The only serious study of the life of William Harrison, antiquarian and social historian, author of the much-quoted Description of England in Holinshed's Chronicles, was undertaken by Frederick J. Furnivall for his edition of the Description. All later biographies stem directly from Furnivall. I have recently uncovered new material which supplements the known facts of Harrison's life, corrects some inaccuracies in Furnivall's biography, and occasionally throws new light on Harrison's garrulous, anecdotal account of Elizabethan England.
A search for Harrison material leads, somewhat improbably, to the Diocesan Library of the Church of Ireland in Londonderry, a phenomenon which can only be explained by the marriage of Harrison's daughter, Anne, to George Downham, a noted teacher of Ramian logic at Cambridge and later bishop of Derry.