Free Damn His Blood by Peter Moore Page B

examples much closer to home, 3 one of which had occurred in the parish of Spondon in Derbyshire, where the local curate had shot and killed the schoolmaster in a duel after the two men had quarrelled over ‘a brisk gay widow’. 12
    But instead of returning insult with violence, Reverend Parker reacted to the farmers’ provocations with stoicism. Perhaps he was not a fighting man; perhaps he did not want to lower himself to the indignity and fanfare of a public confrontation; or perhaps he planned to seize the moral high ground by acting with decency. Such an approach was probably the best available to him, and it was certainly better than fighting men like Evans, Barnett and Clewes head on. But his unwillingness to defend himself publicly could also be perceived as a weakness. It was a weakness that the farmers sought to exploit throughout the spring and early summer of 1806, and of them all Captain Evans was the man who displayed a talent for using language and rhetoric most effectively.
    When Evans summoned Elizabeth Fowler to his parlour at the end of May he was doing more than urging her to swear allegiance to his faction in the village dispute, he was asking her to collude in an oath. This behaviour may well have also stemmed from Evans’ military career – he would have understood that popular support was vital in any divisive cause – but his challenge to Elizabeth was clever and pointed.
    Since the earliest days of English society the belief had persisted that individuals could be bound by an oath to an employer, a quest or a cause. Such oaths are seldom used nowadays – they are only employed formally in court – but in the early nineteenth century they remained an important method of extracting allegiance or guaranteeing support. An oath was sealed when an individual swore aloud over a sacred object or in the presence of their social superiors. By challenging Elizabeth to swear an oath, Evans was testing her loyalty, trying to bind her to him through the magic of words.
    Such magic, akin to a spell, can be found in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge , set in rural England in the first third of the nineteenth century. In the opening scene the novel’s tragic hero, a hay-trusser named Michael Henchard, swears a solemn oath to avoid all strong liquor for twenty-one years after a night of terrible drunkenness during which he sold his wife and baby daughter for the sum of five guineas. Henchard’s oath is sworn over a Bible at the parish church and its solemnity is reflected in Hardy’s prose.
    Hence he reached the church without observation, 13 and the door being only latched, he entered. The hay-trusser deposited his basket by the font, went up the nave till he reached the altar-rails, and opening the gate, entered the sacrarium, where he seemed to feel a sense of strangeness for a moment; then he knelt upon the foot pace. Dropping his head upon the clamped book which lay on the Communion-table, he said aloud –
    ‘I, Michael Henchard, on this morning of the sixteenth of September, do take on oath before God here in this solemn place that I will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come, being a year for every year I have lived. And this I swear upon the book before me; and may I be struck dumb, blind and helpless, if I break this my oath!’
    Oaths have a long history. For centuries communities had been held together by formal oaths or other invisible bonds of allegiance that helped to dictate their actions, ensuring the political make-up of a village or town remained relatively stable, and important secrets were kept safe. Oaths were also used to bind individuals to a cause. In 1803, when the Despard Plot – a scheme which purportedly involved the assassination of King George III, the seizure of the Tower of London and the Post Office and the proclamation of Great Britain as a republic – was foiled by the government, many of the alleged participants were discovered to