by Peter Moore
Lench must have been confused by Barnett’s apparent indifference to the serious crime that had just been committed. The parish clergyman had been hunted down in his own glebe fields, shot and then clubbed to death. Nothing like this had happened in living memory, and already vital minutes had elapsed since Giles had disappeared into the lane after the murderer. With no assistance forthcoming Lench and Tustin left Barnett in his fold-yard and walked down Church Lane towards Oddingley Rectory, carrying the terrible news with them. They ‘told the servant girl what had happened’, then turned once again back towards the body.
Meanwhile, news of the attack was being carried by word of mouth through the parish: from field to field, fold-yard to farmhouse, by labourers, children and passing travellers through the lanes. Many abandoned their work and started towards Parker’s glebe to see for themselves if the story was true or a midsummer hoax. Thomas Langford, a worker at Church Farm, learnt the news from a passing farmer. At the opposite end of the village an 11-year-old boy named Hubert told Sarah Marshall of Pineapple Farm that Parker had been shot dead. She rushed to the glebe alongside a growing number of labourers, but there was little she could do. Her husband, a farmer with the resources and authority to organise a manhunt, was also away from Oddingley at Bromsgrove Fair.
Some reports of Parker’s death were horribly distorted. In the Pigeon House Field Thomas Alsop, one of Barnett’s farmhands, heard about the murder at around six o’clock when a boy named Thomas Greenhill was sent with the news. Greenhill told Alsop that ‘someone had set the parson on fire’. At this, Alsop left his tools and returned to Pound Farm, where he found Barnett ‘bringing the cows out of the yard for me to take to Mr Green’s of Smite’. These were the same cattle that Susan Surman had milked an hour earlier and Alsop was surprised that Barnett now wanted them driven out of the parish. ‘He had not said anything to me before about taking the cows,’ the labourer remembered.
As Alsop led the cattle out of the fold-yard and into the lane, he asked Barnett why there was a great number of villagers ‘riding up the Rye Grass Field’ towards Parker’s glebe.
Barnett replied that ‘someone has been killing or shooting the parson’, but as he spoke did not look Alsop in the eye. Instead he bent his head to the ground. ‘He smiled and seemed pleased,’ Alsop recalled.
John Perkins learnt of the murder at about half past five. He was still tending to his bonfire when ‘a little girl’ – perhaps Parker’s seven-year-old daughter Mary – appeared in his field. She told Perkins that the Reverend had been shot and Mrs Parker would like to see him ‘directly’. Perkins threw down his tools and ran into the lane, leaving the bonfire burning behind him.
At the rectory Perkins found Mary Parker in the garden. She was leaning against a set of milk pails in the yard. ‘For God’s sake!’ she cried when she saw Perkins. ‘Go to Mr Pyndar directly, for I have no friend but you and him!’
Two miles away, in the neighbouring parish, Reverend Reginald Pyndar, one of King George’s justices of the peace, was haymaking in the meadows near his rectory at Hadzor. It was around a quarter to six when John Perkins entered the field, dismounted and told Pyndar that Parker had been killed in his glebe – shot, and his head beaten in. For a moment Pyndar listened to Perkins’ story, trying to absorb it. Pyndar was 51 years old, educated, sure-footed and a well-known member of the local set. He had the authority and personality to restore order to Oddingley in the wake of the murder, and as Perkins turned his horse for his return journey Pyndar called for his mare.
‘I will meet you in Mr Barnett’s Grounds as soon as I can,’ he shouted as John Perkins rode away at the gallop.
In 1806 there was no professional policing system in England to track fugitives, and the best chance of capturing suspected criminals following a violent crime lay in swift action. The further a villain could get from a crime scene, the better their chances of escape. Much then depended on the hue and cry, an ancient social device which ensured that however fast a suspect ran they could never outpace the shrieks and cries (‘Murder! Murder!’ or ‘Stop thief!’) that followed them along streets and alleys, through lanes and into marketplaces, inns and houses as the message was passed from one person to another in a fearful relay of voices. A comic ballad published in 1782 by the poet William Cowper dramatised the raising of a hue and cry.
