document

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pursuit of a cure for her skin problems.86 On 1 January 1648, after a storm shook the house and blew away his kitchen chimney, Eyre considered God had blessed him with a providential deliverance. This inspired him to mend his relationship with his wife, as Wrightson observes, not by asserting his authority, but rather through an attempted compromise and ‘an explicit appeal to the ideal of mutuality in marriage’.87

This morne I used some words of persuasion to my wife to forbeare to tell mee of what is past, and promised her to become a good husband to her for ye tyme to come, and shee promised mee likwise shee would doe what I wished her in anything, save in setting her hand to papers; and I promised her never to wish her therunto. Now I pray god that both shee and I may leave of all our old and foolish contentions, and joyne together in His service without all fraud, malice, or hypocrisye; and that Hee will for ye same purpose illuminate our understandings with His Holy Spirit.88

Wrightson considered this account of ‘conjugal negotiation’ a rarity, while Bernard Capp has called it an ‘extraordinary peace treaty’, despite allowing that early modern diaries ‘often show compromises accepted, sometimes grudgingly for the sake of peace’.89 However, the fresh start appears to have been short-lived. On 18 February, when Eyre returned home from a burial, he was met with blandishments and he broke his wife’s spinning wheel.90 He mended it the next day but was still subject to occasional lapses into heavy drinking, swiftly followed by his usual self-loathing remorse.91 On 11 October 1648, Eyre told his wife she could keep the house as she saw fit, ‘neither would I medle with her at all’.92 The couple’s troubles do much to underline the divergence between contemporary theories of marital relations and how they might play out in practice.93 On 26 January 1649 he prepared for another trip to London, leaving the following day. It is

tempting to speculate that he arrived in London in time to witness the king’s execution on 30 January.94

EYRE AND THE ‘NORTHERN LIST’

The factor that drew Eyre back into the national political arena was his quest to make good the financial losses and debts he had incurred in parliament’s service, along with those of his brother. Having received much of Joseph’s estate, including his arrears, this

86Morehouse, op. cit., 62. Charles I had already touched so many people for scrofula at Holdenby House earlier that summer that he came to be jokingly called ‘the stroker’: M. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 480.

87Wrightson, op. cit., 97.

88Morehouse, op. cit., 84.

89K. Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’ in Griffiths et al., op. cit., 15; B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 75–6.

90Morehouse, op. cit., 99.

91ibid., 98, 104.

92ibid., 111.

93For the wider literature on marriage see M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987); A. Fletcher, ‘The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England’ in A. Fletcher and P. Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge, 1994), 161–81; E. A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999); F. E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadephia, 2008).

94Morehouse, op. cit., 117.

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more than doubled the state’s debt to Adam. On 28 January 1648 Eyre visited Colonel John Bright with a letter for administration of his brother’s goods, and took an oath to pay his brother’s debts.95 Eyre laid claim to close to £1800 in pay arrears, double the value of his estate at Hazlehead. The need to recover them became pressing. On 17 June 1647 he went with Captain Rich to Doncaster, where they intended to have their accounts audited but were thwarted by the absence of the committee for the West Riding. The following day some of their soldiers accompanied them to Sheffield to speak to the sequestrators, but they were again absent.96 On 27 December 1647 Eyre’s accounts were audited at Bradford by Mr Fairfax, Mr Stanhope and Mr Furness upon the oath of Eyre’s lieutenant and cornet who accompanied him. Eyre recorded that Mr More, the secretary, ‘made my books fit for the committee’.97 On 28 January 1648 Eyre was in York to pay More ten shillings ‘to expedyte the protections of my accompts’.98

From early on, Eyre was entrusted by others with the pursuit of their arrears. On 14 February 1648 he noted a list of debentures he had been appointed to carry to London, including his own for £688 8s 0d, his brother’s for £1106 18s 3d, as well as those of thirteen others, totalling over £2566 in value.99 Over one hundred of Yorkshire’s disbanded officers who had had their accounts stated with the county’s Subcommittee of Accounts were listed in a manuscript petition on 25 March 1648. It listed that £678 8s 0d was due to Adam Eyre and £568 13s 0d was due to Joseph Eyre for their personal pay, while a further £600 was owed Joseph Eyre to cover his disbursements for horses and arms.100 This strongly suggests that Joseph Eyre met the expense of raising and equipping the troop, and that Adam succeeded as captain upon his brother’s death, some time between 1643 and 1646.101

