Damn His Blood Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Prologue: Midsummer Day

  1. Rev. Mr Parker of Oddingley

  2. The Gun

  3. The Easter Meeting

  4. The Dance of the Jackdaw

  5. Damn His Blood

  6. Hue and Cry

  7. Dead and Gone

  8. The Man in the Long Blue Coat

  9. Droitwich

  10. Seduced by the Devil

  11. A Dirty Job for Captain Evans

  12. The Horrors

  13. The Old Barn

  14. Extraordinary and Atrocious Circumstances

  15. In the Words of Thomas Clewes

  16. Marvel-Hunters and Wonder-Lovers

  17. The Assize

  18. Damned

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Damn him!’ he swore. ‘There is no more harm in shooting him than a mad dog!’

  The brutal murder of the Reverend George Parker in the rural village of Oddingley on Midsummer’s Day in 1806 – shot and beaten to death, his body set on fire and left smouldering in his own glebe field – gripped everyone from the Home Secretary in London to newspapermen across the country. It was a strange and stubborn case. The investigation lasted twenty-four years and involved inquests, judges and coroners, each more determined than the last to solve Oddingley’s most gruesome crime – or crimes, as it turned out.

  Damn His Blood is a fascinating glimpse into English rural life at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so often epitomised by the civilised drawing rooms of Jane Austen or the rural idylls of Constable. England was exhausted and nervous: dogged by Pitt’s war taxes, mounting inflation and the lingering threat of a French invasion, violence was rife, particularly in rural communities where outsiders were regarded with deep suspicion.

  With a cast of characters straight out of Hardy, Damn His Blood is a nail-biting true story of brutality, greed and ruthlessness which brings an elusive society vividly back to life.

  About the Author

  Peter Moore is a writer and freelance journalist. Born in Staffordshire in 1983, he studied history and sociology at Durham University and then spent six years working in the media in Madrid and London, where he was head of publishing at an award-winning digital agency.

  Illustrations

  1. Map of Worcestershire, Charles Smith, 1804

  2. Map of Oddingley village, c.1806

  3. Woodcut of the shooting of Reverend George Parker, W. Wright, A Broadsheet on the Oddingley Murders, 1830

  4. Reverend Parker’s handwriting, the Marriage Register of Oddingley. Reproduced by kind permission of Reverend Canon J. H. Green

  5. St James’ Church and Church Farm, Oddingley, 2011

  6. Etching of St James’ Church, E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders, 1830

  7. ‘A Birmingham Toast as given on the 14th July by the Revolution Society’, James Gillray, 1791 © NPG Images, London

  8. ‘The Friend of the People & his Petty-New-Tax-Gatherer, paying John Bull a visit,’ James Gillray, 1806 © NPG Images, London

  9. ‘Manning the Navy’, a press gang in action, S. Collings, 1790, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

  10. Map of Worcester, Roper and Cole, 1808

  11. ‘Snipe Shooting’, Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1810

  12. Signatures of Reverend George Parker, Captain Samuel Evans, John Barnett, Thomas Clewes, Elizabeth Heming, Reginald Pyndar, Reverend Clifton and Judge Joseph Littledale. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Dr Gael Turnbull

  13. Etching of Netherwood Farm, E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders, 1830

  14. The layout of Netherwood Farm, E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders, 1830

  15. Title page of E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders, 1830

  16. ‘The Worcestershire Murders’, W. Wright, A Broadsheet on the Oddingley Murders, 1830

  17. Etching of Worcester Guildhall in the early nineteenth century, J. Noake, Worcestershire Relics, 1877

  18. Judge Joseph Littledale, William Beechey, c.1830. Reproduced by kind permission of the Masters of the Bench of the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn

  19. Netherwood Farm, H.R. Hemsworth, c.1910. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Miss B. M. Beer

  20. ‘James Taylor strikes the blow’, from W. Wright, A Broadsheet on the Oddingley Murders, 1830

  21. Woodcut of a devil at the left shoulder, E. Lees, The Oddingley Murders

  22. Fir Tree Inn, Oddingley, 2011

  23. Pound Farm, Oddingley, Sterry-Cooper, 1930s. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Reverend Sterry-Cooper

  To my father

  Tis a sad thing to die1 and know before that they are damned. None knows the misery of commencing their hell upon earth.

