A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter E

estovers

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The common law right to take wood from another's land for specified purposes such as fuel, fencing, or building repairs.

Detailed Definition
Estovers derives from Old French "estovoir" (necessity, supplies) and describes the customary right allowing tenants and commoners to collect wood from land they did not own for essential domestic purposes: fuel for heating, timber for repairing dwellings and fences, and materials for agricultural implements. It was one of several interrelated common rights—alongside turbary, pannage, and herbage—that constituted the "economy of makeshift" sustaining the rural poor. In poetry estovers appears in historical verse examining the common rights that were gradually extinguished through enclosure, when the poor lost their traditional access to the resources of woodland and common land. The word signals an engagement with the legal history of rural England and the political struggle over whose needs the land should serve.
Example
Example in poetry:
Estovers appears in historical verse about the common rights of the rural poor — the legal term that named the customary right to gather wood for fuel, fencing, and building repair from land the commoner did not own; A poet examining the enclosure of English common land might write "they took the estovers with the commons — the winter's fuel, the fence-post, the beam for the leaking roof — and called it improvement"; The legal precision of estovers — its distinction between different types and quantities of wood that might be taken for different purposes — signals a poem's engagement with the detailed legal history of rural England and the contested nature of common rights; In elegies for the pre-enclosure countryside, estovers stands for the entire web of customary access that gave the poor a stake in the land — the small but vital rights whose loss left them entirely dependent on wage labor; The concept of estovers — the right to take what is necessary but not more, the limit imposed by the word "estover" (necessity) — represents a philosophy of sufficiency and restraint in the use of shared resources that many poets find more sustainable than the logic of unlimited private ownership; George Crabbe's unflinching verse about rural poverty implicitly mourns the loss of estovers and similar rights, showing the consequences for the poor when the legal framework of customary access is swept away.
Additional Notes
Estovers belongs to a group of Anglo-French legal terms — alongside turbary, pannage, herbage, and agistment — that describe the customary rights of commoners to use resources from land they do not own. Students studying the politics of enclosure and the history of common rights in England should understand this entire cluster of terms together, as they represent different components of the "economy of makeshift" that sustained the rural poor. Estovers specifically covers the right to take wood: "housebote" (wood for house repair), "haybote" (wood for fencing), "firebote" (wood for fuel), and "ploughbote" (wood for agricultural implements) were the traditional sub-categories. The word's derivation from Old French "estovoir" (necessity) is itself significant: the right is defined by need, not by desire, and the quantity that could be taken was limited to what was necessary rather than what was profitable. This principle of sufficiency — taking what is needed, not more — represents a philosophy of resource use that modern ecological thinking has found relevant. Related terms: turbary, pannage, herbage, agistment.
Also Known As
estover wood allowance firebote housebote haybote
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