out the historian Æthelweard (Fabius Quaestor) to Camden. Astrologer Allen was noted as astrologer to Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, as Dee was for Queen Elizabeth. Foster believes Allen probably met Leicester through Lady Paulet, wife of Hugh Paulet, née Elizabeth Blount, who was the widow of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder of Trinity College, Oxford. There is a surviving 62-page horoscope cast for the teenage Philip Sidney in the Ashmole manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, in the period 1570–2 when he was studying at Oxford, where Leicester was Chancellor, and it has been attributed to Allen; the case has also been made that it was by Dee. A link between the two is that Edward Kelley is said to have worked briefly for Allen. Allen definitely cast a natal horoscope for Robert Pierrepont (1584), and cast also for William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, a later Chancellor of Oxford, in 1626. Reputation Allen's skill in mathematics and astrology earned him the credit of being a magician. In an incident related in John Aubrey's Brief Lives, it was in a visit to Holme Lacy as the guest of Sir John Scudamore that the servants threw his ticking watch into the moat, thinking it the Devil. The author of Leicester's Commonwealth accuses him of employing the art of "figuring" to further the earl of Leicester's unlawful designs, and of endeavouring by the "black art" to bring about a match between his patron and the Queen. There Allen's name is coupled with Dee's as atheists, in a series of claims that Leicester found physicians and other lackeys for his evil-doing at Oxford and elsewhere. After his death, funeral orations praising Allen were given by William Burton and George Bathurst (1610–1644). Burton's retailed the story of how Leicester had offered a bishopric to Allen, who declined the offer. Allen in fact was, by choice, not in holy orders. Works He wrote a Latin commentary on the second and third books of Claudius Ptolemy of Pelusium, Concerning the Judgment of the Stars, or, as it is commonly called, Of the Quadripartite Construction, with an Exposition. He also wrote notes on John Bale's De Scriptoribus M. Britanniae. Library and legacy Allen collected manuscripts relating to history, antiquity, astronomy and astrology, philosophy, and mathematics. At least 250 items from his library can still be traced. He also acquired manuscripts from dissolved monasteries, such as Reading