Learned societies and English literary scholarship in Great Britain and the United States

Front matter

ENGHSH-LIBRARY Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books.

» i, a

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Preface

The following chapters were written as a dissertation for the doctorate in the Department of English, Columbia University. The work was originally planned as a bibliography, with a brief introduction covering the substance of the present volume; but with the growth of the introductory material, it beeame apparent that this alone would be sufficient to satisfy the special requirement. The volume is therefore plainly limited in its scope, and more or less arbitrarily planned and presented.

The writer is under obligation to Professor George Philip Krapp, Professor William Peterfield Trent, and Professor Harry Morgan Ayres, of the Department of English at Columbia, all of whom have read the manuscript and given him generous and valuable help. He owes much also to the personal kindness of Mr. Frederic W. Erb, of the Columbia Library, and Mr. C. W. Kennedy, of the British Museum, and to the courtesy of the officials of the Library of Congress and the libraries at Yale and Cornell.

oth hier bes oe Pa ui ad im i , "sy | rare y iy i pry a I ae f ne oe cite " ag cite . it

‘ 5 f ” - , ae BM by Re nips Manet dry A ).¥ fe ¥ H wT ‘> “ rn ay fl me fad) otis aeop 4 j 3 ‘la op ek Paty i \ i. in bn e% ey 4 eee a ey oY Wy Tt fy it Ae '- a 7 ve Ae ay we AL ee rape a vipa id ae a 5 ina vy is -

As Ly ae a We pit

' pie i cre!

aN a abs 1: ae if See any a ems Pitas) ej Ay ie Bae ae 4 ca om ena

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction ...... ype AM POR Oe Fe PIA 2 els 0 xiii

mee The Weldimtc at G2) so oar oe a cee 1

Introduction

It is certain that one of the most important features of modern scholarship—as, indeed, of every progressive intellectual interest of to-day—is organization. The force of specialization in modern investigative methods, which is a distinct outgrowth of collective effort, is of course too apparent to require comment. Probably few of us, however, who have mentally noted the general efficiency of the literary societies of to-day have stopped actually to measure the quantity and quality of their contributions to criticism and literary history. Originally devised to concentrate individual interests in the common purposes of study, they became eventually to a large extent the purveyors of patronage for scholarship, increasing its remuneration, moral as well as material, and hence its efficiency; and in the last half century they have created a public interest in the products of conscientious research which has literally opened the storehouse of literary antiquity. It does not seem too much to say that the greater part of the scholarly accomplishments in the field of literature during the last century was due to the activities of the learned societies. Scarcely a noted student of that period could wholly separate his success from that of the societies with which he was connected. Such bodies have made generally accessible a quantity and kind of material that could not under other conditions have reached a supporting public in anything like the same limited time. What is perhaps almost as important in the end, co-operation in these societies has given definition to method and conscience in scholarly pursuits.

xili

Xiv INTRODUCTION

The society of to-day, however, is not the result of a day’s growth. The reliable and monumental products of a modern text publication society owe much of their value to the recognition of the hasty, erring, and at times unconscientious scholarship of a mid-century specialists’ society; and these societies in turn represented a generally marked advance in motive and accuracy of scholarship over the aristocratic book clubs of the early part of the century. Before all of these, of course, were the inevitable beginnings in private meetings among small numbers of students, with no defined scholarly policy, and no notion of general publication.

The beginnings of organized literary study, in fact, antedate any records of a self-styled literary society. It is not necessary to assume that the development of the society idea as applied to literary investigation has been constantly progressive and uninterrupted. As a matter of fact, there is really no precedent or tradition for such established cooperation before the beginning of the nineteenth century, though there are some interesting and at times important earlier instances of society activity, wholly isolated, which represent the incentives of the first generally recognized movements. The history of this important phase of nineteenth century scholarship has not been, so far, connectedly presented. Hence the following volume, which will, it is hoped, indicate with an approach to finality the historical growth of these movements and their influences upon the scholarship of their day and our own.

