Timothe Bright, doctor of phisicke : a memoir of "the father of modern shorthand" / by William J. Carlton.

  • Carlton, William J. (William John), 1886-1973.
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Timothe Bright, doctor of phisicke : a memoir of "the father of modern shorthand" / by William J. Carlton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    27/258 (page 5)
    While, in the absence of information with regard to the family connections of this functionary, it would be rash to assume any relationship between him and the subject of the present Memoir, there is nothing either in the scanty records available concerning the former or the equally meagre particulars of the latter’s early life inconsistent with the possibility of their being father and son. The Mayor may well have been a respectable tradesman of slender fortune—just such a one as might be expected to enter his boy as a humble student at the University,which is precisely what the father of Timothy Bright did. Born and nurtured, as he was, under the shadow of that great shrine of classic learning, it would be strange indeed if the future stenographer’s name had not been enrolled among her alumni. The next ascertained fact in the life of Timothy Bright is that he was matriculated as a subsizar1 of Trinity College, Cambridge, on May 21, 1561. In the matriculation book preserved in the University Registry the ages of some of the younger students are jotted in the margin, and against Bright’s name is the note “ imp[ubes] 11.” This is the only indication we have of the date of his birth, which must have taken place in 1550 or 1551—probably the former. It is to be re- membered that the legal year then began on March 25, so that if his age in May, 1561, was eleven years, his birth must have occurred at some date between March 25, 1 Both sizars and subsizars were entered in the matriculation register under the general heading “ sizars,” but the Mason manuscripts at Trinity (copied by Cole, British Museum Addi- tional MS. 5846, p. 284) show that Bright belonged to the lower class.