Hanvill, John

, a monk of St. Alban’s, and a Latin poet of the twelfth century, was a native of this country, and educated at Oxford, where he took a master’s degree. He is said to have travelled through a great part of Europe, and during a long residence at Paris, studied rhetoric, and was distinguished for his taste even among the numerous and polite scholars of that flourishing seminary. On his return to England, he became a Benedictine monk in the abbey of St. Alban’s, where he died about the beginning of the thirteenth century. He wrote a long Latin poem in nine books, dedicated to Walter bishop of Rouen, entitled “Architrenius,” which Warton, who has given a long specimen of it, pronounces a learned, ingenious, and very entertaining performance, containing a mixture of satire and panegyric on public vice and virtue, with some historical digressions, but not enough to justify Simlerus’s blunder in the epitome of Gesner’s Bibliotheca, where he says the subject is *' de antiquitatibus Britannise." This work was printed at Paris, 1517, 4to, and is scarce; but there are two manuscripts of it in the Bodleian library, with some epistles, epigrams, and other poems by the same hand. ²