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Field, Richard, D.D.

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one of the best of the High Church writers of the Church of England, was born at Hampstead, Hertfordshire, is- 1561, and was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he lectured for seven years on logic and philosophy' and gained the reputation of a learned preacher and an acute disputant. He was afterwards reader of divinity at Lincoln's Inn, London, and rector of Burghclear in Hampshire. Here he refused the offer of St. Andrew's, in Holborn, London, a much more valuable living, that he might serve God and pursue his studies in a more retired situation. In 1598- queen Elizabeth made him one, of' her chaplains, and he formed a warm friendship with Richard Hooker, a man of kindred spirit. In 1604 he was made canon of Windsor, and in 1609 dean of Gloucester. "He was esteemed a perfect oracle in ecclesiastical learning. Divines, even of the first order, scarce ever went to him without loading themselves with questions. Fuller calls him 'that learned divine, whose memory smelleth like a field which the Lord hath blessed.' When king James heard him preach the first time he said, 'This is a Field for God to dwell in His majesty retained so good an opinion of him that be designed to raise him to the bishopric of Oxford; but God was pleased, as Mr. Wood remarks, to prefer him for a better place, for, on the 21st of November, 1616, he died, leaving behind him a character equally great and amiable. His reputation rests securely on his great work, The Book of the Church, which was originally issued in 1606, and with a fifth book added in 1810. A new edition, printed for the " Eccl. Hist. Society," appeared at Cambridge, 1847-52 (4 vols. 8vo).-Hook, Eccl. Biog. v, 116; Middleton, Eccl. Biog. ii, 374.