his discursive Exposition on the Prophet Jonah (1600), which was reprinted in 1845. His Geography, or a Brief Description of the Whole World (1599), passed through numerous editions.
The best account of him is in S. R. Gardiner’s History of England.
ABBOT, GEORGE (1603–1648), English writer, known as “The Puritan,” has been oddly and persistently mistaken for others. He has been described as a clergyman, which he never was, and as son of Sir Morris (or Maurice) Abbot, and his writings accordingly entered in the bibliographical authorities as by the nephew of the archbishop of Canterbury. One of the sons of Sir Morris Abbot was, indeed, named George, and he was a man of mark, but the more famous George Abbot was of a different family altogether. He was son or grandson (it is not clear which) of Sir Thomas Abbot, knight of Easington, East Yorkshire, having been born there in 1603–1604, his mother (or grandmother) being of the ancient house of Pickering. Of his early life and training nothing is known. He married a daughter of Colonel Purefoy of Caldecote, Warwickshire, and as his monument, which may still be seen in the church there, tells, he bravely held the manor house against Princes Rupert and Maurice during the civil war. As a layman, and nevertheless a theologian and scholar of rare ripeness and critical ability, he holds an almost unique place in the literature of the period. The terseness of his Whole Booke of Job Paraphrased, or made easy for any to understand (1640, 4to), contrasts favourably with the usual prolixity of the Puritan expositors and commentators. His Vindiciae Sabbathi (1641, 8vo) had a profound and lasting influence in the long Sabbatarian controversy. His Brief Notes upon the Whole Book of Psalms (1651, 4to), as its date shows, was posthumous. He died on the 2nd of February 1648.
Authorities.—MS. collections at Abbeyville for history of all of the name of Abbot, by J. T. Abbot, Esq., F.S.A., Darlington; Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1730, p. 1099; Wood’s Athenae (Bliss), ii. 141, 594; Cox’s Literature of the Sabbath.
ABBOT, ROBERT (1588?–1662?), English Puritan divine. Noted as this worthy was in his own time, and representative in various ways, he has often since been confounded with others, e.g. Robert Abbot, bishop of Salisbury. He is also wrongly described as a relative of Archbishop Abbot, from whom he acknowledges very gratefully, in the first of his epistles dedicatory of A Hand of Fellowship to Helpe Keepe out Sinne and Antichrist (1623, 4to), that he had “received all” his “worldly maintenance,” as well as “best earthly countenance” and “fatherly incouragements.” The worldly maintenance was the presentation in 1616 to the vicarage of Cranbrook in Kent. He had received his education at Cambridge, where he proceeded M.A., and was afterwards incorporated at Oxford. In 1639, in the epistle to the reader of his most noticeable book historically, his Triall of our Church-Forsakers, he tells us, “I have lived now, by God’s gratious dispensation, above fifty years, and in the place of my allotment two and twenty full.” The former date carries us back to 1588–1589, or perhaps 1587–1588—the “Armada” year—as his birth-time; the latter to 1616–1617 (ut supra). In his Bee Thankfull London and her Sisters (1626), he describes himself as formerly “assistant to a reverend divine . . . now with God,” and the name on the margin is “Master Haiward of Wool Church (Dorset).” This was doubtless previous to his going to Cranbrook. Very remarkable and effective was Abbot’s ministry at Cranbrook, where his parishioners were as his own “sons and daughters” to him. Yet, Puritan though he was, he was extremely and often unfairly antagonistic to Nonconformists. He remained at Cranbrook until 1643, when, Parliament deciding against pluralities of ecclesiastical offices, he chose the very inferior living of Southwick, Hants, as between the one and the other. He afterwards succeeded the “extruded” Udall of St Austin’s, London, where according to the Warning-piece he was still pastor in 1657. He disappears silently between 1657–1658 and 1662. Robert Abbot’s books are conspicuous amongst the productions of his time by their terseness and variety. In addition to those mentioned above he wrote Milk for Babes, or a Mother’s Catechism for her Children (1646), and A Christian Family builded by God, or Directions for Governors of Families (1653).
