SOURCE: Orme, Nicholas. “Alexander Barclay, Tudor Educationist.” In Education and Society In Medieval and Renaissance England, pp. 259-70. London: The Hambledon Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Orme provides a brief synopsis of Barclay's biographical information as well as an analysis of Barclay's translation of The Ship of Fools, focusing on how the work reflects his background and writing style.]

Few sixteenth-century Englishmen had such a varied career as Alexander Barclay. By origin a Scot, he spent most of his life in England but also travelled widely on the continent. By career, he was in turn a secular priest in a collegiate church, a monk, a friar, and finally (after the dissolution of the friaries), a secular priest again, this time a parish clergyman. He is best known today as a poet and translator, but he was also an educationist. He held at least two teaching posts, one in a song and one in a grammar school, and he wrote educational works. Yet much of his life remains obscure.¹ Even some of his contemporaries were doubtful whether he was born a Scot or an Englishman (the former is more likely), and the date of his birth is uncertain. It is usually given as 1475-6 on the grounds that he speaks in his Eclogues of being 38, parts of which were written as early as 1513-14. But we do not know when the statement of his age was written, and it may be better to postpone his birth nearer to 1484. This is the latest possible date, since Barclay had to be aged 24 in order to be ordained priest in 1508. He does not appear in records before his ordination, and all that we can gather of his previous life is that he journeyed in France and Italy. If he studied, he did not gain a university degree higher than that of BA. Only one reference before the 1530s calls him ‘Master Barclay’, and the rest describe him as if he were below the rank of MA.² The span of his life from 18 to 24 is enough to accommodate what we can infer of his early career, and to extend it by another eight years seems too long. On being ordained, as we shall see, Barclay took up a comparatively junior post, which also points towards a younger man.

The register of Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, shows that Barclay was ordained subdeacon by Oldham at Exeter on 18 March 1508, deacon on 8 April and priest on 22 April.³ He had not been previously living in Exeter diocese but in that of Lincoln, and had ‘letters dimissory’ from the bishop of Lincoln enabling him to be ordained elsewhere. His ‘title’—the means of support which ordinands had to show—was provided by the collegiate church of Ottery St Mary, twelve miles east of Exeter, evidently because the college was going to give him a job. Barclay probably came to Ottery, therefore, in about March 1508. His stay at the collegiate church is important because it was there that he translated his first major work, The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, but he did not stay long. A note in the first printed edition of The Ship of Fools states that he made the translation at Ottery in ‘1508’ (which in terms of the early-Tudor calendar means March 1508 to March 1509), being ‘at that time chaplain in the said college’.⁴ The phrase ‘at the time’ indicates that Barclay had left Ottery when the printing of the book was completed on 14 December 1509. His stay in Devon was therefore less than a year and three quarters, and possibly only about a year. The most likely person to have brought him to Ottery is Thomas Cornish, the warden or chief officer of the collegiate church and a figure of some importance in the south west of England. A graduate of Oxford, Cornish combined being warden of Ottery, precentor of Wells Cathedral, titular bishop of Tine and suffragan bishop in the dioceses of Exeter and Bath and Wells.⁵ More than anyone else at Ottery he had the wide connections capable of bringing a young man from elsewhere to take up a job there. The likelihood is strengthened when we find that Barclay dedicated The Ship of Fools to Cornish, with an acknowledgement that Cornish had ‘promoted’ (presumably sponsored) him to holy orders and given him many other benefits.⁶ No other member of the college is mentioned in the book with such respect.

