by Peter Moore
As they had all the conveniences of life within themselves they very seldom visited the towns or cities in search of superfluities. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primeval simplicity of manners; and frugal by habit, they scarcely knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with cheerfulness on days of labour, but observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the Christmas carol; sent true love-knots on Valentine’s Morning, ate pancakes on Shrovetide, showed their wit on the 1st of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas Eve.
Elizabeth Fowler was the only female live-in servant at Church Farm, and after driving the cows to be milked she returned to the farmhouse at midday on Easter Monday. She briefly rested in the kitchen with Catherine Banks, the housekeeper, and Catherine’s mother Mary. Snatching a meal – a slice of wheaten bread, perhaps, and a block of Cheshire cheese – there would have been a chance to discuss the latest news. A few hours earlier a traveller had been ambushed by a band of footpads on the turnpike between Worcester and Droitwich, just two miles from Oddingley. Footpads, unlike highwaymen, were poor, worked on foot and killed indiscriminately to eliminate witnesses. They were considered the lowest and vilest class of English criminal and a curse on rural travel. The unfortunate victim, a man named John Williams,13 had been robbed of 5s. 6d. in silver and a half-crown ticket (about a week’s wage) but had escaped alive. The footpads had then vanished from the scene.
The ancient countryside of gentle hills and twisting lanes about Oddingley lent itself well to such dramas. Hedges of hawthorn, ash, elm, hazel, sallow and holly had for centuries been used as much for food as barriers to livestock and were garnished with stray fruit trees – wild cherry, pear and crabapple. The resulting hedgerows were not just woven, oblique shields for the farmland behind, but also cover for cut-throats, highwaymen, thieves and footpads. As Elizabeth Fowler was sent out that afternoon to scour the fold-yard, the sty, stacks and the sheds for eggs, the story must have played strongly in her imagination.
Elizabeth searched the hen houses and the fold-yard and at length came to a rick – a carefully built and protected structure used to store either straw or hay – which stood close to the farm gate. There, she later remembered, something caught her eye. The rick was old – from the previous summer – and to deter rats and other rodents and to keep the straw dry, it stood about three feet clear of the ground, elevated on a number of stone stilts known as staddles. Behind one of these staddles, hidden only partially under a little mound of scattered straw, was something that looked like one of the farm tools but wasn’t.
Elizabeth crouched down. It was a long narrow bag, fastened at the top with binding. Picking it up, she found it heavy. Fashioned from stiff leather, it smelt slightly of salt. Carefully she placed the object back on the ground and undid the binding. Inside she discovered the long polished barrel of a shotgun.14
When Elizabeth returned to the farmhouse, Catherine Banks told her that the Captain and George had both left for a church meeting and were not expected back until late. It was an anxious and puzzling situation. Guns were not rare in the countryside, but those that did exist were usually stowed safely away in glass cabinets or locked in bedroom cupboards. Why someone should leave such a valuable and dangerous weapon unguarded by the gate of a village farm was a mystery.
‘Dare you bring it in?’ the housekeeper asked Elizabeth. Fowler fetched the bag from beneath the rick and laid it between them on the servants’ table.
Meanwhile Captain Evans and George Banks were passing below the oak porch of St James’ Church on their way to the the annual vestry meeting. Set for Easter Monday, vestry was the most significant parish meeting: annual accounts were approved by the executive, and officials – the overseer, constable, vestry clerk and churchwardens – elected for the year ahead. Vestry was attended by all of the parish’s leading men and, reflecting its importance, was not held at a local public house or a nearby farmhouse, but at the parish church under Parker’s chairmanship.
