Damn His Blood (12 page)

CHAPTER 5

Damn His Blood

Oddingley, May, June 1806

AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT on Saturday 24 May, Sarah Lloyd, a 24-year-old farm worker, was sitting up with her younger sister at their family home, a labourer’s cottage, when they were disturbed by a noise from outside. The Lloyds’ cottage stood by the crossroads, surrounded by clover fields and an area of open grassy pastures known locally as the Hulls. In the hours since the sun had set at nine o’clock the village had quietened as work had finished for the day and labourers had returned to their homes and beds. The noise was loud and peculiar enough to wrest Sarah’s attention from her conversation and draw her outside. She opened the cottage door and stepped out into the night. In the garden she heard the noise again – it was drunken voices, all of them raised and jeering. The sounds came from the direction of the Pigeon House, a squat brick outhouse which was owned by the Barnett family, who used it as a summer-house and a store for their finest cider. Sarah crept through the spring air towards the building. Once within earshot, she hid herself ‘under a tree which was nearly down’.

From here Sarah could distinguish the voices of a number of local farmers. ‘I heard several toasts drank and several persons named,’ she recalled, among whom were Captain Evans, John Barnett, Thomas Clewes, George Banks and Mr Davis of Dunhampstead. She recognised each man distinctly and recalled Thomas Clewes’ voice particularly. She heard the master of Netherwood Farm propose a toast: ‘Let us drink damnation to him, he will not be here long to trouble us – and let us drink it left-handed!’ Sarah listened as each of the men repeated Clewes’ charge. She had ‘no doubt’ that Reverend Parker was the subject of the toasts, as there was, as she put it, a ‘misunderstanding’ between the parties.

The toasts continued for some time as Sarah remained concealed 20 yards away behind the collapsed tree, shielded from view in the darkness. But she was not alone in the Pigeon House Meadow that night. A farm dog that belonged to one of the Barnett brothers had been tethered outside the building and, hearing her cough, began to bark. In panic, Sarah scrambled up and started for her cottage, but the moment she moved, the wooden door of the Pigeon House burst open behind her and two men flew out into the night in pursuit. They made after Sarah, who charged desperately through the grass. She reached her cottage before them and pushed the door closed.

‘I wish we had catched her!’ she heard Davis say to George Banks. ‘Damn her blood! We would have mopped her up.’

‘Damn her eyes!’ Banks replied. ‘I wish we had and catched her.’

By now Sarah’s father had been roused by the commotion. George Lloyd was well known in Oddingley as a friend of Parker’s and a respected labourer. Holding his gun, he called through the door to Banks and Davis, ordering them to leave and threatening that if they did not he would be forced to shoot. At this, the men retreated into the night.

Sarah was terrified by the incident. For several days she refused to leave the cottage, and when she did, on Tuesday 27 May, she hastened directly to Parker’s rectory, telling the clergyman exactly what she had heard. Parker listened carefully to Sarah’s account and weighed it. ‘Girl, I don’t care a fig for them altogether,’ he replied.

For all Parker’s indifference, feigned or not, there were signs throughout May that the farmers’ anger was stirring in new ways. Earlier that month a surveyor named George Gilbert Jones had been sent to Oddingley. Jones had no prior connection to the parish, where he spent almost a month researching the land for a new rate form. On his arrival he was instantly forced into an extraordinary situation, finding all the farmers except Perkins ‘at enmity’ with Parker – a fact which forced him to flit like a diplomat between one faction and the other as he worked his way through the village.

Jones had been forewarned about the tithe dispute by his employer, who had told him that it was better to lodge outside the parish. But although he followed this advice, taking rooms at a nearby inn, he did socialise with both Reverend Parker and the Captain, dining frequently with them as the weeks passed. Through his work and these social events, the surveyor gained an unusually full insight into the feud. On several occasions Jones heard the Captain and George Banks ‘damn the parson’s eyes and say that it was no harm to shoot him’. He detected a similar sentiment at Pound Farm, though he found John Barnett more guarded. Barnett confessed to being angry at the manner in which Parker was collecting the tithe in kind, but was otherwise reticent, reluctant to say anything more. The other farmers, particularly Clewes, said nothing. Of all of the villagers, Jones came to spend the most time with young George Banks, who had been instructed by the Captain to act as his guide. Jones found Banks an engaging personality, and they met in the evenings to play cards at Church Farm. But while the bailiff was good company, Jones also noticed an impatient, vicious streak in his character. ‘Banks was the most violent’
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in his language, he recalled later. It was a hint that there was something more to the bailiff than first met the eye: it was plain he was alert, keen and able, but was he also impetuous, quietly belligerent and indiscreet?

