Educated First at Wells Cathedral School and then at University College and Christ Church College, Oxford, Tobias Matthew was successively Dean (1583–1595) and Bishop (1595–1606) of Durham and, finally, Archbishop of York (1606–1628). The people from whom he procured many of his Oxford-bound books belonged to a community that gave regular custom to both the Half-Stamp Binder and other Oxford-based binders. In fact, of the “23 plus” books counted by Graham Pollard as bound by the Half-Stamp Binder, as many as thirteen (and quite possibly more) have annotations and/or ownership inscriptions suggesting that they were specifically made for monks of Durham Cathedral Priory studying at Durham (now Trinity) College, Oxford. Among them was one John Tutyng (sometimes Towten or Tuting), a monk and later canon of Durham Cathedral Priory from ca. 1527 until being deprived of his post in 1559–1560.

Tutyng had been a student at Durham College, Oxford (1530–1538), after which he graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity. Among Tutyng’s books bound by the Half-Stamp Binder was the three-volume copy of Pierre Bersuire’s Prima pars Dictionarij (Nuremberg: Anton Koburger, 1499) now held at Ushaw College, Durham (xvii.E.4.3–5), whose bindings are rather similar to those of the Gerson volumes. Several of Tutyng’s books were later owned by Adam Holiday (sometimes Haliday), who became canon in 1561 and remained in Durham until his death in 1591. Thanks to his extant ownership inscriptions, we know that Holiday acquired a wide variety of books bought by Durham monks in Oxford, including other books bound by the Half-Stamp Binder, such as the copy of Guillelmus Duranti’s Rationale Divinorum officiorum (Strasbourg: Georg Husner, 1493) that is now in Durham Cathedral Library (ChapterLib Inc. 63). The number 23 written in ink across the book’s fore-edge may link it to an inventory of books belonging to the aforementioned Tobias Matthew, which in turn includes a notice of an analogous book received from Holiday. As alluded to above, this is far from the only book of Holiday’s, or indeed of the Durham monks’ more generally, that later ended up in Matthew’s possession.