by Peter Moore
‘All drank it but poor Hardcourt and me,’ remembered Perkins.
Not only was the Captain’s toast designed to humiliate, it was an ironic and highly symbolic act. For centuries witchcraft and devilry had been associated with the left hand. It was commonly thought that Satan used the left hand to baptise his followers, that he whispered his commands into the left ear and lingered behind the left shoulder of his followers. The left-handed were maligned accordingly, with shamed mothers demanding that affected children overcome the disability or at least shield it from public view. The poet Walter Savage Landor in his Imaginary Conversations wrote, ‘Thou hast some left-handed business4 in the neighbourhood, no doubt,’ a euphemism that was repeated elsewhere for other dishonest or devious deeds: left-handed favours, left-handed marriages or left-handed alliances. As such, Captain Evans’ toast was laden with imagery. He was openly suggesting Parker was an aberration: left-handed toasts were reserved for enemies, the untrustworthy or sinister.
Following the Captain’s toast, Perkins was subjected to jeers from around the table. Sensing that Perkins’ temper was growing increasingly brittle, George and Henry Banks – the two youngest members of the party – goaded him further still, accusing him of being a Jacobin.
For Perkins this was an intolerable slur. ‘Jacobin’ was applied to those who supported the French Revolution, political radicals who advocated total democracy, the overthrow of the monarchy and aristocracy and reform of the state and taxation. The Jacobin movement had reached its zenith in England during the 1790s and a new generation of King and Country patriots – to which both George and Henry Banks belonged – had risen up in opposition. For many the merest mention of Jacobinism was enough to stir up images of the bloodiest scenes of the French Revolution: the Reign of Terror, which left thousands dead, the icy eloquence and sanguinary ferocity of Saint-Just, the crazed ruthlessness of Joseph Fouché, of Danton and Robespierre. Historian E. P. Thompson wrote that Jacobins were entrenched ‘in every town and in many villages throughout England’ for many years, ‘with a kist [chest] or shelf full of Radical books,5 biding their time, putting in a word at the tavern, the chapel, the smithy, the shoemaker’s shop, waiting for the movement to revive’.
It is unlikely there was any truth behind the Banks brothers’ claim. Perkins was never accused of being a Jacobin again and it is probable their insult was simply designed to sting and humiliate. Their inference was that Perkins had deserted the cause of his peers in the tithe dispute, a parallel act of treachery. But the taunt was not without irony: as a steadfast supporter of Parker and his right to collect the tithe in kind, ‘Jacobin’ was perhaps the least appropriate insult to hurl at the farmer.
In a flush of temper John Perkins rounded on Captain Evans. He swore loudly, reminding him that as a magistrate he should not be breaking the peace. The young farmer then turned on the Banks brothers. He declared that he was no Jacobin, and that for the slur he was ready to fight the best man among them.
Evans responded angrily to the outburst. ‘Damn you!’ he swore from the head of the table. ‘You ought to be turned out of the room for not drinking the toast.’
The Captain and the Banks brothers returned to Church Farm around midnight, and when Catherine Banks told Evans about the discovery of the shotgun earlier that day he did not appear surprised. The following morning he summoned Elizabeth Fowler and the Banks family into the parlour and ordered George Banks to examine the weapon. It was an old-fashioned firearm, a flintlock shotgun that could be broken down into three parts, and most commonly would have been used in the fields or woods for shooting fowl, foxes or rabbits. Its barrel was empty. Whoever had hidden it had not done so in haste. The Captain told them they should treat the matter as a secret. ‘It should stay in the house until enquired for,’ he said. ‘I dare say the person that left it will call for it.’6
For a week afterwards the gun remained at Church Farm, and as the days passed, anxieties subsided. No further news of the footpads was heard, and just as the incident was about to be dismissed as little more than an unsettling curiosity, a local farmhand appeared to claim the shotgun. Richard Heming was a jobbing carpenter,7 wheelwright, occasional employee of Captain Evans and a sporadic visitor to Oddingley. Across the village he was well known, and he had a talent for slipping almost imperceptibly in and out of daily life. Heming was a short man who walked with an awkward sloping gait, back on his heels. He usually wore an old blue coat and brown corduroy trousers. His face was round, his hair dark and bushy. About his neck he knotted a scarlet handkerchief.
