hostility of his enemies. In consequence of a sermon preached before him against the “sacramentaries,” the king ordered that Frith should be examined; he was afterwards tried and found guilty of having denied, with regard to the doctrines of purgatory and of transubstantiation, that they were necessary articles of faith. On the 23rd of June 1533 he was handed over to the secular arm, and at Smithfield on the 4th of July following he was burnt at the stake. During his captivity he wrote, besides several letters of interest, a reply to More’s letter against Frith’s “lytle treatise”; also two tracts entitled A Mirror or Glass to know thyself, and A Mirror or Looking-glass wherein you may behold the Sacrament of Baptism.
Frith is an interesting and so far important figure in English ecclesiastical history as having been the first to maintain and defend that doctrine regarding the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, which ultimately came to be incorporated in the English communion office. Twenty-three years after Frith’s death as a martyr to the doctrine of that office, that “Christ’s natural body and blood are in Heaven, not here,” Cranmer, who had been one of his judges, went to the stake for the same belief. Within three years more, it had become the publicly professed faith of the entire English nation.
See A. à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (ed. P. Bliss, 1813), i. p. 74; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (ed. G. Townshend, 1843–1849), v. pp. 1-16 (also Index); G. Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation of the Church of England (ed. N. Pocock, 1865), i. p. 273; L. Richmond, The Fathers of the English Church, i. (1807); Life and Martyrdom of John Frith (London, 1824), published by the Church of England Tract Society; Deborah Alcock, Six Heroic Men (1906).
FRITH, WILLIAM POWELL (1819–1909), English painter, was born at Aldfield, in Yorkshire, on the 9th of January 1819.
His parents moved in 1826 to Harrogate, where his father became
landlord of the Dragon Inn, and it was then that the boy began
his general education at a school at Knaresborough. Later he
went for about two years to a school at St Margaret’s, near
Dover, where he was placed specially under the direction of the
drawing-master, as a step towards his preparation for the profession
which his father had decided on as the one that he wished
him to adopt. In 1835 he was entered as a student in the well-known
art school kept by Henry Sass in Bloomsbury, from which
he passed after two years to the Royal Academy schools. His
first independent experience was gained in 1839, when he went
about for some months in Lincolnshire executing several commissions
for portraits; but he soon began to attempt compositions,
and in 1840 his first picture, “Malvolio, cross-gartered
before the Countess Olivia,” appeared at the Royal Academy.
During the next few years he produced several notable paintings,
among them “Squire Thornhill relating his town adventures to
the Vicar’s family,” and “The Village Pastor,” which established
his reputation as one of the most promising of the younger men
of that time. This last work was exhibited in 1845, and in the
autumn of that year he was elected an Associate of the Royal
Academy. His promotion to the rank of Academician followed
in 1853, when he was chosen to fill the vacancy caused by
Turner’s death. The chief pictures painted by him during his
tenure of Associateship were: “An English Merry-making
in the Olden Time,” “Old Woman accused of Witchcraft,”
“The Coming of Age,” “Sancho and Don Quixote,” “Hogarth
before the Governor of Calais,” and the “Scene from Goldsmith’s
’Good-natured Man,’” which was commissioned in 1850 by
Mr Sheepshanks, and bequeathed by him to the South Kensington
Museum. Then came a succession of large compositions which
gained for the artist an extraordinary popularity. “Life at
the Seaside,” better known as “Ramsgate Sands,” was exhibited
in 1854, and was bought by Queen Victoria; “The Derby Day,”
in 1858; “Claude Duval,” in 1860; “The Railway Station,”
in 1862; “The Marriage of the Prince of Wales,” painted for
Queen Victoria, in 1865; “The Last Sunday of Charles II.,”
in 1867; “The Salon d’Or,” in 1871; “The Road to Ruin,”
a series, in 1878; a similar series, “The Race for Wealth,”
shown at a gallery in King Street, St James’s, in 1880; “The
Private View,” in 1883; and “John Knox at Holyrood,” in
1886. Frith also painted a considerable number of portraits
of well-known people. In 1889 he became an honorary retired
academician. His “Derby Day” is in the National Gallery of
British Art. In his youth, in common with the men by whom
he was surrounded, he had leanings towards romance, and he
scored many successes as a painter of imaginative subjects.
