Another untoward event thickened the quarrel, and doubled the action at law; but the event itself cannot be so distinctly related as the last, seeing it occurred in the dark, while the female ambuscade was planted by broad daylight. The successor of the bishops, bearing a staff instead of a crosier, and his chosen Amen, bearing a hayfork, chanced to meet two youths connected with the revolters, one evening after dusk, in the churchyard. Who gave the primal assault cannot be positively affirmed, for it is not over safe to speak closely after the parties in a squabble, when there are no other witnesses. However, a fight certainly took place, even among the tombs of the dead; and so high did the wrath of the belligerent Clerk Spurr rise in the conflict, that a cottager, neighbouring to the church, heard with alarm, even at his own door, the said clerkly warrior threaten to stab his opponent with the hayfork! Ere the cottager could quit his door, up came the parson and demanded help; but the cottager honestly told the parson "he would look better at home." His Reverence then sought "help" at the blacksmith's shop, but there, also, no one thought he needed it,—and so he retreated to his lodgings.
Such, in a few words, was the cause of the double action at law; and, at the ensuing Kirton sessions, the two youngsters who had either cudgelled the parson, or had been cudgelled themselves, together with the ringleaders of the famous female ambuscade, were together tried for "assault and battery." But the wrathful parson did not get his will: the affair was so ludicrous that he was compelled to consent that it should be "hushed up."
To hush up the heart-burnings of the parties, on their return to the seat of war, was, however, not so easy a matter. Above all things, did it now become a difficult task to keep peace between the rival clerks. Passing by the many minor occasions wherein fiery frowns and black glances were exchanged, this history, which we must abridge, through dread of being adjudged tedious, conducts us to another notable event, which became the subject of another "action-at-law," at a succeeding Kirton Quarter Sessions.
The funeral of a parishioner was about to take place, and the friends of the deceased "particularly requested" that Clerk William Middleton, the son of Clerk Gervase,—the true "Parish Clerk,"—the old, hereditary, and established, and legitimate pronouncer of conclusive amens,—might give the responses at this funeral. Clerk Spurr, the "Parson's Clerk," however, determined on contesting the point;—and—a struggle for the old folio prayer-book actually took place in the church!
Here, again, was a sight that had never been beheld, or dreamt of, before, in the parish of Stow: but as strange and indecorous a sight as it was, it was one that many a rural spectator declared he wouldn't have missed for a quart of ale!—The very mourners for the dead were compelled to hide their laughing faces with their white handkerchiefs,—for the grotesque wrestling of the rival clerks, and their looks of rage, as they together grasped and tugged at the prayer-book, put weeping out of the question. The parson had got through—"I said I will take heed to my ways,"—and wanted to begin—"Lord, thou hast been our refuge,"—but there stood the wrestlers, grasping, and pulling, and panting, and sweating,—and it was a most difficult thing to say which would be likely to beat. Many a stout farmer that shook his sides,—for the laugh became broad and general, in spite of the solemnity of the occasion,—longed to shout out, "A crown to a groat upon Middleton!"—but restrained himself. At length,—the genuine, hereditary spirit of the true "Parish Clerk" prevailed!—he possessed the book: the "Parson's Clerk" sought a seat, to take his breath;—and Clerk William, panting, and wiping the streaming perspiration from his comely and heroic brow, proceeded to echo the "Confession" after the Perpetual Curate.
Such was the cause of the "action" brought by Spurr (at the direction, and by the ghostly advice of the Perpetual Curate) against Middleton at the succeeding sessions,—an action of "assault committed by the said Middleton upon him the said Spurr, while in the performance of duty." The jury, on this occasion,—to make short of the narrative,—sat till eleven at night,—the Court rang with laughter for hours,—and the affair was, at last, got rid of,—by some legal resort, and Spurr (or his advisers) were saddled with costs. That was a conclusion that "gravelled" Spurr, as he said, on leaving the Court; and the Perpetual Curate was also "gravelled"—though he did not use the same expression; and they each showed it, soon after their second return to the old seat of war. But another slight event must first be chronicled, ere the several succeeding and exalted doings of the "Parson's Clerk" and the Perpetual Curate are narrated.
