In July 1605 King James sent his unpublished manuscript
Historie of the Churche to
Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. James had composed the work at
Dalkeith Palace in the 1580s. This manuscript however had been written by Patrick Young following a copy made by
John Geddie. James apologised that the language of this copy had been corrupted first by the version of
Scots used by Geddie, and then by Patrick Young's attempts to convert the text into English spelling. He joked that the result was like the Welsh spoken by the courtier
Roger Aston, who was from
Cheshire. Around 1622 he made a catalogue of manuscripts in
Salisbury Cathedral. In 1622 he was ordered to undertake a survey of old manuscripts in English churches and make extracts for King James. He was an eminent scholar in Greek; and he was asked to catalogue the Greek manuscripts of
Giacomo Barocci, numbering around 250, that had been donated in 1629 to the
Bodleian Library by their purchaser
William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. He was entrusted with the revision of the
Codex Alexandrinus of the
Septuagint. He made contributions to
Brian Walton’s
Polyglot Bible, in the annotations (Vol. VI). He was responsible for the
editio princeps of
Clement of Rome's two “Epistles to the Corinthians” (1633 and 1637) In 1637 he published a
catena of the
Greek Fathers on the
Book of Job, attributed to
Nicetas, and in 1639 a commentary on
Canticles, based on that of
Gilbert Foliot His book collection passed to
Thomas Gale. ==Notes==