, son to the preceding Dr. Peter, and grandson to Dr. William Turner,
, son to the preceding Dr. Peter, and
grandson to Dr. William Turner, was born in 1585, and
was admitted a probationer fellow of Merton college, Oxford, in 1607, where he proceeded in arts, and not being
restricted to any particular faculty, as the fellows of other
colleges are, became, according to Wood, versed in all
kinds of literature. His first preferment was the professorship of geometry in Gresham college, in July 1620, but
he continued to reside mostly at Oxford, and held this
place together with his fellowship. In 1629, by the direction of Laud, then bishop of London, he drew up a
scheme for the annual election of proctors out of the several colleges at Oxford in a certain order, that was to
return every twenty-three years, which being approved of
by his majesty, Charles I. was called the Caroline cycle,
and is still followed, and always printed at the end of the
“Parecbolae sive Excerpta, e corpore statutorum universitatis Oxon.
” In the same year he acted as one of the
commissioners for revising the statutes, and reducing them to
a better form and order. In 1630, on the death of Briggs,
Mr. Turner was chosen to succeed him as professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his Gresham professorship.
How well he was qualified for his new office appears by the
character archbishop Usher gives of him, “Savilianus in
academia Oxoniensi inatheseos professor eruditissimus.
”
In custos archivorum,
” or keeper of the archives, to which he
was appointed, and made large collections respecting the
antiquities of the university, which were afterwards of great
use to Anthony Wood. In 1636, on a royal visit to Oxford, Mr. Turner was created M. D. but having adhered
to his majesty in his troubles, and even taken up arms in
his cause, he was ejected from his fellowship of Merton,
and his professorship. This greatly impoverished him, and
he went to reside with a sister, the widow of a Mr. Watts,
a brewer in Southwark, where he died in Jan. 1651, and
was interred in St. Saviour’s church. He was a man of
extensive learning, and wrote much, but being fastidious
in his opinion of his own works, he never could complete
them to his mind. We have mentioned the only writings
he published, except a Latin poem in the collection in honour of sir Thomas Bodley, called the “Bodleiomnema,
”
Oxf. Epistolae variae ad doctissimos viros;
” but we know of no printed letters of his
Dr. Ward, however, gives extracts from three ms letters
in English to Selden, chiefly relating to some Greek writers
on the music of the ancients.