At this time, travellers were finding plant and animal life that confirmed, contradicted or confused the received wisdom concerning exotic and fabulous creatures. As a collector of others’ work Batman exemplifies a cultural phenomenon that had been gathering pace during the sixteenth century. According to a recent study, a culture of collecting culminated in the seventeenth century in the appropriation by the Royal Society of private collections of exotic natural objects and artefacts, and in the museum movement. However, it had its origins in the intense public interest in the trophies brought back to Europe by the overseas travellers of the later-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As Marjorie Swann makes clear, this earlier interest was in objects as novelties and marvels, and did not imply the rationalist methods of enquiry we associate with the Royal Society and the Enlightenment.^[106] There is a shift in emphasis here, away from the medieval concept of compilation as the bee-like plundering of morally useful writings of others and towards the meaning for which Swann argues: that of collection, applicable to natural and cultural objects, including works of art and books, and to the knowledge embodied by them.

The known provenance of manuscripts and books as they passed through the hands of collectors in the sixteenth century supports Swann’s argument. The dissolution of the monasteries had released many ancient texts into circulation and, in effect, commodified them. We have seen that manuscripts of ‘Properties’ formerly in religious houses, and of the translation Properties, were owned and traded by known collectors including Richard Parker, John Dee, Simon D’Ewes and William Dethick. In the light of Swann’s argument, we can consider Batman uppon Bartholome as a compilation or collection in which Batman is a declared, named collector of Bartholomew’s authorities, but also of modern authorities and the knowledge they embody. His lists and citations of modern and classical writers, and his recounting of classical myths and other stories, confer a kind of authority on Batman himself. At the same time, he is a collector of property in the new material sense: he collects Greek myths; he collects stories about English history and landscape and about exotic customs; he collects facts, through the observation and categorisation of plants and other natural phenomena; and he collects interesting specimens. The following addition to the end of the chapter on the rhinoceros provides a peep-hole on Batman as the possessor of at least one displayable curiosity:

Thus, Batman’s additions to, and marginal comments in, Batman uppon Bartholome constitute a display of his own collections; and of a personal identity that aims to be both authoritative and authorial.^[108]

We might also consider the likelihood that Batman, like patrons of ‘Properties’ in the fourteenth century, was endowing his patron with a flattering mantle of wisdom appropriate for one of England’s chief noblemen. Batman expresses the idea of collecting knowledge for the sake of one’s country, as well as one’s patron, in his preliminary address to the reader. Here, having praised John Bale and other ‘famous, and worthy persons, of singular perseuerance and learning’, such as ‘Gesner, Fuchs, Mathiolus, Paracelsus, Dodoneus, Munster, Agrippa and Ortelius’, he aligns his own efforts with theirs:

In this passage, Batman declares his aim as a collector of others’ work, in the sense of both imitator and compiler. Bartholomew had declared a similar aim. Unlike Bartholomew, however, he adds, by means of his maritime metaphor, the connotation of collected wealth from beyond former horizons, like the booty and novelties being brought to English ports from the New World and Asia. Whereas Bartholomew compiled the fruit of others’ labours in order to share its moral usefulness widely through an international brotherhood, Batman collects knowledge for the intellectual coffers of England, his patron Carey and himself.

Swann argues further that the development of the culture of collecting during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave a new meaning to the word ‘property’.^[110] Formerly, the concrete sense of this word had applied to land, but early-modern collectors aimed to fashion an imposing personal identity for themselves through ‘property’ in the sense of awe-inspiring possessions, collected and displayed. Published catalogues of private collections, descriptions of items and lists of donors were texts symbolic of the collection itself, as well as advertisements of that identity. We can deduce that the concept of the ‘property’ of a thing lost the connotation of an underlying moral significance or inherent powerfulness that it had carried in the Middle Ages. Rather, things — including ideas — could become the property of a person, or of a nation. Evidence for the wider existence of such an attitude to intellectual property occurs in seventeenth-century verses written on the flyleaf of a manuscript of Properties now in the British Library. These verses extol Bartholomew as an Englishman who bestows ‘property’ on his country, playing on the variable meaning of the word, and as a universal authority:

The verses are followed by a seventeenth-century addition by Julius Glanville of Lincoln’s Inn.^[112] According to Seymour, Julius Glanville was the son of Sir John Glanville, who ‘may have owned the manuscript in the belief that Bartholomaeus, traditionally surnamed Glanville, was an ancestor’.^[113] The lofty inscription is consistent with family pride in ‘Properties’ as a repository of wisdom and a testament to the worth of the owner.