Header overlay

Down-to-Earth in Over Stowey

I have always had a weakness for diaries and memoirs, especially those written by men of the cloth. It’s generally quite gentle observational stuff, cataloguing the daily round, usually in a country parish, and much of its fascination lies in the diurnal detail, some of it joyous, some of it poignant, as local characters are christened, married and buried. This writing, for me at least, provides an instant escape to a lost world running at less than half the speed of our own.

The varying styles are always individual. Dear old Parson James Woodforde of Norfolk begins his diary in October 1758 with some entries made when he was at Oxford, giving an interesting insight into the life of an undergraduate at the time. He lists various purchases such as ‘a pair of Curling Tongs’, ‘Two Logick Books’, ‘Two Bottles of Port Wine’ and ‘A New Wigg’, and goes on to give us a wealth of wonderful impressions of domestic life – receiving deliveries from a smuggler for tea, ‘a Tub of Gin’ or ‘the best Coniac Brandy’, dining with a bewildering range of relatives, friends and parishioners, and tackling all manner of servant problems.

The diary of the Reverend Francis Edward Witts is notable mainly because he saw the rapid development of late Georgian Cheltenham at first hand, but it is also paralyzingly dull in places:

January 3, 1820: Left Upper Slaughter for Bath in the hope that another course of the waters may essentially strengthen my dear wife’s constitution. Having sent forward my manservant and horse we travelled with Edward and a maid. The weather very cold, frost and snow . . .

Then there are the pompous and self-regarding, the Reverend Benjamin John Armstrong of Norfolk among them:

September 14, 1850: Having this day been instituted by the Bishop of Norwich to the Vicarage of East Dereham, with the perpetual curacy of Hoe anne

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

I have always had a weakness for diaries and memoirs, especially those written by men of the cloth. It’s generally quite gentle observational stuff, cataloguing the daily round, usually in a country parish, and much of its fascination lies in the diurnal detail, some of it joyous, some of it poignant, as local characters are christened, married and buried. This writing, for me at least, provides an instant escape to a lost world running at less than half the speed of our own.

The varying styles are always individual. Dear old Parson James Woodforde of Norfolk begins his diary in October 1758 with some entries made when he was at Oxford, giving an interesting insight into the life of an undergraduate at the time. He lists various purchases such as ‘a pair of Curling Tongs’, ‘Two Logick Books’, ‘Two Bottles of Port Wine’ and ‘A New Wigg’, and goes on to give us a wealth of wonderful impressions of domestic life – receiving deliveries from a smuggler for tea, ‘a Tub of Gin’ or ‘the best Coniac Brandy’, dining with a bewildering range of relatives, friends and parishioners, and tackling all manner of servant problems. The diary of the Reverend Francis Edward Witts is notable mainly because he saw the rapid development of late Georgian Cheltenham at first hand, but it is also paralyzingly dull in places:

January 3, 1820: Left Upper Slaughter for Bath in the hope that another course of the waters may essentially strengthen my dear wife’s constitution. Having sent forward my manservant and horse we travelled with Edward and a maid. The weather very cold, frost and snow . . .

Then there are the pompous and self-regarding, the Reverend Benjamin John Armstrong of Norfolk among them:

September 14, 1850: Having this day been instituted by the Bishop of Norwich to the Vicarage of East Dereham, with the perpetual curacy of Hoe annexed, it becomes my duty to give some account of a place which, with God’s blessing, is to be the scene of my future labours.

And, of course, there is the gentle, compelling prose of the Reverend Francis Kilvert, who opened his diary on 8 February 1870 with this:

From Wye Cliff to Pont Faen. Miss Child in great force. She showed me her clever drawings of horses and told me the adventures of the brown wood owl ‘Ruth’ which she took home from here last year. She wanted to call the owl ‘Eve’ but Mrs Bridge said it should be called ‘Ruth’.

