by Peter Moore
It was a lifestyle that is perfectly portrayed in the pages of Reverend James Woodforde’s diary. Woodforde was a near-contemporary of Parker. He enjoyed a happy life, the majority of it spent at Weston Longville in Norfolk, where he served as the parish parson. Just 20 years Parker’s senior and shielded from the industrial upheavals of the Midlands, Woodforde waged war against nothing more than the toads that infested his pond. He fired his blunderbuss to celebrate King George’s birthday and passed time playing whist or tending to his garden and animals – on one memorable occasion accidentally getting his pigs drunk on strong ale.
In many ways Woodforde’s life was uneventful, but he dutifully recorded his daily routines for more than four decades, documenting with seductive simplicity a benign existence of blithe country walks, occasional sermons and annual holidays, all fuelled by an endless supply of horrifically rich food. This was the archetypal life, the life glamorised by ambitious young curates like George Parker. For Woodforde, living on a generous £400 a year, the tithes were not a divisive tax but an opportunity to knit his community further together. At the end of every year he held a ‘tithe frolic’ to which the ratepayers were invited. The entry in his diary for 30 November 1784 details one of these affairs.
They were all highly pleased8 with their Entertainment but few dined in the Parlour. They that dined in the Kitchen had no Punch or Wine, but strong Beer and Table Beer, and would not come into the Parlour to have Punch. I gave them for Dinner some Salt Fish, a Leg of Mutton boiled, and Capers, a fine Loin of Beef roasted and plenty of plumb and plain Puddings. They drank in the Parlour 7 bottles of Port Wine and both my large Bowls of Rum Punch, each of which took 2 Bottles of Rum to make.
Woodforde was only separated from Parker by two decades in age and a hundred miles in distance, but his experiences could hardly have been more different. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century Norfolk remained a gentle backwater of rural England, socially and politically stable and deeply patriotic. In the Midlands 20 years later the industrial towns were not ruled by decaying feudal hierarchies, but by a new elite of diligent, rational men, their mounting fortunes generated by machines and manpower rather than ancient laws and custom. And towns like Birmingham did not just create wealthy industrialists, but served as incubators for the reformist and dissenting movements, both of which attacked the establishment of which Parker was an ingrained and immovable part.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century more and more ratepayers were questioning the right of their clergyman to a tenth of their produce, and with Pitt’s war taxes mounting, tithe disputes and parochial tensions were becoming increasingly common. Parker was far from suffering alone, and there is a striking parallel between his experiences in Oddingley and Reverend John Skinner’s at his parish of Camerton in Somerset. Like Woodforde, Skinner was a diarist, but he differed in almost every other sense. He was meddlesome, irritable and a fierce defender of his rights. For decades he quarrelled with his parishioners, whom he despaired of as insolent creatures. He was ignored, defied and provoked by a hardened group of farmers and labourers, who enraged him by jangling the church bells at night and releasing a screaming peacock beneath his window. A gun was fired at his dog, and when it came to the tithe the farmers were evasive. Once they brought him a broken-back lamb for his share.
Like Parker, Skinner attempted to fight his enemies head on. The results were documented in his diary: stories of petty squabbles in the lanes, sinister goings-on, and the wretchedness of his parishioners, best seen through their drinking and swearing. Skinner became increasingly intolerant with age. He took to distracting himself from the deficiencies of his own life by burying himself in the past. In time he became a noted archaeologist and antiquarian, responsible for excavating many barrows around Camerton, a place that he became convinced was Camulodunum, the capital of the ancient Trinovantes tribe and the most ancient of all Roman settlements in Britain.
This was a faraway, fantasy world to which Skinner clung with all his might. By 1839 he could stand it no longer. An extract taken from the Bath Chronicle of 17 October reads, ‘On Friday morning, in a state of derangement,9 he [Reverend Skinner] shot himself through the head with a pistol, and was dead in an instant.’
