Sir John, lord chief justice of the common pleas in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was the eldest son of Edward Popham, Esq. of Huntworth in Somersetshire, and born in the year 1531. He was some time a student of Balliol college in Oxford; "being then," says Ant. Wood, "given at leisure hours to many sports and exercises." After quitting the university, he fixed in the Middle Temple; where, during his novitiate, he is said to have indulged in that kind of dissipation to which youth and a vigorous constitution more naturally