insight - the queen's college, oxford · 2017. 1. 4. · the lost medieval library of...

The Queen’s College Library

Insight

Issue 6, Michaelmas Term 2016

Inside this issue:

The lost medieval library of Queen’s: some facts and conjectures by Ian Maclean

The history of a collection: books relating to Cumberland and Westmorland by Douglas Bridgewater

The College Archive: an introduction by Michael Riordan

Unusual methods bring unusual results: dust monitoring in the Upper Library at Queen’s by Victoria Stevens

And more...

THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY INSIGHT 1

W elcome to Issue 6 of Insight. The front cover of this issue contains an image from each of our contributed articles which between them look

back to the foundation both of the College and the Library and look forward to the arrival of a future addition to our special collections. The first article is by Ian Maclean, one of our Supernumerary Fellows and one of our most regular users of the historic collections. His fascinating article charts the somewhat mysterious early history of the College Library with its stories of books which have “gone missing”, presumably with eminent senior members the College who took them with them to new appointments. I must add that this is not something we encourage today… The article by Douglas Bridgewater (Queen’s 1955) sits in contrast to Ian Maclean’s article as he describes the development rather than the dispersal of a collection of books. Douglas has been collecting books on the Lake District since his student days and describes how his collection came about and highlights some of the most interesting items. The collection will, in due course, come to the Library. Although this is the sixth edition of Insight, this is the first time that we have included an article about the College Archive. Mike Riordan, the Archivist, has produced a fascinating account of the history and development of the Archive, which is scheduled to move into the new library building next year alongside our other historic collections into a new purpose made store. We aim each year to include something about either a conservation or preservation project and this year is no different. Victoria Stevens, one of the conservators at the Oxford Conservation Consortium, has written about the perennial problem of dust in historic interiors and how we have gone about monitoring and controlling it in the Upper Library. During the Long Vacation the Benjamin Cole Orrery in the Upper Library was cleaned and serviced by Jonathan Betts, retired Curator of Horology from the National Maritime Museum. The final pages of this issue show some images form this process, depicting the inside of this wonderful machine. We had hoped to bring this issue out in the Long Vacation and that it would have included an article on the archaeological dig which was carried out before the library project started at the end of

June 2015. However, we were awaiting a report from Oxford Archaeology to enable the article to be written, which sadly arrived too late for this year. We look forward to including the article next year, alongside other pieces about the new library which is scheduled to be in full occupation by the end of next summer As always, in addition to my gratitude to all the contributors I am most grateful to my colleague, Lynette Dobson, who has compiled the Newsletter for us and taken many of the photographs. If you have ideas for future articles or indeed would like to contribute, please contact me at [email protected] Amanda Saville, Librarian, December 2016

Selection of imag-es taken during the archaeological work for the new library; a future article, hopefully in 2017’s issue, will examine this excavation and its finds in detail.

mailto:[email protected]

The lost medieval library of Queen’s 2

The lost medieval library of Queen’s:

some facts and conjectures

Ian Maclean

A ccording to legend, the most remarka-ble book in the medieval library of Queen’s was a volume containing works of Aristotle in the Greek. The story goes

that a student called Copcut was set upon by a wild boar on Shotover, and survived the attack by thrusting the tome in question into its mouth, saying as he did so (or, in some versions, causing the boar to say) ‘graecum est’. If this had been a text in Greek, it would have been the earliest in a college library by far; but the apocryphal anecdote is no more than a version of a joke more recently practised by humourists such as Frank Muir and Denis Norden, where a well-known saying is adapted wittily to an implausible context (in this case, the original phrase – ‘graecum est, et non legitur’ – was inserted by medieval jurists in their commentaries on the texts of Roman law when they came across interpolated passages of Greek and declared their bafflement by admitting ‘it is in Greek and cannot be read [or commented on]’). It happens also to be the case that Eglesfield’s statutes expressly forbade the removal of books from the College, and so Copcut was in this respect an early (but certainly not the last) member of the College in breach of the rules of the Library, even if a resourceful one when it came to dealing with wild beasts. The coming of printed books to Oxford and London occurred from the 1460s onwards and had an accumulative effect on college libraries, with printed books displacing medieval manuscript holdings in many cases over the first half of the sixteenth century. But not everything was printed; and colleges felt some piety to their donors, having invested quite a lot in their manuscript collections by having them expensively bound and illuminat-ed. In most cases such books were retained, as well as texts known to be rare. Not so in Queen’s, whose pre-1460 holdings had come from revered donors and had been very well looked after, but had completely disappeared by 1600 (Rodney Thomson tells me that University College presents another similar case of disposal or loss). In 1600, Thomas James, the recently appointed Bodley’s Librarian, published his Ecloga Oxonio–Cantabrigiensis, in which he listed all the

manuscripts he had found in the Libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. His motivation for this was not purely bibliographical. He was an ardent Protestant who wanted to find historical evidence for his crusade against the Church of Rome in the form of accounts of the Church in England during the Middle Ages that demonstrated its independ-ence from the Papacy. James discovered fairly extensive holdings in a number of Oxford colleges, but there are only four titles recorded under the name of the Queen’s College. Of these, one certainly, and two probably, survive in today’s library, but these were all acquired around 1600, and reveal nothing about the earlier holdings. And unlike some other colleges, there is no surviving medieval inventory of books, which is a considera-ble impediment to identifying tomes now in the possession of others; the first library list was established by Provost Gerald Langbaine before his death in 1658. There have been three identifications of surviving pre-1460 manuscripts made, of which only two are plausible. Both rely on catalogues drawn up by the antiquarian, historian and controversialist John Bale (1495-1563), who in the late 1540s actively sought out medieval historical works by Englishmen in Oxford colleges. His notebook, edited in 1902 by Reginald Poole, lists all the discoveries he made: forty-three of the authors and their works were from the Library of Queen’s, which was particularly rich in such compositions. He kept hold of a number of these and took them with many others to Ireland when he was appointed Bishop of Ossory in 1552, only to have to abandon his see and his library in 1553 due to popular unrest and the coming of Mary to the throne. In an appendix of his Scriptorum maioris Britanniae catalogus of 1557-9, he compiled from memory a list of nearly four hundred titles of his collection, and proceeded in law against the deputy for Ireland and his son, Anthony and Warham de Leger, for the return of a number of these. The de Legers however denied all knowledge of them, and all that can be said with any certainty is that the collection was dispersed, and only about a tenth of it is known to have survived. Archbishop Matthew Parker had his hands on a ‘huge heap’ (‘ingens acervus’) of the volumes before Bale’s death in 1561, some of which he loaned together with a number of his own manuscripts to the Lutheran theologian and historian Matthias Flacius Illyricus, then in Regensburg, for return within the year; but as in the case of many other of loans made to Flacius, they never came back. Honor McCusker, who has edited this list of 355 titles, admits that ‘any identification of the Irish


manuscripts is likely to be highly conjectural’, but goes on to offer some identifications, partly based the fact that Bale’s annotations are to be found on the text in question, and partly on the principle that if a number of these manuscripts, associated with each other in the list, are found together in a modern library (preferably in a pre-1560 binding) ‘it is highly probable that [the volume in question] was once in Bale’s possession.’ As a result of one or both of these two principles, the following two works have been identified as survivals of the medieval Library of Queen’s: 1. A historical work known as the Polychronicon by the Chester monk Ranulph Higden. This is now British Library, MS Harley 1751. 2. A collection of twelve short polemical twelfth-century works on various topics mainly to do with the Friars, and Thomas of Eccleston’s account of the arrival of the Friars minor in England and the debate about Franciscan poverty; once Phillipps MS 3119, fols. 55-121, now Bodley MS Lat. Misc.c.75. Other works have been added in this

case, and the binding replaced. These volumes were almost certainly bought from a bookseller in England at some point after 1553; it is not known through how many hands they passed before being acquired by Phillipps and Harley. For a different source of information about the medieval library we are indebted to Provost Magrath’s history of the College, where he records the results of his trawls through the Long Rolls. These reveal that by the fifteenth-century, the Library was quite extensive, certainly running to more than a hundred manuscripts. From the College’s archives and other surviving medieval libraries, the general disposition of the College book collection can be ascertained. It would have been divided into three sections. The service books (Bibles, psalters, and liturgical works) would in most cases have been stored in a chest in the Chapel; there would have been a chained library in a designated room, consisting of core texts relevant to the arts course and the higher

