1 Harrison's Description of England in Shakspere's Youth (4 pts., London, 1877-1908, New Shakspere Soc). All my parenthetical references are to this edition, which supplies an accurate text.

2 Leslie, James B., Derry Clergy and Parishes (Enniskillen, 1937), pp. 7 Google Scholar, 56.

3 H. Cotton, ‘Harrison’s Chronology', I N. & Q. III (1851), 105.

4 So described by Holinshed in his Chronicles (1577), I, Historie of England, p. 33.

5 Other works in the library, which has an extensive holding of sixteenth-century books, may have belonged to Harrison. His habit was to sign at the top of the title page in the space often clipped in rebinding; some of the extant signatures are truncated. Normally Harrison added the price paid for the volume and occasionally the date. His handwriting varies considerably, but no more than could be explained by normal changes over a period of forty years. On a blank leaf in one of his books (Arvernus Gulielmus, Operum summa, Paris, 1516, vol. II, shelf mark A-ii-c-3) Harrison practiced various forms of his signature.

6 The words in square brackets are crossed through in the original. In this transcript I have regularized u and v, and expanded the normal abbreviations.

7 The authorship of this biography remains an open question. From internal evidence, it was written in 1565, when Harrison was still an obscure and unpublished country rector, by some one who knew him well. I strongly suspect he wrote the note himself, using such phrases as ‘ut audio’ in an attempt to ‘objectify’ and bring it into correspondence with Bale's biographies. The evidence of calligraphy is tenuous since I have no other examples of Harrison's writing from so early a period, but the hand of the note seems to correspond to the signature on the title page. I am greatly indebted to the officials of the Diocesan Clerk's office for the freedom of the library, and to Mr. T. MacCallum Walker, librarian at Magee University College in Derry, for his generous assistance. Professor Clarence Miller of St. Louis University gave me invaluable help in deciphering the somewhat difficult hand.

8 G. C. Moore Smith, N. & Q. CLI (1926), 237-239, 452-453.

9 Edward Lynam, The Mapmaker's Art: Essays on the History of Maps (London, 1953), p. 86, states that William and John Harrison were brothers. I do not know the evidence for this assertion. William Harrison certainly knew the printer Reginald Wolfe, John Harrison's father-in-law, and the original planner of the work that came to be known as Holinshed's Chronicles. Wolfe was a German, and Harrison cites him as an example of the tendency of the immigrant to lose command of his acquired tongue with advancing years so that ‘he is woorse therein than ever he was, and thereto peradventure halteth not a litle also in his owne’ (I, XXX). Wolfe died in 1573, three years before Harrison was persuaded to undertake his Description.

10 In the MS. Chronologie (i, li). As usual, Furnivall's date, 1544, is incorrect, as can be shown by Harrison's reference to the singing of Cranmer's English litany at St. Paul's.

11 Charles Henry Cooper and Thompson Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858-1913), II, 163-164. The cancelled word ‘primo’ in the autobiography throws additional doubt upon their statement.

12 Vita et obitus duorum fratrum Suffolciensium Henrici et Caroli Brandoni … (London, [1551]), S.T.C. 25816-17.

13 Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (Oxford, 1891-1892), 11, 663. This information was not available to Furnivall, who guessed Merton as a possibility.

14 Register of the University ofOxford, ed. C. W. Boase (Oxford, 1885), 1, 233.

15 The original paper register is now on deposit at the Essex Records Office in Chelmsford. The baptisms of two of Harrison's children are also recorded: the Anne who later married George Downham on 30 August 1573, and a William, who is not mentioned in Harrison's will and must have predeceased his father, on 7 October 1576. The Radwinter parish records for the period are not extant. For much information about the locality I am indebted to the gracious hospitality of Miss Isabel Wiseman and to her book Wimbish through the Centuries (Chelmsford, 1954).

16 Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. John Roche Dasent, New Ser., x, 1577-1578 (London, 1895), 313, 323-324, 327; XI, 1578-1580 (London, 1895), 174. John Lawson was vicar of Walden from 1570 to 1580.

17 Richard Newcourt, Repertorium eccksiasticum parochiale Londinense (London, 1708-1710), II, 479.

18 Calendar of the Manuscripts Preserved at Hatfield House (London, 1892, Historical Manuscripts Commission), iv, 412-413. The context of the letter has not been previously noted. Cobham's comments suggest that Harrison's death was expected but that the news had not reached him. During the period 1577-1586, three of Cobham's sons, Maximilian, Henry, and George, were at times in residence at Cambridge. The latter two were deeply implicated in the plots against James 1 in 1603. Harrison's description of them as ‘indued with a singular towardnesse unto all vertue and learning’ (1, cxii) seems illfounded.

19 Hennessy, George, Novum repertorium ecclesiasticum parochiale Londinense (London, 1898), p. 73 Google Scholar. Furnivall did not know of Harrison's London parishes.

