[Sidenote:  Rector of Boscombe]

[Sidenote:  Prebend of Salisbury]

About this time the Parsonage or Rectory of Boscum, in the Diocese of Sarum, and six miles from that City, became void.  The Bishop of Sarum is patron of it; but in the vacancy of that See,—­which was three years betwixt the translation of Bishop Pierce to the See of York, and Bishop Caldwell’s admission into it,—­the disposal of that, and all benefices belonging to that See, during this said vacancy, came to be disposed of by the Archbishop of Canterbury:  and he presented Richard Hooker to it in the year 1591.  And Richard Hooker was also in the said year instituted, July 17, to be a Minor Prebend of Salisbury, the corps to it being Nether-Haven, about ten miles from that City; which prebend was of no great value, but intended chiefly to make him capable of a better preferment in that church.  In this Boscum he continued till he had finished four of his eight proposed books of “The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” and these were entered into the Register-Book in Stationers’ Hall, the 9th of March, 1592, but not published till the year 1594, and then were with the before-mentioned large and affectionate Preface, which he directs to them that seek—­as they term it—­the reformation of the Laws and Orders Ecclesiastical in the Church of England; of which books I shall yet say nothing more, but that he continued his laborious diligence to finish the remaining four during his life;—­of all which more properly hereafter;—­but at Boscum he finished and published but only the first four, being then in the 39th year of his age.

He left Boscum in the year 1595, by a surrender of it into the hands of Bishop Caldwell:  and he presented Benjamin Russell, who was instituted into it the 23rd of June in the same year.

[Sidenote:  Rector of Bishops-bourne]

The Parsonage of Bishop’s Bourne in Kent, three miles from Canterbury, is in that Archbishop’s gift; but, in that latter end of the year 1594, Dr. William Redman, the Rector of it, was made Bishop of Norwich; by which means the power of presenting to it was pro ea vice in the Queen; and she presented Richard Hooker, whom she loved well, to this good living of Bourne, the 7th July, 1595; in which living he continued till his death, without any addition of dignity or profit.

And now having brought our Richard Hooker from his birth-place, to this where he found a grave, I shall only give some account of his books and of his behaviour in this Parsonage of Bourne, and then give a rest both to myself and my Reader.

His first four books and large epistle have been declared to be printed at his being at Boscum, anno 1594.  Next I am to tell, that at the end of these four books there was, when he first printed them, this Advertisement to the Reader.  “I have for some causes, thought it at this time more fit to let go these first four books by themselves, than to stay both them and the rest, till the whole might together be published.  Such generalities of the cause in question as are here handled, it will be perhaps not amiss to consider apart, by way of introduction unto the books that are to follow concerning particulars; in the mean time the Reader is requested to mend the Printer’s errors, as noted underneath.”