Heming told Evans that the shotgun was his. He had been travelling past Church Farm along the lane towards Crowle, a hilltop village a mile south of Oddingley, when a rainstorm had struck. Fearing the gun would be ruined, Heming decided to leave it ‘out of the wet and in the dry’. He had swept some straw over the weapon and left.
Evans accepted Heming’s account without question, although a gun was a curious instrument for a carpenter to be carrying and Heming did not disclose his reason for having it. Nor did he state why he had been happy for it to remain unsecured, out of doors, for as long as a week.
The Captain handed the shotgun to the labourer, who, almost as quickly as he had appeared, sloped away up Church Lane and out of sight.
CHAPTER 4
The Dance of the Jackdaw
The Rectory, Oddingley, May 1806
THE WEATHER GREW steadily drier and warmer in Oddingley as April progressed. The winds which blew lustily into the Midlands from the Bristol Channel, chilling the inland counties of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire throughout the winter, had settled, and as far away as London the Morning Chronicle was remarking, ‘The grasses, both natural and artificial,1 have lately improved much, and the Meadows and Pastures in the inland counties … appear beautifully thriving, green and luxuriant.’ This was the scene in early May as the focus of farm life shifted with the season from the fold-yards, stables, sheds and workshops to the fields, where young crops of oats and barley had begun to break through the stiff cloddy marl that coated the parish.
Springtime was vivid and colourful in rural Worcestershire, one of England’s greenest counties freckled with thick woods, rolling hills and dashing brooks. In early April bluebells had burst into bloom on the outskirts of Trench Wood, where among the wild flowers, far less obvious and hidden in the long grass, were isolated colonies of tall delicate orchids named twayblades. Beside them the ridged lime-green stalks of adder’s tongue fern rose from the wet earth like tiny arrows and the first emerald leaves of toxic meadow saffron shone in the spring sunshine. Lapwings and buzzards wheeled over-head.
Reverend Parker lived with his wife and their young daughter at Oddingley Rectory, a sallow, dismal building set a little back from Church Lane, a lonely watery track that meandered down in a series of sweeping bends from the crossroads to the church. Although of some size, the rectory was unimpressive and certainly nothing about it befitted the residence of a country gentleman. Many considered Parker’s home ugly, devoid of any character. Theodore Galton, a local novelist, recalled the rectory 75 years later, deriding it as a ‘hideous, whitewashed, brick structure …2 scarcely worthy of the humblest of suburban villas’.
The rectory stood three storeys high and had been built according to prevailing Georgian instincts. It had a wide facade, a pointed porch, rows of airy sash windows – two either side of the front door at ground level, and three across the upper floors – and a twin set of tall, twirling chimney stacks, a particular local fancy. Ringing the property was a four-foot picket fence which enclosed a thinly populated garden scattered with laurels and other evergreens and carpeted with a gravel drive. At dusk jackdaws would roost on the rectory roof and the row of elms behind the house at the point where the garden disappeared into hedgerows, the hedgerows into orchards and then the orchards away into the rugged farmland beyond.
For 13 years the rectory had been a haven for Parker, away from the Captain, John Barnett, Thomas Cle
wes and the strains of the tithe dispute. One night in May 1806 this all changed. The first of the disturbances that would shake the household came in the third week of the month. Parker and his wife were asleep in their bed when there was a sharp sound at the window. A shower of jagged objects had hit the glass. Alarmed and frightened, the couple had woken at once. ‘Neither of us spoke3 nor got up to the window,’ Mary Parker remembered.
The following morning Parker rose early. He carefully surveyed the garden, pacing deliberately for some time, puzzling over the problem. He then returned indoors. The rectory’s grounds would not have been difficult to enter. It was flanked on one side by hundreds of old twisted pear trees which easily comprised the largest orchard in the parish. If someone had wished to approach without being noticed, the picket fence would only have been a slight obstacle and the orchard provided the perfect escape route.
