William Harrison's Historical Description of the Island of Britain (1577) provides the fullest contemporary account of social institutions and behavior in Elizabethan England. Recent research has put the Historical Description into its proper context by emphasizing the substantial differences between the 1577 edition and the fuller 1587 edition, the source of so much vivid detail, and by discovering some of Harrison's many unpublished historical and chronological works. These previously unknown writings extend the range of Harrison's learning, already impressively wide in the Historical Description; establish him as a major figure in Elizabethan historical scholarship; and also demonstrate a more profoundly Protestant social vision than a cursory mining of the Historical Description would suggest.

By his own account Harrison was born in the "house next to the Holy Lamb toward Cheapside," in Cordwainer Street, London, at "hora 11, minut 4, Secunde 56," on Sunday, 18 April 1535. He less precisely described his parents, Anne and John Harrison...