In the spring of 1812 Robert Bloomfield and his family left London and rented a house in the Bedfordshire town of Shefford, opposite the Green Man in Bedford Street.[i] We currently know little of Bloomfield’s final eleven years there. Although initially enthusiastic about the move to Shefford, by the 1820s he appears to have become disenchanted. In a letter to Thomas John Lloyd Baker, the poet refers to Shefford as ‘this vile little town’.[ii] This note first discusses a previously unrecorded ‘anecdote’ of Bloomfield’s encounter with a member of the local landowning aristocracy which may have soured even the first years of the poet’s residence in Bedfordshire. The note concludes with a discussion of a previously unrecorded epigram by Bloomfield written to mark the occasion.

Although Bloomfield rarely refers to fish and never to the sport of fishing in his published poetry,[iii] his letters reveal that the poet was a keen angler. Writing to his daughter Hannah in 1811, Bloomfield recalls that over thirty years earlier, as a boy growing up in the North Suffolk villages of Honington and Sapiston, he had ‘caught, with my bare hands, fish that would rival a mackerel, and caught gudgeons with a crooked pin’ in the Blackbourne, the brook running between the two villages.[iv] In September 1804 while staying in Northamptonshire with patrons Thomas Grant and Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton, Bloomfield wrote to his wife Mary that he had ‘caught ten pounds of perch with a rod and line on Saturday last, we had them for dinner that day, and on Sunday.’[v] By mid-1806 Bloomfield appears to have already visited Shefford and fished in the river and canal nearby. In a letter to his friend Thomas Inskip, a Shefford resident, Bloomfield asks Inskip to ‘give my respects to your friends upon the Ivel’, an allusion to the river Ivel, a major tributary of the Ouse which ran through the north-western outskirts of Shefford, not far from the poet’s future home in Bedford Street.[vi] In June 1810, in the company of Shefford friends, Bloomfield fished rivers on the Bedfordshire estates of his patrons Sir George Osborne and Samuel Whitbread.[vii] However, although the poet’s subsequent correspondence includes a reference (written by Hannah) to his sons Charles and Robert fishing near Shefford in July 1819, no references to Bloomfield angling have been traced in his surviving correspondence after June 1810.[viii]

In an article published in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction on Saturday 14 August 1824, almost a year after Bloomfield’s death, a correspondent, presumably a resident of Shefford and almost certainly a friend of Bloomfield, discussed the poet’s encounter with a local landowner while fishing at Shefford.[ix]

ORIGINAL ANECDOTE OF BLOOMFIELD

About the second year of Bloomfield’s residence in Shefford in Bedfordshire, he was one day (as is the unrestricted custom or every boy in the town) angling in the river Ivel, when he perceived in the road at a furlong’s distance, two persons on horseback, one of whom came galloping down the field to him, and with all the insolence of a pampered menial, inquired, ‘Do you know that you are trespassing? this river belongs to Lord On-l-y, and he has sent me to order you off.’ The poet immediately began packing up his tackle, but before he could finish, down comes his lordship himself, and inquiring the poet’s name, repeats the message in propria persona; the poet hastened his departure, and never again, although very fond of angling, trespassed by dipping a hair in that river. Bloomfield’s feelings, at all times of the most sensitive quality, were much affected by the rebuke of this Boeotian lord; he went home and wrote him an apology for standing on a common and angling in a paltry stream which the inhabitants of Shefford have been from time immemorial accustomed to fish in with impunity; with this apology the matter ended. The whole business was duly appreciated by the poet’s neighbours, and the following epigram, written on the occasion, may perhaps serve to perpetuate it:

           EPIGRAM

           THE POET ANGLING

As Giles stood patient, angling by a stream,

Lo! a gaunt presence the meek poet aw’d!

