288 
• THE. ESSEX NATURALIST. 
baptized in the parish church of St. Botolph, Colchester, only 
a few years earlier the church of a priory of Augustinian Canons. 
His father who, according to tradition, lived at the small house 
at the corner of Priory and St. Botolph streets, was one William 
Harsnett, a baker, a trade still carried on there. 
The Harsnett or Halsnoth family had migrated some half 
century before from Kent, and numbered among its members 
“ a gentleman," a brewer, and a tailor, but there is no ground 
for supposing they were other than a race of thrifty and thriving 
tradesmen, with that fondness for Old Testament names belong¬ 
ing to those newly acquainted with the treasures of the 
English Bible. 
Although certainty cannot be predicated there is little doubt 
that young Harsnett was educated at Colchester Grammar School. 
The history of that home of learning from 1539, when its Pious 
Founder, Henry VIII, gave the dissolved chantries of Joseph 
Elian ore and others to the Corporation as an endowment, till 
the school was refounded by Queen Elizabeth in 1585, is some¬ 
what obscure, but there is fair evidence for its continuity. 
We know that Colchester, like the rest of England, was at 
this time the scene of much religious strife and discord. The 
Catholics were smarting under the drastic disendowment of 
the ancient faith, with the confiscation of their church goods 
and the bareness of the new services ; the Protestants were 
still full of the horror and resentment caused by the recent 
terrible burnings, which had made the town notorious; while 
the bulk of the population were probably only anxious to be 
left alone, as far as possible, to tread in peace the old paths 
which their fathers trod. 
Young Harsnett would doubtless drink in the story of the 
last thirty years from all points of view, but it seems quite 
possible that he may have been grounded by some pensioned 
Canon of St. Botolph’s, not only in that sound learning which 
he found so useful in his after career, but in that tolerance for 
the faith and practice of the past which made him a pioneer in 
the reconciliation between the Church as Reformed, and the 
still numerous Church-Papists, as they were called, who ulti¬ 
mately realized the futility of resistance and conformed to the 
Common Prayer Book. 
When fifteen, an age which seems to us absurdly young, 
