John Strype was the son of a German refugee who fled to England on account of his religion, and there followed the business of a silk merchant. The son was born in London, in 1643, and educated at Catherine Hall, Cambridge. At that university, and also at Oxford, he took his master’s degree, in 1671. Entering into orders, he became successively curate of Theydon-Boys, in Essex, preacher in Low Leyton, rector of Terring, in Sussex, and lecturer at Hackney. He resigned his clerical charges in 1724, and from that time till his death, which occurred in 1737, he resided at Hackney, with an apothecary, who had married his grand-daughter. Strype was an industrious and even laborious collector of literary antiquities. His works afford ample illustrations of ecclesiastical history and biography, at periods of deep national interest and importance, and they are now ranked among the most valuable of English standard memorials. His writings consist of a “Life of Archbishop Cranmer;” a “Life of Sir Thomas Smith;” a “Life of Bishop Aylmer;” a “Life of Sir John Cheke;” “Annals of the Reformation,” in four volumes; a “Life of Archbishop Grindal;” “Life and Letters of Archbishop Parker;” “Life of Archbishop Whitgift;” and “Ecclesiastical Memorials,” in three volumes. He also edited Stow’s “Survey of London,” and part of Dr. Lightfoot’s works.
General
Of Strype, it would be impossible to speak too highly. His labours have supplied us with some of the most necessary, as well as instructive, portions of Church history…. A writer, who, all fidelity, and honest and honourable in the letter and spirit of every thing which he wrote, seems, nevertheless, too frequently to have been under the influence of a somnolency which it was impossible to shake off. Strype is a fine, solid, instructive fellow, for a large arm chair, in a gothic study, before a winter’s fire; but you must not deposit him on the shelves of your Tusculum—to be carried to rustic seats in arbours and bowers; by the side of gurgling streams or rushing cascades. There is neither fancy, nor brilliancy, nor buoyancy, about him; he is a sage to consult, rather than a companion to enliven.
Honest John Strype.
I have no wish to cavil at what Strype says, and I think no one feels more strongly than I do the value of his work; but really it is one great inconvenience of the careless way in which he wrote, that one cannot bring one passage to correct another, without a high probability of its containing something in itself which needs correction…. We are certainly much indebted to Strype for publishing many manuscripts which he found in old collections, but we must receive what he says of them, and from them, with a constant recollection that, in his estimation, one old manuscript appears to have been about as good as another.
His works have been printed in 27 vols., 8vo…. and though valuable as storehouses of information, are of the Dryasdust order.
The most famous antiquary of the period.
Strype’s lack of literary style, unskilful selection of materials, and unmethodical arrangement render his books tiresome to the last degree. Even in his own day his cumbrous appendixes caused him to be nicknamed the “appendix-monger.” His want of critical faculty led him into serious errors, such as the attribution of Edward VI of the foundation of many schools which had existed long before that king’s reign…. To students of the ecclesiastical and political history of England in the sixteenth century the vast accumulations of facts and documents of which his books consist render them of the utmost value.