But by far and away my favourite is the Reverend William Holland, a gloriously feisty and choleric cleric who reaches out from the page and seizes you roughly by the lapels right from the beginning:

Wednesday, October 23, 1799: Went with my wife to Stowey and she bought a gown of Mr Frank Poole who smiled and bowed graciously. Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a friskey girl or something worse that I was not surprised that a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife. The husband gone to London suddenly, no one here can tell why. Met the patron of the democrats, Mr Thos Poole who smiled and chatted a little. He was on his gray mare, Satan himself cannot be more false and hypocritical.

Holland is a man who speaks his mind. He has no time for idleness, pretension, vanity, drunkenness, unreliability or anything else on the long list of human frailties he regularly encounters in his Somerset parish of Over Stowey, on the edge of the ruggedly beautiful Quantock Hills. I was introduced to this incendiary personality thanks to a 1995 Alan Sutton paperback with the irresistible title: Paupers and Pig Killers: The Diary of William Holland, A Somerset Parson, 1799–1818. The quote is one of Holland’s own – an unflinching assessment of his parishioners. But then he wasn’t a local. He was an incomer, a Welshman, born in Teyrdan, Denbighshire, in May 1746, and could trace his family roots back to John Holland, Duke of Exeter, who died in 1446. Holland graduated from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1768, and began his career as a curate at Cherington in Worcestershire. He stayed there only a short while, moving next to the grand church of St Mary’s, Reading, and then to Over Stowey on 3 September 1779. In 1786, he took on the additional living of Monkton Farleigh, near Bath, and held both until his death on 17 April 1819. The sheer joy of his diary is that you can plunge in anywhere in the certainty of finding a gem.

Monday, October 28, 1799: A great bustle – Wm Frost and Mr Amen carrying apples to the cart for cyder. They are taken down to Hewlett’s to be made through his hair cloths which is not the fashion of this county. Mr Amen thinks it is impossible for the cyder to be good as it is not made after the fashion of the county. I tell him he is a blockhead and that he knows nothing of the matter. ‘Why Sir, I have made hundreds of hogsheads of cyder in my time.’ ‘Silence you Ass.’

Holland calls all Parish Clerks ‘Amen’ or ‘Mr Amen’, and he is seldom impressed by their efforts. Nor is he particularly tolerant of Democrats, Methodists, Catholics or a host of other religious groupings.

Thursday, October 31: Mr Hurley is to send me a bag of red potatoes. Tho’ an Anabaptist I do not dislike the man for he seems to be a fair dealer. I wish all Sectarians were like him for in general I have found them full of malice, ignorant, narrow minded and void of either candour or charity.

And while Kilvert would spend time on easy-flowing descriptions of the countryside around Clyro, or the beauty of some of its young women, Holland is prosaic.

Monday, November 11: Briffet is here to kill the sow. A horrible looking fellow, his very countenance is sufficient to kill anything, a large hulky fellow, a face absolutely furrowed with the small pox (a very uncommon thing in these days of inoculations), two ferret eyes and a little turned up nose with a mouth as wide as a barn door and lips as thick, and projecting they look like two rollers of raw beef bolstered up to guard against, as it were, the approach to his nasty ragged rotten teeth. However he is a good pig killer.

These were turbulent times for the country, and Holland had a keen interest in current affairs, eagerly awaiting the arrival of his daily newspaper. He frequently misspells ‘Buonaparte’, whom he loathed with a passion. Thursday, November 21, 1799: A great Revolution once more in France, that rascal Beunoparte is returned from Egypt having stolen away from the Army and left ’em to Old Nick.

Sunday, October 5, 1800: The newspaper come. Malta has surrendered to the British Arms, Huzza.

Infuriatingly, Holland’s notebooks for the period April 1814 – October 1815 are missing, so we will never know precisely what he made of the defeat of ‘Bonnypart’ at Waterloo, although it is perhaps easy to guess. Next, he focuses on America.