On 5 August 1648 Adam Eyre was authorized to receive £3526 12s 0d out of the excise for 114 of Lord Fairfax’s disbanded officers, later known as ‘the northern list’. On 7 August parliament ordered this sum to be divided among them.102 Eyre had been in London again around this time, not arriving back home until 15 September 1648.103 Soon afterwards, on 10 October 1648, an ordinance of parliament followed that made provision for £23,566 1s 121 d in arrears of pay to the northern officers. Captains Adam Eyre, Thomas Greathead and George Shirt, as well as Cornet Henry Laidman and the merchant Richard Sykes, were made agents to receive this money, and they subsequently listed the proportions each officer was to receive. On 1 April 1649 parliament ordered that this debt ‘was to be

transferred, and settled upon the same Securities, that the rest of the Army were then to be’.104 On 21 April 1649 both the £23,566 1s 121 d and the £3526 12s 0d still remained

95ibid., 93, appendix 354.

96ibid., 45.

97ibid., 82, 96.

98ibid., 93.

99ibid., 96–7.

100BL, Egerton MS 1048, fos 83–5.

101One erroneous genealogy of the Eyres refers to a Joseph Eyre as a lieutenant for the parliament ‘slain at Bamford Hall by an Eyre that was his cousin; & for the King 1643’. Adam Eyre noted that he visited his sister in Derbyshire to discuss his brother’s will in October 1646:

J. W. Clay (ed.), Familiae Minorum Gentium: Diligentia Josephi Hunter, Sheffieldiensis

(Publications of the Harleian Society, XXXVIII, 1895), II, 545; WYAS, Kirklees, KC312/5/3, The diary of Adam Eyre, 5/1/2.

102Journal of the House of Commons, vol. V, 1646–1648, 663; BL, Egerton MS 1048, fos 105–6; TNA, SP 23/1/191.

103Morehouse, op. cit., 107.

104BL, Additional MS 19,399, fo. 48; Journal of the House of Commons, vol. VII, 1651–1660, 174–5; BL, Additional MS 21,427, fo. 177.

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unpaid, and they were transferred from being owed out of the Excise, a value-added tax on goods, to being secured on the land of Dean and Chapters.105

During 1651 Eyre was invited to fund his own arrears by making discoveries of undervalued compositions to the Committee for Compounding sitting at Goldsmiths Hall, London.106 Acting alongside Captain Nicholas Greathead of Holbeck, Robert Matthew, a Leeds clothier, and Richard Sykes, a potential total of £3000 was allotted to them, but by 20 November 1651 they had still only received £500. They complained theyhadspentmorethanthisinprosecuting their case:‘In regardofyeManydelayesw[hi]ch have increased theire wants & left them in a Miserable Condition Many of them having been engaged in ye Scottish warr.’107 Similarly frustrated was Eyre’s neighbour Captain George Shirt. Like Eyre, he had been invited to discover undervalued compositions to recover his arrears. He claimed to have contributed to discoveries worth over £11,000, remarking bitterly ‘most of which money now lyes in the Treasury: besides other discoveries yo[u]r pet [itione]rs have made with the expense of much time & moneyes’.108 Parliament’s dependence here on a punitive means of fundraising through composition fines required a large participatory network of discoverers to function. Such informants were often former parliamentarian officers who were then put to further costly but unpaid service to recover what parliament had initially owed them.

On 14 May 1653 Eyre, along with Captains Nicholas and Thomas Greathead, complained that the Act of Parliament for the northern officers’ arrears remained unpassed, despite parliament’s orders ‘for Collonell Downes to bring in the said Act and hee hath been dayly waited on by one or other who follow the same, nothing is done to this day, neither could wee or any [of] us ever obteyne a sight of the paper in his hands’. They pointed out that Nicholas Greathead was now a prisoner in King’s Bench ‘for want of releife’, that many of their fellows were in a ‘perishing Condicon’, and that they might ‘free ourselves from the misery wee are exposed to by reason of the great losses wee have

susteyned in the late warrs and above 6 yeares Continuall waiting on the late Parliam[en]t for our just due’.109

WORCESTER HOUSE AND THE SALE OF CROWN LANDS

Adam Eyre spent much of the 1650s in London pursuing his arrears. This may have offered the additional benefit of distancing himself from his wife. While in the capital he attended to the affairs of his kinsman and former regimental comrade, Captain Adam Baynes. Baynes was also the son of a yeoman, but he became a cloth merchant and had been among Fairfax’s forces vanquished at Adwalton Moor.110 From early 1649 Baynes

105Journal of the House of Commons, vol. VI, 1648–1651, 191–2.

