Damn His Blood (6 page)

CHAPTER 2

The Gun

Oddingley, Worcestershire, 7 April 1806, Easter Monday

ON EASTER MONDAY 1806 Elizabeth Fowler,
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a 25-year-old dairymaid, was at work at Church Farm in Oddingley. The date was among the most important in the Christian calendar and across the kingdom parishes were celebrating the festival in their own style: playing annual sports or exchanging pasche eggs, hard-boiled eggs dyed in cochineal and inscribed with the end of a tallow candle. At Church Farm, though, Elizabeth Fowler’s routine continued uninterrupted. A little after daybreak she stepped out of the farmhouse into the thin morning light and crossed the fold-yard to the cowshed, where the farm’s little herd of dairy cattle were housed throughout the winter months. She fed the animals with hay and cake, then prepared to drive them on the mile-long journey to Tibberton.

Over the past few weeks the first signs of spring had settled on the village. The winter of 1805–6 had been cold: icy winds had drifted down through the middle of England from the north, bringing with them snow, hail and sleet. On 9 January a terrific storm had ripped right across the county, tearing up trees by their roots and blowing down chimneys. A few weeks later the River Severn had broken its banks at Worcester after a heavy snowfall upstream in Shropshire, causing a torrent that ‘rushed with incredible strength and fury, bearing away everything before it which had not been previously secured’. It was not until the Easter weekend that the frequent showers and dreary clouds that had darkened the skies in February and March gave way to a brighter spell of weather. By the first week of April fields set aside for cultivation had been tilled and crops sown. Cowslips and dandelions skirted hedgerows, lending the lanes a shot of seasonal colour.

Church Farm was a large and handsome property. Its half-timbered farmhouse had perhaps served at some point as the local manor house and it dated back around 200 years. Still grand and imposing, it had nonetheless lost its gleam of perfection and at certain points holes in the outer walls had been filled with restorative patches of brickwork. The building stood three storeys high, was crowned with a fine thatched roof and occupied the most beautiful setting in the parish on the rim of a shallow valley a little distance down from the cool limestone walls of the church. Since 1798 Church Farm had been leased from Lord Foley by Captain Samuel Evans. The Captain – as he was generally known – was a towering figure in the parish. Now aged about 73, he was a clash of conflicting characteristics. To visitors he was polite, formal and welcoming: one remembered him as ‘a remarkably fine old man, with hair as white as snow’ with manners reminiscent of ‘a gentleman of the old school’. But Evans also had a more restless, combative edge, something that seemed to stem from his army days. To his servants he could be short-tempered, keen-eyed and demanding, and at Church Farm he had instilled a work ethic that was unmatched elsewhere in the village. One labourer remembered him as a ‘passionate old fellow’ who was ‘not particular before whom he used violent language’. Another recalled his narrow aquiline features, and the sight of him striding the lanes ‘as upright as a lath’.

Most people who met the Captain were left with a strong impression of his personality. One of these was Mary Sherwood,
³
a prolific and successful children’s author. A frequent visitor to Oddingley, Sherwood would occasionally meet the Captain on her walks through the country lanes. Later she jotted down a pithy character sketch, describing him as a ‘fine person with a superior military air, with the command when it suited his turn, of a manner much superior to that which is met with in general rural life’.

As Sherwood’s portrait suggests, the Captain was somewhat misplaced in the countryside. He had not been born or raised in Oddingley and had spent the majority of his working life in towns or on active duty with his regiment. Over the past decade, though, he had carved out a position for himself at the helm of local politics, merging into the community in a way Parker never had. He was a capable man, trusted for his judgement and engaged in public life as a magistrate in nearby Droitwich. Indeed, the Captain was far more interested in social than agricultural matters. He kept Church Farm more as a country residence to underpin his status as a minor member of the gentry than out of any deep interest or family tie to farming, preferring to declare his occupation as ‘gentleman’ in the local directories or on official forms. To allow him to devote time to pleasure and his duties in Droitwich, the Captain delegated the majority of the farm’s daily operations to a dependable 23-year-old named George Banks.

In both physique and character George Banks was a contrast to the Captain. Where Evans was old, meddling and acerbic, Banks was young, dutiful and industrious, his tall frame of five feet ten inches a familiar sight in Church Farm’s fold-yard. The relationship between the men was close, and it attracted comment in the village. Despite Banks’ youth, the Captain had ignored the claims of many more experienced parishioners and appointed him his deputy, with all of the powers of a farm bailiff. As such, Banks was entrusted with the direction of all day-to-day farming matters: setting tasks for the farmhands, organising the fold-yard, driving livestock between the fields and managing the sheds and stables. Meanwhile, the Captain held fort in the farmhouse, attending to his business in Droitwich several times a week and limiting his domestic interests to the collection of money and the payment of servants.

Though the most visible, George was just one member of the Banks family who lodged at Church Farm. His mother Mary, who was around 50, was an old friend of the Captain’s and had brought her children to Oddingley from their previous home near Ludlow in Shropshire following the death of her husband. Three children remained at the farm in the spring of 1806. There was George’s elder sister Catherine, in her mid-twenties, and the Captain’s housekeeper, and a 19-year-old brother named Henry, who was often away at school in a nearby town. The Captain treated the Banks family as his own, and to many there was something strange in the arrangement of the household. Some villagers believed that Mary shared Evans’ bed by night and the two lived as man and wife in secret. A sly twist to the rumour, probably borne out of the Captain’s tenderness towards his bailiff, was that George Banks was his natural son.

