Microhistory and Cultural Geography: Ben Jonson's "To Sir Robert Wroth" and the Absorption of Local Community in the Commonwealth [*].

The consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the possibility of polyvalent geographic identity. Ben Jonson's country house poem, "To Sir Robert Wroth," was written from the vantage point of a shift in the politico-geographical borders that made local communities in the shires part of a centralizing monarchical commonwealth. Microhistorical examination of the Wroths and their village in the period preceding the composition of the poem reveals their insistent local identity and resistance to the monarchical commonwealth ruled from London. The immediate context of their resistance to the center was a Privy Council project to make the River Lea navigable in order to bring down the price of grain in London. Economically threatened, the Wroths orchestrated sabotage against the project, but eventually acquiesced to the Privy Council and re-entered the centrally administered commonwealth fold. Jonson's poem is a testimony to this reaffiliation, a cele bration of the Wroths as exemplars of commonwealth identity within local region. Only when they distanced themselves from local identity did the Wroths become suitable for Jonson as a poetic model of the country ideal. In Jonson's hands, the country house poem becomes the vehicle of multivalent identification with place.

Recent interest in the relation between Renaissance cartography and literature provides an opportunity to ask how a literary work projects the geographic place from which it is written. [1] Geographic position as the starting point of literary interpretation is especially interesting during times of geographical change -- when borders shift across people, when people shift across borders, when borders move centripetally to create a large political formation out of smaller ones, when borders move centrifugally to create smaller formations out of a larger one. Shifts such as these result in changes in the location of personal, social, and political identity as well as changes in the location of cultural authority, especially among rival claimants for the authenticity of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies in politico-geographical formations.

Two such changes were of particular importance for sixteenth-century literature: on the one hand, European colonial expansion across large distances into the New World, and, on the other hand, the integration of local communities into centrally administered monarchical states. [2] Both these developments changed the way inhabitants of particular place experienced and understood their relation to other places; both these developments created new possibilities for the literary imagination of geographical space. Though not as dramatic as the creolization that resulted from overseas expansion, the consolidation of England into a monarchical commonwealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the emergence of polyvalent geographic identity in England itself. Shires had to re-imagine the meaning of their boundaries at a time when they were coming under greater control of a central government. I would like to examine Ben Jonson's country house poem, "To Sir Robert Wroth," from the vantage point of just s uch a shift in the politico-geographical borders that made local communities in the shires part of a centralizing monarchical commonwealth. My contention is that the poem can be understand in the context of this shift in geographic self-definition, and as such, participates in what Andrew McCrae has recently described as a search for "the very meaning of rural England" as the basis of collective national identity, a search undertaken through a competition over "authoritative representations" of the countryside (2-3).

Though there may still be disagreement, historians have come to emphasize the symbiotic rather than adversarial relationship between country and court, and this realignment has opened the way for literary historians to see connections rather than contrasts between court and country in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature about the country. Leah Marcus has done the most to reconfigure our understanding of the country-court axis in English literature when she argued that the literary representation of the country promoted James's policy of "repastoralization," a policy aimed at keeping the gentry in the country so they could provide hospitality instead of seeking city pleasures. [3] Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake state the larger case as follows:

Country and court are best conceived as constructed, often polemically constructed, ideological terrains. As ideal types they were constructed out of very similar ideological materials or discourses, and contemporaries, both in Whitehall and beyond, habitually espoused, appealed to and manipulated images of both "the court" and "the country." [4]

Left out of this formulation, however, is the view of the country itself, from the country itself. I hope to extend the insights of Marcus, Lake, and Sharpe by placing Jonson's poem to Robert Wroth in the local setting of the Wroth family landholdings. Examination of the Wroths in the period preceding the composition of the poem reveals, first, their disaffiliation with, and resistance to, the monarchical commonwealth ruled from London, followed by their re-entry into the centrally administered commonwealth. Jonson's poem is a testimony to this reaffiliation, a celebration of the commonwealth within local region. [5] Jonson's contention in Discoveries that it was the poet's special task to "feign a commonwealth" and his implied goal to create a poetics of specific place would appear to invite an approach that focused on geographical perspective. [6] The conflict, the Privy Council project to make the River Lea navigable in order to reduce the price of grain and malt in London, was an attempt not only to crea te a more efficient market, but also, through that market, to bring the commonwealth idea to the region in a palpable way. A more efficient market would economically (and perforce culturally) integrate with London the counties, towns, and villages through which the river passed. [7] One can only wonder about Burghley's musing over the extension of dynastic commonwealth in Essex and Middle-sex as he looked at his map of the River Lea on which the names of towns, including those around Enfield, are written in his own hand. [8] Documents relating to the sabotage of the project provide evidence of how and why the intentions of Burghley and the Privy Council were opposed in the region. Resistance to the project can be characterized as a series of "localized dramas," to use Wrightson's term -- confrontational incidents that exemplify on a local level the contending forces shaping the country on a larger scale. [9]

Accepting the dislocations produced by this incursion of the center into the periphery required geographical self-redefinition by local inhabitants. We cannot know how new this self-definition was without a fuller study of the area prior to events concerning the Lea. However, documents recounting these events give the impression that the ensuing controversy required them to think of themselves as citizens of a commonwealth rather than as residents only of a village or a region. The more efficient markets created by the river project brought the people of those towns into direct contact with both the idea and the concrete reality of commonwealth, a centrally organized polity whose institutions lay at some distance from them and yet determined much of their lives. Depositions reveal that villagers speak for or against the river based on their identification with the Queen's commonwealth or with their own region. In fact, villagers who defend the river system refer to it as the "Quenes highway." [10] The succes s of the project depended on the cooperation and supervision of local gentry who had already assumed an affiliation with the commonwealth. Principal among them was Thomas Fanshaw of Ware, author of much of the correspondence that constitutes some of the most important documents about the conflict between commonwealth and local community in the persons and place occupying Jonson's poem. Cecil, as head of the Privy Council, hoped he could count on others like the Wroths, who were, perhaps, the most powerful landowners in their region. Resistance immediately developed in Enfield, as villagers bitterly complained that river transport would ruin what they considered their ancient customs and rights, particularly traditional transportation by horse. The source documents for these events reveal Enfield to be the principal place of sabotage. River disorders occur until the late 1580s and beyond, and investigation of those disorders supply a steady stream of documents that tell us much about local identity in the regi on that Jonson was later to write about.

The investigation reveals how Enfield, the center of resistance to the agents of the crown, was divided in the period before the composition and publication of Jonson's poem. Depositions focus on the intense resentment between those who support and those who oppose the river passage that will bring closer ties with London. Questioning reveals that the dispute divided families and friends based on how they gauged the implications of commonwealth on themselves. A strong alliance among various tradespeople in Enfield develops against the watermen (those who convey the barges), and against the gentry acting as agents of Westminster, even to the point of threats of insurrection against those gentry, and indirectly against the queen herself. At the same time, a new occupation in Enfield, generated by London's integration of county villages, changes the social, economic, and political orientation of its inhabitants. The watermen are physically in the same place, but their country space has become geographically and economically defined in connection with another place, the dynastic center, another place they probably only transiently saw in their transporting trips to the bakers and brewers of London. It is unlikely that they could have experienced London as a detailed, spatially inflected habitus in the way they experienced their native Enfield. Throughout the investigation, specific streets, specific fields, specific meadows, mills, and streams are repeatedly mentioned. London, Westminister, the court are never more than abstract categories to the villagers. And yet the river supporters have taken on identification with this other place, larger than their own, another place which in many respects affects their lives more than the actual physical place they inhabit. Similarly, the horse-carters and their supporters, also unmoved from a long inhabited location, suddenly find themselves dislocated by the changed geographic configuration created by the river project. The development of more efficient transportation force d the villagers at every social level to reorient their position on their mental map to this new geographic configuration. Those on either side of the issue became part of a new "imagined community," to use Benedict Anderson's phrase, within the physical place they had always inhabited. The depositions reveal that the villagers themselves were fully conscious of issues of identity and polity as they were evolving in the region.