The next night was quiet, and so was the next. But later in the week the couple were woken once again by clattering at the window. Again Parker rose at dawn to comb his garden for any sign that a person may have been concealed there. If he did discover anything he did not tell his wife. Later she concluded someone must have been trying to lure him to the window or out into the garden. She thought the noise may have been made by a person throwing shot or gravel.
The night-time disturbances were yet another anxiety with which the Parkers would have to live. The clergyman took the threat seriously. He stopped walking alone in the parish after dark and by day would often detain friendly labourers to quiz them on the movements of the farmers, wondering aloud what it was that they were saying or doing. The situation must have been equally distressing for Mary Parker, who throughout remained a ghostly figure. Ostensibly the farming community was a man’s world, with women reduced to the position of drudges and chattels, but there are hints in the Oddingley story that female villagers played a greater role. For as long as anyone could remember women had worked side by side with men in the fields and in Oddingley many accounts of life on the farms and the movements of the masters were made by female farmhands, dairymaids or housekeepers. In some instances women even held the reins of power, like Old Mrs Barnett, who retained the lease to Pound Farm and effectively employed her sons John and William as her bailiffs.
Little is known of Mary’s background, only that she appeared in Oddingley in the mid-1790s, shortly after George, raising the possibility that she may have previously been employed in his household at Dorking or hired to serve at the rectory on his appointment. Within several years they were married and, by contemporary standards, they formed an odd couple. Mary was seven years older than George and furthermore she was uneducated and of lower status – disadvantages that temper somewhat the characterisation of her husband as wildly socially ambitious. She brought no financial benefit to their union, and in an age when marriages could be as much about business as sentiment it seems mutual attraction rather than monetary convenience was the spur for their relationship. In June 1799 Mary gave birth to a daughter at the dangerously advanced age of 45. It was an event that stands out like a milestone in the mist for, on the tithe dispute, the rift between her husband and Captain Evans and the anxious nights of broken sleep, Mary Parker left behind only the slightest of records.
In 1806 Oddingley was part of a society undergoing deep and profound change. Since the 1760s distinct revolutions had occurred in industry, science, landscape, art, politics and agriculture. They had rippled out across Britain, overturning centuries-old boundaries, challenging prevailing attitudes and the status quo. In Worcestershire, situated in the heart of the Midlands, a hotbed of enlightened thought and industrial experiment, these changes were close at hand. Twenty-five miles north of Oddingley was Birmingham, dubbed by Edmund Burke ‘the grand toy-shop of Europe’.4 By 1780 the town was said to be mass-producing an extraordinary half-million items – everything from salt cellars, buttons, buckles, coins and candle snuffs – each year, many of which emerged from the iron gates of Matthew Boulton’s famous Soho factory.
The gritty accomplishment of the industrialists were mirrored by the more flamboyant escapades of adventuring pioneers like James Sadler, who on 25 August 17855 became the first man to fly over Worcestershire in a hot-air balloon. The launch of Sadler’s ‘aerial voyage’ was witnessed by a crowd which gathered in Worcester to see him rise briskly into a cloudy sky and a high wind that blew him west of the city for two hours, where he terrified a field of harvest workers during his descent. In 1796 a curious but vital medical breakthrough was made in Gloucestershire, the county south of Worcestershire, with Edward Jenner’s development of vaccination. Jenner had discovered that he could protect his patients from deadly or disfiguring smallpox attacks by first exposing them to the less serious cowpox virus. His experiments were detailed in his monograph An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae in 1798. The year after this the verb ‘to revolutionise’ – or ‘to change something completely and fundamentally’ – was recorded for the first time.