Such whispered tales provided the dramatic background to daily life in insular communities like Oddingley, where any hint of a scandal was something to be seized upon and then discussed avidly around the chimney corners. Indeed, farmyard gossip was both a familiar and sustaining currency in the village, which until the beginning of the nineteenth century had been rarely troubled by outside affairs.

There was a story in Oddingley that the village’s name derived from an ancient encounter between two giants. The first, Odd, and the second, Dingley, were said to have met on a heath in the north of the parish to determine who controlled the land. Folklore remembered how Dingley had prevailed and that Odd in defeat had cried out, ‘O Dingley, Dingley, spare my breath. It shall be called OdDingley Heath.’ It was an appealing myth and one that still held currency in the parish, which could more reasonably trace its roots back to around the time of the West Saxons’ triumph at the Battle of Dyrham in 577, when the Britons were forced from the land about the lower Severn. The village, had it then existed, would have been lost amid the towering oaks of the vast Forest of Feckenham as the area around Gloucester fell under the influence of Ceawlin of Wessex. Apart from the names of some rivers and hills, the Saxons left few traces in the area, but to Oddingley they gave a name: Oddinga meaning the kin of the people of Odd (a common Saxon name) and Oddinga-lea the clearing or area of open land belonging to them.

Over the next millennium the forest was gradually gnawed at by successive generations and the manor of Oddingley was passed down from the Bishop of Worcester to the Crown before falling into private ownership shortly after the Reformation. By 1661 it was in the hands of the Foley family, who had added the parish to their extensive portfolio of land and henceforth appointed the clergyman and collected rents from the tenant farmers. By the time Captain Evans secured the deeds for Church Farm from Lord Thomas, the Foley family was entrenched as one of the most prominent in all Worcestershire, and the Forest of Feckenham was reduced to splintered fragments. Bow Wood, Thrul Wood, Oakley Wood and Goose Hill Wood were all relics, as was Trench Wood – also known by some as Foley’s Wood – which lay across the south-eastern edge of Oddingley parish,
⁴
crowning the brow of an escarpment.

Geographically the village could be broadly divided into three distinct areas. Most of the 22 listed buildings were ramshackle labourers’ cottages hewn from wood and plaster huddled around the junction of Oddingley Lane, Church Lane and Green Lane, which met at a piece of level ground in the centre of the parish. These lanes were little more than heavily rutted bridleways or dirt tracks, pockmarked with the hooves of livestock and the wheels of carts and traps. They were seldom repaired and badly made, and liable to flood during the wettest of the winter months, leaving the villagers stranded in their homes for days at a time. Even in fine weather the farmers struggled to drag their produce along the three-mile trip to Droitwich, and riders knew that even a sure-footed horse might be brought down by a plunge into one of the many potholes if they travelled too fast.

St James’ Church and Church Farm today. The Birmingham and Worcester Canal that flows beside the buildings was constructed in the 1810s

Church Lane swung southwards from the crossroads, down a gentle slope and into the shallow basin where St James’ Church and Church Farm stood side by side. These two buildings, heaped almost on top of each other, were a visual representation of the village quarrel: the church sitting on its little knoll being the spiritual centre of Reverend Parker’s parish, and the old farmhouse below the home of his great antagonist Captain Evans. Both properties looked south out over the valley floor and the finest of Oddingley’s fields towards the quietest corner of the parish, where Trench Wood loomed darkly over a scattered cluster of woodcutters’ cottages and the tall red-brick farmhouse of Netherwood Farm, the lonely residence of Thomas Clewes.
⁵

At 36, Clewes was a ‘bluff-looking labouring man’ with dull eyes and a ruddy face. He had been born in the nearby parish of Hanbury, the eldest of a family of six, and had moved to Oddingley while still an infant. Clewes’ father, William, had quickly established the family in the village and had served as churchwarden, a responsibility that marked him as respectable and perhaps smoothed the path for Thomas’ marriage to Diana Nash, the daughter of an affluent local farming family, in 1798. Clewes’ luck had held as he had secured the deeds to Park Farm shortly afterwards. In 1805 he had once again seized an opportunity, moving to the grander property at Netherwood,
⁶
which had suddenly fallen vacant.

Netherwood Farm lay detached from the remainder of the village, just two lengthy fields and a short slope from the edge of Trench Wood. This was the lowest and dampest corner of the parish, an area said to abound with vipers – known in the local dialect as ethers – from which, one local author suggested, Netherwood’s name came. By 1806 Clewes was fully installed in the property with his wife Diana, who had already given birth to two boys and two girls, and who – at the time of the Easter Festival – was around four months pregnant with a fifth child. Thomas Clewes ran Netherwood Farm with the assistance of his younger brother John, who also lived at the farmhouse. The brothers headed a small workforce of casual labourers and live-in servants, who tended the dairy herd and watched the crops. Like many other households, the Clewes family was guarded at night by yard dogs.
^fn1
One of their hounds, a villager later remembered, was ‘a very cross one’.
⁷

Clewes was a successful man, but some of his habits caused his family worry. Villagers knew that he was fond of drink, sometimes brash in conversation and careless with the company he kept at the Red Lion in Droitwich. With his servants at Netherwood Clewes was strict and haughty, and ‘one who regarded the cottagers
⁸
of the parish in the light of serfs created for the benefit of the farmers’, one writer later recalled. This disdain for the very class he had risen from marked Clewes as one of the most socially ambitious of all the farmers. And life at Netherwood was not only notoriously tough, but occasionally brutal. Eleven-year-old farmhand Thomas Arden later recalled how John Clewes had once strung him up by the heels in the stable on suspicion of stealing tobacco. ‘[I] was hung up half an hour or more,’
⁹
he said.