Fig. 1: Loggan’s engraving of the College in 1675, showing the medieval library building in the top left corner.


faculties of medicine, law and theology; the third component would have been the circulating library, which was subject to an annual ‘electio’ by the Fellows, being books distributed to them for their private study. Very often, these would be commentaries on the core texts, or peripheral material to the arts course (such as speculative work on mathematics or cosmology, or works about history). There would also have been polemical material about any one of the many medieval theological debates which might indicate the parti pris of a given College. I have referred to the poverty debate above, whose documents from Queen’s do indeed survive: there were also both Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite texts, as one would expect, given the fact that Wycliffe was a tenant of the College in the 1360s. Magrath has recorded nearly all of the references in the long rolls to these three libraries, whose contents were either purchased by the College, or were acquired by donation. Among the notable donors was William Rede or Reed, Bishop of Chichester, who also gave money for the building and equipment of the Library room itself, and (according to Rodney Thomson) Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, who gave the College a Bible in 1428. The founder’s statutes required that all the possessions of the College should be marked with the sign of the flying eagle. It was certain that this applied to the College pewter, and Magrath records that it was also inscribed in the service books. Had it have been inscribed also on the other collections, it might now be possible to locate other manuscripts that have strayed from the Library. The only other clear identifying clue is the cataloguing device known in the Middle Ages as the secundo folio, being the incipit or opening words of the second leaf of a book, providing a means by which a medieval book could be matched to its record in a list. This, together with a brief title, is found in most college records. It is more useful in excluding possibilities than in providing firm identifications. Many of the works known to have been in Queen’s are now to be found in other college libraries, but with a different incipit, which rules them out as previous possessions of Queen’s. To a limited degree the contents of the missing library can be reconstructed. The most complete recent account of the pre-Reformation library of Queen’s is given in Rodney Thomson’s The University and college libraries of Oxford (2015), who follows the policy of the series in which this work appears by not including post-1540 evidence, although he shows clearly that he is aware of the Bale Index of the late 1540s. Thomson, who consulted de novo the long rolls of Queen’s, was

kind enough to read this paper and supply some emendations and corrections. He refers to two surviving indentures (one already known to Magrath, and reproduced by him). The first records books and other alienated items returned to the College on 13 May 1378. I quote Thomson’s paragraph about this document: The indenture marked the resolution of a dispute which had disrupted the life of the College and divided the fellows for almost a decade. From the moment of his appointment in 1362, Provost Henry Whitfield, a scholar from Exeter diocese and perhaps a member of Exeter College, had shown excessive favour to men from the south-west in fellowship elections. Complaints from the northerners in the College finally prompted royal intervention in 1377 and Whitfield was deposed in favour of the northern faction’s own candidate, Thomas Carlisle. Whitfield and his supporters responded immediately by seizing the College seal, muniments and other moveable goods (including books), in an attempt to force the new provost to stand down. With the support of the crown, however, Carlisle quickly regained control, and the leaders of the southern faction, William Frank, William Middleworth and Richard Thorpe, were expelled. Even so, it seems that it took at least another six months for the seal and other properties to be recovered. In spite of a mandate to bring them into Chancery, it was only after a commission led by the sheriff of Oxford, Edmund Stonor, had commanded their return on pain of arraignment that the rebels released them. The indenture, which is dated 13 May, more than six weeks after Sheriff Stonor issued his writ, records the surrender, by William Frank on behalf of the other rebels, of the stolen items: the seal, seven indentures from the annual electio of library books dating from 1372, a chalice, pax and mazer, and the twenty-four books. The latter are a mixed collection of legal and theological textbooks, together with a handful of well-known reference works, the Catholicon, Higden’s Polychronicon and an unspecified grammar. This is typical of the variety of volumes usually set aside from the library in the medieval colleges for lending under the election system. In fact it is very likely that it was the election books that Frank and his followers had taken. Usually these would be the only ones left unchained, and as elsewhere were probably kept apart from the library itself. This would also explain their seizure of the election inventories. The number of these documents recording loans from a single year (1372) is surprising and might indicate that the elections were conducted differently (and perhaps


more frequently) at Queen’s than at other colleges. None of the books is known to survive. It is also pointed out in this work (somewhat at variance to the above account) that this list consists in two easily discernible parts: the first being fourteen items from the chained library; the second being ten items from the circulating library. It is interesting to note that one of the very substantial items (a concordance) was purchased from the College in 1394-5 by the same William Middleworth who had connived in its removal in 1377. Thomson also reproduces a second indenture (now lost) acknowledging receipt by Henry Scayfe of Queen’s College of books received in an election in 1445. There are a number of items in common between the lists.

* So much for the available evidence of survival: now for some hypotheses to explain the absence in 1600 of Queen’s large medieval collection of manuscripts. They come under two heads: destruction or abandonment, on the one hand; deliberate or accidental alienation, on the other. I begin with the former possibility. The religious troubles of the Reformation on College holdings are often cited as the occasion of the loss and destruction of medieval theological works. In fact, such destruction was wrought mainly during Mary’s reign not on the writings of medieval scholastics but of sixteenth-century reformers; as I mentioned above, ardent Protestants were very often keen to hold on to materials from the medieval church in the hope that these could be interpreted in a way that would provide ammuni-tion against the Church of Rome. Such was not the case however with late medieval grammar and philosophy texts encapsulating highly abstract debates that humanistic scholars, inspired by the recovery of classical Latin and practical logic, saw as fastidiously over-subtle in content and barbaric in expression. The most recondite and barbaric of all scholastic thinkers was reputed to be the ‘doctor subtilis’ Duns Scotus, a version of whose name (‘dunce’) eventually became synonymous with stupidity. He was a popular author in the fourteenth century, and various colleges had considerable holdings of his writings. Magrath records one such volume in Queen’s (there were probably more). During the visitation of the University instigated by Thomas Cromwell in 1535, it was reported that neighbouring New College had ‘utterly […] banished Dunce from Oxford for ever’; those of his works not used as paper in the latrines, were torn up and scattered in the quadrangles, ‘the wind blowing them in every quarter’. A local gentleman was even said to have

