed grounds,’ and now — for their own good and the good of the commonwealth — was reclaiming that permission.
The commoner defendants, led by Humphrey Popplewell and William Torksey, answered with the Mowbray Deed. Their rights, they insisted, existed ‘tyme out of mynde before that’ — not by royal grace but by ancient and inalienable custom.[4]
In April 1629, Epworth’s own steward, William Ferne, deposed that the validity of the rights contained in the Deed was a matter for ‘the censure of the lawe.’[5] He was right. But no trial of title to the commons was ever held. The Exchequer proceeded to enclosure without one. The commoners’ case was circumnavigated rather than answered.
The Award — and the Fury
What emerged from the Exchequer proceedings was an Award that settled how the Epworth commons were to be divided. Of the 13,400 acres belonging to the manor, 6,000 acres were allotted to the commoners as ‘their part or portion, lying next to the Towns’; the remaining 7,400 acres went to the Participants and the Crown.[6]
In theory this was a settlement. In practice it was the source of the most bitter phase of the dispute. The commoners’ 6,000 acres were, as they repeatedly complained, the lowest-lying and wettest of what remained — the land the Participants least wanted. The Mowbray Deed, they continued to insist, entitled them to all 13,400 acres. The Award had not defeated their case. It had simply overridden it.
Further violence followed the Award, leading to four men from Epworth — William Torksey, Hezekiah Brown, John Moody, and Henry Scott — being hauled before the Star Chamber in London and fined £1,000 each, with an additional payment towards Vermuyden for damage caused. The sums were enormous, designed to be crushing. It appears they were never fully collected.[7]
Women in the Star Chamber
The Star Chamber proceedings of Michaelmas 1631 produced one of the most remarkable moments in the whole history of the resistance. Among the thirty-six people charged with rioting in 1628–9, ten were women. Their answers to the charges were noted by the court as ‘both distinct and more defiant’ than those of the men.[8]
This was not only defiance. It was calculation. The widespread belief that women enjoyed diminished legal liability — that the courts would not fall on them as heavily as on their husbands — meant that women who stepped forward in the Star Chamber as ringleaders were, in a sense, protecting the men standing beside them. And indeed, nine of the fourteen people ultimately fined as ringleaders were women, while most of their husbands escaped punishment.[9]
Whatever the law’s reasoning, the women who stood before the Star Chamber and declared they had acted ‘only to maintaine their right’ were speaking for their entire community. They were not ashamed of what they had done. They believed it was just.
The Justice Who Was Not Neutral
Throughout the proceedings of 1628–9, the man responsible for taking evidence from both sides — the JP who had gathered the workers’ sworn testimonies and passed them to Buckingham — was Robert Portington. Portington was steward of Hatfield Manor, deputy game master in the Chase, and a man with deep roots in the old arrangements of the Isle. Several months after the August riots, he was himself accused of being ‘a great encourager’ of anti-drainage sabotage by Yorkshire inhabitants.[10]
The same man who wrote down the injured workers’ testimonies and forwarded them to the Crown was, by the Crown’s own assessment, an opponent of the drainage. This was not an impartial administration of justice. It was a collision of interests, and the records bear the marks of it.
The relative quiet that followed the Star Chamber proceedings and the Exchequer Award lasted until the outbreak of Civil War in 1642 — when everything changed. That story belongs to the next post in this series.
Sources: Robson, ‘Improvement and environmental conflict’, 2018; Lloyd, ‘Communities of the Manor of Epworth’, 1998; Ash, The Draining of the Fens, 2017; Dugdale, History of Imbanking and Draining (1662), Axholme chapter; TNA E112/197/43; TNA E178/5412; HL EL 7913.
[1]Women Star Chamber defendants insisting they acted ‘only to maintaine the[i]r right’: HL EL 7913, cited in Robson, p. 211. On the nine women fined as ringleaders of fourteen total: Robson, p. 228.
[2]On renewed disorder September 1628 and July 1629: TNA SP 16/113 fols 62–7; SP 16/117 fol. 90; Keith Lindley, Fenland riots and the English Revolution (1982), p. 77; cited in Robson, p. 210.
[3]On the informal alliance of Vermuyden, Fanshawe, and Heath: Robson, p. 211. On Heath’s information to the Exchequer: TNA E112/197/43 fol. 1, cited in Robson, p. 211.
[4]TNA E112/197/43 fol. 2, Answers of Humphrey Popplewell and William Torksey (10 December 1628), cited in Robson, p. 211.
[5]TNA E178/5412 fol. 12r, Deposition of William Ferne, steward of Epworth Manor (16 April 1629), cited in Robson, p. 212.
[6]William Dugdale, The History of Imbanking and Draining (1662), Axholme chapter (transcription): the Award allotted ‘six thousand Acres… to the Commoners, as their part or portion, lying next to the Towns’ and ‘the remaining seven thousand and four hundred Acres… to Sir C. Vermuyden and his participants.’ This was decreed in the Exchequer Chamber.
[7]On the Award of 1630 and the Star Chamber fines: axholme.info secondary summary, drawing on contemporary sources, names William Torksey, Hezekiah Brown, John Moody and Henry Scott as the four Epworth commoners fined £1,000 each in Star Chamber, with a further payment in respect of damage to Vermuyden of 1,000 marks.
[8]On women in the Star Chamber proceedings, Michaelmas 1631: HL EL 7913, cited in Robson, pp. 228–9. The Star Chamber noted women’s answers as ‘both distinct and more defiant.’ On the belief in female legal immunity: Robson, p. 228.
[10]Joy Lloyd, ‘The Communities of the Manor of Epworth’, PhD thesis, 1998, p. 244. On Portington as ‘steward of Hatfield Manor and deputy game master’: Eleanor Dezateux Robson, ‘Improvement and environmental conflict in the northern fens’, PhD thesis, Cambridge, 2018, p. 210. On his later accusation as ‘a great encourager’ of sabotage: TNA PC 2/39 fols 27–9, cited in Robson, p. 210.