In these he proved himself to be possessed of exceptional qualities
as a colourist and manipulator, qualities that promised to earn
for him a secure place among the best executants of the British
School. But in his middle period he chose a fresh direction.
Fascinated by the welcome which the public gave to his first
attempts to illustrate the life of his own times, he undertook a
considerable series of large canvases, in which he commented
on the manners and morals of society as he found it. He became
a pictorial preacher, a painter who moralized about the everyday
incidents of modern existence; and he sacrificed some of his
technical variety. There remained, however, a remarkable
sense of characterization, and an acute appreciation of dramatic
effect. Frith died on the 2nd of November 1909.
Frith published his Autobiography and Reminiscences in 1887, and Further Reminiscences in 1889.
FRITILLARY (Fritillaria: from Lat. fritillus, a chess-board,
so called from the chequered markings on the petals), a genus
of hardy bulbous plants of the natural order Liliaceae, containing
about 50 species widely distributed in the northern hemisphere.
The genus is represented in Britain by the fritillary or snake’s
head, which occurs in moist meadows in the southern half of
England, especially in Oxfordshire. A much larger plant is
the crown imperial (F. imperialis), a native of western Asia
and well known in gardens. This grows to a height of about
3 ft., the lower part of the stoutish stem being furnished with
leaves, while near the top is developed a crown of large pendant
flowers surmounted by a tuft of bright green leaves like those
of the lower part of the stem, only smaller. The flowers are
bell-shaped, yellow or red, and in some of the forms double. The
plant grows freely in good garden soil, preferring a deep well-drained
loam, and is all the better for a top-dressing of manure
as it approaches the flowering stage. Strong clumps of five or
six roots of one kind have a very fine effect. It is a very suitable
subject for the back row in mixed flower borders, or for recesses
in the front part of shrubbery borders. It flowers in April or
early in May. There are a few named varieties, but the most
generally grown are the single and double yellow, and the single
and double red, the single red having also two variegated varieties,
with the leaves striped respectively with white and yellow.
“Fritillary” is also the name of a kind of butterfly.
FRITZLAR, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of
Hesse-Cassel, on the left bank of the Eder, 16 m. S.W. from Cassel,
on the railway Wabern-Wildungen. Pop. (1905) 3448. It is a
prettily situated old-fashioned place, with an Evangelical and two
Roman Catholic churches, one of the latter, that of St Peter, a
striking medieval edifice. As early as 732 Boniface, the apostle of
Germany, established the church of St Peter and a small
Benedictine monastery at Frideslar, “the quiet home” or
“abode of peace.” Before long the school connected with the
monastery became famous, and among its earlier scholars it
numbered Sturm, abbot of Fulda, and Megingod, second bishop
of Würzburg. When Boniface found himself unable to continue
the supervision of the society himself, he entrusted the office to
Wigbert of Glastonbury, who thus became the first abbot of
Fritzlar. In 774 the little settlement was taken and burnt by
the Saxons; but it evidently soon recovered from the blow.
For a short time after 786 it was the seat of the bishopric of
Buraburg, which had been founded by Boniface in 741. At the
diet of Fritzlar in 919 Henry I. was elected German king. In
the beginning of the 13th century the village received municipal
rights; in 1232 it was captured and burned by the landgrave
Conrad of Thuringia and his allies; in 1631 it was taken by
William of Hesse; in 1760 it was successfully defended by
General Luckner against the French; and in 1761 it was occupied
by the French and unsuccessfully bombarded by the Allies.
As a principality Fritzlar continued subject to the archbishopric