gathered up the sheets to use them in the construction of scarecrows (‘sewells or blanshers’) to stop deer leaving his woods. Queen’s might also have purged its Scotist holdings in this brutal way, but that would not have been a very high percentage of all the manuscripts it possessed, even though the obvious interest in the College in Franciscan writings would have predisposed its Fellows in Scotus’s favour. Neil Ker has suggested that the arts course books and some of the theology would simply have come to seem irrelevant: ‘at Queen’s, someone in authority may have said “out with these useless old books.”’ Some might have been used in the construction of bindings for newly acquired printed books as flysheets and paste-downs, something that certainly happened in other colleges. Printed books also could have supplant-ed medieval manuscripts, as happened elsewhere: in All Souls, for example, a donor gave an edition printed in 1459 of one of the standard liturgical manuals, the Rationale divinorum officiorum of Guillaume Durand, and the manuscript version was disposed of. I move now to the second possibility – alienation – and to those who might have committed it. The first candidates are a group of Fellows who borrowed books from the circulating library of their college and retained them when they migrated to another society or went even further afield. All Souls, Merton and Exeter are among the colleges who are known to have lost or gained books by this process. Thus far, Rodney Thomson has not been able to identify any volumes from the Queen’s medieval library in other Colleges, but there may well be some lurking there, with or without the mark of the flying eagle. The second group consists of scholarly visitors, one of whom was the notorious magus John Dee (1527-1608). He left a manuscript account of his books, in which there is a reference to a volume containing fourteen mathematical treatises by various authors that he borrowed from Queen’s on 18 May 1556 in the presence of two masters of the College. These, together with the Bishop of London, stood surety for the return of the volume (‘ita quod […] pro eiusdem volumine redditione onus omne se susciperent’). It was still in Dee’s possession when he made a second list of his library in Mortlake on 6 September 1583. Soon after he had a number of his possessions stolen or destroyed by enraged local residents who believed that he was summoning up spirits. The remaining collection was sold long after his death in 1625, but there is no trace of the Queen’s manuscript among the volumes known to have passed into the


hands of a number of the major purchasers, and from these into the British Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Dublin. It has not been returned to the College. We are left with two prime suspects. The former of these is John Bale, whom I have already mentioned. Some of his collection seems to have remained in Ireland, and to have found its way eventually to Trinity College, Dublin: there are no identifiable Queen’s volumes there, however. Honor McCusker gives an account of his struggles to reclaim his manuscript collection after his return to England: it was in vain. Quite a lot of it was no doubt available in the London book trade around 1560, when Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, was invited to purchase it. It is fairly safe to assume that these remnants were dispersed, and found their way thereafter into various collections (notably Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). Again, the Queen’s manuscripts are not among them. A much more surprising figure who alienated books from the Queen’s library is Henry Robinson, who as Provost from 1581 to 1598 is credited with having restored the fortunes of the College under Queen Elizabeth I. In his Ecloga, James added the

following note to the exiguous list of the Queen’s holdings: Extant in hac Bibliotheca plures libri Manu-scripti, non ita pridem a nupero Vigilantissimo illius Collegii Praefecto, iam Episcopo Carleolensi, eo translati, quorum nomina, propter diutinam meam absentiam ab Academia, nondum ad notitiam meam venerunt. (Many manuscript books survive in this Library that were transferred not long ago to Carlisle by the recent most vigilant Provost, by then already the Bishop of that place, whose titles have not yet come to my notice because of my long absence from the University.) Rodney Thomson is unsure of the import of this comment (‘he seems to hint that [some of these books] were taken away by the former Warden Henry Robinson when he became Bishop of Carlisle’). I wonder myself whether the text, whose temporal references are confused, could be incorrect in one detail. If we read ‘erant’ for ‘extant’ and ignore the ‘dum’, the sequence of events becomes clearer ‘many books were in this Library that did not come to my notice…’). As in the case of Dee (but probably not that of Bale), Robinson, who witnessed the many acquisitions of printed books in his time in the College, might have taken the manuscripts away as redundant duplicates with the consent of his colleagues. Canon David Weston of Carlisle Cathedral kindly informed me that Robinson might have taken the manuscripts either to Rose Castle, the Bishop’s Palace, or the Cathedral Library itself. Rose Castle was besieged, captured and burnt by parliamen-tarian troops in 1648; the fabric of the Cathedral was destroyed by Scottish troops allied to the parliamentarians in 1650, and it is generally accepted that the Library was burnt at that time. Only three manuscripts of the medieval period are known to have survived from the Cathedral Library, none with associations with Queen’s, and it must be presumed that these were alienated before its destruction. As a result, that line of investigation is a dead end, just as in the case of Dee’s volume and Bale’s alienations.

*

So the hope that, in the brave new world of the Oxford medieval libraries project and the emergence of digitalised records from all over Europe, some further identifications might be possible has not yet been fulfilled. The collections of both of the prime suspects Bale and Robinson either were traded by shrewd early modern booksellers or have vanished in a number of other ways. It is not impossible that at some future date some further identifications might be made as

Fig. 2: Painting of the student Copcot, of “boar and book” fame, from the Queen’s collection. Unknown artist. Note the boar’s head on a stick in his right hand and the book in his left.


more records become available, but it is in my view unlikely (the most likely source will be tomes from the election library in other colleges). We are left to speculate on the most unlikely reappearance of all: that of the Aristotle in Greek thrust in the mouth of the Wild Boar. I consulted Nigel Wilson of Lincoln College, the foremost Oxford scholar on the transmission of classical learning, and through his kind replies to my enquiries, I am able to say with some degree of confidence that the earliest printed Greek text of Aristotle – the famous Aldine edition of 1495-99 - arrived in Oxford with the founding of Corpus Christi College in 1519, as a gift of its humanist founder. It is unlikely that copies in other college libraries (including Queen’s) were acquired at such an early date. The first Greek manuscript of Aristotle to reach Oxford was produced by the scribe John Serbopoulos, who wrote copies of commentaries on Aristotle from his house in Reading; they were first in the possession of William Grocyn (1446-1519), who between 1491 and 1496 inaugurated the teaching of Greek at Oxford. On his death they passed to Corpus Christi College (MS 106) and New College (MS 240-241). Neither tome, as far as I know, bears the toothmarks of a boar. Some references: John Bale, Scriptorum majoris Britanniae catalogus, Basle, 1557-9; id., Index Britanniae scriptorum, ed. Reginald Lane Poole and Mary Bateson, Oxford, 1902; Bodleian Library, MS Langbaine 7 (Queen’s College Library list); Bodleian Library, Ker Papers, 15. XIV(g), p. 102) (Henry Scayfe’s electio); Thomas de Eccleston, Tractatus de Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam, ed. and introd. A.G. Little, Manchester, 1951, xvii (the best account of the Queen’s provenance of this work); R.H. Hodgkin, Six centuries of an Oxford College; a history of the Queen’s College, 1340-1940, London, 1949, p. 61 (the anecdote about the boar); N.R. Ker, ‘Oxford Libraries in the sixteenth century’, Bodleian Library Record, 6 (1957-61), 490-3 (with the speculative and to my mind unconvincing attribution of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Lat. 3183 to the Library of Queen’s); id., (ed.) Medieval libraries of Great Britain: a list of surviving books, London, 1964 (for Carlisle MSS); id., ‘The provision of books’, in The History of the University of Oxford: 3. The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica, Oxford 1986, pp. 441-77 (446); M.R. James, Lists of manuscripts formerly owned by John Dee , Oxford, 1921, pp. 13, 27, [40]; Thomas James, Ecloga Oxonio–Cantabrigiensis, Oxford, 1600, p. 52; J.R. Magrath, The Queen’s College, Oxford, 1921, esp. 1.72-80, 93-5, 126-9; Honor McCusker, ‘Books and manuscripts formerly in the possession of John Bale’, The Library 4th ser., 16 (1935-36), 144-65; Hastings Rashdall and Robert S. Rait, New College, London 1901, pp. 106-7 (on the fate of the manuscripts of Duns Scotus);

Richard Sharpe, ‘The English bibliographical tradition from Kirkestede to Tanner’, in Britannia Latina, ed. C. S. F. Burnett and C. N. J. Mann, London, 2005, pp. 86–128; http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000086/tei-regest.xsl (Matthew Parker’s letter of 1561 to Flacius Illyricus); Rodney Thomson et al., The University and college libraries of Oxford , London, 2015, pp. 1233-41; Andrew Watson, Medieval libraries of Great Britain: a supplement to the second edition, London, 1987, p. 13 (one Carlisle MS identified by script); id., A descriptive catalogue of the medieval manuscripts of All Souls College, Oxford, Oxford, 1997, pp. 268-73 (for examples of the migration of tomes from circulating libraries); David W.V. Weston, Rose Castle and the Bishops of Carlisle, 1133-2012, Kendal, 2013.