LEARNED SOCIETIES AND ENGLISH LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP

Chapter I The Field

Organized literary scholarship in England, like practically all phases of Renaissance intellectual activity, was a relatively late development. Indefinite as the immediate purposes of the academies of Renaissance Italy may at times seem to us, there can be no question as to the substantial value of such bodies in the development of current culture. In England, however, we find no traces of an amateur literary organization until almost the last quarter of the sixteenth century, at the moment when Italian academies were at the zenith of their popularity and effectiveness; and even then such organizations neither invited nor possessed public prominence. For this reason it is difficult to trace a continuous tradition of this sort through our most important literary period. The movement, exotic in itself, and unsupported by the general humanistic enthusiasm which gave life to the Italian academies, died almost in its birth and left no important effects to succeeding ages. What activity and interest we find in learned societies and academies, then, from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, can generally be considered a reflection of such activities and interests in Continental Europe; and the uniform failure of all such projects throughout almost two centuries can be attributed to a lack of responsible native

2 1 enthusiasm in such movements. The function of societies of this kind during this period was in the main critical, and aspired to profound effect upon the destinies of the vernacular language and literature. For this reason the lack of vitality in academy movements in England is probably connected more or less directly with the practical failure of the well defined classical critical traditions and the theories of vernacular iwlustration then current on the Continent. At any rate, the two facts may be regarded as co-incident evidences of the popular temper of English literary scholarship at the time. With the greater utility and the sharper definition of purpose in the learned societies of the nineteenth century, England comes well to the front; but before this time, we have only occasional and elusive traces of interest in the society idea.

From the earliest period of their existence, the activity of so-called learned societies in the cultivation of English literary traditions, either creative or historical, is affected by a diversity of conceptions as to the function, scope, and methods of organized philological scholarship. These acknowledged differences in attitude and in forms of activity make it necessary to define the fields of interest of the many English literary learned societies. Definition and division on these grounds is not difficult, and is not necessarily arbitrary. <A glance at the various early organized movements in the general direction of philological criticism and research shows three fairly well marked types of society.

The first type, first in importance in its time because of its critical authority in Italy and France, is what is generally known as the ‘‘academy,’’ the purpose of which is to establish canons of literary taste, and to facilitate and correct the growth of the vernacular. Such an established academy has never really existed in England. Even the actual incorporation of the British Academy in 1902, after

THE FIELD 3 suggestion and pressure from the Council of the Royal Society,’ though it aimed in part to represent philological scholarship in England at the meetings of the International Association of Academies, could do no more in this direection than to revive the acknowledgment that there never has been, and probably never can be, an authoritative academy of English language and letters. The many efforts to found such an academy, however, extending over a century of critical scholarship from Bolton to Swift, form interesting history.’

The second type of philological society that I have chosen to distinguish from organizations of connected interests is in its general attitude rather closely allied with the first, but differs from it importantly in the fact that its aim is primarily creative, not objectively critical. There is, as far as I know, no class name given to this type; without compromising the dignity of these usually small unions of literary men, we might call them ‘‘authors’ clubs.’’ The first important society of this kind in England was of course the Areopagus, formed by Dyer, Greville, Harvey, Spenser and Sidney in 1579.5 Other examples readily suggest themselves, as the Martinus Scriblerus Club, and Tennyson’s Apostles. In this kind of organization the interest in literature is essentially personal—the interest of the artist in his own product, completed or projected. The field of literary study is the present, not the past. The obvious purpose of such a society is to outline policies of creative work; the concerns of the society are the plans of the individuals who form it; and however these interests may extend themselves

1 Proceedings of the British Academy, 1903-1904, vii—ix.

2The recurrence of these efforts is traced by Mr. B. 8. Monroe in his article, An English Academy, in Modern Philology, VIII, 107-122

1910). 3 J ae B. Fletcher, Areopagus and Pleiade, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, II, 429-453 (1898).

into generalized theory, the bond of association is always that of the projected contact of the creative artist with his readers.

Differing markedly from these two kinds of literary organization is what is generally called the ‘‘learned society’’ of letters. Here the objects are not creative, not individual, not didactic; they are historical and objective; they touch the past of literature, not the present or the future; in a word, they imply scholarship, not a priori critical theory or the notions of literary artists. The object of such societies is to preserve literary monuments, to use them for the illumination of the national background, to cultivate historical knowledge, to concentrate it by discussion, to diffuse it through publication. All the interests that I have indicated are not necessarily to be found in all the societies of this type; but as a point of certain distinction it is probably fair to say that few or none of the peculiar interests of the literary society are to be found in the academies or the authors’ clubs. It is with the literary society, or the learned society of letters, that I propose to deal.

