by Peter Moore
Fear of such punishments – financial, spiritual or social – was enough to force most of the farmers to pay without complaint. But the spark of violence at Pound Farm in 1801 was a harbinger of what was to come as litigation between the clergyman and Evans, Barnett and Clewes became, for a time, a feature of village life. Records from Parker’s solicitor in Worcester show that the ensuing legal costs alone, which had to be met by the farmers, reached around £100.
In 1803 there was another incident. William Colley, a local farmhand, was working at Pound Farm, just 20 yards from Parker’s rectory. Barnett had told him to crop the tops of his apple trees, and shortly after he had finished, Parker appeared to claim his tenth of the clippings. In the farmhouse Colley found John Barnett peering through a window. He muttered he ‘would give any man five Guineas who would shoot the parson’.
The sentiment was repeated elsewhere. Shortly afterwards, William Colley heard Captain Evans exclaim that ‘there was no more harm in shooting the parson than in shooting a dog’. And when Parker’s name was mentioned at Netherwood, Thomas Clewes declared ‘it was no harm to shoot such a fellow as that’ within earshot of one of his ploughmen, William Chance. The measure of similarity between these expressions hints that the farmers had begun to share their dissatisfaction openly. Their collective wish that he be shot suggests that by 1803 there was already an unsettling degree of collaboration between the men.
The difficulties surrounding Parker’s decision to collect the tithe in kind were aggravated by the divisive politics of the age. Parker would have been 27 years old in July 1789 when the French had risen up against Louis XVI and his finance minister Calonne, who had proposed further crippling taxes on salt, land, tobacco and grain. The revolution that followed was initially received with enthusiasm by many Britons, who celebrated the sight of ordinary French citizens casting off the irons of a despotic regime. But as France sank deeper into violence, the majority of British support ebbed away with the mounting horrors of the September Massacre of 1792, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the Reign of Terror thereafter. By the mid-1790s the British revolutionary cause had gone beneath ground, into murky clubs and secret societies which treasured their radical ideals and were bent on political reform. Pitt’s government reacted to the threat by deploying spies, suspending habeas corpus and feeding reports of Jacobin plots to pro-government newspapers.
Meanwhile Pitt’s war taxes placed a heavy load on the back of the average Briton, and when the harvest failed, as it did several times in the 1790s, food riots followed. One typical example came in June 1795, in Bristol, when malnourished working families gathered in the city centre, smashed butchers’ windows with a hail of stones, carried away all the meat and provoked a confrontation with the militia. Just four months later, after the failure of the harvest, crowds took to the streets of Westminster, haranguing politicians. Outside Downing Street they chanted, ‘No war, no Pitt, cheap bread’.23
Across the country a whole generation knew nothing but uncertainty and fear for more than a decade. For the young, war and revolution were a familiar backdrop, and few could remember as far back as the brief peaceful interlude of the 1780s, a time when Thomas Clewes and John Barnett were just young men and George Banks no more than a child. For these farmers, their present lives were so tainted by uncertainty that they glamorised the past as a time when everything was ordered and right. Now there were wars, revolutions and tithe disputes, curses that combined and manifested themselves in an increased hatred of the outsider. Just as they learnt to hate the French and the vain ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte, they came in time to despise Parker. To the farmers he was dishonest, draconian, treacherous and snide, with something secretive or mercurial within him. They took to calling him by a new nickname, the Bonaparte of Oddingley.
This was a clever invention that in all likelihood was coined by Captain Evans, who would have understood the power of rhetoric and fearful imagery from his army days. Casting Parker as Bonaparte was a clear signal to the parishioners. It challenged them to choose a side, to act as honest patriots loyal to their parish and country. At the same time it shackled Parker’s reputation to that of the most reviled man in the land. Everyone knew about Napoleon. The press and especially the ruthless London caricaturist James Gillray played on ingrained xenophobia, depicting him variously as a posturing dwarf, a spoilt child, a seducer of his sisters, a falcon-eyed predator or an unhinged madman. One chilling nursery rhyme reflected the anxieties of the typical British family.
Baby, baby, naughty baby,24
Hush, you squalling thing, I say;
Hush your squalling, or it may be,
Bonaparte may pass this way,
Baby, baby, he’s a giant,
Tall and black as Rouen steeple;
And he dines and sups, rely on’t,
Every day on naughty people.
Baby, baby, he will hear you
As he passes by the house,
And he limb from limb will tear you,
Just as pussy tears a mouse.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was nobody to compare with Napoleon. Eager students in British towns were marked as young Bonapartes, devouring books, writing bad poems and dreaming of dramatic social success as the young Napoleon had done a decade before. In The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 the historian E. J. Hobsbawm argues that Napoleon’s name became a byword for personal ambition, inspiring those whose fantasy was to replicate the magnificent rise of Le Petit Caporal, as a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or a ‘Napoleon of industry’.
All common men were thrilled by the sight,25 then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilised man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened … He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams.
