Thomas Farnaby

After some military service in the Low Countries he made shift, says Anthony Wood, to be set on shore in the western part of England; where, after some wandering to and fro under the name of Thomas Bainrafe, the anagram of his surname, he settled at Martock, in Somersetshire, and taught the grammar school there for some time with success.

He had boarders as well as day scholars, held his classes in a large garden-house, and joined several houses and gardens together to meet the needs of his establishment.

[1] Such was his success that he was enabled to buy an estate at Otford near Sevenoaks, Kent, to which he retired from London in 1636, while carrying on as schoolmaster.

[1] In politics he was a royalist; and, suspected of participation in the rising near Tunbridge, 1643,[1] he was arrested by the parliamentarians, and was committed to Newgate Prison.

He was placed on board ship with a view to his transportation to America, but was ultimately sent to Ely House, Holborn, where he was detained for a year.

His works chiefly consisted of annotated editions of Latin authors Juvenal, Persius, Seneca, Martial, Lucan, Virgil, Ovid and Terence, which enjoyed great popularity.

Farnaby prefixed verses in Greek with an English translation to Thomas Coryat's Crudities, and he wrote commendatory lines for William Camden's Annales.

Ben Jonson was a friend of Farnaby, and contributed commendatory Latin elegiacs to his edition of Juvenal and Persius.

By his second wife he had, among other children, a son Francis, born about 1630, who inherited the Kippington estate, Sevenoaks, and was a widower on 26 January 1663, when he obtained a license to marry Mrs. Judith Nicholl of St. James, Clerkenwell.