Even the Papist Monks,[15] whom—as a marrid Protestant parson and vicar—he hates, he praises for their buildings. And when he does abuse or chaff heartily any absurdity, like Englishmen’s dress,—“except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see anie so disguised as are my countrie men of England,”—we may be sure it was deservd; Shakspere does it too[16] (Merchant, I. ii. 80; Much Ado, III. ii. 36, etc.).
Harrison’s book will inform and amuse the reader.
Besides writing the Descriptions of Britaine and England for Holinshed’s Chronicle, William Harrison also translated for it, from Scotch into English, Archdeacon Bellenden’s version of Hector Boetius’s Latin Description of Scotland. This work took him only “three or foure daies” he says: “Indeed, the trauell taken heerein is not great, bicause I tie not my translation vnto his [Bellenden’s] letter.” Harrison dedicated this translation—the Description of Scotland—to the Maister Sackford, or Secford, whose “cards,” charts, or Maps, had been of such use to him in his account of the English rivers in his Description of Britaine.
Happily for us, William Harrison was not one of those dignified prigs who are afraid of writing about themselves in their books. He tells us that he was born in London[17]—“I will remember the fame of London my natiue citie.”[18] Also that he was first at St. Paul’s school, and then at “Westminster[19] school (in which I was sometime an vnprofitable Grammarian vnder the reuerend father, master Nowell, now deane of Paules).” And again of the Deans of the see of London (or St. Paul’s), “I will deliuer in like sort the names of the deanes, vntill I come to the time of mine old master now liuing in this present yeare 1586, who is none of the least ornaments[20] that haue beene in that seat.” He was at both universities.[21] When speaking of Cambridge and Oxford, he says—
“In all other things there is so great equalitie betweene these two vniuersities, as no man can imagin how to set downe any greater; so that they seeme to be the bodie of one well ordered common wealth, onlie diuided by distance of place, and not in freendlie consent and orders. In speaking therefore of the one, I can not but describe the other; and in commendation of the first, I can not but extoll the latter; and so much the rather, for that they are both so deere vnto me, as that I can not readilie tell vnto whether of them I owe the most good will. Would to God my knowledge were such, as that neither of them might haue cause to be ashamed of their pupill; or my power so great, that I might woorthilie requite them both for those manifold kindnesses that I haue receiued of them.”[22]
He must have graduated at Oxford first, for in 1569 he proceeded to the degree of Bachelor of Divinity at Cambridge under a grace[23] which calls him M.A. of Oxford of seven years’ standing.[25] He was before this, Household Chaplain to Sir Wm. Brooke, Lord Cobham, to whom he dedicated, as we have seen, his Description of England, and who gave him the Rectory of Radwinter in Essex,[26] to which he was inducted on February 16, 1558-9, and which he held till his death. On January 28, 1570-1, he became a pluralist,[27] and obtaind the vicarage of Wimbish in Essex,[28] but resignd it in 1581, his successor being appointed on the 16th of November in that year. Between 1559 and 1571 he must have marrid Marion Isebrande, “daughter to William Isebrande and Ann his wife, sometyme of Anderne, neere vnto Guisnes in Picardie, and whome” (he says in his Will, referring no doubt to the sometime suppos’d unlawfulness of priests’ marriages) “by the lawes of god I take and repute in all respectes for my true and lawfull wife.” By her he left issue,[29] one son Edmund, and two daughters,—one, Anne, unmarried, and another the wife of Robert Baker. He tells us how his wife and her maid brewd him 200 gallons of beer for 20s., as he was “scarse a good malster” himself, and a poor man on £40 a year (Goldsmith’s sum too). And no doubt his kindly “Eve will be Eve, tho’ Adam would saie naie,” tho’ said of widows, shewd that he understood the sex, was “to their faults a little blind, and to their virtues very kind”—or however the old saw runs. At Radwinter he must have workt away at his Chronologie, collected his Roman coins, got savage with the rascally Essex lawyers, attended to his garden:
“For mine owne part, good reader, let me boast a little of my garden, which is but small, and the whole Area thereof little aboue 300 foot of ground, and yet, such hath beene my good lucke in purchase of the varietie of simples, that notwithstanding my small abilitie, there are verie neere three hundred[30] of one sort and other conteined therein, no one of them being common or vsuallie to bee had,”
kept his eyes open to everything going on round him, and lookt after his parishioners, when he wasn’t writing his Description of England in London, or visiting at Lord Cobham’s house in Kent.
On April 23, 1586, William Harrison was appointed Canon of Windsor, and was installd the day after. The Dean has kindly sent me the following extract from the Chapter Book, St. George’s Chapel, Windsor—