Six gentlemen upon the road4
Thus seeing Gilpin fly,
With postboy scampering in the rear,
They raised the hue and cry:
‘Stop thief! Stop thief!5 – A highwayman!’
Not one of them was mute;
And all and each that passed that way
Did join in the pursuit.
The hue and cry was particularly effective in urban areas, where a mass of bystanders, shopkeepers and passers-by could be animated by a single shout. It appears in the famous scene in Oliver Twist when the Artful Dodger snatches a handkerchief from Mr Brownlow’s pocket as he stands reading outside a bookshop in London. Oliver, the Dodger’s unwitting new recruit, is mistaken for the thief by the confused crowd, which rolls and roars behind him as it chases him down.
‘Stop thief! Stop thief!’ There is a magic in the sound. The tradesman leaves his counter, and the car-man his wagon; the butcher throws down his tray; the baker his basket; the milkman his pail; the errand-boy his parcels; the schoolboy his marbles; the paviour his pickaxe; the child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter, slap-dash, tearing, yelling, screaming, knocking down the passengers as they turn the corners, rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls: and streets, squares, and courts re-echo with the sound.
Despite the lower population density, the hue and cry was often similarly effective in rural areas. In one case that was widely reported, in Surrey in 1742, two highwaymen ambushed and threatened to rob a man outside the town of Ripley. The spirited victim quickly sounded a hue and cry, riding after the men crying out ‘Highwaymen, highwaymen!’ as he went, sparking a pursuit of his assailants which continued for several miles through the countryside. At some point the victim’s calls were heard by two bystanders who fetched a brace of pistols, mounted their horses and joined the chase.
The highwaymen were pursued by a growing crowd to Ripley Green, where a cricket match was under way. Here the crowd tightened around them. Their cry changed from ‘Stop! Thieves! Highwaymen!’ to ‘Knock them down, knock them down!’ The sportsmen closed on the men with their bats. Helplessly cornered, one of the highwaymen shot and killed a cricketer seconds before he was arrested by the local constable. The second highwayman was taken shortly afterwards, a court scribe recording, ‘The town being alarmed,6 [he was] beset on all sides.’
At Oddingley Reverend Parker’s desperate cry of ‘Murder!’ was a final act that can be interpreted variously: as a flash of bravery, of helplessness or even as a glimmer of the same stoic resolve that had seen him through the painful years of the tithe dispute. Perhaps even as Parker felt the weight of the shot crashing into his middle, he had a second to accept that his life was going to end violently and all that remained was to ensure that his attacker would be captured. But his attempt to raise a hue and cry failed. The murder scene had been carefully selected, and only Susan Surman, James Tustin, Thomas Giles and John Lench were within earshot. Tustin and Surman failed to repeat Parker’s cry, and the butchers, unsure of what was happening, chose to investigate further rather than turn back towards the village, cottages and farmhouses behind them. In the crucial few minutes following the attack not a single person was stirred to action, and the murderer – who evidently knew the surrounding countryside well – was able to escape into the thinly populated fields to the west, away from Oddingley village, away from the hamlet of Dunhampstead and the busy farms and fields which dotted the weaving road north to Hadzor.
By the time John Barnett refused Lench’s plea for help ten minutes had passed since the attack and any chance of an effective hue and cry had been dashed. When Perkins left f
or Pyndar’s house at about half past five the likelihood of a quick capture was fading with the afternoon sun.
Betty Perkins had learnt the news of the murder at the same time as her husband and at about 5.30 p.m. had set off for the glebe fields to see Parker’s body. On her way through the village she was stopped by a stranger on horseback, who asked her what had happened. This was a farmer, Mr Hemmus, from Woofferton in Shropshire. Hemmus had been to Bromsgrove Fair that day and, like many others in the lanes, was now travelling home. Betty told him that their clergyman had been attacked and murdered, and Hemmus replied that he ‘would go after the murderer if anybody would go along with him’.
