19/05/2026
A BESTSELLING LINCOLN AUTHOR ALMOST FORGOTTEN TODAY
John Clarke (c.1596-1658)
Clarke’s origins are unknown, but he attended Magdalene College in Cambridge and was ordained in 1619. He became headmaster of Lincoln Free School at the age of 26 in 1622, until 1641. He was very progressive in his curriculum thinking, introducing some lessons in English rather than Latin and even PE.
He taught the future Colonel John Hutchinson, who considered him a ‘supercilious pedant’ and ‘so conceited of his own pedantique forms’ that it gave Hutchinson ‘a disgust of him’. However his wife Lucy noted that John had been sent there as Clarke was also ‘very famous for learning and piety’.
He wrote a large number of books. In 1628 he published a school book ‘Transitionum formulae’ which he claimed sold 7000 copies; this was dedicated to the four sons of Robert Bertie, who had been his pupils. Over his lifetime he wrote many books some of which sold very well indeed, especially those which helped other teachers to do their jobs. In about 1630-1 he returned to Cambridge to study for a Divinity degree following which his writing became more about spiritual matters. A ‘Method of Prayer’ was successful though a Latin book on preaching, ‘Oratoriae sacrae, Skiagraphia’, was seen as plagiarism by some.
Then in 1633 came ‘Dux Grammaticus’. This set out the expected conduct of a schoolboy at home and school. The book is interesting in educational terms as Clarke was seeking to teach ‘Manners’ and also speaking, alongside teaching about Latin verbs. What we might call ‘integrated studies’. As far as conduct, boys were told they should ‘lose no time idly in jangling to his own hurt and hindrance of others.’ Through the dialogue between teacher and pupil, we also learn that: ‘the conversation of one unthrift, is as poison to a whole school, for one scabbed sheep (as they say) marreth the whole flock.’
In 1634 John Clarke dedicated his book ‘Holy Incense for the Censers of the Saints’ to Sir Edward Ayscough – ‘God hath given you a mind to know him, a heart to love him’ – and ‘to his religious and noble lady’. But he also made the most of the Ayscough heritage, naming Anne as ‘the honour of this Country, the Praise of her own Sexe, and the Glory of your Noble family, Mistress Anne Ayscough, Martyr’. He also took space to name ‘John Lacels’ (of Sturton in Notts) who was ‘sacrificed with her in the same fire, for the Word of God and for the Testimony which they held’. Ayscough was a prominent local politician and puritan.
This book is also interesting in that he praised Ayscough for giving him somewhere to live, presumably at South Kelsey, ‘when God’s chastening was upon the city of my habitation’. This phrasing suggests a time of plague, perhaps.
From 1634 he held the living of Fiskerton (where he married in 1633) and he was buried in the chancel there in 1658. In 1641 he resigned from the Lincoln School and he ran his own school at Fiskerton where he was still the parish minister. One of his teachers employed at Fiskerton was a former Lincoln pupil, William Walker, who became headmaster at Louth and then Grantham schools.
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