Ian Maclean is a Supernumerary Fellow of Queen’s. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. He was Fellow and Praelector in French at Queen’s from 1972 to 1996, before being elected to a Senior Research Fellowship in History at All Souls College which he held until 2012. He was the Librarian of the Codrington Library from 1998 to 2015. He has published extensively on book history inter alia.

The history of a collection: books relating to Cumberland and

Westmorland

Douglas Bridgewater

I was born in Workington and went to Workington Grammar School, which unfortunately no longer exists. Its then Headmaster, E.H. Mander, had studied at

Queen’s, whose founder’s village of Eaglesfield was only about seven miles away. During the 1950s the school regularly sent one boy a year to Queen’s and I went up in 1955 to read PPE, after completing my National Service. Books had always attracted me, but I only began collecting them after coming down and moving to Birmingham when I joined Joseph Lucas Ltd in 1958. One of the Lucas factories was in Hall Green and in the course of the year I spent there I visited the local second-hand bookshop two or three times a week during my lunch hour. Those visits to Creswell’s frequently resulted in a temptation to spend. My purchases included the two volume 1st edition (1906) of Scott’s The voyage of the

The history of a collection 8

discovery for £1.50 and a two volume leather bound edition of the Comte de Buffon’s A natural history, general and particular (1787) with numerous hand-coloured plates for £1.00. In 1961 a job was advertised in Workington and I found the prospect of a return to Cumberland impossible to resist. During our first summer there we invited some of the friends I had met at Lucas to join us for a weekend in our Cockermouth home. One of them had browsed with me at Creswell’s and kindly presented me with two books on Cumberland he had found there. They were Volume 4 (the Cumberland volume) of Daniel and Samuel Lysons’ Magna Britannia published in 1816 and William Whellan’s History and topography of Cumberland and Westmor-land (1866). The former was in a good state internally: its spine was split, but this was later remedied by having the book rebound. These gave a fresh impetus to my book collecting, which focussed on the history and topography of Cumberland. Over the years it became an eclectic collection, embracing the whole of modern Cumbria, with some subjects being included as one led naturally to another, others a result of serendipity.

In looking to add to my very small collection, the first requirement was to find a second hand bookshop with antiquarian books. Although Cockermouth didn’t have one, in the course of car journeys to Sheffield on business I discovered Kerr’s in Kendal. One of my first purchases there was William Hutchinson’s History of the County of Cumberland (fig. 1), published in two volumes in 1794: Queen’s College Library is listed as a subscriber and still has its copy.

I joined the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (CWAAS) in the early 1960s. In addition to producing an annual volume of Transactions of scholarly articles (since 1875) the Society also publishes many other volumes, including a Record Series and an Extra Series. Complete sets of the Society’s Transac-tions, its Record Series and its Extra Series are rare: in its early years only 150 copies of its Transactions were printed. One of the most sought after volumes of the Record Series is J.F. Curwen’s Castles and fortified towers of Cumberland and Westmorland (1913) and of its Extra Series R.S. Ferguson’s edition of The Royal Charters of the city of Carlisle (1894), both of which are in my collection. A year or two later I joined the Cumberland Geological Society and the Cockermouth Mountain Rescue team and these introduced me to new areas of interest in geology, the history of mining and the development of rock climbing in the county. Medieval Cumberland was noted for its mineral wealth, an old saying being “Caldbeck and Caldbeck fells are worth all England else”. Many valleys in the Lake District contained valuable sources of minerals and were the site of important mines. Ores of lead and copper were mined in such places as Braithwaite and Coniston. In addition to these metals, gold and silver were extracted from the Goldscope mine in the Newlands Valley: the mine’s name is a corruption of “Gottes Gab” (the gift of God), so called in Elizabethan times by immigrants from Augsburg, who provided the skilled labour necessary to develop the mineral wealth of the Mines Royal. The records of these miners survived in Augsburg

Fig. 1: Added engraved title page from William Hutchinson’s History of the County of Cumberland.

Fig. 2: Cover from Postlethwaite’s Mines and Mining in the Lake District (3rd ed.), showing the Brad-ley Mine on the shores of Derwentwater in 1862.


and were transcribed and translated by W G Collingwood, whose Elizabethan Keswick was published by the CWAAS in 1912. Detailed plans of the mines illustrate John Postlethwaite’s Mines and Mining in the Lake District (fig. 2), first published in 1877 with the third and most comprehensive edition coming out in 1913. I moved back to Birmingham when I joined IBM in 1966. My job took me to London quite frequently, where second hand and antiquarian bookshops abounded. Charing Cross Road was the centre of the trade, Foyle’s being the largest and most well-known shop. The best source I found for Cumbrian books was Stanley Crowe’s, in a side street near the British Museum. His stock was held in a number of gloomy and dusty cellars beneath his house, but there was always something of interest to be had. He was unfailingly helpful and I bought over fifty books from him between the years 1967 and 1982 and only three from Foyle’s. I returned regularly to Cumberland for holidays

and in 1972 discovered the bookshop of Michael Moon in Beckermet, who has contributed more to my collection than any other bookseller. He subsequently moved to Whitehaven, where he flourishes to this day. I also found bookshops which issued relevant catalogues, the most interesting being those of Hollett’s of Sedbergh. Times have changed and my most recent acquisitions have been found on the internet. The merits of walking in the Lake District were extolled in A fortnight’s ramble to the Lakes (1792) by “A Rambler” (Joseph Bedworth), who walked over 240 miles. The most comprehensive guides to walking in the fells were written by Arthur Wainwright and published between 1955 and 1966. The pioneers of rock climbing did much of their climbing in Cumberland, their principal base being the Wasdale Head Inn. One of the first books on the subject was Rock climbing in the English Lake District by O.G. Jones (“the Only Genuine Jones”), published in 1897. The second edition appeared in 1900 and recorded his death in the Alps in 1899. Napes Needle on Great Gable was a spectacular climb. The photographs illustrating Jones’ book (fig. 3, left) were taken by the Abraham brothers of Keswick, themselves well-known climbers, who carried their bulky equipment to the most unlikely places. Early visitors who published accounts of their visits to Cumbria did so as part of a much longer tour. The first account appears in The itinerary of John Leland the antiquary which was published from the original manuscript in the Bodleian. The collection includes the seven volumes of the third edition (1768): these have the armorial bookplate of Samuel Herbert and the Cliveden Library bookplate of Waldorf and Nancy Astor (many other bookplates are to be found in the collection). The earliest account of Cumberland is Thomas Denton’s A perambulation of Cumberland 1687-1688, commissioned by Sir John Lowther but not published until 2003. The first specific Guide to the Lakes (1778) was written by Thomas West, to be succeeded by many more. One such prefaced the Revd Joseph Wilkinson’s Select views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (1810) and was written by Wordsworth. The latter refused to allow his name to appear as he did not approve of the quality of Wilkinson’s drawings. He later published several editions of his Guide under his own name (without Wilkinson’s illustrations). The Lake District had become a popular tourist destination by the end of the eighteenth century. A fashion for the Picturesque developed, due largely to the books of the Revd William Gilpin, a

Fig. 3: Image of the Gable Needle from O.G. Jones’ Rock climbing in the English Lake District.

