Butcher in the Rye

In 1743 John Breads, a butcher, stabbed to death Allen Grebell in the declining Cinque port town of Rye on the east Sussex coast. Grebell was the brother-in-law of James Lamb, the mayor who lived in the town’s big house, Lamb House, that was later to be home to Henry James and E. F. Benson. Paul Monod has chosen that murder as a peg on which to hang his history of the town from the Civil War to the mid-18th century. The Grebell-Lamb interest was the cornerstone of the Whig oligarchy that had come to rule Rye. Can Breads’ story tell us something about the progress of Rye from the failure, amid the religious turbulence of 17th-century politics, of Puritan reformers to institute the rule of the godly to the ascendancy of the Whigs? Or, to put it another way, was Breads a dispossessed malcontent who wreaked political revenge upon Lamb (apparently the intended victim) for the replacement of an inclusive social ‘neighbourliness’ by narrow, class-conscious Whig ‘politeness’ that separated the magistracy ‘from the dangerous mentalities of the common people’ and had no place for people like Breads?