Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hayne, William
HAYNE or HAYNES, WILLIAM (d. 1631?), head-master of the Merchant Taylors' School, is stated in the records of the Merchant Taylors' Company to have been admitted into their school on 28 April 1564 as ‘son of … Haynes of Bristol, yeoman’ (Court Minutes). Seven years afterwards he was elected scholar of Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A., and about 1585 became, he tells us, ‘a teacher in grammar learning’ (Bill of Complaint). Partly through the influence of Watson, bishop of Chichester, and of Goodman, dean of Westminster, he was chosen in 1599 headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School. For twenty-five years he continued in this post, among his more distinguished pupils being Bishops Wren, Dee, and Wilde; Shirley, the dramatist; Bulstrode Whitelocke; and Edmund Calamy the elder. He stood in high repute as a grammarian, and the school flourished under his care, the numbers exceeding the regulations; but his relations with the teaching staff and the governors (the Merchant Taylors' Company) were not always satisfactory. In 1624 he was dismissed from office upon various charges which could not be legally sustained. He appealed to the lord keeper, and obtained compensation from the company upon the ground that the infirmities of age rather than ‘insufficiency’ had caused the alleged misconduct. He is said to have died in 1631 at an advanced age. He had a son, John Hayne, of St. John's College, Oxford, who from 1616 to 1618 was first under-master at Merchant Taylors'; but Thomas Hayne [q. v.], also a master of the school and a grammarian, does not seem to have been related to him.
Hayne published: 1. ‘Certaine Epistles of Tully verbally Translated. Together with a Short Treatise, containing an order of instructing Youth in Grammar, and with all the use and benefite of verball translations,’ &c., printed at London, 1611, small 8vo (a copy in the Bodleian Library). This book has a Latin dedication to the Merchant Taylors' Company, and at the end a list of some other books, sixty-six in number, which ‘I have this twenty years used, and may, as occasion is offered hereafter, publish.’ 2. ‘Lillie's Rules for the Genders of Nouns,’ undated. 3. ‘Henry's Phrases, a very useful book to enable young Scholars to make and speak eloquent Latine’ (reprinted, with an addition of about a thousand phrases, 1653). 4. ‘Lillie's Rules Construed, whereunto is added Tho. Robinson's Heteroclites, the Latin Syntaxis, and Qui Mihi; also There is added the Rules for the Genders of Nouns and preter perfect Tenses and Supines of Verbs in English alone with the terminations of the Decklensions and Verbs. Never printed before,’ London, 1653. This book was largely used and frequently re-edited; a late edition by John Ward, 1760, is best known.
[Wilson's Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School, p. 220, &c.; Robinson's Register of Merchant Taylors' School; Brit. Mus. Cat.; Bodl. Libr. Cat.]