Woodcut of St James’ Church, Oddingley
St James’ Church15 was the oldest building in the parish and badly in need of investment and repair. A local writer would later portray it as a dilapidated structure, ravaged by wind and rain and supported by the type of ‘rude timberwork’ that might be found ‘in a granary or malthouse’. In the damp, badly lit nave, where Parker and the farmers convened, was a mildewed font and an old grinder organ. Above them all, traversing the ceiling, there was a length of wood carved alternately with images of cheerful cusps and inverted vipers – symbols of heaven and hell. The atmosphere of gloom and decay was an accurate metaphor for relations between Oddingley’s leading men. For years meetings had been awkward and fractious, damaged by persistent undertones of personal dislike. The vestry of 1806 was no different and brought the sharpest confrontation yet as Parker and his parishioners battled for power in the year ahead.
The meeting began with the election of the parish officers, and, led by Captain Evans, the farmers asserted their weight of numbers by electing John Barnett as overseer and then his younger brother William as constable. These offices were unpaid but carried great prestige and power, with the overseer responsible for the parish finances and the constable invested with power to apprehend offenders, collect evidence on behalf of victims and ensure that the village’s militia quota was filled. For Parker the election of the Barnett brothers was a blow. Both of them disliked him, and John had been openly hostile for some years. Perhaps nettled by these decisions and with little forbearance, Parker decided to strike back. He retaliated on a point of order, refusing to approve the annual accounts.
Parker took exception to a subsidised dinner which had been planned and attended by the farmers following the previous year’s vestry meeting. His complaint was that the expenditure had not been approved and his inference was that several farmers were indulging themselves with parish money. It was a valid but somewhat unusual objection. As unpaid public servants it was customary for elected officials across the country to compensate themselves with an annual dinner in exchange for their time, skills and commitment. A tacit agreement usually ensured that a slight redistribution of the finances for this purpose was not checked, and the practice was so widespread that Francis Grose the lexicographer had complained some years earlier, ‘Every parish officer thinks he has a right to make a round bill16 on the Parish during his year of power.’ Parker’s objection inflamed what was already a brittle and tense atmosphere. To the farmers it was a contrived and snide attack. A passionate argument ensued, with the Captain, John Barnett and Thomas Clewes rounding on him. Inevitability they raised the subject of the tithes, and thereafter the meeting descended into chaos. The farmers stalked out, abandoning an event intended to bring parishioners together. John Perkins was the only one who stayed to speak to Parker, perhaps the only farmer he could still count as a friend.
Resentment had characterised the relationship between Captain Evans, John Barnett and Thomas Clewes and their clergyman for years, and above all else the Oddingley tithe dispute was the issue that cleaved them apart. The tithe was a complex and unpopular tax. At the very simplest level a tenth of all parish produce ‘or some other things in lieu’ was payable by ratepayers to tithe owners – most commonly members of the clergy or landed gentry. The levy had endured without revision since deepest history, and its payment was a symbolic act designed to bind pastors and labourers together in the productive toil of a community in a partnership of earth and faith. In 1806 the tax still comprised the backbone of Parker’s annual salary, and it was following his decision to re-fix its value in line with inflation at the turn of the century that clashes had begun.
Reverend Parker was an ambitious man, and though it was clear he intended to serve his parish well, throughout the 1790s it had become plain that he also expected to be paid correspondingly. It was perhaps a logical step for Parker, who had overachieved in his early years, to build on his new position, but whatever designs he had
of making his fortune at Oddingley were seriously challenged by the financial climate. Inflation was rampant in the last decade of the eighteenth century, with the price of wheat (and therefore bread) darting up with disarming speed, from 58 shillings a quarter in 1790 to 128 shillings in 1800. Rising prices led to unrest, with bread riots beginning in Wales in the 1780s spilling over the border to Hereford and Worcester in the 1790s, where the city’s corporation was forced to help support the poor. A melancholy note received by the editor of Berrow’s Worcester Journal2 on 20 April 1801 was evocative of the struggle many families had to make ends meet. It declared people were living in ‘an age of extortion’ and it lamented, ‘The poor, in general, exclaim loudly against the dearness of provisions.’18
But it wasn’t just the poor who were affected by the increasing prices; the middling classes to which George Parker belonged would have seen their cost of living rise sharply too. With the addition of a wife and a daughter to his household, extra strain would have been placed on Parker’s finances, and at some point around the turn of the century he decided to redress the balance by amending the £135 tithe payment that he was owed each year by the village farmers. It was the simplest way of raising his income, but it sparked the quarrel that would define Oddingley’s identity for years to come.
