hermitage, till King Ecfrith, with Trumwine, Bishop of the Picts, and other principal persons of the realm, voyaged across those two miles of wintry water, and with prayers and tears prevailed upon him to accept the office that he feared, to unearth the talent that was wrapped in a very dirty napkin and hidden away on a desolate isle. What a subject for an imaginative painter! King, bishop, and noble their robes of peace, kneeling on the grey-green bents before the unwashed and unkempt anchorite, who through the window of his scarcely habitable cell gazes upon them with a face that exhibits a strange conflict of emotions, till the almost repulsive passion for the ascetic life yields to the conviction that the Lord has called him to feed His sheep!

So Cuthbert became Bishop, not of Hexham but of Lindisfarne, Eata, once Abbot and now Bishop of the Holy Isle, agreeing to an exchange of dioceses. How strange he must have felt amid the pomp and ceremonial of his consecration, which was performed some months later at York by Archbishop Theodore, in the presence of Ecfrith and the nobles of Northumbria! But the sacrifice of inclination proved too soon to be a sacrifice of life itself: the office of a Bishop, with its continual and laborious travelling over a large and scarcely civilised diocese, was too burdensome for a constitution already undermined by asceticism, and in less than two years he retired to prepare for the not far distant end in the little wilderness that he loved more than any other place on earth.

Two months later the closing scene begins. A grievous illness, which was to last three weeks, fell upon him; but he was already subject to some chronic malady, and the monks who visited him were slow to recognise the serious nature of the attack. Herefrid, Abbot of Lindisfarne, besought the stricken man to allow some of the brethren to remain on the island and attend on him, but Cuthbert insisted on being left alone. "When shall we come again?" the Abbot enquired. "God shall show you," was the hermit's reply.

Herefrid had intended to return almost immediately, but a storm made the sea impassable for five days. As soon as the voyage was practicable, he sailed once more to Farne, and found Cuthbert lying in the guest-house by the sea in a pitiful condition, suffering from an abscess on the face, and all but dying of starvation; five raw onions were all the provisions he had, and during five days of bodily and spiritual torment he had eaten only the half of a single one.

The good Abbot remained some time on the island and nursed the dying man, washed his feet with hot water, gave him wine, put him to bed, and finally persuaded him to let two servants remain in attendance. But the malady had obtained too firm a hold, and the end drew near apace: before long he was too weak to walk, and he bade his servants carry him to the oratory of the hermitage, where in the afternoon of the same day Herefrid found him lying before the altar. severe was the sickness that his speech was "short and dim," but he was able to give his last exhortation to the brethren in broken sentences between fits of pain, speaking

"Of peace and meekness true; Them that gainstand it to eschew. Peace and holy charity,

Among you ever keep, quoth he."

And yet (let us hope that this is an interpolation) the charity was not to extend to those who did not keep Easter at the proper time. These are placed on a level with those who "lived wicked in sin." So he lingered on till the evening, and at the hour when he was wont to make his evening prayer, he received the sacrament, and presently passed away.

Peace at last! There had been little peace for Cuthbert on Farne Island: wind and water were too often at war around him, and his was one of those morbid and disquiet souls which are for ever being torn by tempests of despondency and tortured by incessant

self-introspection; even in his solitude he was ever wrestling with real or imaginary temptations, and (as he told Abbot Herefrid) the spiritual conflicts of those fearful five days of sickness and starvation had been the severest of all.

What a contrast these scenes form to the picture of Sir George Lancastre, with his garden and his twelve cows and his draught of fish every Sunday! Yet, for all that we can tell, Sir George may have been a very exemplary person, and at any rate it is pleasant to think of him as a genial and simple-hearted old gentleman, who gave away much milk and salmon to the poor of Warkworth; a learned and enthusiastic gardener also-perhaps a scholar or even a poet in a humble way. Warkworth itself is lit by one of the dawn-rays of English verse; for in the Castle yonder John Hardyng, Hotspur's esquire, must have composed much of his rhymed Chronicle. We may doubt whether any benighted lovers ever trespassed on Sir George's hospitality, but surely we must make him a merry entertainer of children, when the little ones of Warkworth came (as, park or no park, they must have come) to gather primroses in the spring or nuts in the autumn in the neighbourhood of the Hermitage; and so let us take our leave of him as he stands on the rock-hewn steps and waves his hands to his departing guests in the mellow light of a sunny evening. Poor man! How he must have missed Warkworth and the "garden orteyard," when fortune packed him off to Wigton!

R. H. F.

THE FIRST HEADMASTER OF SHREWSBURY

SCHOOL.

CCORDING to Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (I, 396, Fisher, Annals of Shrewsbury School, and the Dictionary of National Biography, Thomas Ashton, the first headmaster of the school is to be identified with Thomas Ashton of Trinity College, Cambridge, B. A. 1559-60.

Professor Mayor, in a note written some years ago, communicated to me by Dr Edward Calvert, of Shrewsbury, which I have Professor Mayor's permission to publish, argues that he should rather be identified with Thomas Ashton, of St John's, who was admitted Fellow of the College in 1523 or 1524.

The note is as follows:

"If Trinity College or Shrewsbury have proof of this statement, I have no more to say. But I have held for half a century that your Ashton was our Fellow, B.A. 1518, M.A. 1524, B.D. 1531, some years senior to Cheke and so certainly somewhat early for a humanist.

My reasons are:

1. The strong preference given to St John's in the School Ordinances.

2. The positive statement of the Town, "Mr Ashton ...somtyme of that your colledge" (Fisher, p. 433); the bailiffs could hardly be mistaken on such a point.

3. Fisher, p 30, n. 1, 29 August 1578, "Master Aston that godly father." The Trinity man would not be 40 at that date. Our Ashton would be near 80. In P. 424 he says (20 February 1573-4) “My life is short."

The whole position of authority he assumes would be out of place in a very young man."

I thought that the bursarial books of Trinity might throw some light on the matter, as one could probably learn from them whether the Trinity Ashton went out of residence at the date (1562) when the new headmaster of Shrewsbury would have to take up his duties. I accordingly wrote to the Vice-Master, Mr Aldis Wright, who kindly searched the books for me and wrote to me as follows:

"I think Cooper must be wrong in supposing that Thomas Ashton, the Fellow of Trinity, was the Thomas Ashton who was the first master of Shrewsbury School. He appears in our Bursar's books as Assheton in 1555 (scholar), Assheton (scholar) 1557, Ds Asheton (scholar) 1560, Ds Ashetone (scholar) 1561, Ds Ashton (Fellow) 1563. The years are those ending at Michaelmas. Thomas Ayshton was admitted socius minor in 1562, socius major in April 1563, and continued to reside till Midsummer 1565. At least he received both liberatura and stipendium up to that time, and I think this implied residence. From these dates its seems improbable that he was the first master of Shrewsbury."

We may therefore, till further evidence is forthcoming, accept Professor Mayor's contention that the first master of Shrewsbury School, famous not only for his success in making his School one of the best in England, but for the plays which he wrote and took a part in, was not the Trinity man but the Johnian.

At the same time one may suppose that the Thomas Ashton who was with Walter, Lord Essex, in Ireland in 1574 and 1575, and who is generally identified with the Shrewsbury Ashton, was not the aged ex-headmaster, but the younger Trinity man.

G. C. MOORE SMITH.

VOL. XXVIII.

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