The better fish wouldn’t bite, roach, dace, and bream,

Gudgeons were shy, – he only caught a lord!![x]

The anonymous correspondents reference to ‘About the second year of Bloomfield’s residence in Shefford suggests this incident occurred sometime between April 1813 and April 1814. ‘Lord On-l-y’ can be identified as Robert Henley Ongley, Lord Ongley, second Baron Ongley of Old Warden Park, near Shefford.[xi] The encounter between Ongley and Bloomfield, apparently on or near the grounds of Old Warden Park, can have occurred little later than the ‘second year of Bloomfield’s residence in Shefford’ because Lord Ongley died aged 42 on 20 August 1814, and was succeeded by the eleven year old Robert Henley-Ongley, his eldest son.’[xii] Bloomfield may have been an unwitting victim of Lord Ongley’s consolidation of his estate at Old Warden. According to the Bedfordshire Archives and Records Service, Ongley ‘seems to have begun a policy of consolidating the family estates in Bedfordshire […] At the inclosure of Southill in 1800 he exchanged much of his property there with Samuel Whitbread to make his estates more compact around Old Warden Park and he also bought up a number of small neighbouring estates’.[xiii]  Bloomfield’s letter containing his ‘apology’ to Ongley is untraced. However, although the epigram is not explicitly ascribed to Bloomfield, ‘The Poet Angling’ was in all probability written by the poet: its wit and vocabulary suggest Bloomfield’s authorship.[xiv] The author of the ‘Original Anecdote’ was perhaps reluctant to directly ascribe an acerbic attack on a member of the aristocracy, subsequently deceased, to the ‘meek poet’, and author of The Farmer’s Boy. ‘The Poet Angling’, closely resembles other epigrams by Bloomfield, such as ‘On Hearing of the Translation of Part of the Farmer’s Boy into Latin’ composed in early 1801 and ‘Wine, Beauty, Smiles and Social Mirth’ posthumously published in Remains of Robert Bloomfield (1824).[xv] ‘Giles’ is of course the name of the central figure of The Farmer’s Boy. As in ‘On Hearing of the Translation of Part of the Farmer’s Boy into Latin’ Bloomfield often referred to The Farmer’s Boy itself by the name of ‘Giles.[xvi]  However, elsewhere in his poetry and correspondence Bloomfield also used the name when referring to the writer of The Farmer’s Boy, as does the writer of ‘The Poet Angling’.[xvii]

Bloomfield’s epigram features some instances of veiled, but barbed humour. In the Anecdote the author refers to ‘Lord On-I-y’. One might have expected the author to have written ‘Lord O—-y’. However, by writing ‘On-I-y’ the author of the anecdote elaborates a play on words, drawing attention to the last words of the epigram ‘he only caught a lord’ and a possible pun on the name Ongley. Bloomfield’s reference to ‘Gudgeons were shy’ in the last line of the epigram is also significant. According to the Sporting Magazine, gudgeon were the easiest fish for anglers to catch, being a fish that ‘bites very eagerly’.[xviii] The anonymous author cites a couplet of a song from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera: ‘What gudgeons are we men,/ Every woman’s easy prey.’ Bloomfield’s reference to ‘shy’ gudgeon would have struck early nineteenth-century readers as an oxymoron. Bloomfield, unable to attract such easy prey as ‘gudgeon’, in this period a word synonymous with fool, can only catch an even more gullible ‘fish’: a ‘Boeotian’, inconsequential aristocrat intent on apprehending trespassers.[xix]

