Boorde, or BORDE, ANDREW

Boorde, or BORDE, ANDREW, facetiously styled by himself 'Andreas Perforatus,' was born about 1490, near Cuckfield in Sussex, and was brought up under the stern discipline of the Carthusian order. About 1528 he managed to get a dispensation from his vow, and next studied medicine, as he tells us, at Orleans, Toulouse, Montpellier, and Wittenberg, travelling moreover as wide as Rome and Compostella. On his return to England, he was patronised by Cromwell, and afterwards travelled in his behalf on a confidential mission through great part of France and Spain. The year 1536 he spent in practising and studying medicine at Glasgow, and tells us that he found the natives flattering and false. He next returned to London, thereafter crossed the seas and travelled by Antwerp, Cologne, Venice, and Rhodes to Jerusalem. After his return, he lived a while in London, then most likely in Winchester, where his flagrant immoralities soon brought him into serious trouble. In the spring of 1549 he found himself in the Fleet prison in London, and soon after he died. Boorde's chief works are his Dyetary and the Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, edited by Dr Furnivall for the Early English Text Society in 1870. His Itinerary of Europe has perished, but the Handbook of Europe survives, and the Itinerary of England and Peregrination of Doctor Boorde was printed by Hearne in 1735. Many books, moreover, have been fathered on the fantastic old reprobate, and some have asserted that he was the original 'Merryandrew.' The earliest known specimen of the Gypsy language occurs in the Introduction.