The monastic antiquities of medieval England have, since the days of Camden, if not since those of Leland, received an attention from scholars and antiquaries such as has been given to few other branches of national history. From the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and throughout the century which has with some justice been called “the greatest age of English medieval scholarship”, a succession of men of eminent talents and unwearying industry collected, transcribed and edited all that they could find of the wealth of monastic records that had been in part destroyed and in part scattered at the Dissolution, Sir Thomas Bodley, Sir Robert Cotton, Camden himself, Augustine Baker, Clement Reyner, Sir Roger Twysden, Roger Dodsworth and (most illustrious of all) Sir William Dugdale—these are only a few from among the names that become familiar to every student of monastic history. They were followed by others scarcely less notable—by Tanner, by Gale, by Hearne, by Wanley and by Sparke—and these, in their turn, after an interval, by the historians and antiquarians who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, embarked on the task of publishing the whole corpus of medieval literature and records in the great collections of the Camden, Surtees and other national and regional learned societies, many of which continue, after a century of life, to put out each year new additions to their familiar series.