106This committee examined evidence to determine the composition fines to be paid by royalist ‘delinquents’ to free their estates from sequestration.

107TNA, SP 19/123/15 – 16; Green (ed.),

Calendar of the Committee for Compounding, IV, 2692–3; M. A. E. Green (ed.), Calendar of the

Committee for the Advance of Money (Domestic), 1642–1656, 3 vols (London, 1888), II, 943. 108TNA, SP 19/143/174.

109BL, Additional MS 21,427, fo. 177.

110D. Hirst, ‘The fracturing of the Cromwellian alliance: Leeds and Adam Baynes’, English Historical Review, CVIII, 429 (October 1993), 871n.

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acted as the northern brigade’s financial agent and attorney in London.111 By November 1650 Eyre acted as Baynes’s London agent during the latter’s absence with Major-General John Lambert in Scotland, assisting in Baynes’s management of the purchase of the former royal palace at Wimbledon for Lambert.112 On 6 September 1651 he informed Baynes of the news of Cromwell’s victory at Worcester:

Sir on the 4th at night Instant the Thundering of Ordinance from the Tower & Guards in this Towne & the Rattleing of Musquets from the sev[er]all guards spoke allowd and the light of Bonefyres Manifested the good news to all sorts of people though in the dead of the night cast on their beds of repose of the breaking of the power of the enemy at Worcester.113

Eyre’s growing familiarity with Baynes’s affairs inclined Eyre to an attempt to recover the value of his arrears by another means. This was through using credit from soldiers’ debentures to purchase crown land. Instead of paying its northern officers their arrears, parliament assigned them debentures or certificates for what they were owed. Many soldiers and officers sold these at small fractions of their value to land speculators in order to come by ready money. Ian Gentles, whose doctoral thesis did much to illuminate this process, discovered that soldiers sold their debentures for prices between 1s 6d and 12s 0d in the pound. This situation led to a predictable upsurge in the trading and counterfeiting of debentures.114 Baynes readily bought up the debentures of most of his own troopers at a small fraction of their value, and Eyre had corresponded with him in 1650 and 1651 concerning such transactions.115 These debentures, ‘chardged upon the Credit of the Acts of Parliament’, could be accepted as payment for crown lands. On 16 July 1649 parliament had authorized thirteen trustees to sell crown lands in order to raise money to pay the army. The trustees sat at Worcester House in the Strand, assisted by a staff of twelve contractors, a comptroller, two registrars and four treasurers.116 On 16 March 1651 Eyre witnessed what could be accomplished with debentures when Baynes purchased the manor of Pickering in the North Riding of Yorkshire, on behalf of ‘divers original creditors’ for £6730 14s 1021 d. To accomplish this enormous purchase Baynes had obtained the debentures of his patron, Major-General John Lambert, worth over £3000 alone, along with those of a further 109 officers and soldiers.117

Following Baynes’s example, on 25 July 1651 Eyre requested a particular for the sale of

the enclosed grounds of Blandsby Park, also in the parish of Pickering, signing himself off as the discoverer of the premises.118 He contracted for the sale on 6 August and 15

October thereafter, completing the purchase on 23 July 1652 with a balancing certificate for £5966 7s 6d.119 The sale’s size was second only to Baynes’s purchase in all Yorkshire,

111D. Scott, ‘Adam Baynes (bap. 1622, d. 1671), parliamentarian army officer’ in Matthew and Harrison (eds), ODNB.

112BL, Additional MS 21,419, fo. 243; Hirst, op. cit., 872.

113BL, Additional MS 21,420, fo. 176.

114I. Gentles, ‘The Debentures Market and Military Purchases of Crown Land, 1649– 1660’ (Ph.D., London, 1969), 2.

115BL, Additional MS 21,427, fo. 44.

116Journal of the House of Commons, vol. VI, 1648–1651, 261; TNA, E121 source guide. 117TNA, E121/5/5, no. 28.

118TNA, SP 28/286/370.

119TNA, E121/5/5, no. 30.

