Elias Ashmole F. R. S

Elias Ashmole was born at Lichfield on 23 May 1617, the only son of Simon Ashmole, a saddler. His grandfather, Thomas Ashmole, also a saddler, had played an important part in the affairs of the city and enjoyed the rank and style of a gentleman. Through his mother, Anne, née Bowyer, Elias Ashmole was descended from many of the gentle families of Staffordshire and Cheshire. At the age of sixteen, after attending the Grammar School and the Music School at Lichfield, he was sent to London, where a family connexion of his mother, James Pagit, Puisne Baron of the Exchequer, had offered to take care of the further education of the unusually gifted boy. We hear of legal studies, of music and dancing lessons. By the end of 1638, Ashmole began, at the age of twenty-one, to ‘Solicit in Chancery & had indifferent good practice’. A few months previously he had married Eleanor, the eldest daughter of an impoverished country squire, Peter Manwaring, of Smallwood, Cheshire.