  Arian Elwood, wife of an excommunicated man

  I fled, and cried out DEATH!2

  Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sigh’d

  From all her caves, and back resounded DEATH!

  Paradise Lost, John Milton

  Introduction

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century the village of Oddingley in Worcestershire was little different to any other of its type in the English Midlands. The problems it faced were typical ones. There was creeping migration as young parishioners drifted north to the industrial heartlands of Birmingham and the Black Country. There were anxieties over the harvest, the scarcity of food supplies and the speed of inflation. In the village there was a lingering dispute between the parish clergyman and local farmers over the tithe, and in the newspapers fears persisted of an imminent invasion, with Pitt the Younger, the prime minister, warning Britons to ‘expect the French every dark night’.1 In a politically divided country, riven by war and taxation, there was little reason to notice Oddingley, with its sloping meadows, airy pear and apple orchards, tangled hedgerows and lonely farmhouses, until the dreadful murder that shook it in June 1806.

  The case unravelled slowly over the days and many years that followed. What initially appeared to be a single vicious act transpired, in time, to be something far worse. The crime had been conceived, executed then concealed in such an extraordinary manner that it gained infamy, becoming one of the most compelling of its age. As facts were reported – chiefly through the newspapers – inquisitive Georgians became captivated by the unequalled colour, detail and the ever-twisting, ever-evolving narrative of the case. It was a story of moral corruption, of greed and ruthlessness. It began with a single shot, with the excitement of a chase and then the uneasy thrill of a manhunt. But this initial enthusiasm soon gave way to uncertainty. The magistrates who were sent to investigate were country gentlemen, thrust into duty because of their geographical proximity to the crime scene rather than for their ability to construct a case or pursue a felon. And there were many questions for them to answer. What should they make of the farmers’ curses? What of the clandestine meetings? What of the murder weapon? What of the suspects? It seemed that every little triumph or breakthrough led only to a new strange riddle or another dead end.

  In time it became a newspaper sensation. Articles were published in titles as geographically distinct as the Belfast News Letter and Ipswich Journal. In Edinburgh the Caledonian Mercury labelled the crime a ‘mysterious conspiracy’,2 while in London the Examiner and Morning Chronicle both agreed it was a ‘strange case’. Journalists detected elements of other crimes i
n the Oddingley affair: of Eugene Aram’s murder of Daniel Clark in Yorkshire, of Richard Patch’s killing of Isaac Blight in 1805, of the Red Barn Murder in 1827 and even the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820. Details from these cases were present as echoes in articles filed by the handful of fortunate journalists who gained access to the Worcester courtrooms. A crime committed in an ill-considered instant left the village’s reputation blackened for generations, its name known throughout the land.

  The Oddingley case evokes the expressive and uncouth Georgian society that directly preceded Victorian Britain. Here many parishes remained worlds of their own, where little networks of hardy alliances were built on a stiff foundation of family loyalty and respect, where the men drank hard, worked hard, swore oaths and cursed. For many historians this world has remained elusive and opaque, with the Oddingley villagers of 1806 living in a time before determined record keeping began. It is a lost society that is resurrected in this criminal case, as the voices, concerns and culture of a rural parish at the beginning of the nineteenth century come to life. It’s the world which years later provided such a rich mine for novelists such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, and characters such as kindly Joe Gargery the blacksmith, Abel Magwitch the convict, Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae would have been at ease in the village alongside those who were there in 1806: Captain Evans the retired military officer, parish farmers John Barnett and Thomas Clewes, Richard Heming the tramping odd-job man and Reverend Parker the local parson. For the growing professional classes of late Georgian England, so intent on cleansing society of its ills and excesses, the story was a disquieting tale of a parish astray. More than perhaps any murder before, the crime involved a whole community, and the investigating magistrates’ attempts to unearth facts were dogged by questions of who knew what and at what price they were willing to reveal the truth. In time Oddingley gained a reputation as an unhappy place of secrets and lies. It was cursed, wretched, damned.

