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Bodley
294
Bodley

description, in doggerel Latin, of a journey in company with Captains Toby Caulfield and John Jephson, from Armagh to Downpatrick (the barony of which was called Lecale) to keep Christmas with the governor there, Sir Richard Morrison. A description of the governor of Armagh is supposed to refer to the author himself. The passage runs: ‘unus valde honestus homo, cum barba nigra, qui tructat omnes bene, secundum parvam habilitatem suam, et tractaret multo melius si haberet plus illius rei quam Angli vocant meanes.’ He enlarges much in vindication of hard drinking and occasional, as distinct from habitual, drunkenness, and also of much tobacco-smoking. The tract is printed with a translation, and with notes which were never completed, in vol. ii. of the ‘Ulster Journal of Archæology,’ 1854, pp. 73–99. The second Ware MS. is said to be Observations in English on the forts in Ireland and on the colonies planted in Ulster. Where this manuscript is now preserved does not appear; but probably the tract may only consist of some of his official reports, very many of which are preserved among the state papers.

[Prince's Worthies of Devon; Calendars of the State Papers of Ireland, 1603-1625 (5 vols., 1872–80); Calendars of the Carew MSS., 1601-1624 (2 vols. 1872–3); Fynes Moryson's Itinerary (1617), part ii. pp. 25, 97–8; Liber Munerum Hiberniæ, vol. i. part ii. 106.]


BODLEY, LAURENCE, D.D. (d. 1615), canon of Exeter, was brother of Sir Thomas Bodley, being the third son of John Bodley. He was educated at Oxford, and took the degree of B.A. 21 Jan. 1565–6, and that of M.A. 9 July 1568, probably as a member of Christ Church, since he was entered as being a member of that society when created D.D. 30 March 1613, the day after he had attended the funeral of his brother. He was a canon of Exeter before 1588 (in which year the extant list of canons commences), and was also rector of Shobrooke, Devon. It was probably mainly through him that the dean and chapter of Exeter gave, in 1602, eighty-one early and valuable manuscripts from the library of their cathedral to the new library at Oxford, including (amongst other gifts of Bishop Leofric, the founder of the church) the well-known ‘Leofric Missal.' In the will of his brother, Sir Thomas, he appears as the principal legatee among his kindred. He died 19 April 1615.

[Prince’s Worthies of Devon; Wood MSS. E. 6, 9, and 29. in the Bodl. Libr.; Le Neve's Fasti, ed. Hardy; Macray's Annals of the Bodl. Libr.]


BODLEY, Sir THOMAS (1545–1613), diplomatist and scholar, is chiefly remembered as the founder at the close of his life of the library at Oxford to which his name is attached, and is little known for the many state embassies which gave him earlier importance in the eyes of his contemporaries. For our knowledge of his early life and education we are indebted to a short autobiographical sketch written in 1609, of which the original manuscript remains in the library he refounded (copies are of common occurrence), and which was first printed in 1647, an afterwards by Thomas Hearne in 1703. We learn from this that he was born at Exeter 2 March 1544–5; his parents were (John) Bodleigh or Bodley, ‘descended from an ancient family of Bodleigh or Bud1eigh, of Dunscomb-by-Crediton, and (Joan) Hone, daughter of Robert Hone, of Ottery St. Mary. His father, who afterwards became noted as the recipient from Queen Elizabeth, in 1562, of a patent for seven years for the exclusive printing of the Geneva Bible, was, in the reign of Queen Mary, compelled, on account of his known protestantism, to seek safety in Germany, whither his wife and children followed him, finally at Geneva, in all which places there were congregations of English refugees settling first at Wesel, next at Frankfort, and at Geneva, at the age of twelve, young Bodley became an auditor of Ant. Chevallier in Hebrew, of Phil. Beroald in Greek, and of Calvin and Beza in divinity, besides having Robert Constantine, the author of a Greek lexicon, to read Homer with him privately in the house of a physician with whom he boarded. On the accession of Queen Elizabeth the family returned to England and settled at London, and Thomas was sent to Magdalen College at Oxford, entering there as a commoner under the tuition of Laurence Humphrey, D.D., afterwards president, whose religious teaching would be very much in accordance with that which had been inculcated at Geneva. In 1563 he took the degree of B.A., and in the same year was elected a probationer-fellow of Merton College, being admitted actual fellow in the year following. In 1565 he tells us that he commenced a Greek lecture in the college hall without stipend, encouraging thereby the still comparatively new study of which the early years of that century had seen the revival. His lecture gave such satisfaction that the society afterwards granted him an annual fee of four marks, and made the lectureship a permanent institution. He took the degree of M.A., in 1566, and then undertook in addition a public lecture in natural philosophy in the univer-