The difficulty which he found in procuring sufficient copies of William Somner's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1659) led to the issue of another edition, with additions by Thomas Benson, in 1701.
Somner acquired great reputation as an antiquary, and he numbered among his friends and correspondents Archbishops Laud and James Ussher, Robert Cotton, William Dugdale, Roger Dodsworth, Symonds D'Ewes, Edward Bysshe, Thomas Fuller, and Elias Ashmole.
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He made collections for a history of Kent, but abandoned this undertaking; a portion of the work was published at Oxford in 1693 by the Rev. James Brome, under the title of A Treatise of the Roman Ports and Forts in Kent, with notes by Edmund Gibson, and a life of the author by White Kennett.
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After passing through the free school at Canterbury, he became clerk to his father, and Archbishop William Laud soon advanced him to be registrar of the ecclesiastical courts of the diocese.
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