  Beautiful and almost perfectly hidden among the hills and the woods of the Worcestershire countryside, the village was an unlikely setting for a terrible crime. Mary Sherwood, a popular children’s author, wrote at the time,

  If ever there was a secluded, humble, quiet-looking village3 – a village thinly populated, and which, to all appearance, is the domicile of only patient and peaceable sons of the soil – it is Oddingley. Its aspect belies it. It was the scene – and that not many years since – on which were exhibited some of the fiercest passions of man’s fallen nature; the spot where the seeds of malice, hatred, and the most determined and deeply seated revenge sprang up and ripened into a harvest of crime – crime most deliberately conceived and delicately executed.

  Map of Worcestershire in 1804 by Charles Smith. Oddingley lies to the northeast of Worcester

  PROLOGUE

  Midsummer Day

  Oddingley, Worcestershire, 24 June 1806

  At around four o’clock in the morning on 24 June, Midsummer Day, John Chellingworth stepped out of his cottage in Oddingley and set off on a journey south. The clover harvest and haymaking seasons had arrived and meadowlands across Worcestershire awaited the reapers who would skim the fields with scythes, cutting the crops to within an inch of the ground before raking the yields into rows and turning them again and again beneath the sun. Chellingworth was a journeyman worker and he had secured three weeks’ work at a farm in Gloucestershire, at least 20 miles and a full day’s walk away. The first shadowy smudges of light had not yet appeared in the sky when he met Pritchard, another village farmhand, and the two men struck out on the road together. They passed St James’ Church and Church Farm, and then the drowsing farmyard at Netherwood – flanked with several old barns and a tall brick farmhouse – before they rounded a corner and climbed away up a steady slope towards Crowle, the adjoining parish, and out of view.

  Chellingworth and Pritchard would already have crossed the parish boundary when the sun rose at a quarter to five. It shone over a scene of rare quiet in the village, an ephemeral moment before the day’s work began. Within an hour labourers would be streaming into the yards, lanes and meadows, carrying heavy tools, jugs of weak beer or perry cider, and pushing handcarts, wheelbarrows and wagons. Once they reached the mowing fields, the farmhands would start shifts that would stretch until darkness fell or the weather turned. And though the haymaking season had barely yet begun, they had already suffered one scare. On 12 June a violent storm had knifed wildly across the Midland sky. Rain had drenched the pastures and young crops, and ‘awful and tremendous’ peals of thunder had rung from black clouds over-head, which illuminated the county with ‘the most vivid flashes of lightning’.1

  The storm passed and minds had now turned towards the festival which lay before them. Although it was not an official holiday, Midsummer Day remained a notable date in the calendar, and one which retained its airy, seductive and supernatural allure. In ancient England Midsummer Day was celebrated with Celtic fire festivals that marked the height of summer. Great bonfires were burnt at elevated points across the kingdom and fairs staged in assorted towns. On Midsummer Eve livestock would be dragged by their owners before fires, where they would be blessed by the crackling flames, and men, fortified with alcohol, would line up to leap over the embers in a symbolic ritual which dramatised the perilous and delicate relationship between nature and man. Folklore dictated that the greatest leap determined the height of the year’s harvest.

