21 Jan. following appointed a receiver of petitions. On 24 May 1512 the same person was on the commission of the peace for Buckinghamshire (Brewer, Letters and Papers, i. 365, 811, 3219). It seems certain that the provost of Eton before 23 March 1510 resigned the prebend of St. Michael, Warwick, being then styled king's chaplain (ib. i. 967), and that in 1512 he was vicar of Cropredy in Oxfordshire. In 1516 a license was granted to Thomas Pygot, Roger Lupton, and others, as feoffees of the manor of Portpool with its appurtenances in Holborn, to alienate the property to the House of Jesus of Bethlehem at Shene, the convent still continuing to let out the manor, in later times known as Gray's Inn, to students of the law (ib. ii. 1778).
By 1528 Lupton had completed the preparations for his great work, the foundation of a free school in his native town of Sedbergh, and the affiliation of it, after the example of Winchester and Eton, to a college in one of the universities. He had already endowed a chantry at Sedbergh, and this he now merged in a school, with his chantry priest, Sir Harry Blomer, for its first head-master (Platt, Hist. of Sedbergh, p. 43). At St. John's, Cambridge, he founded in the same year, on its commemoration day (6 May), six scholarships, and in 1536 two fellowships and two more scholarships, making eight in all, for scholars educated at Sedbergh school (Baker, Hist. of St. John's Coll., by Mayor, i. 352). His outlay on the Cambridge branch of his endowments might now be computed at some 17,000l. His fellows and scholars were enjoined to recite at every mass a special collect for their founder. Under Edward VI the endowment became legally forfeited, from ‘superstitious uses,’ but it was restored by an order of council on 3 Nov. 1552.
In 1531 Lupton and the rest of the governing body of Eton surrendered to Henry VIII the leper hospital of St. James, Westminster, with many acres of land adjacent, in exchange for estates situated elsewhere (Kennett's MSS. xlv. fol. 123). The king obtained much the best of the bargain. On 14 July 1534 Lupton and the vice-provost, William Horman, and the other fellows subscribed, apparently without a dissentient voice, an acknowledgment of the royal supremacy (ib.) The following year he resigned the provostship of Eton. Lupton died about 25 Feb. 1539–40, when he was buried with much ceremony in his own chantry at Eton.
[Authorities quoted; Mayor's ed. of Baker's Hist. of St. John's College, Cambridge; Cooper's Athenæ Cantabrigienses, 1500–1609; Harwood's Alumni Etonenses; Cole's MS. xiii. 142; Notes and Queries, VIII. iii. 247; Ripon Chapter Acts (Surtees Soc.), pp. 89, 128, 130; Lyte's Eton College; Harry Lupton's Hist. of Thame; Platt's Hist. of Sedbergh.]
LUPTON, THOMAS (fl. 1583), miscellaneous writer, was the author of:
- ‘A Moral and Pitieful Comedie intituled All for Money. Plainly representing the Manners of Men and Fashions of the World nowe-a-dayes,’ London, 1578, 4to (b.l.) ‘This is in rhyme and remarkably scarce’ (Watt). A late and elaborate morality (see Collier, Dramatic Poetry, ii. 347), it is of great length and numbers among its characters, Learning with Money, Learning without Money, Money without Learning, Neyther Money nor Learning, Satan, Gregorie Graceles, St. Laurence, Dives, Judas, and Mother Crooke. Its heavy artillery is directed against the protean forms of avarice, and it is strongly puritanical in sentiment. The interlude is reprinted in Collier's ‘Literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ 1851.
- ‘A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sortes. Whereof some are wonderfull, some straunge, some pleasant, diuers necessary, a great sort profitable, and many very precious. At the Signe of the Cradle in Lumbard St.’ [1579], 4to (b.l.). This work, by which Lupton is chiefly known, and which was dedicated to ‘the affable Lady Margaret, countess of Darby’ (a granddaughter of Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk), went through numerous editions, one in 1595 (b.l.), another in 1599 (b.l.), and others at intervals down to 1793. It is largely composed of a variety of recipes and nostrums, equally enigmatic and grotesque. To stop an ‘aking tooth’ the writer recommends ‘a certain woorme with many feet (of some called a swyne louse) to be pricked with a needle and the tooth touched with the same needle; the payne thereof will cease immediately. This I got hardly out of an old booke.’ To the ten books of the original were added, in 1601, some anecdotes, which include the fable of Queen Elizabeth asking the Westminster boy ‘how often he had been whip't,’ and his extempore reply: ‘Infandum, Regina, jubes renovare dolorem,’ which he presently English'd ‘to the Queen's great comfort and his advancement.’ ‘It is,’ says Hunter, ‘a poor book, taken much [but not without acknowledgment] from Mizaldus.’
- ‘Sivqila [aliquis]. Too good to be true … Herein is shewed by Dialogue the wonderful manner of the people of Mauqsun, with other talk not frivolous,’ 1580, 4to [b.l.], dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton and reprinted in 1584 and 1587. The idea of the title coincides with that of the modern ‘Erewhon,’