Before Parker’s arrival the parish had opted to ‘compound’ the tithe: the £135 fixed sum was paid annually in a single payment on Lady Day, 25 March, thereby sidestepping all the problems of gathering each tithe individually. This was a sensible arrangement as tithe law was so horrifically complex, so riddled with subtleties and ambiguities that it often caused more confusion than it delivered answers. Not only were tithe holders – mostly members of the clergy or landed gentry – entitled to ‘great tithes’ such as corn, grain and wood, but they were also due many ‘small tithes’ ranging from fruit, garden herbs, root and other vegetables to honey, flax and a hundred other minor items including activities such as labour – a notoriously awkward asset to quantify.
All of this was overruled by local customs that ensured that the tithes were never calculated in the same way in any two places. Each parish kept a document called a glebe terrier which listed in great detail the tithe holder’s right to each different item. These rights had been established over time, in a process of constant negotiation and renegotiation between the tithe holder and the ratepayers. In many instances bargains had been struck between the two parties whereby farmers had achieved exemption from a certain obligation by paying a customary annual or one-off fee, known as a modus. Once recorded in the terrier a modus was very difficult to alter and tithe owners were often shackled to unfavourable agreements settled by their predecessors. In one instance, in Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, the clergyman had to content himself with just £2 12s. 4d. for an area of 1,390 acres of prime titheable land, from which he should have expected many hundreds of pounds.
A surviving ‘true and perfect terrier’ for Oddingley from 1714, copied in a measured hand onto a single sheet of parchment, numbers in a pithy list the benefits of the parish. The dwelling house or rectory was accompanied by several barns and buildings, including a house for pigs. The incumbent also had rights to the two orchards that surrounded the property and a portion of meadowland lying across the common in the north. Three distinct moduses applied in the parish. An exception had been negotiated for all the timber and wood taken from Trench Wood, and there had been an agreement relating to ‘corn, hay and all other things growing’,19 and likewise for the ‘tithes of wool, lamb and piggs [sic]’.
This is very much the same agreement that Parker inherited 75 years later from Reverend Samuel Commeline. In compensation for the above exceptions, the financial equivalent had been set at £135, divided proportionally between the ratepaying properties. But within five years of his arrival Parker had decided the arrangement was unfair and had called a meeting with the ratepayers, informing them he intended to raise the overall value of the tax to a single payment of £150 to reflect rising prices. The farmers, led by Captain Evans, refused Parker’s proposal outright.
How justified was Parker in demanding the rise? Certainly £135 in 1800 did not have the purchasing power that it would have done 50 years before, and in every area the cost of living was increasing in a seemingly endless upward spiral. If the price of wheat could more than double between 1790 and 1800, then what might it do in another ten years? Another unnerving reflection of the bewildering rise in prices was noted by Pitt the surveyor, who estimated that the cost of labour had leapt by 20 per cent in the 11 years between 1794 and 1805. The farmers of course were suffering too, having to pay their workforce higher wages, but in other ways they remained somewhat sheltered, as they had the ability to feed themselves and in some cases even make tidy profits from the rising market.
