Life
1543-1603; b. Shropshireed. Christ Church College, Oxon., BA; chaplain of Christ-Church College, April 1567; travelled to Ireland, 1591; Archdeacon of Ross and vicar of Timealogue, 1591; treasurer of Waterford Cathedral, 1593; chancellor of Cathedral Church of St. Canice, Kilkenny, 1603; became vicar of St Leonard’s Shoreditch, London.
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Commentary
Russell Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798 (Phil: Pennsylvania UP 1959), p.66f: incl. citation from Sir James Ware to the effect that he was remembered at Shoreditch for converting brass monuments into coin (noted in The Whole Works of Sir James Ware, II, 2, p.328); Hanmer achieves an etymological connection between Finn Eric and the Finns, with Eric, through a change of consonants making Fin Erin ‘a great commander [who] conducted into Ireland many Danes’, remarking, ‘this is but my conceit, happily others can say more thereof.’ (op. cit. 45; Alspach p.67); NOTE also that Keating explicitly rejected Hanmer’s theory of Fionn MacCumhal as descendent of the Danes, as also the genealogy in the Book of Howth (Dermot O’Connor, trans., Keating, History of Ireland, 1723 Edn., p.271; Alspach, p.91).
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References
Belfast Public Library holds Ancient Irish Histories, Sir James Ware’s collection of Hamner, Spenser, and Campion (1633, 1809).
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