  Midsummer was a time of magic and myth, where divisions between one world and the next blurred temporarily. Wise women recounted stories about Robin Goodfellows, elves, spirits and fairies that danced in the woods and flitted across the meadows. A chance encounter with one could bestow on a wanderer the gifts of a bard or the terrors of madness. On Midsummer Day it was traditional for villagers across England to gather St John’s Wort, an earthy yellow medicinal herb that was said to be infused with all the mysterious powers of the sun, bringing happiness, comfort and good fortune. In Worcestershire in 1806 this seasonal sense of excitement was increased in the week before Midsummer by a partial eclipse of the sun, which was sighted across the county.2

  In Oddingley 24 June held other significance. It was the date by which many of the parish farmers were required to have paid their annual rents to Lord Foley,3 the local landowner, and for the wider community it was remembered as the day of the popular Bromsgrove Fair. Country fairs were important and much anticipated fixtures in the rural calendar with yeomen, tradesmen and hawking parsons exploiting their popularity as an opportunity to sell produce. Meanwhile, the larger farmers treated fairs as social occasions where they could hire additional labourers from among the crowds, exchange stories with old friends and complain about the weather.

  The rich landscape of a typical fair is recreated in the opening scene of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, when Michael Henchard arrives at the village of Weydon Priors on fair day. He sees the vast field before him bedecked with ‘peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks,4 inspired monsters, disinterested medical men … thimble-ringers, nick-nack vendors and readers of Fate’. Such amusements offered workers a necessary release from the monotonous grind of daily life on the farms, allowing them to act irresponsibly among the lively but unrefined entertainments which included xenophobic plays, drinking stalls and bawdy comedians. William Hazlitt, the contemporary essayist, once observed that labourers used fairs as an excuse to behave like ‘a schoolboy let loose from school, or like a dog that has slipped his collar’, waltzing drunkenly between the jugglers, the roasted hogs and the ginger-bread bakers.

  Forty-one different fair days were held annually across Worcestershire,5 with larger towns such as Worcester, Droitwich, Kidderminster and Pershore boasting two apiece. At Bromsgrove the fair was particularly noted for linen and other cloth, cheese, horses and cattle, and for Oddingley’s farmers it was close at hand, little more than an hour away. Despite this, only those who were able to delegate their duties could afford to attend. Thomas Clewes – master of Nethe
rwood Farm – was one of these, and he was seen riding through the village on Midsummer morning by Susan Surman, a dairymaid who worked for farmer John Barnett at Pound Farm. As Clewes passed Pound Farm, Surman heard him say that ‘he should be very glad to find a dead parson in Oddingley when he came back’.

  Over at Church Farm the clover was being cut and wooden hurdles were being sawn and then blacked in the muddy pool that lay in a dip below the fold-yard – a sheltered area encircled by barns, stables and workshops, where sheep were often penned. Here a second dairymaid, Elizabeth Fowler, saw Richard Heming, a labourer, hauling hurdles out of the pool. He was being helped by a 14-year-old boy called Thomas Langford. Captain Evans – master of Church Farm – was in the fold-yard, and Elizabeth heard him ask the labourer when he thought the job would be finished.

  ‘Not on the morrow,’ Heming told Evans. He added that he would come the next day if he could.

  Half a mile north John Barnett, master of Pound Farm, had opted to remain in the village. He spent the morning directing tasks from his fold-yard and the hours passed quietly. At about 3.30 p.m. Barnett walked over to a nearby field to meet his 24-year-old carter, James Tustin, who was responsible for hauling crops about the farm. Barnett and Tustin spoke for some minutes, brooding over the sad news that Reverend Harrison of Crowle had fallen from his horse and died. Barnett told Tustin, ‘You mark if you don’t hear of this one coming to some unfortunate death, dying in a ditch.’

  Barnett and Tustin were among scores of parishioners at work in the meadows. Most were preparing for the clover harvest or hacking at thistles and weeds; others were driving back and forth between Oddingley and the mill at Huddington, three miles away. It was a dry day. Two of John Barnett’s servants were mowing grass and clover in the village centre, and nearby John Perkins, another farmer, was tending a bonfire outside Oddingley Lane Farm. At this time of year house martins darted through the muggy air, gathering scraps of earth for their nests, and hares raced across the large grassy pastures in the north of the parish. By now, the first wild roses had appeared in the hedgerows and the scarlet poppy and sow thistle had flowered. In the fields farmhands listened for the cuckoo, whose cry changed at midsummer from ‘cuck-oo’ to ‘cuc-cuckoo’.