Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/380

 land, Boorde came back to London, attending a patient in Yorkshire on his road, and saw Cromwell. In London two horses were stolen from him; and in 1537-13 Aug. from Cambridge-he appealed to Cromwell to get them back from their buyers, and also recover 53l. owed to him by Londoners, who called him ‘ appostata, and all-to-nowght’ (good-for-nothing), and otherwise slandered him. Late in 1537, or after the dissolution of the religious houses in 1538, Boorde must have started for his longest tour abroad, and gone through Calais, Gravelines, Antwerp, Cologne, Coblentz, Worms, Venice, thence by ship to Rhodes and Joppa, and on to Jerusalem to see the Holy Sepulchre. He probably came back through Naples and Rome, crossed the Alps, and settled down for a time at his favourite university, Montpelier, ‘the most nobilis vniversite of the world for phisicians and surgions,' ‘the hed vniuersite in al Europe for the practes of physycke.' There, by 1542, he had written his ‘Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge' (publ. 1547 ?)-the first printed ‘Handbook of Europe’—his ‘Dyetary’ (publ. 1542 ?), his Breuyary of Health’ (publ. 1547), and his lost ‘Boke of Berdes’ (beards). In his ‘Dyetary’ he embodied a little anonymous treatise (‘The boke for to Lerne a man to be wyse, in buylding of his howse for the helth his soule and body. The boke for a good of body to holde quyetnes for the helth of husbands to lerne;’ Robert Wyer [London, 1540 ?], which he had either written previously himself, or which he then stole. His ‘Boke of Berdes’ (condemning them) we know only from the imperfect copy of an answer to it by one Barnes-‘Barnes in the defence of the Berde 'or ‘The treatise answeryng the hoke of Berdes,' London, 1543 ?, in which he accuses Boorde of getting drunk at a Dutchman's house, and vomiting over his long beard, which stank so next morning that he had to shave it off.

Boorde was no doubt in England when his ‘Dvetary’ was published in 1542, though its dedication to the Duke of Norfolk is dated from Montpelier, 5 May, for Barnes says that on Boorde's return, evidently to London, where many patients resorted to him, he ‘had set forth  bokes to be prynted in Fleet Strete.’ He probably settled at Winchester, and in 1545 published a ‘Pronosticacion,' as he most likely did in earlier and later years. In 1547 he may have been for a time in London—a ‘Doctor Borde’ was then the last tenant of the house appropriated to the master of the hospital of St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields—to see to the publication of his books, which had been five years in the press: the ‘Breuyary’ (a medical treatise), its companion ‘Astronamye’ (‘I dyd wrett and make this boke in iiii dayes, and wretten with one old pen with out mendyng’), and his ‘Introduction of Knowledge,' besides a second edition of his ‘Dyetary.' Soon after this, ‘within this eight yere,’ says the Bishop of Winchester, Dr. John Poynet, in 1556, Boorde was proved before the justices to have kept three loose women ‘in his chamber at Wigchester,’ ‘and the harlots openly in the stretes and great churche of Winchester [were] punished,' Whether for this, or some other and later offence, Boorde was put into the Fleet prison in London, and there, on 9 April 1549, made his will, leaving two houses in Lynn (which Recorder Conysby had given him), tenements in Pevensey, Sussex (which he got on the death of his brother), and houses and chattels in and about Winchester. He died soon after, probably near sixty years old, and his will was proved on 25 April 1549.

Besides the books above named, Boorde’s ‘Itinerary of England,' or ‘Peregrination of Doctor Boorde,’ was printed by Hearne in 1735 (Ab. Pet. de Hen. III et Ric. II, ii. 764-804); his ‘Itinerary of Europe’ (Introduction, p. 145), and his ‘Boke of Sermons’ (Extrauagantes, fol. vi.) are not known to exist ; two bits of ‘Almanacs’ or ‘Prognostications’ in the British Museum for 1537 and 1540 (?) may or may not be his. The books &c. assigned to him without any evidence are: ‘The Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam,’ ‘Scogins Jests’ (‘an idle thing unjustly fathered upon Dr. Boorde,’ says Anthony à Wood), ‘The Mylner of Abynton,’ and a jocose poem on friars, ‘Nos Vagabunduli.’ He is also absurdly supposed to have been the original Merryandrew. The ‘Promptuarium Physices’ and ‘De iudicijs urinarium,’ which Bale assigns to Boorde, maybe his ‘Breuyary,' and its second part, ‘The Extravagantes.' Besides the first Handbook of Europe, we owe to Boorde the first printed specimen of the Gypsy language, given in his description of Egypt in his 'Introduction.' His anticipation of Shakspere in the close of the passage following is well known: ‘Englishmen be bold. strong, and mighty; the women be ful of bewty, and they be decked gaily. They fare sumptiously; God is serued in their churches deuoutly; but treson and deceyt among them is vsed craftyly, the more pitie; for yf they were true wythin themselfs, thei nede not to fere although al nacions were set against them’ (Introd. ch. i. p. 119). For his treatment of another of Shakspere’s topics, Englishman's fantasticality in dress, Boorde made himself famous by his woodcut of an Englishman standing