Malmesbury and the King's Heath

Right now I'm reading Elspeth Huxley's little book, Gallipot Eyes, a diary from 1974/75. I'm nearly done. It's a local history of a small corner of North Wiltshire, England. An avid historian and digger-in-archives, Huxley lived there many years, interviewing her neighbors. Her January 1975 entry contains my favorite passage, and I share portions of it with you here:

"Malmesbury by lamplight, streets deserted, occasional footsteps clop-clopping, black shadows: a place of magic. You can feel age oozing out of ancient stones and flights of worn steps. Little houses huddle together as if on guard over treacherously narrow streets. Above it all, a broken symbol, stands the ruined Abbey. The High Street curls down to the river with St. John's Almshouses, built in the thirteenth century, at the foot, the quiet Avon in its green valley almost encircling the town.

"These Malmesburians are citizens of the oldest borough in England. This is a big claim but Stan Hudson assured me it's true. In the year 880 King Alfred granted a prescriptive charter to the town and in 939 his grandson AEthelstan, Malmesbury's own king who reigned and was buried here, confirmed it."

Now follows an ancient edict from AEthelstan:

"I Athelstan King of the English do give for me and my Successors to my Burgesses and all their Successors in the Borough of Malmesbury that they shall always have and hold all their Functions and Free Customs as they held them in the time of King Edward my Father freely and honourably and I command to all under my Dominion that they do no injury to them and that they may be free from all Calumny and of Burghboote Brugboote Wardwhite Horngeld and Scot and I give and grant to them the royal Bruery of five hides of land near to my town of Norton for their assistance in my Conflict against the Danes."

(Calumny is slander. The interesting words after it are all types of taxes and monetary collections. AEthelstan is promising reward to his faithful soldiers and their descendants ... forever.) Huxley continues:

"These were the words, an extract from King AEthelstan's charter, recited to me from memory by the current High Steward of the Malmesbury Commoners, who was born in this town, schooled here, worked here all his life and lives here now in his retirement, in a plain and dignified late Georgian house in the High Street, with a garden running down to the old wall above the Avon. A spare, upright, slender man nearing eighty, with all the courtesy and kindliness of his generation.

"Over one thousand years ago an ancestor of his fought for AEthelstan against the Danes, and in return for services rendered by this ancestor, Stan Hudson today receives the rent on ten and 5/8 of an acre of farm land on the King's Heath ...."

Huxley then describes the 240 local men who still collect this bit of monetary advantage because of the bravery of ancestors a thousand years earlier. They must live in Malmesbury still, to collect it. Huxley goes on:

"In former times each man got his own plot of land which he could, and did, cultivate; now it's all let off as farms, and the Capital Burgesses manage it as a small estate, paying each Commoner his share of the rent. The ancient ceremony of initiation is still held, though no longer on the King's Heath. The newcomer used to dig a hole in his plot and throw in a silver coin while one of the Burgesses, the Clerk to the Common, touched him with a twig, reciting:

This turf and twig I give to thee,

As free as AEthelstan gave to me,

And I hope a loving brother thou wilt be."

(p. 147-149)

Can you picture it, in the growing twilight, a huddle of men in a field with a shovel, a silver coin twinkling as it flips into the soil, and a twig laid gently on a shoulder, while a brief ancient rhyme is whispered?

In 1974, the year Huxley's diary was written, government reforms in England did away with boroughs entirely, and Malmesbury's claim to fame as the oldest one, was lost. Rather sad, I think.

Isn't it enchanting -- magical, as Huxley notes -- that a little town could retain traditions involving twigs, and pieces of silver, and recitations of an ancient edict handed down from father to son? Is it any wonder that Tolkien would've come from such a place? (I dashed over to learn more about Tolkien's childhood home. He grew up at his grandparents' home in Birmingham, just two counties north of Huxley's home, about 70 miles by road and shorter as the crow flies. The name of his grandparents' town? King's Heath. How's that for a coincidence?)

I've enjoyed Huxley's diary. She's direct, occasionally lusciously descriptive, funny ("Now that my plan to reduce the garden has led to a small but significant increase in its size, my hankering for an asparagus bed has taken on a new force." p. 24), unpretentious, and full of detail. 

Her village, Oaksey, lies just inside the Cotswolds. What a charming place! If you've followed Susan Branch's vacations to the UK, you know its lovely yellow-stone cottages, hillsides of sheep, quiet footpaths, and hamlets unchanged for 300 years, and pristine for tourists' visits. Some villages, however would prefer a bit of modern development! Of this phenomenon, Huxley states, "It's other people's villages we want to leave unspoiled so that we can go and look at them, while we develop our own." (78)

If you find this little one year's diary and enjoy hamlet stories, I recommend it highly.