Bartholomew’s supposed Englishness may have been crucial to his official acceptance in early-modern London. To appropriate him as an English national treasure would have helped demonstrate English cultural capital to scholars on both sides of the English Channel. There is evidence to suggest that English historians and antiquarians of the day were promoting Bartholomew as a worthy forefather of English writing, asserting that he was both English and of fairly recent noble birth. In 1533, Henry VIII commissioned the lay antiquarian John Leland to search out and describe England's ancient monuments, and any records of England’s ancient history that might be held in monastic and college libraries — a task that took him six years.^[13] Fifty years after Berthelet’s time, Leland produced his commentaries on British writers, which included a biography of Bartholomew. In this, he describes the compiler as ‘Bartholomaeus Glanville descended most nobly (as I understand) from the county of Suffolk’.^[14] According to Richard Sharpe, Leland ‘picked up the surname ‘Glanvile’ from the unusual colophon in Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 67, fol. 203’. Gerald Se Boyar suggests that Leland confused the compiler with a Bartholomaeus de Glanvilla of Suffolk, who died in about 1360.^[15] Whatever the reason, Leland was able to claim Bartholomew and his authority for the nation, while implying that the Franciscan commitment was merely an act of Bartholomew’s youth before his ‘maturer years’ of study.^[16] Moreover, after mentioning Corbechon’s translation (a manuscript of which he claims to have seen at Oxford in Duke Humphrey’s library) he implies a lofty English church connection for Bartholomew by stating that an earlier Glanville, called Gilbert, had been Bishop of Rochester and a friend of Thomas Becket.^[17] Leland makes no mention of Trevisa or the translation of the work into English, and his readers could have drawn the conclusion that Corbechon translated the work into French from an English original. According to James Carley, some time between 1533 and 1538 Leland had visited the Franciscan library in Oxford, which he found in sad disarray. He also visited the mendicant and monastic houses at Cambridge, listing their contents. He records a copy of ‘Properties’ in the Dominican library as Barptolemaeus Anglicus Franciscanus de proprietatibus rerum. There is circumstantial evidence that this manuscript could have been among a group sold or sent abroad for safekeeping before 1545 and acquired by Pope Marcellus II, and further testimony to the work’s continuing status at this date.^[18]

On the basis of Leland’s biography of English writers, his friend John Bale (1495–1563) included Bartholomew in his own chronicle of 1548/9.^[19] Bale had himself been a Carmelite since the age of 12, but later renounced his vow of celibacy and became a vigorous defender of reformed doctrines under Thomas Cromwell. Bale helped to establish an anti-Catholic discourse that served during later attacks against the Spanish in Elizabeth’s reign, and against those perceived as agents of the devil in that of James I.^[20] He has been described as ‘an impeccable renaissance humanist’ who felt a weight of responsibility to expound the apocalyptic meaning of the Book of Revelation in terms of the two churches, headed respectively by Christ and by Antichrist. Bale was also among those who, notwithstanding their reforming zeal, were anxious to rescue valuable manuscripts, repositories of knowledge, which were already being pilfered from monastic libraries.^[21] Bartholomew and his compilation evidently had a part to play for Bale in his attempt to document, through supposedly English writers, a national past distinguishing the British Isles from the papally dominated countries across the English Channel.

Like Leland, Bale faced the problem of how, in the England of the 1540s and ’50s, to claim the writer for England while distancing himself and his subject from the Roman church of which Bartholomew had been a part, and whose doctrine he had expounded. Bale quotes Leland almost verbatim, but he inserts into the second sentence on Bartholomew’s mendicancy the crucial phrase ex nescio qua superstitione (‘from I know not what superstition’), which serves to emphasise that Bale himself is far from condoning membership of the Franciscan order. Like Leland, he accords Bartholomew a noble origin, ‘out of the most noble race of the county of Suffolk’, and a date, 1360, ‘during the reign of Edward the Third’, from which it could be inferred that Bartholomew, though unfortunately a Franciscan, was a member of chivalric society. He adds, moreover, that Bartholomew, a good and devout man for his own day and age, worked hard to the end that those coming after him would understand better the Scriptures and their mysteries hidden beneath the figures and properties of natural things. This is close to Bartholomew’s own statement of his purpose, and may indeed help to explain Bartholomew’s continuing relevance into the Reformation period. The Scriptures were becoming available in the English language, without explanatory glosses, to literate laity. Correct understanding was of paramount importance.