The following year he suffered a serious accident there in which he lost one eye: he spent three months under the medical care of Sir Hans Sloane.

In 1755, he failed to obtain the post of sub-librarian at the British Museum; but in 1757 he was appointed keeper of Lambeth Palace Library by Archbishop Hutton.

Ducarel, by contrast, remained in post for nearly thirty years, under five archbishops (Herring, Hutton, Secker, Cornwallis, and Moore), until his death.

[6] He greatly improved the catalogues both of the printed books and the manuscripts at Lambeth, and made a digest, with a general index, of all the registers and records of the province of Canterbury.

Besides the digest preserved among the official archives at Lambeth, he formed another personal manuscript collection in forty-eight volumes: after his death this passed to the antiquary Richard Gough, and in 1810 was bought for the British Museum library.

However, the work led to a virulent rift between the two friends, when Mores, who had made significant contributions to it, discovered that he was not named on the title page.

For many years Ducarel used to go in August on an antiquarian tour through different parts of the country, in company with his friend Samuel Gale, and attended by a coachman and footman.

Through his publications Tour through Normandy in a letter to a Friend (1754), later greatly expanded and illustrated as Anglo-Norman Antiquities Considered (1767), he effectively put the Duchy on the map for the late 18th-century English traveller.

[10] He was one of the first Englishmen to see and appreciate the significance of the Bayeux Tapestry, and included an account of it written by his late friend Smart Lethieullier – the first detailed description in English – as an appendix to Anglo-Norman Antiquities.

Francis Grose described Ducarel in scathing terms: The Doctor was a very weak man, and ignorant, though he was ambitious of being thought learned.

[11]Grose further wrote: The Doctor was a large black man,[12] with only one eye, and that of a focus not exceeding half an inch; so that whatever he wished to see distinctly he was obliged to put close to his nose.

... [He] always was a great lover of the ladies as well as his glass; the latter grew on him so much, that he was constantly drunk every day, a little before his death: his liquor was generally port, or as he called it, "kill priest".

His entertainments were in the true style of the old English hospitality; and he was remarkably happy in assorting the company he not infrequently invited to his table.