In the English imagination Napoleon was a lowly creature: effeminate, ostentatious and untrustworthy – the antithesis of John Bull, the gritty, no-nonsense farmer. And as Bonaparte had brought misery to Britain, Parker had brought discord to Oddingley on his arrival in 1793 – the very year war had begun. As the rift between the clergyman and his parishioners deepened, reports began to circle that the farmers met at night in secret locations to curse him and plot their revenge. Drunken oaths were sworn; Parker’s blood was damned.
Their characterisation of Parker, however, was flawed. He had not set out to destroy the existing order in Oddingley, rather re-establish it. He was not a member of the new enlightened classes – an industrialist, a philosopher, a soldier or an explorer – he was a country parson, the very paragon of English tradition and respectability. Of all the parishioners, Captain Evans was the closest to this vision of Napoleon. He was the self-made military man who had risen against the odds to a position of rank, wealth and power.
The nickname may have been unjust, but it stuck. Parker became the outsider – mischievous, antagonistic and ambitious – while, the farmers, led by Evans, were the opposite: free, independent and right. But while the nickname was a powerful social device it did little to help the farmers in the eyes of the law. The most they could do was to make it as difficult as possible for Parker to collect his taxes.
Captain Evans had his cows milked in the adjoining parish of Tibberton in order to avoid the tithe; others hid their goods in hay ricks, barn corners, outhouses and workshops. Villagers were caught in the crossfire, their loyalty split between Parker, their spiritual leader and kindly neighbour, and the farmers who they relied upon to stay above the breadline. Most calculated that it was better not to anger their employers, and the congregations thinned for Sunday service at St James’. One of Thomas Clewes’ workers recalled, ‘None of the family or servants ever frequented Oddingley Church;26 my master told us
he would not order us not to go, that we might go if we like, but he had rather we should stop away.’
It seemed that there was no remedy for the quarrel. By 1805 Parker was employing more and more tithe men, so that he did not have to speak to the farmers himself. One of these recalled how ‘Barnett, Banks and Captain Evans always abused Mr Parker whenever they met him’ and speculated that Thomas Clewes had devised an ingenious strategy to spoil his tithe milk by adding a secret substance to it, causing it to sour as soon as it came from the cow.
That Clewes resorted to skulduggery was possible, but others had less time for such measures and a further incident between Parker and Barnett was more characteristic. Parker had gone to Pound Farm in midsummer 1803 to collect his tithe lamb and met Barnett brooding silently in the fold-yard. Barnett asked Parker which of the animals he would like, and the clergyman responded that Barnett could pick two or three of the lambs out, and from them he would select one. Barnett, exasperated with Parker and livid he was wasting his time, grabbed one of the young animals and thrust it into the parson’s arms, shouting, ‘Take that or you shall not have any one!’ Barnett damned Parker, who fled the fold-yard hurriedly without his lamb. A few weeks later Barnett was prosecuted yet again. The courts were becoming an important check point in a vicious cycle: reaction to Parker, followed by litigation, followed by more reaction – all at an ever-quickening pace.
For the farmers it was an exhausting and futile struggle: they had to submit and Parker was going to make them. Also, after several years it had become clear that they were surrendering far more than £135 a year to Parker by paying in kind. In the autumn of 1805 they backed down and informed Parker that they were willing to pay him £150 a year to compound the tithe and bring an end to the dispute.
The offer satisfied his initial demand, but instead of accepting the proposal outright Parker imposed a precondition to the agreement. Collecting the tithe in kind had been expensive. He had been required to hire staff, to build a tithe barn and fill his tool shed with all the implements of a country farmer. Parker told the farmers that he would only agree to their offer if they paid him £150 in compensation for the inconvenience they had caused.
The farmers were outraged. They had conceded defeat only to be dismissed and embarrassed once again. They flatly refused Parker’s proposal. Only Old Mr Hardcourt and John Perkins remained on speaking terms with the clergyman after this, a fact which annoyed their peers and further split the village. In January 1806 Captain Evans’ frustration at the situation had flared at Perkins. ‘Mr Parker is a very bad man,’ the Captain told him. ‘Nobody in the parish agrees with him.’ When Perkins disagreed, the Captain flew into a rage. ‘Damn him!’ he swore. ‘There is no more harm in shooting him than a mad dog!’27
This was more than a throwaway curse; it was the unchecked sentiments of an angry and frustrated man. The Captain’s words were redolent with imagery: Parker was a rabid dog – fierce, deranged and unpredictable. Just as a mad hound might fly at an innocent bystander, infecting them with its bite, Parker was doing the same – poisoning Oddingley with his greed, his ambition and ideas.
fn1 Terriers, bulldogs and spaniels were common breeds of hound in the locality, but for guarding property no breed was more efficient than the mastiff, ‘the size of a wolf, very robust in its form and having the sides of the lips pendulous. Its aspect is sullen, its bark loud and terrific.’ (The London Encyclopedia, Vol 7. 1824. p.389.)