Jones had completed his survey and left Oddingley by the middle of May, around a week before the farmers’ meeting at the Pigeon House.
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It was now less than a month before the clover was ready to be harvested and the haymaking season was due to begin. In the valley between the village crossroads and the edges of Trench Wood crops of wheat, barley and oats were growing tall in the fields. For the farmers these were anxious days, and for much of the time they lived by their wits, knowing a single sharp frost, unexpected rainfall or fierce storm could ruin months of work. As by its nature collection of the tithe in kind closely mirrored the agricultural calendar, the busy months of May, June and July were natural flashpoints and to the farmhands and local tradesmen there were signs that tempers were already unusually frayed.

An early indication of this came at Church Farm at around the end of May. Captain Evans was sitting in his parlour with Mary Banks one evening when he sent for Elizabeth Fowler, the dairymaid. It was a strange summons, and when she presented herself it became clear that he did not wish to speak about the farm or any of her other duties. Instead he offered her a glass of wine. The dairymaid accepted the drink, but as she took it up he stopped her and challenged her to raise it as a toast against Parker. Elizabeth refused and excused herself, leaving the Captain ‘very much offended’.

On Tuesday 10 June Thomas Reed, a cabinetmaker from Worcester, was drinking at the Raven on Droitwich Road – a short distance from the city – when he saw a group of Oddingley men enter and start a boisterous conversation at a table in the taproom. Reed only knew three of the men, the two Barnett brothers and a labourer, John Chance. Soon the men were complaining loudly about Parker and the tithe, and, unusually, John Barnett was the most vociferous of them. He declared that if he had ten children, he was sure that one of them would be claimed as tax. Later they stood up, pulled off their hats and then ‘drank damnation’ to Parker. One of the men Thomas Reed did not recognise (most likely Clewes or Banks) described waspishly how he had recently cut four and a half cabbages from his garden and then sent for Parker, asking him to take the remaining half. The tone of the conversation, which varied from cruel humour to malice and icy threats, struck Reed strongly. Over the next few years he would tell ‘different people [of it] a hundred times’. One detail he remembered above all others was John Barnett’s claim that ‘he would give £50 for a dead parson’.

This incident was followed, several days after, by another in Oddingley parish. Reverend Parker had walked down Netherwood Lane to Thomas Barber’s shop at Sale Green. The two men were friendly and had fallen into a conversation when they were interrupted by Clewes unexpectedly knocking at the door. Anticipating a confrontation, Parker hurried out of the kitchen door as Clewes entered, but the farmer caught a glimpse of him as he disappeared along the lane. Clewes turned to Barber and told him there was £50 for any man ‘who would shoot the parson’.

By mid-June there were indications that Parker was growing uncharacteristically nervous. He cut down on his rambles through the lanes and he avoided Church Farm, Pound Farm and Netherwood altogether. Whether he had been cautioned that the farmers were offering a reward for his murder or not, he had certainly been told enough by Sarah Lloyd to know they were proposing toasts against him and meeting by night to vent their anger. Perhaps instinct was drawing him back from any contact with the men, but it was difficult to avoid people in a place like Oddingley and from the middle of June there was a further worry. The Captain, who for so long had avoided Parker and treated him with contempt, seemed determined to catch him and was seen on various occasions in Church Lane, waiting for him to emerge from the rectory.

A chance soon presented itself. The lanes were busiest during harvest time, with labourers drawing handcarts, fetching supplies from the cottages and relaying messages back and forth. Much of the traffic flowed along Church Lane outside the rectory, where on Tuesday 17 June two labourers from Crowle stopped to speak to Parker. A minute later Captain Evans appeared on horseback from around a kink in the lane. He rode towards Parker, and when he was within earshot called out, ‘Stop, sir, do stop! Let me speak to you once more!’