Bloomfield in his ‘apology’ to Lord Ongley is also uncharacteristically sharp. Since the publication of The Farmer’s Boy in 1800, Bloomfield had been used to kinder treatment from both gentry and aristocracy.[xx] That Ongley himself should order the poet off his land even after discovering Bloomfield’s identity seems telling, bearing in mind Bloomfield’s fame and acquaintance with Ongley’s genteel neighbours Osborne and Whitbread. The poet’s reference in his ‘apology’ to Ongley, to his ‘standing on a common and angling in a paltry stream which the inhabitants of Shefford have been from time immemorial accustomed to fish in with impunity’ may suggest Ongley’s recent enclosure of a stretch of river that local inhabitants had hitherto been permitted to fish freely. The reference may also suggest a recollection of Bloomfield and his brothers’ childhood experiences of walking in the pastures belonging to the Duke of Grafton around Honington.[xxi] Bloomfield wrote to his brother George in August 1801, ‘on Sunday last, some verses of Nat’s about my parents and the enclosing of Honington Green, had melted me into salt water, and opened every latent weakness of my heart to a very uncommon degree.’[xxii] In his poem ‘Elegy on the Enclosure of Honington Green’ Nathaniel Bloomfield recalls that during Nathaniel, George and Robert Bloomfield’s childhood in North Suffolk during the 1760s and 1770s:

The Green was our pride through the year,

For in Spring, when the wild flow’rets blew,

Tho’ many rich pastures were near,

Where Cowslips and Daffodils grew;

And tho’ such gallant flow’rs were our choice,

It was bliss interrupted by Fear –

The Fear of their Owner’s dread voice,

Harshly bawling ‘You’ve no business here.’[xxiii]

However, the primary focus of Nathaniel Bloomfield’s ‘Elegy’ is the later enclosure about 1801 of Honington Green, a small piece of common land on the margin of which Bloomfield and his brothers had been born and bred. Of the Duke of Grafton’s enclosure of the Green, Nathaniel Bloomfield observes:

Not Avarice itself could be mov’d

By desire of a morsel so small:

It could not be lucre he lov’d;

But to rob the poor folk of their all.[xxiv]

Robert Bloomfield expressed similar sentiments on the enclosure at Honington: ‘my native Green, with its daisies, I never shall [see again]. To take such a small bit of ground and divide it into three, was hardly worth while. What man, with a sack of wheat on his back, would stoop for one grain?’[xxv]

Bloomfield’s encounter with Lord Ongley may also suggest a context, or catalyst for Bloomfield’s mock-heraldic bookplate, engraved for Bloomfield by W Jackson of Gutter Lane, Cheapside, in 1813.

According to W J Hardy, the design features:

A farmer on cow-back [who] does duty as a crest, two ploughmen act as supporters, whilst the bearings on the shield represent every variety of agricultural implement, every occupant of a farmyard ordinarily met with, and the farmer’s boy himself, in an attitude suggestive of his having done full justice to the fare provided at a harvest-home not conducted on abstinence principles. The quarterings include three open volumes, and across the pages of one is printed ‘The Farmer’s Boy’.[xxvi]

More recently Bruce Graver has suggested the engraving reflects Bloomfield during his residence at Shefford as ‘a little feisty, subversive, more than a little jaded, still clinging to “the honest pride of having proved […] that a poor man may still possess qualities which [the learned and wealthy] are forced to admire.”‘[xxvii] But Bloomfield’s design also closely parodies the coats of arms of aristocratic families such as Lord Ongley’s.[xxviii]

Ongley Crest. From Edmund Lodge, The Peerage of the British Empire (London: Sanders & Ottley, 1839), 378.