For a look at how local community and commonwealth competed in the area of the Wroth landholdings and how local inhabitants readjusted -- or refused to readjust -- their sense of identity based on geographical allegiance, we can focus the micohistorical lens on a local event: the burning of Waltham Lock in August 1581 on the Essex side of the River Lea near the village of Waltham. This was the first significant act of sabotage that revealed the rift between local community and commonwealth in the area, the point of departure in a local historical narrative that begins the process of realignment of center and periphery in the place commemorated in Jonson's poem and in the family he celebrates. The burning of Waltham Lock also provided the occasion for local inhabitants to work out in their daily lives their relationship to Elizabeth's and Cecil's continuation of Cromwell's imperial commonwealth, and to arrive at, so Cecil hoped, what the Privy Council and the culture it represented considered the normative ve rsion of that relationship.

After some delay, the burning of Waltham Lock finally led to an investigation by local officers on August 20-September 4, 1581. [11] The depositions repeatedly report charge and countercharge by the horse carriers and their supporters on the one side, and, on the other, the new watermen. Their individual voices can be heard in all their local entanglements with each other; the effect of the testimony to a large extent rests on the accretion of repeated names of offenders, informers, and examiners, as well as the accumulated allusion to specific places, where meticulously recorded epithets and taunts are hurled at each other by the townsmen, whose various familial relationships are detailed in an interconnected web that forms the fabric of the village and region.

A number of local narratives are told in the course of the investigation that reveal the tensions and conflicts in geographic loyalty. For example, during the interrogations about the burning of Waltham Lock, one "John Seyger of ware waterman" deposes that, as he looked on horrified at the burning lock, he declared "he would give fourtie shillinges to knowe who did attempte to burne [y.sup.e] locke." He deposes further that an angered and apparently threatened "Cristofer penyfather the millers man of waltham" standing beside him countered with his own warning: "what were [yo.sup.u] the better yf that you did knowe for yf [yo.sup.u] did knowe who did yt you could but hange him emongest [yo.sup.u], And yf he were hanged you would have evill going by the River after." [12] We may assume that the waterman is a local inhabitant who has most likely only recently taken on his new livelihood after the opening of the river passage. The document (obviously favoring the waterman) portrays him watching an act of violenc e directed not only against local order, but also against his very livelihood and potentially even against his person. We see him, in apparent innocence, express his concern to someone he thinks is his neighbor standing beside him, someone he expects to feel the same horror at the sight, only to discover his neighbor's satisfaction in the destruction of his trade, because of his loyalty to and dependence on his master the miller, whose income will decline if the river project is successful. Former neighbors find each other and each other's household mutually menacing through the enhancement of geographic and economic links between London and river towns in the shire.

Through this line of questioning, we get to see the experience of a munity encountering the ethos and law of commonwealth embodied in the person of the queen and executed through the Privy Council. Moreover, this may well have been Enfield's first experience of that ethos as it crossed local loyalty, family allegiance, and local economic interest. The depositions lay bare outright defiance of the Privy Council and even of the queen herself, but they also reveal numerous crises de conscience among townspeople torn between personal interest in the local economy and deference to the queen's law promulgated in the country through gentry in the towns along the river, gentry loyal to the Privy Council. Throughout the investigation, the depositions suggest that those for and against the river passage appear to know each other; accuser and accused are sometimes neighbors; at times witnesses grudgingly give in to pressure to inform on acquaintances' actions or words, often reported at a second and third remove as talk of the events has reverberated through the village and hundred. The depositions suggest a breakdown in interpersonal relations occurring in the communities affected by river transport, especially Enfield, as inhabitants feel compelled to take sides for or against the queen's commonwealth, for or against local customs.

Consider, for example, the following narrative recorded in a deposition. [13] On this occasion, the examiners highlight the ethical strength of a waterman's servant who keeps his family on the straight and narrow. The servant, Richard Saltmarsh, testifies that on the night that cuts were made in the riverbank near Enfield in order to lower water levels to prevent boating, he saw a group of Enfield men he knew by name suspiciously -- and menacingly -- "at [Cockesm.sup.r] ende in Enfeilde" on their way home bearing "long staves." They are among the most frequently named offenders in the depositions of 1581. (The frequent mention of the names over a period of years suggests mutual acquaintance, and reinforces both the sense of community and the sense of mutual, sometimes violent, threat felt by the competing groups.) Among this group were friends of the servant's brother, William Saltmarsh, servant to William Gurnerd, apparently a miller. When confronted, William Saltmarsh openly admitted being "appoynted to go cutt the Ryver." Richard, acting on the side of his master, "gave his brother Counsell he should not go [w.sup.t] them." William agrees to stay "[w.sup.t] [m.sup.r] Sadler that lodgeth in his [m.sup.ts] [i.e., master's] house." Far from providing the scene of peaceful serenity of Jonson's picture of the "courteous shade," the river is here the subject of a local narrative that more than hints at potential divided loyalties among members of the lowest social order in the town: on the one hand, there is allegiance to family, and through family to social hierarchy (to the waterman, the master) and through the master to the Queen in whose name the watermen have come to be in the first place; on the other hand, there is allegiance to peers, to local region, to traditional occupation, now cut off from the hierarchy headed by the queen. The interrogators taking the deposition regard this group as uncontrollable and prone to violence. The servant convinces his brother to choose family (now allied with the commonweal th) and the queen's rule over peer and region. It is unlikely that either Richard or William Saltmarsh, so obviously products of their circumscribed locations, had much personal experience of the place whose norms of behavior they now accept as their guides.

Saltmarsh's testimony is recorded not only for its facticity in the investigation, but also because it serves as an exemplary narrative of country loyalty to the new presence of the center. In a sense, testimony like his can be understood as narratives of identity bounded by place, texts in another mode that parallel Jonson's country house poem. The various documents detailing this localized drama can be seen as narrative retellings of conflicted loyalties in such a way as to stabilize those loyalties. Since these documents are invariably the records of a central government intervening in the local community, it is not surprising that they hold out as their norm the incorporation of local community within a dynastic scheme centered in London. In contrast to Bakhtin's contention about the monologic consequences of centripetal consolidation of Europe in the sixteenth century, these documents hold out as their norm a polytopic sense of identity in geographic space whose coordinates traverse locale and dynastic center.

It is also not surprising that the new, normative geographic mentality projected in these documents is exemplified by an occupational group defined by rapid mobility through transportation. The new occupation created by river transport -- the watermen -- especially embodies a new politico-geographical identity, and their representatives offer an especially articulate defense of it: "the gayne of that transportation [i.e., on the river]," the watermen insist against charges of purely personal interest, "is not pryvatt onely" for the benefit of only "iiij or v brewers of London," as has been alleged; it is instead for the benefit of "all the Brewers of London that will buy malte." Similarly, they contend, "all that will send any thinge by water" in the other direction "from London to Stansteede, ware or Hertford," will profit, in addition "to waltham & other places nere the Ryver." [14] Whatever personal incentives they have, the watermen also articulate a strong sense of how local communities will benefit by incorporation into a commonwealth sponsored by a monarchical center administered by the Privy Council. Against their accusers, the watermen make the case that the real enemies of the commonwealth are just a few millers and "badgers": "the Continewaunce and mayntenaunce of the Ryver will redownd greatlye to the Comon welth althoughe a fewe badgers and myllers do stourme at yt," mostly from Enfield and neighboring Cheshunt. [15] The watermen argue the case for commonwealth when they accuse "onely those [loaders] of Endfield and Cheshunt and Cheiflye of Endfeild" of trying to thwart river transport even though they are "but fewe in Comparyson of many thowsandes or hundrethes" in the region who favor the river system. [16] Once again the watermen articulate the argument that river transport will restore fairness to the grain and malt market within a commonwealth protected by the Privy Council executing the justice of the monarch. [17]

