Edmund Jordan

Edmund Jordan’s pleasantness is part of his power: he can offer bread and ale, laugh over a joke, and speak of family loyalty while converting an emptied village into a sheep-farming estate. His decisive act is not simply to propose a new use for the land, but to treat the villagers’ flight and the accusations against three women as openings for a program of enclosure, hired labor, and renewed control. In his dealings with Walter Thirsk and Charles Kent, warmth and coercion work side by side.

Identity and Manner

When Walter comes to the manor house after the villagers have fled, Edmund meets him at the door and brings him in to breakfast. He offers bread and ale, though not the cold meats or cheeses, a small detail that makes his welcome both civilized and carefully measured. His spirits are high; he claps his hands at the news that no villager has stayed behind or spoken of returning. To Walter, he seems pleasant when relaxed, even as the pleasure he takes in the villagers’ absence exposes what that ease serves.

His humor helps him control a room without appearing to strain for authority. He jokes about the frightened neighbors, laughs at his own wordplay, and places a hand on the forearm of each man at the table. The gestures invite closeness, but they accompany a settled announcement: Charles Kent will leave with him, and the two cousins already have a plan. Edmund’s manner softens the presentation of decisions whose consequences are severe.

A Program of More

Edmund describes himself as a steward pursuing direction, profit, progress, and enterprise. He contrasts the existing village, organized around “Enough,” with the settlement of “More” he intends to make. His scheme is comprehensive: fence the land, reinforce its boundaries with quickthorn, and turn the fields, commons, and woods he calls wasted into sheep country. The language of improvement makes the transformation sound like responsible management, but its material result is the replacement of a settled community and its mixed uses of land with an enclosed estate devoted to sheep.

That program bears directly on the villagers’ subsistence. Their farming depends on uncertain seasons: sun and rain may fail, wind can flatten crops, mildew can ruin them, cattle may suffer disease, and crows can take the harvest. Wool, by contrast, is presented as more dependable because it grows without relying on the sun and is not ruined by the same agricultural hazards. The pastoral promise of predictable fleece and easier work thus answers real insecurity, but it does so by shifting control of the land and its livelihood to the estate. The villagers’ customary world of common labor and shared provision is not preserved in Edmund’s imagined prosperity; sheep replace the sheaf.

Power, Kinship, and the Bargain

Edmund presents his authority as compatible with family feeling. He tells Walter that Charles is his cousin through marriage, calls him family and country kin, and claims that Charles’s benefit is his own. Yet the alliance also allows Edmund to secure Charles’s departure in his company, while Charles’s silent nods and nudges support Edmund’s plans at breakfast. Kinship here does not prevent a transfer of power; it helps arrange one.

Walter, bruised after the violence in The Village, cautiously asks whether Charles is to be deposed. Edmund redirects his concern, assuring him that Charles need not spend anxiety on his own position. He instead asks Walter to stay behind as the new master’s ears and eyes. The proposed appointment is tied to a timetable for remaking the estate: a steward has already gone to organize the purchase of sheep; hired workers are expected to lodge in empty cottages as trees are cut and hedges and stone walls built; shepherds are expected in autumn, bringing wages. Until then, Walter will have little company and is also charged with ensuring that the man in the Pillory serves the remaining three days of his sentence. Edmund’s management begins not with a fully staffed estate but with surveillance, a labor plan, and instructions for enforcing an existing punishment.

The Captives and the Estate Boundary

The witchcraft accusations become another instrument of Edmund’s settlement. When Walter raises the subject, Edmund presses a thumb into his bruised arm and warns that he does not want Walter’s other cheek scarred. He then forbids further talk of magic or sorcery. The command ends the prospect of trials and executions, but it does not restore the accused women to freedom on the estate. Edmund agrees to release Kitty Gosse, Anne Rogers, and Lizzie Carr only after they have been escorted under custody to a marketplace three days away. Their names, and the names of their families, are excluded from his lands thereafter.

The bargain is explicit: Edmund consents to “untether the witches” if Walter stays to watch the estate until sheep take charge. He describes the women as having made time stand still and shaded his path, refusing to pardon what he regards as their interference. His prohibition on witchcraft talk therefore has a double edge. It stops the accusations from escalating into formal trials, while leaving Edmund in control of the women’s movement and using their expulsion to enforce the boundary of his property. Charles accompanies the party so that he can witness the women walking free in the town, though he says he does not expect to return to the place.

Departure and Significance

Edmund’s immediate victory is practical: he leaves with Charles and the three captives, while Walter remains behind to represent the new order. The villagers’ departure is recast as a return of the land to its owner, giving Edmund what he calls a chance to begin again on a spotless sheet of parchment. That image turns abandonment into a clean administrative beginning, obscuring the human cost of the supposed fresh start.

Edmund is not presented only as a smiling reformer or as a plainly violent ruler. His welcome, jokes, family language, and assurances against witchcraft trials coexist with the threat of further injury, the continued custody of the women, and the planned conversion of common land into sheep pasture. Through him, the rhetoric of progress becomes a means of making dispossession appear orderly and beneficial. The change he promises is not merely agricultural: it determines who may remain, who must leave, and who will watch the land while its new boundaries are built.