On the basis of the word ‘chaplain’ applied to Barclay in the printed book, he is usually thought to have held the post of chaplain (or clerk) of the Lady chapel while he was at Ottery. The duties of this office were twofold. He had to teach the choristers and adolescent clerks or ‘secondaries’ of the college to sing, and to organise the daily series of services, accompanied by polyphonic music, which took place in the Lady chapel in honour of the Virgin Mary.⁷ These services were sung by the choristers and secondaries, along with the adult vicars choral of the college. Barclay mentions the secondaries in The Ship of Fools, but he does not actually say that he was their teacher. We know, however, that he was not one of the dignitaries or canons of Ottery (whose names are recorded), nor (in view of his age) a secondary or chorister. It is unlikely that he would have come to the college to be a vicar choral, since many similar posts could be had elsewhere at more important places such as the cathedrals, and those at Ottery were probably filled by local men. There was only one office in the college apart from that of chaplain of the Lady chapel to which a man would be likely to have come from elsewhere: that of master of the grammar school. Barclay was well up in Latin grammar when he translated The Ship of Fools⁸ and taught for a time in a grammar school, as we shall see, in the 1540s. But it was not necessary to be ordained to be schoolmaster of Ottery collegiate church, and if Barclay had held that office we would expect him to have been described in print as a schoolmaster, rather than as a chaplain. On the whole, the likelihood seems to favour Barclay having been chaplain of the Lady chapel, though the fact itself is never overtly stated.

The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, published in Germany in 1494, is a long, rather diffuse poem, further extended by Barclay with his own additions. It satirises various groups in society: gentlemen, clergy and scholars, parents, women and children, and complains of their follies and faults. In the course of the work, opinions are stated about some aspects of education, notably parents and children, academic study, and the ignorance of gentlemen and clergy. On the first of these topics, Barclay is traditional and unexceptional. Parents should set a good example to their offspring, and correct them when they do wrong. In return, children should be obedient and care for their parents when they are old. To fathers who say that children are too tender to be chastised, Barclay replies like Langland,

What hurtyth punysshement with moderacion
Unto yonge children? Certaynely, no thynge;
It voydeth vyce, gettynge vertue and cunnynge.

Like an Oxford writer of his own period, he asks is it not better for your son to be beaten than to grow up wicked and be hanged?⁹ In the section on study, Barclay is more original because he takes sides with the humanists against the medieval grammarians. Many scholars who study logic and law, he says, do so without having mastered grammar properly, which is the basis of all the liberal arts. They read the old Doctrinale of Alexander of Ville-Dieu (a work then still in print in England), and disdain Priscian and Sulpizio, the classical and Renaissance authorities on grammar:

If he have onys red the olde Dotrinall
With his diffuse and unparfyte brevyte,
He thynketh to have sene the poyntis of grammer all,
And yet of one errour he maketh two or thre;
Precyan or Sulpice disdayneth he to se.
Thus many whiche say that they theyre grammer can,
Ar als great folys as whan they firste began.(10)

When it comes to promotion to ranks and offices in the world, however, the studious do not get their just deserts:

Eche is nat lettred that nowe is made a lorde,
Nor eche a clerke that hath a benefyce.(11)

Criticism of clerical education was a well-worn theme among satirists, but Barclay shows the typical humanist tendency to extend it to the nobility and gentry. He was to repeat the charge a few years later in the preface to his translation of Sallust's Jugurthine War (published c. 1520). ‘The understandyng of Latyn … at this tyme is almost contemned of gentylmen.’¹²

Some literary works tell us nothing about the places in which they were written. The Ship of Fools is not of that kind, since Barclay greatly enlarged the German text in his translation and took the opportunity to include several references, both complimentary and disparaging, to people whom he had met in Devon. Two of these people were dignitaries whose favour Barclay had or wished to have. The whole work, as has been said, was dedicated to Cornish, and in a section on foolish and wicked sheriffs and knights, Barclay explains that there is an exception to them: ‘Kyrkham’, who is not to be put into the ship along with the rest, because he is ‘manly, righteous, wise, discreet and sad’, a man of ‘perfect meekness’ and a supporter of men in poverty. Barclay asserts that he himself is Kyrkham's ‘servitor, chaplain and bede-man’; he promises to remain so during his life, and prays to God to raise Kyrkham to honour and give him the favour of the king.¹³ ‘Kyrkham’ was evidently Sir John Kirkham of Paignton, who had been sheriff of Devon two years previously, from December 1505 to December 1506, and was to hold the office a second time in 1523-4.¹⁴ Barclay appears to have done some travelling while he was in Devon; he later mentions Exeter and Totnes as if he had visited them,¹⁵ and it is possible that he met Kirkham either at Paignton or at Ottery. Sir John's third wife, Lucy, was the daughter of Sir Thomas Tremayle of Sand in Sidbury parish near Ottery, and the knight may well have passed by the collegiate church on visits there from time to time.¹⁶

