“Liar!”
“I bloody tell you it was that scar-face old bastard what got ‘em all hanged. Me mam’s two brothers and me dad’s big brother’s son, all three of ‘em swinging on the gallows in Burton and all acos of ‘im!”
The landlord of the Mulso Arms intervened, he wanted no arguments in his bar and, especially, he could not afford to tolerate abuse of His Lordship, not in a pub whose freehold belonged to the estate.
“Calm down, Mr Barney, if you please! And you, whoever you are, bugger off out of my pub! Go and shout your mouth off in Burton, if that’s where you’re from, but we’ll hear no more of your bloody nonsense in these parts. Drink up and get out, quick!”
Barney was a well-to-do tenant farmer and as such an important local figure, even if unusually young for the role. The other man was a carter, not much better than a gypsy in the landlord’s estimation, and his seditious rubbish was not wanted where important people might hear of it.
“Arse creeper! That’s all you are, you fat old bugger. And you brew a piss-poor pint! As for you, mister, if you wants to step outside and call me a liar there, you can bloody well try it.”
The carter stamped out, stood waiting in full view of the door, a big man, heavily built, well-muscled from swinging loads on and off of his wagon. There were forty ten-stone sacks of flour up on the bed, four feet off the ground, and he would have put them there himself, single-handed, one hundred and forty pounds at a time.
Joshua Barney glanced at him, did not fancy the prospect of taking him on bare-knuckle, but he had no choice, there were four other men in the bar and the word would soon go round the village if he showed yellow. All the girls would hear of it and laugh at him and some of the young men would get pushy, would try to bully him if they thought he was a weakling; his labourers on the farm would slack off behind his back as well.
He put his unfinished pint down on the counter, walked out without a word. The drinkers and the landlord crowded to the window to watch.
“Put them up then. I’ll shut your big mouth for you, mister!”
The carter rushed him, swinging high and with all his weight. Joshua ducked and stepped in close, bringing his knee up hard. There was a collective wince behind him, an indrawn breath, mutters of ironic commiseration.
Joshua punched the carter as he dropped, more for the show of it than for any need, belting him on the nose and bringing a spray of blood, much appreciated by the audience.
The onlookers came out, picked the carter up and bundled him onto his seat, shoved the reins into his hands and urged the pair of horses into motion. With any luck he wouldn’t fall off, they thought, not really caring – he was a foreigner from five miles up the road, not one of their own people.
The word reached Quillerson that afternoon, the village grapevine effective as ever, news spreading almost by magic.
Lord Andrews was in London with my lady and intending to make a visit to her parents in Dorset afterwards, they demanding company whilst they made their annual duty stay with their thoroughly boring son. My lord would not be back at the Hall for nearly two months and, with any luck, this little matter would have blown over by then. There was no need to send him a letter, he concluded, although this was the third time in four weeks he had heard word of bitterness amongst the Burton people.
The hangings of the previous year had produced shock and fear, as had been intended, but both had worn off and now there was grief and anger in their place. Quillerson did not think there was any intention of revenge as yet, but loose talk could lead to bad temper and that could produce anything. Fighting on a grand scale between the two sets of villagers was always a possibility as there had never been any love lost between Burton and Finedon; that had been so for generations, at least since the days of the Roundheads and Cavaliers when it seemed that the squires had taken different sides.
The country as a whole was calming down, so my lord had told him, perhaps as a result of the hangings in more than one small town, and they did not want any further disorder to flare up and spread.
It would be a waste of time to speak to the Latimers. Sir Charles had no concept of tactful dealing with his people, would certainly react with a heavy hand: threats and evictions and trumped-up prosecutions that would make matters worse. The only sensible course was to watch, to collect names of troublemakers against future need and to do nothing at all while it could be avoided.
The best thing immediately would be for Joshua Barney to settle down with a wife and keep out of the pub, but farmers did not commonly marry until they were in their thirties, especially if they had a mother in the house to run the yard for them. The milking shed, poultry and the dairy itself were all in the domain of the womenfolk and there could be friction when a new wife expected to take over from a still fit and active mother-in-law, so most wise men delayed marriage until their mothers were ready to sit by the fireside and rock their grandchildren’s cradles. It often led to engagements lasting ten or more years before the actual marriage and had the beneficial effect of reducing the size of the farmer’s family.
Only one son could inherit the tenancy or the land itself in the case of a yeoman. Younger brothers might find a life of their own in another trade, in the past very often becoming soldiers, now more likely to go overseas. The sole alternative was to remain as unpaid labourers to their brothers, never marrying and a nuisance to the farm, having to be kept on even if they lacked skills and the willingness to put in a good day’s work. Daughters were useful in the dairy and with the poultry but were an expense to marry off, needing a bottom drawer at minimum, often a couple of hundreds in cash as a dowry which a prosperous farmer had to provide, or seem mean-spirited and possibly unthrifty and unable to meet his obligations.
There was much to be said for late marriage for countrymen generally, but it could lead to a degree of wildness amongst the unsettled young men, especially where church and chapel were weak and unable to keep their flock in line.
