# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Harrison, William (1534-1593)

​HARRISON, WILLIAM (1534–1593), topographer, chronologer, and historian, was born in Cordwainer Street (or Bow Lane), London, on 18 April 1534, ‘hora 11, minut. 4, secunda 56.’ He was educated first at St. Paul's School and then (he says) at ‘Westminster School, in which I was sometime an vnprofitable grammarian under the reuerend father, master [Alexander] Nowell’ [q. v.], ‘now deane of Paules;’ then at Cambridge in 1551, and afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. 1556 and M.A. 1560. Later Harrison was chaplain to Sir William Brooke, lord Cobham, who gave him the rectory of Radwinter in Essex, to which he was inducted on 16 Feb. 1558–9, and which he held till his death. On 28 Jan. 1570–1 he obtained also the vicarage of Wimbish in Essex from Francis de la Wood, but resigned it in the autumn of 1581. By 1571 he had married Marion Isebrande, ‘daughter to William Isebrande and Ann his wife, sometyme of Anderne, neere vnto Guisnes in Picardie.’ On 23 April 1586 Harrison was appointed canon of Windsor, and installed the day after. At Windsor he died in 1593, and his will—dated at Radwinter, 27 July 1591—was proved by his son Edmund on 22 Nov. 1593. He left also an unmarried daughter, Anne, and another daughter married to Robert Baker. He outlived his wife.
Queen Elizabeth's printer, Reginald Wolfe [q. v.], planned ‘an vniversall Cosmographie of the whole world … with particular histories of euery knowne nation,’ and secured Harrison's help in it. After twenty-five years' work at the scheme Wolfe died about 1576; his successors narrowed his plan to descriptions and histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and for this work Harrison wrote his ‘Description of England’ and turned into English Bellenden's Scottish translation of Hector Boece's Latin ‘Description of Scotland.’ Harrison's famous ‘Description of England’ was set before Holinshed's ‘Chronicle’ (1st ed. 1577; 2nd ed., revised and enlarged, 1586–7), and his English version of Bellenden appeared in Holinshed's ‘Chronicle,’ vol. ii. The latter took him ‘three or foure daies.’ Two unprinted works by Harrison, apparently compiled as part of Wolfe's scheme, are in the diocesan library at Derry in Ireland: three big folios, vols. ii. iii. iv. of his ‘great Chronologie,’ ‘which he had gathered and compiled with most exquisit diligence’ (Chron. iii. A 4, ed. 1587), from the Creation to February 1592–3, two months before his death; and his much-corrected manuscript on weights and measures, Hebrew, Greek, English, &c., dated 1587. He pasted his corrections over his mistakes; the paste has perished, and the correction-slips are now all loose in the manuscript.
Harrison unluckily began his ‘Description of England’ by turning into words ‘maister Thomas Sackfords cardes’ or ‘Charts of the seuerall prouinces of this realme,’ describing the courses of rivers, &c.; but once clear of these in book i., he gave in book ii. a very valuable account of the institutions and inhabitants of England, their food, dress, houses, &c. In book iii. he described the products of the land, its inns and fairs. His racy accounts of our forefathers' dress—‘except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see anie so disguised as are my countrie men of England;’ of their food, their houses in chap. xii., the ‘amendment of lodging, since they had a good round log vnder their heads instead of a bolster or pillow;’ his description of the artificer and husbandman—‘so merie without malice, and plaine without inward … craft, that it would doo a man good to be in companie among them’—have made Harrison one of the most often quoted and trusted authorities on the condition of England in Elizabeth's and Shakespeare's days. His ‘Chronologie’ of his own time, in vol. iv. of his manuscript ‘Chronologie,’ is also of value. Extracts are given from it in Dr. Furnivall's edition of Harrison's ‘Description of England’ (i. xlvii–lx), 1877.
[Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr.; Harrison's Description of England, bks. ii. and iii., New Shakspere Soc., 1877, &c., and authorities there cited.]
F. J. F.