ABSTRACT
On the discovery of one significant piece of personal documentation, a collection of fragmentary evidences has emerged for the reconstruction of the life of William Buckley, an English schoolmaster who lived and worked in Greenwich and Cambridge in the first half of the sixteenth century. At one level, the evidence for William Buckley's life and cultural innovations fits snugly into the usual story, or the 'grand narrative' of the early English Renaissance. This chapter is structured as a number of themed sections, each dealing with one aspect of the fragments which survive for William Buckley's life. In this sense it is a simple structure arising from the description of various fragments which themselves emerged because of the chance finding of the single piece of new evidence – the will document. William Buckley's last will and testament is very similar to many such texts also found in the will registers of the Canterbury Prerogative Court in the sixteenth century.
