Page:The History of the Church & Manor of Wigan part 1.djvu/95

 Hawkhurst, in Kent, on the presentation of the Abbot and Convent of Battel, which he retained until 1524, the year of his death. We can hardly imagine that he was not even in deacon's orders all this time, but there is no record of his ordination, and the church discipline of that date was exceedingly lax.

He appears to have accepted some preferment also in 1515; for Erasmus, in a letter to Ammonius, written from Dover on 10th April of that year, sends his congratulations to Linacre, of whom he says, he had heard something at the archbishop's not without pleasure. And Ammonius, in his reply, dated at London 19th May, 1515, says Linacre has a living; "sacerdotio auctus est;" from which, I suppose, we are simply to understand that he had taken the name and position of a clerk or clergyman, for certainly he did not receive his priest's orders until some years later.

Sir Thomas More, writing to Erasmus in 1516, tells him that Linacre had been speaking highly of Erasmus, as he heard from some who were present at a supper given by the King, where the praises of Erasmus were sung.

In this year also Erasmus writes to Linacre a letter, dated from St. Omer, on 5th June, 1516, in which he complains of a slight fever which had prevented his sailing, and begs him to send a prescription which had done him good when he was last in London, but which his servant had left at the druggist's. In the same letter he expresses himself anxious to see Linacre's "Lucubrations;" and, alluding to his own edition of the New Testament which had just been published in Greek, he says "the New Testament gives such satisfaction to the learned, even among divines, that the unlettered are silent for shame."

In the latter years of his life Linacre devoted himself to the study of theology, of the new views of which he had doubtless heard much from his friend Colet, who had been