Richard James (scholar)

Richard James (1592 – December 1638) was an English scholar, poet, and the first librarian of the Cotton library.

Richard James was born in Newport, Isle of Wight, third son of Andrew James, by his wife Dorothy, daughter of Philip Poore of Durrington, Wiltshire. Thomas James was his uncle. Richard was educated at Newport Grammar School, and matriculated as a commoner at Exeter College, Oxford, on 6 May 1608. On 23 September that year he migrated to Corpus Christi College, of which he had been elected scholar, and graduated from there B.A. on 12 October 1611 and M.A. on 24 January 1615. On 30 September 1615 he was elected probationary fellow of his college, and on 7 July 1624 graduated B.D.

After taking holy orders James set out on a long series of travels. Starting in Wales and Scotland, they extended to Shetland and Greenland. He went to Muscovy in 1618 as chaplain to Sir Dudley Digges. His notes about that journey (found in 1840s in Bodleian Library) included the first Russian-English Dictionary, remarks about Russian culture and six Russian folksongs about the Time of Troubles, making his papers an important source about Russian casual life and songs of the period.

In November and December 1618 he was at Breslau. In 1622 he was in Newfoundland. James had returned to Oxford by January 1623.

In the latter part of 1624 James was employed with John Selden in the examination of the Arundel marbles, and when Selden published his Marmora Arundeliana in 1628 he acknowledged in his preface the assistance he had received from James. James had already been introduced to Sir Robert Bruce Cotton; he soon became Cotton's librarian, and the lists of contents prefixed to many manuscripts in the Cottonian collection are in James's handwriting.

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