Listen to the track:
The Weight of the Wood
A dark historical song about John Hensleigh, a ruined farmer whose family had held Spirewell for generations until hard times took it away. When the new tenant, William Bunker, claimed the old family pew at Wembury Church, the last symbol of Hensleigh pride was threatened too. During Sunday service in 1837, that bitterness turned violent. The song tells of land, status, loss and one shocking moment when private grievance broke into a sacred place. As featured in a Wembury Local History Society article in The Wembury Review.
Verse 1
Two hundred years of the Hensleigh name
Plowing the dirt until the hard times came
The war was over and the prices fell
He lost the dirt and the Spirewell
Bunker moved in to claim the debt
And the one thing John couldn't leave just yet
Was the family pew where the wood was lined
The only piece left he could call his kind
Chorus
He didn't come to church to hear the word
He came to settle what the lawyers blurred
With a pocket knife and a steady hand
He struck a blow for his father’s land
Now the box pew’s stained a heavy red
And the life he knew is good as dead
Verse 2
It was Sunday morning, thirty-seven
The hymns were lifting up to Heaven
Bunker sat in the Warden’s place
With a winner’s grin on a tenant’s face
One quick strike through the Sunday air
And the neighbors screamed in a house of prayer
The gavel fell for the old man’s head
And he died in a cage in a prison bed
Chorus
He didn't come to church to hear the word
He came to settle what the lawyers blurred
With a pocket knife and a steady hand
He struck a blow for his father’s land
Now the box pew’s stained a heavy red
And the life he knew is good as dead
Yeah, the life he knew is good as dead
The life he knew is good as dead