members of the High Commission. Occasionally laymen were appointed.[1] The main work of correction now fell to these officials, but books were still sometimes allowed by the archbishop or bishop in person, or by the Privy Council or some member of that body.
The reaction of the changes of 1586-88 upon the entries in the register is on the whole one of degree rather than of kind. Occasionally the wording suggests a differentiation between the functions of the wardens and those of the ecclesiastical licensers, but more often the clerk contents himself with a mere record of what 'hands' each book was under.[2] Some shifting of the point of view is doubtless involved in the fact that 'Entered vnto him for his copie' and 'Allowed vnto him for his copie' now become the normal formulas, and by 1590-1 'Licenced vnto him' has disappeared altogether.[3] But a great number of books, including most ballads and pamphlets and some plays, are still entered without note of any authority other than that of the wardens, and about 1593 the proportion of cases submitted to the ecclesiastical deputies sensibly begins to slacken, although the continuance of conditional entries shows that some caution was exercised. An intervention of the prelates in 1599 reversed the tendency again.[4] As regards plays in particular,
- [Footnote: and St. Mary's at Hill; Henry Tripp of St. Faith's and St. Stephen's,
Walbrook. Most of this information is from Hennessy. Crowley was presumably Robert Crowley, vicar of St. Giles, Cripplegate, and himself a stationer, although his activity as a Puritan preacher and pamphleteer makes his appointment an odd one for Whitgift. Moreover, he died on 18 June 1588. There may have been two Robert Crowleys, or the archbishop's list may have been drawn up earlier than Lambe dates it.]Denhams hand to the copie'.]. </poem>
Richard Jones. Entred vnto him for his Copye The twooe commicall discourses of Tomberlein the Cithian shepparde vnder the handes of Master Abraham Hartewell and the Wardens. vj^d.'
]*
- ↑ Amongst the correctors who appear later in the Register are Richard Bancroft, John Buckeridge, and Michael Murgatroyd, secretaries or chaplains to Whitgift, Samuel Harsnett, William Barlow, Thomas Mountford, John Flower, and Zacharias Pasfield, prebendaries of St. Paul's, William Dix, Peter Lyly, chaplain of the Savoy and brother of the dramatist, Lewis Wager, rector of St. James's, Garlickhithe, and dramatist, John Wilson, and Gervas Nidd. Mountford and Dix were in the High Commission of 1601. I have not troubled to trace the full careers of these men in Hennessy and elsewhere. Thomas Morley (Arber, iii. 93) and William Clowes (ii. 80) seem to have been applied to as specialists on musical and medical books respectively.
- ↑ ii. 463, 464, 508, 509, 'Alowed by the Bishop of London vnder his hand and entred by warrant of Master [warden
- ↑ A typical entry is now <poem> 'xiii^{to} die Augusti [1590
- ↑ iii. 677. A number of satirical books were condemned by name to
