This is a history of Wales from the beginning to the time of the author. First part deals with the ancient kings of Britain and Wales up to the extinction of the royal line. The second part deals with the history of Princes of Wales of English origin, from Edward I on. It includes the famous episode of Edward I appointing his son Edward II, newly born in Caernarfon, Prince of Wales, having promised Welsh people that he would appoint a non-English-speaking ruler born in Wales. 

The author is R. B., or Robert Burton, though it is not clearly indicated. Robert Burton is a pseudonym of Nathaniel Crouch (c. 1640-1725?), bookseller and writer. He wrote and published many books on history from 1681 on, including Wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland (1681), England's Monarchs (1685), The History of Kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland (1686), The History of Oliver Cromwell (1693), The History of the House of Orange (1693), The History of the Kingdom of Ireland (1693), and The History of Scotland (1696). The History of the Principality of Wales seems to be the last but one book he published. HIs historical works were reprinted many times in the eighteenth century, and were widely read. 

It is a very small copy, only slightly bigger than a normal iPhone. My copy is in a nice modern binding, and Crouch's name, which is not mentioned in the book itself, is printed on the label put on the spine. 

This is a very small, iPhone-sized collected edition of works by Geoffrey Chaucer, and is part of John Bell's Poets of Great Britain series. The text of The Canterbury Tales is based on Thomas Tyrwhitt's edition published in 1775, while the other works' texts are based on John Urry's published in 1721. On the title pages of all the fourteen volumes, eulogies on Chaucer by John Gower, John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, Gavin Douglas, and William Dunbar are printed, which is a bit unusual. 

Volume 1 is mostly introduction to Chaucer's life and works by Tyrwhitt and others. Volumes 2-13 contain Chaucer's actual works, and Volume 14 is a glossary. 

It is said that John Keats read Chaucer with this edition. His friend Charles Cowden Clarke owned a set, and Keats borrowed it, read it, left some markings in the text of Troilus and Criseyde, and even left a sonnet in the blank space at the end of 'The Floure and the Leafe' in vol. 12 ('The Floure and the Leafe' turned out to be a work by someone else but had been believed as Chaucer's). This copy with Keats's inscriptions is preserved at the British Library now. For more details, see Beth Lau, 'Keats's Markings in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde', Keats-Shelley Journal 43 (1994), pp. 39-55.

This is a translation of an anonymous fourteenth-century French prose romance, Artus de la Petite Bretagne, by John Bourchier (1467-1533). Bourchier's own manuscript is lost and the translation is extant as two sixteenth-century editions published c. 1555 and c. 1582. The original language (early Modern English) is preserved in this edition. The earliest extant manuscript of the French original is Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale 761 (14th century), but it is said that probably Bourchier did not consult fourteenth-century manuscripts but consulted pre-1533 French editions, only four of which are extant (they were published in 1493, 1496, 1509, and 1514) (Woods, p. ix). 

The hero of the story, Arthur of Little Britain (or Brittany), is a son of Duke Johan of Brittany. He is named after King Arthur, and his lineage goes back to Lancelot. The story covers his life in 112 chapters, but he dies quite young, at the age of 32; it is a very long and detailed story (and I have not read it through). This work, as well as the translator himself, has been quite neglected in literary history, but it is said that it is one of the sources Edmund Spenser used for his Faerie Queene. 

The translator, John Bourchier, is best known for his translation of Froissart's Chronicles, which he says he translated at Henry VIII's behest. It is also known that he translated another French romance, Huon de Bordeaux (Huon of Burdeux), as well as (a French version of) Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de amor (The Castell of Love),  and Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio (The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius).  

It is said that only 175 copies of this book were made, so it must be quite rare. My copy was owned by Hugh Robert Hughes of Kinmel and Dinorben, Esq (1827-1911) and was then owned by the Paolino Gerli Collection, Manhattan College, NYC. It is in a very heavy wooden-board binding somewhat looking like a medieval manuscript. 

There are two doctoral dissertations dealing with this work:

George Emile Mitchell, 'A Textual Edition on Modern Principles of Arthur of Little Britain, A Romance of the Sixteenth Century Translated by John Bourchier, Lord Bernes', diss. University of Notre Dame, 1969.

Nancy Elizabeth Broom Woods, 'A Time of Transition: Studies in Lord Berner's "Arthur of Little Britain", diss. University of Southern Mississippi, 1986. 

The former is mostly an edition of the work, while the latter is a study on the work, including a very lengthy summary of the story. 

For the life and career of John Bourchier, see James P. Carley, 'Bourchier, John, second Baron Berners' in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

This is a posthumous, second edition of Milton's The History of Britain first published in 1670. As the subtitle shows, the volume covers from the beginning of the British history to the Norman Conquest; large part of it deals with the Anglo-Saxon period.