Enfield and Cheshunt are the sites of a struggle in the historical transformation of local community and local identity; they emerge over and over as special cases in their intense opposition. As investigations continued throughout the 1580s, it became increasingly clear that behind the millers, behind the horse carters, the mealmen, and maltmen stood large landowning interests who profited from high grain prices, and who tried to keep those prices inflated. On the other hand, those who defended the region's entry into the commonwealth through the new market accused the rich landowners of the county of being corrupted by luxury. In a competition for the iconography of the country, London was thus depicted as representing thrift, rationality, and equity, while the country was the place, not of simple pleasures, but of greed and selfish comfort, at least when left unconnected to London. [18] Consider, for example, the baker of London who bitterly complained against the horse carters and landowners that "the tr ue zeale that everie man ought to beare to the comon welthe of the realm wherin he is borne ought to moue everie christian hart rather to presume A generall comoditie to the same before a privatt greedie gayne to themselues." [19] In effect, defenders of the river project were arguing for regional identity within the larger political formation of a centrally located dynastic monarchy. Only in alliance with what they claimed to be this morally superior location could the ethically good life be led; only, that is, if the country were mapped as a heterotopic location in the overlapping geographical frames of a centripetal commonwealth could it be the place of virtue. This is the position in which Jonson will attempt to place the Wroths in his country house poem; however, at this point in the historical narrative, this position is represented, not by the Wroths as we shall see, but by those of their neighbors who are in charge of investigating the sabotage that the Wroths will be shown to have orchestrated. At th is point in the narrative, the Wroths will prove to be the most powerful resisters to the very vision of which, in Jonson's hands, they will later appear as the ideal embodiment.

As it turns out, the Wroth family fit the caustic description of wealthy landholders who benefitted, at everyone else's expense, from high grain prices, and who thus had an interest in seeing the river transport fail. All along, the Wroth family, the elder Robert Wroth and his mother, Lady Wroth, had been suspected of complicity in the disorders. None other than Robert Wroth senior was chief planner of the resistance, the same Robert Wrath who sat as Justice of the Peace to enforce the queen's law in Middlesex and Essex and who was appointed as one of the Commissioners of Sewers to investigate the sabotage. Wroth emerges as a kind of double agent, accumulating the wealth that made possible the country life celebrated in Jonson's poem. Wroth stood at the head of those villagers who resisted integration into a commonwealth, who resisted multivalent self-redefinition.

THE WROTHS IN AND OUT OF THE COMMONWEALTH

Unlike the Sidneys, to whom far more attention has been given as the subject of Jonson's most celebrated country house poem, "To Penshurst," the Wroths had a considerable history as a family with a country identity. For all the similarities shared by the two poems, the poem to Wroth (the son-in-law of the Robert Sidney, the addressee of "To Penshurst") provides a quite different perspective than its companion poem. Whereas the Sidneys' local activities in Kent were ultimately aimed at advancement at court, the Wroths had a past in Middlesex and Essex, and even when they were loyal to the court, they performed most of their courtly duties in the shire. The Wroths had a local identity in a way that the courtly Sidneys never did, and as result, their relationship to the commonwealth was historically far more oblique than that of the Sidneys, who had little identity that was not tied to the commonwealth. The Wroth family history reveals the stressful and at times violent path that a country family journeyed to re ach inclusion in the commonwealth before they could find themselves in a poem by Jonson.

To understand how the Wroths fit into the dynamic between local community and commonwealth one must go back several generations in their family history. The Wroth family began to re-orient its identity as a landed country family in relation to an urban administrative center during the reign of Henry VIII. [20] The addressee of Jonson's poem was the grandson of Thomas Wroth (d. 1573), who attended St. John's college, Cambridge, and was a friend of John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and John Jewel, among others. He was also a friend of William Cecil himself, with whom he had numerous friendly dealings at court. Thomas Wroth had established many successful court ties, and put his humanist education to use by serving the court in the country through a number of offices, by which he considerably enlarged his already considerable landholdings in Essex and elsewhere. [21] His rise was checked when he became a Marian exile, and though he recovered his large landholdings intact after his return to England under Elizabeth, he never regained his former level of importance under the new queen.

His son Robert Wroth, the father of the poem's addressee, likewise became a JP, an enforcer of the law of the crown in the country, acting in accordance with the past two generations of his family as a member of the gentry serving the needs of the dynastic center in the periphery. One of this Wroth's first appearances in public records is as a JP when he and William Fleetwood, the Recorder of London, sat in judgement over a joiner who resisted paying subsidy to the county for the crown. Wroth and Fleetwood, as dignitaries of a monarchical government extending its jurisdiction to local communities, looked on disapprovingly when the joiner finally but insolently agreed to pay, defiantly dashing his money to the ground before them in a local court. [22] Similarly, in 1578 Wroth and Fleetwood worked together on examining suspects for manslaughter and illegal hunting in Enfield Chace, as we know from a report by Vincent Skinner, a lower local officer. [23] Wroth's association with the Earl of Essex indicates his participation in affairs at the national and international level as well, for example, when Essex mentions him in a report to Burghley about a treaty with Spain. [24] However, by the late 1570s and throughout the 1580s, a few years after raking over his father's holdings, the father of Jonson's addressee began to rake a different tack. Soon, he would defy Fleetwood; soon he would puzzle a court-loyal country gentry -- men like his own father -- with insolent behavior towards what his gentry neighbors appeared to have accepted as inevitable incorporation into the commonwealth. The elder Robert Wroth is a striking example of someone who handled his identity as a shifting, and ultimately unsettled performance manipulated according to geographical categories -- the local and the dynastic, themselves in flux in the area of the Wroth landholdings. In the process, he projected a country identity quite different from the one Jonson embodied in his son. The transition from the father's to the son's identity provides t he narrative of the genesis of a poetic subject suitable for a country house poem.

The elder Wroth placed himself at the center of the conflict between locale and commonwealth through his opposition to the navigation of the Lea. The same depositions, reports, and correspondence that record the disorders in Enfield also detail the reaction of the Wroths from about 1577-1590. Several weeks into the questioning of suspected saboteurs, the elder Wroth's involvement becomes clearly and embarrassingly revealed. Two men in his employ depose under examination by Fanshaw that they witnessed Wroth receiving a letter from Burghley requiring his help to stop the sabotage. Upon reading the letter, Wroth "burst out into the is words saying the Lords of the [Privy] Counsell had done theym greate wrong" by creating the river project, "which was to their undoing." [25] Wroth boasted that "rather then my Lords of the Counsell shall force vs to make vp the breaches againe we will be hanged at or owne gats." Wroth here invokes the inviolability of home and proprietorship against illicit outside encroachment f rom another place, from the commonwealth center, as he imagines his house gates as the last line of defence, even unto a defiant death. The father of Jonson's addressee, a generation before the poem, appeals to an image of house and home whose integrity can be maintained only through independence from a grasping dynastic center. Wroth's attitude inspires fear of open rebellion against his gentry neighbors who comply with Cecil's directives.