Both John Skinner and George Parker were men out of time. Oddingley and Camerton would never be their happy fiefdoms in the same way that Weston Longville had been Woodforde’s. Dreams that had been forged in the late eighteenth century had vanished by the beginning of the nineteenth. As Parker and Skinner stood fast, the sands shifted around them. They had not anticipated the changes: the industrial and political revolutions, wars and inflation. In Oddingley Parker had certainly not bargained on men like Captain Evans, Thomas Clewes and John Barnett – men who would fight him at every step. Parker had arrived at his post to find the rules were changing, that he had been cheated by society of his inheritance and robbed of his dream.
Almost a century after his death, Virginia Woolf still felt a sense of tragic pity for John Skinner and his futile attempts to salvage the souls of his wretched parishioners. It was a fate that Reverend George Parker of Oddingley shared.
Irritable, nervous, apprehensive,10 he seems to embody, even before the age itself had come into existence, all the strife and unrest of our distracted times. He stands, dressed in the prosaic and unbecoming stocks and pantaloons of the early nineteenth century, at the parting of the ways. Behind him lay order and discipline and all the virtues of the heroic past, but directly he left his study he was faced with drunkenness and immorality; with indiscipline and irreligion; with Methodism and Roman Catholicism; with the Reform Bill and the Catholic Emancipation Act, with a mob clamouring for freedom, with the overthrow of all that was decent and established and right. Tormented and querulous, at the same time conscientious and able, he stands at the parting of the ways, unwilling to yield an inch, unable to concede a point, harsh, peremptory, apprehensive, and without hope.
As Reverend Parker puzzled over the night-time disturbances at his rectory in Oddingley, in London the government was announcing new measures that would all but double the existing property tax and lower the threshold of eligibility. It was a bold move from Lord Grenville’s new administration, which had been formed following Pitt’s death in January and which was being increasingly derided in the press as the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’. The tax increases were roundly criticised, with William Cobbett declaring in the Political Register, ‘[it] leaves no man anything in this world11 that he can call his own’.
On 28 May James Gillray responded with a satirical caricature that captured the national mood. Entitled The Friend of the People & His Petty-New-Tax-Gatherer, paying John Bull a Visit,12 it lampooned Charles Fox, the foreign secretary, and Lord Henry Petty, the new chancellor of the exchequer. The two men are shown rapping impatiently at John Bull’s door, with Petty bellowing ‘Taxes! Taxes! Taxes!’ as he leans on the knocker. As his furniture is carted away on the street behind, John Bull peeps out of an upstairs window, replying, ‘Taxes? – Why how am I to get Money to pay them all? I shall very soon have neither a House nor a Hole to put my head in.’ The corpulent Charles Fox, supporting a vast folio crammed with a list of new levies, calls up, ‘A house to put your head in? Why what the Devil should you want with a House?’
Published on 28 May 1806, James Gillray’s A Friend of the People & his Petty-New-Tax-Gatherer, paying John Bull a visit shows a worn and irritable country
Like much of Gillray’s work the piece was a searing parody, an intoxicating cocktail of lofty satire and burlesque imagery that tapped into a national mood of gathering frustration and captured dissembling politicians like Fox and Petty riding roughshod over popular opinion. The caricature is suggestive of the brittle atmosphere that was pervading England by the end of May. It was a country worn to the bone. The stoic John Bull is depicted embattled in his garret window, about to snap. It is a neat visualisation of the plight of the Oddingley farmers. Not only were they subject
to the increased property tax, but they also had to contend with the extra menace of Parker’s tithe. The harvest months now loomed before them, the stones at the rectory window just one harbinger of what was to come.
CHAPTER 5
Damn His Blood
Oddingley, May, June 1806
AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT on Saturday 24 May, Sarah Lloyd, a 24-year-old farm worker, was sitting up with her younger sister at their family home, a labourer’s cottage, when they were disturbed by a noise from outside. The Lloyds’ cottage stood by the crossroads, surrounded by clover fields and an area of open grassy pastures known locally as the Hulls. In the hours since the sun had set at nine o’clock the village had quietened as work had finished for the day and labourers had returned to their homes and beds. The noise was loud and peculiar enough to wrest Sarah’s attention from her conversation and draw her outside. She opened the cottage door and stepped out into the night. In the garden she heard the noise again – it was drunken voices, all of them raised and jeering. The sounds came from the direction of the Pigeon House, a squat brick outhouse which was owned by the Barnett family, who used it as a summer-house and a store for their finest cider. Sarah crept through the spring air towards the building. Once within earshot, she hid herself ‘under a tree which was nearly down’.
