IN 1638, OLD English studies acquired its first professional practitioner in Abraham Wheelock, for whom Sir Henry Spelman and Sir Simonds D’Ewes endowed a lectureship at Cambridge University. Wheelock was already the Cambridge University Librarian and lecturer in Arabic, positions he had held since 1629 and 1632, respectively. Wheelock had been at the university since 1615, when he matriculated at Trinity College; after he graduated, he became a fellow of Clare, a position he left upon his marriage in 1632. He remained in harness at the library and in his dual lectureships until his death in 1653. Wheelock and one of his students wrote “Old English” poems in praise of Charles I in 1641, the first compositions in Old English in centuries, but his premier achievement in early medieval studies is his 1643 edition of the ninth-century Old English translation of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, printed side-by-side with the Latin original and augmented by explanatory notes and passages from other Old English texts, followed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) with Wheelock's own Latin translation. A second edition was printed in 1644 with some additions prepared by Sir Roger Twysden, primarily a new edition of William Lambarde's 1568 Archaionomia and the first edition of the Leges Henrici Primi (LHP). A list of Old English and Latin legal terms rounded out Twysden's contributions, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Allen Frantzen, in his discussion of Wheelock's book, observes that it “cannot be understood outside the network of readers and writers gathered around it.” Frantzen mostly examines how the text participates in controversies between Catholics and Protestants. He notes that such activities as singing at church services were opposed by “extreme reformers (later Puritans),” but by the early 1640s, puritans were taking the reins of the English church after having the Archbishop of Canterbury imprisoned. 4 This chapter will place the 1643/1644 Bede more specifically in the context of English religious and political upheaval in the 1640s, which was felt particularly at Cambridge University.