Bloomfield’s motto hangs on a scroll or cloth below his ‘coat of arms’, like Ongley’s Latin motto, ‘Mihi cura futuri’ (‘my care is for the future’) [illus. 2]. But the motto itself (in plain English), ‘FRIENDS IN NEED AND A FIG FOR THE HERALDS’ seems to privilege the labouring classes (‘FRIENDS IN NEED’) while deriding the pretensions of the nobility. Similarly, in ‘The Poet Angling’ ‘roach, dace […] bream, [and even] Gudgeons’ are valued more highly than ‘a Lord’. Bloomfield’s ‘coat of arms’ includes supporters, in the early nineteenth century, still an exclusive privilege of the nobility. However, instead of Ongley’s `[t]wo griffins argent, collared […] chained’[xxix] and rampant, Bloomfield’s coat of arms features ploughboys, affronté and passant, as supporters. While the Ongley crest above the escutcheon features a crown and above ‘On a wreath; a phoenix in flames, holding in his beak a fireball’,[xxx] Bloomfield’s crest is a ploughboy riding a cow. Ongley’s escutcheon merely features four fields, alternating simple geometric designs. Bloomfield’s bookplate is far more complex. While the left field of Bloomfield’s escutcheon incorporates eleven small designs the majority of which portray aspects of Bloomfield’s life as farmer’s boy, shoemaker, Aeolian harp-maker and poet,[xxxi] the design on the right field of the escutcheon appears to represent an agitated Bloomfield. While Hardy interprets the image as portraying a drunken Bloomfield at a rural harvest home, Graver suggests the design reveals Bloomfield ‘shaking his noisemakers at [the opposite field] as if it were a flock of jackdaws.’[xxxii] However, Sam Ward correctly observes that ‘[t]he capering figure […] wears a cobbler’s leather apron and holds a cobbler’s shoe strap and hammer.’[xxxiii] Indeed, the figure’s stockings, apron and small hammer suggest that he is an artisan, perhaps a shoemaker, Bloomfield’s profession since the 1780s. In the light of the poet’s encounter with Lord Ongley it could be argued that Bloomfield’s bookplate comprises a forceful parody of aristocratic heraldry. In profile with right leg and both arms raised the figure appears to be imitating the martial heraldic symbol of a lion rampant. This 1813 representation of Bloomfield, an increasingly impoverished and marginalized shoemaker, poet and Aeolian harp-maker, as ‘artisan-poet rampant’ framed by a mass of heraldic quarterings representing Bloomfield’s range of achievements as farmer’s boy, craftsman and poet may be interpreted, like the epigram and the ‘apology’, as a rejoinder to Lord Ongley’s pretensions, minimal accomplishments and ‘violat[ion of] the feelings of the poor.’[xxxiv]

I am grateful to Keri Davies for reading and commenting extensively on an earlier draft of this note

Angus Whitehead is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Singapore.

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[i] See William Wickett and Nicholas Duval, The Farmer’s Boy; The Story of a Suffolk Poet (Lavenham, Suffolk, 1971), 53; Robert Bloomfield, Letter to Hannah Bloomfield, 9-10 November 1815 (Letter 297), Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt (eds.), The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and His Circle, Romantic Circles Electronic Edition (all references to Bloomfield’s letters hereafter are from this electronic edition).

[ii] Robert Bloomfield, letter to John Thomas Lloyd Baker, 25 May 1821 (Letter 351).

[iii] Bloomfield’s sole reference to fish in his published poetry appears in Book I of The Banks of Wye where he describes how while he and his hosts dined on a boat on the Wye near Ravencliff and Coldwell Spring, ‘fish [.] watch’d beneath/ For falling crumbs’, The Banks of Wye (London, 1813), 18.

[iv] Robert Bloomfield, letter to Hannah Bloomfield, 28 August 1811 (Letter 268).

[v] Robert Bloomfield, letter to Mary Ann Bloomfield, 4 September 1804. See also Robert Bloomfield. letter to Mary Ann Bloomfield, 9 September 1804 (Letters 138-9). Bloomfield also describes himself as ‘fisher-general to the family” (see Robert Bloomfield, letter to Mary Ann Bloomfield, 15-16 September 1804 Letter 140).

[vi] Robert Bloomfield, letter to Thomas Inskip, 27 June 1806 (Letter 189), Letters. According to Samuel Taylor, writing in 1800, the Ivel contained ‘pike, perch, fine eels, crawfish, and abundance of common fish’ (Samuel Taylor, Angling in All its Branches (London, 1800), 2). Bloomfield, writing to Hannah from Shefford in late 1815, jokes ‘Such is the changing state of things here, that I expect in my next to have to say somthing (sic) like the following, “The Ivel has taken into its head to turn about and run towards Clophill, it would do your heart good to see how it contrives to get up the waterfall at Chicksands.”’ (9-10 November 1815; Letter 297). Four years earlier, in a letter to his friend Mary Lloyd Baker discussing his proposed move to Shefford, Bloomfield mentions the advantage of ‘the free ramble by a stream full of fish’ (letter to Mary Lloyd Baker, 14-15 August 1811 (Letter 265). Bloomfield is almost certainly referring to the Ivel.