Fig. 5: The Library roof after repair.

The history of a collection 10

Cumbrian who spent many years at Queen’s, finally taking his MA in 1748. Observations relative to Picturesque beauty was first published in 1786 and was instantly popular among those sufficiently well-heeled to afford the time and money to visit the area. His work was parodied by William Coombe in The tour of Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque (1812) (fig. 4). This book has thirty coloured plates by Thomas Rowlandson and a fine modern binding by Sangorski and Sutcliffe. The most attractive illustrations appear in T.H. Fielding’s and J. Walton’s A Picturesque tour of the English Lakes (fig. 5, above right), published by R. Ackermann in 1821. The copy in the collection is a large paper edition, of which only 100 were printed. A good collection of books on the theme of the Pictur-esque was put together by the late Peter Bicknell,

who also produced a comprehensive bibliograph-ical study of them, The Picturesque scenery of the Lake District 1752-1855 (1990). Bicknell presented his collection to King’s College, Cambridge where it is to be found in the Provost’s Drawing Room. Many books in his collection, but by no means all, are included in my own. William Gilpin was not the first member of the Gilpin family to go up to Queen’s. Bernard Gilpin, “the Apostle of the North”, went up in 1533 and his portrait hangs in the College, despite the fact that he turned down the Provostship in 1561 (having already declined the Bishopric of Carlisle). I acquired an early nineteenth century manuscript Bernard Gilpin: his birthplace and its neighbour-hood: a memory of the English Mereland from Michael Moon in 1987. Many other Cumbrian families were associated with Queen’s for generations. One such was the Fothergills: George Fothergill (1705-1760) entered Queen’s as a Taberdar and Poor Child and rose to become Principal of St Edmund’s Hall in 1751. Two of his younger brothers, Henry and Thomas, also went up to Queen’s, the latter serving as Provost from 1774-1796. Their correspondence from Queen’s to their parents appears in The Fothergills of Ravenstonedale: their lives and their letters (1905). The late George Fothergill was a contemporary of mine at Queen’s. Provost Magrath’s three volume The Flemings in Oxford gives details of the lives of several members of that family from 1650 to 1700. There were many poets writing in Cumberland at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. The most notable was William Wordsworth, who was born in Cockermouth in 1770, whence he would have gravitated to Queen’s.

Fig. 4: Title page from The tour of Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque. Note buildings forming three letters in the image.

Fig. 5: Image of “Keswick Lake” from J. Walton’s A Pictur-esque tour of the English Lakes.


However, at the age of eight he was sent to school in Hawkshead, whose Grammar School had a connection with St John’s, Cambridge. He remains the most notable Cumbrian to have gone up to Oxbridge but not to Queen’s. The Words-worth Collection in St John’s is a fine one. An earlier Cumbrian poet was the Revd Josiah Relph, Vicar of Sebergham, whose Miscellany of poems was published posthumously in 1747 and who is referred to by Hutchinson as “The Poet of the North”. He was educated at Appleby Grammar School and the University of Glasgow, but seems to have had some connection with Queen’s: of the 542 named subscribers, no fewer than 75 were from Queen’s. Susanna Blamire (1747-1794), “the Muse of Cumberland”, was formerly well enough known to be quoted by Dickens in The old curiosity shop, to have three of her songs set to music by Haydn and to be lauded as “unquestionably the best female writer of her age”. Some of her verse was written in collaboration with Catherine Gilpin, the sister of William. A prolific versifier of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was Canon H.D. Rawnsley of Cros-thwaite, a founder of the National Trust and of the Keswick school of Industrial Art. A more notable poet was Norman Nicholson of Millom. Many of the Cumbrian poets, including Relph and Susanna Blamire, wrote at least some of their verse in dialect. The Revd Thomas Ellwood, in The Landnama Book of Iceland (1894), showed how closely the dialect, place names and folk lore of Cumbria relate to early Norse. A glossary of the words and phrases pertaining to the dialect of Cumberland (1907) is one of a number of such books, while linguistics studies appear in A grammar of the dialect of Lorton (1913) and A grammar of the dialect of Penrith (1927). A bibliography of the dialect literature of Cumber-land, Westmorland & Lancashire North of the Sands was published by the CWAAS in 1907. Just as Cumbria and its people have inspired many poets, novelists have been attracted to set their works in the area. These include Hugh Walpole, who produced six novels in the 1930s and 1940s chronicling the history of the Herries family across several centuries. Graham Sutton (St Bees and Queen’s) produced a series of five historical novels with a Cumbrian setting. Melvyn Bragg is a prolific author of books on Cumbria. A notable feature of the landscape in the north of Cumberland is the Roman Wall, of which much has been written. William Hutton published his History of the Roman wall in 1802, giving a full account of its appearance in 1801. The first

edition of the Revd John Collingwood Bruce’s Guide came out in 1851. A pilgrimage along the Roman Wall, jointly organised by the CWAAS and the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries has been held every ten years since 1849. One book I was very pleased to find was published by John Christian Curwen of Workington Hall in 1808. Hints on the economy of feeding stock and bettering the condition of the poor set out his advanced ideas

on agriculture and social security. Schoose Farm on his Workington estate was a model of the application of his farming practices: he established the Miners’ Society of Workington in 1793 to make provision for his miners when they retired or were injured and his book contains its rules together with summaries of its accounts for the first ten years of its existence. Sheep farming was and is an important part of agricultural life in Cumbria. Since much the greater part of the fells is unenclosed, the sheep which graze on them need to be readily identifia-ble as they are constantly liable to stray. Each farmer’s flock had its own distinguishing marks, catalogued in Shepherd’s Guides. A good example is Daniel Gate’s New shepherd’s guide of 1893 (fig. 7). Fortunately, I began cataloguing my books at an early stage, recording not only the details of the books themselves, but where and when I found them and the price paid for them. The oldest book, the Revd Thomas Robinson’s Essay towards a natural history of Westmorland and Cumber-land, was printed in 1709. The collection has now grown to well over 1,100 volumes and this article has told something of the way that happened and of some of the subjects it embraces. I have accumulated and enjoyed my collection over many years and have no wish to see it broken up. Given the long-standing connection between Cumbria and Queen’s, it seems entirely appropriate that I should make my own contribution to the 675th anniversary of the foundation of the College by a Cumbrian and donate it to Queen’s. The College already has a collection of over 180 books, almost

Fig. 6: Title page from Cur-wen’s Hints on the economy of feeding stock and bettering the condition of the poor.

The College Archive: an introduction 12

all stored beneath Back Quad (to the building of which another Cumbrian, Sir Joseph Williamson, was an important contributor). A major addition to that collection is particularly apt in view of the advent of the new library building. It will mean that Queen’s will have the largest and most comprehensive such collection of any Oxbridge college.

