Damn His Blood (2 page)

The Oddingley case evokes the expressive and uncouth Georgian society that directly preceded Victorian Britain. Here many parishes remained worlds of their own, where little networks of hardy alliances were built on a stiff foundation of family loyalty and respect, where the men drank hard, worked hard, swore oaths and cursed. For many historians this world has remained elusive and opaque, with the Oddingley villagers of 1806 living in a time before determined record keeping began. It is a lost society that is resurrected in this criminal case, as the voices, concerns and culture of a rural parish at the beginning of the nineteenth century come to life. It’s the world which years later provided such a rich mine for novelists such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, and characters such as kindly Joe Gargery the blacksmith, Abel Magwitch the convict, Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae would have been at ease in the village alongside those who were there in 1806: Captain Evans the retired military officer, parish farmers John Barnett and Thomas Clewes, Richard Heming the tramping odd-job man and Reverend Parker the local parson. For the growing professional classes of late Georgian England, so intent on cleansing society of its ills and excesses, the story was a disquieting tale of a parish astray. More than perhaps any murder before, the crime involved a whole community, and the investigating magistrates’ attempts to unearth facts were dogged by questions of who knew what and at what price they were willing to reveal the truth. In time Oddingley gained a reputation as an unhappy place of secrets and lies. It was cursed, wretched, damned.

Beautiful and almost perfectly hidden among the hills and the woods of the Worcestershire countryside, the village was an unlikely setting for a terrible crime. Mary Sherwood, a popular children’s author, wrote at the time,

If ever there was a secluded, humble, quiet-looking village
³
– a village thinly populated, and which, to all appearance, is the domicile of only patient and peaceable sons of the soil – it is Oddingley. Its aspect belies it. It was the scene – and that not many years since – on which were exhibited some of the fiercest passions of man’s fallen nature; the spot where the seeds of malice, hatred, and the most determined and deeply seated revenge sprang up and ripened into a harvest of crime – crime most deliberately conceived and delicately executed.

Map of Worcestershire in 1804 by Charles Smith. Oddingley lies to the northeast of Worcester

PROLOGUE

Midsummer Day

Oddingley, Worcestershire, 24 June 1806

At around four o’clock in the morning on 24 June, Midsummer Day, John Chellingworth stepped out of his cottage in Oddingley and set off on a journey south. The clover harvest and haymaking seasons had arrived and meadowlands across Worcestershire awaited the reapers who would skim the fields with scythes, cutting the crops to within an inch of the ground before raking the yields into rows and turning them again and again beneath the sun. Chellingworth was a journeyman worker and he had secured three weeks’ work at a farm in Gloucestershire, at least 20 miles and a full day’s walk away. The first shadowy smudges of light had not yet appeared in the sky when he met Pritchard, another village farmhand, and the two men struck out on the road together. They passed St James’ Church and Church Farm, and then the drowsing farmyard at Netherwood – flanked with several old barns and a tall brick farmhouse – before they rounded a corner and climbed away up a steady slope towards Crowle, the adjoining parish, and out of view.

Chellingworth and Pritchard would already have crossed the parish boundary when the sun rose at a quarter to five. It shone over a scene of rare quiet in the village, an ephemeral moment before the day’s work began. Within an hour labourers would be streaming into the yards, lanes and meadows, carrying heavy tools, jugs of weak beer or perry cider, and pushing handcarts, wheelbarrows and wagons. Once they reached the mowing fields, the farmhands would start shifts that would stretch until darkness fell or the weather turned. And though the haymaking season had barely yet begun, they had already suffered one scare. On 12 June a violent storm had knifed wildly across the Midland sky. Rain had drenched the pastures and young crops, and ‘awful and tremendous’ peals of thunder had rung from black clouds over-head, which illuminated the county with ‘the most vivid flashes of lightning’.
¹

The storm passed and minds had now turned towards the festival which lay before them. Although it was not an official holiday, Midsummer Day remained a notable date in the calendar, and one which retained its airy, seductive and supernatural allure. In ancient England Midsummer Day was celebrated with Celtic fire festivals that marked the height of summer. Great bonfires were burnt at elevated points across the kingdom and fairs staged in assorted towns. On Midsummer Eve livestock would be dragged by their owners before fires, where they would be blessed by the crackling flames, and men, fortified with alcohol, would line up to leap over the embers in a symbolic ritual which dramatised the perilous and delicate relationship between nature and man. Folklore dictated that the greatest leap determined the height of the year’s harvest.

Midsummer was a time of magic and myth, where divisions between one world and the next blurred temporarily. Wise women recounted stories about Robin Goodfellows, elves, spirits and fairies that danced in the woods and flitted across the meadows. A chance encounter with one could bestow on a wanderer the gifts of a bard or the terrors of madness. On Midsummer Day it was traditional for villagers across England to gather St John’s Wort, an earthy yellow medicinal herb that was said to be infused with all the mysterious powers of the sun, bringing happiness, comfort and good fortune. In Worcestershire in 1806 this seasonal sense of excitement was increased in the week before Midsummer by a partial eclipse of the sun, which was sighted across the county.
²

In Oddingley 24 June held other significance. It was the date by which many of the parish farmers were required to have paid their annual rents to Lord Foley,
³
the local landowner, and for the wider community it was remembered as the day of the popular Bromsgrove Fair. Country fairs were important and much anticipated fixtures in the rural calendar with yeomen, tradesmen and hawking parsons exploiting their popularity as an opportunity to sell produce. Meanwhile, the larger farmers treated fairs as social occasions where they could hire additional labourers from among the crowds, exchange stories with old friends and complain about the weather.