As well as applauding his patrons, Barclay inserted six stanzas into The Ship of Fools in praise of ‘his well-beloved friend Sir John Bysshop of Exeter’ who, he said, was the first person to see his translation and encouraged him not to keep it in the dark but to publish it.¹⁷ ‘Bysshop’, as Barclay makes clear, was a cleric, and there is no reason to dissent from the late Professor Nelson's suggestion that he was the John Bishop who was ordained deacon at Ottery on 4 December 1500 to the title of Ottery collegiate church.¹⁸ The title implies that Bishop came from Ottery or nearby, and Barclay could easily have met him there on in Exeter. In 1508 Bishop may already have been rector of St Paul's church, Exeter,¹⁹ the benefice he definitely held in 1522.²⁰ He seems to have been ambitious to rise in the Church and Barclay calls him ‘covetous’, though he also expresses a hope that Bishop's fortunes will grow and that he will one day be a bishop in fact as well as in name. This hope was not fulfilled. In 1522 the rectory of St Paul's was worth £10 a year and Bishop's own possessions were valued at £26.13s.4d., but he never got a better benefice, and his resignation of the parish in 1537 to become priest of the Grandisson chantry in Exeter Cathedral, worth a little over £6 a year, looks like a retirement by a man of failing powers.²¹ It is the last that we hear of him, and he probably died in the 1540s. Barclay, as the incumbent of two or three parishes in his last years, ended up better off than his former friend.

The rest of the local allusions in The Ship of Fools are unfavourable ones, suggesting that Barclay held a poor opinion of most Devonians, as did his fellow-poet Herrick a hundred and forty years later. It may be Ottery that he had in mind in his sketch of the disorders of contemporary church choirs: the musical director running hither and thither holding his staff of office, while the clergy gossip about the latest battle in France.²² Barclay certainly mentions the eight secondaries of Ottery who, he says, are worthy to receive first place in the ship of fools because they know nothing and will learn nothing, even though they receive their tuition free of charge and live in a building next to the school itself.²³ He is scathing too about the local clergy, asserting as elsewhere that the least learned are promoted to the best benefices,

For if one can flater, and bere a hawke on his fyst,
He shalbe made person of Honyngton or of Clyst.(24)

Once in possession of these benefices, such people employ a hired chaplain to do their work—a ‘Sir John of Garnesey’—and think themselves absolved of all responsibility.²⁵ No chaplain of this name can be discovered in early-Tudor Devon, so Barclay was either bestowing a nickname on some local priest who came from Guernsey, or using a stock name current at the time.²⁶ We should be careful, however, not to assume that the pre-Reformation clergy were as uniformly bad as he and other literary writers asserted. The secondaries of Ottery were probably a mixture of studious and ignorant, idle and conscientious youths, like their counterparts at Exeter Cathedral in the early sixteenth century.²⁷ And while we cannot now be sure which rector Barclay had in mind in the five parishes called Clyst, it is clear that his picture of the rector of Honiton was an inadequate one. Barclay may not indeed have had any personal knowledge of Henry Ferman, who held the parish from 1505 to 1527, since Ferman was studying at Oxford at about the time that Barclay was in Devon. But Ferman's ability to take a university degree in canon law, his promotion by the bishop to be precentor of Ottery in 1523 and his bequests to the fabric of Ottery and Honiton churches in 1526, shows that there was more to him than Barclay's canard suggests.²⁸

Barclay reserved his rudest remarks for a group of people who seem to have been mainly lay inhabitants of Ottery. Foremost among them was a certain Mansell, whom he portrays as a man with a huge belly who went about seeking for prey and despoiling the poor, presumably as a steward, rent collector, or summoner of the Church courts.²⁹ Barclay suggested that if Mansell arrived too late to get into the fools' ship, he should be made the captain of a separate barge of ‘bawds’ or scoundrels. Later, the poet changed his mind and allocated Mansell a place in the filthiest part of the ship—the stinking bilges—along with Jack Chard, Robin Hill, millers and bakers who cheated with weights and measures, and ‘all stealing tailors’ such as Soper.³⁰ The court rolls of Ottery manor mention a Chard family in 1515-17,³¹ but it is unfortunately impossible to identify any of Barclay's enemies as such, due to a lack of contemporary local records. Nevertheless, his criticisms of these people, along with the absence of any compliments to the staff of the collegiate church excepting Cornish, show plainly that Barclay was not very happy during his stay in Ottery. In one respect The Ship of Fools was his revenge: a squib to startle his enemies when he had left. It is amusing to picture their indignation when Barclay's book exploded in Ottery, some time in 1510, when he himself was safely far away.

