I suppose the diaries of the Rev Francis Kilvert (1840-1879) — who was married at the parish church of Wootton, near Woodstock, one rainy day in August 1879, just weeks before his death — must take pride of place in any collection of 19th-century parsons’ diaries. But those of the Rev Francis Edward Witts (1783-1854, above), son of Edward Witts of Swerford Park, near Chipping Norton, make compulsive reading, too — particularly for anyone living (as I do) in his Cotswold stamping grounds on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire borders.

He was a rich man, living a couple of generations before the gentle and self-doubting Kilvert, but he was made of much sterner stuff. I gather this from The Diary of a Cotswold Parson, (Sutton Publishing, 1979), edited by the architectural historian David Verey (1913-1984), a copy of which I have found hard to put down since buying it last week for £1.50 at a Cheltenham charity shop.

Witts became Rector of Upper Slaughter in 1808 and also Vicar of Stanway, near Winchcombe, in 1814; and he lived at the lovely rectory of Upper Slaughter, now the Lords of the Manor Hotel. He was a Conservative of the very old school, sincerely believing that it was his God-given duty to conserve, literally, the hierarchical status quo into which he was born — and which, I am sure, he considered to be the very essence of civilisation.

As a magistrate he was unbending. Certainly, I would have quailed in my boots had I been a poor man brought before him (if I had any boots in which to quail, that is). For example on April 27, 1821, a gypsy couple, described as “casual poor” appeared. The parish overseer wanted to establish that neither they nor any of their five children had been born there — and therefore should not be a charge on the parish. Witts decided that four children had been born elsewhere and sent them back, thus separating them from each other and their parents.

On June 15, 1837, he attended committal proceedings at Stow-on-the-Wold with reference to a youth charged with stealing two-and-a-half sovereigns. He wrote in his diary: “After hearing the evidence of one witness, we were obliged by the pressure of other business to suspend the examination and sent him to the lock-up house about 12 o’clock. When about 5 in the afternoon the officer was sent to bring the prisoner before us he was found dead, having strangled himself by forcibly tightening his neck cloth, a wretched example of living without God in the world, a wild, reckless, hardened life of idleness and vice.”

At that time his son, who became curate at Stanway in 1840 and eventually succeeded his father as rector at Upper Slaughter too, was “happily botanizing” in Cirencester Park. Edward Francis Witts rediscovered a species of a plant called the Thlaspi perfoliatum, a kind of Shepherd’s Pouch, that Jacob Bobart of the Oxford Botanic Garden had found near Burford a century before, but had since been thought extinct.

On May 8, 1838, Witts wrote: “Three years ago my son discovered it growing in profusion on some stony banks in this parish, at the back of my rectory farm and in an adjacent field, where the plough never had reached, nor can reach.” Shades of the Selborne’s naturalist vicar Gilbert White.

He knew all about human frailty. In the diary we learn that John Forbes, architect of the Pittville Pump Room at Cheltenham’s spa, was sentenced to transportation for life for fraud, though this was commuted to imprisonment. He was charitable, too, and particularly interested in helping lunatics. He often met up with his neighbouring rector, Samuel Warneford, who gave generously for Oxford’s Warneford Asylum. But all in all, would I rather be alive in the Cotswolds now than then? Yes.