Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [487]
“Why does he work with the labourers?” he asked in surprise.
“Because he chooses to,” Margaret answered. And then she explained: “Your brother Edmund has become a Digger.”
A Digger: he had not met the term before; he wondered what it was.
Of all the curious groups and sects thrown up by the ferment of the Civil War, the Diggers were amongst the most curious: but also, like many extremists, the most logical. Indeed, when Obadiah and Edmund had quarrelled about who should have the vote, the Presbyterian had been right to accuse Edmund of tendencies which would lead to what he called chaos.
For if the Levellers had demanded a vote for all free men of property, the Diggers believed that all men should be free.
“And if true freedom lies in the owning of land and goods; why then, should not – if all men are to be free – all goods be held in common?” So Edmund urged his sister and his ten-year-old brother that day as they sat at the big table in the farmhouse where the Digger community of St George’s Hill lived together.
“All we have here, we hold in common,” he explained. “We labour together as friends.” He showed them round the place proudly.
So this was the practical result of Edmund’s long agony and self-questioning.
“’Tis like a monastery and a nunnery all together,” she joked.
“There is no religious rule,” he assured her seriously, and she wondered how long the community could last upon such easygoing terms.
She watched him carefully. He seemed so thin. There was a new gleam in his eye: was it a gleam of inner peace, or some suppressed desperation? She did not know.
They spent a pleasant evening together. He was clearly happy to see them both. But he seemed equally happy when they left the next morning.
Samuel was puzzled.
“Does he mean we should not keep the farm?”
“He wants no part of it.”
“I wonder why he does not want the farm.”
“He has been unhappy.”
Samuel considered. He could not make much of this.
“Is he happy now?”
“I wish I knew.”
He had died after a wasting sickness eighteen months later. The reports brought to Margaret told her he died contented. The community of Diggers did not last, but remained one of the more determined of the early European essays in practical communism.
With only Margaret and Obadiah to look to, it seemed to Samuel, therefore, that in his life there were two worlds. There was the Avon valley, where Margaret ruled, and Salisbury, where Obadiah held court. Avonsford was his childhood, Salisbury the outside world. One, much loved, held him back: the other, undiscovered territory tempted him forward.
Obadiah Shockley bided his time.
By the time he was twelve, Samuel was a bright, fair-haired youth who looked even more like his sister than Nathaniel had. Quick-witted, he knew everything there was to know about the farm and the water meadows and, thanks to Jacob Godfrey, he already had a thorough understanding of the farm accounts. He had been given some schooling – pressed by Obadiah, Margaret had seen to that. She had engaged a young clergyman to come to the Shockley farm three days a week to tutor him. He had made excellent progress.
But above all, Margaret taught him to know the local countryside.
“I may not be a scholar like Obadiah,” she said defiantly, “but I understand the land.”
There was seldom a day they did not walk five or ten miles.
He knew the Avon valley, every inch of it, all the way up to Amesbury in the north and past Stonehenge beyond.
Each part had its particular characteristic.
There were the slopes and meadows near Old Sarum, where the villagers still held extensive common land.
“But they are ploughing it into fields now,” she explained, “where they can close-fold their flocks.” Soon he was familiar with the complex set of bye-laws that regulated the villagers’ intense cultivation of their jointly owned flocks and hedged fields.
Sometimes, they would follow the Avon downstream, past the cathedral, over the bridge and south to the little village of Britford, at the edge of old Clarendon Forest. Once or twice they walked further still, southwards