IN this day the man who writes a useless book, commits a great sin
against society. The aim of this volume is utility; although the word,
as applied to it, must be interpreted in a very limited sense. Beyond a
circuit of a few miles it will have no interest; and even in respect to
its legitimate sphere it only assumes to be a record of facts by which
the man in public life may refresh his memory as to the particulars of
past events, or by which those who have lived and moved amongst the
occurrences here set down may call up pleasant associations of things and
times gone by. By its means all persons resident in or connected with
Worcestershire may possess themselves of a knowledge of the history of
the County during the century, besides having at their command a
repertory of all the principal events of the locality. It would in many
instances have been more gratifying to the writer to have exchanged the
chronicle for the narrative—the annal for something more pretentious as a
history, but the “utility” of the book would thereby have been impaired,
and he refrained. To have attempted a continuation of _Nash_ would have
been mere pedantry, and the mode would have been wholly unsuitable for a
record of modern Worcestershire. As for the opinions which may be found
scattered here and there on the following pages, the writer is no further
anxious about them than as being naturally desirous that what he believes
to be truth should be accepted and acted upon by others. But as to the
facts professed to be narrated, he hopes that they will be found
scrupulously accurate and undistorted by anything like party bias; of the
faults of omission, no one can be so conscious as the writer himself, but
the book, even now, is larger than he had at first intended. If errors
should be found, those whose censure would be the weightiest will readily
be able to suggest abundance of excuses, and to their forbearance he
unhesitatingly trusts the following pages.