EVESHAM AND BENGEWORTH. 157

formerly it was one of the seats of the clothing trade; but the town is mainly dependent on agriculture and market gardening, large tracts of land on the banks of the Avon and elsewhere being devoted to the cultivation of garden produce, which finds its way to Worcester, Birmingham, and many other large towns. By far the largest owner of property in Evesham is E. C. Rudge, Esq., who has a charming mansion and estate just outside the town.

The Lord Chancellor is patron of the living of Evesham; Rev. M. Wood vicar; value, about £208, but efforts are being made under the Lord Chancellor's augmentation scheme to raise the value by about £21 per annum; and they have so far succeeded that a grant of £400 to meet a local offer of £220, in all £620, will produce about £20 per annum. St. Lawrence's Church (which has recently undergone considerable repair) accommodates about 830 persons, and 710 of the seats are free; All Saints has nearly 1,000 sittings, 300 being free, and the rest old so-called faculty pews.

Dissent is well rooted in Evesham, although it had a most unpropitious planting. The Quakers have a chapel in Cowl Street, built in 1676 ; Unitarians in Oat Street, 1737 ; Baptists in Cowl Street, 1787 ; Wesleyan Methodists in Chapel Street, 3808; Reformed Wesleyans in Market Place, built lately. In no town of Worcestershire was Dissent so persecuted—nay, so barbarously ill-used—as at Evesham in the seventeenth century, the poor Quakers especially coming in for a full share of rough handling. True, the original Quakers and their founder were far different beings from their quiet and peaceable descendants of the present day, and not unfrequently, by their fanatic zeal and coarse abuse of the established powers, challenged and invited that chastisement so liberally dealt out to them. One William Sympson ran naked through the streets of this town "as a prophetic warning to the people, but was whipped on the back and breast by an envious-minded man of that place." Even female Quakers were put in the stocks a whole day and night together in a freezing atmosphere; and