His works, ranging from a play and poetry to textbooks in rhetoric and logic, all fall under the general rubric of the arts of language.
Abraham Fraunce was born in Shrewsbury, in northern England, about the year 1560. His exact date of birth is not recorded and is derived by counting back from his matriculation at Cambridge (he probably started university at the normal age of sixteen or seventeen, and his name is first registered there in 1576). His family had a long history in the region and was secure and reasonably well off, and was principally associated with the Glovers' Company, a guild in Shrewsbury. Not a gentleman by birth, Fraunce attained this status later by virtue of his attendance at the university and the Inns of Court.
Fraunce is listed as a student at Shrewsbury School in the register of the school for 1571. Founded just a few years earlier in 1562, Shrewsbury grew quickly and was for a time the largest grammar school in England (360 students by 1581). Fraunce's first master may have been the well-known Thomas Ashton, who left the school about 1571; Fraunce was later taught by Thomas Lawrence.
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