"Prior, a watercress man, was fined ten shillings, and in default of payment committed to the treadmill for a fortnight on the complaint of the Rev. Charles Rodwell Roper, for using indecent and obscene language.
"A woman, who had refused to buy his cresses incited the wrath of defendent; and he avenged himself by a torrent of excessively bad English.
"The reverend gentleman remonstrated with him; but reproof led to no reformation, and hence the result."
I have not met a watercress man before in the golden realm of The Western Times but they would have been busy here with their baskets of cress in or around the Higher Market. I imagine the cresses in Exeter would have been foraged from local streams and ponds rather than farmed, although the Victorians did have watercress farms.
Two weeks imprisonment with hard labour seems a stiff sentence for effing and blinding, but then there was an Anglican parson involved and no doubt Prior was 'disrespectful'. I smell something of what Tom Pooley would call Bible Tyranny in the case.
I have blogged the Tractarian, Reverend Rodwell Roper before. He was the Rector of Saint Olave's who made Mr Ferris take off his hat in the vestry. (THE CLERICAL COMMAND).
20th May, 1843
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