Stephening

On St Stephen’s Day the whole parish of Drayton Beauchamp went to the rectory and claimed the right to as much bread, cheese and ale as they liked at the rector’s expense. Tradition told of a miserly rector who shut up the house and hid, until young men took the tiles off the roof, got in and threw open the doors to a hundred or more hungry visitors. The custom lasted until the Rev. Basil Wood, rector from 1808, stopped it for the drunkenness it caused, and his money payments in its place ended about 1827.