The most visible changes to the landscape were pockets of frantic urban growth, where quiet vistas were suddenly filled with fire, smoke and activity. Rural parishes like Oddingley were overshadowed by these industrial towns, many of which had risen with fabulous speed, often from the seed of a single mill or foundry. As towns like Birmingham grew the population of Oddingley dropped – from a peak of 173 in 1780 to just over 100 in 1810. It was part of a wider national trend. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century the rural population would diminish from above a third to beneath a quarter of the total, and many of those who left would not return. They were lured away by the prospect of steady work and financial rewards, but in reality as many went to subsist as seek their fortune. The gradual trickle of migrants left deserted cottages, overworked farmhands and shrinking congregations in their wake.
Those labourers who remained were faced with new challenges. Successive enclosure acts had been passed in the last decades of the eighteenth century in a bid to make rural England more efficient. The laws carved up the commons, amalgamating the land into large estates – a source of opportunity for ambitious farmers like John Barnett and Thomas Clewes. Oddingley Heath, a vast common to the north of the parish, had already been enclosed by 1791 with villagers stripped of their ancient rights to graze livestock, collect nuts and berries. The move formed part of policy that would see 740,000 acres of open land enclosed between 1760 and 1810. At the beginning of 1806 a bill was passed in Parliament concerning land in Crowle, the adjoining parish. It was another signal that Oddingley’s surviving commons might be next on the list. Reverend Richard Warner, on a tour of the southern counties, mused, ‘Time was when these commons6 enabled the poor man to support his family, and bring up his children. Here he could turn out his cow and pony, feed his flock of geese, and keep his pig. But the enclosures have deprived him of these advantages.’
In the 1790s uncertainties over land rights mixed with new worries about the rate of inflation. Since the beginning of the French war the British economy had been in an endless state of flux: roaring forward one year only to implode spectacularly the next. The effects were magnified in the countryside, where a fraught population worried about the crops and the cruel caprices of nature. The years 1799, 1800 and 1804 were particularly disastrous for Worcestershire’s farmers, who saw their crops drowned by a succession of devastating rains. In 1802 a hurricane tore across the county, destroying acres of farmland and leading to a fire at the windmill at Kempsey, just south of Worcester, ‘[its] sail being whirled around with such great rapidity’, it was reported. One local chronicler recalled that the new century had broken amid a ‘tempest of war and confusion’.7
Tensions from the ongoing war seeped into county life too, provoking a change in mindset at local level. In August 1803, with a French invasion increasingly likely, 722 men assembled at Pitchcroft in Worcester and declared themselves the Worcester Volunteers. Over the following months they dragooned the countryside, drawin
g recruits from every town, village and hamlet. The degree of enthusiasm for the regiment was displayed the following December, when local ladies ‘brought up every particle of flannel that they could lay their hands on, to make flannel dresses [for the men]’. Like the Home Guard of the 1940s, the Volunteers readied themselves for the invaders, marching in nervous enthusiasm from one side of the county to the other. One morning in 1804 the recruits based in Bewdley and Kidderminster were stirred to action, being ‘alarmed very early by the beating of the Volunteer drums, in consequence of reports that the French had landed, 50,000 strong’. It transpired to be another false alarm, but not before they had completed a march of some several miles. They returned, it was dryly reported, ‘in ire and chagrin’.
The volunteers remained in Oddingley’s neighbourhood for several years, serving as a constant reminder of the dangers Britain faced. The population was unsettled: weapons such as pistols, cutlasses and blunderbusses, clubs and bayonets were in ever higher circulation. There were rumours of spies, and strange men with unfamiliar accents were regarded with suspicion. This was the climate in which Parker strove to collect his tax. Worcestershire, like many other counties, was an uptight, uncertain place. As he maintained his policy of collecting his tithe in kind Parker continued to have the support of the law, but he must also have seen the French Revolution as an example of how laws can suddenly change.
From Oddingley Rectory Parker must have watched as these changes swirled through British society. He could not have foreseen any of it. At some pivotal moment in his early life, among the rolling hills and opaque silver skies of the Lake District, he had decided to leave for clerical school in Warwick. To become a clergyman was an admirable rational ambition. He would be a member of the gentry in his own right. Thereafter, a good position would bring him a healthy income, a country residence, a team of servants, a position at the core of his parish and a moral platform to guide the souls of his congregation.
