Another Churchman of this period who was interested in the revival of learning has recently been revealed to us by his books, John Shirwood, Bishop of Durham, 1483-93.  He was an adherent of Neville whom we mentioned as the patron of Emmanuel of Constantinople; and having risen to prosperity as Neville rose, he did not desert his patron when Fortune’s wheel went round.  It does not appear that he was educated in Italy; but for a number of years he was in Rome, as a lawyer engaged in the Papal court; and to his good service there as King’s proctor he probably owed his advancement to Durham.  Whilst at Rome, he bought great numbers of the Latin classics, especially those which were coming fresh from the press of Sweynheym and Pannartz.  Cicero seems to have held the first place in his affections, six volumes out of forty-two; the Orations, the Epistles, de Finibus and de Oratore, the two last being duplicated.  History is well represented with Livy, Suetonius, Josephus, Plutarch, Polybius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus; the last four in translations.  In poetry he had Plautus and Terence, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, and Statius; in archaeology Vitruvius and Frontinus; of the Fathers, Jerome, Lactantius, and the Confessions of Augustine.

Twice after becoming Bishop Shirwood went to Rome again, as ambassador; once in 1487 in company with Selling and Linacre:  on the second occasion, in 1492-3, he died.  His books, however, had already found their way home to Durham, where they were acquired by Foxe, Shirwood’s successor in the see; and Foxe subsequently presented them to his newly-founded college of Corpus Christi in Oxford.  It is interesting to contrast Shirwood’s collection with books presented to the library of Durham monastery by John Auckland, who was Prior 1484-94.  Not a single one of them is classical, not one printed; Aquinas, Bernard, Anselm, Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Chrysostom in Latin, Vincent de Beauvais, Summa Bibliorum, Tractatus de scaccario moralis iuxta mores hominum, Exempla de animalibus.  The Prior’s outlook was very different from the Bishop’s.

Leland tells us that Shirwood had also a number of Greek books, which Tunstall found at Auckland in 1530; but only one of these has been traced, a copy of Gaza’s Grammar written by John Rhosus of Crete in 1479, and bought by Shirwood at Rome.  Where the rest are no one knows; doubtless scattered in many libraries, among people to whom the name of Shirwood has no meaning.  One wonders why Foxe did not secure them for Corpus when he took the Latin books.  He wanted Greek, but perhaps he considered the set of Aldus’ Greek texts which he actually gave to Corpus, more worth having than Shirwood’s manuscripts (for when Shirwood was collecting in Italy, the first book printed in Greek, the Florentine Homer, 1488, had not yet appeared):  possibly he never saw them.