A keeper had killed a deer, and Richard Staverton had taken his bow. Neville’s reply from Billingbear on 19 July 1609 turned the quarrel into a dispute about forest boundaries and legal authority. He called his land “no purley but a free Chace”: a purley, or purlieu, was land removed from a forest’s jurisdiction but still subject to restrictions, and the distinction mattered to his claim that Staverton had no authority there.1
In As You Like It 4.3, Oliver asks for directions to a house:
OLIVER
Good morrow, fair ones. Pray you, if you know,
Where in the purlieus of this forest stands
A sheepcote fenced about with olive trees?
— As You Like It, 4.3
The play uses the same technical vocabulary that Neville employed in defending his jurisdiction.2
The connection extends beyond a single word. Shakespeare’s forests contain keepers, tenants, grazing rights, timber works and disputes over authority. Neville dealt with all of these. At Mayfield he also manufactured and sold cannon, bringing woodland fuel into the military economy that repeatedly enters Shakespeare’s imagery.
Anne Barton’s The Shakespearean Forest (2017) and Randall Martin’s Shakespeare and Ecology (2015) examine these features independently of the Neville authorship question. Barton follows hunting, forest law and woodland communities; Martin connects them with agriculture, timber consumption and armaments. Read alongside Neville’s documents, their studies bring a particular kind of experience into focus: the countryside as a place to administer, work and defend.3
Purlieu and free chase
Barton explicitly identifies Shakespeare’s purlieus as a “legal term.” Martin devotes part of his discussion of Arden to the unresolved rights attached to such ground. Land could cease to be forest without becoming land upon which every former restriction had disappeared. Owners, tenants and forest officers could therefore disagree about the authority under which it should be used.4
Neville questioned Staverton’s right to retain a known keeper’s bow and insisted that the place of the offence decided the jurisdiction. If Beard, the keeper whose appointment was disputed, had killed the deer in Warfield on land held of him, Neville would call him to account in his own court. He traced that liberty through earlier grants and legal proceedings, and refused to condemn his own chase keeper, Trigge, on an allegation alone. Chapter 8 gives the full dispute, including Beard’s contested appointment.1
Among 239 plays dated 1590–1615 in the comparison examined, five use purlieu. As You Like It, dated about 1599, is the earliest and the only one to use it literally for forest land. The later examples—Parasitaster (1604), Ram Alley (1608), Philaster (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (1614)—turn it towards sexual or figurative territory. Neville’s letter supplies the word in the practical legal business he regularly conducted.5
Land, tenants and keepers
The practical knowledge extends to the people who make their living in the forest. Barton describes Arden’s gradual disclosure of “a forest society that was there long before the arrival of the various exiles from farmland and court.” There are shepherds, wage labourers, property for sale, a village and a chapel.6
One change from the play’s principal prose source is especially revealing. In Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, Coridon is a tenant with a cottage and land; Shakespeare’s Corin is a hired worker who owns neither the sheep nor their pasture. Both Barton and Martin connect the change with the declining position of small tenants. Corin cannot offer the hungry newcomers his employer’s provisions: he works on the land without controlling its resources.7
Neville knew land from the owner’s and steward’s side of these relationships. In September 1608, valuing copyholds for the king at Sonning, he reported faults in the survey and sought better information before fixing their value. His household and estate memorandum concerns sheep, wheat, barley, ponds, provisions and fuel.8
Barton also finds the language of managed English woodland in the Roman setting of Titus Andronicus. Its woods contain “walks,” which she describes as administrative divisions. Saturninus locates Bassianus and Lavinia in a lodge:
SATURNINUS
[…]
He and his lady both are at the lodge
Upon the north side of this pleasant chase.
