First of all, there is the fact that, during the last six years, Mr Wesley had taken a prominent part in the great controversy of the period,—the exceedingly bitter controversy between the Dissenters and the High-Church party of the Church of England. This had made him many enemies.
Secondly, he had, four years before, in the severely contested county election, incurred great opprobrium, and not a little danger, by voting for the Tory and High-Church candidates.
Thirdly, he had to deal with dishonest parishioners, and did not always treat them with the utmost discretion. Take a case in point. Many of the parishioners gave him trouble about his tithes, and, at one time, would only pay in kind. Going into a field where the tithe corn was already separated from the rest, Mr Wesley found the farmer very deliberately cutting off the ears of corn from Wesley’s tithe sheaves, and putting them into a bag. Wesley walked up to him, but, instead of accusing him of his shabby theft, took him by the arm, and walked with him into Epworth. Reaching the market-place, the rector suddenly seized the farmer’s bag, and turning it inside out before all the people, told them of the petty pilfering of which the farmer had been guilty. He then left him, with his scattered spoils, to the judgment of his neighbours, and, with the utmost composure, went home to his wife and family. The beggarly thief richly deserved such a withering exposure; but such treatment was likely to turn such delinquents into most insatiable enemies.[[201]]
Fourthly, added to all this, it must be borne in mind that, at this period, the people in the neighbourhood of Epworth, and living in the Isle of Axholme, were little better than Christian savages, and that it was no unusual thing for them to vent their hatred by burning the crops and the farm-steads of those whom they regarded as their enemies. A few years before the burning of the parsonage, a Mr Reading, with commendable spirit, had enclosed about a thousand acres of Epworth manor with a good substantial fence, and had ploughed it, and used other means to make it productive; and, for this enterprising act and for other reasons, the half-brutal inhabitants assaulted him and his servants wherever they had a chance, and even fired guns at them. They destroyed all Mr Reading’s out-buildings and his tenants’ houses; they chipped his fruit-trees, burnt his fences, and turned his cattle into his standing corn; and finally they fired his house, with the intention of burning him, his wife, and his children in their beds. This lawless mob was headed by a furious, termagant woman, called Popplewell; and she and some others of her companions were indicted at Lincoln assizes, in 1694, and were convicted, but, strangely enough, were allowed to escape punishment by the payment of a paltry fine.
Mr Reading, after this, rebuilt his burnt house at a short distance from the site of the former one; but no sooner was it finished than it was set on fire during the night, the key-holes of the doors being filled with clay to prevent the family making their escape. This was in April 1697; and two months afterwards, as though it was not enough to burn a man’s house twice over, the rioters proceeded to pull down his farm buildings, broke his lead pump in pieces, cut down his orchard, and burnt all his implements of husbandry.[[202]] One reason assigned for all this lawless outrage was that Mr Reading had been appointed to collect the rents of the sixty thousand acres of swamps in the Isle of Axholme, which, at an expense of £56,000, had been drained during the reign of Charles 1., and on which recovered lands about two hundred Dutch families and a number of French Protestants had settled. For more than fifty years tumults were continual; and, in 1702, Mr Reading drew up a memorial, in which he mentions his “having provided horses, arms, and necessaries, with twenty hired men, and often more,” to maintain the peace; and, that “after thirty-one set battles,” he had reduced the riotous inhabitants to obedience. Proceedings in Chancery were instituted, but these unhappy disputes, respecting the proprietaryship of the soil, were not finally adjusted till 1719.[[203]]
It was among such half-civilised savages that Samuel Wesley lived and laboured. No wonder that, as in the case of his neighbour Mr Reading, his house and premises should be set on fire once and again within the space of seven short years. At that period this was the way in which the men of the Isle of Axholme displayed and gratified their malignant and revengeful feeling.
The second burning of Mr Wesley’s parsonage was a terrible calamity. Apart from the loss of his furniture, books, and manuscripts, it was a serious trial for himself, his pregnant wife, and his seven children, to be left without a home, and almost without a rag to hide their nakedness. The children were divided among their neighbours, relatives, and friends, Matthew Wesley, the surgeon, taking two, Susannah and Mehetabel. The rector and his wife, of course, had to remain at Epworth, and provide for themselves in the best way they could. The house was rebuilt within a year after it was burnt; but the rector was so impoverished that thirteen years afterwards his wife declares that the house was still not half furnished, and that to that very day she and her children had not more than half enough of clothing.[[204]] No wonder; for, in the self-same letter, Mrs Wesley expressly states that, after deducting “taxes, poor assessments, sub-rents, tenths, procurations, and synodals,” the Epworth living brought them not more than about £130 a year. Out of that amount the rector had to re-furnish his house, re-stock his library, find food and clothing for a family of ten or twelve, and provide the best education for his children that he could.
The new parsonage was a great improvement upon the old thatched building that was burnt. It is thus described by Dr Adam Clarke, who visited it one hundred and eleven years after it was built:—“It is a large, plain mansion, built of brick, with a canted roofed and tiled; a complete old-fashioned family house, and very well suited for nineteen children. The attic floor is entirely from end to end of the whole building; the floor terraced, and evidently designed for a repository of the tithe corn, and where it would be kept cool and safe. In the churchyard there is a sycamore tree, which was planted by the hand of old Samuel Wesley, and which is exactly two fathoms in circumference. It is become hollow at the root, and is decaying fast. It is well grown, and has shot out strong and powerful boughs, but some have already dropt off, and, after a few more years, it will have neither root nor branch.”
This was in 1821. Dr A. Clarke represents the people of Epworth, at that time, as having “but little polish, but no boorishness in their manners.” They appeared to be good-natured, simple, sincere, humble, and singularly modest, and retained “the manners of the better part of the peasants of two hundred years ago,” so that, of course, in the doctor’s estimation, they were still, notwithstanding all their improvements, two hundred years behind their age. The doctor, however, was highly gratified with his visit; brought away with him a pair of fire-tongs which had once been the property of Samuel Wesley; and mentions a fact unparalleled in his travellings, viz., that, on leaving Epworth, he “had no road for upwards of forty miles, but travelled through fields of corn, wheat, rye, potatoes, barley, and turnips, often crushing them under the carriage wheels.” Even as late as 1821, there seems to have been no better road to Epworth than this.[[205]]
In the same year that the Epworth parsonage was burnt, great excitement was created in the nation by two turbulent sermons preached by Dr Henry Sacheverell, one at Derby, the other at St Paul’s.