John Horseman (1776–1844): Clergyman. The son of an Oxfordshire cleric, he was educated at Corpus Christi, Oxford (BA 1795), where he remained as a fellow from 1795–1819. He was Rector of Heydon and Little Chishill from 1810. He was a university friend of Southey’s. Although they lost touch in the mid-1790s, in 1835 after a gap of ‘one and forty years’ Horseman wrote to Southey recalling their old acquaintance. At the time of their reunion, Southey was not aware that at the height of the Wat Tyler controversy in 1817, a ‘John Horseman’ — presumably the same one — had sent his political opponent William Smith (1756–1835) a transcript of another production of the Poet Laureate’s radical youth — ‘To the Exiled Patriots’. Horseman’s letter is now in the William R. Perkins Library, Duke University.

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