Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence: In Antiquities concerning the Most Noble and Renowned English Nation (London: John Bill, 1628).
The author of this book, Richard Verstegan (c. 1550-1640), was a Catholic Anglo-Dutch author, antiquary, publisher, translator, intelligence agent, and cloth trader. He is also known as Richard Rowlands; Rowlands is a patronym (his father's name being Theodore Rowland Verstegan) he used when he was studying at Christ Church, Oxford. As a Roman Catholic, he secretly printed an account of the execution of Edmund Campion (an English Jesuit priest and martyr) in 1581, but it was discovered, so he escaped from England to the Continent, and started to use the family name Verstegan again.
In 1585 or 1586, he started a publishing business in Antwerp and also started to smuggle books and people. He kept the business until about 1603. The book above was first printed in Antwerp in 1605, so it was not by his own firm. The book was widely read and was reprinted in 1628, 1634, 1652, 1655, and 1673. I have two copies: the first edition in England published in 1628; and the last edition published in 1673. The 1634 and subsequent editions are a bit smaller in size than the 1605 and 1628 editions.
In this book, Verstegan explores the Germanic origin of the Anglo-Saxons (and of the English people), and traces the origin of the Germanic peoples to Babel (so the tower of Babel is printed on the title page), arguing that the Germanic language is one of the oldest languages in the world and that the Danish and Norman conquests both failed to eradicate the fundamentally English character of the nation. The volume includes the first glossary of about 685 Old English words (pp. 207-40) as well as the first English account of 'Pied Piper of Hammelin' (pp. 85-86). The volume also includes several engravings, among which the one depicting the scene of the arrival of the first ancestors of the English people led by Hengist and Horsa (p. 117) is especially well known.
A facsimile of the 1605 edition is published as No. 952 of 'The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile' series by Walter J. Johnson, Inc. (based in New Jersey) and by Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd. (based in Amsterdam) in 1979.
For the life of Richard Verstegan, see Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), in which a section discussing this book is included (pp. 85-93).
Verstegan's letters are edited as Anthony G. Petti, ed., The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c. 1550=1640), Publications of Catholic Record Society 52 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1959). In a letter dated 15 June 1609, Verstegan refers to this book, writing that 'For my book of our nation's antiquities I continew to gather such notes as I deem convenient, intending, if I can understand it wilbe gratefull once more to be committed to the presse, to set foorth with augmentation' (Petti, p. 266), but all the subsequent editions were simply reprinted from the 1605 edition (Petti, p. 267).
See also Richard W. Clement, 'Richard Verstegan's Reinvention of Anglo-Saxon England: A Contribution from the Continent', in William F. Gentrup, ed., Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 19-36; and Donna B. Hamilton, 'Richard Verstegan's "A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence" (1605): A Catholic Antiquarian Replies to John Foxe, Thomas Cooper, and Jean Bodin', Prose Studies 22.2 (1999), pp. 1-38.
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