of life from Salisbury once a week.  The vicar was non-resident; and the squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach, was only an occasional visitor, for his principal residence was fifty miles off, at Williamstrip, near Fairford. (He had acquired Netheravon by his marriage with Miss Beach.) The church was empty, and the curate in charge likened his preaching to the voice of one crying in the wilderness.  The condition of the village may best be judged from a report made to Mr. Hicks-Beach by his steward in 1793.  Nearly every one was dependent on parochial relief.  Not a man earned ten shillings a week.  A man with a wife and four children worked for six shillings a week.  A girl earned, by spinning, four shillings a month.  Idleness, disease, and immorality were rife; and, as an incentive to profitable industry, a young farmer beat a sickly labourer within an inch of his life.

Mrs. Hicks-Beach referred this uncomfortable report on the condition of her property to the newly-installed curate, requesting his opinion on the cases specified.  The curate replied with characteristic vigour.  One family owed its wretched condition to mismanagement and extravagance; another to “ignorance bordering on brutality”; another to “Irish extraction, numbers, disease, and habits of idleness.”  One family was composed of “weak, witless people, totally wretched, without sense to extricate them from their wretchedness”; a second was “perfectly wretched and helpless”; and a third was “aliment for Newgate, food for the halter—­a ragged, wretched, savage, stubborn race."[8]

The squire and Mrs. Hicks-Beach, who seem to have been thoroughly high-principled and intelligent people, were much concerned to find the curate corroborating and even expanding the evil reports of the steward.  They immediately began considering remedies, and decided that their first reform should be to establish a Sunday-school.  The institution so named bore little resemblance to the Sunday-schools of the present day, but followed a plan which Robert Raikes[9] and Mrs. Hannah More[10] had originated, and which Bishop Shute Barrington[11] (who was translated to Durham in 1791) had strongly urged on the Diocese of Sarum.[12] Boys and girls were taught together.  The master and mistress were paid the modest salary of two shillings a Sunday.  The children were taught spelling and reading, and, as soon as they had mastered those arts, were made to read the Bible, the Prayer Book, and Mrs. More’s tracts.  The children attended church, sitting together in a big pew, and, in hot weather, had their lessons in the church, before and after the service.  As soon as the Sunday-school had proved itself popular and successful, an Industrial School was arranged for three nights in the week, so that the girls of the village might be taught domestic arts.  Both institutions prospered, and ninety years later Mr. Stuart Reid, visiting the cottages of Netheravon in order to collect material for his book, caught the lingering tradition that Sydney Smith “was fond of children and young people, and took pains to teach them.”