— Titus Andronicus, 2.3
Lodge, walk and chase belong to the organization of a hunting landscape. Neville’s responsibilities included Sunninghill Park, Swinley Walk and Fines Bailiwick. These were places he helped administer, with the distinct tenures described in Chapter 4.9,10
The oak and the sawpit
The Merry Wives of Windsor brings this working countryside onto familiar ground. Martin calls it Shakespeare’s “most locally detailed play”; Barton likewise emphasizes its precise setting. Windsor, Datchet, Frogmore and Eton belong to Neville’s home landscape. Chapter 25 examines the routes and local relationships in detail.11
The Windsor comedy makes a timber-working site part of its final entertainment: the supposed fairies emerge from a sawpit beside Herne’s oak. Martin connects that juxtaposition of living tree and timber industry with the competing demands upon Windsor’s woods. Chapter 25 also examines the keeper behind the Herne legend.12
Those trees faced competing demands. Glassmaking needed furnace fuel; houses needed timber and firewood; mature trees took far longer to replace than to cut down. There were efforts at renewal as well as consumption: a later petition records thirteen acres fenced and sown with acorns in Cranbourne Walk during Elizabeth’s twenty-second regnal year.13,14
Neville participated directly in the timber trade. In August 1609 Sir Thomas Smythe acknowledged the delivery of one hundred loads to the East India Company and asked whether Neville could provide another hundred to finish its ships. The first delivery had satisfied the Company.15
Mayfield: woodland becomes ordnance
Martin’s section “Deforestation militant” moves from timber consumption to the iron industry. He describes the royal foundry at Newbridge in Sussex, its French and English workers, the use of nearby Ashdown Forest timber, and the expansion of Wealden cannon production. His account makes the connection explicit:
An unintended consequence of this rapid progress was the iron industry’s inordinate consumption of local wood.
He follows that consumption into complaints about lost trees and habitat, and into the priority given to armaments over competing uses of fuel.16
How the furnace consumed the forest
A blast furnace joined three resources: iron ore from the ground, charcoal from the woods, and water to power the bellows. Streams were dammed to form ponds; the stored water drove wheels that worked the bellows, forcing air into the furnace. The intense heat produced liquid iron. Much of it was cast into pigs for further refining at a forge, but gun founders could cast it into cannon. Neville’s ordnance business belonged to this furnace industry.17
Its appetite for fuel was continuous. A furnace could remain in blast for long periods, so its managers needed dependable supplies of ore and charcoal. Crossley contrasts the twenty or thirty tons a year produced by a late-medieval bloomery with an annual output of about two hundred tons of pig iron that was not uncommon for a sixteenth-century blast furnace. That change in scale multiplied the demands on woodcutters, charcoal makers and carriers, as well as on the men working at the furnace.18
Woodland supplied much more than the furnaces. Timber was needed for buildings and ships, while households and other industries competed for fuel. These uses did not all require the same trees or the same sizes of wood, but they placed competing claims on the landscape. Martin’s Windsor discussion of glassmaking and his Sussex discussion of cannon manufacture belong to the same problem: profitable industries could consume woodland faster than mature trees could be replaced.
Coppicing—cutting trees back and allowing new shoots to grow from the surviving stools—provided recurring crops of fuel wood. That makes the history more specific than the disappearance of every forest. Hammersley shows that the cost of carrying fragile charcoal constrained the area an ironworks could draw upon. The critical pressure was often local: how much suitable wood could be obtained within economical reach, how quickly it regrew, and who else needed it. Managed regrowth could sustain production, but an ironmaster still had to secure that supply.18
Neville’s stake in the industry
Neville dealt with the business behind these weapons as well as their manufacture. His papers record guns rejected at inspection and deliveries against a contract for 150 tons. Casting, inspection and shipment were separate stages, each affecting whether the bargain had been fulfilled. Chapter 4 gives the scale of the undertaking.19
His petition to Burghley in 1590 concerns the state’s regulation of the trade. Neville accepted production controls and the marking of guns but resisted being compelled to sell through designated merchants. He proposed reporting purchasers and giving security against unauthorized export. His objection was to a restriction he believed might serve private advantage under the name of public policy. He was negotiating the terms on which England’s armaments industry operated.20
The furnace as an image
Shakespeare repeatedly turns the furnace’s heat, breath and smoke into images of living bodies. In Venus and Adonis, Adonis’s horse breaks loose to pursue a mare. Its excited breathing becomes the action of a furnace:
His nostrils drink the air, and forth again,
As from a furnace, vapors doth he send.
— Venus and Adonis
The movement is inward and outward: air enters, heated vapour emerges. The furnace supplies a physical image of the horse’s energy and desire.21
In Lucrece, the emphasis falls on the smoke. After Tarquin’s assault, Lucrece addresses the darkness that concealed him:
“O Night, thou furnace of foul reeking smoke,
Let not the jealous Day behold that face
Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak
Immodestly lies martyred with disgrace!
