The Second Headmaster of BVGS.
The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (
ODNB) contains this biography of the second (head)master of BVGS:
Laurence Nowell (c 1516 – 1576) was the third son of John Nowell (died 1526) of Read Hall, Whalley, Lancashire, and his second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Kay of Rochdale. After entering Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1536, he migrated to Cambridge University to study logic, graduating BA in 1542. Oxford incorporated this BA and awarded him an MA in 1544. Two years later he became master of the grammar school at Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire. In 1550 the town's corporation, as the school's patrons, charged him in chancery with neglect of duty, but he appealed to the privy council, which issued an order forbidding the warden and fellowship of Sutton to remove him from office. In November 1550 Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London, ordained him deacon. Upon Queen Mary's accession he took shelter with Sir John Perrot in Pembrokeshire and later joined his brother Alexander Nowell on the continent, though it is not known where Laurence finally took refuge. In 1558, when he returned home, he was promoted archdeacon of Derby, and in 1560 dean of Lichfield. In the convocation of 1563 he voted with Alexander, now dean of St Paul's, to modify church ceremonies. That year he obtained the prebend of Ferring in Chichester Cathedral and the rectories of Haughton and Drayton Basset in Staffordshire. In 1566 he received a prebend in York Minster, and in 1567 pleaded with Archbishop Matthew Parker on behalf of two nonconformists.
Nowell married Mary Glover, a widow with two sons, and between 1567 and 1574 they had four daughters and five sons, including his namesake heir who matriculated at Brasenose College in 1590. With Alexander, Laurence served as executor of their brother Robert's will in 1569. The next year, he denied the charge of Peter Morwent, a prebendary of Lichfield, that he had made seditious speeches against Queen Elizabeth and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. In 1575 he bought an estate in Sheldon and some lands in Coleshill, Warwickshire. In his will, dated 17 October 1576, he named Alexander and his half-brother John Towneley his overseers. He was dead by 22 November, when his successor as dean, George Boleyn, was installed. He was probably buried at Weston, Derbyshire.
William Dugdale (1656) dates his demise as headmaster to 1547 rather than 1550 and adds some interesting details:
[It] seems that his dexterity and diligence in teaching scholars, fell far short of what they expected; for it appears that soon after his settling here [Sutton], the Corporation took great exceptions at him for the neglect of his school, and exhibited articles against him in the Chancery; whereupon, after the sitting of a Commission, and sundry depositions taken, he procured letters from the Council Table, admonishing them that they should not go about his removal, except any notable crime could be proved against him; so that in conclusion, finding such slender esteem amongst them, he accepted of his arrears, and a gratuity of ten pounds, whereof the said Bishop of Exeter gave five marks; and in 1547 resigned; so that his stay in this place, was not much more than a year.
[We should probably accept
ODNB's date of 1550, because it was Retha Warnicke (the author of the
ODNB biography) who in the 1970s first disentangled the story of our Laurence Nowell from that of his better known namesake cousin Laurence Nowell (c 1515 – c 1571). This cousin was a pioneering scholar of the Old English language, and the earliest known owner (from 1563) of the only surviving manuscript (the
Nowell Codex or more formally
Cotton Vitellius A.xv) containing the Old English poem
Beowulf.]
