William Harrison

William Harrison was a Church of England clergyman and rector of Radwinter in Essex whose Description of England, written for Holinshed’s Chronicles of 1577, is the fullest picture we have of Elizabethan daily life: the classes and their manners, the universities, the law, food and drink, building, gardens, dogs, roads, fairs and the punishment of criminals. It is the source Shakespeare and every later historian drew on for what ordinary life looked like in the 1570s, and the Harvard Classics print it as a companion to the plays. He also wrote a chronology of the world that was never printed.