Douglas Bridgewater is married to Susan (who

happens to be a direct descendant of Queen

Philippa) and has two sons. Most of his working

life was spent in the computer business. He lives

in Henley in Arden and on his retirement

represented the town on Warwickshire County

Council for eight years. He then returned to

academia, reading for an MA in English Local

History and subsequently for a PhD in Modern

History at the University of Birmingham. He has

written two books on the Great War.

The College Archive: an introduction

Michael Riordan, Queen’s College

O n meeting new members of College, and after first establishing that I am not an architect (or an activist, or even once an alchemist!) the first question I am

usually asked is what does the College Archive actually contain. People tend to be surprised. Essentially, it is the College’s institutional archive, i.e. the records created by the College in the operation of its own business, whereas items created or acquired from outside the College tend to be in the library’s manuscript series. There is some grey area here, particularly regarding the records of college societies and the papers of Fellows and Old Members, examples of which can be found in both collections. The Archive has existed since the very foundation of the College – indeed, it was mandated by Robert de Eglesfield’s statutes of 1341. The Archive’s importance is shown by the fact that the statutes insisted that the records should be kept in a chest with three locks, and its three keys were to be held by the Provost and the two Bursars so that they could be accessed only when all three officers were present. Why the archive was considered so important that such security was necessary is hinted at by the Latin word used in the statutes to refer to the records: munimentia. The room used to store the greater part of the Archive for nearly a century is still known as the Muniment Room, and the Oxford English Dictionary defines muniment as being a document ‘preserved as evidence of rights or privileges’. The importance of its muniments to a college is particularly well illustrated by the statutes of Corpus Christi College of 1517 (and copied by the founders of the later sixteenth century colleges that followed) which saw the muniments as weapons to defend their property and interests, insisting that they be preserved so that (translating from the Latin) ‘the men of our College, when challenged to suits and arms, may be always ready, and not march to the pitched battle unarmed.’ A college, in 1341 as now, cannot survive without an income stream to fund its primary functions of teaching and research and so the muniments were vital in proving ownership of

Fig. 7: Some of the images from Daniel Gate’s New shep-herd’s guide depicting the marking used on sheep flocks be-longing to different farmers.


the estates that formed the College’s endowment and in ensuring that the College continued to receive the rents, fines and other incomes from these estates that it needed in order to survive. Thus, from the start, the most important records in the archive related not to students, fellows, teaching or buildings, but to property. It comes as a surprise to many people that perhaps half of the Archive consists of records relating to the College’s estates. And some of this pre-dates the College itself, particularly those deeds which relate to St. Julian’s Hospital (aka God’s House) in Southampton, founded in c.1197 by (the appropriately named) Gervase le Riche and of which, courtesy of Edward III, the College became perpetual warden in 1347 (fig. 1). Thus, all of the deeds passed to the College as part of the College’s title to the hospital’s lands. There are not many institutions, even in Oxford, that hold records dating to the twelfth century. The College has a little over two and a half thousand deeds from before 1500 as well as nearly 350 manorial court rolls, account rolls and rentals from the same period. Almost half of the deeds, and all of the rolls, relate to property acquired through God’s House, and a third of these are from the estates of Pamber Priory in Monk Sherborne, given to God’s House by Edward IV in 1462. The remaining half relate to property given to the College itself, including Robert de Eglesfield’s gift of his manor of Renwick in Cumbria as the College’s founding estate, and 155 deeds for tenements in Oxford itself. Rounding off the

College’s medieval deeds are forty-three that relate to the College as an institution itself, including Edward III’s Letters Patent granting Eglesfield permission to found the College (usually referred to, a little inaccurately, as the Foundation Deed, fig. 2) of 18 January 1341 and, on one large piece of parchment measuring approximately 98cm by 63cm and covered with tiny writing, the statutes for the college which Eglesfield issued on 10 February 1341. The vast majority of these medieval deeds are stored not in College, but in the Bodleian’s Weston Library. In 1930 Noel Denholm-Young, a medieval historian and fellow of Magdalen, was employed to catalogue the Archive as he had done for several other colleges. It was Denholm-Young who divided the Archive into two either side of c.1500, claiming that the post-1500 records were the Bursar’s domain and ‘hardly comes within the province of an archivist’. Thus the modern records remained in College, while the medieval records were dispatched to Bodley where Denholm-Young believed, no doubt correctly at the time, they would be more accessible to scholars. This now seems regrettable, not least because it artificially divides the archive into two on what was even then a false distinction between administrative and scholarly records. In fact, even now, every few years a situation arises where a piece of necessary college business can only be expedited by reference to some of the medieval records. We hope that it will be possible to return the medieval deeds to the college when the new Historic Collections and Archive store opens in 2017. (There is an interesting coda to Denholm-Young’s work. The College has a collection of ledgers dating back to 1566 into which every lease was copied so that the Bursar had them available for

Fig. 1: Letters Patent of Edward III appointing College as perpetual warden of God's House.

Fig. 2: Foundation Deed.


easy reference, while the College’s counterpart copy of the lease, which bore the seal of the college and the other parties, was kept with the deeds. Denholm-Young advised the college to destroy the counterpart copies to save space, but the College instead decided to sell them, reckoning that ‘some Americans or others might care to have them’. They were right, so although the Queen’s leases are sadly no longer in the College Archive, they do still survive in the Kenneth Spencer Library of the University of Kansas.) But what of the College itself? Besides its property records there is only one series of records that dates back to medieval times, and two more that began in the early modern period. The oldest, of course, is the one record series that no institution can survive without: accounts. These, formally known as computi but known informally as the Long Rolls, followed, as their informal name

suggests, the English governmental tradition in being written on parchment rolls, the income on one side and the expenditure on the other; it was not until 1592 that the College switched to the church tradition of codices (bound volumes), though the accounts continued, through to the nineteenth century, to be written on parchment. The earliest roll to survive is from 1348 and there are lacunae throughout the medieval period. The accounts were prepared each year (running from 7 July to the same date the following year) by the Bursars – known as the Treasurer and Chamberlain (in the nineteenth century this would become the Senior Bursar, dealing with the estates, and the Junior Bursar, dealing with domestic matters). Setting aside the technical difficulties (one needs a knowledge of Latin and some palaeographical experience) they are relatively simple documents. There is no attempt at double entry book-keeping; there are simply notes of all income and all expenditure (organized into related groupings), all added up to provide a summa at the bottom of the roll. Finally, the sum total of expenses would be deducted from the sum total of income to provide the cash that the bursars had in hand which would then be carried over in pede rotuli (i.e. from the foot of the roll) to the income side of the following year’s roll (fig. 3). By the mid-fifteenth century the rolls had become completely standardised with the same headings used each year (and continued even after the rolls were swapped for volumes), and some payments were also standardized. However, we can still learn a lot from the accounts and they are vital for the medieval period in which they are, except for the property records, just about the only source for college history. For example, under the heading

Fig. 3: Part of the expentiture side of the 1374-5 Long Roll. Fig. 4: Selection of memoranda of a college meeting from Register G, signed by the fellows present.


