WATLING STREET: MOONRISE.
XL
By daylight the traveller can see that the barren chalk of Barham Downs, although left so long in repose, has been lately cut up into golf links. A racecourse, little frequented now, also stands on the ridge. Bourne Park skirts the road for some distance on the right, and the spire of Barham Church, rising from behind a thick clump of trees in a little valley, shows where the village of Barham lies secluded, some three hundred yards down a country lane.
THE BARHAM FAMILY
How few the wayfarers who either notice where Barham stands or who visit it even when they know its situation! And yet that place, together with its hamlet of Denton, is full of memories of one of the best and most genial among the humorists of the nineteenth century. There is a great deal of history, ancient and modern, genealogical and literary, about Denton and Barham, and the genealogical part of it commences in the reign of Henry the Second. At that time, the manor, including Denton and a great number of other hamlets round about, belonged to that Sir Randal, or Reginald, Fitzurse, who has come down through the ages as one of the murderers of Becket. Immediately after their crime, the murderers fled, Fitzurse escaping to Ireland, where he is said to have taken the name of MacMahon, which, meaning “Bear’s son,” was an Irish form of his original patronymic. He died an exile, leaving the Manor of Barham to his brother, who, so odious had the name of Fitzurse now become, changed it for that of his estate, and called himself De Bearham. His successors clipped and cut their name about until it became plain “Barham,” and the manor finally descended to one Thomas Barham, who, in the reign of James the First, alienated it to the Rev. Charles Fotherby, Archdeacon of Canterbury. Thus were the Barhams torn from their native soil and rendered landless, for already they had sold their adjacent manor of Tappington Everard situated at Denton. Some improvident Barham had done this deed in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and the property passed through a number of hands until it was bought from Colonel Thomas Marsh by a wealthy hop-factor of Canterbury, Thomas Harris. The hop-factor died in 1726, leaving as sole heir his daughter, married to a Mr. John Barham. In this manner the Barhams became once more owners of a portion of their ancient heritage, and from this John Barham was descended that witty Minor Canon of St. Paul’s, Richard Harris Barham, author of the Ingoldsby Legends. To one who knows his Ingoldsby well, and is possessed, moreover, of some antiquarian fervour, the neighbourhood of Denton and Barham must needs be of the greatest interest. Fact and fiction are so inextricably mixed up in those delightful tales of mirth and marvels that it would require all the knowledge of an expert in local and family history to disentangle them. The countryside appears in those pages under fictitious names, and the deeds or misdeeds of local families are decently veiled under many an alias; and yet here and there are real names, and actual facts are cited, leaving the stranger in a delightful uncertainty what to accept for truth and what to disbelieve. The manor-house of Tappington, where Barham spent his youth, would seem to readers of the Legends to be a grand Elizabethan mansion, approached by a long avenue and guarded by gates bearing “the saltire of the Ingoldsbys.” Indeed, Barham’s fertile imagination led him to picture such a place on the frontispiece of the Legends; but the stranger would seek for it in vain. Instead, he would find an ancient farmhouse, standing in a meadow skirting the road to Folkestone, a mile from the place where it branches from the Dover Road. An ancient farmhouse, its roof bent and bowed with age, and the greater part of it shrouded in ivy, from which Tudor chimneys peep picturesquely. In the meadow are traces of walls and an old well which before the greater part of Tappington Manor-house was destroyed stood in a quadrangle formed by the great range of buildings. Within the farmhouse there remains much that is quaint and interesting. The chief feature is a grand oak staircase of Elizabethan or Jacobean period, with the merchant’s mark of that “Thomas Marsh of Marston,” familiar to readers of that fine legend The Leech of Folkestone, carved on the newel. On the whitewashed walls, crossed here and there by beams of black oak, hang portraits of half-real, half-legendary Ingoldsbys, and on the staircase landing, outside the bedroom of the “bad Sir Giles,” are still shown bloodstains, relics of an extraordinary fratricide that was committed here while the war between Charles and the Parliament was raging.
TAPPINGTON
It is quite remarkable that while Barham clothed Tappington with many a picturesque legend and detail of his own invention, he never alluded to the genuine tragedy. The secret staircase, the “bad Sir Giles,” “Mrs. Botherby,” and many another picturesque but fictitious character or incident are introduced, and perhaps the visitor may feel somewhat disappointed at not finding the turrets, the hall, or the moat described so fully in the Legends; but the story of the fratricide is genuine enough for the most sober and conscientious historian. It seems that when all England was divided between the partisans of Charles and his Parliament, Tappington Manor-house was inhabited by two brothers, descendants of the Thomas Marsh whose mark is on the staircase. They had taken different sides in the great struggle then going on, and had quarrelled so bitterly that they never spoke to one another, and actually lived in different parts of the house; only using this staircase between them as they retired along it at night to their several apartments. One night they met on top of the stairs. No one knew what passed between them, whether black looks or bitter words were used; but as the Cavalier passed, his Puritan brother drew a dagger and stabbed him in the back. He fell and died on the spot, and the blood-stains are there to this day.