Wroth's attempts to define country life independent of the center is countered by London's attempts to promulgate its own view of the country and its iconography. Court-affiliated country gentry picture Wroth as an unruly, untamed, uncivil, irresponsible creature lacking in elemental decorum. He is contrasted to those members of the gentry who are local officers loyal to the center. These gentry are portrayed as united in their hospitality, neighborliness, and fellowship, true men of the country, the stuff of what Jonson was to conceive as a country house poem. The shared recreation that generates their sense of community arises not from local authority, but from London, whence it flows back into the shire. For example, one of the examiners writes to Burghley of the following incident: He and others "satt att Mr Sherife Martyns howse art Tottenham where he sent his Cooke and made us a greate dynner." [26] At the country dinner table are seated a cross-section of the commonwealth rulers: The Recorder of Londo n; the sheriff, a local officer; and in between, the gentry landowners, local gentry committed to London and the court. As they were eating "It was informed us crediblye that on the Monday before, [M.sup.r] Wrothe made a mervelous greate sturr att the Swane mote in the fforest wherby her Majesties servies was greatlye hyndered and the officers there greatelie disquieted." The communal meal of the country gentlemen is interrupted by their uncivil neighbor who refuses to become one of their number through affiliation with the center. Not until the Wroths change their orientation to the center will they be poetically represented as hosting such occasions of fellowship, as Jonson will in fact represent the younger Wroth and his wife Mary Wroth hosting the Sidneys. Jonson will share the belief of the court-loyal local examiner that true fellowship in the country goes hand in hand with loyalty to the center. [27] Wroth's crude behavior, on the other hand, is attributed to his wealth and luxury: "I feare," observes the recorder, "the Gentleman be over much puffed in pride wth over muche Lyving and wealthe" -- the wealth that derived from keeping grain prices high and by keeping Enfield from entering the commonwealth. Luxury and pride are products of a corrupt village insisting on being cut off from the just commonwealth.

In a dispute over an entirely different matter, Wroth does in fact articulate a sense of his own geographic identity that illuminates his behavior in the River Lea sabotage. Wroth had served as muster master for some years, [28] but in March 1587, at about the same time that the river disorders resurface after having died down for several years, he refused the call to muster from the local officers, the deputy lieutenants for Essex. [29] He angrily balked at the short notice as "scarborowe warnynge." He unceremoniously suggested that the musters be put off until May since his men were busy farming at the time of the call. [30] (That he did not muster until October suggests he got his way.) [31]

He concludes the letter by advising the lieutenant "there ys greate plenty of farre better choyse of gentlemen in the Contrey then of me," and so, if they can not wait until he is ready, they would do better "to make choyce of some other for her [ma.sup.tis] [s.sup.r]vice." In the process of fending off these inconvenient demands to serve the center, he rakes the occasion to announce his local identity: he reminds the lieutenants of Essex that it is "in the country" that "I ame contynually Imployed in her [ma.sup.ts] [s.sup.r]vice." Here Wroth's claim to serve the country in the county has the force of defying the call to duty to the realm. Wroth does indeed go on to assure the local lieutenants serving the center in this dangerous period on the eve of the Spanish Armada that he is ready to serve the queen "in all places"; even so, he all but retracts this pledge as he makes it clear that his First obligation to his country is to his shire in the institution that represents his shire, parliament:

And, although I will at al tymes and in all places, according to my bounded dutie in humble sorte be mostly ready and willinge to [p.sup.r]forme and doe all duty full and loyal [s.sup.r]vice to her [ma.sup.tis] yet this I ame to let you vnderstand, [w.sup.ch] I hope you are not ignorant of, that as the tyme serverhe, by reason that I am ellected to the [p.sup.r]lyament for the Shiere that I was born and bred in, to the [w.sup.ch] [s.sup.r]vice othere [s.sup.r]vices yeald vnto, and the [p.sup.r]lyament nowe in esse, I shall not nor yet cannot be able to [s.sup.r]ve in twoo places. (emphasis added)

This letter is the closest Wroth ever comes to providing us with a text that articulates a sense of identity in relation to local community in a centriperal stare. Wroth cannily both asserts and denies his obligation to the commonwealth: the country is part of the commonwealth, he suggests, and so he serves the queen by serving the country -- and, as far as he is concerned at this point, not beyond that. His avowal to serve the queen "at al tymes and in all places" is rendered nearly perfunctory in light of his assertion that all other service must yield to the service that he was elected to do for the shire. He portrays himself as belonging, by both preference and birth, primarily to local community, tied by local bonds to those who have elected him to represent his local place of work and habitation where he was "born and bred." For Wroth, service in Parliament institutionalizes this local responsibility with enough of a nod toward duty to the commonwealth to satisfy himself His averral that he cannot "s'v e in twoo places" contains within it the implication that county and commonwealth are served by different interests. If this is the Robert Wroth of implacable local identity, born and bred in the country, he represents an attitude and identity antithetical to the poem Jonson will write about his son. Something must happen before a Wroth can become a fit subject for Jonson's country house poem. The elder Wroth cannot avoid conceiving of county and country as "twoo [i.e., separate] places," instead of one place traversed by two intersecting sets of interests.

It would of course be a mistake to think of the elder Wroth as a historically regressive, unsocialized, pre-dynastic remnant of local community untouched by the impact of an expanding dynastic center on personal and social behavior. The elder Wroth's insistence on being country born and bred, primarily a man of the shire rather than the commonwealth, a man who finds his calling in local representation in Parliament rather than in duty to the center, is a performative gesture of great ambiguity. On the one hand, his insistence on the inviolability of the gates of his house bears something in common with the growing sentiment in Parliament against purveyance and for rights attached to private property, a sentiment articulated in detail by Thomas Headley in the Parliament of 1610. [32] On the other hand, the elder Wroth appears to have deliberately reverted to a country type that antedates his father's association with the court through land and education; he has taken on, almost in masquerade, the archaizing g uise of a countryman that his neighbors clearly found culturally obsolete, considering that his father was a man of courtly cultivation, a friend of Cecil himself. The Recorder laments that despite his long acquaintance with the Wroth family, he has been unable to bring this bizarre character back into the commonwealth fold: "I have alwaies Loved his father and hym well and therfore I doe wishe the thinge that be a mys were amended." [33] There is no doubt an element of dissimulation in a family friend of Cheke, Ascham, Jewel, and Cecil projecting himself in the persona of a farmer born and bred in the shire. It is a gesture that reversed the dual sense of place under which the previous generation of his family had prospered as county notables through cooperation with Crown and Privy Council, at least up to the time of Elizabeth. Wroth may have been born in the country, and he may have lived there, but he lived in that corner of the country that had already become allied with the court.

If we move ahead one decade to the 1590s we see a very different Wroth. Though trouble on the River Lea continues, Wroth is no longer mentioned in connection with the saboteurs. Instead, Wroth appears in the Lansdowne Papers as a close personal friend of Michael Hicks, secretary to Burghley and Salisbury. [34] He entertains Hicks at his home, and, as the Salisbury Papers show, he functions as a cooperative local officer to the Cecils in Enfield Chace and in Hertfordshire, where the Cecil country house, Hatfield is located [35] Wroth encloses land for the crown and even prosecutes Enfield villagers, some of whom were presumably former allies in the river sabotage. [36] During this same period, he pledges "kindness and service" to Burghley to represent the interests of the commonwealth on an embassy to France, to which he is appointed. [37] The elder Wroth has reverted back to the position of his father under Henry VIII, finally accepting the lower status from which his father could not recover after Marian ex ile; he has resumed his own behavior as local officer when we first saw him in the 1570s assisting Fleetwood in enforcing the law of the center in the country. He has accepted his position in the country as part of a mutually supportive relationship with Cecil, the Privy Council, and the court. After he implicitly dissociated himself from the villagers of Enfield, the Wroths came that much closer to being proper country subjects (in every sense) for Jonson's country house poem. The father of Jonson's Wroth has become one of the court-affiliated gentry who oversaw the navigation of the Lea and who investigated the sabotage to it, the gentry whom he earlier both perplexed and opposed.

