356 In Memoriam John Edward Jac/cson, F.S.A. 



than tbe 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 hut to the general public. 



He was not a Wiltshireman by birth, having* been born at Bon- 

 caster in 1805. He was educated at Charterhouse and Brasenose 

 College, Oxford, where he took his degree — second class in Lit. 

 Hum. — in 18£7 ; 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 to 

 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 o£ 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 archaeology 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 



