³¹ John Donne, Satire 4, line 98, quoted from The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1971).

³² Camden’s epistle ‘from the author to the reader’, quoted from Philemon Holland’s translation of Brittania: Britain, or, a Chorographicall Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1610), sig. 4. The epistola to the 1586 first edition contains virtually the same sentiment in Latin.

³³ The phrase is the title of Barbara Shapiro’s book A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000). Shapiro discusses legal and historical facts in her first two chapters, 8–62. See 12, 15–16, 38, 42–3, and passim on the growing authority of documents in determining the truth about the past.