Everything about William Lilye totally explained
» For the English astrologer and occultist, see William Lilly.
William Lilye, or
Lily (c.
1468 –
25 February,
1522) was an English classical
grammarian and scholar. He was an author of the most widely used Latin grammar textbook in England and was the first headmaster of
St Paul's School,
London.
Life
Lilye was born c. 1468 at
Odiham,
Hampshire and he entered the
university of Oxford in
1486. After graduating in arts he went on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem. On his return journey he put in at
Rhodes, which was still occupied by the
knights of St John, under whose protection many Greeks had taken refuge after the capture of
Constantinople by the
Turks. He then went on to
Italy, where he attended the lectures of
Sulpitius Verulanus and
Pomponius Laetus at
Rome, and of Egnatius at
Venice.
After his return he settled in
London—where he became friends with
Thomas More—as a private teacher of
grammar, and is believed to have been the first who taught Greek in that city. In 1510
Colet, dean of
St Paul's, who was then founding the school which afterwards became famous, appointed Lilye the first high master in 1512. Colet's correspondence with
Erasmus shows he first offered the position to the
Dutchman, who refused it, before considering Lilye. Ward and Waller ranked Lily "with
Grocyn and
Linacre as one of the most erudite students of Greek that England possessed". The school became a paragon of classical scholarship.
He died of the plague in London on
25 February 1522 and was buried in the north churchyard of
St. Paul's Cathedral.
Works
Lilye is famous not only as one of the pioneers of Greek learning, but as one of the joint-authors of a book, familiar to many generations of students during the 19th century, the old Eton Latin grammar or
Accidence. This
Brevissima Institutio, a sketch by Colet, corrected by
Erasmus and worked upon by Lilye, contains two portions, the author of which is indisputably Lilye. These are the lines on the genders of nouns, beginning
Propria quae maribus, and those on the conjugation of verbs beginning As in
praesenti. The
Carmen de Moribus bears Lilye's name in the early editions; but Hearne asserts that it was written by Leland, who was one of his scholars, and that Lilye only adapted it.
An edition published in 1534 was entitled
Rudimenta Grammatices. Various other parts were added and a stable form finally appeared in 1540. In 1542
Henry VIII authorised it as the sole Latin grammar textbook to be used in education and schools; it has been suggested that Henry commissioned the book but the interval between initial publication and authorisation argue against this. With corrections and revisions, it was used for more than three hundred years. It was so widely used by Elizabethan scholars that
Shakespeare was able to refer to it in the second scene of Act IV of
Titus Andronicus, quote from it in the first scene of Act II of
Henry IV, Part 1 ("
Homo is a common name to all men") and allude to it in the first scene of Act IV of
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Part of the grammar is a poem, "Carmen de Moribus", which lists school regulations in a series of pithy sentences, using a broad vocabulary, and examples of most of the rules of Latin grammar that were part of an English
grammar school curriculum. (See
Latin mnemonics.) The poem is an early reinforcement of part of the reading list in Erasmus'
De Ratione Studii of the Classical authors who should be included in the curriculum of a Latin grammar school. Specifically, the authors derived from Erasmus are
Cicero,
Terence, and
Virgil.
When
John Milton wrote his Latin grammar
Accedence Commenc't Grammar (1669), over 60 percent of his 530 illustrative quotations were taken from Lilye's grammar.
Besides the
Brevissima Institutio, Lilye wrote a variety of Latin pieces and translations from Greek, both in prose and verse. Some of the latter are printed along with the Latin verses of Sir Thomas More in
Progymnasmata Thomae Mori et Gulielmi Lylii Sodalium (1518). Another volume of Latin verse (
Antibossicon ad Gulielmum Hormannum, 1521) is directed against a rival schoolmaster and grammarian,
Robert Whittington, who had "under the feigned name of Bossus, much provoked Lilye with scoffs and biting verses."
A sketch of Lilye's life by his son George, canon of St Paul's, was written for
Paulus Jovius, who was collecting for his history the lives of the learned men of Great Britain.
Further Information
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