[vii] Robert Bloomfield, letter to Mary Ann Bloomfield. 25 June 1810 (Letter 251).

[viii] Robert and Hannah Bloomfield, letter to James Bloomfield (nephew], 27 July 1819 (Letter 338).

[ix] Perhaps the author was Thomas Inskip. Inskip later published anecdotes in an article entitled ‘Bloomfield and his Latter Days’, The Odd Fellows’ Quarterly Magazine, vol. Ix, NS (July, 1847), 346-49. Bloomfield had known Inskip since at least 1806. See Robert Bloomfield to Thomas Inskip. 27 June 1806 (Letter 189).

[x] ‘Original Anecdote of Bloomfield’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, Saturday 14 August 1824, 118-9.

[xi] Ongley’s title was a recent creation in the Irish peerage (July 1776) (see Edmund Lodge, The Genealogy of the Existing British Peerage, 6^th edn (London, 1838, 372). Roger Fulford hasdescribed Robert Henry Ongley as ‘a rough Bedfordshire peer’ (Roger Fulford, Samuel Whitbread, 1764-1875: A Study in Opposition (London, 1967), 336). A letter from Ongley to Samuel Whitbreadreveals his attitude to the plebeian inhabitants surrounding Old Warden Park and perhaps Ongley’sfailing health. ‘I have been confined almost entirely to my bed since Thursday last … [Old] Warden is full of vagabonds’: 18 December 1811 Whitbread Correspondence, Bedfordshire County Record Office, W 1/333, cited Alan F. Cricket, ed., Samuel Whitbread’s Notebooks, 1810-11, 1813-14 (Bedford, 1971), 80.

[xii] See Gentleman’s Magazine September 1814, 294. Ongley’s father, Robert, Lord Ongley, had been an MP for Bedfordshire. Anne Fitzpatrick, estranged wife of Bloomfield’s early patron Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton, appears to have assisted the second Lord Ongley win his Bedfordshire seat. See Matthew Kilburn, ‘Anne Fitzpatrick’, ODNB.

[xiii] ‘The Ongley Family’ Bedfordshire Archives and Records Service http://www.bedfordshire.gov.uk/CommunitvAndLiving/ArchivesAndR ecordOffice/CommunityArchiv es/OldWarden/TheOngleyFamily.aspx accessed 2 June 2009.

[xiv] Note for example the Epigram’s inclusion of ‘gudgeon’, a word rarely used in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century poetry. Before 1800 Amos Cottle wrote ‘The Sparrow and the Gudgeon, a Fable’, but the poem was not published until 1837 (see Joseph Cottle, Early Recollections (London, 1837) Vol. I, 121-34. However, the word appears regularly in seventeenth-century poetry. See for example ‘[…] Flownder, Pout, the Wraith, the Gudgeon, and the boneless Seal’, Nicholas Billingsley, ‘The World’s Infancy’ (London, 1658). ‘Gudgeon’ appears in Bloomfield’s letters and was clearly part of the poet’s vocabulary (see Letter 268).

[xv] See Robert Bloomfield, Letter to George Bloomfield, 24 February 1801, Letter 50. ‘On Hearing of the Translation of Part of the Farmer’s Boy into Latin’ was published in The Monthly Mirror, 11 (1801), 271 as ‘Impromptu. On hearing that part of “The Farmer’s Boy” was translatedinto Latin’. See also Robert Bloomfield, Rural Tales (London, 1802), 105. ‘Wine, Beauty, Smilesand Social Mirth’ was published in The Remains of Robert Bloomfield (London: Baldwin, Craddock,and Joy, 1824), Vol 1, 40.