Chapter II

The most ancient of our literary societies—and probably the most ancient of all English learned societies—was the Assembly of the Antiquaries, founded by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1572.1. The history of this foundation has been presented in large part by a number of extended references to the society. Thomas Smith’s life of Sir Robert Cotton, prefixed to his catalogue of the Cottonian Library and afterwards reprinted in a collection of biographies,” seems to be the fountain-head of historical information on the subject. From this account Hearne secured the material for his Collection of Curious Discourses,®? which in turn was utilized by Richard Gough, the author of the introduction to the first volume of the Archaeologia.* Prof. Fliigel’s recent contribution to the history of the body is a reprint, with brief comment, of the prospeetus for the incorporation of the society, probably presented in 1589.5 This prospectus is fully digested in Smith’s

1 Henry Spelman, English Works, 24 ed., 1727; Part b, 69-70.

2Thomas Smith, Vita D. Roberti Cottoni; in Gryphius’s Vitae Selectae Quorundam Eruditissimorum ac Illustrium Virorum, 434- 536, Vratislaviae, 1711.

3 Thomas Hearne, A collection of curious Discourses, I, *iii-*viii, xi—xvii, lvii-lxi, II, 324-326, 421-449 (2d ed., 1775).

4 [Richard Gough], An historical account of the Origin and Estab- « lishment of the Society of Antiquaries; Archaeologia, I, i-xxi (1777). This article, the authorship of which was unknown even to Joseph Hunter, who reworked the early history of the Society of Antiquaries in Archaeologia XXXII, is ascribed to Richard Gough by Nichols, in his Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, VI, 297 (1812).

5 Ewald Fligel, Die dlteste englische Akademie; Anglia, XXXII, 261-268 (1909).

account of the society, and was printed substantially as a whole by Hearne. In reworking Smith’s memoir of the society, Hearne expanded the historical matter to some extent, and printed many of the papers read before the society, expressing his debt to Smith’s materials, where Smith had merely printed a representative number by titles. We see, then, that the bulk of the historical material was brought out by Smith, with some additions by Hearne. Smith, however, seems unfortunately to have been forgotten by most of those who have had occasion since Hearne’s time to write upon the society.®

In all the historical accounts of this assembly its importance in the general field of English scholarship has been obscured by the narrowness of the special interests of the writers upon the subject. All save Professor Fliigel are antiquaries pure and simple; and his purpose is confined to pointing out the scheme for the society’s incorporation as the earliest plan for the organization of an English academy.’ From the fact that most of the historical material relating to the society was originally brought out by antiquaries, we can feel reasonably certain that the nature of their interest in the body dominated their judgment of what was specially

6 An independent sketch of this society appeared in William Oldys’s Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, prefixed to his edition of Ralegh’s History of the World, 1736 (I, exxx—cxxxi). There are special reasons for considering this article separately; see post., 32, note.

7Mr. Monroe (op. cit., 107) states that the society was actually chartered in 1589; but I can not find evidence, in the face of Smith’s express denial, to support this conclusion. Richard Carew, a member, writing to Sir Robert Cotton in 1605, shortly after the dissolution of the society, says: ‘‘I heard by my Brother, that in the late Queenes tyme it was lykelie to have received an establishment and extraordynarie favour from sundrie great personages’’ (Original Letters of Eminent Literary Men, Camden Society, 1843; 99). This passage seems to indicate clearly that the society never secured legal recognition.

