Damn His Blood (8 page)

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 wages
²⁰
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 colourfully 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 pig
²¹

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.

Fear of such punishments – financial, spiritual or social – was enough to force most of the farmers to pay without complaint. But the spark of violence at Pound Farm in 1801 was a harbinger of what was to come as litigation between the clergyman and Evans, Barnett and Clewes became, for a time, a feature of village life. Records from Parker’s solicitor in Worcester show that the ensuing legal costs alone, which had to be met by the farmers, reached around £100.

In 1803 there was another incident. William Colley, a local farmhand, was working at Pound Farm, just 20 yards from Parker’s rectory. Barnett had told him to crop the tops of his apple trees, and shortly after he had finished, Parker appeared to claim his tenth of the clippings. In the farmhouse Colley found John Barnett peering through a window. He muttered he ‘would give any man five Guineas who would shoot the parson’.

The sentiment was repeated elsewhere. Shortly afterwards, William Colley heard Captain Evans exclaim that ‘there was no more harm in shooting the parson than in shooting a dog’. And when Parker’s name was mentioned at Netherwood, Thomas Clewes declared ‘it was no harm to shoot such a fellow as that’ within earshot of one of his ploughmen, William Chance. The measure of similarity between these expressions hints that the farmers had begun to share their dissatisfaction openly. Their collective wish that he be shot suggests that by 1803 there was already an unsettling degree of collaboration between the men.

The difficulties surrounding Parker’s decision to collect the tithe in kind were aggravated by the divisive politics of the age. Parker would have been 27 years old in July 1789 when the French had risen up against Louis XVI and his finance minister Calonne, who had proposed further crippling taxes on salt, land, tobacco and grain. The revolution that followed was initially received with enthusiasm by many Britons, who celebrated the sight of ordinary French citizens casting off the irons of a despotic regime. But as France sank deeper into violence, the majority of British support ebbed away with the mounting horrors of the September Massacre of 1792, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the Reign of Terror thereafter. By the mid-1790s the British revolutionary cause had gone beneath ground, into murky clubs and secret societies which treasured their radical ideals and were bent on political reform. Pitt’s government reacted to the threat by deploying spies, suspending habeas corpus and feeding reports of Jacobin plots to pro-government newspapers.

Meanwhile Pitt’s war taxes placed a heavy load on the back of the average Briton, and when the harvest failed, as it did several times in the 1790s, food riots followed. One typical example came in June 1795, in Bristol, when malnourished working families gathered in the city centre, smashed butchers’ windows with a hail of stones, carried away all the meat and provoked a confrontation with the militia. Just four months later, after the failure of the harvest, crowds took to the streets of Westminster, haranguing politicians. Outside Downing Street they chanted, ‘No war, no Pitt, cheap bread’.
²³

Across the country a whole generation knew nothing but uncertainty and fear for more than a decade. For the young, war and revolution were a familiar backdrop, and few could remember as far back as the brief peaceful interlude of the 1780s, a time when Thomas Clewes and John Barnett were just young men and George Banks no more than a child. For these farmers, their present lives were so tainted by uncertainty that they glamorised the past as a time when everything was ordered and right. Now there were wars, revolutions and tithe disputes, curses that combined and manifested themselves in an increased hatred of the outsider. Just as they learnt to hate the French and the vain ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte, they came in time to despise Parker. To the farmers he was dishonest, draconian, treacherous and snide, with something secretive or mercurial within him. They took to calling him by a new nickname, the Bonaparte of Oddingley.

This was a clever invention that in all likelihood was coined by Captain Evans, who would have understood the power of rhetoric and fearful imagery from his army days. Casting Parker as Bonaparte was a clear signal to the parishioners. It challenged them to choose a side, to act as honest patriots loyal to their parish and country. At the same time it shackled Parker’s reputation to that of the most reviled man in the land. Everyone knew about Napoleon. The press and especially the ruthless London caricaturist James Gillray played on ingrained xenophobia, depicting him variously as a posturing dwarf, a spoilt child, a seducer of his sisters, a falcon-eyed predator or an unhinged madman. One chilling nursery rhyme reflected the anxieties of the typical British family.

Baby, baby, naughty baby,
²⁴

Hush, you squalling thing, I say;

Hush your squalling, or it may be,

Bonaparte may pass this way,

Baby, baby, he’s a giant,

Tall and black as Rouen steeple;

And he dines and sups, rely on’t,

Every day on naughty people.

Baby, baby, he will hear you

As he passes by the house,

And he limb from limb will tear you,

Just as pussy tears a mouse.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was nobody to compare with Napoleon. Eager students in British towns were marked as young Bonapartes, devouring books, writing bad poems and dreaming of dramatic social success as the young Napoleon had done a decade before. In
The Age of Revolution 1789–1848
the historian E. J. Hobsbawm argues that Napoleon’s name became a byword for personal ambition, inspiring those whose fantasy was to replicate the magnificent rise of
Le Petit Caporal
, as a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or a ‘Napoleon of industry’.

All common men were thrilled by the sight,
²⁵
then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilised man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened … He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams.