Damn His Blood (7 page)

Thomas Clewes’ ascension to master of Netherwood raised him to the social level of, if not financial parity with, Captain Evans and John Barnett
¹⁰
of Pound Farm, the village’s largest property. Barnett was 32, ‘a respectable looking yeoman with a head of slightly greying hair and calm blue eyes’. Hard-working, astute and reticent but with a fiery temper that could flare unexpectedly, John Barnett most closely resembled the classic image of the English agriculturalist. He was the eldest surviving son of Thomas Barnett, who had died in 1785, and ran Pound Farm with his younger brother William on behalf of their mother, who for more than 20 years following the death of her husband had retained the lease for the property.

Four other agriculturalists controlled the remaining farms, which all lay scattered a short distance from the crossroads. John Perkins, an impetuous single-minded man in his twenties, had lived in the village for the past decade and had recently assumed control of Oddingley Lane Farm; Edward Hardcourt – Old Mr Hardcourt as he was known – kept a small farm of no more than a few fields off Church Lane; Samuel Jones, an unassuming character about whom little is known, also farmed in the parish, as did John Marshall of the colourfully named Pineapple Farm.

Of these seven men all but Hardcourt were tenant farmers who paid annual rent to Lord Foley in exchange for their houses and the right to farm the attached land on leases of eight years. The tenant farm system was well established
¹¹
as the staple form of land management in England at the time, enabling prudent landlords like Foley to appoint businesslike farmers to work the land on their behalf. Tenancies were rarely available and hard to win, with aspiring farmers needing to be diplomatic, forceful, well connected and hard-working to succeed. Life for the Oddingley agriculturalists would have wavered very little from this studious description 40 years before by Oliver Goldsmith
¹²
in
The Vicar of Wakefield
(1766).

As they had all the conveniences of life within themselves they very seldom visited the towns or cities in search of superfluities. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primeval simplicity of manners; and frugal by habit, they scarcely knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with cheerfulness on days of labour, but observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the Christmas carol; sent true love-knots on Valentine’s Morning, ate pancakes on Shrovetide, showed their wit on the 1st of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas Eve.

Elizabeth Fowler was the only female live-in servant at Church Farm, and after driving the cows to be milked she returned to the farmhouse at midday on Easter Monday. She briefly rested in the kitchen with Catherine Banks, the housekeeper, and Catherine’s mother Mary. Snatching a meal – a slice of wheaten bread, perhaps, and a block of Cheshire cheese – there would have been a chance to discuss the latest news. A few hours earlier a traveller had been ambushed by a band of footpads on the turnpike between Worcester and Droitwich, just two miles from Oddingley. Footpads, unlike highwaymen, were poor, worked on foot and killed indiscriminately to eliminate witnesses. They were considered the lowest and vilest class of English criminal and a curse on rural travel. The unfortunate victim, a man named John Williams,
¹³
had been robbed of 5s. 6d. in silver and a half-crown ticket (about a week’s wage) but had escaped alive. The footpads had then vanished from the scene.

The ancient countryside of gentle hills and twisting lanes about Oddingley lent itself well to such dramas. Hedges of hawthorn, ash, elm, hazel, sallow and holly had for centuries been used as much for food as barriers to livestock and were garnished with stray fruit trees – wild cherry, pear and crabapple. The resulting hedgerows were not just woven, oblique shields for the farmland behind, but also cover for cut-throats, highwaymen, thieves and footpads. As Elizabeth Fowler was sent out that afternoon to scour the fold-yard, the sty, stacks and the sheds for eggs, the story must have played strongly in her imagination.

Elizabeth searched the hen houses and the fold-yard and at length came to a rick – a carefully built and protected structure used to store either straw or hay – which stood close to the farm gate. There, she later remembered, something caught her eye. The rick was old – from the previous summer – and to deter rats and other rodents and to keep the straw dry, it stood about three feet clear of the ground, elevated on a number of stone stilts known as staddles. Behind one of these staddles, hidden only partially under a little mound of scattered straw, was something that looked like one of the farm tools but wasn’t.

Elizabeth crouched down. It was a long narrow bag, fastened at the top with binding. Picking it up, she found it heavy. Fashioned from stiff leather, it smelt slightly of salt. Carefully she placed the object back on the ground and undid the binding. Inside she discovered the long polished barrel of a shotgun.
¹⁴

When Elizabeth returned to the farmhouse, Catherine Banks told her that the Captain and George had both left for a church meeting and were not expected back until late. It was an anxious and puzzling situation. Guns were not rare in the countryside, but those that did exist were usually stowed safely away in glass cabinets or locked in bedroom cupboards. Why someone should leave such a valuable and dangerous weapon unguarded by the gate of a village farm was a mystery.

‘Dare you bring it in?’ the housekeeper asked Elizabeth. Fowler fetched the bag from beneath the rick and laid it between them on the servants’ table.

Meanwhile Captain Evans and George Banks were passing below the oak porch of St James’ Church on their way to the the annual vestry meeting. Set for Easter Monday, vestry was the most significant parish meeting: annual accounts were approved by the executive, and officials – the overseer, constable, vestry clerk and churchwardens – elected for the year ahead. Vestry was attended by all of the parish’s leading men and, reflecting its importance, was not held at a local public house or a nearby farmhouse, but at the parish church under Parker’s chairmanship.

