by Peter Moore
Swearing was an evil that the respectable classes recoiled from and railed against, and punishments for those found guilty could be severe. For day-labourers, sailors, common soldiers or seamen there was a fine of one shilling for a first conviction. For farmers, merchants and any other person beneath the rank of gentleman the rate was increased to two shillings, and for gentlemen and those of higher status the fine was five shillings. The amounts were doubled for a second offence and tripled for a third. Furthermore a raft of legislation had been passed by the Pitt government during the 1790s to counter the increasing number of sedtious meetings in the country – which, it was held, was teetering on the brink of revolution. Particularly stiff punishments were meted out to those convicted of taking or administering oaths that bound individuals to mutinous or seditious causes. Hard evidence about the farmers’ meeting in the Pigeon House might be difficult to bring before a magistrate, but it was clear the men were acting on the very edge of the law.
Parker did not react to the farmers’ curses; instead he brushed them off as best he could. But they were an affront to his reputation he could barely ignore. In 1806 Georgians were still consumed by questions of personal honour, and offended parties would often retaliate to perceived affronts to their dignity by challenging the offenders to fist fights or duels. Such encounters occurred at all levels of society, and even Pitt, the prime minister, had become entangled in an argument that ended in a duel on Putney Heath just a few years earlier. In the Midlands there were many further examples much closer to home,3 one of which had occurred in the parish of Spondon in Derbyshire, where the local curate had shot and killed the schoolmaster in a duel after the two men had quarrelled over ‘a brisk gay widow’.12
But instead of returning insult with violence, Reverend Parker reacted to the farmers’ provocations with stoicism. Perhaps he was not a fighting man; perhaps he did not want to lower himself to the indignity and fanfare of a public confrontation; or perhaps he planned to seize the moral high ground by acting with decency. Such an approach was probably the best available to him, and it was certainly better than fighting men like Evans, Barnett and Clewes head on. But his unwillingness to defend himself publicly could also be perceived as a weakness. It was a weakness that the farmers sought to exploit throughout the spring and early summer of 1806, and of them all Captain Evans was the man who displayed a talent for using language and rhetoric most effectively.
When Evans summoned Elizabeth Fowler to his parlour at the end of May he was doing more than urging her to swear allegiance to his faction in the village dispute, he was asking her to collude in an oath. This behaviour may well have also stemmed from Evans’ military career – he would have understood that popular support was vital in any divisive cause – but his challenge to Elizabeth was clever and pointed.
Since the earliest days of English society the belief had persisted that individuals could be bound by an oath to an employer, a quest or a cause. Such oaths are seldom used nowadays – they are only employed formally in court – but in the early nineteenth century they remained an important method of extracting allegiance or guaranteeing support. An oath was sealed when an individual swore aloud over a sacred object or in the presence of their social superiors. By challenging Elizabeth to swear an oath, Evans was testing her loyalty, trying to bind her to him through the magic of words.
Such magic, akin to a spell, can be found in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in rural England in the first third of the nineteenth century. In the opening scene the novel’s tragic hero, a hay-trusser named Michael Henchard, swears a solemn oath to avoid all strong liquor for twenty-one years after a night of terrible drunkenness during which he sold his wife and baby daughter for the sum of five guineas. Henchard’s oath is sworn over a Bible at the parish church and its solemnity is reflected in Hardy’s prose.
Hence he reached the church without observation,13 and the door being only latched, he entered. The hay-trusser deposited his basket by the font, went up the nave till he reached the altar-rails, and opening the gate, entered the sacrarium, where he seemed to feel a sense of strangeness for a moment; then he knelt upon the foot pace. Dropping his head upon the clamped book which lay on the Communion-table, he said aloud –
‘I, Michael Henchard, on this morning of the sixteenth of September, do take on oath before God here in this solemn place that I will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come, being a year for every year I have lived. And this I swear upon the book before me; and may I be struck dumb, blind and helpless, if I break this my oath!’
