Alfred Parsons became a member of the ‘Broadway Group’ of artists and writers in the 1880s, and then worked extensively in Bredon and other villages of southern Worcestershire. His illustrations to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Warwickshire Avon (1892) include one of Bredon’s ‘huge tithe-barn ... with a chamber over its doorway, doubtless for the accountant’. The building was commissioned by one of the Bishops of Worcester – probably Wulstan Bransford –
in the mid fourteenth century. It was long thought to be a tithe barn, for the storage of crops taken as taxes for the church and clergy. However, it is now known to have been a manorial barn, for the storage of crops belonging to the Bishops of Worcester, who were the local landowners.