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Every man who had any house at all had some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two that he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then there were no large farmers. I cannot make out that there was any one in Rougham who farmed as much as two hundred acres all told. What we now understand by tenant farmers were a class that had not yet come into existence.
And so it came to pass that Peter Romayn of Rougham, cleric though he were, lost his heart one fine day to a young lady at Rougham, and marry he would. The young lady's name was Matilda. Her father, though born at Rougham, appears to have gone away from there when very young, and made money somehow at Leicester.
I suppose the court was crowded, and in the crowd some rogue cut off Sir Richard's purse, and made off with his seal. And now I must return to the point from which I wandered when I began to speak of the free tenants and the "villeins." William le Butler, who sold old Ralph Red to his own son, the young Ralph, was himself sprung from a family who had held the Manor of Rougham for about a century.
When Archdeacon Middleton gave up living at Rougham, Thomas Felix bought his estate, called the Lyng House; and shortly after he bought another estate, which, in fact, was a manor of its own, and comprehended thirteen free tenants and five villeins; and, as though this were not enough, on September 24, 1292, he took a lease of another manor in Rougham for six years, of one of the daughters of Sir Richard le Butler, whose husband, I suppose, wanted to go elsewhere.
In those days, as in our own, there were much richer men in the country than the country gentlemen, and in Rougham at this time there were two very prosperous men who were competing with one another as to which should buy up most land in the parish, and be the great man of the place. The one of these was a gentleman called Peter the Roman, and the other was called Thomas the Lucky.
Then, too, the smaller monasteries had one or more chaplains, and I suspect that the canons at Castle Acre always would keep two or three chaplains in their pay, and it is not unlikely that as long as Archdeacon Middleton kept on his big house at Rougham he would have a chaplain, who would be attached to the place, and bound to perform the service in the great man's chapel.
The parish church was too small for the population of Rougham, and the consequence was that it had been found necessary to erect what we should now call a chapel of ease served, I suppose, by an assistant priest, who would be called a chaplain. Wilkins' "Conc.," vol. ii. p. 296. There was, I think, only one road deserving the name, which passed through Rougham.
He had married a Norfolk lady, one Agatha of Cringleford; and he seems to have died, leaving his widow and daughter fairly provided for; and they lived in a house at Rougham, which I dare say Richard of Leicester had bought. I have no doubt that young Peter Romayn was a young gentleman of means, and it is clear that Matilda was a very desirable bride. But then Peter couldn't marry!
It was delivered in the Public Reading-room of the village of Tittleshall, a parish adjoining Rougham, and was listened to with apparent interest and great attention by an audience of farmers, village tradesmen, mechanics, and labourers.
They were both the sons of Rougham people, and it will be necessary to pursue the history of each of them to make you understand how things went in those "good old times." First let me deal with Peter the Roman. He was the son of a Rougham lady named Isabella, by an Italian gentleman named lacomo de Ferentino, or if you like to translate it into English, James of Ferentinum.
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