The plaintiffs in this case, Thomas Barrowe, John Bowles, gentleman, and Thomas Fullstone, yeoman, were all inhabitants of Faulstone. ‘Faulstone’ may refer to the manor, the tithing, or one of the six villages in Bishopstone parish, which was located about six-and-a-half miles southwest of Salisbury and two miles east of Broad Chalk. The defendants–Jesse Paige, his wife Katherine, and her daughter (presumably by an earlier marriage) Dorothy Whitemarsh–were all of Salisbury, as were the civil and ecclesiastical officials drawn into the dispute. The conflict arose because Jesse and Katherine Paige objected to the marriage of her daughter to Thomas Fullstone and intervened to separate the couple. The complex series of claims and counterclaims covers events that go back to 1602 and range from Brent Knoll, Somersetshire, in the west to Norwich in the east. Besides allegations of corruption, perjury, subornation of witnesses, and bribery, the case included a charge of defamation for certain verses, which ridiculed Thomas Fullstone for being, not a gentleman born worth £50 a year, but a poor player wandering about the country ‘Pipinge and taberinge for peces of breade and Chese’. Given the adversarial nature of the document and the character of the allegedly libellous verses, we cannot be sure if this representation of Fullstone is factually accurate. He may have been a musician; on the other hand, this image of him might have been a false, but rhetorically vivid way of demeaning and ridiculing him.
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