According to Robert Irwin,[4] he regarded it as part of his academic duty to discourage students from taking up the subject.
In 1632 he oversaw the transfer of Thomas van Erpe's collection of oriental books and manuscripts to Cambridge University Library from the family of the 1st Duke of Buckingham who had bought it before the latter's death in 1628.
[7] In the same work he published an important edition – and the first in England – of Bede's Ecclesiastical History in its original Latin text,[8] opposite the Old English version, along with Anglo-Saxon laws.
In the following year (1644), the London publisher Cornelius Bee put out another, enlarged edition, which included an updated version of William Lambarde's legal text "Archaionomia."
[9] Quatuor evangeliorum domini nostri Jesu Christi versio Persica Syriacam & Arabicam suavissimè redolens[10] was a trilingual version of the Four Gospels, published in the same year as the London Polyglot, to which he also contributed.