Thomas Allen

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Thomas Allen (1542–1632) was an English mathematician, astrologer, and antiquary, long resident at Gloucester Hall in Oxford, whose mastery of abstruse learning earned him, in the eyes of his neighbours, the reputation of a magician. He left almost nothing in print; what survives of him is a career of teaching and collecting, and a legend that grew up around the career while he was still alive.

Born in Staffordshire and educated at Trinity College, Oxford, Allen settled into the life of a private scholar rather than a public office or a chair. He gathered around him a circle of pupils and patrons drawn to mathematics, astronomy, and astrology at a moment when those subjects were not yet cleanly separated from what an outsider would call magic. He was associated with the household of Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland — the so-called “Wizard Earl,” whose patronage of mathematicians and natural philosophers gave the cluster its name — and he moved in the same world as John Dee, the period’s most famous student of the occult sciences. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is said to have valued his counsel; whether that counsel was ever astrological in the strict sense is harder to fix than the anecdotes suggest.

The reputation as a conjurer is the part of Allen that the sources dwell on, and it is worth reading carefully. The chief witness is the antiquary John Aubrey, writing decades after Allen’s death, who reports that the country people took the scholar’s clocks and instruments for the apparatus of a necromancer, and that servants who heard his automata strike fled in fear of the spirits they imagined he kept. Aubrey records the stories as stories — as the awe of the unlettered before a man who could calculate eclipses — rather than as a confession of practice. What the record establishes is not that Allen worked magic, but that mathematical skill, in late-Tudor England, was itself read as something close to it.

His most durable legacy was material. Allen was among the great manuscript collectors of his age, assembling medieval texts in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and theology that might otherwise have been lost in the dispersal of the monastic libraries. The bulk of the collection passed to his pupil and admirer Sir Kenelm Digby, who in turn gave it to the Bodleian Library, where the Digby manuscripts remain among its treasures. Allen himself published little and theorised less; his importance lies in what he preserved and whom he taught.

He died in 1632, by then an old man of nearly ninety, and was buried in Oxford with an academic’s honours. The figure that comes down through Aubrey and the later antiquaries is a particular Elizabethan type: the learned man whose competence outran his neighbours’ understanding, and who was credited, half in admiration and half in unease, with powers he is never shown claiming for himself.

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