Abstract
The fenland abbey of Ramsey was founded in Anglo-Saxon England in 966. Fifty years later its most famous native son, the monk Byrhtferth was able to draw on the resources of a library containing slightly in excess of 100 titles. The search for books belonging to the early phases of Ramsey's library is thrown back on to the corpus of writings, in Latin and Old English, by Byrhtferth. These include computistical writings (a Latin Computus, and the Enchiridion, an introduction to the same Computus ), hagiography (Vita S. Oswaldi and Vita S. Ecgwini), and history (Historia regum), as well as a vast collectaneum of excerpts, classical, patristic and Carolingian, assembled to illustrate two treatises of Bede (De natura rerum and De temporum ratione), and known as the Glossae Bridferti in Bedam. An astronomical text which was apparently brought to Ramsey by Abbo and which is quoted on several occasions by Byrhtferth is the Astronomica of Hyginus.
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