John Shakespeare’s payment of a shilling for his muckhill may well have been a source of revenue for the town of Stratford (Shakespeare expert overturns fly-tipper myth about playwright’s father, 23 February), but the fine was imposed for breaching an order of the court (“contra ordinationem Curie”).
It was common for manorial courts of the time to make orders that occupiers of land carry out certain tasks and in default be fined or amerced, as my ancestor Robert Ashton discovered for similar offences.
In 1706, the court baron for the Peak District hamlet of Rowland decreed: “We lay a payne that Robt Ashton shall remove his midine [dung hill] before 10th day of August next or forfit two shillings”. He was a serial offender, and in 1720 he was ordered to pay three shillings and four pence for a further offence.
That, however, was not as antisocial as his neighbour William Stanley, who was fined two shillings for “having a dead horse in the highway”.
Nic Madge
St Albans, Hertfordshire
• David Farrow is quite correct in his deductions about Shakespeare’s father’s “muckhill”. He was acting within his rights in leaving a heap to be collected. In effect he was renting the space for which he paid a regular “fine”, probably for many years.
The same thing must have happened everywhere where people needed a bit of ground – either because they had none or because they needed an “entrepot” for another to collect it. This happened in the town of Nottingham until the middle of the 19th century, when the late Inclosure Act 1845 changed habits.
A freemen’s committee “perambulated” fields and meadows up to that date to note every encroachment on the land and charge a fine.
Some were permanent, like buildings, ropewalks, washing lines, and cellars at the racecourse belonging to the town inns. Some were seasonal, like the haystacks, and the piles of bricks brought down to heap on the forest before the access roads to the brickyards became impassable.
Sometimes these heaps were defined, but often they were called “dungheaps”. This was apparently quite a respectable thing to do. In fact, those listed included “John Daykin of Nottingham Castle, gent” and “Ichabod Wright of Mapperley Hall, banker”.
June Perry
Nottingham
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