Oaths have a long history. For centuries communities had been held together by formal oaths or other invisible bonds of allegiance that helped to dictate their actions, ensuring the political make-up of a village or town remained relatively stable, and important secrets were kept safe. Oaths were also used to bind individuals to a cause. In 1803, when the Despard Plot – a scheme which purportedly involved the assassination of King George III, the seizure of the Tower of London and the Post Office and the proclamation of Great Britain as a republic – was foiled by the government, many of the alleged participants were discovered to be carrying unlawful oaths in their pockets headed: ‘Constitution: The Independence of Great Britain14 and Ireland’. The importance individuals placed on such pledges is perhaps best demonstrated by the convict Abel Magwitch in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Magwitch displays a total reliance on a black Bible that he carries everywhere with him and on which he forces successive characters to swear loyalty. To Magwitch, Pip observes, the Bible seems to have powers equal to a ‘spell or a charm’. When Pip’s friend the hapless Herbert Pocket encounters the convict for the first time, Magwitch flies at him in a flurry of curses that do not abate until a peculiar ceremony involving the Bible has been concluded. ‘Take it in your right hand!15 – Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in any way sumever! Kiss it!’ Magwitch snarls.
Oaths were used in this way to secure loyalty and distinguish friends from enemies, and Fowler was acting bravely in refusing Evans’ request. In rural parishes like Oddingley those considered disloyal to a cause could face the wrath of the community and the prospect of being hounded out by ridicule or alienation. Such a fate was a reality for those such as John Perkins, Sarah Lloyd, Old Mr Hardcourt and Elizabeth Fowler who stood by Parker. The two remaining farmers, Mr Marshall and Mr Jones, who stayed neutral throughout the dispute, might well have calculated that it was better to remain quiet rather than take the clergyman’s side.
This may have been a wise choice. When a community’s will was gathered behind a popular cause its power could be overwhelming. Unpopular villagers could be bullied into submission, ridiculed mercilessly or provoked into embarrassing themselves. There were far cruder ways to settle local scores. In some villages labourers would dress in gaudy, hideous costumes to mock adulterers or debtors. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, when the shameful affair between Michael Henchard and Lucetta Le Sueur is exposed, a drunken mob gathers and then roars through the town in a humiliating procession or skimmity-ride (‘an old foolish thing that they do in these parts when a man’s wife is – well, not particularly his own’). The Casterbridge mob carries effigies of Henchard and Lucetta. The figures are tied back to back at the elbows and processed through the middle of the town on a donkey. It was rough, crude justice, the horror of which was enough to kill Lucetta: ‘“Tis me!” she said, with a face as pale as death. “A procession – a scandal – an effigy of me, and him!”’
The Oddingley farmers set out to undermine Reverend Parker just as the fictional townsfolk of Casterbridge first undermined then humiliated Lucetta. The farmers characterised Parker as an evil aberration who had abused his position as the village clergyman for his own selfish ends. Parker was not just the Bonaparte of Oddingley, he was the Devil dressed in the clothes of a priest. They damned his soul, damned his eyes, damned his bones and damned his blood.
CHAPTER 6
Hue and Cry
Oddingley, 24 June 1806, Midsummer Day
ON MIDSUMMER AFTERNOON John Perkins was at work at his farm a quarter of a mile south of the village crossroads. Oddingley Lane Farm was one of the smaller holdings in the parish. It was connected to the little network of country roads by a wide earthy drive which branched off from the southern part of Oddingley Lane. Perkins’ farmhouse lay at the far end of this drive behind a little pool. It was surrounded by a scattered cluster of cow sheds, cart houses and workshops, filled like all the others in the parish with wheelbarrows, handcarts, tongs, weeding hooks, hammers and nails, saws, pincers, scythes and pitchforks. Farmers across Oddingley guarded their tools carefully, knowing they were among their most valuable and vital possessions. Keys to the workshops were kept by the farmers, and into the woodwork of each implement they burnt their initials as a deterrent to thieves.
