Jeremiah Horrocks - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Jeremiah Horrocks was born at Lower Lodge farm, in Toxteth Park, a former royal deer park, near Liverpool. His father, James, was a watchmaker who had moved to Toxteth Park to be apprenticed to Thomas Aspinwall and subsequently married his master's daughter, Mary. Both families were well educated Puritans; the Horrocks' sent their younger sons to the University of Cambridge and the Aspinwalls favoured Oxford. The unorthodox beliefs of the Puritans excluded them from public office and pushed them towards trade and industry and thus, by 1600 the Aspinwalls had become a successful family of watchmakers. As a boy, Jeremiah had an early introduction to astronomy as one of his chores was to measure the local noon in order to set the watches accurately, and his Puritan upbringing gave him an inbuilt suspicion of witchcraft, magic and astrology.

Horrocks joined Emmanuel College on 11 May 1632 and matriculated as a member of the University of Cambridge on 5 July 1632 as a sizar. At Cambridge, he made friends with John Wallis and John Worthington. He was the only person at Cambridge to believe the revolutionary heliocentric theory of Copernicus and, in his spare time, used the college libraries to study the works of Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and others. In 1635 he left without formally graduating, for reasons which are not clear. Marston (2007) has suggested that he may have wished to defer the cost of graduation until he had secured employment, whilst Aughton (2004) has speculated that he may have failed his exams due to concentrating too much on his own interests or that he didn't want to take Anglican orders and so a degree was of limited use to him.