Wroth himself expresses loyalty to the commonwealth as if he had never uttered his resolve against serving in two places, as if he had never opposed the Privy Council acting for the Crown. Significantly, he specifically pledges his loyalty as a landholder:

I am her Maties. tennant in possessione, her [Ma.sup.s] servant, and one that hath faythfully truly and chargeablye served her Matie. wh. out any recompence, and therefore I hope there wil be sum good consideracone had of me. [38]

This is a Wrath who could, at last, potentially be the subject of a country house poem. The assertion of loyalty to the crown in almost feudal terms is consistent with Wroth's request of Hicks to help in securing a grant from the Queen to purchase Loughton House in Essex, which he had until then occupied only under lease.

Wroth's reversal to compliance with Cecil and the Privy Council in fact roughly concides with his change of principal residence from Durrants in Middlesex to Loughton in Essex, on the other side of the River Lea, in the hopes of owning Loughton Manor, which he held only through lease from the crown, and where he entertained Hicks and his wife. Wroth radically alters the earlier image of his house, presented in his challenge to Burghley when he railed that "we will be hanged at [o.sup.r] owne gats" rather than comply with requests to repair the river sabotage; the change from Durrants to Loughton coincides with his transformation of house and land from the base of defiant anti-commonwealth local identity to the place of affiliation with the center. His move from Durrants to Loughton, from one side of the Lea to the other, is an almost baptismal crossing that cleanses him of the local sabotage he once led and which once defined his relationship to house and river. However, Wroth's attempts to purchase Loughton never reached success. We cannot know for sure, but perhaps Wrath's conversion never appeared complete; perhaps he never appeared to be fully socialized into the monarchical commonwealth. In Parliament he continued to oppose the crown fiercely on issues of purveyance, issues that were closely connected to how one defined one's relation to land vis a vis the crown. He died in 1606 without purchase of Loughton. Upon his death, he remained identified with the village in which he organized sabotage against the Privy Council, the village in which he staged his shifting performance of his geographic identity: his will identifies him as "Robert wroth thelder of Dourance in Endfeild in the Countie of Midds." [39]

As the younger Wrath became head of household at Loughton after his father's death in 1606, he showed little will or capacity to double deal. Jonson's addressee emerges as a much less colorful, much less interesting character, but he does reveal a more consistent, more settled relationship to local community and dynastic center. He is indeed a man of the country, hardly venturing beyond his local surroundings, or as Jonson says of him, never "wrack[ing] on a strange shelfe" (95). But he was also enough of a friend of King James to maintain his hold on Waltham Forrest over the legal claims of a powerful country rival, the Earl of Oxford. [40] A good deal of his friendship with James was based on their mutual interest in hunting. The River Lea now becomes the place of that bond. Rather than contesting the commonwealth on the river, Jonson's Wroth builds bridges over it to facilitate hunting and hawking; he keeps the river stocked with game birds for James. He encloses land for James in both Enfield and Theobal ds at great profit to himself. [41] Whatever Jonson says of his avoidance of the sport of city and court, he has made the river into a place of courtly sport. It is difficult to find much trace in Wroth of his father's anti-dynastic rebellion. If anything, he has taken on an identity closer to that of his courtly wife, Mary Wroth, who appropriately plays a pivotal role in Jonson's poem. With the help of his wife and of other highly placed friends, he -- not his father -- received permission in 1613 to buy Loughton House. [42] This is the house King James and Prince Henry visited in 1605 when his father was alive and head of household. [43] This may very well be the house referred to in the poem. [44] It is the house he offered for royal entertainment, were he allowed to purchase it. Perhaps that is why he died [pound]23,000 in debt, a debt large enough to have been noticed in court, and perhaps the surest sign of his having been absorbed into the social life of the commonwealth center. [45] In his will, the y ounger Wroth, is identified as "Robt Wrothe of Loughton in the Countie of Essex." [46] Loughton Manor itself embodies the intersection of locale and dynastic center achieved through a marriage between two families whose relation to country and county mirror each other, the Sidneys seeking influence in the country through connections at court. Loughton Manor itself embraces in one the two places the elder Wroth formerly refused to serve. The younger Wroth's relationship to the crown through his house and land has thus put in place the landscape of Jonson's poem. The shire had to be politically and socially -- geographically, that is -- of the commonwealth before it could be represented as the country by a poet who was essentially identified with the cultural apparatus of the commonwealth at court. Jonson's Robert Wroth completes the process by which he remains firmly planted in a local community that is now integrated into a centrally administered commonwealth under the crown whose rule is executed by the Priv y Council. His reward is ownership of his country house and an idealized portrait in a country house poem.

JONSON'S PORTRAIT OF WROTH

Jonson's choice of Wroth as his addressee may be connected to his relationship to his patroness Mary Wroth, Robert Wroth's celebrated wife, but the history of the Wroth family over three generations involved them in more compelling issues than those of patronage, issues that concern the formation of the Tudor and Stuart monarchical commonwealth. The history of the Wroths in and around their village, Enfield, is the story of the way a country family with courtly connections ultimately came to accept dynastic, multivalent identity in a particular local place. It is the story of how the cultural geographic attitude of the Wroth family converged over time with the official attitude of the monarchical commonwealth as represented by one of its pre-eminent poets, Ben Jonson, in a genre he revived to express that attitude. That the Wroths resisted for a time makes them even more compelling subjects for such a poem. Reading the poem within its local historical context and in the context of the Wroth family history pe rforce must lead to a re-evaluation of its apparent invention -- the starkly binary contrast between the city and court, on the one hand, and the country, on the other. If the poem is read within the specific circumstances of the Wroth family history, the anti-urban tone that dominates so much of the poem can be read in an almost counter-intuitive way. Whatever critique Jonson may level at the commonwealth center itself, the poem is a celebration of the commonwealth center in the country. Jonson's celebration of the Wroths' country life, their country house, and its surrounding country landscape should be understood as a celebration of the Wroths' re-entry into the commonwealth fold, marked by the purchase of Loughton Manor as the Wroths' favored place of residence, and very likely the setting of Jonson's poem.

Jonson's most obvious transformation of the Wroths and their country lands is that the country, unlike its representation in depositions, reports, and correspondence, is no longer the scene of conflict, but is instead the location of integral harmony. The tranquility of the setting, as we shall see, registers the Wroth country house and lands as the embodiment of the commonwealth. The poem's perlocutionary action is the reversal of the derogatory iconography applied to Wroths' Middlesex community, the picture of his country life as one of greed, luxury, and loutish violence, as viewed from the perspective of court-loyal country gentry and court-centered agents alike. With the reconciliation between the Wroths and the Privy Council, Jonson, also a court-centered agent, could revert to traditional Horatian images of country harmony and city conflict to idealize the Wroths; the city, nor the country, is now the locus of uncivil behavior. The imagery is conventional and even predictable, but in the context of th e Wroth family history, that imagery was earned after passing through a sometimes violent process that ultimately led to affiliation with the aims of the monarchical commonwealth in the country.

The invention of the poem is the correlation between the physical geography of the Wroth estate and the moral geography of its inhabitant. The poem's thematic center is Wroth's inner space, his inner calm of mind and spirit described in the first line as "blest." The connection between inner and outer space is implied by the pun on the word "state" as both landed estate and spiritual condition: "Thy peace is made; and when man's state is well, / 'Tis better, if he there can dwell" (93-94). This coincidence of mental and physical habitus has the ultimate effect of making Wroth, in a word, "happy" (99). The geographical bounds of his country, his shire, promote the development of inner virtue and peace of mind. By staying within those bounds, Wroth has followed what Jonson describes as the divine wish that "none should wracke on a strange shelfe" (95), a strange sentiment coming from a courtly poet even if it accurately describes Wroth. Being rooted to a single place in the country is the spatial equivalent of keeping within moral bounds. To "dwell" becomes an achievement of monumental solidarity in the simplicity of standing still on the land, where Wroth achieves complete Being beyond choice or chance. It is here that he can "make [his] owne content" (65), a pun on content as happiness and as the state of being metaphysically filled. The country provides the younger Robert Wroth with the setting for the fullness of Being in situ.