Parker, though, clearly felt the changes keenly. By the start of the nineteenth century it was rare to find livings that supported the comfortable and occasionally extravagant lifestyles country parsons had famously enjoyed. The past 50 years had seen the status of the clergy slip, and in comparison with the rocketing fortunes of the industrialists they now seemed little better than a plebeian class. It was said that for each clergyman who achieved the status of a gentleman, ten others were left as menial servants, condemned to a life of toil in their glebe fields, feeding swine and loading dung carts. Many were forced to supplement their incomes. Some became agriculturalists: keeping livestock, growing crops and raising coppices for timber. In 1806 William Wilberforce informed the House of Commons that he was aware of a curate who augmented his parish income with a job as a weaver.17
Parker’s temerity, however, was dangerous. There were already many disputes across the country between clergymen and farmers over tithes, with the agriculturalists claiming that the levy discriminated against them disproportionally, while failing to tax the emerging classes in the industrial towns. It seemed unfair that a wealthy London banker should escape the attentions of the taxman while the fields of England remained subject to the full ravages of the law. Parker’s annual salary, too, was already much higher than what they could expect to earn from their properties, with an average yeoman farmer’s income hovering at around just £100. According to the diary of Richard Miles, a nearby farmer, in 1807 a wagoner could be employed for £12 12s. a year, a manservant for £10 10s., and a dairymaid for £5 or £6. So Parker’s proposed rise would have only cost the wages20 of three dairymaids shared between all of the seven ratepayers. But without the farmers’ agreement, Parker’s plans were ruined. He returned angrily to his rectory, only to emerge shortly afterwards displaying what would become characteristic tenacity: he announced his intention to collect the tithe in kind – an unheard-of action in Worcestershire.
Tithing in kind meant visiting each of Oddingley’s ratepaying properties assessing the different yields and taking what was owed on the spot. As the acceptance of monetary compound was entirely at the discretion of the tithe owner, tithing in kind remained a fall-back for clergymen willing to undergo the inconvenience of collecting individual yields themselves. The practice, however, was rare and only remained in the north-western counties, where Parker would most probably have seen it as a boy, and in Kent. In Worcestershire tithing in kind had dwindled then disappeared over the centuries, and Parker’s decision to reintroduce it was like dragging the village back into the feudal age.
It was a decision mired in difficulties. Parker was forced to hire men to visit farms and collect produce on his behalf. He was compelled to buy barrows and handcarts, and to build a barn to store all the collected items. As Oddingley was such a large and sprawling parish, it became a lengthy and troublesome task with Parker or one of his employees forced to haul carts and drive animals along the twisting lanes. Worst of all he was cast into the demeaning role of taxman and market trader, his decision thrusting him into the very day-to-day situations that the tax was designed to protect him from. A humorous ballad penned in the eighteenth century underlined colourfu
lly the problems associated with tithing in kind. It recounts the story of a parson’s attempt to claim his tithe pig – a plan foiled by a characteristically uncooperative farmer.
Good morning says the parson,
Oh, good morning sir, to you
I’m come to claim a sucking pig21
You know it is my due
Therefore, I pray, go fetch me one
That is both plump and fine
Since I have asked a friend or two
Along with me to dine
Then in the stye the farmer goes,
Amongst the pigs so small
And chooses for the parson,
The least amongst them all;
But when the parson saw the same
How he did stamp and roar
He stampt his foot and shook his wig
And almost curst and swore
The ballad foreshadowed events at Oddingley, where clashes between Parker and his ratepayers commenced shortly afterwards. The first had occurred four or five years before the vestry meeting, when Parker and Thomas Lloyd, his first tithe man, called at Pound Farm and met John Barnett, who quickly ordered them to leave. Parker refused, declaring that he was there by right. At this, Barnett’s temper cracked and he squared up to the clergyman. ‘Damn your blood!’22 he shouted. ‘Take that!’ And he kicked him sharply on the thigh.
Parker reported the incident and had Barnett successfully prosecuted for assault. It was a warning to the farmers, who knew that if they refused him the tithes he was within his rights to have them hauled before the common law courts. If they were found guilty of failing to pay church rates they could be punished by a fine or, in extreme instances, prison. Parker had a second weapon too. He could report them to the ecclesiastical courts, where wayward parishioners could be admonished openly, suspended from church altogether or forced to do penance. A typical punishment ordered delinquents to stand outside the church porch on a Sunday morning before divine service, dressed in a long frock with bare legs and feet.