Greek scribes in England: the evidence of episcopal registers

In the library of Trinity College, Dublin, there exists a manuscript of the Grammar of Theodore Gaza, copied in 1484 by John Servopoulos of Constantinople. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this: Gaza's Grammar was in great demand in the later fifteenth century as more and more Western scholars resolved to learn Greek. What is striking about this particular example is that in the colophon the scribe stated that he copied it, not in Constantinople or one of the centres of the Italian Renaissance, but in what he called 'the island of the Britons'.1