4. Four Happy Years

 

Stathern Rectory and the tower of St Guthlac's

The Archdeacon’s Curate
It was not quite ‘a little hut.’ Dr Thomas Parke, Archdeacon of Stamford and Rector of Stathern, required a curate to look after his parish. The Crabbes were anxious to leave the Castle and in the Summer of 1785 they moved to the Rectory at Stathern, close to the parish church of St Guthlac. Crabbe’s sons George and John and his daughter, Sarah, were all born in Stathern Rectory.  Crabbe told his son that the four years they spent there were ‘on the whole, the happiest of his life.’  He explains:’My mother and he could now ramble at their ease, amidst the rich woods of Belvoir, without any of the painful feelings which had before chequered his enjoyment … at home, a garden afforded him healthful exercise and unfailing amusement…(1)

Hunting and Natural History
It was normal in those days for clergymen in the Vale of Belvoir to join in with the hunting which was the chief pastime of the gentry. Crabbe tried to fit in, buying himself a ‘velveteen jacket and all its appurtenances‘ but ‘he wanted precision of eye and hand to use the gun with success’. He also tried hare coursing but ‘the cry of the first hare he saw killed, struck him as so like the wail of an infant, that he turned heart-sick from the spot;..’(2)

Crabbe took much greater pleasure in hunting for plants, insects and geological specimens. His studies lead to the chapter on the Natural History of the Vale of Belvoir which he contributed to Nichols’ History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester. Many of the other sections in Nichols’ work which refer to the Vale are also based on Crabbe’s notes.

Humble Abodes of Distress
At Stathern and later at Muston, Crabbe continued to use his medical knowledge to help his poorer parishioners. ‘The contents of his medicine chest.. were ever at their service: he grudged no personal fatigue to attend the sickbed of the peasant, in the double capacity of physician and priest…On some occasions, he was obliged to act even as accoucheur…‘ (3)

The majority of Crabbe’s parishioners were poor. In 1790 a Royal Commission report described Stathern parish as an area of 2,000 acres of open fields, moderate land, with a few small enclosures, producing wheat, beans and barley. It possessed ‘considerable common pastures and many gardens belonging to the poorer dwellings…But not withstanding these apparent and …real advantages, the poor at Stathern are no objects of envy to the poorest in the surrounding villages.’ (4)

Crabbe did not collect tithes from parishioners who were out of work or victims of misfortune and his poetry gives ample evidence of his sympathy for their suffering, remembering, no doubt the hardships he had experienced in his own earlier life. For the Crabbes, though, life at Stathern  was comfortable.. His son refers to the ‘parsonage’ as ‘humble’ and ‘obscure’, but to modern eyes it is a rather imposing house. In Pevsner’s description, the rectory, where it generally assumed that the Crabbes lived, is a ‘Good Early c 18 ironstone house of five bays and two and a half storeys.’ with ‘ a parapet and molded door surround.’ (5)

Exuberance of Thought and Exercise of Intellect
Crabbe appears to have been well contented. ‘As the chief characteristic of his heart was benevolence, so that of his mind was a buoyant exuberance of thought and a perpetual exercise of intellect’.(6) According to his son he never appeared to be bored. In addition to his parish duties, there was his writing.. In 1784 his memoir of Lord Robert Manners was published and in 1785 the poem The Newspaper, a satire on the popular press. There were expeditions into the surrounding countryside to collect botanical, entomological and geological specimens, made in the ‘huge, old fashioned one-horse chaise‘ driven by Mrs Crabbe, since the poet was too absent minded to drive himself. ‘Out of doors he had always some object in view-a flower, or a pebble, or his notebook, in his hand; and in the house, if he was not writing, he was reading’.  (7)

Although he continued to write, Crabbe published nothing more for twenty two years, apart from his contributions to Nichols’ History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester. He wrote and then periodically burnt much of what he had written: ‘he was all that time busily engaged in composition…I can well remember more than one grand incremation …-and with what glee his children vied in assisting him, stirring up the fire, and bringing him fresh loads of fuel as fast as their little legs would enable them.’(8)

A Mechanist of no Small Emminence
Visitors to Stathern were few, but one frequent visitor was the Rector of Goadby Marwood, Dr Edmund Cartwight, who was born at Marnham, near Newark. He was a poet, inventor and agriculturalist who became a close friend of Crabbe. In 1785 Cartwright had patented his design for the power loom, which he developed for use in his mill in Doncaster. In the Summer of 1787 the Crabbe’s went to see their friend’s invention in action. Crabbe’s reactions are not recorded by his son, but Mrs Crabbe found the experience distressing : ‘when she entered the vast building, full of engines thundering with resistless power, yet under the apparent management of children, the sight of the little creatures condemned to such a mode of life in their days of natural innocence, quite overcame her feelings, and she burst into tears.’ (9)

Crabbe was not, like his contemporary Blake, ready to condemn his friend’s works as ‘dark, satanic mills’, but later he voiced his awareness of the conflict of interests in the development of mechanization: ‘I lament the use and still more the increase of machinery… on one side the masters feel the necessity of employing agents who do not eat or drink, and on the other the men who are hungry and thirsty, threaten and no wonder, their rival the machines, with utter destruction: who can truly say, “If I were a master I would give up machinery; if I were a workman I would starve in quiet…” and yet it is a sad thing to check and baffle ingenuity, though a worse to do this by hunger..’(10)

The loss of a kind and condescending friend
In October  1787 the 4th Duke of Rutland died, aged 33, in Dublin, of liver disease, exacerbated by excessive consumption of claret and turkey eggs, of which he was reputed to consume six or seven for breakfast daily (11). He was embalmed and buried with his ancestors at Bottesford. Crabbe gave a funeral oration which was later published. ‘My father had a strong personal regard for his Grace, and grieved sincerely for the loss of a kind and condescending friend. Had he cherished ambitious views, he might have grieved for himself too.'(12)

Crabbe’s chaplaincy was at an end, but the widowed Duchess persuaded Lord Chancellor Thurlow to exchange the two livings Crabbe held in Dorset for livings in the vicinity of Belvoir. In January 1789 Crabbe was presented with the livings of Muston and West Allington.

References.

(1) ibid p. 123
(2) ibid p. 123
(3) ibid p. 123-124
(4) quoted in Evans
(5) Pevsner
(6) Life p. 127
(7) ibid
(8) ibid
(9) ibid pp129-130
(10) Letters, Letter to Sarah Hoare, 27th Jan. 1829
(11) Thorne, O.D.N.B.
(12) Life p. 130