Authorities.—Brook’s Puritans, iii. 182, 3; Walker’s Sufferings, ii. 183; Wood’s Athenae (Bliss), i. 323; Palmer’s Nonconf. Mem. ii. 218, which confuses him most oddly of all with one of the ejected ministers of 1662.
ABBOT, WILLIAM (1798–1843), English actor, was born in Chelsea, and made his first appearance on the stage at Bath in 1806, and his first London appearance in 1808. At Covent Garden in 1813, in light comedy and melodrama, he made his first decided success. He was Pylades to Macready’s Orestes in Ambrose Philips’s Distressed Mother when Macready made his first appearance at that theatre (1816). He created the parts of Appius Claudius in Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius (1820) and of Modus in his Hunchback (1832). In 1827 he organized the company, including Macready and Miss Smithson, which acted Shakespeare in Paris. On his return to London he played Romeo to Fanny Kemble’s Juliet (1830). Two of Abbot’s melodramas, The Youthful Days of Frederick the Great (1817) and Swedish Patriotism (1819), were produced at Covent Garden. He died in poverty at Baltimore, Maryland.
ABBOT (from the Hebrew ab, a father, through the Syriac abba, Lat. abbas, gen. abbatis, O.E. abbad, fr. late Lat. form abbad-em changed in 13th century under influence of the Lat. form to abbat, used alternatively till the end of the 17th century; Ger. Abt; Fr. abbé), the head and chief governor of a community of monks, called also in the East hegumenos or archimandrite. The title had its origin in the monasteries of Syria, whence it spread through the East, and soon became accepted generally in all languages as the designation of the head of a monastery. At first it was employed as a respectful title for any monk, as we learn from St Jerome, who denounced the custom on the ground that Christ had said, “Call no man father on earth” (in Epist. ad Gal. iv. 6, in Matt. xxiii. 9), but it was soon restricted to the superior. The name “abbot,” though general in the West, was never universal. Among the Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians, &c., the superior was called Praepositus, “provost,” and Prior; among the Franciscans, Custos, “guardian”; and by the monks of Camaldoi, Major.
In Egypt, the first home of monasticism, the jurisdiction of the abbot, or archimandrite, was but loosely defined. Sometimes he ruled over only one community, sometimes over several, each of which had its own abbot as well. Cassian speaks of an abbot of the Thebaid who had 500 monks under him, a number exceeded in other cases. By the rule of St Benedict, which, until the reform of Cluny, was the norm in the West, the abbot has jurisdiction over only one community. The rule, as was inevitable, was subject to frequent violations; but it was not until the foundation of the Cluniac Order that the idea of a supreme abbot, exercising jurisdiction over all the houses of an order, was definitely recognized. New styles were devised to express this new relation; thus the abbot of Monte Cassino was called abbas abbatum, while the chiefs of other orders had the titles abbas generalis, or magister or minister generalis.
Monks, as a rule, were laymen, nor at the outset was the abbot any exception. All orders of clergy, therefore, even the “doorkeeper,” took precedence of him. For the reception of the sacraments, and for other religious offices, the abbot and his monks were commanded to attend the nearest church (Novellae, 133, c. ii.). This rule naturally proved inconvenient when a monastery was situated in a desert or at a distance from a city, and necessity compelled the ordination of abbots. This innovation was not introduced without a struggle, ecclesiastical dignity being regarded as inconsistent with the higher spiritual life, but, before the close of the 5th century, at least in the East, abbots seem almost universally to have become deacons, if not presbyters. The change spread more slowly in the West, where the office of abbot was commonly filled by laymen till the end of the 7th century, and partially so up to the 11th. Ecclesiastical councils were, however, attended by abbots. Thus at that held at Constantinople, A.D. 448, for the condemnation of Eutyches, 23 archimandrites or abbots sign, with 30 bishops, and, c. A.D. 690, Archbishop Theodore promulgated a canon, inhibiting
