"Arden Lay Murdered in That Plot of Ground": Surveying, Land, and Arden of Faversham

Without the habit of conceptualising space, a traveller going to war or work could not link his separate impressions to the nature of his route as a whole... [A] man could not visualise the country to which he belonged; a landowner, unable to “see” his properties as a whole was not concerned to concentrate his scattered holdings by sale or exchanges. 1

According to its epilogue, Arden of Faversham tells us “the truth of Arden’s death.” 2 That “truth” refers not only to the homicidal machinations that lead up to the murder of Arden, but also to a certain relationship between the killing and the land: “Arden lay murdered in that plot of ground / Which he by force and violence held from Reede; / And in the grass his body’s print was seen / Two years and more after the deed was done” (AF, Epilogue, 10–13). The murderous actions taken against Arden mirror the “force and violence” with which he withheld the “plot of ground,” and the bloody print seen in the grass attests to the indignation of both Reede, who earlier cursed his landlord, and the land itself. The epilogue reminds us that in the late sixteenth century land is not solely thought of in terms of its utility or its fungibility, its status as a commodity; here the land speaks an ethics of ownership that has its origins in feudalism. What I shall argue, though, is that in Elizabethan England, thanks to changes in a variety of social and material practices, and to technological innovations such as those that revolutionize estate surveying, the meaning of the land begins to undergo a profound transformation. Arden of Faversham takes sides in an Elizabethan struggle over the cultural function of land, a struggle in which older conceptions of property as social office are troubled by emergent ideologies and technologies that imply a radically different view of what it means to be a landowner.

I

Let us begin with that “plot of ground.” Returning from Shorlow, Arden is met by the ocean-bound Dick Reede, who confronts him as follows:

My coming to you was about the plot of ground Which wrongfully you detain from me. Although the rent of it be very small, Yet will it help my wife and children, Which here I leave in Faversham, God knows, Needy and bare.

(AF, 13.12–17)

In reply, Arden, who states he “dearly bought” the land, angrily asserts that if Reede continues to “rail on [him],” he will “banish pity” from his actions (AF, 13.19–27). Then follows Reede’s curse, also a request beseeched of God:

That plot of ground which thou detains from me... Be ruinous and fatal unto thee! Either there be butchered by thy dearest friends, Or else be brought for men to wonder at, Or thou or thine miscarry in that place, Or there run mad and end thy cursed days.

(AF, 13.32–38)

This curse is one that Reede shall “leave with [his] distressful wife; / [His] children shall be taught such prayers as these” (AF, 13.51–52). Interestingly, though, Arden is not murdered on the contested land; he is only later dragged to the plot of ground necessary for the maintenance of Reede’s family.

What we see here is land positioned variously in relationship to intersecting feudal, religious and familial discourses. In banishing pity, Arden rhetorically casts off the mantle of the beneficent lord, the model for whom might be found in this “popular eulogy” for the third Earl of Huntingdon:

His tenants that daily repaired to his house Was fed with his bacon, his beef, & his souse. Their rents were not raised, their fines were but small, And many poore tenants paid nothing at all. No groves he enclosed, nor felled no wood, No pastures he paled to do himself good. To commons and country he lived a good friend, And gave to the needy what God did him send. 3

Even in this paean to the generous lord, one who fulfills the moral responsibilities of his office...