William Harrison (1534-1593)

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William Harrison (18 April 1534 — 24 April 1593) was an English writer, whose Description of England was produced as part of the publishing venture of a group of London stationers who produced Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (London 1577).

Harrison, London-born, educated at Westminster School and, having studied at Cambridge University, with a degree from Christ Church, Oxford (1560), was chaplain to William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and a Member of Parliament, in whose household he was in a position to travel within a small compass in the south of England,^[1] and who in 1559 presented him a rector of Radwinter, Essex,^[2] and a Canon of Windsor, where he is buried in St George's Chapel.

To him was allotted the task of writing the "Descriptions of Britain and England" He gathered his facts from books, letters, maps, conversations with antiquaries and local historians, like his friends John Stow and Camden and through the notes of John Leland as well as from his own vigilant observation and broad experience, tempered by his wit and expressed in a conversational tone without a trace of pedantry, which has made it a classic.^[3] Like many staunch Elizabethans he was a defender of English customs in dress as in victuals. The result is a compendium of Elizabethan England during the youth of William Shakespeare. "No work of the time contains so vivid and picturesque a sketch," was the assessment of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature.^[4]

[edit] Notes

^ “Untill nowe of late,” he wrote his patron "except it were from the parish where I dwell, unto your Honour in Kent; or out of London where I was borne, unto Oxford and Cambridge where I have bene brought up, I never travelled 40 miles foorthright and at one journey in all my life." (Quoted in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. III. "Renascence and Reformation", XV. Chroniclers and Antiquaries. 3. Harrison’s Description of England.
^ Endowed with a very modest £40 a year; Harrison held at the same time
^ Harrison's Description of England found a place among the Harvard Classics, (Vol. 35, Part 3), the "Harvard five-foot shelf".
^ The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, eo. loc.