356 In Memoriam John Edward iperk P.S8.A. 
than the talent—for it was nothing less—with which he presented 
the matured results of his investigations in a form acceptable not 
merely to the antiquary but to the general public. 
He was not a Wiltshireman by birth, having been born at Don- 
caster in 1805. He was educated at Charterhouse and Brasenose 
College, Oxford, where he took his degree—second class in Jit. 
Hum.—in 1827; and his first curacy was that of Farleigh 
Hungerford, to which he was ordained in 1834, 
In 1845, however, he became—to the great advantage of our 
county—a Wiltshireman by residence, being presented by the late 
Mr. Joseph Neeld to the rectory of Leigh Delamere, and in the 
following year to the vicarage of Norton, which he continued ? 
hold with Leigh Delamere until his death. 
In his earlier life he had paid much attention to the study of 
geology, and the collection of fossils which he then formed he has 
left by will to the Society’s Museum ; but in later days the absorbing 
interests of family and county history and topography occupied the 
greater part of his leisure time and thoughts. It was to these 
subjects that the best years of his life were devoted, and it was in 
these, rather than in art, natural history, or archzology strictly 
speaking, that he specially excelled. 
It is characteristic of the power, or rather, perhaps, of the instinct 
which he possessed of completely identifying himself with the 
genius loci of the locality on which his attention happened to be 
fixed for the time that the years of his residence at Farleigh 
Hungerford were marked by what he himself spoke of as his 
“Hungerford mania”—a mania which bore fruit in a series of 
portly folio volumes of MSS., containing an enormous mass of 
information on the fortunes of that once widespread and important 
family, and on the historical events with which the various members 
of it were connected,— information which it is much to be regretted 
has never been given to the world. 
With this faculty of concentrating his powers on the history of 
his “environment ” it is not to be wondered at that having settled 
down at Leigh Delamere he should have at once set to work at the 
task of collecting materials for the elucidation of the past history 
