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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