Born at Bowes, Yorkshire (now in County Durham), he was the son of William Kipling, a cattle salesman.
He received his early education at Scorton and at Sedbergh School, and was admitted a sizar of St. John's College, Cambridge, on 28 June 1764.
[2] When John Lingard's Strictures on Herbert Marsh's Comparative View of the Churches of England and Rome appeared in 1815, Kipling took offence at the terminology "modern church of England"; and thinking that it came within the category of "seditious words, in derogation of the established religion", wrote to Lingard through the public papers informing him that unless within a reasonable time he published a vindication of his "inflammatory language" he would be indicted.
Lingard merely advertised his Strictures in all the papers which had published Kipling's letter; and the controversy died away.
[2] Kipling's major work was Codex Theodori Bezæ Cantabrigiensis, Evangelia et Apostolorum Acta complectens, quadratis literis, Græco-Latinus.
Academia auspicante venerandæ has vetustatis reliquias, summa qua potuit fide, adumbravit, expressit, edidit, Codicis historiam præfixit, notasque adjecit T. Kipling, Greek and Latin, 2 pts., Cambridge, 1793, printed at the university press.
This edition of the Codex Bezæ used types resembling the uncial characters of the original manuscript.
[4] Errors in this edition and the bad latinity of the preface were mercilessly censured, so that in the slang of the university a "Kiplingism" came to be synonymous with a grammatical blunder.
Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener, in the preface to his own edition of the Bezæ Codex Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, 1864) defended Kipling's textual work, but not his adopted forms.