[1] Certainly, however, English scholars
soon appreciated this new literature.
[1] E. H. R., xxv. 449.
Letters sent to Pope Sixtus in 1484 by the king, refer
to the skill of John Shirwood, bishop of Durham, in Latin
and Greek.[1] Shirwood seems to have collected a respectable
library. His Latin books were acquired by Bishop Foxe,
and formed the nucleus of the library with which the latter
endowed Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Some thirty
volumes, a number of them printed, now remain at the
College to bring him to mind: among them we find Pliny,
Terence, Cicero, Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Horace.
Less fortunate has been the fate of his Greek books, which
went to the collegiate church of Bishop Auckland. At the
end of the fifteenth century this church owned about forty
volumes. The only exceptions to its medieval character
were Cicero's Letters and Offices, Silius Italicus, and
Theodore Gaza's Greek grammar.[2] But Leland tells us
that Tunstall, who succeeded to the bishopric in 1530,
found a store of Shirwood's Greek manuscripts at this
church. What became of them we do not know.[3]
[1] Rymer, Foedera, xii.
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