[…]
— Lucrece
Here the furnace darkens and pollutes the surrounding air. Later, the poem compares Lucrece’s escaping breath with smoke from Etna or from discharged cannon. Furnace and gun provide related images for bodily distress.21
Jaques makes the furnace audible in the seven ages of man:
JAQUES
[…] And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. […]
— As You Like It, 2.7
The lover’s sighing gives industrial breath a human use. Chapter 23 examines the structure of Jaques’s speech and its relation to Cuffe; the detail that matters here is his choice of a furnace to make desire visible and audible. Across the poems and the play, Shakespeare draws on different features of the same process—air, heat, vapour, smoke and sound. For Neville, that process belonged to a business whose operation and fuel supply he had to understand.22
The Macbeth chapter takes the artillery comparison into destructive force and emotional strain, including Neville’s description of Anne as overcharged with grief.
Cannons where history has none
Shakespeare places cannon outside Angers in King John, although its action belongs to the early thirteenth century. Martin contrasts their prominence with The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591). That play has a separate figurative “Cannons crack,” but does not give the Angers confrontation this sustained artillery. King John threatens:
KING JOHN
[…]
The cannons have their bowels full of wrath,
And ready mounted are they to spit forth
Their iron indignation ’gainst your walls.
— King John, 2.1
Shakespeare has brought contemporary military power into a medieval siege. Martin connects the imagery with the violence threatened against a civilian town.23
The artillery runs through the confrontation. When the citizens refuse to admit either army until the rival claims are settled, Philip Faulconbridge, the Bastard, proposes that England and France first combine to destroy the town:
BASTARD
[…]
By east and west let France and England mount
Their battering cannon charged to the mouths,
Till their soul-fearing clamors have brawled down
The flinty ribs of this contemptuous city.
[…]
— King John, 2.1
The town becomes a body broken by bombardment. The guns are mounted, charged and directed against its walls; their noise accompanies the destruction. When a citizen proposes a marriage alliance instead, the Bastard hears even the man’s forceful speech as artillery:
BASTARD, [aside]
[…]
What cannoneer begot this lusty blood?
He speaks plain cannon fire, and smoke, and
bounce.
[…]
— King John, 2.1
“Bounce” completes the report of the gun. Cannon give the scene its threats, its images of bodily violence and even its description of a voice. These repeated uses make the artillery a sustained feature of Shakespeare’s treatment of the siege.24
The ordnance petition of about 1590, the 1592 licence and the 1595–96 deliveries fall around the period usually assigned to King John. Woodland fuel sustained cannon manufacture; King John gives those weapons a conspicuous place in a much earlier war. Neville knew the material and commercial world behind the imagery, from the supply of fuel to the inspection and sale of finished guns.
Hamlet opens amid cannon casting and shipbuilding; Macbeth turns the overcharged cannon into an image of destructive force. Their chapters examine the particular language and Neville documents. The Windsor chapter returns to the managed forest, while Timon follows Neville’s wish to escape the expense of hospitality by retreating to the woods. This chapter supplies the practical setting for those comparisons: forests supported livelihoods and industries, and Neville’s responsibilities placed him among the people deciding how their resources would be used.
