Old Sports and Sportsmen; or, the Willey Country with sketches of Squire Forester and his whipper-in Tom Moody — Reading Notes

The Rector's Dual Role

The Rector of Willey, Dr. Stephens, emerges as a figure who combined law, divinity, and a smattering of medicine. Randall notes that he was in the commission of the peace for the borough, and that law and divinity dove-tailed into each other so perfectly that he might have been taken as a personification of either. As a justice, he was no regarder of persons, provided they equally brought grist to his mill; he accepted presents such as a piece of pork, a pork pie, or a dish of fish, though once the fish had been caught from his own pond. His weakness for knee-breeches and top-boots led to a scene where, seated in his judicial chair, he saw a pair of new chalked tops projecting from both plaintiff's and defendant's pockets. After hums and haws and inquiries after crops, he would find the evidence equally balanced and suggest a compromise.

A Poacher's Bargain and a Scorched Band

Two anecdotes illustrate the rector's character. In the first, needing a hare for a friend, he employed a notorious poacher. When the man brought it in a bag, the hare flew round the room over the papers. The poacher refused to kill it, knowing that doing so would bring him within the law, and told Stephens, you kill her; I've had enough trouble to catch her. After two or three runs, the justice succeeded in hitting her with a ruler, thus bringing himself within the poacher's power. In the second, when his bands were not ready for a service, Stephens set to work to iron them himself. He left the iron to go to the bottom of the stairs, with a D—n you, madam, to his wife, and on returning found his bands scorched and discoloured. These incidents reveal a man of temper and compromise, whose authority was both exercised and undermined in domestic and legal spheres.

A Foxhunter's Christening

Randall recounts a christening at which the Willey Rector officiated. He was the guest of Squire B—t, a well-known foxhunter who at one time hunted the Shifnal country with his own hounds. A very jovial company had assembled, and it was determined to celebrate a new arrival in the squire's family and to take advantage of the parson's presence to christen the little stranger. The thing was soon settled, and Stephens proceeded in due form with the ceremony. The excerpt cuts off, but the episode underscores the integration of clerical duties into the sporting social world, where the rector's role was as much a part of the hunt's festivities as the chase itself. The christening becomes another instance of the blending of sacred and profane that characterizes Randall's portrait of the Willey Country.

Randall's method is to let character emerge from incident. Readers will find that the book's value lies not in a continuous narrative but in the accumulation of such scenes—each one a small, telling detail about the manners, morals, and contradictions of a rural society. The Willey Country is less a place than a web of relationships, where a squire, a parson, and a poacher each play their parts in a drama of custom and compromise.

The rain kept me indoors with Randall’s Willey Country, where the old squire’s relationship with Tom Moody felt less about the hunt than about patient, daily trust. That quiet rhythm followed me to the stables, and I found myself turning pages of Riding and Driving — Context and Discussion the same way, unhurried, watching how a steady hand shapes everything.