I am about to do something very unusual in this paper. Rather like the hero of this volume, Herbert of Bosham himself, who tells of Thomas Becket from the perspective of a reminiscent participant, I have been persuaded to relate a little about my own first encounters with Herbert of Bosham and his surviving manuscripts; and, if such an approach seems inappropriately personal and autobiographical in such a serious publication, let me assure you at the outset that this is a tale from which I emerge consistently badly, and in which I am shown to be incom-petent as well as foolish, not merely once but multiple times.

The story goes back to my arrival in Oxford as a graduate student in 1972, and my first meeting with my appointed thesis supervisor, Richard Hunt (1908–79), then Keeper of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. I had no real research topic in mind. He suggested, in his vague and diffident way, that maybe I might investigate the production of glossed books of the Bible, and he told me to look at MS Auct.E.inf.7, the huge glossed Pentateuch once owned by Thomas Becket, who brought it back to England shortly before his martyrdom in December 1170, and at the very similar manuscript, adjacent to it on the Bodleian shelves, of the second volume of Herbert of Bosham's re-working of Peter Lombard's Great Gloss on the Psalms, Auct.E.inf.6. This had originally been intended for Becket himself but it was not finished by Herbert until after Becket's death. I asked what I should be seeking. ‘Oh, just look at them, and get to know them, and come and tell me about them’, Dr Hunt said.

Thus it was that I came to spend many weeks in Selden End in the Bodleian, with Herbert's vast and intricate manuscript propped open in front of me. It was one of the first twelfth-century books I had ever really looked at. It introduced me to Prior Eastry's early fourteenth-century library catalogue of Christ Church, Canterbury, which listed the Pentateuch among the books once owned by Becket and, over the page, Herbert of Bosham's edition of the Great Gloss on the Psalms as the second of five volumes given or left to the cathedral priory by Herbert himself.