Notes and sources
Neville to Richard Staverton, 19 July 1609, Royal Berkshire Archives, Warfield tenant-dispute papers, D/EN/L2/1/1 file context; John O’Donnell’s transcription. The form purley is retained; the opening short quotation is on the first body face. The threatened proceedings and proposed accommodation do not establish a later settlement. The contemporary address supplies Staverton at New Lodge; the final dateline supplies Billingbear, 19 July 1609. The catalogue identifies the Warfield dispute bundle; the individual item number remains uncertain.↩︎
John Cowell, The Interpreter (Cambridge: John Legate, 1607), entries Chase, Forest and Purlue, EarlyPrint/TCP A19476; John Manwood, A brefe collection of the lawes of the forest ([London, 1592?]), discussion of unlawful purlieu hunters, pp.186–187, EarlyPrint/TCP A06855. Text cited from the TCP editions. Cowell allows specially granted courts in a subject’s chase, so the distinction must not be reduced to an absolute claim that chases had no courts. Manwood’s qualifications explain why purlieu was not unrestricted hunting ground. Neither treatise decides the facts or title in Neville’s particular dispute. Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.3, Folger Shakespeare Library.↩︎
Anne Barton, The Shakespearean Forest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), publisher and DOI; Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), publisher and DOI. Both authors write within the conventional attribution to William Shakespeare. The application of their observations to Neville is the argument of this chapter.↩︎
Barton, pp.11–12; Martin, pp.50, 70–71. Their accounts of purlieu are read alongside Cowell and Manwood, cited in note 2, rather than treated as interchangeable technical definitions.↩︎
Neville to Richard Staverton, 19 July 1609, Royal Berkshire Archives, Warfield tenant-dispute papers, D/EN/L2/1/1 file context; John O’Donnell’s transcription. The form purley is retained. Shakespeare, As You Like It 4.3. The comparison selects 239 plays dated 1590–1615 from Pervez Rizvi’s Collocations and N-grams, using his published play catalogue and assigned dates. Within this selection, the normalized forms purlieu and purlieus occur once in each of five plays: As You Like It, Parasitaster, TCP A07077, Ram Alley, TCP A04881, Philaster, TCP A06343, and Bartholomew Fair in Jonson’s works, TCP A04633. Public transcriptions confirm the variant forms purlues, purlews and purlewes. The assigned dates are 1599, 1604, 1608, 1609 and 1614 respectively. The four comparator passages concern Cupid’s territory, a woman’s sphere of attraction, sexual poaching, and the haunts of prostitutes; none locates a place in an actual forest. This sense classification is confined to the selected texts and dates. Neville’s letter is later than the play’s usual 1599 date; it documents his use, not an earlier source for the play.↩︎
Barton, p.11. The quoted phrase describes Arden’s pre-existing population.↩︎
Barton, p.132; Martin, pp.68–70. Both cite V. H. Skipp’s work on economic and social change in Arden. Their comparisons with Lodge are attributed to them here; they do not establish that every detail of forest management originated in Shakespeare rather than in Lodge. Barton, pp.129–31, specifically discusses Lodge’s lodges, rangers and walks.↩︎
Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O12/47, Neville to Sir Julius Caesar, 24 September 1608, repository record. Neville reports using the Sonning survey to value copyholds, finding it faulty in some points, and seeking a better value for the king; Chapter 8, “Land and overseas ventures,” summarizes this work. The same letter concerns the unopened Bray survey and two leases. For the separate household and estate memorandum, see Chapter 7, “Managing Billingbear from the Tower,” and Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/F45/1 (catalogued with D/EN/F45/2).↩︎
Andrew Thrush, “Neville, Sir Henry I (1564–1615),” History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629 (2010), “Offices Held”. Sunninghill Park: 1593–1601 and by 1607 to death; Swinley Walk and Fines Bailiwick: by 1607. These were distinct tenures; see Chapter 4.↩︎
Barton, p.124. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus 2.3, Folger Shakespeare Library. Omitted text is marked. The play’s lodge is not called a keeper’s lodge in Saturninus’s quoted sentence; that description belongs to Barton’s discussion.↩︎
Barton, pp.125–28; Martin, p.33. The short quotation is Martin’s. Both discuss possible connections with the author’s experience; neither documents a Neville source for the play.↩︎
Barton, p.127; Martin, pp.39, 47–53. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.4, Folger Shakespeare Library. Martin’s interpretation of the juxtaposition is identified as his reading; a sawpit’s presence does not establish the purpose for which every piece of timber was cut.↩︎
Martin, pp.37–41, especially p.39, on glassmaking and Windsor wood supplies.↩︎
Martin, pp.46–47 and 50–53. John Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles I, 1627–1628 (1858), p.245, vol. LXX, no.44, abstracts Richard Daye’s petition reporting thirteen acres fenced and sown in Elizabeth’s twenty-second regnal year. Petition abstract.↩︎
