tonbury, the 1570 edition is also known to have been bought at the same time. Various editions—mostly mutilated but still chained—are known to exist or have very recently existed in the parish churches of Apethorpe (Northamptonshire), Arreton (Isle of Wight), Chelsea, Enstone (Oxfordshire), Kinver (Staffordshire), Lessingham (Norfolk), St. Nicholas (Newcastle-on-Tyne), Northwold (Norfolk), Stratford-on-Avon, Waltham, St. Cuthbert (Wells).
Of modern editions that edited by S. R. Cattley, with introduction by Canon Townsend, in eight volumes (1837–41), is the best known. It professed to be based on the 1583 edition, with careful collation of other early editions. But Dr. Maitland proved these pretensions to be false, and showed that the editing was perfunctorily and ignorantly performed. Slight improvements were made in a reissue (1844–9). In 1877 Dr. Stoughton professed to edit the book again in eight volumes, but his text and notes are not very scholarly. The earliest abridgment was prepared by Timothy Bright and issued, with a dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1589. Another, by the Rev. Thomas Mason of Odiham, appeared, under the title of ‘Christ's Victorie over Sathans Tyrannie,’ in 1615. Slighter epitomes are Leigh's ‘Memorable Collections,’ 1651; ‘A brief Historical Relation of the most material passages and persecutions of the Church of Christ … collected by Jacob Bauthumley,’ London, 1676; and ‘MAΡΤΥΡΟΛΟΓΙΑ ΑΛΦΑΒΕΤΙΚΗ,’ by N. T., M.A., T.C.C., London, 1677. A modern abridgment, by John Milner (1837), was reissued in 1848 and 1863, with an introduction by Ingram Cobbin [q. v.] Numerous extracts have been published separately, mainly as religious tracts. John Stockwood appended to his ‘Treasure of Trueth,’ 1576, ‘Notes appertayning to the matter of Election gathered by the Godly and learned father, I. Foxe.’ Hakluyt appropriated Foxe's account of Richard I's voyage to Palestine (Voyages, 1598, vol. ii.) Foxe's accounts of the martyrs of Sussex, Suffolk, and other counties have been collected and issued in separate volumes.
With the puritan clergy, and in almost all English households where puritanism prevailed, Foxe's ‘Actes’ was long the sole authority for church history, and an armoury of arguments in defence of protestantism against catholicism. Even Nicholas Ferrar, in his community of Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, directed that a chapter of it should be read every Sunday evening along with the Bible, and clergymen repeatedly made its stories of martyrdom the subject of their sermons. But as early as 1566, when Nicholas Harpsfield wrote his ‘Sex Dialogi,’ which his friend, Alan Cope, published under his own name, Foxe's veracity has been powerfully attacked. Robert Parsons the jesuit condemned the work as a carefully concocted series of lies in his ‘Treatise of the Three Conversions of England,’ 1603. Archbishop Laud in 1638 refused to license a new edition for the press (Rushworth, ii. 450), and was charged at his trial with having ordered the book to be withdrawn from some parish churches (Laud, Works, iv. 405). Peter Heylyn denied that Foxe was an authority on matters of doctrine affecting the church of England. Jeremy Collier contested his accuracy in his ‘Ecclesiastical History,’ 1702–14. Dr. John Milner, the Roman catholic bishop of Castabala (d. 1826), and George Leo Haydock, in ‘A Key to the Roman Catholic Office,’ 1823, are the best modern representatives of catholic critics. William Eusebius Andrews's ‘Examination of Foxe's Calendar,’ 3 vols. 1826, is an intemperate attack from the same point of view. But the most learned impugner of Foxe's honesty and accuracy was Dr. S. R. Maitland [q. v.], who in a series of pamphlets and letters issued between 1837 and 1842 subjected portions of his great work to a rigorous scrutiny.
The enormous size of Foxe's work has prevented a critical examination of the whole. But it is plain from such examination as the work has undergone that Foxe was too zealous a partisan to write with historical precision. He is a passionate advocate, ready to accept any primâ facie evidence. His style has the vigour that comes of deep conviction, and there is a pathetic picturesqueness in the forcible simplicity with which he presents his readers with the details of his heroes' sufferings. His popularity is thus amply accounted for. But the coarse ribaldry with which he belabours his opponents exceeds all literary license. His account of the protestant martyrs of the sixteenth century is mainly based on statements made by the martyrs themselves or by their friends, and they thus form a unique collection of documents usually inaccessible elsewhere and always illustrative of the social habits and tone of thought of the English protestants of his day. ‘A Compendious Register’ (Lond. 1559) of the Marian martyrs by Thomas Brice [q. v.] doubtless supplied some hints. Foxe's mistakes sometimes arise from faulty and hasty copying of original documents, but are more often the result of wilful exaggeration. A very friendly critic, John Deighton, showed that Foxe's account of the martyrdom of ‘Jhon Horne and a woman’ at Newent on 25 Sept. 1556 is an amplification of the suffering at the stake of Edward Horne