The ethos of "To Sir Robert Wroth" accommodates the country life of the principal heir to reconciliation with the Privy Council, and thus with the administrative center of the monarchical commonwealth; though a friend of King James and loyal to the center, the younger Wroth was known to have preferred country sport and had little interest in advancement in London. It is consistent with this preference that the particular place of Wroth's habitus often appears to be identified in the poem with local community. The impression that the place of virtue is in one's country, in the narrower sense, in one's shire, is furthered by the way Jonson structures this contrast geographically by commenting, right at the poem's start, on the physical proximity but moral distance between Wroth's country and the urban center: "though so neere the citie, and the court," Wroth is "tane with neithers vice, nor sport" (3-4). Following from this geographical division, the poem is rhetorically structured as a series of oppositions f ormally disposed in thematically and spatially contrastive sections. These sections are based on the contrasting frames of court and country, one a place of moral disintegration, the other of moral integration.

One might expect this ostensibly singular identification of country locale in a country house poem, but it cannot be overemphasized that this portrait comes after the Wroths made peace with the insufficiency of their purely local identity and with the authority of the Privy Council over their local community. It is not surprising, then, that the space of the Wroth estate, as it appears in the poem, is complicated by the double perspective of overlapping geographic frames of commonwealth center and country locale. Counterpointing the emphasis on Wroth's rootedness in singular local place is a dialectical relationship between the local and the dynastic, a relationship that by the poem's end has become its operative trope. The poem is framed by the word "countrey," but the closing lines amplify the meaning of the word as it appears in its opening lines. Jonson begins by praising Wrath for his complete identification with his local milieu, so much so that his presence there no longer depends on an act of conscio us ill: "How blest art thou, canst loue the countrey, WROTH,/Whether by choice, or fate, or both" (1-2). Stripped of the elder Wroth's defiant tone when he refused to muster, the lines as applied to his son incorporate the father's claim to being "born and bred in the country." Jonson uses the word countrey in the same way when he observes in Discoveries that "a man may live as renown'd at home, in his owne Countrey, or a private village, as in the whole world" (8:609). By the end of the poem, Jonson exhorts Wroth "[t]o doe thy countrey seruice, thy self right" (103). At this juncture in the poem, the word "countrey" has taken on added meaning. Coming after a description of the Wroths' reception of the King, the word has punningly combined its two senses as county, shire, or local community and as nation or commonwealth. [47] However negative the portrait of city and court, the initial contrast to the country has modulated into complementarity when Jonson shifts to the country itself -- in a poem whose pre-hi story is the Wroths' troubled path to ultimate cooperation with the administrative center. What started as contrast has become similarity. Whereas his father refused to "serve in two places," Jonson's pun on "countrey" joins two places as the location and object of Wroth's service. The history of the Wroths in Enfield provides the narrative of how they came to that pass, and how it became possible for Jonson to attempt the pun.

This pattern of antithesis become complement is repeated several times in the poem. In tension with a series of images that contrast country virtue to the vice of court and city, Jonson uses images that subtly suggest the interdependence of court and country. Of particular interest, for obvious reasons, is the image with which we began, that of the "serpent riuer" passing through "the curled woods, and meades." The comfort and security of possessed habitation expressed in untroubled sleep in a country landscape is provided along the river by the "coole, courteous shade, which he calls his,/And [which] makes sleep softer than it is" (17-20). The river furnishes an image of security in a landscape that is the scene of a royal visit to a family reconciled to the center's intentions in the country, to a house purchased by Wroth in exchange for the promise to provide for such visits. All this renders the phrase "courteous shade" (read: courtly shade) a highly charged expression of the multivalent geographical ide ntity of a place whose inhabitants experience the overlapping geographical frames of center within their locale. Security resides, not in the elder Wroth's refusal to "serve in two places," but in the younger Wroth's ease in dwelling in two places, so to speak, in his ease with a multiple geographic identity. This landscape guarantees Wroth's security on his estate according to a model, less of property than of tenure, less of ownership than of holding land through grant from the monarch. [48] Purchase of Loughton, rather than lease, from the crown may have been the enabling condition of the poem, but Jonson reassures both parties that culturally and symbolically at least the Wroths live in the country by the leave of their lord the monarch. That perhaps is the implication of Jonson's observation, referring to Wroth's eagerness to make his land available to James for hunting, that Wroth is "oft roused for [his] master's sport" so that James "for it, makes thy house his court" (23-24). Holding land through feu dal military obligation has been replaced by the obligation to make one's land available for the king's sport, the mirror image of the vassal's -- that is, Wroth's -- own leisure. In this way, Jonson registers Wroth's dynastic identity within polyvalent coordinates, his sense of place in a local community, which forms a subset of the monarchical commonwealth. Jonson presents a scene of serenity in possessed habitation through service to the monarch in the same kind of place, if not the very place itself -- at the side of a river -- where that service was violently resisted during the early youth of the Wroth to whom the poem is addressed. After the purchase of Loughton, with all that it represents, serenity now reigns in what may be the very place where the meaning of the word country was hotly contested in the very location the poem is meant to represent -- contested, no less, by the father of the poem's addressee through machinations orchestrated to foil emerging commonwealth identity in Enfield, to thwart the concrete, local experience of commonwealth, in short, to keep the country out of the country. The poem's final lines emphasize the integration of private and public identity within a policy in which local and dynastic identity complement each other, where private leisure in the country enhances -- or perhaps is in itself -- public service in the commonwealth.

Unlike the universalist poetics of Philip Sidney, the atavus of so many addressees of The Forrest, Jonson fashions a poetics of specific place, where the country milieu both is self-contained and contains the larger commonwealth. The poem in a sense parallels the depositions, reports, and correspondence concerning the dispute over the River Lea, a dispute that provided the occasion for villagers and gentry alike to come to terms with what it meant for a local community to be part of a commonwealth, not only politically, but economically and culturally as well. Jonson's poem appears to be set in a place where, years earlier, it was necessary to articulate and enforce the relationship of a region to London, the urban administrative and economic center; it appears to be set in a place where country neighbors learned that they were in fact linked to each other through a nexus whose center is in London. If the country house poem represents the country as the place of the good life, then Jonson set his poem where the moral valence of the country has been appropriated by a centralizing administration that countered claims of local custom into charges of luxury and greed. Jonson brings Wroth's point of view in line with that of Fleetwood, Fanshawe, and the watermen of Enfield. Once the place of sabotage and defiant disorders against a centripetal commonwealth, Wroth's estate is now the landscape of Jonson's idyll; a former location of confrontation has become an emblem of domestic order, security, and settled property. The "serpent river," the particular geographical feature through which the contending parties argued for or against integration with London, has become a poetic symbol that transmutes a scene of local struggle to one of tranquil local possession through a purchase from the crown and cooperation with its administrative arm, the Privy Council. Wroth has been repastoralized, to use Marcus's term, not to keep him away from London, but to keep London in the country. [49]

Through the publication of "To Sir Robert Wroth" in the 1616 Folio, Jonson endowed the poem with canonical status as a modern version of the classical celebration of a country villa. Whatever personal relationship he may have expressed through whatever manuscript version he may have presented to Robert and Mary Wroth, the Wroths became part of a quasi-official discourse of a poet who claimed to speak for the commonwealth. Jonson has pastoralized the river and feudalized the Wroth estate, in accord, that is, with James's claim to be the lord of all the land of England. The full impact of the simple pun at the end of the poem on the countrey is now apparent, as Jonson quietly combines the two geographic meanings of the word. When he invites Wroth to "Doe thy countrey seruice," the local and dynastic connotations of the countrey have become indistinguishable. The simplicity of the pun, the facility with which Jonson applies it to the Wroths, suggests the ease with which they exist in dual spatial identity Facil ity of expression, however, belies the tumultuous history of dynastic absorption of local community; it belies the turbulent role of the Wroths in that history as it was played our in their own community Behind this coincidence of meanings lies the chronicle of the Wroth family in the last decades of the sixteenth century when the two meanings of the word did not rest so well together in their lives and actions; effecting the unobtrusive coincidence of meaning against the background of this history is at least one achievement of the poem.

