A Drake by George!

A boisterous retired captain moves into a small hill parish, furnishing an ostentatious villa and asserting himself as the town's de facto leader. His arrival ignites a feud with a gloomy neighbor over a long-used field and a contested right of way, drawing in the vicar, the local arbiter called the Yellow Leaf, and the parish council. The struggle escalates through meetings, barbed wire, and popular demonstrations and culminates unexpectedly in the captain's violent death and the antagonist's ascendancy. The narrative then follows the effects on family fortunes, scandal, inheritance disputes, labour tensions, and the comic, provincial maneuvers of townsfolk as power and property are contested.