20l. Hatton is said to have foreseen very early the fall of the church of England, and he commissioned Dugdale to proceed with a draughtsman, both of whose expenses he paid, and have drawings made of the monuments and armorial bearings, and copies taken of the epitaphs, in Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, and a number of provincial churches. Their mission seems to have been performed in 1641 (cf. Dugdale, Life, by himself, in Hamper, p. 14, and Epistle Dedicatory to History of St. Paul's).
Dugdale was summoned as a pursuivant to attend the king at York on 1 June 1642, and when the civil war broke out he was employed in the delivery of royal warrants demanding the submission of garrisons holding towns and fortified places for the parliament. He accompanied Charles I to Oxford when it became the royalist headquarters, October 1642, and in the following month he received from the university the degree of M.A. He was created Chester herald on 16 April 1644. His estate being among those sequestrated, and the allowance granted him by the king remaining unpaid, he seems to have supported himself for some time on what he received for arranging and marshalling the elaborate funerals of persons of station (Life, p. 21; Wood, Fasti, ii. 18). During his stay in Oxford he frequented assiduously the Bodleian and other libraries, collegiate and private, to collect materials for his ‘Warwickshire,’ for the work which developed into the ‘Monasticon,’ and for one on the history of the English peerage (see the preface to his Baronage), a scheme also projected and in part executed by Roger Dodsworth [q. v.] On the surrender of Oxford to Fairfax, 20 June 1646, Dugdale proceeded to London and compounded for his estate, the whole amount of his payments being 168l. In the summer of 1648 he spent three months in Paris with his exiled friends the Hattons, and derived some information respecting alien priories in England from an examination of the collections on the history of French monasteries left by the well-known André Duchesne. In 1649–50 Dugdale was busy with the ‘ Warwickshire’ and the ‘Monasticon.’ In August 1651, speaking of the ‘Monasticon’ as Dodsworth's ‘work of monastery foundations’ (Correspondence in Hamper, p. 264), Dugdale says that it is ‘ready for the press,’ but in January 1652 (ib. p. 266) that he had been some eight months away from home in London, ‘so great a task have I had to bring Mr. Dodsworth's confused collections into any order, and perfect the copy from the Tower and Sir Thomas Cotton's library.’ The London booksellers having declined the first two volumes of the ‘Monasticon’ for a sum sufficient to cover the cost of the transcripts made for them, according to Dugdale (Life, by himself, p. 24), he and Dodsworth ‘joined together and hired several sums of money’ to defray the expense of publication. Rushworth, of the ‘Historical Collections,’ contributed so liberally for this object that the work, Dugdale acknowledges (Correspondence, p. 284), could not have been published without him. Only a tenth part of the first volume had gone through the press, but the remainder of both volumes was ready for it, when Dodsworth died, August 1654. The proportion in which Dodsworth and Dugdale contributed to the first two volumes has been a subject of dispute (cf. Gough, Anecdotes of British Topography, p. 55, Hunter, pp. 247–9, Wood, Fasti, p. 24, and Raine, pp. 16–19). In the first draft of Sir John Marsham's Προπύλαιον, prefixed to vol. i., Dugdale's share in the work seems to have been ignored (Somner to Dugdale, Correspondence, p. 282). But in it when printed, and while ascribing to Dodsworth the chief honour of the work, Marsham spoke of Dugdale as one ‘qui tantam huic operi supellectilem contulit, ut authoris alterius titulum optime meritus sit.’ Both volumes were undoubtedly edited by Dugdale, who, writing a short time before the appearance of vol. i., says: ‘It hath wholly rested on my shoulders; nay, I can manifest it sufficiently that a full third part of the collection is mine’ (Correspondence, p. 284), and he adds that Rushworth, who had done financially so much for the work, ‘would not by any means but that I should be named with Mr. Dodsworth as a joint collector of the materials.’
The first volume of the monumental work was issued in 1655, with the title ‘Monasticon Anglicanum, sive Pandectæ Cœnobiorum Benedictinorum, Cluniacensium, Cisterciensium, Carthusianorum, à primordiis ad eorum usque dissolutionem, ex MSS. Codd. ad Monasteria olim pertinentia; archivis Turrium Londinensis, Eboracensis, Curiarum Scaccarii, Augmentationum; Bibliothecis Bodleianâ, Coll. Reg. Coll. Bened., Arundellianâ, Cottonianâ, Seldenianâ, Hattonianâ, aliisque digesti per Rogerum Dodsworth Eborac., Gulielmum Dugdale Warwic.’ The volume consists largely of charters of foundation, donation, and confirmation (in the last two cases frequently abridged) granted to monastic establishments, the Latin translations of those in Anglo-Saxon being executed by Somner. In editing them Dugdale often showed a lack of critical discernment (see Sir Roger Twysden's letter to him, Correspondence, p. 335). It contains also a vast mass of information respecting the history and biography of English
