Richard Lichfield was a barber surgeon

Barber surgeon

The barber surgeon was one of the most common medical practitioners of medieval Europe - generally charged with looking after soldiers during or after a battle...

 in Cambridge, England, during the late 16th and early 17th century. In 1597 he wrote a pamphlet sharply criticising the writer Thomas Nashe

Thomas Nashe

Thomas Nashe was an English Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist. He was the son of the minister William Nashe and his wife Margaret .-Early life:...

, which for many years was believed to be the work of Gabriel Harvey

Gabriel Harvey

Gabriel Harvey was an English writer. Harvey was a notable scholar, though his reputation suffered from his quarrel with Thomas Nashe...

.

Although not a member of the academic community Lichfield belonged to the property-owning middle class, and had a local reputation as a humorist. His humour took the form of parodies of learned speeches, complete with phony Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

isms, evidently a popular genre at Cambridge and one in which other barbers are also said to have excelled.

Nashe's pamphlet Have with You to Saffron-Walden

Have with You to Saffron-Walden

Have With You To Saffron-Walden, Or, Gabriell Harveys hunt is up is the title of a pamphlet written by Thomas Nashe and published in London in late 1596 by John Danter. The work is Nashe's final shot in his four-year literary feud with Dr. Gabriel Harvey...

(1596) had been dedicated to Lichfield in a provocative and slyly insolent way. After a brief delay, Lichfield answered it with The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Gentleman, (1597). For many years it was assumed that Harvey himself had adopted the persona of Lichfield and written the reply to Nashe, but the style of the pamphlet is nothing like his and appears quite genuinely to be by Lichfield, and is generally so accepted today. Certainly when Nashe light-heartedly threatened a demolition of the work in Nashes Lenten Stuffe- "...stay till Ester Terme, and then, with the answere to the Trim Tram, I will make you laugh your hearts out" - he does not suggest it is Harvey's.

Lichfield's pamphlet is interesting to literary historians because it gives some biographical details on Nashe which would otherwise not be known, and makes a glancing reference to the rising Cambridge satirist, Joseph Hall.