20 A Survey of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford, 1908), 1, 306.

21 Newcourt, II, 674.

22 Hennessy, p. 301.

23 Davids, T. W., Annals of Evangelical Nonconformity in the County of Essex (London, 1863), pp. 88–126 Google Scholar.

24 Grace Book Δ: Containing the Records of the University of Cambridge for the Years 1542-1589, ed. John Venn (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 225-226, 229, 240, 248. In the ‘Ordo senioritatis’ for the bachelor of divinity candidates in 1569 (p. 226), Harrison appears twentieth in a list of twenty-two and is the only man for whom no college is recorded.

25 Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 114. Harvey attributes the remark to ‘M. Harrison of Radwynter'.

26 The act books are now preserved at the Essex Records Office, catalogued D/ACA 3-8.1 am grateful to Mr. F. G. Emmison, the county archivist, and the members of his staff for many courtesies.

27 Also preserved at the Essex Records Office are the Colchester probate records of the period. D/ACR 6-7 cover the years 1566-1585. From 1569 to 1575 Harrison frequently appears as the probating official.

28 The original record of this incident is included in act book D/ACA 3, fol. 13^r, dated July 1569. Harrison's deposition in chancery is dated n February 1585, a sufficient indication of the glacial movement of Elizabethan legal proceedings. The Edward Birchemore mentioned in the deposition was a summoner or ‘apparatour’ of the archidiaconal court; in answer to a query regarding his probity, Harrison deposes that Birchemore ‘by me also was removed from that office for sundry abuses and misdemeanours'.

29 Professor Mark Eccles of the University of Wisconsin called my attention to the existence of this deposition, which is in the Public Record Office, Court of Chancery, C24 /177 /52. The document is largely in Harrison's hand. I have modernized punctuation and capitalization, and expanded abbreviations.

30 Description ojBritaine in Holinshed's Chronicles, 1587, 1, 45, 85, 101. In the second, 1587, edition Harrison entitled his first book, which is largely topographical, the Description ojBritaine (as all three books in the first, 1577, edition had been called), while the second two together form the Description of England. Furnivall printed only brief excerpts from the first book.

31 See also Stow's Survey, ed. Kingsford, 1, 349.

32 The full text of the rather lengthy letter is printed in the Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A. D. 1573-1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott (Westminster, 1884, Camden Soc, New Ser., xxxni), pp. 166-167. Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser and Gabriel Harvey's Letter-Book', M.P. xxix (1931), 163-186, dates the letter on internal evidence as written in the fall of 1573. In the original MS. the letter is addressed simply ‘To Harrison'. Apparently the recipient has not been previously identified, but the evidence of Harvey's marginal note cited above and the content of the letter seem conclusive. Harvey was from Saffron Walden, five miles west of Radwinter.

33 Holinshed's Chronicles, 1587, II, 23.

34 The same, m, sig. A4^r. There are some twenty explicit references to Harrison's work in the first eight books of the Historie.

35 From a note at the end of the MS., which was seen by Furnivall and is more fully described in the Eighth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical MSS. (London, 1881), pp. 639-640. The treatise is no longer in Derry and, presumably, has shared the fate of the Chronologie. In the 1577 edition of Holinshed Harrison included four chapters (xxn- XXV of his third book) on weights and measures. He dropped them from the 1587 edition, probably because he intended to expand and publish them separately.

36 2d ed. (Chelmsford, 1816), n, 538. The first edition appeared in 1768. Harrison's rectory was torn down in the early nineteenth century In one of his books preserved in Derry (Benedictus Aretius, Problemata theologica, Lausanne, 1573, shelf mark C-i-j-4) an ink drawing of the rebus occurs on a blank leaf at the front.

37 During this period, if not earlier, Harrison employed a curate at Radwinter. The record of visitations for the archdeaconry of Colchester in 1586-1588 (Essex Records Office, D/ACVI, the only extant volume for the period) reports George Pomfrett as holding the position. The records of the chapter at Windsor, which I have not seen, may give more detailed information about Harrison's periods of residence and duties. It would be interesting to know if he ever preached before the queen during her visits to the castle. One of his books at Derry (vol. rv of the ‘Magdeburg Centuries', Basle, 1564, shelf mark D-i-d-4) has, on a blank leaf, a very rough draft in Harrison's hand of an address to the queen, perhaps prepared for one of her visits to Essex. The style is typical of such endeavors, e.g., ‘who ar thes of lowe callinge, basse condition, small wealthe, and smaller auctoritye that they shuld have any place to come in your presence?’

38 The burial records of the chapel for the years before 1625 are not extant, and no monument survives, but an entry in the chapter book (Furnivall, 1, xiv) explicitly states Harrison was buried at Windsor. There is no entry for him in the registers of the parish church, the only other possible place of interment.

39 Harrison was installed as canon on 24 April 1586. His will is in the hand of Thomas Hartley, one of the witnesses. In addition to the legal notation on the reverse, there is a sentence at the top which I am at a loss to interpret, partially mutilated as it is by a tear in the sheet: ‘Rece … ilson to m^r W^m Glovrs [?] at thebleweboreindistaffelanein … ful as may be, ther to be kept for m^r Wilson.’