Page:The Life of Thomas Linacre.djvu/15

THE LIFE OF CHAPTER I.

Birth — Family — Early Education — William Tilly, alias William de Selling — Established Mode of Instruction in the Fifteenth Century — Sent to Oxford — State of Learning — Grocyn — Latimer — More.

was born at Canterbury. The names of his parents have eluded research, and the time of his birth is uncertain; it probably took place A.D. 1460. The genealogy of the family, from which he boasted a descent, has been recorded with more certainty. It was seated in Derbyshire, and was respectable by its antiquity, a sufficient reason why his birth has been assigned to that county, with which he could have been only collaterally connected. Holinshed, who wrote in an age when the fact might have been ascertained without difficulty, gives this honour to the town of