In 1770, the income of the trust was £190 17s.; and by 1863 it had risen to £900, when the trustees successfully applied to the Court of Chancery to vary the trust deed, for the purpose of expending a sum of £5,000 upon necessary repairs to the three Langton churches, and of applying a further sum to school purposes.
The church of Church Langton is a massive Early English structure on a large scale, containing monuments of this singular projector and successors of his kin. It has been very thoroughly renovated from the funds released by sanction of the Court. Hanburys still preside here.
There is a good deal of interest in the immediately surrounding country. Away across the meadows on the other side of the road are Foxton Locks, on the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire Union Canal. Every visitor to Harbro hears of Foxton Locks, and is bidden go see them; and indeed they are remarkable achievements in modern engineering, putting those of the old canal engineers to the blush. They are visible quite a long way off, looking like the gear at the mouth of a colliery, and consist of an elevated engine-house installed with powerful machinery that raises or lowers the modern lock—practically a large tank—with barges floating in it. This replaces the remarkable old series of ten locks that scale the hill like some Jacob’s ladder, and are now discarded. The new lock, completed in 1898 at a cost of £37,000, was undertaken for the purpose of saving water, wasted in large quantities in the old order of things, but a great deal of time is also incidentally saved by the new methods.
Proceeding again along the road, the church tower of Kibworth appears among clustered woods on a height above the railway station of that name. The Midland Railway and other moderns call the place “Kibworth” merely, but it is properly Kibworth Beauchamp, while adjoining is the infinitely more handsome twin-village of Kibworth Harcourt, which, however, has no church of its own.
“A PLAGUE O’ BOTH YOUR HOUSES”
A quaint memorandum in the register of Kibworth Beauchamp, under date of 1641, seems to have been made by the parson as the readiest means of absolving himself from blame for not properly keeping his books. It runs:
“Know all men that the reason why little or nothing is registered from this year 1641 until the year 1649, was the Civil Wars between Charles and his Parliament, which put all into a confusion till then; and neither minister nor people could quietly stay at home for one party or the other.”
There is a suspicion, in the wording of this, that the parson was heartily sick of both sides.
The Rev. James Beresford was presented to the living by Merton College, and held it for very many years, dying in 1840, aged seventy-seven. He was author of a book on the “Miseries of Human Life,” published in 1826, which, in spite of its doleful title, is not the work of one who has surveyed existence and found all to be vanity; but is cast in a humorous form, as humour was then understood. He possessed a pretty wit, and a quaint sarcastic manner, showing prominently in the story told of him and some junior fellows of Merton whom he observed prospecting over his garden wall, in view of his possible decease, and the living falling vacant.
He went out to them and politely said, “Walk in, gentlemen, walk in and take stock, not only of the parsonage, but of the present incumbent. Most happy at all times to do anything to oblige you—except die.”