From here Sarah could distinguish the voices of a number of local farmers. ‘I heard several toasts drank and several persons named,’ she recalled, among whom were Captain Evans, John Barnett, Thomas Clewes, George Banks and Mr Davis of Dunhampstead. She recognised each man distinctly and recalled Thomas Clewes’ voice particularly. She heard the master of Netherwood Farm propose a toast: ‘Let us drink damnation to him, he will not be here long to trouble us – and let us drink it left-handed!’ Sarah listened as each of the men repeated Clewes’ charge. She had ‘no doubt’ that Reverend Parker was the subject of the toasts, as there was, as she put it, a ‘misunderstanding’ between the parties.
The toasts continued for some time as Sarah remained concealed 20 yards away behind the collapsed tree, shielded from view in the darkness. But she was not alone in the Pigeon House Meadow that night. A farm dog that belonged to one of the Barnett brothers had been tethered outside the building and, hearing her cough, began to bark. In panic, Sarah scrambled up and started for her cottage, but the moment she moved, the wooden door of the Pigeon House burst open behind her and two men flew out into the night in pursuit. They made after Sarah, who charged desperately through the grass. She reached her cottage before them and pushed the door closed.
‘I wish we had catched her!’ she heard Davis say to George Banks. ‘Damn her blood! We would have mopped her up.’
‘Damn her eyes!’ Banks replied. ‘I wish we had and catched her.’
By now Sarah’s father had been roused by the commotion. George Lloyd was well known in Oddingley as a friend of Parker’s and a respected labourer. Holding his gun, he called through the door to Banks and Davis, ordering them to leave and threatening that if they did not he would be forced to shoot. At this, the men retreated into the night.
Sarah was terrified by the incident. For several days she refused to leave the cottage, and when she did, on Tuesday 27 May, she hastened directly to Parker’s rectory, telling the clergyman exactly what she had heard. Parker listened carefully to Sarah’s account and weighed it. ‘Girl, I don’t care a fig for them altogether,’ he replied.
For all Parker’s indifference, feigned or not, there were signs throughout May that the farmers’ anger was stirring in new ways. Earlier that month a surveyor named George Gilbert Jones had been sent to Oddingley. Jones had no prior connection to the parish, where he spent almost a month researching the land for a new rate form. On his arrival he was instantly forced into an extraordinary situation, finding all the farmers except Perkins ‘at enmity’ with Parker – a fact which forced him to flit like a diplomat between one faction and the other as he worked his way through the village.
Jones had been forewarned about the tithe dispute by his employer, who had told him that it was better to lodge outside the parish. But although he followed this advice, taking rooms at a nearby inn, he did socialise with both Reverend Parker and the Captain, dining frequently with them as the weeks passed. Through his work and these social events, the surveyor gained an unusually full insight into the feud. On several occasions Jones heard the Captain and George Banks ‘damn the parson’s eyes and say that it was no harm to shoot him’. He detected a similar sentiment at Pound Farm, though he found John Barnett more guarded. Barnett confessed to being angry at the manner in which Parker was collecting the tithe in kind, but was otherwise reticent, reluctant to say anything more. The other farmers, particularly Clewes, said nothing. Of all of the villagers, Jones came to spend the most time with young George Banks, who had been instructed by the Captain to act as his guide. Jones found Banks an engaging personality, and they met in the evenings to play cards at Church Farm. But while the bailiff was good company, Jones also noticed an impatient, vicious streak in his character. ‘Banks was the most violent’2 in his language, he recalled later. It was a hint that there was something more to the bailiff than first met the eye: it was plain he was alert, keen and able, but was he also impetuous, quietly belligerent and indiscreet?