important in its history. The selected papers published by Hearne are all concerned with architectural and numismatic antiquities and miscellaneous evidences of social and political organization; philological inquiries, though represented at times, are meager and only incidental. The restricted aims of the writers who have treated the activities of the society at greater or less length have tended, therefore, to confine our impressions of its general importance. It seems, however, that we can not measure the full historical value of this organization by standards of judgment and interest as limited as those which have so far been applied. It is worth noting, in this connection, that no account down to the present writing has dealt adequately with one significant clue to the nature of the society’s concerns, and a most important test of its organic efficiency : that is, the effect which the personnel of the society must inevitably have had upon its activities. Furthermore, in an effort to trace the history of literary scholarship in this period we must not omit to recognize two well defined facts: that literary history then was only a vaguely distinguished phase of antiquarian study, and that this fact itself is due to the natural failure to separate belles lettres from the literature of knowledge. It is hopeless for us to expect to find at this time clear literary conceptions of a race and a period which were only at that moment being brought within the field of investigative study. We have, it must be granted, no positive evidence of the existence of literary interests in this society; we have, however, no evidence which denies the possibility of such interests. Considering, then, the obviously partial—and literally partial —historical remains which have descended to us, we must fall back upon what inferences are to be drawn from the evidence of its personnel.

Archbishop Parker, the founder of the society, was an ardently industrious antiquarian, and, as his biographer, Strype, puts it, ‘‘a mighty collector of books.’’ His interest in English antiquity was of more than ordinarily practical value because it was measured by his intellectual responsibility to the church of which he was the appointed head. His chief concern with ancient English literature seems to have been to justify, by reference to old authorities on church history and ceremonial, the Anglican establishment. But his interest in secular history also was broad and generous; and above all, he must be remembered for his timely and practical recognition of the urgent necessity of collecting ancient manuscripts, even though for narrower reasons than may move us to-day. An idea of how gravely imminent was the practical annihilation of quantities of manuscript records after the closing of the monasteries may be gained from Bishop Bale’s characteristically vigorous but convincing picture of their advancing fate.* It is interesting to find that Parker was Bale’s correspondent upon this very subject,® and that he endeavored for some years after Bale’s death to purchase his collections for permanent preservation, probably actually securing them in the end.?° Parker’s own collections of manuscripts were exceedingly extensive, and critically made. His ecclesiastical duties, as well as the mere magnitude of his ambition as a collector, prevented him from assembling personally the bulk of his library; but he employed for this purpose a number of travelling agents, including John Stow, Wiliam Lambarde,

8 The Laboryouse Journey & serche of John Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees, with declaracyons enlarged: by Johan Bale, 1549, Preface.

9A Letter from Bishop Bale to Archbishop Parker, communicated by H. R. Luard; Cambridge Antiquarian Communications, III, 157- 173 (1879).

10 Correspondence of Matthew Parker, D.D., Ed. John Bruce and Thomas Thomason Perowne, 198, 287 (1853).

and Stephen Batman, the last of whom alone is said to have gathered for the Archbishop 6700 volumes.*! Twenty-five volumes of historical manuscripts were presented by Parker in 1574 to the Cambridge University library ;?? the greater part of the library, however, was bequeathed by him to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, his own college."*

This learned antiquary’s extraordinary importance as a library builder, however, scarcely exceeds his note as a powerful and intelligent patron of early English literary scholarship. It is umnecessary to quote contemporary eulogia on this point; suffice it to say that practically every antiquarian writer of his day had reason to express his indebtedness to Parker not alone for his collections, but for his encouragement and personal interest in work under way. His own household was from time to time opened to the students of his period, and he extended vitally necessary aid to the scholarly labors of Foxe, Lambarde, and his own secretary Joscelyn.?#

It was presumably with John Joscelyn’s assistance that he issued the first Anglo-Saxon text in Anglo-Saxon types, eut by his order for his printer, John Day. This volume was A Testimonie of Antiqvitie, shewing the auncient fayth in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord, published according to Strype’s ‘‘guess’’ in 1566, and according to Wanley in

11 John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, II, 497-8, 517 (1821). The untiring activity of Parker in hunting down literary relics can be seen in numerous notices by Strype: I, 419, 466-7, 509, 511, 522-5, II, 497-500, 515-20,

13 The remarkable historical value of this collection in the field of early English literature may be judged from Dr. Montague Rhodes James’s The Sources of Archbishop Parker’s Collection of MSS at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (1899).