On leaving Devon, Barclay moved both geographically and vocationally. By 1513 he had become a Benedictine monk of Ely cathedral priory, and since in 1516 he is listed as sixteenth among the thirty brethren, it is likely that he went there straight from Ottery. Was the change due to economic or spiritual motives? He may have despaired of getting patronage with which to leave Ottery and get a more comfortable benefice, such as a parish church. Ely offered a better standard of living, being a large and well endowed foundation, where a monk would have his personal servant, a private room, and a good library at hand. But Barclay had hardly been in Devon long enough to feel a sense of failure in the search for patronage, and his later career suggests a strong vocation to live in a religious order. His life at Ely must have been relatively comfortable, and he was able to go on writing. Six of his works were published wholly or partly during this period, up to the mid 1520s, falling into two groups: literary and educational.³² The first were all translations of texts by classical or Renaissance authors: The Life of St George by Battista Mantovano (published c. 1515), five Eclogues, nos 4-5 by Mantovano (published 1518-21) and nos. 1-3 by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (published 1523-30), and Sallust's Jugurthine War (published c. 1520). The educational group began with a translation of The Mirror of Good Manners by the humanist scholar Domenico Mancini, a Renaissance work in the medieval genre of treatises on behaviour and etiquette aimed at young people. Next came a revision of John Stanbridge's popular Vocabula (published 1519), an early humanist vocabulary in Latin and English for use in schools, and successful enough in Barclay's edition to be reprinted in 1524 and 1526. Finally, an Introductory to Wryte and to Pronounce Frenche was published in 1522, the latest of a long line of such treatises in England, stretching back to the thirteenth century.³³ Barclay drew on these, admitting in his work that he had ‘seen the draughtes of others’ made before his time, and sometimes he perpetuated out-of-date spellings of French words. The book was treated scornfully by John Palsgrave, the author of a much longer work on French, L'Esclarcissement de la langue francoyse, published in 1530, who stated

I have seen an old book written in parchment in manner in all things like to his said Introductory which by conjecture was not written this 100 years. I wot not if he happened to fortune upon such another.

But Palsgrave was self-consciously trying to write a new kind of treatise, in which French grammar was thoroughly reduced to rules. Barclay belonged to an older tradition which gave the learner practical advice, rather than aiming at grammatical completeness.³⁴

The best known of Barclay's Ely works are the Eclogues, which were the first formal poems of their kind to be written in English. They belong to humanist literature since they are translations from two fifteenth-century Italian authors, but Barclay sympathised enough with pre-humanist Latin poetry to pay a compliment in his prologue to the Eclogue of Theodulus, the ninth-century poem which was widely read in English grammar schools up to the early sixteenth century:³⁵

What shall I speake of the father auncient,
Which in briefe language both playne and eloquent,
Between Alathea, Sewstis stoute and bolde,
Hath made rehearsall of all thy storyes olde,
By true historyes us teaching to object
Against vayne fables of olde Gentiles sect.(36)

