ABSTRACT
Charles Mills, whose two-volume History of the Crusades for the Recovery and Possession of the Holy Land was also regularly borrowed by library readers, was a more 'traditional' historian of the crusades. Gladstone of course may have been more interested in Gerusalemme as literature rather than an account, however fantastic, of the First Crusade, but there is other evidence of his interest in the crusades. As a pupil at Eton he had certainly read Mills' History of the Crusades, and he composed a poem of some 250 lines on Richard Coeur de Lion in 1827. As well as the foundation of the London Library, the nineteenth century saw a number of other important developments in terms of access to books throughout Britain and for all classes of society. Whilst there was no public library system as such until after the Public Library Bill of 1850, books were accessible in a variety of ways.
