Harrison, WILLIAM

Harrison, WILLIAM, the chief of Holinshed's coadjutors, was born in London, educated at St Paul's and Westminster, and studied first at Oxford, next at Cambridge, graduating B.D. at the latter in 1569. He became household chaplain to William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who presented him to the rectory of Radwinter, in Essex, which he held all his life, together for ten years with the vicarage of Wimbish in the same county. In 1586 he was installed canon of Windsor, and died in 1593. Almost all we know of him he has told us himself, even to his gardening and his brewing; and he impresses his readers throughout as a learned, honest, and singularly open-eyed although untravelled man. When he wrote the book by which his name is remembered one Trinity term in London, he was more than forty miles from his books, and he tells us further that till recently, except in visits to the universities or to Lord Cobham's house in Kent, he had never gone a forty miles' journey in his life. But at that time he had the advantage of access to the valuable manuscripts of Leland. The fruit of his application was his famous Description of England, as well as his Description of Britain, written for Holinshed's Chronicle. In the 'Epistle Dedicatorie' he tells us he had an 'especial eye unto the truth of things;' and further that he was 'the first that hath taken upon him so particularly to describe this Ile of Britain.' The former is especially interesting to us as a vigorous and elaborate account of the conditions of life in the England of Shakespeare's day, treating in succession, with some fullness of detail, subjects so diverse as the church, the bishoprics, the universities, the navy, the food, apparel, armour, the beggars and rogues, laws, punishments, buildings, cities, parks, gardens, fairs, and markets. The second and third books of the Description of England were edited by Dr Furnivall, for the New Shakespeare Society (parts i.-iii. 1877-81). The whole work is of course reprinted in all editions of Holinshed.