Midsummer came in the middle of a busy stretch in the farming calendar, and unlike Clewes and Old Mr Hardcourt, Perkins had decided not to travel to Bromsgrove for the annual fair, instead opting to remain in the village. Traditionally the first few weeks of June were devoted to sheep shearing, a task which had to be completed by the middle of the month so attention could shift towards haymaking and the clover harvest – two of the most delicate and important businesses of the year. Both clover and sainfoin grass – typically the variety raised for hay – were highly nutritious foods for livestock, and to harvest and store them well was vital for the future of a farm. Once cut with a scythe, the crops had to be withered beneath the sun until they were dried, sapped of their juices and ready to be carted off and built into ricks.
A short distance north of Oddingley Lane Farm, across a narrow stretch of land known as Cottage Meadow, Perkins’ neighbour Samuel Jones was also in his fields that summer afternoon, as was George Banks, a quarter of a mile away near Church Farm. There is no surviving record to show which labourers Perkins had working for him on 24 June. The only other person who can be placed at Oddingley Lane Farm with any certainty is his wife of three years, Betty.
John and Betty Perkins were among the Parkers’ closest friends in the parish. Parker had officiated at their wedding, on 16 October 1803, at which Mary Parker had taken the unusual step of signing the register instead of Pardoe, the parish clerk. As Mary was illiterate she could only manage a dog-legged cross in the gap her husband left for her signature, but it was a symbolic act and enough to demonstrate the depth of trust and friendship between the couples. The bond had endured, and they had continued to worship at Parker’s services throughout the quarrel and in the face of all the Captain’s threats. John and Betty Perkins would have been among the congregation at Parker’s final service, two days earlier, on 22 June, where there had been disquieting whisperings in the pews.
Parker had conducted the service dressed in a new set of clothes, something that had caught the eye of several parishioners. During the service Sarah Lloyd, who had recently been so terrorised by Banks and Davis outside the Pigeon House, had been approached by William Knight, one of Captain Evans’ servants. Knight had asked Lloyd whether she liked Reverend Parker’s new clothes; Lloyd had replied that she did. Knight rejoined, ‘Oh, he has got his dying dress on.’2
One of John Barnett’s servants, the carter named James Tustin, had also been at church that morning. Tustin was one of Barnett’s most loyal workers, responsible for keeping the horses and managing the fold-yard when the brothers were away. Tustin had told Lloyd, ‘There will something happen in Oddingley in less than a week that never happened before and that will make your hair stand on end.’ Lloyd had asked Tustin what he meant, but there was no reply.
It was now two days after the Sunday service and Perkins was working in his fields. Weeding wheat and other crops was a constant battle in spring and early summer. Between late April and the end of June teams of women and children walked the furrows, stabbing at thistles and dock leaves to stop their hardy roots from taking hold. For this they used a spear-like implement called a spud, the blade of which resembled a carpenter’s chisel bent to an acute angle and sharpened like a knife.
On Midsummer afternoon Perkins was busy with a similar task. One of his meadows had been blighted by an outbreak of a weed known as cammock or rest harrow, a low-growing but pretty wild-flower, so called because its roots were so thickly knotted they could bring a heavy tool like a harrow to a jolting halt. From the middle of the afternoon onwards, he busied himself in the field, hacking at the plant.
At around four thirty in the afternoon Perkins gathered the cammock into a heap, and at five o’clock he set his little bonfire alight. He did not hear anything unusual. There was just the dim rustle of a harvest scythe, the occasional sweep or creak of a wheelbarrow, and the gentle sound of birdsong: robins, blackbirds, chaffinches, blackcaps and willow warblers, darting across the fields and into hedgerows where their nests were hidden among the brambles. Unlike James Tustin and the two butchers half a mile away at Pound Farm, he did not hear the blast of a shotgun or Reverend Parker’s piercing, desperate cry of murder.
