Damn His Blood (15 page)

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,
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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.
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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 noticed ‘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.

Lench must have been confused by Barnett’s apparent indifference to the serious crime that had just been committed. The parish clergyman had been hunted down in his own glebe fields, shot and then clubbed to death. Nothing like this had happened in living memory, and already vital minutes had elapsed since Giles had disappeared into the lane after the murderer. With no assistance forthcoming Lench and Tustin left Barnett in his fold-yard and walked down Church Lane towards Oddingley Rectory, carrying the terrible news with them. They ‘told the servant girl what had happened’, then turned once again back towards the body.

Meanwhile, news of the attack was being carried by word of mouth through the parish: from field to field, fold-yard to farmhouse, by labourers, children and passing travellers through the lanes. Many abandoned their work and started towards Parker’s glebe to see for themselves if the story was true or a midsummer hoax. Thomas Langford, a worker at Church Farm, learnt the news from a passing farmer. At the opposite end of the village an 11-year-old boy named Hubert told Sarah Marshall of Pineapple Farm that Parker had been shot dead. She rushed to the glebe alongside a growing number of labourers, but there was little she could do. Her husband, a farmer with the resources and authority to organise a manhunt, was also away from Oddingley at Bromsgrove Fair.

Some reports of Parker’s death were horribly distorted. In the Pigeon House Field Thomas Alsop, one of Barnett’s farmhands, heard about the murder at around six o’clock when a boy named Thomas Greenhill was sent with the news. Greenhill told Alsop that ‘someone had set the parson on fire’. At this, Alsop left his tools and returned to Pound Farm, where he found Barnett ‘bringing the cows out of the yard for me to take to Mr Green’s of Smite’. These were the same cattle that Susan Surman had milked an hour earlier and Alsop was surprised that Barnett now wanted them driven out of the parish. ‘He had not said anything to me before about taking the cows,’ the labourer remembered.

As Alsop led the cattle out of the fold-yard and into the lane, he asked Barnett why there was a great number of villagers ‘riding up the Rye Grass Field’ towards Parker’s glebe.

Barnett replied that ‘someone has been killing or shooting the parson’, but as he spoke did not look Alsop in the eye. Instead he bent his head to the ground. ‘He smiled and seemed pleased,’ Alsop recalled.

John Perkins learnt of the murder at about half past five. He was still tending to his bonfire when ‘a little girl’ – perhaps Parker’s seven-year-old daughter Mary – appeared in his field. She told Perkins that the Reverend had been shot and Mrs Parker would like to see him ‘directly’. Perkins threw down his tools and ran into the lane, leaving the bonfire burning behind him.

At the rectory Perkins found Mary Parker in the garden. She was leaning against a set of milk pails in the yard. ‘For God’s sake!’ she cried when she saw Perkins. ‘Go to Mr Pyndar directly, for I have no friend but you and him!’

Two miles away, in the neighbouring parish, Reverend Reginald Pyndar, one of King George’s justices of the peace, was haymaking in the meadows near his rectory at Hadzor. It was around a quarter to six when John Perkins entered the field, dismounted and told Pyndar that Parker had been killed in his glebe – shot, and his head beaten in. For a moment Pyndar listened to Perkins’ story, trying to absorb it. Pyndar was 51 years old, educated, sure-footed and a well-known member of the local set. He had the authority and personality to restore order to Oddingley in the wake of the murder, and as Perkins turned his horse for his return journey Pyndar called for his mare.

‘I will meet you in Mr Barnett’s Grounds as soon as I can,’ he shouted as John Perkins rode away at the gallop.

In 1806 there was no professional policing system in England to track fugitives, and the best chance of capturing suspected criminals following a violent crime lay in swift action. The further a villain could get from a crime scene, the better their chances of escape. Much then depended on the hue and cry, an ancient social device which ensured that however fast a suspect ran they could never outpace the shrieks and cries (‘Murder! Murder!’ or ‘Stop thief!’) that followed them along streets and alleys, through lanes and into marketplaces, inns and houses as the message was passed from one person to another in a fearful relay of voices. A comic ballad published in 1782 by the poet William Cowper dramatised the raising of a hue and cry.

Six gentlemen upon the road
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Thus seeing Gilpin fly,

With postboy scampering in the rear,

They raised the hue and cry:

‘Stop thief! Stop thief!
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– A highwayman!’

Not one of them was mute;

And all and each that passed that way

Did join in the pursuit.

The hue and cry was particularly effective in urban areas, where a mass of bystanders, shopkeepers and passers-by could be animated by a single shout. It appears in the famous scene in
Oliver Twist
when the Artful Dodger snatches a handkerchief from Mr Brownlow’s pocket as he stands reading outside a bookshop in London. Oliver, the Dodger’s unwitting new recruit, is mistaken for the thief by the confused crowd, which rolls and roars behind him as it chases him down.

‘Stop thief! Stop thief!’ There is a magic in the sound. The tradesman leaves his counter, and the car-man his wagon; the butcher throws down his tray; the baker his basket; the milkman his pail; the errand-boy his parcels; the schoolboy his marbles; the paviour his pickaxe; the child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter, slap-dash, tearing, yelling, screaming, knocking down the passengers as they turn the corners, rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls: and streets, squares, and courts re-echo with the sound.

Despite the lower population density, the hue and cry was often similarly effective in rural areas. In one case that was widely reported, in Surrey in 1742, two highwaymen ambushed and threatened to rob a man outside the town of Ripley. The spirited victim quickly sounded a hue and cry, riding after the men crying out ‘Highwaymen, highwaymen!’ as he went, sparking a pursuit of his assailants which continued for several miles through the countryside. At some point the victim’s calls were heard by two bystanders who fetched a brace of pistols, mounted their horses and joined the chase.

The highwaymen were pursued by a growing crowd to Ripley Green, where a cricket match was under way. Here the crowd tightened around them. Their cry changed from ‘Stop! Thieves! Highwaymen!’ to ‘Knock them down, knock them down!’ The sportsmen closed on the men with their bats. Helplessly cornered, one of the highwaymen shot and killed a cricketer seconds before he was arrested by the local constable. The second highwayman was taken shortly afterwards, a court scribe recording, ‘The town being alarmed,
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[he was] beset on all sides.’

At Oddingley Reverend Parker’s desperate cry of ‘Murder!’ was a final act that can be interpreted variously: as a flash of bravery, of helplessness or even as a glimmer of the same stoic resolve that had seen him through the painful years of the tithe dispute. Perhaps even as Parker felt the weight of the shot crashing into his middle, he had a second to accept that his life was going to end violently and all that remained was to ensure that his attacker would be captured. But his attempt to raise a hue and cry failed. The murder scene had been carefully selected, and only Susan Surman, James Tustin, Thomas Giles and John Lench were within earshot. Tustin and Surman failed to repeat Parker’s cry, and the butchers, unsure of what was happening, chose to investigate further rather than turn back towards the village, cottages and farmhouses behind them. In the crucial few minutes following the attack not a single person was stirred to action, and the murderer – who evidently knew the surrounding countryside well – was able to escape into the thinly populated fields to the west, away from Oddingley village, away from the hamlet of Dunhampstead and the busy farms and fields which dotted the weaving road north to Hadzor.