The benefice, then, was the Rectory of the Cliffe above mentioned, situated in the peninsula, or Hoo, north of Rochester. This living was held, from 1543 to 1548, by Dr. Nicholas Heath: it was, therefore, during these years that the marginal notes were written. He was afterwards Bishop of Rochester, and of Worcester, and Archbishop of York, and Lord Chancellor; and during the reign of Henry VIII., and to the accession of Elizabeth, took leading parts in most affairs, both in Church and State. Wood calls him “a most wise and learned Man, of great Policy, and of as great Integrity.”
As to Dr. Heath’s friend, the writer of the marginal notes, there can be no doubt that he was Dr. Nicholas Wotton: one of the small knot of revivers of Anglo-Saxon literature, and of those, named by Mr. Earle,[31] as a few persons who then had the handling of Saxon MSS. It is found that the long active and distinguished career, of each of these two men, ran both in the same groove:--through the same period, in the same rank and line of affairs, and locally together.[32] They were both part authors of the well-known Institution of a Christian Man, 1537. Wotton was the first Dean of Canterbury, and so continued for more than twenty-five years: also Dean of York. During two intervals he administered, by commission, the Province of Canterbury; and was named, along with Parker, as successor to that Primacy.
These are the two men, who are first found in possession of the historical tradition, that the famous place where the Mercian kings, with the Archbishops, the Bishop of Rochester, and the Mercian and other Bishops, held their councils; the acts of which must, in all ages, have been most conspicuous to learned English Canonists, was no other than this very Cliffe-at-Hoo; and it is evident, from the directness of the marginal note, that they held it as an unquestioned fact. So, about fifty years afterwards, when he published Britannia, it was as we have seen, also without reserve, accepted by Camden.[33] Up to this time the tradition--not among men who accept Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories and the like, but among the learned--was yet undisturbed. But twenty years later we find Camden wavering; influenced only by speculations on the nature of the district, and a then prevalent distorted perspective of the remote historical circumstances of the time concerned. In the edition of Britannia, which received his latest revision,[34] he qualifies his former statement, by saying that he no longer dares to affirm, as others do, whether or not the Cliffe in the little country called Ho, may be the “Cliues at Ho,” so celebrated in the infancy of the Anglican Church; because the place seems not to be a convenient one for holding the Synod; and that the actual place seems to have been within the kingdom of Mercia, rather than Kent. From that time to this present day the place, indicated by this name, has ranked among the most disputed and unsettled questions of early English topography.