Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/243

The woodcut at page 206 is a facsimile of one given in the Boke. It exhibits Borde standing in a kind of canopied pulpit with a lectern and book before him: he wears a chaplet of laurel to denote his academical honours.

To return from these desultory observations to the few remaining notices of Dr. Borde's history, we next find this eccentric personage "prisoner in the close wards of the Fleet in London."^[1] The cause of his imprisonment, and the length of its duration, I have been unable to discover; but there, in the month of April, 1549, he died. Wood thinks he was buried in the church or churchyard of St. Bride, Fleet Street. Bale gives another account of his end, affirming that on the discovery of his alleged immorality he "took physical poyson to hasten his death," an event which he places in the year 1548. But this, as Wood shows, is incorrect, for his will was dated in the Fleet the eleventh, and proved the twenty-fifth of the April of the subsequent year. By this instrument he constitutes one Richard Mathew his heir, without stating the consanguinity, if any, between them, and bequeaths to him, inter alia, his two tenements in the Sooke, in the town of Lynn in Norfolk, his house and chattels in and near Winchester, and his tenements with appurtenances which he had by the death of his brother in Pevensey—who was probably no other than the well-beneficed priest already more than once referred to.

The foregoing pages contain the substance of all that is known of this very extraordinary man, whose life and writings manifest so strange a mixture of respectable and unworthy characteristics—who was "everything by turns, and nothing long"—and who united "the apparently opposite qualities of scholar and pedant—authorized physician and quack doctor—ascetic friar and good fellow—man of genius and buffoon!"^[2] The times in which he lived were well adapted for the production of such a character, and no subsequent phase of our