1567.16 Whether Parker was or was not the responsible editor of this work—and there are critical opinions that Joscelyn, or even Foxe, was principally instrumental in publishing it*7—there can be no doubt that the Archbishop’s connection with the publication was one of commanding supervision. The volume includes in its contents Aelfric’s Paschal Homily, two epistles of Aelfric, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and some scriptural passages, all in the old tongue, and employed to support Anglican views on the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Parker’s subsequent publications of the materials of early English history were the Flores Historiarum, wrongly assigned by his predecessors to a ‘‘Matthew of Westminster,’’!® in 1567-70; Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, 1571; Asser’s life of Alfred, Aelfredi Regis Res Gestae, 1574;7° and Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana,

16 Jbid., I, 472; Humphrey Wanley, Antiquae literaturae septentrionalis Liber alter, seu Catalogus historico-criticus, 326 (1705). It is worth noting that Strype (II, 448) observes that some pieces of ancient documentary evidence in Parker’s Defence of Priests’ Marriages, 1562, were ‘‘set down in the Saxon tongue.’’ This may deprive the Testimonie of its claim to be the first printed Anglo-Saxon work.

17See R. M. White’s preface to his edition of the Ormulum, I, vili-ix, note (1878).

18 Sir Frederic Madden has established the fact that the greater portion of the Flores Historiarum is an abridgment of Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, probably prepared under Paris’s direction. See Matthaei Parisiensis Historia Anglorum, ed. Sir Frederic Madden, 3 v., 1866-9; I, xx—xxviii. Though Parker’s edition of 1570, issued after the discovery of manuscripts which showed the edition of 1567 to be incomplete, did not correct the error in ascription, Parker evidently recognized the error by the following year (op. cit., xxxii). The mistake, however, was generally prevalent until Madden pointed it out anew.

19 The Asser, although a Latin text, was printed in Parker’s Anglo- Saxon types for the purpose of encouraging acquaintance with the character in which the Anglo-Saxon monuments were for the most part written.

THE ELIZABETHAN SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES y He

1574.29 Parker’s claim to special recognition for these services to learning is simply that of having set an example. It is very well known that his texts are not at all faithful to his manuscripts, and this in spite of his direct assertion in the preface to Asser’s Alfred that he ‘‘never added anything of his own, nor diminished from the copy; but expressed, to a word, everything as he found them in the originals.’’?t Modern criticism has not been inclined to generosity toward Parker’s faults as an editor, though it should be admitted by his critics that Elizabethan conceptions of textual sacredness were by no means as well defined as they are to-day.”?

20 Mr. Sidney Lee in his biography of John Stow, Dict. Nat. Biog., LV, 4, assumes that Stow himself was the responsible editor of Parker’s texts of the Flores Historiarum, Matthew Paris, and Thomas of Walsingham. His opinion, I believe, may be traced to a misinterpretation of Stow’s statement that among the manuscripts which Parker printed were those mentioned, ‘‘all which he received of my hands’’ (Annales or generall Chronicle of England, continued and augmented by Edmond Howes, 1615; 679). Both Strype and Sir Frederic Madden have interpreted this phrase more reasonably as indicating merely that Parker used Stow’s manuscripts.

21 Strype’s translation from Parker, II, 501.

22 The inaccuracy of Parker’s texts has been pointed out from a period almost within reach of his own lifetime. Not one of his texts is wholly free from blame; and most of them have been submitted to scathing criticism. See Thomae Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. Thomas Riley, 1864, I, ix—xii; Matthaei Parisiensis, Historia Anglorum, ed. Sir Frederic Madden, 1866-9, I, xix—xxxvii; Matthaei Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 1872-83, II, xxii-xxvili; Asser’s Life of Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson, 1904, xvii-xxi. These references enable us without doubt to estimate fairly the value of Parker’s editorial work: in the light of modern scholarship, his texts are practically useless. The fact is indisputable, but it is far from determining with finality Parker’s importance as a scholar; for as against the evidence of his texts, in itself so strongly condemnatory, we have these points to consider. In the first place, it has not been demonstrated that he was personally

An old English publication for which the Archbishop was less directly responsible than for the works already referred to was the Anglo-Saxon version of the Gospels put forth by John Foxe in 1571. Foxe states in his preface that it was at Parker’s instance and at his cost that the publication was undertaken.