Deliberata preepsito et sociis is recorded the stipends of the fellows, a vital source, as we shall see, for knowing who they were; under Custos reparacionum intrinsecarum are payments for building and repairs in the College (including Wycliffe’s latrine in 1374!); under Custos forinsecorum is a whole miscellanea of expenses ranging from lawyers’ fees to payments for book chains in the library, which reveal a great deal about the history of the college during each year. One might have expected another series to have been kept by the medieval College, a record of College meetings and decisions and elections to fellowships, but this does not happen until Register G (strictly speaking Registrum G, fig. 4) appears in 1558. Magrath believed that the name of this register suggested that six previous registers had existed, but had been lost. However, the first of the lease ledgers are lettered A to D, and it may be more likely that two sequences were intended – lease ledgers beginning at A and registers beginning at G – which were then discontinued. Certainly, there is no evidence of any earlier registers, and there is a great deal of evidence that the College transformed its record keeping practices in the second half of the sixteenth century. As we have already seen, the lease ledgers date to 1566 and the long rolls were modified into codices in 1592 and, as we will see, the entrance book begins around 1589. It is probable that the ‘Cartulary’, a large volume in which a great deal of important property transactions were copied for reference, also dates to this time. Furthermore, one might take for evidence of a newly created record keeping tradition the fact that having decided to start keeping a register, the Provost and Fellows were not entirely sure what to put in it. There are many miscellaneous matters recorded in the registers, and not always in chronological order. Arguably, it is not until the late nineteenth century that the registers take a fixed format of simply recording the minutes of the meetings of the fellows (though the erratic indexing still makes it sometimes impenetrable even in the twentieth century). However, from the 1560s onwards two items are generally recorded: the election of Fellows and Taberdars (though those elected on the Michel Foundation were recorded in a separate series of registers) and decrees of the Provost and Fellows. Though we therefore only have evidence of the elections of fellows from the 1560s, we can create a list of fellows for the medieval period from the Deliberata praeposito et sociis section of the accounts where each fellow is listed and his

stipend given. There are some lacunae, particular-ly in the late fifteenth century, which mean that it is possible that someone who was a fellow for just two or three years might – if they happen to be in 1483-6 or 1494-1500 when there are substantial continuous gaps – escape notice, but other than this we can be sure of getting a near-complete list of fellows. Of course, in the accounts only the fellow’s surname is given, but it is usually possible to identify him in comparison with university records (and, of course, Emden has done that for us in his Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500). Unfortunately, it is not always possible to identify the commensales, men who lodged in the college but were not fellows. The most famous is Wycliffe whom we can find several times in the accounts, but there is no certainty that we can identify all commensales. It is this lack of certainty that has allowed the College, from time to time, to indulge in the fantasy that Henry V was educated here. As for undergraduates, there really weren’t any in

Fig. 5: First list of commoners in Entrance Book.


Queen’s in the medieval period. Robert de Eglesfield had intended his college for the study of theology and therefore every fellow had to have already taken the MA degree, which meant about seven years’ study in the university before election to Queen’s was possible. And although Eglesfield had intended for up to seventy-two ‘Poor Boys’ (later to be informally called Taberdars) to be taught in the College it seems that he was really intending this to be a kind of grammar school

attached to the College and that they were expected to go elsewhere, perhaps to an arts college like Balliol, before they might one-day return to Queen’s as a fellow. However, it is very difficult to trace these poor boys – only occasional-ly can we identify someone in the accounts who is being paid for an errand and is probably a poor boy – though we can be fairly certain that they never reached anywhere near seventy-two. However, in the sixteenth century the university, and particularly the colleges, started to change radically, and all the colleges began to admit men who came to be called commoners (because they paid for their commons, i.e. food at the common table) and who, unlike fellows (and in some colleges, scholars) received no stipend from the college. Because they received no stipend they do not appear in the expenses of the College and the Long Rolls did not record batells individually. Therefore, like commesales, the early commoners appear nowhere in the College’s records. This changes about 1589. In 1581, the government of Elizabeth I being concerned about both Catholics and Puritans insisted that all men matriculating at the University must subscribe their name to an oath of belief in the Thirty-nine Articles, the formal theological dogma of the Church of England. And although it took the best part of a decade for the College to start to keep an entrance book (fig. 5), the names of all those who entered the College since 1581 were written into it, suggesting that the Oath of Subscription was central to the new record (though as we have seen this also comes at the end of a period of considera-ble innovation in the college’s record keeping). The College also copied in the names of all provosts and fellows since the foundation, no doubt just copying them from the Long Rolls. It is therefore possible from the end of the sixteenth century to be able to ascertain when any commoner entered the College, but it tells us no more about them (usually not even a forename). We can learn a little more from the end of the seventeenth century. From 1685 onwards we have the Batells Books and from 1693 to 1842 the Buttery Books, though with long lacunae for both. The Batells Books records the termly sum of each man’s batells (Provost, Fellow and Commoner alike, fig. 6) and the Buttery Book is a weekly record of what each man paid in the buttery (i.e. for food and drink beyond commons). This tells us a little more about each man (and in this period, of course, they were all men) as we can gauge to some extent whether they were amongst the poorer or richer of the commoners and, perhaps more importantly, we can determine from their

Fig. 6: Page from Batells Book, showing some of the termly batells for some of the commoners in 1773-4


payments when they were actually resident in college and when they were merely paying a nominal fee to ‘keep their name on the books’. But to get any real information about a member of the College we must wait until the end of the nineteenth century and two new series of Entrance Books. One of these will be familiar to all those Old Members reading this for, beginning in 1864, each man’s name was entered in a new book along with his address and school. From 1905 he entered these details himself and signed it. The other series, so far as I’m aware unique amongst college archives, was instituted by Magrath when he became Provost in 1876. It seems that he had an interview soon after every freshman came up and made a short record of it. The first half of each entry contains the same information as the other Entrance Book with a record of parents and schools, but then Magrath records more personal information, usually including what the freshman was studying and what he hoped to do after leaving Oxford, along with what sports he played, whether he was musical and whether he had any particular hobbies. It ends with a note of his college room and tutor (fig. 7). This practice continued throughout Magrath’s long provostship (including the years of his retirement when successive pro-provosts carried out the interview) until 1930 when Walker was promoted from pro-provost and replaced this system with a record card, including a photograph, which was maintained throughout a man’s time in college and beyond. At some point after the Second World War, the College also started keeping files on all students, which included their tutors’ reports. Sadly, many of these

were long ago destroyed, though they are more or less complete from the mid-1960s onwards. We are now scanning these files and destroying the originals to save space (the files grow bulkier by the year) but the important information they contain continues to be permanently preserved.

Fig. 8: Building Account Book 1714. Fig. 7: Magrath's notes on new members.

Unusual methods bring unusual results 18

This brings us neatly to the twentieth century, but before we linger here, we should note that beyond these principal record series there are also a gaggle of smaller, specific accounts, most notably four books of buildings accounts from the early seventeenth century when the rebuilding of the college was at its height (fig. 8), and a variety of account books from the bedmakers’ fund through the stable account in the nineteenth century. Similarly, there is a great deal of correspondence relating to various college matters (again mostly property related) and College Members. The formal series of Bursar’s letters begins in 1900, created by making copies of all outgoing letters by the damp-press method. These letter books continued until the 1920s when the Bursar started to keep everything in a series of files. The file, as a record management concept, is now so ubiquitous that we forget it is barely a century old in its modern form. From the 1920s, and even more so from the 1940s, the college kept files on everything. We have already come across a file for each student; there was a file (or, rather, successive files) for each college property. There were also files for a whole range of domestic matters including buildings, benefactions and brewing (at least, until the brewhouse closed in 1939), and much else besides. Though curiously, one key college function has never been properly documented: teaching. There is a Tutors’ Minute Book (the precursor to Tutorial Committee) from 1882, but because teaching was overseen by individual tutors very little has been kept, although some files and notes given by a few fellows and Old Members has filled in a few gaps. The accumulation of files continues, of course, and the bulk of them still, of course, relate to the College’s property. The Register still continues too, though now in the form of the minutes and papers of Governing Body, as do the accounts. But although the Archive continues in the task assigned by the founder of protecting the College’s rights and interests, it also tries to do more in documenting not only the functions of the College as an institution, but something that has rarely been achieved in 675 years: an attempt to document college life for all those who have spent some part of their own life in Queen’s. Michael Riordan is the Archivist of both Queen’s and St. John’s. His research focuses on nineteenth-century historiography and early modern record-keeping.

