THE BARHAM FAMILY 233 



of many feet are as real to the imaginative traveller, 

 if not of a greater reality, than the moaning telegraph 

 that runs on countless poles in a diminishing procession 

 beside the road as far as eye can reach. 



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. 



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 



