(Sir Edmund), a younger son of an ancient Scotch family settled in Lincolnshire. He was some time a student of Lincoln college, Oxford; and removed from thence to the Inner Temple, where he applied himself diligently to the study of the law, and became a barrister. In the ninth of Queen Elizabeth, he was both lent and summer reader, and in the sixteenth double reader. He was appointed her majesty's sergeant-at-law in the nineteenth year of her reign; and some time after, one of the justices of assize. In 1582 he was made lord chief justice of the common pleas, and in the year following was knighted. He held his office to the end of his life, died in the year 1605, and was buried at Eyworth in Bedfordshire. He was an able, but punctilious lawyer; a scourge to the Puritans; and a strenuous supporter of the established church. His works are, 1. Reports of many principal cases argued and adjudged in the time of Queen Elizabeth, in the common bench. Lond. 1644, fol. 2. Resolutions and judgments on the cases and matters agitated in all the courts of Westminster, in the latter end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Published by John Goldsbrough, Esq.; Lond. 1653, 4to. Besides these, there is a manuscript copy of his Readings still in being.