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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Milton's incorporation as Master of Arts at Oxford is a perennial problem. Resting as it does on the word of Anthony Wood, with no corroboration from either Milton himself or any of his early biographers, it has never been satisfyingly clear. Wood's statement (Fasti Oxonienses, 1721 edition, I, 262) is curious: “1635. … This Year was incorporated Master of Arts John Milton, not that it appears so in the Register, for the Reason I have told you in the Incorporations 1629, but from his own mouth to my friend, who was well acquainted with, and had from him, and from his Relations after his death, most of this account of his life and writings following.” The note under the incorporations for 1629 (I, 247) to which Wood refers is the following: “This Year John French M.A. and Fellow of Merton College was elected public Scribe or Registrary of the University, who being a careless Man (tho' a good Scholar) and more fit for another, than that, employment, hath omitted throughout all his time the Incorporations of the Cantabrigians at the conclusion of the Act, having had sometimes 40, at other times 50 and more incorporated at that time, in several degrees and faculties. Those therefore that I find, you shall have as they follow.” It is perhaps worth while to add, however, that Wood had remarked under incorporations for 1613 (i, 195): “The Incorporations of the Cantabrigians are this Year omitted by the public Scribe.” Evidently John French was not the only lazy scribe.
1 We need not necessarily assume that Aubrey was this friend, though he may have been. Thomas Hearne reminds us (Bodleian MS. Rawl. B 246, as quoted in Bliss's Wood, i, cxxx) that “in carrying on his great and tiresome work of ATHENÆ, … if you will believe what he himself says, and what I have often heard reported in Oxon, the greatest help he found from any one person in that university, was from Mr Andrew Allam, vice-principal of St. Edmund's hall, who died, to our author's great reluctancy, an. 1685. This ingenious retired and modest person helped him very much in the notitia of divers modern authors, whilst Mr Wood himself was day and night drudging in those more ancient. …” That Aubrey himself thought of Allam in connection with Milton and planned to consult him is made plain in his notes; see my Life Records of John Milton, iii, 378–379. Allam might easily have had some record, not now accessible, of Milton's incorporation.
2 But see below, p. 29.