FRITH or FRYTH, John (cir. 1503-1533), an eminent pioneer of the Reformation in England, was born about the beginning of the 16th century at Westerham, Kent, where his father kept an inn. He was educated at Eton, and afterwards at King’s College, Cambridge, where Gardiner, who subsequently became bishop of Winchester, was his tutor. Immediately after taking his B.A. degree, he transferred his residence (December 1525) to the newly founded college of St Frideswide or Cardinal College (now Christ Church), Oxford, whither, along with other young men of distinguished talent, he had been invited by Wolsey. At Oxford the sympathetic interest which he showed in the Reformation movement in Germany soon caused him to be suspected as a heretic, and led to his imprisonment for some months. On being at the instance of Wolsey released from confinement, towards the close of 1526 or early in 1527, ho fled to the Continent, where he appears to have resided chiefly at the newly founded Protestant university of Marburg, and to have been associated with Tyndal in many of the literary labours of the latter. At Marburg he became acquainted with several scholars and Reformers of note, and particularly with the famous Patrick Hamilton. Frith’s first publication in fact was a translation of Hamilton’s Places, made shortly after the martyrdom of their author; and soon afterwards the Revelation of Antichrist, a translation from the German, appeared, along with A Pistle to the Christen Reader, by “Richard Bright wall” (supposed to be Frith), and An Antithesis wherein are compared togeder Christes Actes and our Holye Father the Popes, dated “at Malborow in the lande of Hesse,” 12th July 1529. His Disputacyon of Purgatorye, a treatise in three books, against Rastell, Sir T. More, and ...