This refers to the Abbey of St Frideswide which, along with Wallingford Priory, was suppressed in 1525 to provide the necessary building funds. It is interesting to note that the college was subsequently suppressed in 1531 following the fall from grace of Wolsey and re-founded in 1532 as King Henry VIII's College and re-founded again in 1546 as Christ Church (the seat of the new diocese of Oxford).

No mention of this man appears in the 1563 edition. He was Rodulphus Gualterus of Zürich, who published (among other things) the first translation of the Koran into German.

The text is similar to the 1563 edition, except here (below) Foxe lists more names.

The identifiable names are John Clerke (senior canon), Henry Sumner, Godfrey Harman, William Bettes, Richard Cox, John Fryer, William Baily, John Frith, Michael Drumm, John Radley, Thomas Lawney and John Taverner. See Brian Raynor, John Frith: Scholar and Martyr (Peterborough, 2000), p.60].

This refers to the scandal of 1528, in which a number of indexed books were found to be in circulation at the college. See Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 2004), p.267.

These men are Dr John London, warden of New College (c.1526), Dr John Higden, president of Magdalen College (1516-25) and dean of Cardinal College, and Dr Thomas Cottesford, Commissary.

Clarke died in the custody of Bishop Longland of Lincoln.

William Betts was chaplain to Anne Boleyn - see Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 2004), p.266.

As noted in the 1563 edition commentary, Taverner was recruited (as early as 1524 but declined the offer until 1526) and became the 'Informator Choristarum' (or director of music and instructor of the choristers) - a prestigious position. He is now recognized as one of the most influential musicians of the period and, although later arrested for holding heretical views, his talent, ignorance of theological matters, and Wolsey's opinion that Lutheranism was exclusively a clerical issue saved him from death. See TNA, State Papers 1/47, fol.111A. For more details on his music, see the biography at http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/ taverner.html or the listing in David M Greene, Greene's Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers (London, 1985), pp.30-1. Also see, Roger Bowers, 'Taverner, John (c.1490-1545)', in ODNB (Oxford, 2004), 53, pp.836-40.

This refers to the abjurations of Anthony Dalaber - a bookseller - and Thomas Garrett in 1528.

Frith was released from imprisonment in 1528 and spent the next four years travelling Europe, sometimes in the company of William Tyndale. He was, for instance, with Tyndale at Marburg and Antwerp, but Frith also travelled around the centres of Reformed Protestantism (e.g., Basel and Zurich). The influence of Oecolampadius is obvious in his later doctrine.

There may be more to the story here than Foxe relates. Although not mentioned in S F Ryle's biography of Cox in the ODNB (but according to Frederic Carpenter), Cox (Coxes or Cockes) was a friend of both Erasmus and Melanchthon. In 1524, he was the schoolmaster of Reading Grammar School and was much noted for his The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryck which was the first such book published in England in the vernacular. Much of it is a translation of Melanchthon's Institutiones Rhetoricae (1521). While Ryle notes its publication in 1530, Carpenter notes that this was a second edition. See Frederic Ives Carpenter, 'Leonard Cox and the First English Rhetoric', in Modern Language Notes 13:5 (May 1898), pp.146-7 and S F Ryle, 'Cox, Leonard', in ODNB, 13, pp.854-6].

The earliest translation of Homer's Iliad into English was in 1598 by the dramatist George Chapman.

This would be October 1532. Frith appears to have been preaching at Bow Lane.

Foxe does not go into the chain of events very deeply at this point which is unfortunate as the events are quite interesting. Simon Fish, in exile in Antwerp in 1529, had written a vehemently anti-clerical short pamphlet entitled Supplication of the Beggars in which he disputed the existence of purgatory (from a 'sola scriptura' perspective) and, consequently, the validity of papal indulgences as he construes them to be. He also made the argument that the clergy had usurped certain temporal powers. Such an argument as this was, of course, calculated to appeal to a king who was, at the time, vying with papal obstructionism over his effort to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In October 1529, Thomas More responded to the pamphlet with his The Supplycatyon of Soulys (in two books) defending the doctrine of purgatory with all the wit and logic at his command. It was on this point of purgatorial doctrine that Frith comes into the picture, determined to undertake an answer to More's book on Fish's behalf and in defence of his anti-purgatorial theology.

Frith had published two books in 1529. One of these was entitled Patrick's Places - the translation of a short treatise of the Scottish reformer, Patrick Hamilton, covering such issues as law, gospel, charity and good works. The other work of that year was the much more important The Revelation of Antichrist written under the pseudonym Richard Brightwell. This treatise consists of an introductory letter and three sections dedicated to doctrine, of which only the first section - 'An Epistle unto the Christian Reader' - is original. The other two sections - 'The Revelation of Antichrist' and 'Antithesis between Christ and the Pope' - are respectively translations of Luther's Concerning Antichrist (1521) and Melanchthon's Suffering of Christ and Antichrist (1521). Frith, in this way, presented the doctrine of 'sola fide' to the English reading public. In 1531, while still in exile, Frith wrote two considerable more original treatises. The lesser of the two is a commentary on the last will of the executed heretic William Tracy, entitled Tracy's Testament. The greater work - entitled A disputation of Purgatory - is an attack on the traditional Catholic orthodoxy as presented in three other recent English works. These are John Rastell's rationalist account New Book of Purgatory (1530), Thomas More's scriptural account The Supplycatyon of Soulys (1529) and Bishop John Fisher's patristic account Confutation of Lutheran Assertions (1523). These are discussed in Carl R Trueman, Luther's Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525-1556 (Oxford, 1994), pp.121-56.