Milton wrote it much earlier than it was published; the first four books in the 1640s, and the remaining two books in the 1650s. In the Defensio Secunda (1654), Milton writes that he was intending to write a history up to his own age, and so this volume may well have originally been intended as just the beginning of a much bigger project. In the same work, he also writes that he was composing the History as a private exercise. This may well be a reason why it was not published long after it was written; it was just a beginning part of a longer history and anyway it was originally intended as a private thing. 

As he was serving for the Commonwealth and was publishing political tracts defending the Parliament and the Commonwealth government, and also justifying King Charles I's execution, he hided himself after the Restoration in 1660. When he emerged from hiding, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for some time but he was eventually released. Milton was in disfavour with the new government, and did not (or could not) publish anything for more than six years until 1667, when his Paradise Lost was published. This gives another good reason for the History not to have been published long after it was originally composed. 

As Graham Parry points out, it is likely that Milton added the following last paragraph of the volume as his 'muted comment on the Restoration scene' (Parry, 'Introduction', p. 46): 

If these were the Causes of such Misery and Thraldom to those our Ancestors, with what better close can be Concluded, than here in fit season to remember this Age in the midst of her Security, to fear from like Vice without amendment the Revolution of like Calamities. (p. 357)

Due to the Norman Conquest, which is the last major topic of the volume, the English people forced into submission to the Norman yoke. Milton may have compared the situation after the Norman Conquest with that in his own time when Milton might have considered, the English people were once again subjugated to the royal supremacy and oppressive aristocratic establishment after the Restoration. 

Milton extensively uses Æthelweard's Chronicle, along with major medieval histories such as those by Gildas, Bede, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Symeon of Durham, et al, which is impressive, since Æthelweard's Chronicle is never used by medieval historians other than William of Malmesbury, who is the last 'witness' of it before scholars started to mention it again in the sixteenth century. Henry Savile published its editio princeps in 1596, and probably Milton used it, since there was only one manuscript recording Æthelweard's Chronicle, British Library, Cotton Otho A.x, which was mostly destroyed in the fire in 1731. 

My copy was once owned by D. P. Alford, vicar of Tavistock, who left sporadic neat inscriptions. 

A facsimile of the second edition of this book is published as John Milton, The History of Britain: A Facsimile Edition with a Critical Introduction by Graham Parry (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1991). 

For more details about Milton's History of Britain, see Graham Parry, 'Introduction', in the aforementioned facsimile edition, pp. 7-48. 

This is a copy of the second edition of Thomas Sheridan's A General Dictionary of the English Language first published in 1780. The title of the second edition is slightly modified with 'General' changed to 'Complete'. 

Thomas Sheridan (1719?-1788) was an Irish actor but he left his acting career and moved permanently to England in 1758, where he was active as an educator, giving lectures on 'the art of reading and reciting and grammatical knowledge of the English tongue' (DeRochi and Ennis, 'Introduction' in J. E. DeRochi and D. J. Ennis, eds., Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context (Lewisburg, 2013), p. 6).  He published a book based on his lectures in 1762, entitled Lectures on Elocution.


 

As the title of the dictionary shows, the main objective of publishing the above dictionary was to 'establish a plain and permanent standard of pronunciation', and for this purpose, Sheridan adds 'A Prosodial Grammar' and also 'Directions to Foreigners' at the beginning of the dictionary. In Dr Johnson's and earlier dictionaries, the pronunciation of words is not indicated, whereas Sheridan, using phonetic symbols, indicates the pronunciation of all the headwords, which system is inherited by John Walker (1732-1807) in his Pronouncing Dictionary, though he uses a different set of phonetic symbols. 

This is the first systematic etymological dictionary of the English language by Francis Junius (1591-1677), a German pioneer of Germanic philology, edited and posthumously published by Edward Lye (1694-1767), an Old English and Germanic philologist.  

Junius, on his death, bequeathed his books, manuscripts, types (called Junian types), and other things to the University of Oxford, which included the manuscript of this dictionary. Lye, the last of many Anglo-Saxonists inspired by Junius, edited this dictionary based on the manuscript, adding an Old English grammar based on George Hickes's Linguarum veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-criticus et Archaeologicus. Later, Lye compiled, based on Junius's Latin-Old English glossary without acknowledgement, an Anglo-Saxon dictionary, Dictionarium Saxonico- et Gothico-Latinum, posthumously published in 1772. 

, 2 vols. (London: Lucas Harrison, 1577). 

Perhaps the book is now best-known as the probable source of Shakespearean history plays, Macbeth, and part of King Lear, and of Cymbeline. It is also said to be probable that Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser used it as a source of their works. 

