ABSTRACT
Access to the documents prior to British Library acquisition was quite restricted. In any case, it is almost certainly true that only two or three people alive today have examined the entire collection at all systematically – myself and the two modern archivists (earlier, Miss M.D. Slatter; and Dr Harris, for the British Library)2 – though important use has been made of sections of the archive by some scholars, most notably Sharp (1977) and Barnard (e.g.1979; 1981a; 1981b; 1982). A selection of manuscripts from the collection was published by the sixth Marquis of Lansdowne (1927; 1928) – and also an important discovery by Matsukawa (1977). The latter is the only new document from the archive that has been published since World War II, to the best of my knowledge, though Amati and Aspromourgos (1985) provide an English translation of a Latin manuscript published in Lansdowne (1927).