The rich landscape of a typical fair is recreated in the opening scene of Thomas Hardy’s
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, when Michael Henchard arrives at the village of Weydon Priors on fair day. He sees the vast field before him bedecked with ‘peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks,
⁴
inspired monsters, disinterested medical men … thimble-ringers, nick-nack vendors and readers of Fate’. Such amusements offered workers a necessary release from the monotonous grind of daily life on the farms, allowing them to act irresponsibly among the lively but unrefined entertainments which included xenophobic plays, drinking stalls and bawdy comedians. William Hazlitt, the contemporary essayist, once observed that labourers used fairs as an excuse to behave like ‘a schoolboy let loose from school, or like a dog that has slipped his collar’, waltzing drunkenly between the jugglers, the roasted hogs and the ginger-bread bakers.

Forty-one different fair days were held annually across Worcestershire,
⁵
with larger towns such as Worcester, Droitwich, Kidderminster and Pershore boasting two apiece. At Bromsgrove the fair was particularly noted for linen and other cloth, cheese, horses and cattle, and for Oddingley’s farmers it was close at hand, little more than an hour away. Despite this, only those who were able to delegate their duties could afford to attend. Thomas Clewes – master of Netherwood Farm – was one of these, and he was seen riding through the village on Midsummer morning by Susan Surman, a dairymaid who worked for farmer John Barnett at Pound Farm. As Clewes passed Pound Farm, Surman heard him say that ‘he should be very glad to find a dead parson in Oddingley when he came back’.

Over at Church Farm the clover was being cut and wooden hurdles were being sawn and then blacked in the muddy pool that lay in a dip below the fold-yard – a sheltered area encircled by barns, stables and workshops, where sheep were often penned. Here a second dairymaid, Elizabeth Fowler, saw Richard Heming, a labourer, hauling hurdles out of the pool. He was being helped by a 14-year-old boy called Thomas Langford. Captain Evans – master of Church Farm – was in the fold-yard, and Elizabeth heard him ask the labourer when he thought the job would be finished.

‘Not on the morrow,’ Heming told Evans. He added that he would come the next day if he could.

Half a mile north John Barnett, master of Pound Farm, had opted to remain in the village. He spent the morning directing tasks from his fold-yard and the hours passed quietly. At about 3.30 p.m. Barnett walked over to a nearby field to meet his 24-year-old carter, James Tustin, who was responsible for hauling crops about the farm. Barnett and Tustin spoke for some minutes, brooding over the sad news that Reverend Harrison of Crowle had fallen from his horse and died. Barnett told Tustin, ‘You mark if you don’t hear of this one coming to some unfortunate death, dying in a ditch.’

Barnett and Tustin were among scores of parishioners at work in the meadows. Most were preparing for the clover harvest or hacking at thistles and weeds; others were driving back and forth between Oddingley and the mill at Huddington, three miles away. It was a dry day. Two of John Barnett’s servants were mowing grass and clover in the village centre, and nearby John Perkins, another farmer, was tending a bonfire outside Oddingley Lane Farm. At this time of year house martins darted through the muggy air, gathering scraps of earth for their nests, and hares raced across the large grassy pastures in the north of the parish. By now, the first wild roses had appeared in the hedgerows and the scarlet poppy and sow thistle had flowered. In the fields farmhands listened for the cuckoo, whose cry changed at midsummer from ‘cuck-oo’ to ‘cuc-cuckoo’.

For Reverend George Parker, Midsummer Day was like any other. Tuesdays brought no official business and he was free to pass the time as he wished, in his study or gardens, with his wife and daughter or friends. There was just one job to distract him. He kept a little herd of four dairy cows which were led up to graze in the north of the parish, in his glebe meadows, each morning by his servant. Every afternoon Parker would fetch them home himself, an easy task entailing little more than a gentle stroll along Church Lane and then perhaps a minute more along an overgrown byway, before he could gather them together and drive them home for milking. Parker was a man of particular custom, and he set off for his glebe at five each afternoon. Usually he took his seven-year-old daughter, Mary, with him, but on 24 June 1806 he left his rectory alone.

By now the narrow lanes that cascaded down through Oddingley from the north, winding from Hadzor or Smite Hill towards Tibberton and Crowle, were dotted with travellers, tradesmen and farmers returning from Bromsgrove Fair. In the village James Tustin saw Parker as he passed Pound Farm. Hardly a minute later Susan Surman, who was bringing down Barnett’s cattle, met him further along the lane. Reverend Parker and Surman paused to bid each other good afternoon. It was just a brief exchange, but it was one that the dairymaid would for ever recall with a chill of terror. Surman entered Barnett’s Wash Pool Meadows, and Parker turned right into his glebe.

At about five or six minutes past five o’clock, two butchers from Worcester, Thomas Giles and John Lench, were walking through Oddingley on their way north to Hadzor. They had passed Oddingley crossroads and were about ‘two stones throws’ north of Barnett’s Pound Farm when they heard the piercing report of a shotgun from behind a hedge. The butchers stopped and listened. The echo of gunfire had passed in a second. All that remained was the low chatter of birdsong. Lench told Giles that he had seen a hare rush across the lane. Someone must be shooting game.

A split second later came a ‘wry, dismal’ shout of ‘Murder! Murder! Murder!’ It was a desperate cry, even heard by James Tustin a quarter of a mile away at Pound Farm. The butchers wheeled around. The shouting had come from a meadow, close by but shielded from view behind a tall, thick hedgerow. Determined to investigate further Lench and Giles ran up the lane ‘as hard as they could’.

The butchers soon reached a gate which opened out into Barnett’s Middle Wash Pool Field, and they raced across to the adjacent hedgerow, frantically trying to glimpse through the woven briars, holly and hawthorn, but it was impossible ‘owing to the thick of it’. Temporarily defeated but with increasing resolve, they then ran up the meadow desperately searching for a stile or a gate.