“ At Morpeth Horsley opened a private school. Respect for his character and abilities attracted pupils irrespective of religious connexion, among them Newton Ogle, afterwards dean of Westminster. He gave lectures on mechanics and hydrostatics in Morpeth, Alnwick and Newcastle, and was elected F.R.S. on the 23rd of April 1730. It is as an archaeologist that Horsley is now known. His great work, Britannia Romana, or the Roman Antiquities of Britain (London, 1732) , one of the scarcest and most valuable of its class, contains the result of patient labour. ”

“ John Hodgson (1779–1845) , the historian of Northumberland, in a short memoir published in 1831, held that he was born in 1685, at Pinkie House, in the parish of Inveresk, Midlothian, and that his father was a Northumberland Nonconformist, who had migrated to Scotland, but returned to England soon after the Revolution of 1688. J. H. Hinde, in the Archaeologia Aeliana (Feb. 1865) , held that he was a native of Newcastle-on-Tyne, the son of Charles Horsley, a member of the Tailors’ Company of that town. ”

“ Hinde shows that during these years “he certainly followed a secular employment as agent to the York Buildings Company, who had contracted to purchase and were then in possession of the Widdrington estates.” ”