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for as recently as 1565 the park’s walls had been estimated to be six miles in circumference. In 1629 the park had been settled on Queen Henrietta Maria for life, with reversion to the crown, but it was leased to Henry Danvers, earl of Danby, prior to an order for its disparking in 1641.120 After the earl’s death in 1644 a claim to the lease passed to his younger brother, the regicide Sir John Danvers, but as with other crown lands the park was settled on trustees for the use of the Commonwealth of England. A survey of 15 July 1651, which listed Captain Adam Eyre as the discoverer, disputed Danvers’s claim and stated that Blandsby Park encompassed 1421 acres worth £319 per annum in rent, with trees and woodland worth a further £361. The park included a ‘fayre’ hunting lodge, ‘lately built’, in which Danvers had installed an under tenant.121 Eyre’s interest in such an elite property, complete with what, if any, game there had survived the deer massacres of the 1640s, suggests an ambition drastically to advance his social status.122

Eyre had been acquiring debentures in Yorkshire as early as December 1647.123 Yet to pay the first moiety Eyre used the debentures of 173 soldiers and gunners from Colonel Nathaniel Whetham’s Portsmouth garrison, along with a further 21 from officers and soldiers of the New Model Army. His own debentures, and those of his brother, were not listed, perhaps because he had not abandoned hope of redeeming them for money through parliament. The second moiety included the debentures of a further 73 men, including John Troutbeck, surgeon to Lord Fairfax, and those of the late Yorkshire colonel, John Mauleverer, who had died at Edinburgh in December 1650.124 Therefore, in order to make this purchase, Eyre had obtained the debentures of a staggering 267 men. Most purchases of crown land were dwarfed by this, usually containing between ten and twenty debentures, and amounting to less than £1000 in cost. During the next two years Eyre speculated about acquiring further crown land at Yokefleet in the East Riding of Yorkshire, along with Castleton and Over Haddon in Derbyshire, although certificates for these particulars do not survive.125 It might be wondered what gave this yeoman farmer, who was already in straitened circumstances, the credit, confidence and ability to make such an enormous purchase. The answer is that for some of the 1650s Eyre was employed in the debenture office at Worcester House on the Strand.

Adam Eyre wrote a series of letters to Adam Baynes from Worcester House, to whose good offices he probably owed his position, on 6 September 1651, 7 April 1652, 14 May 1653, 4 June 1653 and 20 March 1654.126 His employment there would have afforded him plentiful opportunity for bureaucratic corruption. There were no fewer than nine stages during which Worcester House officials could charge fees during the process of purchasing crown lands.127 Gentles has observed that soldiers often received less for their

120W. D. Hamilton (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1640–41 (London, 1882), 528, 547, 551; W. Page (ed.), A History of the County of York: North Riding (London, 1923), II, 465–6.

121TNA, Records of the Duchy of Lancaster, 32/79, transcribed in R. B. Turton (ed.), The Honor and Forest of Pickering (North Riding Record Society, new series, I, 1894), 64, 69, 71.

122D. C. Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War

(Cambridge, 2008).

123Morehouse, op. cit., 84, 97.

124A. J. Hopper, ‘John Mauleverer (c.1610– 1650), army officer’ in Matthew and Harrison (eds), ODNB.

125TNA, SP 28/286/166, SP 28/286/260, SP 28/286/29.

126BL, Additional MS 21,420, fo. 176; BL, Additional MS 21,421, fo. 131; BL, Additional MS 21,422, fos 72, 93; BL, Additional MS 21,423, fos 72–3.

127TNA, SP 46/109/4.

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debentures owing to the necessity of paying fees to the Worcester House administrators. Adam Baynes’s own lieutenant warned him that such charges incurred ‘a discontent amoung the soulderie’, who reflected ‘it is sumthing strange that the poor souldiers should pay the wages of the parliaments trustees’. In addition to the fees, Gentles has pointed out ‘that there was widespread forgery of public faith bills in the interregnum’, and that this was well known by contemporaries.128 On 11 June 1651 the Worcester House contractors were sent an anonymous letter declaring that a Captain Huett and Captain Cannon, who were ‘everyday at Worcester House’, were tendering counterfeit debentures, and that they ‘intend to passe greate sumes’. The informant claimed to have heard it as ‘a trueth from their owne mouthes spoken in their jollity’.129 The Rump’s Council of State ordered the arrest of a series of Worcester House officials and several were held in custody during summer 1652 before being bailed on 21 August.130 However, Gentles considered that the ‘investigation of corruption within the administration appears to have proceeded with less than maximum vigour’.131

