August 1st:

Celebrating M.R. James and the Shadows of Lammas

From the Unquiet Silence "A letter once a month, drawn from the quiet, but never still"

A companion to bl-literarymagic.com

As the calendar turns to August 1st, we find ourselves at a curious intersection of history, harvest, and haunting. It was on this date, in the year 1862, that Montague Rhodes James was born in the vicarage of Goodnestone, Kent—the original registry of 30 August listed him only as Montague James. His middle name was not added until the baptism on Sunday, 5 October: an unassuming beginning for a man whose influence on the English ghost story remains unmatched. August 1st, 2025, marks the 163rd anniversary of his birth.

But the day carries older resonances as well. In the Christian calendar, August 1st is Lammas Day—Loaf Mass Day—when the first bread baked from the new wheat crop was brought to church in thanks. In the Celtic calendar, particularly among the Irish, it is Lughnasadh, a festival dedicated to the god Lugh, marking the onset of the harvest season. While Lammas leans toward sacramental gratitude, Lughnasadh revels in communal rites—games, feasting, courting—and both are steeped in a reverence for cycles, thresholds, and transformations.

James, though no folklorist in the academic sense, was exquisitely attuned to these rhythms. His stories turn not on grand battles between good and evil, but on the subtle violations of boundary: a curtain lifted, a name spoken, a line crossed. There is in his work a constant awareness of liminal space—the narrow season between light and dark, between grain and chaff, between the remembered and the forgotten. Lammas and Lughnasadh, with their mingling of reverence and unease, might well have appealed to his narrative instincts.

He was born the youngest of four children—Sydney, Herbert (called Ber), Grace, and Monty—to Herbert James, a clergyman of Evangelical conviction, and Mary Emily James, whose firm affection helped shape Monty’s quietly affectionate disposition. His earliest years were spent at Goodnestone, where his father served as perpetual curate.

In 1865, five weeks before Monty turned three, the family relocated to Great Livermere in Suffolk. The move was prompted by his father’s appointment to the rectory of St. Peter’s, a living which offered not only a more stable income but also proximity to the broader intellectual and ecclesiastical life of the region. If Goodnestone offered a childhood cribbed within the vicarage walls, Livermere expanded the world.

The landscape of Great Livermere made a profound and permanent impression on him. Tales of spectral monks, a headless ghost rising from the mere, and an 18th-century murderer buried half beneath the churchyard wall all swirled through the village’s lore. One grim account tells of Arundell Coke, hanged for attempted murder in 1722, whose corpse, denied burial in consecrated ground, was interred by his faithful butler half under the wall of Little Livermere’s abandoned churchyard. (When bones were unearthed in 1966 beside the wall, villagers whispered it was Coke at last!) Another tale told of a Mothersole grave—empty when opened during vestry renovations—prompting whispered charges of witchcraft. And always there were the tales: a man beheaded in the bell tower, his ghost wandering with head tucked beneath his arm; the graveyard’s north side said to be reserved for the ‘ungodly,’ for it was closest to the pulpit where salvation’s instruction might reach the unsaved soul. For young Monty, who wandered the grave mounds and watched the oak branches rake the dusk, this was not just village chatter. It was foundational.

The church, the darkened lanes, the wide mere, and the whispering woods formed a living backdrop to his imagination. The rectory’s library, filled with theological texts and antiquarian volumes, became his sanctuary. It was here that he first encountered the medieval manuscripts and ecclesiastical histories that would later inform his scholarly pursuits and literary creations. The Livermere years formed the bedrock of his spiritual and imaginative compass.

At eleven, he left the familiar fogs of Suffolk for Temple Grove School, an austere institution in East Sheen, where his brilliance and reticence set him apart. He went armed not with bravado, but with memory—the sense of an English village haunted not only by spirits, but by time itself.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: How Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary almost never was

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