Thomas Bastard

Elizabethan epigrammatist and clergyman Thomas Bastard was born in Blandford, Dorchester, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he earned a BA and MA and was made a perpetual Fellow in 1588. The fellowship was retracted on charges of libel in 1601, after Bastard was suspected of authoring the anonymous tract An Admonition to the City of Oxford, or Marprelates Basterdine, which noted the sexual misdeeds of well-known members of the community.
 
Bastard’s poetry collection, Chrestoleros: Seven Books of Epigrames (1598), contains almost 300 of his epigrams. These brief poems, ranging in length from two to 16 lines, are primarily concerned with the events and people of his time and balance lively satire against bitter reflections of poverty. Bastard also published the three-volume Magna Britannia: A Latin Poem (1605).
 
Bastard served as a chaplain and vicar for the Church of England and in 1615 published two collections of tracts: Five Sermons and Twelve Sermons. After a mental breakdown, he died at the age of 52 in debtor’s prison in Dorchester and was buried in a churchyard there.