William Kingsley (Archdeacon)

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William Kingsley (d. 1648) was Archdeacon of Canterbury (1619–1648) and canon of Stall VIII (1614-1648). He matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1597 (B.A. 1599; M.A. All Souls 1603; B.D. 1613; D.D. 1616). He was rector of Saltwood with Hythe (1614), of Great Chart (1615) and of Ickham (1617). [1] He was deprived as a Laudian in 1644.[2]

He is recorded as having a son George who was at Magdalen College Oxford from 1634[1] and who was admitted to the office of Registrar of the Archdeacon's Court by his father in 1639;[3] he died in 1649[1] and would appear to be the Captain George Kingsley whose son William Kingsley (d. 1701) lived in the Precincts.[4]

A second son William matriculated at Magdalen in 1640 aged 13 and was a student at Gray's Inn in 1647; his son William matriculated at St Edmund Hall in 1668.[1]

Botfield records that Archdeacon Kingsley gave a manuscript of Cicero to the Library in 1663 (recte 1667). As Kingsley died in 1648, when the Cathedral no longer functioned, this must either be a misunderstanding or the gift must have been a bequest which passed through the hands of his son George (died 1649) and then George's son William Kingsley (d. 1701). William Kingsley junior was living in the Precincts when he received the freedom of Canterbury by gift in 1661.[5]. He may have given this and other books to the newly opened Chapter Library as one of the Cathedral's lessees.

There is no entry in the Benefactors' Book for Archdeacon William Kinsgley. The entry for ‘Gulielmus Kingsley generosus’ clearly refers to a layman, presumably his grandson.

Gameson lists four other early Canterbury Cathedral manuscripts which had belonged to William Kingsley in 1667. He associates them with a ‘Canon William Kingsley, grandson of the archdeacon of Canterbury of the same name’[6] but no such canon is listed by Hasted or Le Neve; all of these books may have belonged to Archdeacon William Kingsley and then to his grandson William Kingsley (d. 1701).

The Archdeacon's medieval manuscripts which later belonged to his grandson William are :

CCA-DCc/LitMs/A/8 St Augustine's Sermons,early 12th century
CCA-DCc/LitMs/C/15 Cicero, Epistolae, late 15th century.
CCA/DCc/LitMs/C/20 Register of St Laurence's Hospital, Canterbury, 14th century.
CCA-DCc/LitMs/D/6 Glossed Gospel of Matthew. 12th century.
CCA-DCc/LitMs/D/13 Richard Rolle, The Pricke of Conscience, mid 14th century.
CCA-DCc/LitMs/E/10 Testamenta Duodecim Patriarcharum, 13th x 14th century.

He also owned

CCA-DCc/LitMs/E/34 Archdeacon William Kingsley's copy of Christ Church Canterbury Cathedral register, 17th century.
References
  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, vol. 2, p. 855.
  2. Gillian L. Ignatijevic, The parish clergy in the diocese of Canterbury and Archdeaconry of Bedford in the reign of Charles I and under the Commonwealth, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 1986. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3009/1/D076449.pdf, p. 177.
  3. CCA-DCc/LitMS/E/34
  4. CCA-DCc/BB/64/5.
  5. Cowper, Roll, col. 320.
  6. Richard Gameson, The Earliest books of Canterbury Cathedral, London: The Bibliographical Sociey (2008) pp. 267–8.