Rural Governance in Regulating Customary Rights of Gleaning: A Case Study of Sherborne, Dorset 1635

Abstract

Custom was by definition lex loci, and customary consciousness was above all local, whereby local circumstances were' almost decisive in influencing the experience of, and responses to, change'. Therefore 'shifting configurations of interest' within the social order of individual communities are increasingly significant, not least because they reflected significant variations in social structure, wealth distribution, and demographic experience even between adjacent parishes and towns. This recognition led to negation of the historiographical 'bi -polar models of social, political, and economic relations: patricians and plebeian; governors and governed; propertied and propertyless'. It also led to rethinking the role of 'middling sort', which social historians have traditionally regarded as static ranks of orders based on assumption that economic inequality was absolute rather than relative. It furthermore has recently revealed the dynalnic process of the extent to which social policy could be transformed by popular participation in exploring the significance of triangular or quadrangular negotiation involving pauper, parish officers, magistrate, and the itinerant judiciary or the justices of King's Bench. More importantly the way in which the limitation of paupers' agency, tightly-controlled access to the 'circuit of authority'.2 Thus, the negotiation as third dimension constructed the intermediate sphere transmitted both of them, whereby relationship of the central and local was reconfigured. 3