[1] Cotton was of a Shropshire family[2] who originated near Wem[3] and were based in Alkington[4] and employed by the Geneva Bible publisher, statesman and polymath Sir Rowland Hill in the mid 16th century.

The leading scholars of the era, including Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and James Ussher, came to use Sir Robert's library.

[6] The library is of special importance for having preserved the only copy of several works, including Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

At the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, official state records and important papers were poorly kept, and often retained privately, neglected or destroyed by public officers.

The Cotton family were prominent in Shropshire, and their seat at Alkington, and they were connected to the polymath and sixteenth century statesman Sir Rowland Hill who published the Geneva Bible;[7] and by the seventeenth century Sir Robert Cotton came to hold, and subsequently bound, over a hundred volumes of official papers.

There is a theory that the curious incident of the 1643 Battle of Wem was the output of concerns of both sides to secure the Library of Old Sir Rowland at Soulton Hall.

On 3 November 1629 he was arrested for disseminating a pamphlet held to be seditious (it had actually been written fifteen years earlier by Sir Robert Dudley) and the library was closed on this pretext.

Ashburnham House also became the residence of the keeper of the king's libraries, Richard Bentley (1662–1742), a renowned theologian and classical scholar.

[13] Bentley escaped while clutching the priceless Codex Alexandrinus under one arm, a scene witnessed and later described in a letter to Charlotte, Lady Sundon, by Robert Freind, headmaster of Westminster School.

[15] Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons, as one of the statutory trustees of the library, directed and personally supervised a remarkable programme of restoration within the resources of his time.

However, these early conservation efforts were not always successful: bungled attempts to clean the Magna Carta exemplification rendered it largely illegible to the naked eye.