James Tustin, who was standing nearby, instantly volunteered to join Hemmus ‘if anyone would lend him a horse’. Betty Perkins agreed to do so, and the party set off towards Pound Farm, where Tustin left them at the gate to change his clothes. Meanwhile Betty carried on to Oddingley Lane Farm, where she had ‘her horse got ready’ and brought back up to the gate for Tustin. Betty then continued up to the glebe, where she met Tustin’s young son. The boy told her that his father had been prevented from joining Mr Hemmus by his mistress, Mrs Barnett. Old Mrs Barnett had refused to allow Tustin to leave the farm with a criminal loose in the countryside. If it was not for Mrs Barnett, the boy explained, ‘he would have gone in a minute’. Without help, Hemmus had left Oddingley and continued on his journey home.
As frustrated in her attempts to aid the chase as Lench had been before her, Betty Perkins continued to the centre of the glebe, where many villagers were crowded in mute horror about Parker’s body. The clergyman’s groin was exposed and badly burnt, his head bloodied and battered. Surman, who by now had returned to the scene of the crime, had doused the flames and pulled off Parker’s singed breeches and underclothes, exposing the charred and shot-freckled skin below. After initially fleeing the glebe, it seems that Surman had spent some time at Pound Farm during the preceding 20 minutes. She too had witnessed the Barnetts’ attempts to disrupt the manhunt. ‘Four or five others offered to go with Mr Barnett’s servant [Tustin],’ she later remembered. ‘But Mr John Barnett would not let him go.’
Thomas Giles now reappeared with the news that the murderer had threatened him and had run off toward Hindlip, a neighbouring parish. Giles then rooted in the hedgerow in search of the weapon that he had seen half an hour before. Soon he drew out an old muzzle-loading shotgun. The stock of the weapon was broken in two at the lock. After shooting the clergyman, the murderer had delivered a series – perhaps two or three – of awful injuries to Parker’s head with the stock of the weapon. It was a wild and merciless crime. The executioner would have stared down into his victim’s eyes as he delivered the fatal blows. As if setting the scraps of evidence down in a hateful collage, Giles laid the broken, bent shotgun down beside Parker’s corpse. Tustin picked up the gun bag and placed it over the clergyman’s exposed groin.
At six o’clock Reverend Pyndar arrived in the glebe meadow to assume control of the investigation. With no police force people relied upon the scattered network of unpaid magistrates to marshal their communities and to act in emergencies. As a justice of the peace, ‘the workhorse of everyday magistrate power’,7 Pyndar held an ancient feudal title laced with imagery and prestige. A vast proportion of the JPs in England were well-to-do parsons and country squires (to be eligible an individual had to have an income in excess of £100 a year) like Pyndar. They were considered well suited to the role, which further raised their status and strengthened their influence over a community. Ever since the fourteenth century magistrates had been responsible for hearing minor offences, and they had the power to have petty offenders whipped or thrown into houses of correction and more serious criminals committed to gaol to await trial at the assize – or criminal – courts.
Pyndar looked down at Parker’s corpse. He picked up the bag and asked Perkins what he thought. Perkins replied that he ‘thought it came from Droitwich as it smelt salty’. Pyndar then ordered Parker’s body to be removed to the rectory. But rather than carrying the corpse, a decision was made to send for a chair from the rectory on which the body could be transported more suitably. Several minutes later a pathetic cortège embarked for Church Lane. The corpse – slumped back in the chair – was carried by Tustin and some other farmhands towards the rectory as if it was the centrepiece of a bizarre religious procession. A train of parishioners, passers-by, children and curious onlookers walked behind.
What followed in the minutes afterwards would be disputed in the village for years to come. Susan Surman claimed that Pyndar, shocked at John Barnett’s apathy, determined to seek him out for an explanation. Surman had told Pyndar that her master could be found at his farmhouse, but when he knocked at the door Old Mrs Barnett told him her son was out – ‘that he had gone to the Captain’s’. Pyndar then wheeled around to confront Surman, whom he accused of ‘telling him a tale’. The dairymaid – in a dangerous breach of loyalty – protested, ‘I have not at all, for Mr John Barnett is in the parlour [and] had just before stuck his head out of the window and told James Tustin to go to the stable [and her] to mind her milking.’
