INTRODUCTION. a numerous family and it was then not easier than it
now is to pro- vide for daughters and younger sons a position
consistent with the honour and dignity of the family from which
they sprung. Primo- geniturafacit appanagium but courtiers then
swallowed up employments which have in later times been a happy
resource for the scions of influential county families and the
squire of the seven- teenth century had to provide means for
cadets, which a more skilful age has sought in other modes of
provision than a careful and frugal economy. And yet, amidst all
the distractions of political and public life, and the cares
imposed upon him by his station and domestic circum- stances,
undeterred by difficulty, undismayed by persecution, we find him
devoting the energies of a powerful mind to the investiga- tion of
our national antiquities, rendering some of our earlier autho-
rities accessible for the first time to his fellow countrymen, and
finally producing two of the most remarkable contributions we yet
possess to our ecclesiastical and political history. The student in
an age like this, when the means of collecting knowledge are widely
diffused, and the aids to its co-ordination and implication
sufficiently supplied, can form but a faint notion of the
difficulties which, in the seventeenth century, still beset the
path of the historical inquirer. Much that is now accessible
through a never resting press was then still locked up in
manuscripts, too often guarded with jealous care from the eye of a
stranger. No British Museum opened its hospitable doors to every
respectable applicant and even though Cotton and DEwes, and other
equally noble men, gave great facilities to all who hadany claims
upon their notice, in many cases long negotiations and no little
diplomacy were necessarv in order to obtain sight of a rare book or
valuable manuscript. . Continental works of the greatest note were
not then easily obtained, and even when picked up by the travelling
Englishman were only to be purchased at a high rate, and at
imminent risk of miscarriage in the transport to this country.
Above all, historical studies were but in their infancy nor had the
zeal and labour of successive generations of scholars yet
established that critical apparatus, without which so many problems
in chronology and philology would still remain unsolved. And yet it
is impossible to deny that no age has produced a more vigorous race
of thinkers, or one to which we owe more gratitude for their
labours. It does not, however, seem difficult to account for this.
It was an age of restless mental activity, in which every energy of
mind was braced and trained by the daily exigences of public life
when great principles were still to be brought into light, great
ends still to be struggled for, and when strong minds eagerly took
part in the struggle, to which circumstances irresistibly hurried
them on...
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