_Holingshed._ “I cannot take my leave of Holingshed without clearing up a
difficulty which hath puzzled his biographers. Nicholson and others have
_supposed_ him a _clergyman_. Tanner goes further and tells us that he was
educated at Cambridge and actually took the degree of M.A. in 1544.—Yet it
appears by his will, printed by Hearne, that at the end of life he was
only a _steward_, or a _servant_ in some capacity or other, to Thomas
Burdett, Esq. of Bromcote, in Warwickshire.—These things Dr. Campbell
could not reconcile. The truth is we have no claim to the education of the
_Chronicler_: the M.A. in 1544 was not _Raphael_, but one _Ottiwell
Holingshed_, who was afterward named by the founder one of the first
Fellows of Trinity College” (Farmer).