ABSTRACT
Thomas Cranmer was born at Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on 2 July 1489, the eve of the feast of the translation of St Thomas the Apostle. The family settled in Lincolnshire where they lived in a 'mansion house' called 'Cranmer Hall'. Cranmer's Norman heritage defined his family as belonging to the gentry in the midlands where the counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and Leicester meet. The Cranmers as a family held certain expectations which were reflected in Cranmer's own perception of himself. Cranmer's mother was Agnes, the daughter of Laurence Hatfield of Willoughby on the Wolds, a village to the south of Aslockton down the old Roman road of the Fosse Way. Cranmer was extremely familiar with the school at Southwell. Another possibility for Cranmer's early education was Grantham's venerable grammar school. Thomas Cranmer was fourteen years old when he arrived in Cambridge in 1503, the youngest age under the university's statutes that a student could matriculate.