Eyre uncovered further corruption personally, and wrote from Worcester House to inform Baynes, who was by then MP for the newly enfranchised Leeds, on 20 March 1655.132 In this letter, Eyre claimed that the Registrar of Debentures133 had discharged Matthew Barker, one of the clerks, for having informed him that Thomas Babington, another clerk, had received into the office £20,000 of debentures and produced some of them after the time allowed. According to Eyre, the Registrar ‘quashed the businesse’ and that day ‘commanded silence to all the clerks in the office Concerneing it’. Eyre was aggrieved that the Registrar then raised Babington’s salary from 5s to 8s per day ‘and Certified his brother Hotham on a Sallery at 5s p[er] diem as my Assistant, who did nothing with mee for it’. Eyre added that in October 1654, Isaac Hunt, the auditor to the trustees, showed him a way of making profit by ‘making vending and allowing on purchase Bills formerly allowed over againe, w[hi]ch I refused and positively denied’. Eyre complained that Hunt claimed to have passed £700 in this way already. Hunt proposed to split the profits three ways between himself, Barker and Eyre, with ‘secrecy enjoyned’. Eyre pondered whether he should leave ‘the office & them to their wayes’, doubting whether Hunt ‘spoke truth or to ensnare mee, neither indeed did I imagine feasible for that all cancelled debenters have their entryes of ye bills endorsed before they come to mee & the Bills to be split were used to bee written upon by my selfe’. Eyre continued that ‘at my goeing into the Country before Christmas I shut upp the office that none of them might pass in my absence’. Once Eyre informed Baynes, the latter in turn notified Lambert and some of the Protector’s council, but the Registrar responded by taking the key from Eyre, saying Mr Babington, Mr Hotham and himself ‘were to doe the worke of their Offices’, and padlocking the door that night to deny Eyre entrance. Eyre had informed Mr Bosvile ‘to acquaint the Trustees withal why the p[er]sons aforesaid are unfit’, but lamented ‘nothing is yet done in itt’. Eyre gave his reasons for speaking out with some indignation, suggesting he had done much to internalize

128Gentles, op. cit., 78–9.

129BL, Stowe MS 184, fo. 232.

130M. A. E. Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1651–1652 (London, 1877), 376, 565.

131Gentles, op. cit., 96.

132BL, Additional MS 21,423, fos 72–3.

133This was probably William Potter, registrar of debentures from 1650.

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parliamentarian notions of civil duty and serving a trust. Protesting he had been ‘faithfull in discharge of my Trust’, he declared:

In all w[hi]ch I know not that I have erred from my duty, notwithstanding severrall Censorious opinions of mee to the Contrary, for that I humbly conceive it more for the Honour of the house & the benefitt of the security to detect then countenance fraud, w[hi]ch tends to the Ruine of all Just Interests & prejudice of the Publiq, and what ever my reward shall bee I shall thinke my selfe happy in that I have discharged my duty and am deliv[er]ed from soe greate a temptacon & snare.134

Eyre lamented that the Registrar now intended his removal, which would in future prove ‘a faire inducem[en]t to such as shall have the like op[p]ertunity rather to imbrace & Comply with it, then suffer by detecting it’. He concluded that the Registrar’s advancement of Thomas Babington and John Hotham, who went on to become registrars themselves later that year, was ‘inconsistent with the honor of the House’, as both had been ‘form[er]ly guilty of the breach of trust for private p[ro]fit’.135 Babington was once more under suspicion of fraudulent practices in July 1656, while Isaac Hunt and the comptroller, Henry Robinson, emulated Babington in using their positions to acquire crown land for themselves.136

This was Eyre’s last surviving letter from Worcester House so it is possible the affair led to the termination of his employment there. Yet Eyre’s travels between Hazlehead and London continued, punctuated by stopovers at Holdenby House, where Cornet George Joyce had seized the king in June 1647, but which was now the property of Adam Baynes.137 Eyre also utilized his knowledge and contacts within the Protectorate’s bureaucracy, along with his access to Baynes, in order to advance friends and family. On 29 February 1656 Eyre recommended his cousin Robert Eyre to Baynes for employment in London. Robert had served in Baynes’s troop, and Eyre informed him that he had heard that ‘divers landwaiters at ye custom house are lik[e]ly to be shortly reduced & new ones chosen w[hi]ch place I believe hee may well execute notwithstanding ye impediment in his speech & it would be a good subsistence for him’.138 Eyre wrote again

on 11 March, stressing that one Mr Partridge ‘would be glad on reasonable terms to assist’ Robert, ‘in case hee may not be thought fit of him selfe’.139