Upon William Camden, one of the original members of the society, it is, of course, unnecessary to enlarge. Though responsible for his texts; it has been ever since Parker’s time a matter of dispute whether he was the actual overseer of these publications. As to Asser’s Alfred we have more or less definite and reliable evidence: Hearne, whose opinion and whose command of literary tradition are, when his prejudices are not involved, generally to be depended upon, says without qualification that Joscelyn was responsible for the editing of this volume (Remarks and Collections, VII, 240). On the question of Parker’s responsibility we have no evidence touching his issues of the Flores Historiarum and Paris’s Chronica Majora; but what is apparently true of the Asser is quite conceivably true of all the other publications which appeared under his auspices. Further than this, no evidence other than the attribution of these works to the editorship of Parker remains to convince us that he was actually capable of performing the textual work on them; Joscelyn and Lambarde, on the other hand, have left substantial memorials of their scholarly attainments. Miss E. T. Bradley makes the general claim in behalf of Joscelyn that Parker in all probability received eredit for much of his secretary’s editorial work (Dict. Nat. Biog., XXX, 205), and both Madden and Stevenson seem disposed at least to admit the plausibility of this view (Matthaei Parisiensis, Historia Anglorum, I, xxxvi-xxxvii; Asser’s Alfred, xvii). These facts may explain Parker’s asseveration of his fidelity to his manuscript, reverently echoed by Strype (Life and Acts of Parker, II, 501). If we may assume that Parker was not spared sufficient leisure from his ecclesiastical and political duties to supervise the preparation of his texts, he may well have been ignorant of what his editors, not bred in a tradition of scholarly ethics, and almost certainly incapable of understanding the weight of their offence, were actually doing with the texts. In any event, there is apparently sufficient doubt in the whole matter to make it dangerous to pronounce an unqualified judgment of Parker’s guilt.

his interest in literature for its own sake was certainly less than for its service to his historical and antiquarian labors, still the mere extent of his correspondence with learned men of letters and the weight of his incidental services to literary and linguistic scholarship give him unquestioned importance in the domain of philological study. His most specific claim to recognition as a student of letters lies in the publication in 1602-3 of his collection of six early English-Latin chroniclers.2* This publication, dedicated to Fulke Greville, who had secured for Camden his appointment as Clarenceux King of Arms, though valuable for its time, was hastily done, the erratic text of Parker’s former publications, for example, having apparently been followed without any attempt at corrected readings.** The work is not merely open to criticism on this ground, however, for it may be remembered that it was in this edition of Asser’s life of Alfred that the notorious interpolation concerning the foundation of Oxford before the time of Alfred appeared, the substance of which had already been used by Camden in the fifth edition (1600) of his Britannia.”®> In spite of the great unreliability of Camden’s work as an editor, however, we must concede to him, as to Parker, credit for his pioneer labors. Camden’s interest in the

24 Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint Neots, edited by William Henry Stevenson, 1904, xxii.

25 For the history of the controversy as to the authenticity of this passage see James Parker, The Early History of Oxford, 1885, 39-45, and Asser’s Life of Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson, 1904, Xxili—xxviili. Whether or not Camden was the actual author of the passage—and there seems adequate reason to believe that it may have been forged by ‘‘Long Henry’’ Savile (op. cit., and Dict. Nat. Biog., L, 369-70)—there seems to be little doubt that Camden’s use of the passage was purposely misleading, if not altogether dishonest.

society was obviously, and unlike Parker’s, purely antiquarian. Indeed, it might not be too much to assume that the ardor and the engaging personality of Camden did much to determine the trend of the tastes of the later members, and hence to color the interests of the society as a body.

William Lambarde’s connection with the society was due very evidently to his association with Archbishop Parker. He was one of the earliest accomplished scholars in Anglo- Saxon, having studied the language with Laurence Nowell, probably the pioneer in the field.2* His general contributions to linguistic scholarship are acknowledged to have been great, though his labors of this kind are obscured by the fact that they are usually incidental to a wider interest in English antiquity. His antiquarian works were his "Apxo.ovouia, published in 1568, a digest of Anglo-Saxon laws, and his Perambulation of Kent, 1576, the first printed county history.