Thomas Smythe to Henry Neville, 10 August 1609, Royal Berkshire Archives, within D/EN/F6/1; parent catalogue. The individual item number requires archival confirmation: an address photograph bears F6/1/16, while the parent catalogue does not allocate the suffixes.↩︎
Martin, pp.85–86; quotation from p.85. His account connects Wealden cannon manufacture with the consumption of woodland fuel.↩︎
Jeremy Hodgkinson, “The Wealden Iron Industry”, Wealden Iron Research Group, originally published in High Weald Anvil (2002). The account distinguishes blast furnaces, refining forges and the development of cast-iron cannon production.↩︎
D. W. Crossley, “The Management of a Sixteenth-Century Ironworks,” Economic History Review, new series, 19, no. 2 (1966), pp. 273–288, especially pp. 273–274, 278–280 and 285–288, JSTOR. The study concerns the Sidney works at Robertsbridge and Panningridge, chiefly 1541–1573. It supplies industrial context rather than evidence of Neville’s personal activities. For coppice, regrowth and the cost of transporting charcoal, see G. Hammersley, “The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540–1750,” Economic History Review 26, no. 4 (1973), pp. 593–613, especially pp. 603–610, JSTOR. Hammersley challenges a general exhaustion explanation while recognizing local pressure on accessible supplies; his estimates depend on approximate capacities, variable measures and woodland yields.↩︎
The inspection report sent from Mayfield to Neville, August 1595, Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O/23/4, supplies the rejected-gun passage. The writer was probably William Luck, but the surname in the subscription remains uncertain; Abraham James is named on the reverse. parent catalogue. Compare Abraham James to Neville, 15 November 1595, D/EN/O/23/2, which distinguishes two shipments. The near-match between November’s 22 tons 19 hundredweight and the Sackville draft’s 22 tons 19 hundredweight 1 quarter does not establish that they are the same consignment. The catalogue describes the group as correspondence concerning Neville’s sale and shipment of ordnance, 1593–1597. A separate account has not been securely connected with this letter and supplies no additional tonnage in the calculation here. Working copy to Robert Sackville, ca. 1593, Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O/23/3; same parent catalogue. The approximate date is used here provisionally. The letter closes “the first of August”, without a year, whereas the endorsement reads “8° feb. 1595” (8 February 1596 with the year beginning in January). These dates conflict; the endorsement does not establish the date of composition. The opening deliveries are 44 tons 2 hundredweight 3 quarters, 28 tons 13 hundredweight, and 79 tons with unspecified hundredweight. Five hundredweight is inferred from the stated subtotal, not explicitly written. At 20 hundredweight per ton and four quarters per hundredweight these total 152 tons 0 hundredweight 3 quarters; the additional 22 tons 19 hundredweight 1 quarter brings the total to 175 tons. The letter continues in the margin; the sheet contains revisions and is a draft, not a clean sent letter. The final delivery location and the first bond-release threshold remain uncertain. No claim is made that all these guns came from a single furnace. The August inspection rejected two sakers, six falcons and two minions. The documents also concern carriage, delivery and the release of bonds.↩︎
Henry Neville to Lord Burghley, [1590], British Library, Lansdowne MS 65/22; manuscript images published by Ken Feinstein. See also Owen Lowe Duncan, Jr., The Political Career of Sir Henry Neville: An Elizabethan Gentleman at the Court of James I (Ohio State University PhD dissertation, 1974), pp.69–71, especially p.71, OhioLINK. Duncan cites Lansdowne 65, no.22, f.70; his preceding note70 prints no.27 with the same folio. His longer transcription has textual differences, including a repeated “rather,” not reproduced here. The year is assigned; no day or month is claimed.↩︎
Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, the description of Adonis’s horse; Lucrece, Lucrece’s address to Night and the subsequent stanza beginning “This said, from her betumbled couch she starteth.” Folger Shakespeare Library. The furnace imagery is compared here with the physical processes described above; the poems do not identify a particular furnace or ironworks.↩︎
Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7, Folger Shakespeare Library. The excerpt preserves the line breaks and marks the omitted portions of its first and last lines.↩︎
Martin, pp.21 and 82–83. Shakespeare, King John 2.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. The short extract is from King John’s speech. Martin’s stronger comparative claim about the number of cannon references across the canon is not repeated without an independent count.↩︎
Shakespeare, King John, 2.1, Folger Shakespeare Library: the Bastard’s proposed joint bombardment and his response to the citizen’s marriage proposal. Quotation lineation follows Folger, including the wrapped verse line before “bounce.”↩︎