Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/345

  subsistence and enabled him to give his children a liberal education. Richard, born in 1636, was entered as a student at the English college, Douay, 24 March 1652. On returning to this country he began his legal education at Gray's Inn in 1663. In 1686 he was selected by King James II to be one of his counsel, and was knighted. On 28 April 1687 he was made a serjeant-at-law, and then appointed to fill the place of a puisne judge in the King's Bench, vacated by the discharge of Mr. Justice Wythens. The appointment was very unpopular in consequence of Allibond being a catholic, and Lord Macaulay asserts that he was even more ignorant of the law than Sir Robert Wright, who had been appointed lord chief justice of England. At the famous trial of the seven bishops in Trinity term, 1688, Sir Richard Allibond laid down the most arbitrary doctrines, and exerted himself to the utmost to procure their conviction. Lord Macaulay says ‘he showed such gross ignorance of law and history as brought on him the contempt of all who heard him.’ On going the home circuit in July, immediately after the trial, he had the indecency, in his charge to the Croydon jury, to speak against the verdict of acquittal in the case of the bishops, and to stigmatise their petition to the king as a libel that tended to sedition. His death, which occurred in the following month (22 Aug. 1688) at his house in Brownlow Street, Holborn, saved him from the attainder with which he would probably have been visited if he had lived till after the revolution. He was buried on 4 Sept. near the grave of his mother at Dagenham in Essex, where a sumptuous monument was erected to his memory. His wife was Barbara Blakiston, of the family of Sir Francis Blakiston of Gibside, Durham, baronet.



ALLIES, JABEZ (1787–1856), antiquary, and one of the earliest writers on folk-lore, the second son of Mr. William Allies, was born at Lulsley, Worcestershire, 22 Oct. 1787, where his family had resided for generations. In early youth he was deeply impressed by the lingering relics of Roman and Saxon days and by the pastoral life that characterised his native place. He served a clerkship in London, and practiced there for some years as a solicitor. Numerous papers of his were read to the Society of Antiquaries, of which he was elected a fellow about 1840, and at the meetings of the Archæological Institute. He showed there much aptness for antiquarian discovery, and threw light upon vestiges of Roman occupation in his native county which Nash and other historians had regarded as unidentified. Marrying Catherine, daughter of William Hartshorne, Esq., of Clipstone, Northamptonshire, by whom he had an only child, William Hartshorne (who succeeded him), he quitted London, and resided some years at Worcester, at Catherine Villa, in the Lower Wick, taking part in all reunions and movements connected with Worcestershire and its history. Allies wrote the following works: 
 * 1) ‘Observations on Certain Curious Indentations in the Old Red Sandstone of Worcestershire and Herefordshire considered as the Tracks of Antediluvian Animals,’ 1835.
 * 2) ‘On the Causes of Planetary Motion,’ with a diagram, 1838, in which he put forward a simple theory, that the sun's rotation on its own axis causes an excitement of the caloric or latent heat, and creating a comparative rarefaction of the atmosphere of the earth and other planets, on one side of the same makes the opposite atmosphere press forward to keep up the equilibrium; the revolution of the planets necessarily ensuing, and their orbital course being kept by the laws of attraction and repulsion in the plane of the sun's equator. As the sun acted on the planets, so they affected their satellites, and the moon, having no atmosphere, was caused to revolve once a month only.
 * 3) ‘On the Ancient British, Roman, and Saxon Antiquities of Worcestershire,’ 1840, 86 pages.
 * 4) ‘The Jovial Hunter of Bromsgrove. Horne the Hunter, and Robin Hood,’ 1845.
 * 5) ‘The Ignis Fatuus, or Will o' the Wisp and the Fairies,’ 1846. The last two little works are full of pleasant gossiping tales and notes illustrative of Shakespeare's fairy mythology and folk-lore in general. There was also published a supplement on the ‘Seven whistlers,’ which is not always found in the copies in public libraries. 6. ‘The Ancient British, Roman, and Saxon Antiquities and Folk-lore of Worcestershire,’ 2nd ed. 1852. This was an extension of the original works (4 and 5 supra), making an octavo of 500 pages. It is the most interesting work on local field-names that has yet been published. Besides papers in the ‘Archæological Journal,’ he wrote many interesting letters on his favourite subjects in the ‘Literary Gazette,’ 1845, et seq., and other magazines.