Barclay himself may have read Theodulus at school, and it is interesting that despite his acquaintance with humanist writing, he still valued its ‘playne and eloquent’ style and content (the debate of Pseustis and Alathea as to whether Greek mythology or Hebrew history was better). His opinion did not prevail, however, and Theodulus ceased to be printed in England after 1515.³⁷ Elsewhere in Barclay's Eclogues there are some brief but vivid references to childhood. The mother sits on the doorstep with her children on her lap, kissing and hugging them, delousing and combing them, and rubbing their necks with butter—perhaps to soothe sunburn. The street boys busy themselves with their tops in Lent, and sing and hop for joy in the fruit season. In winter, torn and ragged, they watch men killing pigs, in hope of a good dinner, and claim the bladder into which they put beans and peas to make it rattle, blow it up well, and play handball and football with it to drive away the cold.³⁸ There is also a more formal discussion about whether the royal court is a place of education for good or ill. Coridon, one of the shepherd characters, asserts that at court you find wise men, good music and the reading of chronicles which stir young princes to imitate the worthy deeds of their predecessors. But Cornix, who tends to represent Barclay, disagrees; most of the talk at court is of war, novelties and abominable deeds. The wise cloak their sayings with flattery to gain promotion. Some great men indeed send their sons to court to learn virtue and manners, but all that the youths absorb is malice, bad manners and vice. Courtiers boast of their sexual exploits, the murders they have done, the frauds they have committed, and you must not think to find any chaste or sober young men among them; instead ‘all sueth vices, all sue enormitie’.³⁹ Once more the vein is the familiar humanist one of telling the aristocracy to reform their manners.

In the middle of the 1520s, somewhere between 1521 and 1528, Barclay's career experienced another change with his departure from Ely to become a Franciscan friar.⁴⁰ A move of this kind was most unusual—monks and friars had different traditions, objectives and ways of life—and it undoubtedly signified a major shift of outlook in the man himself. He ceased to write, either poetry or practical works, and his only important publication afterwards, the first three Eclogues of 1530, was probably written before he joined the friars. Instead, he acquired a reputation as a religious activist, even a nonconformist. In about 1528 the German informer Hermann Rinck wrote to Cardinal Wolsey that various dissidents, including ‘William Roy, William Tyndale, Jerome Barlow, Alexander Barclay and their adherents, etc., formerly Observants of the Order of St Francis but now apostates, … ought to be arrested, punished and delivered up on account of Lutheran heresy’. As the others mentioned were all living in Germany, it looks as though Barclay was also settled there. The Observants were the reformed branch of the Franciscan Order, with six houses in England, and this is the chief evidence that Barclay joined them rather than the larger ‘Conventual’ section of the order. It seems to be supported by a letter to Wolsey of April 1529 by another Observant friar, John West, who was about to meet Barclay whom he accused of calling the cardinal a ‘tyrant’ and other ‘opprobrious and blasphemous words’. The Observants were noted for their fervour, by contemporary religious standards, and if Barclay joined them, he did so as a religious challenge not merely for personal convenience. It is unlikely that he was a Lutheran. He may have been interested in some of Luther's writings (like other eventually conservative men of his day), but Rinck's letter is not wholly accurate (Tyndale was not a friar), and his linking of Barclay with the admittedly Lutheran Roy and Barlow may be a mistake. In the event Barclay remained a friar, returned to England and became known not for his Lutheranism but for his religious conservatism.⁴¹

We know little of Barclay's life as a friar, but friars were great students and it is likely that part of his time was spent studying theology at a university and taking a doctor's degree—a process of several years. He is described as ‘Doctor Barclay’ in 1538,⁴² and if this is correct (as it certainly was by 1546), he must have taken his degree in the late 1520s or 1530s in a foreign university, since he does not appear in the degree registers of Oxford or Cambridge. Study in Germany would account for his mention there in 1528. In 1534 the Observant houses in England were closed because of their hostility to the king's supremacy over the Church, and the surviving members were transferred to the Conventual houses, themselves suppressed in 1538. Barclay thus experienced further changes of life, this time changes forced on him and unwelcome. The London chronicler Charles Wriothesley singled him out by name, under the year 1538, as one who was reluctant to give up wearing his friar's habit in public until he was compelled to do so, and John Foxe the martyrologist later recounted a story in which Thomas Cromwell personally threatened Barclay with a hanging unless he changed his clothes. In the summer and autumn of 1538 Barclay carried out a number of preaching engagements: at Barking (Suffolk) at Whitsuntide and in the diocese of Exeter in October. It is not recorded whether he revisited Ottery, but three reports of his demeanour subsequently reached Cromwell. At Barking he had not preached in favour of the king's supremacy or against the pope; at St Germans in Cornwall he had made his conservatism known, albeit in a circumspect way; and in Cornwall and Devonshire generally he was doing ‘much hurt’ with ‘open preaching and private communication’.