At this Pyndar returned to Pound Farm, forcing entry to the farmhouse and dragging Barnett out into the yard. According to Surman, it was a dramatic scene. It was now early evening and knots of villagers were gathered outside Pound Farm watching the action unravel. They saw Pyndar interrogate Barnett, and as he did so the bearers of the chair carrying Parker’s helpless corpse edged into view behind them. In full sight of the villagers Pyndar pressed Barnett asking ‘if he knew anything of that job’. Barnett replied that he did not, and protested that he was ‘very sorry that it had happened’.
There is something improbable in Surman’s story. She seems to suggest that Tustin was at Pound Farm when several other sources have him transporting Parker’s body to the rectory. More importantly, nobody who was present would ever corroborate her account of Pyndar fetching Barnett out of the parlour. There were, though, various reports of a confrontation between the magistrate and the farmer. John Perkins claimed that Pyndar met Barnett further along Church Lane as if, he reasoned, Barnett was returning from Captain Evans’. Perkins heard Pyndar call to the farmer, ‘Barnett, you have had a very pretty job happen in your parish, are you not ashamed of it? When those two butchers came to your house to go in search of the murderer you refused to go?’
Barnett said nothing. The magistrate – seemingly overcome with fury or frustration: a friend and peer murdered, the suspect escaped and one of the parish’s leading men apparently indifferent – then raged at the farmer. He shouted, ‘You rascal! You villain! If you had a dog and had any love for him you would have saved him if you could! – I shall think of you as long as I live.’ John Barnett dropped his head and ‘never said a word’.
Parker’s corpse arrived at the rectory at about 7 p.m., around two hours after he had set off up Church Lane for his cows. Gone in those few hours were the tranquillity of a summer afternoon and the fragile peace of the village, which so often in recent months and years had been threatened. The noises of labourers at work – the rattle of their handcarts, the swinging of scythes and the scrape of rakes – were replaced by the sound of horses’ hooves as George Day, the Parkers’ servant boy, left the rectory garden on Perkins’ old nag for Worcester.
Worcester in the early nineteenth century, printed by Roper & Cole, 1808
That all minds should now turn towards Worcester was logical. It was a fine city, built almost entirely of red brick with the exception of a handful of public buildings, its churches and exquisite medieval cathedral. Although its streets were capacious, newly paved and lighted, the city, with a population of 12,792, offered two sources of hope for the fleeing murderer. First, it would allow him to plunge into the crowds, where he might have friends or accomplices lying in wait. Second, it would give him access to a great number of routes of further escape. Worcester sat almost at the heart of England and was served by a rapidly dev
eloping network of turnpike roads heading off in all directions: towards Tewkesbury to the south, to Birmingham in the north and Evesham in the south-east. The city was popular with travellers and tradesmen, who came to view, purchase or collect orders of its famous porcelain or gloves, and at all hours of the day wagons, mail and stage coaches rolled sluggishly out of the yards of its major public houses into Foregate Street, Broad Street and the High Street. In his Brief History of Worcester8 (1806) J. Tymbs noted that Worcester ‘is generally allowed by most travellers not to have an equal’.1 If the murderer could reach the city before the news of his crime, then he could easily secure passage onwards.
Worcester lay just six miles from Oddingley, but for a traveller on the winding lanes or wading through the long summer grass it was not a simple distance to cover. Without risking the turnpike – known locally as the Droitwich Road – there was little chance of him reaching Worcester in less than two hours. The Birmingham Light Coach had already left earlier that afternoon, and the next best opportunities to escape the county were the Bristol Mail, which occasionally took passengers and departed from the Star and Garter public house in Foregate Street at 8.30 p.m., and the London Stage Coach, which left Angel Street in the city centre at 10 p.m. each Tuesday. That coach, perhaps, was the most logical. It would arrive three days later at the Bull and Mouth coaching inn in the City of London.
The primary aim of George Day’s gallop to the city that evening was to close these routes of escape. Then he would deliver Thomas Giles and John Lench’s description of the wanted man to the authorities. In contrast to the lightly policed community at Oddingley, Worcester was tightly governed. It had five aldermen – senior members of the local corporation – who also served as justices of the peace, a sheriff, thirteen constables and four beadles. The centre of Worcester was about forty minutes’ ride away at the gallop. If the murderer intended to take either the London or the Bristol coaches that night, there was still enough time to catch him.
