Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Barkham, John
BARKHAM or BARCHAM, JOHN, D.D. (1572?–1642), antiquary and historian, was descended from the Barchams of Brabant, and afterwards of Meerfield, Dorsetshire. Wood and other biographers affirm that he was the second son of Lawrence Barkham of Exeter, and Joan, daughter of Edward Bridgman of Exeter; but in the visitation of Essex (Harl. Soc. Publications, vol. xiii.) he is entered as the eldest son, and his mother's father is stated to be of Greenway, Devonshire. Barkham was born in the parish of St. Mary-the-Moor, Exeter, about 1572, and entering a sojourner of Exeter College in the Michaelmas term of 1587, he was in August of the following year admitted scholar of Corpus Christi College. He became B.A. in February 1590–91, M.A. in 1594, and probationer fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1596. In 1603 he took the degree of B.D., and some time after he was made chaplain to Dr. Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, an office which he also held under his successor, George Abbot. In June 1608 he was collated to the rectory of Finchley, Middlesex; in October 1610 to the prebend of Brownswold in St. Paul’s Cathedral; in March 1615 to the rectory of Packlesham, Essex; in May following to the rectory of Lackington, in the same county; and in December 1616 to the rectory and deanery of Booking, also in the same county. In 1615 he resigned the rectory of Finchley, and in 1617 that of Packlesham. He died at Booking 25 March 1642, and was buried in the chancel of the church there. Barkham had the reputation of being an accomplished linguist, an able divine, and an antiquary and historian of great erudition; but he published comparatively little, and this more lor the benefit of others than himself. Speed, the author of the ‘History of Britain,’ received from him much valuable assistance, and he also wrote for the work the ‘Life and Reign of King John,’ and the ‘Life and Reign of Henry II.’ According to Anthony it Wood he composed in his younger days a book on heraldry, which he gave to Guillim, who, ‘after adding some trivial things,’ published it in 1610, with the authors sanction, under his own name. There is, however, some reason to suppose that he gave to Guillim nothing more than notes, extensive and elaborate probably, but not in such a complete form for publication as Wood represents (see note by Bliss, Athenæ, ii. 299). In 1625 he published, with a preface, the posthumous volume of Crakanthorpe, ‘Defensio Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ contra M. Antonii de Dominis injuries.’ Barkham had made a very extensive collection of coins, which he gave to Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, who presented them to the Bodleian library. He left also a treatise on coins in manuscript, which was never published. He married Anne, daughter of Robert Rogers, of Dartford, Kent, by whom he had one son.
[Lloyd’s Memories (1677), pp. 278–81; Wood’s Athenæ Oxon. (ed. Bliss), iii. 35–7; Fuller’s Worthies, ed. 1662, i. 276; Biographia Britannica, ed. Kippis, i. 602–3; Prince’s Worthies of Devon, 101–4; Chalmers’s Biog. Dict. iii. 476–8.]