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with inflation at the turn of the century that clashes had begun.
    Reverend Parker was an ambitious man, and though it was clear he intended to serve his parish well, throughout the 1790s it had become plain that he also expected to be paid correspondingly. It was perhaps a logical step for Parker, who had overachieved in his early years, to build on his new position, but whatever designs he had of making his fortune at Oddingley were seriously challenged by the financial climate. Inflation was rampant in the last decade of the eighteenth century, with the price of wheat (and therefore bread) darting up with disarming speed, from 58 shillings a quarter in 1790 to 128 shillings in 1800. Rising prices led to unrest, with bread riots beginning in Wales in the 1780s spilling over the border to Hereford and Worcester in the 1790s, where the city’s corporation was forced to help support the poor. A melancholy note received by the editor of Berrow’s Worcester Journal 2 on 20 April 1801 was evocative of the struggle many families had to make ends meet. It declared people were living in ‘an age of extortion’ and it lamented, ‘The poor, in general, exclaim loudly against the dearness of provisions.’ 18
    But it wasn’t just the poor who were affected by the increasing prices; the middling classes to which George Parker belonged would have seen their cost of living rise sharply too. With the addition of a wife and a daughter to his household, extra strain would have been placed on Parker’s finances, and at some point around the turn of the century he decided to redress the balance by amending the £135 tithe payment that he was owed each year by the village farmers. It was the simplest way of raising his income, but it sparked the quarrel that would define Oddingley’s identity for years to come.
    Before Parker’s arrival the parish had opted to ‘compound’ the tithe: the £135 fixed sum was paid annually in a single payment on Lady Day, 25 March, thereby sidestepping all the problems of gathering each tithe individually. This was a sensible arrangement as tithe law was so horrifically complex, so riddled with subtleties and ambiguities that it often caused more confusion than it delivered answers. Not only were tithe holders – mostly members of the clergy or landed gentry – entitled to ‘great tithes’ such as corn, grain and wood, but they were also due many ‘small tithes’ ranging from fruit, garden herbs, root and other vegetables to honey, flax and a hundred other minor items including activities such as labour – a notoriously awkward asset to quantify.
    All of this was overruled by local customs that ensured that the tithes were never calculated in the same way in any two places. Each parish kept a document called a glebe terrier which listed in great detail the tithe holder’s right to each different item. These rights had been established over time, in a process of constant negotiation and renegotiation between the tithe holder and the ratepayers. In many instances bargains had been struck between the two parties whereby farmers had achieved exemption from a certain obligation by paying a customary annual or one-off fee, known as a modus. Once recorded in the terrier a modus was very difficult to alter and tithe owners were often shackled to unfavourable agreements settled by their predecessors. In one instance, in Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire, the clergyman had to content himself with just £2 12s. 4d. for an area of 1,390 acres of prime titheable land, from which he should have expected many hundreds of pounds.
    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