The leaf above covers the history of late Anglo-Saxon England, from 1040s to early 1050s, dealing with events happening after the death of Harthacnut (c. 1018-1042) and chiefly related to Edward the Confessor and his mother Emma of Normandy. 

I also have a copy of the first two volumes of the second impression of the second edition. 

Nathan Bailey (d. 1742) was a lexicographer and schoolmaster best known for his dictionaries. This dictionary is the tenth edition of his first dictionary which he published in 1721. Tenth edition was published in the same year as Bailey's death. 

In 1727, Bailey published a second volume, which includes an orthographic dictionary, in which he introduced accentuation markings for the first time in a general English dictionary. Unlike a list of hard words like Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604), Bailey's dictionary includes not only hard words but also common words, scientific terms, dialect terms, and some vulgar words, with their etymology. Dr Johnson used the second edition of this dictionary as a basis of his own dictionary when compiling it. Bailey's dictionary was superseded by Johnson's, but is said to have long remained popular especially among autodidacts (see Michael Hancher's article on Bailey in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). 

The dictionary is preceded by an introduction which is effectively a brief history of Britain and the languages spoken therein. 

Polychronicon is a history of the world written by a Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden (d. 1364) in the first half of the fourteenth century. Its original is in Latin, while it was translated into Middle English by John Trevisa in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Trevisa's translation was printed and published by William Caxton in 1482 (see this page), and was reprinted by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495. 

This leaf is from a volume printed in 1527 by Peter Treveris (fl. 1525-32) for John Reynes (d. 1545). It is also based on Trevisa's translation. Treveris's edition is an illustrated one and is said to be important for its woodcuts. It is also known that it includes the earliest printed depiction of musical notation in an English book. 

This leaf contains a woodcut initial, and covers from the last part of Book 7 Chapter 21 to the beginning of the next chapter, from 1153 to 1155, and mentions the death of St Bernard, the death of King Stephen, and the accession of King Henry I. It also includes some contemporary marginal notes and underlining in ink. 



The relevant part is printed in J. R. Lumby, ed., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, vol. 8 (London, 1882), pp. 15-27. 

This is an English translation of Rask's earlier grammar of Old English, Angelsaksisk Sproglære, tilligemed en kort Læsebog (Stockholm, 1817), but as the title says, it is a new edition enlarged and improved by Rask himself. 

Written by a Danish scholar and published in Copenhagen, it is written from the Danish perspective primarily for a Danish (or Scandinavian) readership, as reflected in the following quite discouraging words for learners of Old English at the very beginning of Preface: 

The Anglo-Saxon language, as well as its literature, holds unquestionably a rank inferior to the ancient Scandinavian, in respect both of intrinsic excellence, and of interest and importance, at least to the inhabitants of the North (p. iii). 

But in the next paragraph, Rask also says:

Yet, of all the old Teutonic dialects, this is perhaps the most important to us Scandinavians; Firstly, because it has been considered, by some elder writers, as the fountain of the present northern tongues, at least of the Danish, whence it indeed necessarily follows that it must also be that of the Norwegian (which is the same as Danish), and of the Swedish, which so nearly resembles it, ... (p. iv). 

He also writes that 'The Anglo-Saxon literature too, though not to be compared with the Icelandic, is to us of the highest interest. Its amplitude enables us to acquire a complete knowledge of the language, with respect both to its structure and vocabulary; and as it is very difficult to judge and make use of that which we know but partially, this is a great advantage which the Anglo-Saxon enjoys over the other ancient Teutonic tongues, ... (p. v). 

Thus, for Rask, Old English was important chiefly for the purpose of Germanic comparative linguistics, and actually, the preface as a whole is like a short introduction to Germanic comparative linguistics chiefly focussing on Old English and Old Norse. 

The translator, Benjamin Thorpe (1781/2-1870), is a reputed Anglo-Saxonist, publishing many Old English texts. He went to Copenhagen in 1826 to study Old English under Rasmus Rask, professor of literary history at the Danish University and the author of this book. In the translator's postscriptum, Thorpe writes that he started to translate this book when he briefly went back to London about two years before its publication (probably 1828). After he went back to Copenhagen, he was busy with other things and for a while forgot about the translation, but then Rask told him about 'the results of his researches subsequent to the publication of the first edition', and also consented to cooperate with him in completing his translation, which Thorpe writes induced him to complete it (p. lx). This was the first book Thorpe published, and its second edition was published in London in 1865.

I have two copies, one is in a leather binding and the other is in a standard cloth binding. The former was owned by Sir William Selby Church (1837-1928), 1st Baronet, KBC, while the latter used to belong to Kinshiro Oshitari (1932-2008), a Japanese Anglo-Saxonist reputed for his Beowulf studies.