On 14 May 1653 Eyre petitioned that if the northern officers’ arrears were not settled, he, having purchased crown land, was ‘in danger to loose the whole to his utter ruine, hee having contracted great debts for payment of his said first moytie which at present he canne neither sell nor borrow monie on for payment’.140 The same day he wrote to Baynes from Worcester House pleading for his aid and intercession ‘in respect of my present condicon’.141 Soon afterwards, on 4 June, he confided to Baynes that unless

134BL, Additional MS 21,423, fos 72–3.

135ibid.; TNA, SP 28/286/448.

136Gentles, op. cit., 96, 120, 162, 240, 300, 317– 18, 339, 355.

137BL, Additional MS 21,424, fos 33, 45; BL, Additional MS 21,427, fo. 186; Scott, ‘Adam Baynes’; G. Isham, ‘Adam Baynes of Leeds and Holdenby: soldier, politician, justice of the

peace, land speculator, demolition contractor, and prisoner in the Tower’, Northamptonshire Past and Present, II, 3 (1954–9), 139.

138BL, Additional MS 21,424, fo. 33.

139ibid., fo. 45.

140BL, Additional MS 21,427, fo. 177.

141BL, Additional MS 21,422, fo. 72.

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Major-General Lambert’s assistance was procured, ‘our Attendance for our Arreares shall be continuated to our absolute ruine, and not Releived at last’. If there was no hope of relief, Eyre demanded that it was

high time I think (wee having allready attended 6 ye[a]rs & upwards) that wee knew it. But I hope neither England in Gen[er]all nor wee in p[ar]ticuler shall have cause to say our Taskmasters are Changed but our Burthen not removed. S[i]r would you please to urge as many reasons for us as you have form[er]ly done ag[ains]t us it would doubtelesse much facilitate & allso accelerate our releife.142

This suggests that Eyre placed some of the blame upon Baynes himself. It appears Eyre was once again thwarted, as by the following March he was forced into relinquishing half of Blandsby Park for an undisclosed sum.143 Having heard that Captain Oates had approached Lambert directly for his own arrears, on 18 September 1655 Eyre entreated advice from Baynes about whether he might receive ‘parti[a]le satisfaccon . . . for what is in my hands still w[hi]ch com[e]s to 6000li, therefore rather then hazard the losse of all’.144 It is highly unlikely that a full payment of Eyre’s arrears was ever made and the remnant of his crown land at Blandsby Park was lost at the Restoration, reverting back to the Queen Mother, who used it to reward her favourites.145

Eyre continued to serve the Protectorate regime in minor local offices. On 9 June 1657, styled as an esquire, he was named among the commissioners for the West Riding to raise a monthly assessment for Cromwell’s war with Spain.146 That month he prosecuted the Commonwealth’s business on behalf of Adam Baynes and the Committee for the Army at Mansfield in Sherwood Forest.147 On 13 April 1659, he petitioned Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate parliament on behalf of many of the late Lord Fairfax’s officers to have the £23,566 still owed to them ‘put into bills or bonds and allowed on any part of the four forests or chases, as other bills and debts are’.148 In its final days, this parliament killed the petition by referring it to the investigation of a committee.149 On 2 September 1659 Eyre was in London soliciting Baynes, should a similar Forest Act be passed by the restored Rump, to ‘assist the Northerne List wherein my cheife Concernem[en]t lyes’.150 The Restoration of Charles II shortly thereafter thwarted Eyre’s last, remote hopes of relief. He was buried at Penistone on 6 April 1661, but his will, proved by his cousin and executor Joseph Eyre, was the one made on 15 February 1648, containing very modest bequests. This will had revoked previous wills, indicating that, until then, Eyre had kept them up to date. His employment in London had not been lucrative enough to warrant a new will, while his widow Susannah’s will of 1668 was also very modest, underlining that her husband’s military and civilian services to parliament had scarcely advanced the couple financially.151

142ibid., fo. 93.

143Gentles, op. cit., 279, 346.

144BL, Additional MS 21,423, fo. 142.

145Morehouse, op. cit., appendix, 353; Gentles, op. cit., 3; Page, op. cit.