The smooth fit of this coincidence, however, depends on a distortion: the poem suppresses all reference to the village of Enfield. Enfield was the place where the Wroths turned agricultural work into wealth; Enfield was to become part of a regional network connected to a London market through the growing and trading of grain; Enfield was the location where the Wroths organized the sabotage against the Privy Council and revolted against commonwealth; Enfield became the place that connected them to commonwealth once they accepted river transport. In celebrating the Wroths' re-entry into the commonwealth, Jonson completely effaces the place of the commercial activity that was the very source of commonwealth. Instead, he portrays the Wroth estate as a self-contained world of plenitude, of self-sufficient abundance, "blest" with "un-bought provision (14), as if it were immune to commercial transaction. In Jonson's portrait, the abundance of Wroth's countryside is a result not of market exploitation, but of self-s ufficiency, and as such is the location of virtue. Jonson's picture revokes the charge of greed and luxury by erasing the Wroths' interest in the London grain market, thereby displacing criticism onto court and city as centers of acquisitiveness, of fiscal irresponsibility and conspicuous display "not paid for yet" (12). Jonson erases time and history -- the history that brought the Wroths into, out of, and again into the orbit of the monarchical commonwealth -- in order to remove Enfield from the Wroths' babitus, to place them exclusively in an agrarian location, and to picture that location as the totality of their existence, the source of Wroths' peace of mind. Jonson crops the Wroths' historical situation, and enlarges what is left, creating from a partial picture, as Louis Mann puts it, a mythopoetic utopic space of "harmonious totality" projected by an "extreme pretension of language to provide a complete portrait of an organized and inhabited space." [50]

If Jonson celebrates the geographical superimposition of commonwealth onto local region, and hence the ability to fulfill in the country one's duty to the kingdom -- to "serve in two places" -- then he removes from the poem the conditions of mobility that made that mentality possible. The replacement of horse carting with river transport had cultural implications for membership in a commonwealth that went far beyond economic efficiency. After the 1580s the Wroths' changing relationship to the transportation system defined their place in the commonwealth and hence as possible subjects for Jonson's poem. The poem is a product of the possibilities of mobility from place to place, from center to periphery and back, yet Jonson erases the very conditions that made it possible. The village as a point of movement between London and the country disappears in Jonson's portrait.

The resulting portrait of the Wroths may come into clearer focus when compared to another source of representation of the countryside, mid-Tudor complaint. Unlike images of the country derived from Horatian poetry, mid-Tudor complaint, as McCrae points out, provided a vision of England from the viewpoint of the countryside itself. From that perspective, as articulated for example by Bishop Latimer, national identity depended on the open-field system in which England could be imagined as a community of stable, self-sufficient manorial estates. This vision was typically voiced by a humble tenant who complained about the covetousness of landlords whose greedy innovation of enclosing common land destroyed traditional land use. [51] Within this iconography of the countryside, as McCrae puts it, "Towns and markets -- and even the court -- could be dismissed as aberrant outgrowths of the body politic." [52] In locating the commonwealth in the country rather than in its administrative center in London, and by leavin g out any reference to the towns and villages through which the commonwealth was brought to the Wroths' Middlesex and Essex, Jonson appropriates aspects of the mid-Tudor vision of agrarian England to portray the Wroth house and lands as the embodiment of the commonwealth. In doing so, he switches the perspective from the tenant to landlord, while reversing the role of landlord from a figure who threatens commonwealth through enclosure, to one who embodies the commonwealth through his manorial life of self-sustained abundance. [53]

(*.) I wish to express my gratitude to the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation, which made research for this article possible.

(1.) See, for example, Alpers, Helgerson, Mundy, Lcvesque, Conley.

(2.) For the implications of colonial expansion, see Pagden. See also Wrightson, 1982, 222-27. Throughout this paper, I am indebted to Wrightson's general description of the absorption of local communities into a centralizing state in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

(3.) Marcus, 1986, 1993. See also Sharpe and Lake, 1-20. For a different view of the connection between pastoral and social engagement, see Dubrow.

(4.) Sharpe and Lake, 8. James Turner similarly argued that landscape was metropolitan in nature, and was not primarily about the country.

(5.) I use the term monarchical commonwealth to denote England as a unified, coherent society under a monarch. I use the term dynastic identity to describe the social identity associated with the commonwealth in this sense. I avoid the term nation, which I take to refer to a unified, coherent people as the basis of a sovereign society. In this way, I follow Liah Greenfeld's distinction between the two ways the commonwealth was conceptualized: as kingdom as opposed to nation, or as realm as opposed to res publica. As a realm and kingdom, England was the estate of the king, a loyal patrimony embodied in the institution of monarchy and in the person of the monarch, who in a real sense held England as his or her property. As a nation, on the other hand, England was a corporate entity of the people, a collective enterprise of rational individuals, citizens, for whom love of native country was assumed to be a natural inclination which was expressed through participation in the country's collective political life. The institution that embodied the nation of the English people was Parliament. Both these polities were the result of two sets of competing forces in tension on two related, but separate political axes. See Greenfeld, 29-87. On the few occasions when I do use the term nation, I mean it only in the sense of a centralized commonwealth.

(6.) For Jonson on poetry and the commonwealth, see Discoveries, in Jonson, 1925-1952, 8:595. All citations of Jonson are from this edition. For the political implications of Jonson's notion of a poetry of the commonwealth, see Norbrook, 188, and Jenkins, 165-166. Dubrow, 153-80, also argues that Jonson's aim in his country house poems is to fashion the ideal Jacobean subject.

(7.) The problem of high grain prices is clearly laid out in a letter written by Sir Henry Cock, a local member of the gentry active for the Privy Council in musters and other matters, in both Essex and Hertfordshire. See State Papers 13/254/10 (hereafter SP), PRO, London. The letter, dated October 6, 1595, is written considerably later than the incidents involving the Wroths in the 1 580s, but it reveals the problems the river passage was meant to redress. Cock (along with two co-signers, Sir John Brockett and Sir Philip Boreler) gives a full two-page economic analysis of the high price of grain in the country resulting from both a poor crop and from marker relations with other counties and especially with London. The letter reveals how the local gentry cooperated with the central administration by reporting on the local awareness of, and by pleading for relief for, what historians like Buchanan Sharp consider a fundamental local and national problem of early modern England, experienced acutely in Essex and Hertfordshire -- the high prices caused by shortage of grain, a problem that was among the main causes of local riot.

(8.) The Calendar of the MSS oft/it Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House, 13, 522 (1594?) (Hereafter Calendar of Salisbury Papers). Burghley's interest in the river is suggested by inclusion of documents in his papers dating back to the 1580s. Calendar of Salisbury Papers, 13, 353 (1587) concerns stocking the river with game. Calendar of Salisbury Papers 3, 728 (Sept 1588) contains details of barge owners and the duration of trips between towns on river.

(9.) Wrightson, 1982, 222. Wrightson (1980, 21-46) examines such a drama in the 1629 riots in Maldon, a town in Essex not very far from the Wroths.

