In 1573 Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury, presented a gift to William Cecil, one of Elizabeth i's chief advisors and chancellor of the University of Cambridge. This was a lavishly decorated presentation copy of a curious book that Parker had had printed: his De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae & priviliegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis. Some copies, including Cecil's, also included another text, added on at the end: a collection of lists and potted histories relating to the University of Cambridge. For Parker and Cecil, as for many of the most central figures in the Elizabethan regime, Cambridge was a shared part of their personal histories. They had both been at the university during the reign of Henry viii, although in very different capacities: Parker was a doctor of theology who would soon become a Head of House and serve as university vice-chancellor, while Cecil ended his time studying in Cambridge without taking a degree. Both, however, retained a life-long affection for the place where they had spent such formative years, an affection to which the text at the end of De antiquitate bears witness.

Written from the vantage point of 1572, it also bears witness to some of the upheaval and rupture that political and religious change had wrought in the university since 1535, the year when Cecil had begun his studies, and when a Henrician royal visitation had rewritten the university curriculum in the name of royal supremacy over the English Church. The book includes a calendar that begins in 1500 and ends with Parker's present day. It includes a few extra notes, so that there are interspersed references to the arrival of the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus in Cambridge in 1506, to the burning of Lutheran books in 1521, to the death of the German theologian Martin Bucer in 1551 (whose funeral occasioned a display of Protestant piety and celebration) and to the ceremonial exhumation and burning of his remains six years later (a display of Catholic condemnation and triumph). The pages where these latter two events are noted also contain another marker of the rapid and conflicting nature of both England's and Cambridge's political reformations in these years.