The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends". Charles G. Harper
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anxious to assume long descent, even if they have to date from a murderer. Time throws an historic condonation over such things, and many an ambitious person who would not willingly kill a fly, and who would very naturally shrink from owning any connection with a homicidal criminal now on his trial, would glow with pride at an attested family tree springing from that blood-thirsty knight.
Another tales gives the Italian name of Orsini as a variant of FitzUrse. If there be anything in it, then assuredly the notorious Orsini of the infernal machine, who attempted the life of Napoleon III., was a reversion to twelfth century type.
Other Barhams there are known to fame: Henry, surgeon and natural history writer, who died in 1726, and was one of the family of Barhams of Barham Court; and Nicholas Barham, lawyer, of Wadhurst, Sussex, who died in 1577, and was descended from the Barhams of Teston, near Maidstone. Nicholas was ever a favourite Christian name with all branches of the family, and Tom Ingoldsby so named his youngest son—the "Little Boy Ned" of the Legends.
The witty and mirth-provoking Reverend Richard Harris Barham, destined to bear the most distinguished name of all his race, was fourth in descent from the peculiarly fortunate John Barham who wedded the Harris hopfields and the Harris daughter. His father, himself a "Richard Harris" Barham—was that alderman of capacious paunch of whom mention has already been made. He resided at 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury, a large, substantial house of pallid grey brick, plain almost to ugliness outside, but remarkably comfortable and beautifully appointed within, standing at the corner of Canterbury Lane. A brick of the garden wall facing the lane may be observed, scratched lightly with "M. B. 1733."
To this house he had succeeded on the death of his father, Richard Barham, in 1784. He did not very long enjoy the inheritance.
"TOM INGOLDSBY": THE REV. RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM.
From a drawing by his son, the Rev. Richard Harris Dalton Barham.
The alderman was of truly aldermanic proportions, for he weighed nineteen stone. Existing portraits of him introduce us to a personage of a more than
Falstaffian appearance, and the tale is still told how it was found necessary to widen the doorway at the time of his funeral. For eleven years he lived here; and here it was, December 6th, 1788, that the only child of himself and his housekeeper, Elizabeth Fox, was born.
Elizabeth Fox came from Minster-in-Thanet. A miniature portrait of her shows a fair-haired, bright-eyed woman, with abundant indications of a sunny nature, rich in wit and humour. It is quite clear that it was from his mother Ingoldsby derived his mirthful genius, just as in a companion miniature of himself, painted at the age of six, representing him as a pretty, vivacious little boy with large brown roguish eyes, he bore a striking likeness to her.
It is singular to note that the future rector of St. Mary Magdalene in the City of London was as an infant baptised at a church of precisely the same dedication—that of St. Mary Magdalene in Burgate Street, a few doors only removed from his birthplace. The tower only of that church is now standing, the rest having been pulled down in 1871. It is still possible to decipher some of the tablets fixed against the wall of the tower, but exposed to the weather and slowly decaying. There is one to Ingoldsby's grandfather, Richard, who died December 11th, 1784, aged 82, and to his grandmother, Elizabeth Barham, who died October 2nd, 1781, aged 81; and other tablets commemorate his aunts Eliza and Sarah, who died September 26th, 1782, and December 16th, 1784, aged respectively forty-six and forty-four years.
THE HOUSE, 61, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY, WHERE THE AUTHOR OF THE "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" WAS BORN.
ST. MARY MAGDALENE, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY.
Ingoldsby was only in his seventh year when a very serious thing befell, for his father, the alderman, died in 1795. Those who love their Ingoldsby and everything that was his, as the present writer does, will be interested to know that he was buried at Upper Hardres ("Hards," in the Kentish speech), a small and lonely village, four miles from Canterbury, on the old Stone Street, as you go towards Lympne and Hythe. There, in the village church, high up on the south wall of the nave, the tablet to his memory may be found. What became of Elizabeth Fox is beyond our ken. We are told, in the Life and Letters of Richard Harris Barham, by his son the Reverend Richard Dalton Barham, that she was at the time a confirmed invalid.
WESTWELL.
THE HALL, 61, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY, WHERE THE AUTHOR OF THE "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" WAS BORN.
To three guardians had been given the administration of the comfortable patrimony of the boy, and by them he was sent to St. Paul's School, then in the City of London. Thence he went to Brasenose, Oxford, leaving the university with a modest B.A., degree in 1811. Meanwhile the villain of the piece had been at work, in the person of a dishonest attorney, one of his guardians, by whose practices his fortune was very seriously reduced. Returning to Canterbury, he seems to have contemplated studying for the law, but quickly relinquished the idea, and prepared himself for the Church. He was admitted to holy orders, and in 1813, in his twenty-fifth year obtained a curacy at Ashford. This was exchanged in the following year for the curacy of the neighbouring village of Westwell. Thus he was fairly launched on his professional career, becoming successively Rector of Snargate and Curate of Warehorne, Minor Canon of St. Paul's and Rector of the united parishes of St. Mary Magdalene with St. Gregory-by-St.-Paul's, and finally, by exchange in 1842, Rector of St. Faith-by-St.-Paul's—a fine mid-nineteenth century specimen of the "squarson." A competent genealogist, an accomplished antiquary, a man of letters, he, by force of his sprightly wit, welded the fragmentary legends of the country—but largely those of his native county of Kent—into those astonishing amalgams of fact and fiction which, published first, from time to time, in Bentley's Miscellany, were collected and issued as the Ingoldsby Legends. It is not the least among the charms of those verses that fact and fiction are so inextricably mixed in them that it needs the learning of the skilled antiquary to sift the one from the other; and so plausible are many of his ostensible citations from old Latin documents, and his fictitious genealogies so interwoven with the names, the marriages and descents of persons, real and imaginary, that an innocent who wrote some years ago to Notes and Queries, desiring further particulars of what he thought to be genuine records, is surely to be excused for his too-ready faith.
The assumed name of "Ingoldsby" is stated by his son to be found in a branch of the family genealogy, but inquiry fails to trace the name in that connection, and it may be said at once that the Kentish Ingoldsbys are entirely figments of Barham's lively imagination. Yorkshire knows a family of that name, of whom Barham probably had never heard anything save their name. He was a man of property, and modestly proud of the descent he claimed, and though by no means rich, his place was among—
The élite of the old county families round, Such as Honeywood, Oxenden, Knatchbull and Norton, Matthew Robinson, too, with his beard, from Monk's Horton, The Faggs, and Finch-Hattons, Tokes, Derings, and Deedses, And Fairfax (who then called the castle of Leeds his).
He was, in fact, "armigerous", as heralds would say, and the arms of his family were—not those lioncels of the Shurlands impaled with the saltire of the Ingoldsbys, of which we may read in the Legends—but as pictured here. It may be noted that another Barham family—the Barhams of Teston, near Maidstone—bore the three bears for arms, without the distinguishing fesse; and that they are shown thus on an old brass plate in Ashford church, which Ingoldsby must often have seen during his early curacy there.
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