ABSTRACT
At the time of his death Fulke Greville was custos rotulorum of the county bench and much admired by his fellow justices as a worthie patriot' and paragon of godly magistracy. Sir John Newdigate is perhaps the best-documented example of a gentleman-reader from this generation. He studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the late 1580s and served on the Warwickshire bench from 1598 until his death in. An excellent account of Newdigate's writings, see her paper on The Godly Magistrate: The Private Philosophy and Public Life of Sir John Newdigate, Dugdale Society Occasional Paper. Newdigate's surviving notebooks and study programmes reveal a remarkably sustained curriculum of reading and self-improvement. Newdigate's principal means of acquiring this type of wisdom was through reading, but it was not the only one. Newdigate may have been exceptional in the amount of time and energy he dedicated to his studies, but the mental world he inhabited was one which was thoroughly familiar to his contemporaries.