[xvi] See Letters 16, 49, 63, 64, 70, 286.

[xvii] See the MS poem included in a letter to Mrs Palmer, 7 December 1802 (Letter 101), Robert Bloomfield to George Bloomfield (Letter 115) and ‘THE INVITATION’ at the beginning of May Day with the Muses. See John Goodridge and John Lucas, Robert Bloomfield; Selected Poems (Nottingham, 2007), 140. Bloomfield’s friend and fellow poet William Holloway also addressed Bloomfield as ‘Giles” in ‘An Epistle from Roger Coulter of Dorsetshire to his Friend Giles Bloomfield the Suffolk Farmer’s Boy’ (Monthly Mirror, May 1802, 350).

[xviii] ‘To Angle for Gudgeon’ Sporting Magazine; or Monthly Calendar, October 1793, 39.

[xix] See Thomas Holcroft, Anna St Ives: a Novel (London, 1794), Vol VII, 97.

[xx] Bloomfield received support and patronage from, amongst others, the third and fourth Dukes of Grafton, the Earl of Buchan, Sir Charles Bunbury and Samuel Whitbread.

[xxi] In a letter to fellow poet William Holloway, Bloomfield recalled the ‘pleasure I have so often found in roaming about the flower-deck’t meadows at Honington with my Brothers.’ Robert Bloomfield, letter to William Holloway, before 11 June 1809 (Letter 238).

[xxii] Robert Bloomfield, letter to George Bloomfield, 27 August 1801 (Letter 55), See also Robert Bloomfield, letter to George Bloomfield , 1 November 1802 (Letter 98).

[xxiii] Nathaniel Bloomfield, An Essay on War (London, 1803), 36.

[xxiv] Ibid, 37.

[xxv] Joseph Weston, ed., Remains of Robert Bloomfield (London, 1824), II, 53. Here Bloomfield appears to recall specific lines of ‘Elegy on the Enclosure of Honington Green’. Compare stanzas 15, 18.

[xxvi] W J Hardy, Bookplates (London, 1893), 164-5.

[xxvii] Bruce Graver, ‘Illustrating The Farmer’s Boy‘, Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan, eds., Robert Bloomfield; Lyric, Class and the Romantic Canon (Lewisburg, 2006), 66. Graver cites Bloomfield’s letter to Elizabeth Glover, 1 November 1801 (Letter 66). Bloomfield’s bookplate is reproduced figure 16 (ibid.).

[xxviii] See the Ongley crest reproduced in Edmund Lodge, The Genealogy of the Existing British Peerage (London, 1838), 372. Bloomfield’s first encounter with heraldry may have been the coats of arms of George I and the funeral monument to seventeenth-century landowner John Ball in the chancel of St Andrew’s church, Sapiston (see Roy Tricker, St Andrew’s Church, Sapiston, Suffolk (London, 2005), 7).

[xxix] Hugh Clark, The Peerage of the Nobility of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1779), 216.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] The three top left designs in the left field represent two sets of crossed shoemaker’s tools intersected by a horizontal bar featuring a work bench; the top right designs represent pigs and a sheaf of corn divided by a diagonal bar, represented as a ploughed field. The bottom right hand design. represents three open books, one of which is engraved ‘Farmers Boy’, below an Aeolian harp and a sheet of music; the bottom left hand design features a bird (a goose?), a hay wagon and a plough horse.

[xxxii] Graver, 66.

[xxxiii] Sam Ward, ‘Robert Bloomfield’s Bookplate’, The Robert Bloomfield Society Newsletter, No. 1, June 2001, 8.

[xxxiv] Robert Bloomfield, The Farmer’s Boy (London, 1800), 46. While Ongley’s father and grandfather’s achievements are listed, genealogists have little to say concerning the life of the second Lord Ongley. See for example Lodge, 372.