25 
generation or two ago, such as those of Daylesford ; where the 
overseers once got into such hopeless confusion that an official 
was sent down from London to examine their books. At the 
bottom of a page he struck out an item upon which they had 
relied as their only means of getting a balance, and which ran 
thus : 
“ Mauwmbled away” ..:..- so and so 
The event recorded by Foxe, and the records relating to it 
in this book of the Gloucester city expenditure, date back for 
more than three hundred and twenty years; but before entering 
on the comparison of them, it may be well to say a word or two 
as to the general trustworthiness of the Martyrologist as an 
historian. 
As must be expected in a work of such magnitude as the 
Acts and Monuments, there are inaccuracies as to dates: for in 
compiling from a multitude of sources, not a few of them oral 
descriptions, it is not possible in all cases to fix the exact dates, 
even when the facts themselves are beyond doubt. Probably 
every one who reads these lines can recall many circumstances 
which have occured within his own positive knowledge, and yet 
of which he would be unable to specify the times when they 
happened.* 
The points we look for in an historian, as tests of his trust- 
worthiness, are, first, his ability, and next, his honesty. No one 
who examines the Book of Martyrs, as it is popularly called, 
will feel any doubt that Foxe was a man of vast reading; and the 
position he held in the esteem and friendship of men who were 
the great stars in the reign of ErizapeTH would be evidence of 
* Inaccuracy in dates arising from lack of means at hand for fixing them, 
is easily distinguished from the discrepancy in dates that results from an 
endeavour to manipulate facts. A writer in a local newspaper, some time 
since, to show that Epwarp VI, or those under him, persecuted, made a 
statement that during his reign certain Anabaptists were burned ; and that 
Joun LAMBERT was put to death for disbelief in transubstantiation. Now 
as the Anabaptists were burned in 1535, and JoHN LAMBERT in 1538, 
according to this writer Epwarp VI must have signed the death warrants 
of the former, between two and three years before he was born, arid that of the 
latter nine years before he became King. 