What action Cromwell took, if any, is not clear, because Barclay drops out of records for the next eight years. When he reappears it is in the role of a beneficed clergyman, indeed a clerical pluralist—a different role by far from that of an Observant friar. This suggests that Barclay accepted that the friars were done for and decided to come to terms with the situation. In 1546 the subdean of Wells Cathedral presented him to be vicar of Wookey (Somerset), close to Wells and with an income of £12.15s.8d.; he probably lived in one or other of those places for the next couple of years.⁴³ Then, in the summer of 1547, the headmaster of Wells Cathedral School, Richard Edon, fell ill and Barclay was persuaded to take his place, probably on a temporary basis, with a further salary of £13.6s.8d.⁴⁴ He did the task until Michaelmas or Christmas 1548, when he moved abruptly from Somerset to the other side of England to become resident vicar of Great Baddow in Essex. It has always been said that Barclay was admitted as vicar of Great Baddow on 7 February 1547 (new style), but this is a mistake of the eighteenth-century historian Richard Newcourt. The true date is 1549, and we know from other evidence that Barclay went to live in Great Baddow in January of that year.⁴⁵ It was a more valuable benefice than Wookey, with an income of £18.6s.8d., and as Barclay obtained permission to go on holding Wookey as well,⁴⁶ his net income rose to a respectable £25 even if he paid a curate to serve his Somerset parish. In 1552 he was given a third, even wealthier benefice: the rectory of All Hallows Lombard Street, London, with an income of £22.6s.8d., which involved him giving up one of his other two parishes. In the event, before he could do so, he died at Croydon (Surrey), early in June 1552, and was buried there on the tenth of the month.

If we had to write his epitaph, it would be difficult to sum him up concisely. As a Latinist, he was a humanist, dismissive of Alexander of Ville-Dieu and steeped in classical and Renaissance literature. Yet he could write appreciatively of Theodulus, compile a treatise in French of a very traditional kind, and make customary observations about parents and children. He also became a monk and a friar, both of which we associate with the middle ages. Yet the humanist monk-poet of Ely is parallelled by Robert Joseph, the humanist monk-letter writer of Evesham,⁴⁷ and the old religious orders were perfectly capable of absorbing new ideas, not to mention heretical ones as we see with Roy and Barlow. Once upon a time, Barclay would have been called ‘a transitional figure’, with a foot in the medieval and the Renaissance worlds. The truth is that every generation is transitional, and that all innovators are conservative in some respects. We shall witness the same when we pass on to Shakespeare.

Notes

1. On Barclay's life, see principally his translation of The Ship of Fools, ed. T. Jamieson, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1874), i, pp ix-xcii; Dictionary of National Biography, article by A. W. Ward; The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay, ed. Beatrice White, Early English Text Society, original series, clxxv (1926), pp i-liv, and Barclay, The Life of St George, ed. W. Nelson, EETS, original series, ccxxx (1955), pp ix-xxv.

2. Eclogues, ed. White, p xli.

3. Devon Record Office, Chanter XIII, ff 92^v, 95^v. The evidence was first brought to light by W. Nelson, ‘New Light on Alexander Barclay’, Review of English Studies, xix (1943), pp. 59-61. The mentions of Barclay's ‘admission by the schoolmaster’ in the bishop's register refer to John Calwoodleigh, master of Exeter high school, who acted as one of the examiners of the ordinands (Orme, [Nicholas, Education in the] West of England, [1066-1548, Exeter: University of Exeter, 1976,] pp 50, 56).

4. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, i, p cxvi.

5. For Cornish's career, see Emden, BRUO, i, 491-2.

6. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, i, pp cxvi-vii.

7. J. N. Dalton, The Collegiate Church of Ottery St Mary (Cambridge, 1917), pp 93, 98, 100, 145, 262.

8. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, i, 144.

9. Ibid., pp 45-52, 234-8; ii, 147-52. On hanging, compare A Fifteenth Century School Book, ed. W. Nelson (Oxford, 1956), p 14.

10. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, i, 142-7; compare A Fifteenth Century School Book, ed. Nelson, p 19.

11. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, i, 21-2, 158.

