SOURCE: Hay, Denys. Introduction to Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters, pp. vii-xiii. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.

In the following excerpt, Hay argues that several of Vergil's works, notably his Anglica historia and De Inventoribus rerum, have had an influence on a large body of literature and thought.

[Polydore Vergil's] importance in the development of English historiography has been evident since C. L. Kingsford's English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century was published in 1913. The basic authority of the Anglica Historia for the events of Henry VII's reign was established by W. Busch in the first (and only) volume of his history of England under the Tudors, which appeared in German in 1892 and in English three years later. A very little investigation shows that the Anglica Historia not only determined to a great extent the form which later histories of the Tudor period were to take, but...