(10.) BL Lansdowne 38/32 (1583). Most documents related to the sabotage of the River Lea are in the Lansdowne Collection in the British Library.

(11.) BL Lansdowne 32/37, 32/34. Curiously, neither deposition mentions the principal offenses investigated in the other, suggesting perhaps lack of coordination in the early stages of the investigation.y

(12.) BL Lansdowne 32/35. When the story is repeated second hand by another waterman, the miller's man is reported to have added his wish that there be a barrel of gunpowder under both lock and boat. See BL Lansdowne 32/35. In Calendar of Salisbury Papers, 5, 408 (12 October, 1595); Henry Cock mentions to Robert Cecil a warrant for a Pennyfeather who was poacher and, as the calendar puts it, a "very lewd fellow, [who] ran away above two years past with another man's wife at Cheshunt."

(13.) BL Lansdowne 32/37.

(14.) BL Lansdowne 32, fol. 105r (undated).

(15.) BL Lansdowne 32, fol 108v. See also BL Lansdowne 32, fol 105r, for the theme of market fairness that runs throughout the investigation: "the nomber of badgers which haue bene thought to rayse the prices of grayne in the countrie m'kettes is or may be by the water Cariadge abated."

(16.) BL Lansdowne 32, fol 105r.

(17.) Similarly, the bitter testimony of a London baker stridently supports the new transportation system because it breaks the monopoly of the big landholders and their middlemen in Enfield and Cheshunt, who together have cornered the grain market, keeping prices artifically high. See BL Lansdowne 32, fol 107r.

(18.) There is a visual analogue of this rivalry for the iconography of the country in Dutch art of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. For example, the paintings of Lucas van Valckenborch (ca. 1535-1597) and David Vinckboons (1576-before 1633), as well as the many widely circulated engravings of Vinckboons especially, portray their aristocratic patrons engaged in scenes of courtly leisure in opulent country houses. These congratulatory pictures have their counterparts in representations of decadently opulent country houses, often by the same painter, and sometimes the two visions of the country -- abundant and decadent -- vie within the same painting. These paintings and engravings are precursors and prototypes of Jonson's country house poems.

(19.) Lansdowne 32, fol 107. The document is undated but appears with documents related to the burning of Waltham Lock.

(20.) Pam.

(21.) Thomas Wrath also attended Grey's Inn, and held many local as well as court offices: he was master of the musters, an influential gentleman usher to Prince Edward, a gentleman of the privy chamber, a member of a commission to enforce martial law, as well as a member of a special commission to review the courts, the Exchequer, and other bodies; his duties included the review of moneys owed to and by the Crown.

(22.) Calendar of Salisbury Papers, 2, 488 (4 December, 1577). Wroth's actions as JP are also recorded in the Essex Quarter Sessions Rolls and Essex Assize Files, both in Essex Public Record Office, Chelmsford, Essex.

(23.) Ibid., 13, 158. See 13, 155 for the actual examination.

(24.) Ibid., 13, 159.

(25.) BL Landsdowne 32/41 (1581).

(26.) Ibid., 32/39 (1581).

(27.) Felicity Heal has argued that the ritual performance of entertainment was designed to project the "power and magnaminity" of a local community in order to have an effect in the dynastic capital.

(28.) See, for example, Calendar of Salisbury Papers, 13, 239 (1583).

(29.) SP 12/199/13.

(30.) It is, he insists, "ane harde tyme for the poeple, by reason that yr ys a buzie tyme of sowinge, and in my opynyon excepte the necessytye of the cause desyred yt wth I hope dothe not, Maye is the most fyttest, and idlest [i.e., idealest] tyme for the poeple to deale in that actyon" (SP12/199/13). The real hardships imposed by the crown on those who mustered are revealed in a letter by the local officers Sir Henry Cock, Sir John Brockett, and Sir Philip Boteler to Lord Burghley in his role as Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire. See SP 12/254/11 (Oct 6, 1595).

(31.) October 1587, he finally responds in his own good time by contributing a band of 400 men to be stationed at Brentwood at the entry of the Thames. (In 1589 Wroth is listed as a Captain, that is a gentleman-farmer-soldier in charge of 400 men, the classical associations of which, for example with Cincinnatus, Jonson never exploits.) In 1590, however, he refuses again, even after he no longer opposes the river project. See SP 12/232/2 (May 1, 1590), an elaborate multi-page document listing captains of footbands in Essex along with their companies, including lieutenants, ensign bearers, corporals, drummers, crc, with totals of all the footmen. Robert Wroth, in apparent, unexplained non-compliance, appears at the very end of the document with the following comment: "Robert Wrothe esquier Captaine of iiij' footmen Raysed in the hundred of Onger, Hurlowe, and Waltham hath made noe Certificate vnto vs.

(32.) Forster, 170-97.

(33.) BL Lansdowne 32/39 (1581).

(34.) See for example the following Lansdowne documents: 86/35 (1597); 85/26 (1597); 87/83 (1600); 87/84 (1600). Some of the letters are transcribed in Waller.

(35.) See, for example, Wroth's letter written from Loughton to Cecil in Calendar of Salisbury Papers 7, 387 (19 September, 1597). See also 11, 242 (20 June, 1601).

(36.) For example, for a list of villagers prosecuted by Wroth for resisting his enclosure of Enfield commons, see Lansdowne 59/30 and Lansdowne 59/31 (Aug 1589). Interestingly, the Richard Saltmarsh who convinced his brother William not to participate in resistance orchestrated by Wroth now appears on the list of villagers Wroth acted against in the name of the crown.

(37.) See BL Lansdowne 86/35 (1597).

(38.) BL Lansdowne 88/27 (1601).

(39.) Prerogative Court of Canterbury Wills, Prob 11/107, PRO, Kew (hereafter Prob).

(40.) See SP 14/2/63 (July? 1603).

(41.) See, for example, BL Lansdowne 59/30 (Aug 1580).

(42.) See Mary Wroth's letter to Queen Anne in Wroth, 233-34.

(43.) BL Lansdowne 89/65 (1605) and 89/96 (1606).

(44.) Herford and Simpson do not identify the house. They quote lines from a 1621 book of epigrams that identifies Wroth with Durrants, but they only comment that "His [the younger Wroth's] chief residences were Loughton House and the estate of Durrants in the parish of Enfield" (9:11, 35). Subsequent writers and editors seem to have assumed that Durrants is the setting of the poem without any evidence to suggest so. See MeClung, 107-108; Wayne, 167; Parfitt, 509.

(45.) For Wroth's debt, see the Chamberlain-Carleton letter, SP 14/76/49. Mary Wroth's letter asking Queen Anne to help Wroth receive permission to buy Loughton is reprinted in Wroth, 233-34.

(46.) Prob 11/123.

(47.) Liah Greenfeld provides a brief history of the sixteenth-century transformation of the word "country" from shire to nation (31-32).

(48.) For a different view of the role of property in the country house poem, see Molesworth.

(49.) My conclusions parallel Warren Boutcher's argument that humanist education did not create a national identity that superseded regional identity, as has often been claimed, but that national and regional identities were interwoven in those who attended humanist educational institutions.

(50.) Marin 53, 51. I am indebted to Don Wayne for the importance of Mann for Jonson's poetry. See Wayne, 1984.

(51.) The situation in Enfield was the reverse: Wroth the landowner opposed the innovation of the center, river transport, which was meant to enhance commonwealth.

(52.) McCrae, 84. For McCrae's discussion of Bishop Latimer, see 46-48.

(53.) For Jonson's satiric treatment of landlords in The Devil is an Ass, see McCrae, 104-09; for McCrae's reading of" To Penshurst" as an attempt to restore the rural ideal, see 285-90.

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