That led Quillerson to his other worry, the chapels and their prickly relationship with each other and in particular with Mr Nugent, pastor of the original and largest but no longer fullest of the Methody denominations.
Nugent was increasingly unstable, Quillerson believed, becoming unreliable in his anxiety to refill his pews, reaching out to the least desirable members of the community.
Quillerson had had some success in the previous year persuading young men with no work and no prospect of finding a job to emigrate, to go away for good. Farm labourers’ sons could find little enough to occupy them in the local area. Jobs at the iron foundry and the boot manufactury were increasingly rare, due to the average age of the workers being low – vacancies among the original workers had been taken up by younger men who would not, in all probabilities, die for another thirty years, a long time to wait. Without work and a cottage of their own the men would be unable to marry and the girls would not even speak to them, so there was nothing to keep them in the area. Many had gone to the new mines opening in neighbouring counties, a few farther north to the mills and manufacturies building in increasing numbers there. The rest, generally, had taken the ticket and the few pounds Quillerson had offered and had shipped out to the Americas.
Now Nugent was interfering, actively working to keep the men in the village.
A member of the congregation, a retired and widowed merchant, a man with more money than sense, Quillerson believed, had built a dozen cottages, each with two or three acres attached, and had rented them out for pennies at Nugent’s instigation. Young men had been installed as smallholders, able, just, to keep body and soul together on their little bits of land. Nugent had encouraged them to wed and the local Poor Law had then had to step in and supply loaves of bread every day and scrag ends of meat once a week to avert starvation. All had started families and, being young, those families might be expected to grow quite enthusiastically, and the cost to the Poor Law would grow as well. No doubt Mr Nugent would lead them to praise the Lord on Sunday
s, but for the rest of the week the Poor Law Board must look after them.
There was no national organisation of the Poor law, and government paid nothing from its taxes to help the localities. Every parish had a responsibility to its own, meeting the charge as it could and doing its best to pare expenditure to the very bone. The Thingdon estate paid more than its fair share of the local costs and Quillerson could see no reason why they should subsidise Nugent in his foolishness, and could find no way of avoiding the obligation to do so. Add to that, Nugent made no attempt to disguise his hostility to them, believing that the manor should have crushed the upstart chapels when they were first created instead of permitting them to challenge his monopoly of Nonconformity in the village.
One answer might be to create a Poor Law Union by Private Act of Parliament, the surrounding villages and Kettering all in one body and able to build a workhouse or arrange for some kind of public works, road-mending or some such, but that would demand Finedon and Burton to act together, an obvious impossibility, and Irthlingborough to the south was an industrial village, not agricultural at all, and neither of the other places had anything to do with its people, so that was out as well.
They needed a lead from the government, and would not get it while Westminster’s sole aim was to cut taxes and reduce all of its activities to ‘traditional’ levels, whatever they were supposed to be. Quillerson wondered if he should perhaps speak to Mr James about the problem so that he could raise the matter in the House. He decided not to after a little consideration of exactly what he would tell him and how.
It was a pity that it was the Methodists who were strong in the area, Quillerson thought. Had it been the Church then the bishop could have stepped in to enforce the rules of good behaviour on his errant priest, but there was no effective hierarchy amongst the chapels, all could go their own way, ignoring any protests made by their governing councils.
He supposed he should be thankful that there were no camp fire revivalists in the area, beating on their drums and whipping the mob into hysterical scenes of repentance and rediscovered virtue. That would be too embarrassing for the estate, would make them a laughing stock in the whole county. He had heard that there was a resurgence of Primitive Christianity in the North Country – they could keep it, the people of the Midlands were respectable.
“We really ought to go to Dorset, Thomas.”
“We should, I agree. Could we be called away, a sudden emergency perhaps? Do you think we might have to go to New York at a day’s notice?”
They decided that it might seem a little unlikely. The civil would have to be done, they would have to tolerate a sennight at least of her brother and his worthy wife and boring offspring.
“We could pay a call on Thomas Burley, my dear.”
“His wife might be a little puzzled still, Thomas.”
“Not to worry, I am sure that the intellectual exercise will be good for her.”
She accepted that his mind was made up, and was not too concerned one way or the other.
“Did you ever find out any more about his mother’s people, Thomas? He might be glad to know something of them.”
“They would probably be dead by now, almost must be. Which means, of course, that they cannot be embarrassed at discovering his existence. A word to Michael, I suspect.”
/////////
Book Six in the, ‘A Poor Man at the Gate Series’, Illusions of Change is available on Kindle and in all leading online ebook stores: Amazon - Kindle Link:
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The Duty and Destiny Series: Published in 2014, these superbly-crafted novel length sea stories are set in the period of the French Revolutionary War (1793 – 1802). The series follows the naval career and love-life of Frederick Harris, the second son of a middling Hampshire landowner, a brave but somewhat reluctant mariner. Amazon - Kindle links to the whole series:
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Privilege Preserved (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 5) Page 25
