The Herberts and the Manor of Ribbesford

The manor of Ribbesford, in Worcestershire, holds a small but significant place in English literary history. In 1627, in the months following Magdalen Herbert’s death, the estate passed from the Crown into the Herbert family, first to the trio of George and Edward Herbert and Thomas Lawley, and then to Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, who reportedly purchased it from his brothers and cousin for £3,000. Ribbesford remained in the hands of Henry Herbert’s heirs for a century and a half.¹ This, at least, is the customary account, as it appears (with minor variations) in the Dictionary of National Biography’s entry for Sir Henry Herbert, in F.E. Hutchinson’s Oxford edition of George Herbert’s Poems, and in Amy M. Charles’s Life of George Herbert.² How Henry Herbert came into possession of the manor of Ribbesford is a question Herbert scholars must now revisit, along with the implications of that transaction for our understanding of George Herbert’s life and career.

Modern biographical scholarship devoted to George Herbert attaches considerable importance to King Charles’s grant of the Ribbesford estate, and the subsequent sale to Henry. Cristina Malcolmson sees the grant from the Crown as a concrete sign of the death of Herbert’s court hopes. In her words, “it is clear that Charles and Buckingham felt the need to acknowledge the value of the Herbert brothers given their previous public labors and the death of their mother, but this need did not include preferment to office.”³ According to Amy Charles, George’s “share in such a sum of money must have been an extraordinary windfall, giving him for the first time in his life some measure of financial independence.” She goes on to speculate that his resignation of the Cambridge Oratorship may have as much to do with this infusion of funds as with Magdalen Danvers’ death.⁴ Malcolmson assumes (logically, but without documentary evidence) that George Herbert’s share of the proceeds was £1,000.⁵ Both feel (and others, including myself, have concurred) that this newfound financial security may have prompted his decisions to marry, to take orders as a priest and to enter the parish ministry. Charles also claims, on the basis of his will, that George invested some of the proceeds of the Ribbesford sale with the London printer Philemon Stevens, and in a recent essay I argue that this investment tells us something about his attitude towards commercial as opposed to landed wealth.⁶ In short, some Herbert scholars have built rather ambitiously on what now seems an insecure foundation. We may have to revise our account of George Herbert’s biography in which the royal grant of the Ribbesford estate launches the Cambridge Orator and would-be courtier on his brief clerical career.

Before going into the details it is worth expanding on the broader significance of Ribbesford for English literary history. Some evidence about the estate comes not from research into George Herbert’s poetry, but from research into the career of his brother Henry as licenser of Jacobean and Caroline plays and entertainments. As N.W. Bawcutt reports, “at the death of Sir Henry in 1673 Ribbesford contained a large quantity of manuscripts … including the office-book in which he entered a record of the licenses he had issued” for public performance of plays from 1623 to the closing of the theatres in 1642.⁷ Some of these papers made their way, through the hands of Henry Herbert’s heirs, and eventually into the collections of the British Museum and the National Library of Wales. But an “old chest” containing two of the most important documents, the Revels office-book and a manuscript of Edward Herbert’s autobiography, famously remained at Ribbesford until 1789, when it was discovered by the new owner of the estate, Francis Ingram. Also included among these papers were some documents relating to Sir Henry Herbert’s acquisition of the Ribbesford estate, and these property documents remained with the Ingram family until they were acquired by the British Library in 1998.

After the...