146C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols (London, 1911), II, 1067.

147BL, Additional MS 21,427, fos 253–4.

148J. T. Rutt (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Burton, 4 vols (1828), IV, 413n.

149Journal of the House of Commons, vol. VII, 1651–1660, 638.

150BL, Additional MS 21,425, fo. 122. 151Morehouse, op. cit., 353–7; BL, Additional MS 25,463, fo. 95.

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CONCLUSION

Wallace Notestein once considered that if Eyre’s diurnal had continued ‘the story probably would not have differed much from that already recorded’.152 The reverse now seems more likely. Eyre’s civil war activism had widened his horizons, rendering him far more socially and geographically mobile than he was in 1640. Eyre’s experience also warns historians against generalizing about provincial puritans or making assumptions regarding their behaviour. Paul Seaver once considered that Puritanism created ‘a minority religious culture’ which ‘left the Godly blind to much of traditional culture and largely immune to its attractions’.153 Yet Eyre was capable of appreciating the Godly sermon as well as traditional, festive culture, popular sports and pastimes, heavy drinking and good neighbourliness. Eyre’s example led David Hey to speculate that some historians have ‘over-emphasized the clash of cultures between the chapel and the alehouse’.154 Eyre also affords an interesting comparison to Protestant literary village elites in continental Europe, such as the prosperous Zwinglian peasant, Jost von Brechersha¨usern, who wrote lamenting the immorality of his neighbours in the mid- seventeenth-century Canton of Bern.155

Historians should not underestimate the political sophistication of such parish elites, even in far-flung localities. Driven to recover the debt owed him by the parliamentarian regime he had supported, Eyre voluntarily engaged himself with national affairs and institutions, as well as serving as a kind of informal elite vestryman in parish government. Compelled by the revolutionary circumstances of the 1640s, he accomplished the transition from Pennine yeoman farmer to London bureaucrat, highlighting the difficulties in applying the labels of class or even ‘sorts’ to seventeenth-century individuals. He was comfortable sporting with the soldiery in West Riding alehouses, as well as discussing high politics and legal affairs with local knights Sir John Kay and Sir John Savile.156 In his will of 15 February 1648, he was styled a yeoman. For his burial in the parish register he was styled a gentleman.157 For his purchase of crown lands he was styled a gentleman of London. For his service as parliamentary commissioner in 1657 he was styled an esquire. Eyre was able to present his identity in different ways according to the requirements of social context and, unlike those parochial gentry investigated by H. R. French, his social identity was not rooted exclusively in his immediate neighbourhood.158 The civil wars drew considerable numbers of parish elites like Eyre into local and national office, in both military and civilian roles. This suggests that such groups ought not always to remain ‘of limited importance to the political historian’.159 In

152Notestein, op. cit., 269.

153P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London

(Stanford, 1985), viii.

154Hey, History of Penistone, op. cit., 86.

155I am very grateful to Beat Ku¨min for these references and inviting this comparison: A. Dubois and D. Tosato-Rigo, ‘Jost von Brechersha¨usern. Un paysan bernois du XVIIe sie`cle entre solidarite´ de classe et solidarite´ confessionelle’ in A. Head-Ko¨nig and

A. Tanner (eds), Die Bauern in der Geschichte der Schweiz (Zurich, 1992), 105–28; J. Peters (ed.), Mit Pflug und Ga¨nsekiel. Selbstzeugnisse schreibender Bauern. Eine Anthologie (Cologne, 2003).

156Morehouse, op. cit., 40, 55.

157BL, Additional MS 25,463, fo. 95.

158H. R. French, ‘The search for the “middle sort” of people in England, 1600– 1800’, Historical Journal, XLIII, 1 (March 2000), 286.

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Adam Eyre and the English Revolution

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areas where parliament enjoyed little support from the county gentry, middling sorts like Eyre provided the driving force behind the parliamentarian war effort. Their activism transformed their horizons, but the experience of Eyre and the ‘northern list’ indicates that they were poorly recompensed. By looking beyond Eyre’s diurnal and then combining local and national sources, this article demonstrates how our perceptions of individuals can be transformed, sometimes quite drastically, when social and political histories are more closely integrated.

Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester

159H. R. French, ‘Accumulation and aspirations among the parish gentry: economic strategies and social identity in a

Pennine family 1650–1780’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, XIV (1999), 20–1.