On 6 March 1867, Elias Rendall, Isaac Stevens and Joseph Withey were summoned for damaging a stile belonging to John Hayward of Hardington on Sunday 10 February.
John’s wife, Harriet, told the court that she saw the three men coming across the fields between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. When they got to the stile, Withey, who was very drunk, urged Rendall to pull it down, which he did, throwing the pieces into the hedge. Stevens said he would “cut out of it” and went along the road.
In their defence, Rendall and Withey said that they merely put their hands on the stile, and it fell down. However, the magistrates found them guilty and imposed a fine of 5s each, along with costs and damages of 6s 3d. Stevens, on the other hand, was acquitted.
All three men were skilled tradesmen from East Coker: Elias Rendall, a blacksmith aged about fifty; Isaac Stevens, his son-in-law, a stone mason; and Joseph Withey, another blacksmith a few years older than Isaac. However, their trades did not reflect their true character.
Withey had been convicted in 1861 of assaulting another man and fined 10s.
Stevens was thoroughly disreputable. His wife left him in about 1874, and he later “married” bigamously another woman. He died in 1878 aged only thirty-three; his early death probably hastened by drink.
However, the worst of the three was Rendall, for whom crime was a way of life. By the time of the Hardington incident, he had served three different prison sentences for theft. In fact, he was lucky to be still in the country because, in 1851, he had been sentenced to transportation for breaking into the rector’s coach house at Ryme Intrinseca. In 1873, he committed yet another crime, for which he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, dying shortly after his release.
This study reminds us that Victorian rural society contained individuals happy to transgress the laws and conventions of their day.
The photographs is of Portland Prison, where Elias Rendall was an inmate from October 1862 until October 1864. This image provides a glimpse into the harsh conditions of the prison and the reality of Rendall’s punishment.
