SOURCE: Dunham, William Huse, Jr. “William Camden's Commonplace Book.” Yale University Library Gazette 43, no. 3 (January 1969): 139-56.

In the following essay, Dunham describes the discovery of Camden's Commonplace Book, noting that the book offers proof for the existence of Journals of the House of Lords prior to the reign of Henry VIII and documents important trials, including the contest for the barony of Abergavenny.

The romance of research often lies in finding the unexpected, the unsought-after, and the commonplace book is one of the more provocative avenues of discovery. Such a miscellany of memoranda transcribed in the seventeenth or eighteenth century from earlier documents and writings excites the modern scholar's imagination. Especially is this so when the compiler was an antiquary or historian—a Cotton, a Selden, a Spellman, a Dugdale, or a Camden. The hope of learning something new makes the historian eager to see and touch and...