Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/408

400 with the royal treasure, and thus have been handed down to the time of Henry I. As a member of the royal household Adelard would have had access to these books, and his citation is the earliest mention of a library of the Norman kings. But if any one can suggest a better explanation, non invideo! .





1879 Dr. F. Liebermann published, along with other brief monastic annals, the 'Annales Radingenses 1066–1189'. They were derived from marginal notes attached to a table of the Paschal cycle of a manuscript formerly belonging to Reading Abbey, and now in the British Museum (Roy. 8, E. xviii). This is not, however, the only surviving instance of such an annotated table from Reading Abbey, as there exists in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge, a twelfth-century manuscript (no. 22) containing Bede's De Temporibus and one or two other works, and a Paschal cycle on the margin of which brief notes of events from 1135 to 1264 are jotted down. The present provost of Eton, in his catalogue of the St. John's manuscripts, has fully described this book (pp. 30 ff.), and has printed a few of the annalistic notes; but it seems worth while to print the whole of them, although they have not much of interest. They do not seem connected with the Reading annals which Matthew Paris appears to have used. Such as they are, they are written by several different hands, some four or five, contemporaneous usually with the events commemorated, and a distinctly loyalist tone may be detected in this abbey so near to Windsor. Unfortunately, the longest entry, dealing with the battle of Lewes, has been erased, and I could only recover a few words. The year A.D., as might be expected, begins on 25 March. I have, as a rule, expanded words without noting the fact.

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