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
Elianore and others to the Corporation as an endowment, till
the school was re-founded 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,