Brand,_John

Brand, John (1744-1806), English antiquary, was born on the 19th of August 1744 at Washington, Durham, where his father was parish clerk. His early years were spent at Newcastle-on-Tyne with his uncle, a cordwainer, to whom he was apprentice in his fourteenth year. Showing promise, however, at Newcastle grammar school, friends interested themselves in him and assisted him to go to Oxford. It was not, however, until his twenty-eighth year that he matriculated at Lincoln College, but before this he had been ordained, holding in succession the curacies of Bolam, Northumberland, of St Andrew’s, Newcastle, and of Cramlington, 8 m. from the county town. He graduated in 1775 and two years later was elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Having for a short time been under-usher at the Newcastle grammar school, the duke of Northumberland, a former patron, gave him in 1784 the rectory of the combined parishes of St Mary-at-Hill and St Mary Hubbard, London. Appointed secretary to the Society of Antiquaries in the same year, he was annually re-elected until his death in 1806. He was buried in the chancel of his church. His most important work is Observations on Popular Antiquities: including the whole of Mr Bourne’s “Antiquitates Vulgares,” with addenda to every chapter of that work. This was published in London in 1777, and after Brand’s death, a new edition embodying the MSS. left by him, was published by Sir Henry Ellis in 1813. Brand also published a poem entitled: On Illicit Love, written among the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, near Oxford (1775, Newcastle); The History and Antiquities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2 vols., London, 1789), and many papers in the Archaeologia.

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