If The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was as much about the inner life of the Victorian home as it was about murder, then Damn His Blood, an equally fascinating account of a real-life murder from the distant past, is about the inner life of a Georgian rural village.
And in exposing it, Peter Moore sheds light on what he rightly calls a "lost society". In 1806, the parson of Oddingley, the Reverend George Parker, was shot in broad daylight. The man fingered for the crime was a vagrant, Richard Hemming, who soon disappeared. Ten years later, his body was found underneath a barn. The Worcestershire village's ancient feudal laws meant that local farmers had to pay the Rev Parker £135 in tithes, which they refused to do, and violent quarrels ensued as neither side backed down.
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