Dutch Elm did for me, to be replaced by a juvenile oak encircled by black railings. A plaque that no one reads – too intent on hustling a parking place in Market Square or necking a pint in The Crown.

I remember John Wesley. How he often came to Stony Stratford to stand under my spreading boughs and preach to the ungodly. So long ago, but I still remember…

*

July 30, 1777 and Wesley is here again. Standing in my shade on a wooden step in front of two hundred people crammed into Canham’s barn, just off the high street. Wesley, a smallish man but powerful. Oxford don in a farm labourer’s body. A sweeping forehead, aquiline nose and piercing hazel eyes bright and burning as the sun.

The wind ruffles his straggly white hair. His voice rings out above the warring pigeons, yapping dogs and clatter of horse-drawn wagons – now entreatingly gentle, now bellowing like thunder. Rector Babington of St Mary and St Giles is in the crowd. Scowling. Forehead furrowed. Malevolent eyes.

‘Damn this Wesley,’ he curses under his breath. ‘He will ruin us all with his radical talk.’

*

The Church did not approve of Wesley and his brother Charles. Forbidden the pulpit, they took to the open air. His message of love uncompromisingly direct; his parish, the country.

‘Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can,’ he enjoined the packed crowd to an avalanche of cheers.

This is very bad. Why does he not speak of our good church? Babington thought. We must do something to stop him but what? He thought of paying someone to throw dung at Wesley, but Wesley was too far away and they would probably get lynched.

Also in the crowd was a very worried Tom Barber, landlord of The Angel. His pub was at the wrong end of the high street and forced to subsist on the left-overs of the coaching trade monopolised by The White Horse and The Cock. He was losing money and about to sack his old stable assistant, Isaac. Trouble was, Isaac was practically family.

Wesley preached what he called ‘social holiness’ – a duty on Christians in their actions to do all they could to create a more just and equitable society. Wesley warmed to his theme, arms open wide in supplication.

‘You must help feed the hungry, clothe the naked, help the stranger, the widow and do all you can to relieve the wants of mankind,’ he entreated.

*

That night Babington wrote to the Bishop asking him to get the Lord Lieutenant to have Wesley banned from open air preaching in Stony Stratford. The bishop declined. Tom Barber didn’t sack Isaac. His son went on to help build a Methodist church in Silver Street, Stony Stratford in 1845.