It was perhaps the first time the two men had encountered one another since their argument at the vestry meeting ten weeks before. The image of the two adversaries together is a vivid and enduring one: the Captain on horseback, advancing at a pace towards Parker. The clergyman is defiant, resolute and static, the Captain dynamic, domineering and aggressive. As Evans approached, Parker shouted to him, ‘You are not going to pay the debt of nature – that is the only debt you will pay.’ It was a dismissive riposte with clear implications: that while the Captain might strive to evade his obligations to God on earth (his payment of the tithes), he would not be able to avoid divine punishment at the Day of Judgement. It was a stinging rebuke to an elderly man.

There was no further conversation. Parker turned his back and retreated into the rectory, leaving the Captain in the lane with John Bridge and Joseph Kendall, the two labourers. Incensed that his attempt at conciliation had been so starkly rebuffed, the Captain damned Parker furiously, concluding his flow of invective with a cry of rhetorical exasperation, asking the men ‘which ship
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belonged to’. It was a moment of unbridled anger, a public spilling-over of many months of simmering frustration in full view of the villagers.

It seemed a final blow that ruined any lingering hope that a compromise might be struck between the parties before harvest, yet, just three days afterwards, the Captain tried again. Catching Parker in Church Lane, Evans pursued him on horseback as he retreated towards the rectory, imploring him to stop and talk. The appeals, though, fell on deaf ears. Once more Parker slipped away before Evans could corner him or impart whatever message it was he was so desperately trying to convey. ‘God damn the fellow!’ Evans shouted. ‘Lord have mercy upon me, what a fellow it is!’

Inside the rectory Parker was comforted by his wife. In a fit of exasperation he told her, ‘I will swear my life against them all,
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for I know not what they want – unless it is my life.’

For years much of the resentment towards Parker had been subsurface. The frustration and anger of the farmers had for the most part festered in the privacy of Netherwood Farm, Church Farm and Pound Farm, only emerging publicly in isolated outbursts. Since the argument at the vestry meeting, however, the mood in the parish had blackened. The farmers’ provocations had only led to a strengthening of Parker’s resolve. Every attempt at conciliation had resulted in escalation, and of all the clashes these final two between the Captain and Parker were the most significant. In one sense they can be seen as a microcosm of the whole quarrel – Evans, the reluctant ratepayer, helplessly hemmed in by the law, moving from attempts at compromise to outpourings of anger and abuse, while Parker remains throughout as he always was: infuriatingly steadfast and unswervingly aloof.

The relationship between Evans and Parker cuts to the heart of the Oddingley feud. Behind the wrangles over tithes and control over the parish purse there lay something deeper: a vicious personality clash. Divided by circumstance, the two men were in fact remarkably similar. Both had risen to join the ranks of the gentry, both considered themselves community leaders and both were determined, driven and principled. Had their lives been exchanged, each might have fared well in the other’s shoes. But fate had brought them together in conflict. Parker represented the Church, with all of its ancient powers of unyielding authority over the mind and soul, while Captain Evans, the retired military man, symbolised a quite different breed of material and secular power. The feud at Oddingley was a tithe dispute, but it is more clearly seen through the prism of this personality clash between the Captain and the clergyman: two men who could never get on.

Little is known of Samuel Evans’ early life. The few surviving sources note that he initially worked as a baker in Kidderminster, a town about 20 miles north of Oddingley, before joining the army. A further source mentions his reputation as ‘a wild youth’. A clear biography only emerges with the start of the American War of Independence in 1775, a conflict which caught the British government on the back foot and quickly brought the weakened state of its armed forces into sharp focus. After the opening phases of the fighting it became apparent that what had initially been treated as a local uprising was actually far more serious. Soon the French were embroiling themselves in the conflict alongside the rebels, and opportunistic ships belonging to the Spanish, Dutch and French navies were massing in the Caribbean, eyeing the wealthy British colony of Jamaica. Facing the prospect of war on two fronts, the government was forced to dramatically increase the size of the armed forces, from 48,000 men in 1775 to 110,000 six years later. Most of the new recruits were enlisted in a rash of new regiments raised between 1778 and 1780, and it is at this point that Samuel Evans, then aged about 46, first surfaces – as a recruiting sergeant for the 89th Regiment of Foot. By 1779 the outfit – better known as the Worcestershire Volunteers or Carey’s,
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after its commanding colonel Lucius Ferdinand Carey – was fully operational, and Evans was in the thick of its attempts to recruit men.