As the Nine Bridges Benefice eagerly awaits the induction of Reverend Keir Dow on 17 September in St Peter’s church, Maxey, I find myself reminiscing about Tribland’s past incumbents. Some are held fondly in living memory, like Reverend Mark-Aaron Tisdale and the late Dr Hilary Geisow, Reverend Dave Maylor of Bainton, Helpston and Ufford and Reverend Canon William Burke (who brought Time Team and Access Cambridge Archaeology to Castor, leading to two ‘Digs’ at Peakirk).
Other renowned people who took holy orders are firmly consigned to history. Springing to mind are the saintly seventh-century princesses, Kyneburgha and Kyneswitha, who exchanged their crowns for a convent at Castor; St Pega (died 719), who gave her name to Peakirk; William Morton, the fifteenth-century Peterborough Abbey official who kept accounts of his transactions relating to his monastic manors of Maxey and Sutton; and Reverend Kingsley, Rector of St John the Baptist’s, Barnack (1824-32), father and namesake of Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies.
Herbert Charles Marsh: Unholy Orders
Of course, there were men of the cloth who led less than virtuous lives. Reverend Kingsley was followed at Barnack by the disreputable Reverend Canon Herbert Charles Marsh MA (1832-44), whose father, Herbert Marsh, Bishop of Peterborough (1819-39), appointed him to the living. Unfortunately, by 1844, Herbert junior was being blackmailed for 10,000 francs [£400] by his French mistress, Nathalie Miard, whom (he later admitted under oath) he had met ‘a few years earlier’ in a London brothel and had been ‘keeping’ ever since. When Mademoiselle Miard, who barely spoke English, appeared at Northamptonshire Assizes, she was acquitted by a sympathetic jury, which was lustily cheered by a packed court.
Astonishingly, the Reverend Canon was not defrocked for his unseemly conduct but was obliged to leave Barnack for a parish in Cambridgeshire. He married another Frenchwoman, Sedonie de Ponsard, in Kensington, in 1848. Two years later, he was declared insane (causes open to speculation) and died on 4 September 1851, in Brompton Sanatorium, Surrey, aged 43. He was buried in Hillingdon Cemetery, Middlesex, where his headstone describes him as the ‘Son of the Lord Bishop of Peterborough, Rector of Barnack in the County of Northampton and a Canon of Peterborough Cathedral’. Thus, Herbert Marsh’s sense of entitlement even extended beyond the grave!
Marsham Argles: The Barnack Philanthropist
After a six-year interregnum, Barnack’s next incumbent, the family-orientated Reverend Canon Marsham Argles MA (1851-91), must have brought a sense of relief to his parishioners. The office was bestowed upon him by Herbert Marsh’s successor as Bishop of Peterborough, George Davys (1839-64), Marsham Argles’s father-in-law. Another blatant case of nepotism! By now St John’s was in a state of neglect. Fortunately, unlike many of his contemporary clergymen, Argles just carried out essential repairs rather than ruthlessly sweeping away the old and rebuilding anew in the trendy Victorian-Gothic style.
Nevertheless, Argles recognised the significance of St John’s Anglo-Saxon tower. He unblocked its openings and removed the thirteenth-century wall that separated it from the nave. Thus, the massive archway could be seen in all its glory. The Early-English doorway, which once led to the tower, was redeployed as an entrance to his rectory garden. (It was repositioned in School Road in 1963). During the alterations, the stone seat in a gabled recess in the western wall was revealed, together with more fragments of seating for about 40 people and the threshold of the disused south doorway.
Argles obviously intended to end his days in Barnack for he then turned his attention to the early-nineteenth-century rectory opposite the church (now known as Kingsley House). By the 1860s, it was too small to accommodate him, his wife, Margaret, and their nine children. Wealthy in his own right from estates in Cumbria, Argles financed its partial rebuilding to his own specifications, brazenly planting his family crest on either side of the front door. He also funded an extension for the local school, ultimately becoming the Chief Inspector of Schools for the Northamptonshire Education Society, and was a major benefactor to Peterborough Cathedral.
Tragically, of Marsham and Margaret’s five sons, only the eldest, George, outlived them. Henry died, aged eight, in 1858; Francis in 1871 and Marsham junior in 1883, whilst Charles was drowned when swimming in the Thames, in 1879. The grief-stricken rector transformed St John’s chancel into a memorial chapel with a sumptuous Italian mosaic reredos, depicting four angels, behind the altar. In 1873, he commissioned the great east stained-glass window, which he dedicated to his father-in-law, Bishop Davys. It is flanked by two others in the north and south walls commemorating his lost sons Henry and Francis. Two more windows in the south aisle, inserted in 1884, honoured Marsham and Charles.
Argles retired after an incumbency of 40 years in 1891, dying on 19 December 1892. He was buried with his wife and sons in the family plot to the east of the churchyard. He must have been a very hard act to follow.
Walter Debenham Sweeting: An Enquiring Mind
Thankfully, Argles’s contemporary, Reverend Canon Walter Debenham Sweeting MA (1839-1913), Rector of Maxey from 1881 until 1901, was also far too busy to interfere with the fabric of St Peter’s church. In addition to providing pastoral care for his congregation, he was headmaster of Peterborough’s King’s School, editor of the Fenland Notes & Queries journal and a prolific author, lecturer, amateur archaeologist, tenacious researcher of local history and a father of seven. In his spare time, he scoured local church archives and travelled the length and breadth of Tribland and beyond, making copious jottings and condensing some of them into his book, Historical and Architectural Notes on the Parish Churches in and around Peterborough (published in 1868).
Within its pages, we find interesting vignettes of everyday life from the 1550s onwards: In 1678, the Marholm parishioners collected £1.19s.10d [£1.95] towards the redemption of ‘English captives out of Turkish slavery’. In 1566, Robert Angell left two stooks of barley and 20 pence [10p] ‘unto the repairinge of St Pee’s image [wall painting?]’ and, in 1767, the village was plagued with moles and rats. At Castor church, as late as the 1860s, the sexes were separated during services (a relic of Puritan times), with women sitting on the left (north side) and men to the right. Sweeting also witnessed the rebuilding of Helpston tower in 1865, revealing its Anglo-Saxon foundations and describing a holy-water stoup in the porch, which now supports a bench.
Suddenly, in 1901, it was announced that Reverend Canon Sweeting was to exchange livings with Reverend Henry Selby Hele of The Holy Trinity Church, Rotherhithe. It is difficult to comprehend why, at the age of 62, Sweeting should want to uproot himself from all that he held dear. Was it that, after the death of his wife, Maria Georgianna, in November 1900, he wished to be near his youngest son, Gerald? Or were his extra-mural activities causing him to neglect his Maxey flock and he received a nudge from the bishop?
Whatever the reasons for his departure, Sweeting kept fond memories of his erstwhile parish. He died at his home, ‘Maxey’, in Wallington, Surrey, on 19 January 1913, aged 74. His legacy is his writings and his cabinet of curiosities which stands beneath St Peter’s church tower. It contains examples of the treasures that he unearthed in the churchyard, including a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon grave-slab. Some of the numerous medieval coffin lids that he found are now redeployed as coping stones for the churchyard wall.
So preoccupied were the Reverend Canons Marsh, Argles and Sweeting with secular matters it is surprising that they had any time to prepare their sermons and to preach. We may wonder how they would have coped with today’s multiple parishes under their care. At least their busy lives meant that all three incumbents left their churches alone so that we can still enjoy them as their Anglo-Saxon or medieval master masons intended. For that we must be eternally grateful …