John Lench and Thomas Giles, the two butchers from Worcester, were only a hundred yards away from Parker’s glebe on Oddingley Lane when the attack took place. But there was no hope of them reaching the scene quickly. The glebe meadows were contained within a triangular-shaped series of fields rented by John Barnett that were enclosed on all sides by tall hedgerows. A series of gates conducted workers into the heart of these meadows, where the crime scene lay. It was about five or six minutes past five o’clock when Parker was attacked. The hedgerows, full and thick, shielded a place that had clearly been selected for its seclusion. As the gunshot rang out, there were only three people within the little triangle of meadowland: Parker, his murderer and John Barnett’s dairymaid, Susan Surman.
The shot was fired just yards from Surman and the sound terrified her. A second later she heard Parker’s cry of murder,3 and she fled out of Barnett’s field into the lane towards the village, flanked by his cattle, who also charged in shock. Thereafter Surman’s movements are difficult to pin down. It is not recorded where she went or whom she told of the attack. At the trial when questioned she added just one inchoate detail to the butchers’ account. ‘Looking in the direction from which the report came,’ she remembered, ‘I saw the Rev. Mr Parker run towards Mr Barnett’s hedge.’
Minutes later, Lench and Giles had almost trapped the murderer at the scene. But a moment’s hesitation had allowed him to escape, pursued by Giles, into the lanes to the east. Lench then began his desperate search for help. Within a few minutes he had found James Tustin near Pound Farm and had begged him to come after Giles and the murderer. The two men sprinted back towards the glebe, turning into another track to look for Giles. Without any clue as to which of the maze-like paths that branched out to the north, west and south he had taken, they abandoned the chase. It was eight or nine minutes after the gunshot when Lench and Tustin returned to the spot where Parker lay, sprawled helplessly in the grass.
Tustin gazed down at the bloodied body. Just a minute earlier he had told Lench that the victim was definitely not Parker, ‘as the parson had just gone up the fields for his cows’. But now, confronted with the body, he was able to confirm that it was the clergyman – a stranger to Lench. As he stared down, Tustin claimed he heard Parker give a final, feeble gasp, as if he could see the last of his life ebbing away. Lench, however, would challenge this account at the inquest, stating that when they returned ‘he was quite dead’.
Parker’s bloodied corpse cut a frightful picture. The smouldering wadding that had entered his body with the shot had by now ignited into little flames which ran along the seams of his linen breeches and small clothes.fn1 Little puffs of smoke and the sickly stench of burning flesh were ‘rising from his right side’, which John Lench later described as being ‘all of a mooze’. The right side of his head was bludgeoned in and blood oozed from an inch-long gash on his temple. It was not just the corpse that was alight; Tustin notic
ed ‘the grass round the wound was burning’. Nothing could be done to help Parker. The emphasis now lay upon a swift parochial response: in capturing the man responsible and dragging him back to the village for interrogation.
Lench and Tustin left the glebe for a second time, hurrying towards Pound Farm, where they hoped to find John Barnett. Although Barnett’s mother held the deeds to the property, he was its de facto master, with the power to instruct the workers and make use of the horses and weaponry. Barnett knew the land well, the slopes of the fields, the gaps in the hedgerows, the bustling or deserted lanes into which a fugitive might retreat or steal himself away. As the overseer, an elected parish official, he also had the moral authority to command the villagers to action.
A quarter of an hour earlier, at about 5 p.m., John Barnett had left Pound Farm for a quick tour of his fields. He called at Mr Jones’ barn, which stood a short distance from his gate at the far side of the crossroads, then turned towards the Pigeon House Field, where he checked the work of two farmhands who were mowing grass and cutting thistles. Barnett had not stopped to talk and was back at Pound Farm by 5.15 p.m. ‘Two or three minutes afterwards’ Lench and Tustin arrived, breathless, in his fold-yard.
Barnett was standing beside his gate when Tustin informed him that ‘he had found Mr Parker dead’ in the glebe meadows. The farmer made no immediate response and Lench, anxious for his companion Thomas Giles, who had now been gone about a quarter of an hour in search of the murderer, asked him ‘if he would please go to the place and look at the body’. Barnett refused. He gave no explanation. He just stood, with no trace of agitation, beside his gate.