Journal of Proceedings. clix
storeys to the more ancient buildings. There was not time, however,
for long delay, and the visitors somewhat reluctantly mounted their
conveyances and proceeded along the dusty roads to the pleasant village
of Cressing, seated on a little tributary of the Blackwater, and celebrated
even in Saxon times for its water-cresses, and later as one of the Essex
hop-gardens. The Knights Templars had a preceptory here, and on their
suppression their lands were given to the Hospitallers of S. John of
Jerusalem. Cressing Temple, shorn of its old importance, is now a farm-
house, but it still retains some carved wood-work, and traces of the
ancient moat.
Mr. Shoobridge had caused some old foundations and part of a wall
to be excavated. Two magnificent old barns, formerly belonging to the
Knights Templars, attracted much notice.
Black Notley, " the Mecca of all good Essex Naturalists," to quote the
words of the programme, was the next halting place. Here the party
was welcomed by the Rector, the Rev. T. Overton, the Rev. J. W. Ken-
worthy and others.
Here the party (increased by an attentive band of local friends and
villagers) soon gathered round the tomb of the illustrious John Ray, a
man of whom Essex will ever be proud, to listen to Prof. Boulger's
discourse on :—
The Domestic Life of John Ray at Black Notley.
By Prof. G. S. Boulger, F.L.S., F.G.S.
This unpretending hamlet witnessed alike the birth and the death of
him who was, perhaps, England's greatest naturalist. Here and at the
grammar school at Braintree he passed the first seventeen or eighteen
years of his life ; and, after occasional visits, returning here when nearly
fifty-three years of age, it was here that the last twenty-five years—the
most productive of his life—were spent; and here, in the churchyard,
among his ancestors, his body was laid to rest. There is some little
doubt as to the date of his birth, the month at least of the usually
received date, " November 29th, 1628," being rendered impossible by the
fact that his baptism, in the parish church of Black Notley, is registered
under June 29th, 1628." In an interesting skeleton biography in
Linnaeus' handwriting in a copy of Ray's ' Synopsis Quadrupedum,' at
the Linnean Society, the year has been written 1626, but corrected to
1628, probably by Sir J. E. Smith. The strongest evidence, however,
has hitherto been overlooked. In a letter dated June 80th, 1702,
printed by Derham and by Lankester, and of which the original is in
the Botanical Department of the British Museum, Ray himself writes :
" I am now almost threescore and fifteen years of age," a statement too
explicit to mean threescore and thirteen and a-half, but pointing
rather to 1627 as the year of his birth. Though the son of a black-
smith, Ray seems to have always been of delicate health, being, accord-
ing to Calamy, and as his portraits suggest, consumptive ; and after
leaving Braintree grammar school for Cambridge, in Kill, he seems to
have been but little in his native county until 1677. His letters, how-
ever, tell us of his being at Black Notley in the Octobers of 1667 and 1668.
Having taken Holy Orders in 1660, resigned his Fellowship of Trinity
College on the passing of the Bartholomew Act two years later, lived