But what was he to do?

'Whereupon, examining exactly for the rest of my life what course I
might take, and having sought all the ways to the wood to select
the most proper, I concluded at the last to set up my staff at the
Library door in Oxford, being thoroughly persuaded that in my
solitude and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs I could not
busy myself to better purpose than by reducing that place (which
then in every part lay ruined waste) to the publick use of
students.'

It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea
destined to be translated into action. Bodley proceeds to state the
four qualifications he felt himself to possess to do this great bit of
work: first, the necessary knowledge of ancient and modern tongues and
of 'sundry other sorts of scholastical literature'; second, purse
ability; third, a great store of honourable friends; and fourth,
leisure.

Bodley's description of the state of the old library as lying in every
part ruined and in waste was but too true.

Richard of Bury, the book-loving Bishop of Durham, seems to have been
the first donor of manuscripts on anything like a large scale to
Oxford, but the library he founded was at Durham College, which stood
where Trinity College now stands, and was in no sense a University
library. The good Bishop, known to all book-hunters as the author of
the _Philobiblon_, died in 1345, but his collection remained intact,
subject to rules he had himself laid down, until the dissolution of
the monasteries, when Durham College, which was attached to a