Haigh was born 7 August 1819 at Brinscall Hall in the village of Brinscall in Lancashire, but his family came from Huddersfield and he grew up in Yorkshire, so he considered himself a Yorkshireman. His father died when he was still a child, and his mother when he was sixteen, leaving him the eldest of three orphan brothers, who shared a large inheritance.
Haigh initially went into business in Leeds, but soon turned to the church, and trained to become an Anglican priest at Street Saviour"s church in On 8 April 1848 he was ordained as a priest at the seminary of Street Mary"s College, Oscott. He used his personal fortune to build a church at Erdington, near Birmingham. The church was designed by Augustus Pugin, and cost him £15,000.
The foundation stone was laid on the feast of Street Augustine (26 May 1848), and was consecrated by Bishop Ullathorne on 11 June 1850.
He lived at Erdington, as a priest, where he shared his house with about a dozen orphans. He retired in 1876, suffering from poor health and bronchitis, and went to live at Street Mary"s College, Oscott, where he died on 10 May 1879 after a short illness.
Although Haigh did not have any formal academic training, he dedicated himself to the study of Anglo-Saxon history and literature, and wrote two influential works on Anglo-Saxon history, The Anglo-Saxon Sagas and The Conquest of Britain by the Saxons, both published in He also wrote several monographs on Anglo-Saxon Numismatics, and a number of studies of Anglo-Saxon runic inscriptions. However, his transcriptions and interpretations of runic monuments have been criticized by Raymond Page as "often erratic, showing an eagerness to find runes where none exist".
He also studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and Assyrian Cuneiform inscriptions, contributing several articles to Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde.
