Robert Ashley: Elizabethan Man of Letters

Abstract

ALTHOUGH Robert Ashley is on record as the translator of six ? works from the Italian, French, and Spanish languages, his noteworthy aim in making certain foreign works known to Elizabethan readers has received scanty attention from students of the bypaths of Elizabethan literature. He has fared better, however, among historians of the law, who recognize him as the founder of the library of the Middle Temple, where he resided for the greater part of his rather long life, and where, in the Temple Church, he was buried. An original English work by him has hitherto escaped the attention of Elizabethan scholars. I refer to his treatise entitled Of Honour (MS Ellesmere I I I 7 in the Huntington Library), which represents, I believe, the first attempt by an Englishman to deal with the subject of honor comprehensively and systematically in a separate work. An examination of this treatise1 has led me to make some inquiry into its author's life and thought. According to his own report,2 Robert Ashley was born on Saturday, July 2, I565, at nine o'clock in the evening,3 at Damerham, some seven miles from Salisbury and Wilton, the second son of