The history of libraries between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth is one not simply of expansion and multiplication, but of changes in the relationships between readers and the book trade, in the ways books were organized, and in the values placed upon them by institutions or individuals. Books – new and old – were neglected as well as welcomed, while Britain became accustomed to using libraries on a scale unimagined at the beginning of our period.

When John Bateman, Fellow of the newly re-founded Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, died in 1559, the university appraisers valued his goods at £48 17s.1d. He was probably not yet forty years old. His quarters comprised a chamber, an inner chamber, an upper chamber and a study. The chamber contained a table, a desk, sundry chairs and forms, a quantity of clothing, nearly all of it described as ‘old’, but he was well equipped with drinking glasses and table linen. There was also a ‘pair of clavichords’. His inner chamber was his bedroom, with more chairs, two desks and a fireplace. The upper chamber contained a trestle table and eating utensils. The ‘study’ had two chairs, but no free-standing writing surface, a brush, a pen-case and an inkhorn. Here also were found some 500 books. We might perhaps describe the room as his library.