Licking the 'Beare Whelpe': William Lambarde and Matthew Parker Revise the Perambulation of Kent

Abstract

This essay focuses on the drafts and discussions which went into the first (1576) edition of the Perambulation. Lambarde’s autograph drafts and letters set his work in dialogue with other contemporary efforts to study the English past, in particular Matthew parker’s De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae (1572). This book developed in tandem with Lambarde’s. Lambarde and parker created and shared drafts in manuscript and print as they delved into Kentish church history. Remnants of their conversations about sources like the Textus Roffensis can be found in their books and even in the manuscripts under discussion. Revision, like reading, was a particular social enterprise with its own conventions. The line between a finished, printed presentation copy and a manuscript draft was completely blurred: both constituted a ‘beare whelpe that lacketh licking’.