No one would now argue, as a certain Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries once did, that the vanished register of Bishop Longland of Lincoln on which Foxe drew for his account of the Lollards of the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire and their trials (the fullest and most valuable of all records of early Tudor Lollardy) never existed but was forged by Foxe to give his narrative a spurious "appearance of veracity". A. G. Dickens has observed that Foxe lacked the intent, the incentive and the diabolical erudition to forget his voluminous and highly specific mass of evidence. The missing Lincoln act book is not now likely to be rediscovered. Foxe seems to have used a transcript of it together with other Lollard trial records at Lambeth Palace, where it no longer exists. But other "registers" in similar form have been found by modern research (notably the record of the Coventry trials of 1511) and comparison of these sources with the passages in Foxe which are based on them suggest that the martyrologist worked only a little more carelessly and a few shades more partially than would be tolerable in a modern doctoral thesis, but with essentially the same methods.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "No one would now argue, as a certain Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries once did, that the vanished register of Bishop Longland of Lincoln on which Foxe drew for his account of the Lollards of the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire and their trials (the fullest and most valuable of all records of early Tudor Lollardy) never existed but was forged by Foxe to give his narrative a spurious "appearance of veracity". A. G. Dickens has observed that Foxe lacked the intent, the incentive and the diabolical erudition to forget his voluminous and highly specific mass of evidence. The missing Lincoln act book is not now likely to be rediscovered. Foxe seems to have used a transcript of it together with other Lollard trial records at Lambeth Palace, where it no longer exists. But other "registers" in similar form have been found by modern research (notably the record of the Coventry trials of 1511) and comparison of these sources with the passages in Foxe which are based on them suggest that the martyrologist worked only a little more carelessly and a few shades more partially than would be tolerable in a modern doctoral thesis, but with essentially the same methods." in the context of "Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs’, Elizabethan Essays (1994), pp. 155-156" to mean that wisdom is timeless.