Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/133

 Byrnstan age of twenty-two gained the Society of Arts medal for a plate of the ‘Villa Madama,’ after Richard Wilson. He then went to Paris and became a pupil of Aliamet and afterwards of J. G. Wille. He was a member of the Incorporated Society, and exhibited in Suffolk Street between 1760 and 1780. He died in Titchfield Street, London, on 24 Sept. 1805, and was buried at Old St. Pancras Church. His works, which are numerous, display much skill in aerial perspective and beauty in the finish of the skies. Among them are ‘The Antiquities of Britain,’ after Hearne; ‘The View of the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland,’ after Joseph Farington; ‘Apollo watching the Flocks of King Admetus,’ after Lauri; ‘The Flight into Egypt,’ after Domenichino; ‘The Death of Captain Cook;’ ‘The Waterfall of Niagara,’ after Wilson, &c. Byrne had a son and three daughters, who all became artists; two daughters, Anne Frances and Letitia, are noticed above. His second daughter, Mary, married James Green (1771–1834) [q. v.]

[Redgrave's Dictionary of Artists of the English School, 1878, 8vo; MS. notes in British Museum.]  BYRNSTAN, BIRNSTAN, or BEORNSTAN (d. 933), bishop of Winchester, was in early life a king's thegn or minister of Eadward the Elder, in which capacity he attests charters of the years 900–2 (Codex Diplomaticus, mlxxvi. and mlxxvii.; cf. Liber de Hyda, pp. 97, 101, 116). In 902 he became a priest, and very probably a secular canon in the new minster of Winchester, which Ælfred the Great had projected, and Eadward himself established under the headship of Grimbald. Between 902 and 910 Byrnstan frequently appears as attesting charters, including especially the series of grants made by the king to the churches of Winchester (Cod. Dipl. mlxxxiv–mccvi.; Liber de Hyda, p. 105). After this we have no trace of his activity for twenty years. Whether an increasing fervour of devotion drove him from the court to those ascetic practices for which he became celebrated, and whether, as the later monastic writers assert, he forsook the secular life of a canon for the regular obligations of a monk, cannot be determined. The fact that the most zealous champion of the monks revived his cultus makes the latter very probable. The charters of the twenty years are too few to enable us to base any inference upon them; but in 931 the resignation of the bishopric of Winchester by the saintly Frithestan was succeeded by the election of Byrnstan to rule over the diocese with which he had been so long connected. On 29 May he was consecrated by Frithestan, but he only ruled over the church two years and a half, dying on All Saints' day 933 (Anglo-Saxon Chron. s.a.). Florence puts his death in 934, and his consecration in 932; but the attestation of a charter of 933 by Bishop Ælfheah, his successor (Cod. Dipl. mcix.), and the definite statement of the chronicle as to the length of his government of his bishopric, make the earlier date preferable. The only acts of Byrnstan as bishop that have survived are his attestation of a few charters (ib. mciii–viii.) Byrnstan had been bishop so short a time that his saintliness and charity were almost at once forgotten, until his memory was revived, a generation later, by Bishop Æthelwold. Henceforward he received the honours due to one of the holiest of the early bishops of Winchester. William of Malmesbury commends his sanctity, his humility, and his care for the poor, whose feet he daily washed, and whose needs he supplied with a lavish hand. He also tells how Byrnstan said every day a mass for the repose of the souls of the dead, and how by night, regardless of the terrors that haunt churchyards, he perambulated the cemetery in the midst of which the new minster was built, reciting psalms for the same pious purpose. In 1150 his relics were translated to a nobler sepulchre, along with those of Birinus, of Swithun, and the most famous of the occupants of the see.

[Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Florence of Worcester; Annales de Winton (Annales Monastici, vol. ii. in Rolls edition); William of Malmesbury's De Gestis Pontificum; Liber Monasterii de Hyda; Rudborne's Historia Major Wintoniensis in Anglia Sacra; Codex Diplomaticus, vol. v.; Dugdale's Monasticon, vol. ii.]  BYROM, JOHN (1692–1763), poet and stenographer, was born 29 Feb. 1691–2 at Kersall Cell, Broughton, near Manchester. He was the second son and seventh of the nine children of Edward Byrom, by his wife Sarah Allen. The Byroms of Manchester were a younger branch of the Byroms of Salford, themselves a younger branch of the Byroms of Byrom. The last representative of the parent stem was Samuel, commonly called ‘Beau Byrom,’ a spendthrift, who sold his estates (some of which were bought by John Byrom's father and uncle), got into the Fleet prison, and there published (in 1729) an ‘Irrefragable argument fully proving that to discharge great debts is .... more reasonable than to discharge small.’ It was sold for the benefit of the author, and was, in reality, a covert appeal for charity. The ‘beau’ got out of prison, and John Byrom helped him to obtain support. 