and Russian forms of the story than with those current in southern Europe. It stands almost alone, however, in selecting an historical personage as the central figure. The ‘legend’ of Whittington is not known to have been narrated before 1605. On 8 Feb. 1604–5 a dramatic version entitled ‘The History of Richard Whittington, of his lowe byrth, his great fortune, as yt was plaied by the prynces servants,’ was licensed for the press (Arber, Stationers' Registers, iii. 282). On 16 July 1605 a license was granted for the publication of a ballad called ‘The vertuous Lyfe and memorable Death of Sir Richard Whittington, mercer, sometyme Lord Maiour.’ Neither play nor ballad is known to have survived. The earliest extant references to the ‘legend’ figure in Thomas Heywood's ‘If you know not me, you know nobody’ (act i. sc. i.) published in 1606, and in Beaumont and Fletcher's ‘Knight of the Burning Pestle,’ which appeared five years later. Both references imply that serious liberties had been taken in the legend with the historical facts. The various attempts to rationalise the legend, by dragging in the use of the word ‘cat’ as a name for ships carrying coals from Newcastle, a mere humorous suggestion of Samuel Foote [q. v.], or by explaining ‘cat’ as a corruption of the French achats, fall to the ground when the real character of the story is recognised. Lysons's defence of the historical truth of the incident of the cat would hardly call for criticism if it had not been seriously revived in Sir Walter Besant's popular history of Whittington. Their corroborative proofs may be at once dismissed. The evidence of the portraits is of course worthless. The piece of sculpture found in an old house at Gloucester said to have once belonged to the Whittington family, and figured by Carr (p. xvi), represents a small boy, not ‘a fine sturdy youth,’ carrying a nondescript small animal, and there seems no satisfactory evidence for attributing the stone to the fifteenth century. The assumption that the cat carved on the front of Newgate when rebuilt after the great fire had existed on the building erected by Whittington's executors rests on a mere mistake of Pennant.
[The first serious attempt to ascertain and bring together the facts of Whittington's life was made by Samuel Lysons, one of the authors of the Magna Britannia, in ‘The Model Merchant of the Middle Ages’ (1860); very little escaped him, but the value of his work is marred by his acceptance of the legend as genuine biography. The life by (Sir) Walter Besant and James Rice (1881; 2nd ed. 1894) adds a few details from the City Archives, but adheres to Lysons's uncritical standpoint, and is little more than an expansion of his work without his references and documents. The chief original authorities are the following: Rotuli Parliamentorum; Rymer's Fœdera, original ed.; Ordinances of the Privy Council, ed. Nicolas; Calendarium Inquisitionum post mortem; Devon's Issues of the Exchequer; Return of Names of Members of Parliament, 1878; Lists of Sheriffs, 1898; Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. Caley, Ellis, and Bandinel; Annales Ricardi II (Rolls Series); Fabyan's Chronicle, ed. Ellis; Gregory's Chronicle and Chronicle of Greyfriars (Camden Soc.); Stow's Survey of London, ed. Strype; Riley's Memorials of London. Also Brewer's Life and Times of John Carpenter, 1856; Malcolm's Londinium Redivivum; Hutchins's History of Dorset, 3rd ed.; Clutterbuck's History of Hertfordshire; Ashmole's History of Berkshire; Wylie's History of Henry IV. The legend is critically examined in Thos. Keightley's Tales and Popular Fictions, 1834, W. A. Clouston's Popular Tales and Fictions, 1887, and by H. B. Wheatley in the preface to his edition of the ‘History of Sir Richard Whittington’ (By T. H. [1670]) for the Villon Society, 1885; compare also Reinhold Köhler, Orient und Occident (ii. 488), and Ralston's Russian Folk-Tales. The earliest form of the story in the British Museum Collection is a black-letter ballad of 1641, entitled ‘London's glory and Whittington's renown; or a looking glass for the citizens of London; being a remarkable story how Sir Richard Whittington … came to be three times Lord Mayor of London, and how his rise was by a cat.’ The prose series begins with ‘The famous and remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London,’ by T. H. 1656, also in black letter, a later edition of which has been republished by the Villon Society. The story became a favourite subject of chap-books whose imprints include Edinburgh, Durham, Carlisle, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. Carr's Story of Sir Richard Whittington, 1871, is a modern version.]
WHITTINGTON, WHYTYNTON, or WHITINTON, ROBERT (fl. 1520), grammarian, was born at Lichfield, and educated first at the school of St. John's Hospital in that city (Short Account of the Ancient and Modern State of Lichfield, 1819, p. 112), and afterwards under John Stanbridge [q. v.] in the school attached to the college of St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford. In April 1513 he supplicated the congregation of regents at Oxford for laureation in grammar, which was granted him on 4 July ensuing. At the same time he was admitted B.A. In his supplicat he represents that he had studied rhetoric for fourteen years, and taught it for twelve. This would point to his being born not much later than 1480. On his laureation he assumed the title of ‘Protovates Angliæ,’
