Fire in the Thatch by Edith Caroline Rivett

Mr. William Tothill, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths, was an old-established and much respected legal practitioner in Mallowton. He and his father before him had drawn up leases and agreements, negotiated disputes, engrossed wills, advised on settlements and the management of property for nearly a century, working in the same dusty office, which looked out on to Mallowton High Street. Mr. Tothill was known as a very “safe” man. When irate clients demanded immediate legal action to redress their grievances, Mr. Tothill always advised settlement out of court. He was, as he explained, “anti-litigious.” He held it a failure if he could not induce would-be litigants to compromise without going to the extreme of taking their cases to court.

Mr. Tothill was now seventy years of age—a dry, precise little man, not to be hurried in speech or action. It was to Mr. Tothill that Nicholas Vaughan had gone when he took the lease of Little Thatch, saying frankly that he had no knowledge of land tenures in Devonshire, and that he wished to have his agreement “vetted” by a local man of law.