Woodcut of St James’ Church, Oddingley

St James’ Church
¹⁵
was the oldest building in the parish and badly in need of investment and repair. A local writer would later portray it as a dilapidated structure, ravaged by wind and rain and supported by the type of ‘rude timberwork’ that might be found ‘in a granary or malthouse’. In the damp, badly lit nave, where Parker and the farmers convened, was a mildewed font and an old grinder organ. Above them all, traversing the ceiling, there was a length of wood carved alternately with images of cheerful cusps and inverted vipers – symbols of heaven and hell. The atmosphere of gloom and decay was an accurate metaphor for relations between Oddingley’s leading men. For years meetings had been awkward and fractious, damaged by persistent undertones of personal dislike. The vestry of 1806 was no different and brought the sharpest confrontation yet as Parker and his parishioners battled for power in the year ahead.

The meeting began with the election of the parish officers, and, led by Captain Evans, the farmers asserted their weight of numbers by electing John Barnett as overseer and then his younger brother William as constable. These offices were unpaid but carried great prestige and power, with the overseer responsible for the parish finances and the constable invested with power to apprehend offenders, collect evidence on behalf of victims and ensure that the village’s militia quota was filled. For Parker the election of the Barnett brothers was a blow. Both of them disliked him, and John had been openly hostile for some years. Perhaps nettled by these decisions and with little forbearance, Parker decided to strike back. He retaliated on a point of order, refusing to approve the annual accounts.

Parker took exception to a subsidised dinner which had been planned and attended by the farmers following the previous year’s vestry meeting. His complaint was that the expenditure had not been approved and his inference was that several farmers were indulging themselves with parish money. It was a valid but somewhat unusual objection. As unpaid public servants it was customary for elected officials across the country to compensate themselves with an annual dinner in exchange for their time, skills and commitment. A tacit agreement usually ensured that a slight redistribution of the finances for this purpose was not checked, and the practice was so widespread that Francis Grose the lexicographer had complained some years earlier, ‘Every parish officer thinks he has a right to make a round bill
¹⁶
on the Parish during his year of power.’ Parker’s objection inflamed what was already a brittle and tense atmosphere. To the farmers it was a contrived and snide attack. A passionate argument ensued, with the Captain, John Barnett and Thomas Clewes rounding on him. Inevitability they raised the subject of the tithes, and thereafter the meeting descended into chaos. The farmers stalked out, abandoning an event intended to bring parishioners together. John Perkins was the only one who stayed to speak to Parker, perhaps the only farmer he could still count as a friend.

Resentment had characterised the relationship between Captain Evans, John Barnett and Thomas Clewes and their clergyman for years, and above all else the Oddingley tithe dispute was the issue that cleaved them apart. The tithe was a complex and unpopular tax. At the very simplest level a tenth of all parish produce ‘or some other things in lieu’ was payable by ratepayers to tithe owners – most commonly members of the clergy or landed gentry. The levy had endured without revision since deepest history, and its payment was a symbolic act designed to bind pastors and labourers together in the productive toil of a community in a partnership of earth and faith. In 1806 the tax still comprised the backbone of Parker’s annual salary, and it was following his decision to re-fix its value in line with inflation at the turn of the century that clashes had begun.

Reverend Parker was an ambitious man, and though it was clear he intended to serve his parish well, throughout the 1790s it had become plain that he also expected to be paid correspondingly. It was perhaps a logical step for Parker, who had overachieved in his early years, to build on his new position, but whatever designs he had of making his fortune at Oddingley were seriously challenged by the financial climate. Inflation was rampant in the last decade of the eighteenth century, with the price of wheat (and therefore bread) darting up with disarming speed, from 58 shillings a quarter in 1790 to 128 shillings in 1800. Rising prices led to unrest, with bread riots beginning in Wales in the 1780s spilling over the border to Hereford and Worcester in the 1790s, where the city’s corporation was forced to help support the poor. A melancholy note received by the editor of
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
²
on 20 April 1801 was evocative of the struggle many families had to make ends meet. It declared people were living in ‘an age of extortion’ and it lamented, ‘The poor, in general, exclaim loudly against the dearness of provisions.’
¹⁸

But it wasn’t just the poor who were affected by the increasing prices; the middling classes to which George Parker belonged would have seen their cost of living rise sharply too. With the addition of a wife and a daughter to his household, extra strain would have been placed on Parker’s finances, and at some point around the turn of the century he decided to redress the balance by amending the £135 tithe payment that he was owed each year by the village farmers. It was the simplest way of raising his income, but it sparked the quarrel that would define Oddingley’s identity for years to come.

Before Parker’s arrival the parish had opted to ‘compound’ the tithe: the £135 fixed sum was paid annually in a single payment on Lady Day, 25 March, thereby sidestepping all the problems of gathering each tithe individually. This was a sensible arrangement as tithe law was so horrifically complex, so riddled with subtleties and ambiguities that it often caused more confusion than it delivered answers. Not only were tithe holders – mostly members of the clergy or landed gentry – entitled to ‘great tithes’ such as corn, grain and wood, but they were also due many ‘small tithes’ ranging from fruit, garden herbs, root and other vegetables to honey, flax and a hundred other minor items including activities such as labour – a notoriously awkward asset to quantify.

All of this was overruled by local customs that ensured that the tithes were never calculated in the same way in any two places. Each parish kept a document called a glebe terrier which listed in great detail the tithe holder’s right to each different item. These rights had been established over time, in a process of constant negotiation and renegotiation between the tithe holder and the ratepayers. In many instances bargains had been struck between the two parties whereby farmers had achieved exemption from a certain obligation by paying a customary annual or one-off fee, known as a modus. Once recorded in the terrier a modus was very difficult to alter and tithe owners were often shackled to unfavourable agreements settled by their predecessors. In one instance, in Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, the clergyman had to content himself with just £2 12s. 4d. for an area of 1,390 acres of prime titheable land, from which he should have expected many hundreds of pounds.