The last English edition of Properties is an annotated and augmented version entitled ‘Batman vppon Bartholome, his booke De proprietatibus rerum, enlarged and amended by Stephen Bateman’.[31] The Dedication is to Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon (1526–96), who became Lord Chamberlain to Elizabeth in 1585. He was a nephew of Anne Boleyn and cousin to the Queen. George, the eldest son of this magnate, became Lord Chamberlain in 1596 and the patron of the company of players associated with William Shakespeare, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.[32] Batman, then, was a gentleman scholar serving the established church, and having social connections to the government and court.
In the late 1940s, Elizabeth Brockhurst undertook a detailed but unpublished study of Batman which remains of great value. She found sufficient biographical information from church records to show that Batman, or Bateman, was a married Protestant cleric, a pluralist, and a scholar of gentlemanly rank at the level of archiepiscopal employee.[33] He was a clerical servant of Richard Parker (1504–75), who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559 and who, among other achievements, was the author of the Advertisements (1566) insisting upon the use of the surplice by parish priests.[34] Batman collected manuscripts for Parker but seems to have been a bibliophile in his own right; his Commonplace Book indicates that he was, in any case, interested in antiquities and had views on the value of historical documents and old authorities. In 1578, Batman wrote:
He is no wyse men that for the having of spiders scorpions or any other noysom things in his howse will therefore set the whole howse on fier for by that meanes he disfornisheth himself of his howse; and so doo men by rashe borneng of ancient Recordes lose the knowledge of muche learnenge/there by meanes and wayes to presarve the good corne by gathering oute the wedes.[35]
Batman’s interest in ‘ancient Recordes’ was not necessarily casual. Studies of the Parker circle indicate that they turned to Old and Middle English texts for evidence of the antiquity and purity of the English church to provide an historical and ideological basis for the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.[36] Parker’s interest in manuscripts is expressed in a letter dated January 24th 1566 to William Cecil, thanking him for the loan of a Latin manuscript of the Old Testament with a ‘Saxon’ gloss: ‘in the riches whereof … I rejoice as much as they were in mine own. So that they may be preserved within the realm and not sent over by covetous stationers, or spoiled in the poticaries shops.’[37] Batman preserved manuscripts for Parker, who later bequeathed his collection, including a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.[38] According to Jürgen Schäfer, Batman claimed to have collected over 7000 manuscripts for his employer.[39]
Batman may have had personal contact with the group of about 30 antiquaries convened by Archbishop Parker in 1572 and dissolved in 1606 (according to the antiquary Thomas Hearne) on suspicion of heresy and through the machinations of enemies in high places. It numbered among its members William Camden, John Stow, Francis Thynne, William Lombard, Sir William Dethick, Garter King at Arms (who made a Grant of Arms to Batman), Sir Robert Cotton and Lancelot Andrewes.[40] Parker’s society met together to read papers, preserved in their records, on antiquarian subjects. In this context, Batman’s analogy of separating good corn from weeds can be seen as a form of justification for the eradication of the monasteries but the preservation of their library contents.