He was born at Sherbourn, in Gloucestershire, in 1693. We know little of his boyhood except that he went to the Grammar School at Northleach, and that the memory of this fact was preserved at the school in 1832 when Rigaud was writing his memoir. [The school is at present shut up for want of funds to carry it on; and all inquiries I have made have failed to elicit any trace of this memory.] Similarly we know little of his undergraduate days at Oxford, except that he entered as a commoner at Balliol in 1710, took his B.A. in the regular course in 1714, and his M.A. in 1717. As a career he chose the Church, being ordained in 1719, and presented to the vicarage of Bridstow in Monmouthshire; but he only discharged the duties of vicar for a couple of years, for in 1721 he returned to Oxford as Professor of Astronomy, an appointment which involved the resignation of his livings; and so slight was this interruption to his career as an astronomer that we may almost disregard it, and consider him as an astronomer from the first. But to guard against a possible misconception, let me say that Bradley entered on a clerical career in a thoroughly earnest spirit; to do otherwise would have been quite foreign to his nature. When vicar of Bridstow he discharged his duties faithfully towards that tiny parish, and moreover was so active in his uncle's parish of Wansted that he left the reputation of having been curate there, although he held no actual appointment. And thirty years later, when he was Astronomer Royal and resident at Greenwich, and when the valuable vicarage of Greenwich was offered to him by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he honourably refused the preferment, "because the duty of a pastor was incompatible with his other studies and necessary engagements." [Sidenote: Learnt astronomy _not_ at Oxford, but from his uncle, James Pound.] [Sidenote: Pound a first-rate observer.]