Chapter 8 opens with two events which took place in the summer of 1568: the commission to Archbishop Matthew Parker to identify and record manuscripts dispersed from monastic libraries, especially books with a bearing on English history, and the publication of William Lambarde’s APXAIONOMIA, his edition of Old English law, much of it in parallel text, Old English and Latin. The chapter then reverts to the dissolution itself, and who can be shown to have saved which particular books. It pays particular attention to the activities of John Leland, John Bale, and certain bibliophilic royal commissioners, most notably Sir John Prise. Although initial official interest in English history concentrated on the period of the conversion and before, collectors saved the great works of the twelfth century, and it was these that Prise envisaged in his will should be edited and printed. The chapter then considers the circle around Parker, most particularly John Joscelyn, and the use they made of the medieval English histories in their polemical works on ecclesiastical history. Parker’s editions of Matthew Paris were the first works of medieval English historiography to be printed, probably on account of Matthew’s anti-papal instincts. In counterpoint with all this concern for the sources, the chapter also addresses the Italian Polydore Vergil’s recently published and influential attempt to write up English medieval history, for the period in question largely on the basis of the great histories of the early twelfth century.
The subjunctive mood in the Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical history .