CHAPTER 3
The Easter Meeting
Tibberton, Worcestershire, 7 April 1806, Easter Monday
GOD SPEED THE Plough was a public house a few paces off the main road at the northern end of the village of Tibberton. It was a small two-storey brick building fitted with neat twin dormer windows nestled into the front of its steep sloping roof. The inn was one of two which served the growing population of Tibberton, a parish a mile to the south-west of Oddingley. Tibberton had a quite different appearance to that of its neighbour. It wasn’t lost amid sprawling hedgerows or fruit orchards, but properly and deliberately arranged about the road which ran through it like an artery, drawing traffic from all the nearby villages as it wended south towards Worcester. A single row of thatched labourers’ cottages lined this route, which on market days teemed with horse-drawn traps, wagons and handcarts, as farmers hauled their goods to market and the drovers urged their stock languidly on.
On the evening of Easter Monday the Oddingley farmers convened at the Plough to celebrate the annual parish dinner. Their own village was too small to support a public house of its own, and Tibberton – with its larger population and busier road – offered the farmers the closest inn of any size. It was now several hours since the argument with Reverend Parker at the vestry, and the farmers’ numbers had swollen, with brothers, local tradesmen and friends joining Captain Evans, the Barnett brothers and Thomas Clewes in the parlour. Among the new arrivals was John Clewes, Thomas’ brother, and George and Henry Banks, who were there at the invitation of Evans. The Captain took the seat at the head of the table – a position which should have been reserved for Parker.
An evening of hard drinking followed. Inns such as the Plough sold ale from wooden casks, wine by the bottle or hogsheads of perry, a pear cider that Robert Southey would encounter two years later on his tour through Worcestershire. ‘Perry is the liquor of this country,’1 Southey wrote under the extravagant pseudonym Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. ‘The common sort when drawn from the cask is inferior to the apple juice, but generous perry is truly an excellent beverage. It sparkles in the glass like Champaign, and the people assure me that it had not unfrequently [sic] been sold as such in London.’
Alcohol played an important role in village life. Gallons of weak ale or perry were used to sustain the farmers and labourers in summer, during the exhausting harvest shifts, and drinks were exchanged after hours on market days in the alehouses or in farmhouse parlours late at night, when bottles of claret or brandy were fetched up to toast the latest military victory, profitable sale or stroke of luck. All of the Oddingley farmers drank, Thomas Clewes and John Barnett particularly so, and the men were regulars at a long list of local establishments, of which the Red Lion on the Droitwich road was perhaps the most popular. Like many of these, the Plough at Tibberton was divided into a taproom – a stark space fitted with low stools and floored with beaten sand, where the heaviest of the drinking was done from pewter mugs – and the parlour, which catered for a higher class of clientele, who enjoyed such luxuries as carpeted floors, stuffed leather benches and mahogany tables.
In the parlour of the Plough that evening the farmers, almost all of them united against Parker, had a rare chance to share their grievances in an atmosphere that was close and confessional. As there were no women present, there was no one before whom the men had to moderate their drinking, their language or their behaviour. By the time the meal had drawn to a close and the cloth pulled from the table in readiness for the round of toasts, the mood among the farmers was boorish and excitable.
Toasts were an old English tradition,2 a vital component of any red-blooded dinner party and often loud, enthusiastic and vulgar. It was customary for each diner to stand and toast a gentleman’s name, beginning at the top of society with a member of the royal family and weaving downwards, through a list of landlords and popular local characters, before challenging another member of the table to do the same. Fifteen years before, 18 toasts had been raised at a reformist dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The dinner, attended by prominent dissenters and reformists, inadvertently sparked a wave of destructive anti-Jacobin riots in Birmingham; the toasts – to the ‘King and Constitution’, the ‘National Assembly of the Patriots of France’ and to the ‘Rights of Man’ – were perceived as a direct call to arms. The same uneasy passions were present a decade and a half later in Tibberton. In early 1806 patriotic feeling was running high. Nelson’s brilliant but tragic victory at Trafalgar was a fresh an
d stirring memory, as was the defeat at Austerlitz and the death of William Pitt a month later. The Gentleman’s Magazine remembered the age as ‘a time when every newspaper poet,3 according to his style, exhorted patriots to resist “proud Gallia”, [and urged] John Bull to come on and show his fists’.
As head of the table, it fell to Captain Evans to toast first. It was a practice with which he would have been familiar and he took to his feet charging his glass to the King. Other toasts followed to ‘some noblemen’ and all were returned loudly. At length Evans stood once again and turned towards John Perkins.
For most of the farmers Perkins’ friendship with Reverend Parker amounted to a shameful breach of loyalty, and as a result relations between the farmers had soured. The young farmer had only opted to join the dinner a few hours earlier at the insistence of Parker himself, who, anticipating intemperate words or scenes, had urged him to attend to defend his name. Now Captain Evans seized his opportunity to mock them both, inviting him to drink the health of a friend. Perkins refused the invitation, sidestepping the obvious challenge to mention Parker’s name.
The Captain returned Perkins’ stoicism with mockery. He declared Perkins was neglecting his duty to the table and lifted his glass yet again – this time in his left hand – calling out, ‘To the health of the Reverend George Parker!’
James Gillray’s depiction of the infamous Bastille toasts that inadvertently sparked three days’ rioting. Charles Fox toasts with his left hand
