William Barnes

William Barnes (1801–1886) was an English poet, philologist and clergyman, born into a farming family in the Vale of Blackmore in Dorset. Largely self-taught, he worked as a solicitor's clerk, ran a school in Dorchester, took a Cambridge degree in middle age and became rector of Winterborne Came. He is remembered for his poems in the Dorset dialect, collected in Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, which Thomas Hardy, his friend and neighbor, admired and later edited. A gifted linguist, Barnes also campaigned to rid English of borrowed words, proposing native coinages such as "starlore" for astronomy.