12. Sallust, The Jugurthine War, trans. Barclay (London, R. Pynson, c. 1520), f A5^v. For similar contemporary references, see Richard Pace, De Fructu (Basel, 1517), p 15; John Skelton, Poetical Works, ed. A. Dyce, 2 vols (London, 1843), i, 334-5; Sir Thomas Elyot, The Governor (London, 1531), book i, chapter 12.

13. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, ii, 81.

14. Lists of Sheriffs for England & Wales, PRO, Lists and Indexes, ix (1898), p 36.

15. Eclogues, ed. White, pp 19-20.

16. On Kirkham, see John Prince, Danmonii Orientales Illustres: or, The Worthies of Devon (London, 1810), pp 554-6.

17. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, ii, pp vii, 278-80.

18. Review of English Studies, xix (1943), p 60; Devon Record Office, Chanter XII part ii, f 42.

19. Devon Record Office, Deeds (Exeter, St Paul's), ED/BC/6-8. For another reference to Bishop, see PRO, C 1/287/78 (and possibly C 1/303/53 and C 1/317/53).

20. Tudor Exeter: Tax Assessments, 1489-1595, ed. Margery M. Rowe, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, xxii (1977), p 14.

21. Devon Record Office, Chanter XIV, ff 88, 90; Nicholas Orme, The Minor Clergy of Exeter Cathedral (Exeter, 1980), p 83. The stipend of the Grandisson chantry was £5.6s.8d., but the priest could earn about another 19s.0d. by attending obit masses for the dead in the cathedral.

22. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, ii, 155.

23. Ibid., i, 179. For the locations of the secondaries' house and the school, see Dalton, op. cit., p 75 and plan between pp 80-1.

24. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, i, 22.

25. Ibid., p 160.

26. The term ‘Sir John’ for an ordinary priest was, of course, very common.

27. Orme, Nicholas. Education and Security in Midieval and Renaissance England. London: Hambledon Press, 1989, pp 194-5.

28. For Ferman's career, see Emden, BRUO, iv, 202.

29. The Ship of Fools, ed. Jamieson, ii, 82.

30. Ibid., ii, 307. In this reference Mansell is spelt ‘Manshyll’ in order to rhyme, and perhaps in parallel with Prince Hal's gibe at Falstaff: ‘a huge hill of flesh’ (1 Henry IV, II.iv.239).

31. Devon Record Office, CR 1288, mm 105, 107^v, etc.

32. On these works, see A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, 1475-1640, 2nd ed., 2 vols (London, 1976-86), nos 1383.5-1386, 3545, 10752, 12379, 17242, 21626, 22992.1 and 23181.

33. Orme, Education, p 11.

34. Kathleen Lambley, The Teaching and Cultivation of the French Language in England during Tudor and Stuart Times (London and Manchester, 1920), pp 3-4, 77-80.

35. Orme, [Nicholas,] English Schools [in the Middle Ages, London: Methuen, 1973,] p 103.

36. Eclogues, ed. White, p 2.

37. Pollard and Redgrave, Short Title Catalogue, nos 23939.5-23943.

38. Eclogues, ed. White, pp 184, 191-2.

39. Ibid., pp 60-3, 128-9.

40. For references to the rest of Barclay's career, unless otherwise given, see ibid., pp xli-liv.

41. On Roy and Barlow, see E. G. Rupp, Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge, 1949); this contains no evidence of Barclay's involvement with them.

42. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England, 1485-1559, ed. W. D. Hamilton, vol i, Camden Society, new series, xl (1875), p 82, assuming that the entry was written at the time.

43. The Registers of Thomas Wolsey, etc., Bishops of Bath and Wells, 1518-1559, ed. Sir H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, Somerset Record Society, lv (1940), pp 113-14.

44. Orme, West of England, pp 87-8, 90.

45. Barclay was admitted as vicar of Great Baddow on 7 February 1549 (new style) (London, Guildhall Library, MS 9531/12 part i (The Register of Edmund Bonner), f 164^v). For the other evidence, see Eclogues, ed. White, pp xlviii-li.

46. Barclay was licensed to hold an additional benefice with Wookey on 28 January 1549 (D.S. Chambers, Faculty Office Registers, 1534-1549 (Oxford, 1966), p 316).

47. Orme, Education, pp 39-40.