09 jsome (gctrtp 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE ORIGINALS IN HIS 

 POSSESSION. 



By NELSON M. RICHARDSON, B.A., F.E.S. 



(Read Feb. 26th, 1900. ) 



AM afraid that Dorset cannot claim any very close 

 connection with any of the printers or translators 

 of the earliest English Bibles, but the fact that 

 Bryanston at one time belonged to the ancestors 

 of John Rogers, to whom we owe the second 

 complete printed English Bible, will furnish an 

 excuse for bringing the subject before the Dorset 

 Field Club. 



The history of the early Bibles is so interwoven with the history 

 of the Reformation and with many matters of a religious and 

 semi-religious nature which would be unsuitable for discussion 

 by our Club, that I must necessarily confine myself, as far as 

 possible, to an antiquarian view of the subject, and even on this 

 I can, on account of its extent, make but a few notes. Before I 

 proceed to the English Bibles I would exhibit a fine copy in 

 printed facsimile of the New Testament portion of one of the 

 earliest MSS., in uncial letters, dating from the 5th century, the 

 Codex Alexandrinus, which was presented to Charles I. by the 



