The parish must have been an uncivilized place in former times; there was an accusing record beneath the west window of the tower, in the shape of a blocked up entrance.  I was told that the ringers, not wishing to enter or leave the tower through the church door during service, and also to facilitate the smuggling in of unlimited cider had, after strenuous efforts, cut an opening through the ancient wall and base some feet in thickness, and that the achievement was announced to the village by uproarious cheering when at last they succeeded.  A door was afterwards fitted to the aperture, but the entrance was abolished later by a more reverent Vicar.

The belfry was decorated with various bones of legs of mutton and of joints of beef, hung up to commemorate notable weddings of prominent parishioners—­perhaps, too, as a hint to future aspirants to the state of matrimony—­when the ringers had enjoyed a substantial meal and gallons of cider at the expense of the bridegroom.  There seems to have been a traditional connection between church bell-ringing and thirst, for Gilbert White relates that when the bells of Selborne Church were recast and a new one presented in 1735, “The day of the arrival of this tuneable peal was observed as an high festival by the village, and rendered more joyous by an order from the donor that the treble bell should be fixed bottom upward in the ground and filled with punch, of which all present were permitted to partake.”

The Vicar of Badsey told me that at the neighbouring church of Wickhamford, then also in his jurisdiction, that when he first came, in the early fifties, it was customary, as the men entered the church by the chancel door, to pitch their hats in a heap on the altar.  Also that on his home-coming with his bride, he was, the same evening, requisitioned to put a stop to a fight between two drunken reprobates outside the vicarage gate.  Badsey people can in these modern times point with pride to a much higher standard of civilization, and they fully recognize that “’Eave ’alf a brick at his ’ead; Bill,” is a method of welcome to a stranger not considered precisely etiquette at the present day.

There was no vestry before the restoration of Badsey Church; the Vicar’s surplice might be seen hanging over the side of one of the square pews which obstructed the chancel, and when the Vicar appeared he was followed by the clerk, who assisted at the public ceremony of robing.  Church decorations at Christmas consisted at that time of sprigs of holly stuck upright in holes bored along the tops of the pew partitions at regular intervals, and at the harvest thanksgiving an historic miniature rick of corn annually made its appearance on the altar.  In those days, however, flowers, which are scarcely suitable for a festival where the decorations should proclaim the abundance of the matured season of growth, by corn and fruit, were not included.  I have seen too many of these, to the exclusion of corn, in modern town churches, and even wild oats, which, though very pretty, are not exactly typical of thanksgiving.