Thomas Skill, was a skilful yeoman of good report, holding two farms in the ancient parish of Stow; and although he eschewed all heresy and dissent, and willed to worship after the fashion of his forefathers,—who had been creditable yeomen in Stow from time immemorial,—yet liked he not of the wayward doings of his Reverence the Perpetual Curate. Now it chanced that on a certain Sunday in November that the said Skill the skilful went, as was his pious and religious wont, to pay his devotions according to law, in the parish church of Stow, the ancient and venerated sanctuary of his forefathers. As a holder of two farms, be it observed, this creditable yeoman had a right, by the customs of this rural district, to two pews; nevertheless, being by no means a person of an unreasonable disposition, he was content, on that day, to occupy but one, if so be that he might be allowed to worship quietly. Nevertheless, scarcely was he seated, ere a certain Jesse Ellis, an aged man of some rural rank as a master-husband-man who had been selected by the Perpetual Curate as his churchwarden, came up to the pew-door, said "he was ordered to pull Skill out," and, forthwith, attempted to put the "order" into execution. Did Skill the skilful resist?—Did he yield? No, no: he knew a trick worth two of either. He had not his name for nought! When Ellis laid his grasp vehemently on the pew-door, skilful Skill held it fast for a few moments, and then skilfully let it go,—all in a moment,—so that the vehement Ellis, by the vehemence of his grasp and the rebound of the pew-door, was overthrown; and there he lay,—he, the parson's own churchwarden,—on the floor of the aisle of Stow church, in the time of "divine service," with the congregation from their seats and pews, and the Perpetual Curate, from his reading-desk, and Clerk Spurr, the "Parson's Clerk," and Clerk William Middleton, the son of Clerk Gervase, squeezing one another in the desk below, and yet looking on, and all looking on, at his signal defeat and overthrow: there he "lay vanquished—confounded;"—like Milton's Satan, sprawling on the "fiery gulf," when all the fallen angels were sprawling there likewise, but yet looking on and shaking their heads at him for a rash captain—no doubt!
Then appeared Skill the skilful, and Ellis the sprawler, before a bench of "Her Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the parts of Lindsey," in the Moothall of Gainsborough; where the justices acted with sense and discernment, and dismissed the sprawler's suit, saddling him with costs. An end might have come to this episode here; but the sprawler and his son were people of spirit, and were so much dissatisfied with this decision of the justices, that they went home muttering all the way about law, and declaring to every one they met, that they "would yet have it." And so skilful Skill thought it wise and prudent to let them "have it;" and, therefore, from mere neighbourly good humour, commenced his action, in turn, against the said Jesse Ellis for attempting to pull him out of his own pew, on the said Sunday in November, and in the parish church of Stow aforesaid. Our manuscript hath, in this place, an hiatus; so that we cannot say how the said action terminated: but it will not excite wonder that amidst the ravelled tissue of broils and litigations occasioned by the gospel-mindedness of the illustrious successor to the Sidnacestrian prelates, some of their issues should escape complete and satisfactory chronicle.
It behoveth, moreover, that we now attend to the more lofty department of this our history of ecclesiastical revolutions,—for, as the sun transcendeth the stars, so do the acts of sacerdotal personages outshine the brightest deeds of the vulgar laity.
And first, of the continued luminous acts and deeds of Clerk Spurr, the notable and notorious "Parson's Clerk," the hero of the hayfork. Let none imagine that he always warred with such a vulgar weapon of the field; forasmuch as his Reverence the Perpetual Curate, being in possession of a grand double-barrelled gun, was wont to commit and intrust it to the lawful custody of his worthy coadjutor in heroic exercises, the heroic Clerk Spurr. Neither did it redound a little to the credit of the Perpetual Curate's humanity, that he did so commit and intrust the said formidable piece of ordnance to the custody of the said Spurr;—forasmuch as the life and safety of that hero of the hayfork were discerned to be seriously in danger,—inasmuch as it had been proven how the malicious urchins of the community, participating deeply in the heart-burnings of their sires and mothers, were wont often to annoy, with sundry small pebbles and other mischief-working missiles, the precious person of the said hero. Lest, therefore, these assaults should issue in some bodily harm to himself, the man of nightly valour was equipped with the gun, and speedily proceeded to defend himself therewith, in the manner that shall now be described and related, together with the fruition of his new act of heroism.