John Lakenheath reorganized the archives of the Benedictine abbey of Bury St Edmunds in the 1370s, a key tool in his administrative work on its estates that was still in disorder after it was sacked by the townspeople in 1327. This culminated in the ‘Lakenheath Registry’ (London, British Library, Harley MS 743), an indexed directory of the Bur…[Read more]

The most widely consulted thesis in the Bodleian Library for most of the twentieth century was that of R.W. Hunt: ‘Alexander Neckam’, completed in 1936 for his D.Phil. at Oxford under F.M. Powicke. He was later its Keeper of Western Manuscripts, from 1945 until 1975. The list of those who have consulted the thesis, pasted in the front of the vol…[Read more]