A list of his Latin tracts and sermons is given by Wood, and others, some of which were never printed, appear in Bale. Four editions of the Actes and Monuments appeared in Foxe’s lifetime. The eighth edition (1641) contains a memoir of Foxe purporting to be by his son Samuel, the MS. of which is in the British Museum (Lansdowne MS. 388). Samuel Foxe’s authorship is disputed, with much show of reason, by Dr S.R. Maitland in On the Memoirs of Foxe ascribed to his Son (1841). The best-known modern edition of the Martyrology is that (1837-1841) by the Rev. Stephen R. Cattley, with an introductory life by Canon George Townsend. The numerous inaccuracies of this life and the frequent errors of Foxe’s narrative were exposed by Dr Maitland in a series of tracts (1837-1842), collected (1841-1842) as Notes on the Contributions of the Rev. George Townsend, M.A. ... to the New Edition of Fox’s Martyrology. The criticism lavished on Cattley and Townsend’s edition led to a new one (1846-1849) under the same editorship. A new text prepared by the Rev. Josiah Pratt was issued (1870) in the “Reformation Series” of the Church Historians of England, with a revised version of Townsend’s Life and appendices giving copies of original documents. Later edition by W. Grinton Berry (1907).
Foxe’s papers are preserved in the Harleian and Lansdowne collections in the British Museum. Extracts from these were edited by J.G. Nichols for the Camden Society (1859). See also W. Winters, Biographical Notes on John Foxe (1876); James Gairdner, History of the English Church in the Sixteenth Century.
[1] Printed by Oporinus and Nicolaus Brylinger. The title is Rerum in ecclesia gestarum ... pars prima, in qua primum de rebus per Angliam et Scotiam gestis atque in primis de horrenda sub Maria nuper regina persecutione narratio continetur.
FOXGLOVE, a genus of biennial and perennial plants of the natural order Scrophulariaceae. The common or purple foxglove, D. purpurea, is common in dry hilly pastures and rocky places and by road-sides in various parts of Europe; it ranges in Great Britain from Cornwall and Kent to Orkney, but it does not occur in Shetland or in some of the eastern counties of England. It flourishes best in siliceous soils, and is not found in the Jura and Swiss Alps. The characters of the plant are as follows: stem erect, roundish, downy, leafy below, and from 18 in. to 5 ft. or more in height; leaves alternate, crenate, rugose, ovate or elliptic oblong, and of a dull green, with the under surface downy and paler than the upper; radical leaves together with their stalks often a foot in length; root of numerous, slender, whitish fibres; flowers 1¾-2½ in. long, pendulous, on one side of the stem, purplish crimson, and hairy and marked with eye-like spots within; segments of calyx ovate, acute, cleft to the base; corolla bell-shaped with a broadly two-lipped obtuse mouth, the upper lip entire or obscurely divided; stamens four, two longer than the other two (didynamous); anthers yellow and bilobed; capsule bivalved, ovate and pointed; and seeds numerous, small, oblong, pitted and of a pale brown. As Parkinson remarks of the plant, “It flowreth seldome before July, and the seed is ripe in August”; but it may occasionally be found in blossom as late as September. Many varieties of the common foxglove have been raised by cultivation, with flowers varying in colour from white to deep rose and purple; in the variety gloxinioides the flowers are almost regular, suggesting those of the cultivated gloxinia. Other species of foxglove with variously coloured flowers have been introduced into Britain from the continent of Europe. The plants may be propagated by unflowered off-sets from the roots, but being biennials are best raised from seed.
| Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), one-third nat. size. |
| 1. Corolla cut open showing the four stamens; rather more than half nat. size. 2. Unripe fruit cut lengthwise, showing the thick axial placenta bearing numerous small seeds. 3. Ripe capsule split open. |
The foxglove, probably from folks’-glove, that is fairies’ glove, is known by a great variety of popular names in Britain. In the south of Scotland it is called bloody fingers; farther north, dead-men’s-bells; and on the eastern borders, ladies’ thimbles, wild mercury and Scotch mercury. In Ireland it is generally known under the name of fairy thimble. Among its Welsh synonyms are menyg-ellyllon (elves’ gloves), menyg y llwynog (fox’s gloves), bysedd cochion (redfingers) and bysedd y cwn (dog’s fingers). In France its designations are gants de notre dame and doigts de la Vierge. The German name Fingerhut (thimble) suggested to Fuchs, in 1542, the employment of the Latin adjective digitalis as a designation for the plant. Other species of foxglove or Digitalis although found in botanical collections are not generally grown. For medicinal uses see [Digitalis].