Monday, January 1, 1816: The Year has been eventful for and Victorious for Great Britain and the Peace founded on Justice and Honour and Religion and she is universally acknowledged to be the First Empire in the World. But her former Colonies in America, tho’ now at Peace with her are still full of Envy and Malice against her and ready to join in any scheme for her destruction, tho’ she has been their Saviour, evidently from the Dominion of Buonaparte who has now a strong party among them.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Holland merely as an irascible, uncaring man. There is much evidence in the diary of a deep attachment to the people in his charge, even if they frequently failed to meet his own high standards. Country parishes in the late eighteenth century had more than their fair share of challenges. Holland raged in one entry about the ‘disgusting’ behaviour of a man who had made his daughter pregnant. The child was later still-born, but Holland repeatedly said he wanted to see the man brought to justice. That justice came soon enough when a fever carried the miscreant off. Death was ever present. ‘Sunday, August 24, 1800: A great many persons at Asholt. There was a burying and a christening there. The father buried and his child christened on the same day, ’twas a melancholy circumstance. He has left nine children, many of them small.’ Holland himself had known tragedy. In 1795 there was a serious outbreak of scarlet fever. His five children all fell ill, and within just two weeks four were dead. Only his daughter, Mary, survived. The couple were blessed with a new arrival in 1797, baby William, who remained the apple of his father’s eye. We see Mary and William grow up in the pages of the diaries, and the story of the Holland family has no further tragic twists. Overall, I think Holland did his best. The life of the incumbent of a small country parish like Over Stowey was simple enough – one Sunday service a week, visiting the sick, conducting marriages, christenings and funerals. It was, and remains bleak, dank and atmospheric country, a geographical cul-de-sac, certainly not a destination. These days, the area is dominated by the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point, the visitor’s view on the way to the coast here frequently interrupted by plaits of power cables hitched to huge metal pylons striding across the fields. And yet it is a fertile place. The Holland household was able to be largely self-sufficient, the vicarage having around eight acres at its disposal. There were stables, a barn and a yard, and the vicar kept horses, pigs and cattle. Vegetables were grown, bread baked, and beer and cider brewed. Any surplus was given to the poor. We know from the diary that the Hollands employed a cook/maid and were also ‘helped’ by a man-of-all-work who would do everything from mucking out the animals and digging the vegetable patch to going on errands and even serving at table. Holland got through quite a few of these. They seldom measured up, and his mounting dissatisfaction frequently found an outlet through his pen, so providing us with some of the most amusing passages in the diary. In addition to his interest in current affairs, Holland also carefully recorded the readings from his thermometer and barometer. Such was the ferocity of the winters, he sometimes refers to the room being so cold his fingers were numb and unable to grip the pen. In the fruitful seasons, the comparative plenty of the vicarage garden was not lost on some of his neighbours.

Sunday, August 31, 1800: Before Church this evening in going to the bottom of the garden I perceived the plum tree moving and a person’s head above the hedge. I called out and ran to theplace but he was off, yet I secured the article of depredation, a strong hook, which he must have prepared for the purpose with some pains and care. It was a neighbour’s son, Charles Sellick’s son, a great looby from seventeen to eighteen years of age. It is hard to be plundered by one’s neighbours who receive so many favours at our hands. I told the father of it.

Holland’s diary originally consisted of ninety notebooks, but some have been lost. My Alan Sutton paperback features a picture of a page from one of them. It reveals strong, educated handwriting with a pronounced rightward slant, the lines all drifting upwards, clearly written at some speed. Jack Ayres, who edited Paupers and Pig Killers, believes Holland would still have retained his Welsh accent, and I think you can hear that in the entries, especially the angrier ones. It is surprising Holland isn’t better known. He gives us glimpses of simple lives lived in a very quiet corner of an increasingly turbulent world and a charmingly flawed narrator, but one whose heart was in the right place.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Anthony Longdon 2015


About the contributor

Anthony Longden is a journalist, media consultant and former newspaper editor.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.