Despite constantly accumulating evidence of the ownership of books and of arrangements for their storage and care during earlier reigns, King Edward IV remains clearly identifiable as the founder of the old Royal Library. The bulk of Edward's manuscripts are large-scale copies of well-known and widely distributed library texts in French of original Latin texts. Several members of Edward IV's immediate family are known to have owned books. The next major contributor to the English Royal Library was the first Tudor sovereign, Henry VII. His own acquisitions seem to have been the result of gifts. A particularly grand gift was offered during the last year of the reign by the French ambassador, Claude de Seyssel, who presented a richly illuminated copy of a translation of a work by Xenophon from a Greek manuscript in the French royal library at Blois. The King's mother Lady Margaret Beaufort, owned at least one very grand contemporary Hours from a leading Parisian workshop.

To a substantial extent, devotional reading was everyone's reading. The predominance of religious literature among the books that we know to have been owned by Margaret of York, for instance, may be an indication that she was genuinely very devout, but it may also have caused her piety to be over-emphasized by modern writers. The libraries of many fifteenth-century lay people show a similar preponderance of spiritual books. The history of the book of hours in England represents only a comparatively small corner of the book's larger history. The great centres of manuscript production were France and later Flanders, and the story of the book of hours in England is at least as much about foreign books' importation and subsequent ownership as it is about the local production of books. In 1495, five new Parisian books of hours provided competition for Wynkyn de Worde's horae, while at England Pynson had brought out two.