The Ridleigh Family

The Ridleigh Family is only mentioned as being the founders of Ridleybank, and no documents during recorded history of England make any mention of them. This knowledge was reputedly found in arcane tomes in the Ridleybank Historical Society's archives, organized by a Sir Michael Edward Barh. Miraculously, following the Outbreak, several of these ancient tomes that would otherwise have been destroyed were brought to light outside of Malton. From them several excerpts have been widely circulated.

Sir Michael Edward Barh is suspected in many circles to have been a charlatan and a death-cultist, and quite possibly a deviant in other ways. Despite the growing corpus of defamatory information, it is Barh's history and none other that remains accepted as the most true for the Ridleigh Family.

Excerpt

The first recorded inhabitants were Celts who had established a fort on the hill where Moggridge Place PD now stands. A small village, Caswill, eventually developed to the east, devoted primarily to semi-nomadic sheep-herding and simple carpentry, drawing upon the nearby (but now gone, except in name) Blomfield Grove. It is not known how long these simple folk existed in idyllic peace here, but what is known is when it ended. In 43AD, the Roman emperor Claudius invaded Britannia, and in the second year of the campaign, Vespasian's 2nd Legion tore through the area like an axe. The people of Caswill rallied around their tribal chief, a great hulking brute of a man named Ridlaegh, and fought a vicious battle that stretched on for hours. Vespasian later recorded in his memoirs:

"The natives fight like no men I have ever seen. Struck repeatedly with what surely seemed fatal blows, they would rise again for another attack, covered in gore. One hundred barbarians needed to be killed one thousand times and the fighting lasted all day."

Despite their endurance, the Caswills were no match for the better-trained and better-equipped Romans. Ridlaegh was captured as the fighting finally wound down; when his war club was finally taken from his hand, the legionnaires could not find a single unbroken bone in his body. He was crucified in the center of the fort, which was then burned around him as the rest of the townspeople were put to the sword.

With his dying words, Ridlaegh cursed the site of the massacre, swearing that no living soul would ever again know peace here, and indeed, several subsequent attempts by the Romans to establish colonies failed, generally for reasons of disease. Eventually, the Romans simply stopped trying, and for many centuries the land remained unused and unwanted.

Rumours

It is rumoured that Papa Petrosjko is a long lost descendent of this family.