Jones had completed his survey and left Oddingley by the middle of May, around a week before the farmers’ meeting at the Pigeon House.1 It was now less than a month before the clover was ready to be harvested and the haymaking season was due to begin. In the valley between the village crossroads and the edges of Trench Wood crops of wheat, barley and oats were growing tall in the fields. For the farmers these were anxious days, and for much of the time they lived by their wits, knowing a single sharp frost, unexpected rainfall or fierce storm could ruin months of work. As by its nature collection of the tithe in kind closely mirrored the agricultural calendar, the busy months of May, June and July were natural flashpoints and to the farmhands and local tradesmen there were signs that tempers were already unusually frayed.
An early indication of this came at Church Farm at around the end of May. Captain Evans was sitting in his parlour with Mary Banks one evening when he sent for Elizabeth Fowler, the dairymaid. It was a strange summons, and when she presented herself it became clear that he did not wish to speak about the farm or any of her other duties. Instead he offered her a glass of wine. The dairymaid accepted the drink, but as she took it up he stopped her and challenged her to raise it as a toast against Parker. Elizabeth refused and excused herself, leaving the Captain ‘very much offended’.
On Tuesday 10 June Thomas Reed, a cabinetmaker from Worcester, was drinking at the Raven on Droitwich Road – a short distance from the city – when he saw a group of Oddingley men enter and start a boisterous conversation at a table in the taproom. Reed only knew three of the men, the two Barnett brothers and a labourer, John Chance. Soon the men were complaining loudly about Parker and the tithe, and, unusually, John Barnett was the most vociferous of them. He declared that if he had ten children, he was sure that one of them would be claimed as tax. Later they stood up, pulled off their hats and then ‘drank damnation’ to Parker. One of the men Thomas Reed did not recognise (most likely Clewes or Banks) described waspishly how he had recently cut four and a half cabbages from his garden and then sent for Parker, asking him to take the remaining half. The tone of the conversation, which varied from cruel humour to malice and icy threats, struck Reed strongly. Over the next few years he would tell ‘different people [of it] a hundred times’. One detail he remembered above all others was John Barnett’s claim that ‘he would give £50 for a dead parson’.
This incident was followed, several days after, by another in Oddingley parish. Reverend Parker had walked down Netherwood Lane to Thomas Barber’s shop at Sale Green. The two men were friendly and had fallen into a conversation when they were interrupted by Clewes unexpectedly knocking at the door. Anticipating a confrontation, Parker hurried out of the kitchen door as Clewes
entered, but the farmer caught a glimpse of him as he disappeared along the lane. Clewes turned to Barber and told him there was £50 for any man ‘who would shoot the parson’.
By mid-June there were indications that Parker was growing uncharacteristically nervous. He cut down on his rambles through the lanes and he avoided Church Farm, Pound Farm and Netherwood altogether. Whether he had been cautioned that the farmers were offering a reward for his murder or not, he had certainly been told enough by Sarah Lloyd to know they were proposing toasts against him and meeting by night to vent their anger. Perhaps instinct was drawing him back from any contact with the men, but it was difficult to avoid people in a place like Oddingley and from the middle of June there was a further worry. The Captain, who for so long had avoided Parker and treated him with contempt, seemed determined to catch him and was seen on various occasions in Church Lane, waiting for him to emerge from the rectory.
A chance soon presented itself. The lanes were busiest during harvest time, with labourers drawing handcarts, fetching supplies from the cottages and relaying messages back and forth. Much of the traffic flowed along Church Lane outside the rectory, where on Tuesday 17 June two labourers from Crowle stopped to speak to Parker. A minute later Captain Evans appeared on horseback from around a kink in the lane. He rode towards Parker, and when he was within earshot called out, ‘Stop, sir, do stop! Let me speak to you once more!’
It was perhaps the first time the two men had encountered one another since their argument at the vestry meeting ten weeks before. The image of the two adversaries together is a vivid and enduring one: the Captain on horseback, advancing at a pace towards Parker. The clergyman is defiant, resolute and static, the Captain dynamic, domineering and aggressive. As Evans approached, Parker shouted to him, ‘You are not going to pay the debt of nature – that is the only debt you will pay.’ It was a dismissive riposte with clear implications: that while the Captain might strive to evade his obligations to God on earth (his payment of the tithes), he would not be able to avoid divine punishment at the Day of Judgement. It was a stinging rebuke to an elderly man.
