The Reverend Humphrey Michel (or Mitchell) became Rector of Blaston in 1675, acquiring the living of Horninghold two years later. His ministry, which lasted some 47 years, was marked by disagreements, slander, grudges and a driven agenda to impose his old fashioned, conservative and royalist views on his parish. Michel spent his time railing against the wealthy landed classes, whom he believed defrauded him of church tithes; the indolent and privileged rural clergy, who didn't need to worry about money; the Whigs, who in his view were destroying the legacy of the Stuart kings; non-conformists and Jesuits, who didn't uphold the Church of England, and those with unsatisfactory moral standards, some of whom he accused of witchcraft. Indeed Michel is our only source for the Horninghold witch trials which took place in June 1709.

Michel's journey begins around 1650 in Birmingham, where he was born into the family of a butcher. This lowly ancestry was to give him a strong sense of social inferiority, which was to fuel many of his conflicts when he came to rural Leicestershire. He clearly had ambition, for he managed to gain a degree from Brasenose College in Oxford in 1670, where he was described as a 'plebeian and a pauper'. At Oxford Michel befriended Nathaniel Alsop, a fellow student, whose family connections enabled Alsop to gain the rich living of Church Langton in east Leicestershire. It was he who appointed Michel as curate of nearby Tur Langton, but Michel took up the role without a license and was reprimanded for it, being finally ordained as a priest in 1673.

Michel's next bit of good fortune was to marry Frances Goodman, grand daughter of Sir Thomas Burton of Stockerston and daughter of Everard Goodman of Blaston. It was Goodman who probably secured the livings of Blaston and Horninghold for Michel, although the actual patrons were Sir Edward Hungerford and Mr Edwin Redich. There was a poor parsonage at Horninghold, but Michel chose to live at Blaston - his absence was noted by the churchwardens in 1694, who claimed he was negligent in his cleric duties and in maintaining the vicarage. The issue was resolved in 1703 when the old parsonage was exchanged for a 'new well built house' close to the church, which is the current Old Rectory. Michel moved in, residing there until his death.

Michel's tenancy as a country parson was hardly harmonious. He brought three suits for non payment of tithes in Blaston between 1677 and 1687, including his own brother-in-law. One of the accused was Leonard Vow, who Michel berated after his death as being a 'drunken God robber'. When the Goodmans sold up, he turned his attention to their successor, Edwin Conyers. Michel's resentment simmered until Conyer's death in 1701 prompted Michel to pen an ill-judged and libellous sonnet entitled Ned Conyer's Ghost. In this he portrayed Conyer's birth as 'My Dagle Tail Mother like a fart blurt me out' and he speculated that his demise in a fiery lake was the result of inappropriate sexual activity. The sonnet led to a lengthy suit for libel and public humiliation. The experience didn't quiet him for in 1709 it came to the Bishop of Lincoln's attention that Michel 'was accused to me for reading some odd verses of his own in church'.

To instill piety in his parishioners, Michel tried to instigate daily services at St Giles in Blaston, but the villagers removed the bell rope, clapper and ultimately the bell to prevent him. He was quick to report moral laxity among his flock. In 1691 he accused a Horninghold couple of 'disorderly walking', which meant speaking ill of their minister. This had come about over a commotion in the village regarding Michel effectively allowing the accused, John Marshall, to evict the tenant of the old vicarage. It was clearly a source of village gossip for Michel noted to the court 'Some were observ'd to laugh in the church'. Michel went on to accuse Marshall of stealing and eating a 'tithe pig', which he had kept in the church porch, as well as tithe corn which had been destroyed in a ditch.

Dissenters were a clear target. Here Michel employed extreme language to report leaders. In 1712 he complained he was 'Pester'd and Petrify'd with ... scandalous Schismaticks and Hereticks', while in 1715 he claimed there was a 'Presbyterian Synagogue of Satan' being held in Horninghold. He was damning of Presbyterians for he believed that they had 'murdered King Charles, the best of all Kings but one - King Jesus'. He clearly had an old fashioned nostalgia and loyalty for the Stuart dynasty, but this did not extend to Jacobitism, which he said was 'enough to turn any English stomach'. Indeed, he distributed essays and works condemning Catholicism and the Jacobite cause to restore a Catholic Stuart to the throne.

Being a staunch Conservative, he viewed the ascendant Whig party and its members as disrupters of virtue. He was suspicious of the judiciary, claiming they had been corrupted by Whig agendas and he was horrified when a Whig candidate for Parliament defended the execution of Charles I.

Michel's relative impoverishment, which had forced him to pursue his tithe payments, was exemplified by the wealth of incumbents in surrounding parishes. He was incensed when three of them offered Edwin Conyers absolution on his death bed and in subsequent letters he derided them as being 'pompous, pampered, periwig'd powdered' priests, finally calling on St Paul who 'hath excluded all effeminate Persons (parsons not excepted) from the Kingdom of God'.  The bitterness created by his working class background led him to lash out at those who benefitted from family connections, ignoring the fact that he himself had gained some status through such means. To justify his background he championed Cardinal Wolsey and Lord Chief Justice Scrogs as being sons of butchers, claiming that 'the honest butchers ... the honest hogherds ... are more honourable than any such priestly prigs'.

Michel's diary, which begins in 1707, was transcribed by the historian J. H. Hill in 1859 and published in Associated Architectural Societies Reports & Papers. This is our only source for the witch trials which took place in Horninghold and Blaston in June 1709 - see Witch Trials. The diary reveals that conflict resided even within the Rector's household. In November 1707 Michel's wife died and the sickness she had contracted he put down, in large part, to the wickedness of their second son, John, who had 'broken her heart'. Soon after this John was 'drunk and running about like a drunken sot', despite a pledge on his mother's deathbed not to do so. Michel's daughter left home and was accused of being 'impudent', while the eldest son's clandestine marriage prompted the retort 'so rebellious a rogue was the son, and so rebellious a jade was the daughter'.

Michel's later life, as recorded in the diary, shows no diminution of his grievances, although he did secure a second marriage to a local woman in 1711. His diary proudly lists his old enemies who had justly been sent to their graves, those 'prig-pated' patrons and rectors and those 'secret persecutors' for 'Curseth be he that smiteth his neighbour secretly'.

Having battled against Whigs, Dissenters, Jacobites, God-robbers, witches, rectors, patrons, parishioners and family, Michel died in 1722, aged around 72. He was buried beneath the altar of St Giles Church in Blaston, but as that church was completely rebuilt in the Victorian period, it is unlikely his last resting place survives.