The term ‘squarson’ is virtually unknown today. A combination of ‘squire’ and ‘parson’, the word reached its heyday in the reign of Queen Victoria, referring to the squire who doubled up as the village parson. A breed of Anglican clergymen noted for eccentricity, squarsons recorded the minutiae of rural life in their diaries and often earned fame in the wider world.

The Church of England has produced some remarkable characters, none more so than the squarson. A familiar character in 18th and 19th century England, dressed in clerical black, he could be seen clip-clopping his horse along lanes and across fields in all weathers to tend the spiritual needs of his flock.

At the same time, he was concerned with the efficient running of his estates, the source of often considerable wealth, which allowed the squarson to live in style and pursue pastimes beyond the means of clergymen existing on a stipend.

Although the name ‘squarson’ was not invented until the 1850s, possibly half in jest by the clerical wit Sydney Smith, the role the squire-parson played in the community had been around since the Middle Ages.

In the 14th century, for example, John de Gourney was the chief landowner, Lord of the Manor and incumbent at Harpley in Norfolk. Two hundred years later, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries released more Tudor land into secular hands.

This was done through the Court of Augmentations, which sold large tracts of church lands to the laity, together with advowsons giving the right to appoint a clergyman to a living as a rector or vicar.

With an intimate knowledge of his parishioners, the incumbent squarson was in a position to record his impressions of their ‘hatch, match and dispatch’ lives in a world that lived by the seasons, where farming folk often existed at subsistence level, and rarely travelled further afield than the next parish.

This might seem dull material for a bestseller, but the squarson’s diary affords an invaluable and fascinating insight into a lifestyle long since passed away.

The most prolific diarist was Parson James Woodforde, born in 1740, who from his university days until his appointment to the living of Weston Longville, Norfolk – via a jilted love affair and disappointments in his career – kept a diary named The Diary of a Country Parson for 45 years.

It is illuminating in its ordinariness, for he was an ordinary man, never doubting the Anglican doctrine, earning a reputation for gluttony after large dinners with his clerical neighbours, and enjoying country pursuits.

On 11 January, 1763, he notes “Went on the River again this Morning a skating and have improved in the out Stroke.” He also cared for his flock over the years, as shown in a diary entry for Christmas Day 1786: “I had… old men dine at my House on roast beef & Plumb Pudding and after Dinner half a Pint of strong ale and a shilling each to carry home to their Wives.”

If Woodforde was typical of clerical correctness, Sabine Baring-Gould represented the intellectual squarson not fully content with his everyday existence and eager to explore the world outside the church.

Born in Exeter in 1834, Baring-Gould was destined to be unconventional. He spent much of his youth travelling around Europe on family excursions led by his footloose father. He spent just two years in formal education but nevertheless earned a BA and MA at Cambridge before ordination as curate at Horbury Bridge, in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The curate was eccentric throughout his life. He once taught at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex with a pet bat on his shoulder. And, just as bizarrely, when he fell in love with a mill girl, he sent her to relatives to learn to speak properly and learn the social graces expected of a parson’s wife. It was obviously a wise move, for the couple were married for 48 years and had 15 children.

Moving south from the wild dales of Yorkshire, Baring-Gould spent 10 years in the gentler terrain of Essex before inheriting the family estates at Lew Trenchard in Devon – and losing no time in appointing himself squarson.

Busy with his new flock, he still found time for numerous activities outside the pulpit. He was, for example, a pioneer archaeologist, respected for his work on Dartmoor, in Wales and France.

He was also a folklorist, collecting traditional songs throughout the West Country, a poet, author and writer on ecclesiastical issues. But it is as composer of popular hymns that Baring-Gould is best remembered, his output including ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Now the Day is Over’.

Records do not show the Reverend Baring-Gould as a sportsman, one popular image of a squarson. The Reverend George Hely-Hutchinson, on the other hand, fitted the description to a T. Born in Dublin in 1799, scion of an aristocratic family with estates in County Tipperary, after graduating at Cambridge he was ordained a priest in 1829. Eight years later, the Lord Chancellor appointed Hely-Hutchinson vicar of Westport St Mary with Brokenborough and Charlton, in Wiltshire, a sought-after living with a worthwhile salary of £520 per annum.

But it was as much location as money that attracted him, for his vicarage was bang in the middle of the Beaufort and Vale of the White Horse hunting country. Eagerly taking on the role of a typical squarson, George Hely-Hutchinson hunted regularly with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds, and was a frequent guest on local estates for the hunting, shooting and fishing.

George also hired a sporting property at Strathconon in Scotland for recreation during summer and autumn, employing a curate to carry out his day-to-day duties back home. In fact, he only officiated in his parish at major church events or the baptisms, weddings and funerals of prominent parishioners.

These, of course, had to occur outside the stalking and grouse shooting seasons, when the sporting parson was resident across the border in Scotland. He even built a new vicarage at Charlton at his own expense so he could provide adequate stabling for his hunters.

But Hely-Hutchinson was not entirely self-indulgent, finding time out from his social life to rebuild and enlarge the church at Westport St Mary and establish a school for the poor children of the parish.

If they were not recording the lives of their parishioners, squarsons nearly all noted the vagaries of the weather in their journals.

On Christmas Day, 1860, for example, the Rev Benjamin John Armstrong, vicar of Dereham, Norfolk, wrote: “Without doubt the most intensely cold day I can remember. A ray of sunshine coming out as the communicants came to the rail, melted the congealed damp in the roof [that] came down as heavy drops of water, which became ice immediately upon reaching the floor or seats.”

Whether preoccupied with the weather, or like parson Robert Francis Kilvert an advocate of nude bathing in public, the diaries of England’s squarsons add a rich vein to our knowledge of the worlds in which they lived.