Tedious brief tales of Granta and GramaryeGray, Arthur
General
Tedious brief tales of Granta and Gramarye
Gray, Arthur
Ghost stories, English; Jesus College (University of Cambridge) -- Fiction; Short stories, English
So meagre is the record of his life’s work that it is contained in a
few bare notices in the College Bursar’s Books, in the Grace Books
which date his matriculation and degrees, and in the entry of his
burial in the register of All Saints’ Parish. These simple annals I
have ventured to supplement with details of a more or less hypothetical
character which will serve to show what humanity lost by his early
death. Readers will be able to judge for themselves the degree of care
which I have taken not to import into the story anything which may
savour of the improbable or romantic.
Anthony Ffryar matriculated in the year 1541-2, his age being then
probably 15 or 16. He took his B.A. degree in 1545, his M.A. in 1548.
He became a Fellow about the end of 1547, and died in the summer of
1551. Such are the documentary facts relating to him. Dr. Reston was
Master of the College during the whole of his tenure of a Fellowship
and died in the same year as Ffryar. The chamber which Ffryar occupied
as a Fellow was on the first floor of the staircase at the west end
of the Chapel. The staircase has since been absorbed in the Master’s
Lodge, but the doorway through which it was approached from the
cloister may still be seen. At the time when Ffryar lived there the
nave of the Chapel was used as a parish church, and his windows
overlooked the graveyard, then called “Jesus churchyard,” which is now
a part of the Master’s garden.
[Illustration: _North West Corner of Cloisters._]
Ffryar was of course a priest, as were nearly all the Fellows in his
day. But I do not gather that he was a theologian, or complied more
than formally with the obligation of his orders. He came to Cambridge
when the Six Articles and the suppression of the monasteries were of
fresh and burning import: he became a Fellow in the harsh Protestant
days of Protector Somerset: and in all his time the Master and the
Fellows were in scarcely disavowed sympathy with the rites and beliefs
of the Old Religion. Yet in the battle of creeds I imagine that he
took no part and no interest. I should suppose that he was a somewhat
solitary man, an insatiable student of Nature, and that his sympathies
with humanity were starved by his absorption in the New Science which
dawned on Cambridge at the Reformation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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