A scholar of the East
Edward Pococke was born in Oxford in 1604 and educated at Corpus Christi College. He learned Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac, and in 1630 went to Aleppo as chaplain to the English merchants of the Levant Company, where he spent six years perfecting his Arabic and collecting manuscripts. On his return Archbishop William Laud made him the first holder of the new professorship of Arabic at Oxford, and after a second journey, to Constantinople, he became one of the leading orientalists in Europe.
Country parson in troubled times
In 1642 or 1643 his college presented him to the rectory of Childrey, a college living in the Vale west of Wantage. It was a hard moment to arrive: the Civil War had begun, his patron Laud was imprisoned and later executed, and Pococke’s royalist and high-church connections made him suspect. Around 1646 he married Mary Burdet, and they raised a large family at the rectory.
According to the Dictionary of National Biography, some parishioners cheated him of his tithes and harassed him by billeting soldiers on him. In 1655 he was summoned before the county commissioners charged with removing ‘insufficient’ ministers. Leading Oxford scholars, including John Owen, protested that it was absurd to eject so learned a man, and the case was dropped. Local tradition remembers him as a quiet parson whose learning his flock did not always appreciate.
He went on working at Childrey. His Specimen historiae Arabum (1649), an early European study of Arab history and customs, was published while he was rector. After the Restoration in 1660 he became a canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Hebrew, lived mainly in Oxford and appointed a curate for Childrey, but he remained its rector until he died in 1691. He is buried in Christ Church Cathedral, where his widow put up a monument with his bust.
What to see locally
- St Mary’s Church, Childrey, the church he served.
- The cedar at the old rectory: a large cedar in the rectory garden has long been said to have been grown by Pococke from seed he brought back from the Levant. The rectory is private.