Unusual methods bring unusual results: dust monitoring in the Upper Library at

Queen’s

Victoria Stevens Oxford Conservation Consortium

A s in our own homes, so in historic libraries: as much as we may not enjoy the process, regular housekeeping is a constant and necessary part of

maintaining a good environment in any space. The key difference with historic interiors is that poor housekeeping practices can have a significant and damaging impact on the stability and longevity of the objects they house. Conservation aims to provide solutions for the issues library and archive storage spaces face, balancing use with the preservation of the collections they contain. One of the main collections care concerns in historic interiors such as the Upper Library at Queen’s, where the library is a heavily used study area, an aesthetically important space and a repository for some of the college’s rare book collections, is dust.

Dust is constantly created by human activity, and is composed of a mixture of textile fibres, atmospheric pollutants, building debris and organic material, as well as degradation products from the collection itself. It is a self-perpetuating cycle: dust is distributed throughout a space by the movement of people, open windows and air circulation systems, actions which in themselves create dust. Characteristically, higher surfaces have fine particulate dust, with coarser debris gathering at lower levels. Carpets and floor coverings act as reservoirs for dust and dirt, and if

Fig. 1: Visible dust accumulation on shelf edges.


left to accumulate it is then disturbed and recirculated by traffic through the space, and so the cycle continues. If the dust and dirt is not removed the continuous layering process starts to cause visible deposits on exposed surfaces, including on objects such as books.

Dust impacts on the condition of library objects in several ways. The most obvious effect is to lower the aesthetic impression of the collection and the library as a whole. A great deal of research has been carried out by institutions who offer public

access to heritage sites, such as English Heritage and the National Trust, into acceptable levels of dust. This research showed that visitors expect to see some evidence of dust, even appreciating it as part of the visitor experience by inferring age, but heavy deposits of visible dust and dirt were equated with neglect. Anecdotally, a perception of lack of care in any space encourages the likelihood of mistreatment and poor handling. Dusty and dirty books are unpleasant for readers to use, and through normal handling other areas of the object and the collection can be contaminated and affected. Clearly, it is important to the college that the Upper Library at Queen’s is displayed to its very best effect through good stewardship.

In terms of the interaction with objects, in this case specifically books, dust can cause several significant preservation issues. Dust is hygroscop-ic, attracting water from the surrounding environment. This can establish damaging chemical interactions with components in the bindings and textblock causing irreversible discolouration and degradation, such as browning and foxing. It is clear to see the impact of this process on any historic library item: the tail, or lower edge is usually in pristine condition,

Fig. 3: Part of the 2014 book cleaning team at work.

Fig. 2: Storage dirt, showing the potential cross-contamination effects of handling such items.


whereas the head, or upper edge is permanently darkened. Where there are high levels of atmospheric humidity dust can undergo a process known as cementation, causing it to adhere to the surface of an object and may cause permanent damage on handling or removal. Furthermore, dust and dirt are also an attractant to pests, including insects such as silverfish and woodbor-ing beetles as well as rodents, and, in the presence of high humidity, it can significantly increase the risk of microbial attack, causing irreversible damage to the object and loss of media.

It is clear that dust is an issue in historic library collections, and the conservation team at the Oxford Conservation Consortium were keen to work with the college to develop effective strategies to mitigate its impact on the Upper library at Queen’s. Dealing with dust can be divided into three stages: cleaning, maintenance and monitoring. Ideally, a full collection clean should be followed up and maintained by regular, thorough housekeeping and the development of a monitoring programme to check where the dust continues to accumulate, the results of which can be used to develop a cleaning strategy. The Upper Library at Queen’s is a excellent example of best practice, as all three stages of maintaining a good library environment have been in place since December 2014.

A full Upper Library collection cleaning pro-gramme takes place every three years in the Long Vacation. The work is undertaken by teams of students, in some instances from book conserva-tion training courses. This offers invaluable experience for trainee conservators, giving them an excellent opportunity to come into contact with a wide range of binding styles and see the conservation issues that affect a library collection as a whole.

There are three key considerations for the library cleaning. Firstly, in order to keep handling to a minimum and avoid mechanical damage to the book joints, only the external faces are cleaned. Handling and use poses one of the greatest risks to any library collection, with fragile joints and endcaps being very vulnerable to damage or loss, even when treated with care. Many of the volumes in the Upper Library may not have been opened for some time, and systematic flexing of the boards and spine, even when supported on foam book supports, may potentially cause more significant damage than leaving surface dirt on the endpapers and textblock. This also has a bearing on the second consideration, time. As each book has to be removed, cleaned and reshelved the level of cleaning has to be restricted. Anyone who has used the Upper Library at Queen’s will appreciate the

scale of this task, with 80 bays, each with at least 6 shelves. The third consideration is that dust generation from the cleaning process itself should be kept to minimum, and that it is removed from the library and not allowed to fall either on previously cleaned areas of the collection or the floor. This approach is reflected in the equipment used, with heavy emphasis on vacuum suction rather than dusters, and simple procedural methods such as working from the top shelf down when cleaning any given bay.

Following training from OCC conservators, and working in pairs, the student teams work systematically through the library, cleaning both the books and the shelves. Each book is removed from the shelf to a table cushioned with bubble wrap and covered in polyethylene sheeting. This provides a protective surface that can easily be kept clean and free of any debris that may cause damage through abrasion to the fragile surface leather of the bindings. It is important that the books are kept in shelf order at all times to

Fig. 4: Supporting the book on foam blocks when cleaning to minimise handling.


minimise handling and more importantly the need to open the books to check shelf marks.

Using one of the several portable conservation vacuum cleaners bought by the Library for this purpose, the outer surfaces of the books are carefully vacuumed to remove loose surface dirt and dust using a small soft brush attachment. If necessary, loose or detached boards or areas of the spine can be tied up using cotton tape at this stage. The tape is specifically designed for this purpose and is available in a range of browns to blend in with the collection and provide an unobtrusive means of supporting loose areas of the book structure. It is a simple but effective means of ongoing collection care, as having the boards tight against the textblock is particularly important for preventing further penetration of dust into the volume. Additionally, tying up reduces the risk of loss or further damage to the binding, as well as flagging up to readers that the book is in a damaged condition and therefore requires careful handling. Following the cleaning of the books, the shelf is also cleaned using vacuum suction with HEPA filtration and a large brush attachment, again to remove rather than spread the dust and dirt. The books are then returned in order to the shelf, and the team moves on to the next shelf. The cleaning of the whole Upper Library by this method takes four people working full-time 6 weeks to complete.

Clearly, this is a major commitment and investment into the care of the library and its collection by the college. Following the last cleaning programme in 2014 and in advance of the next scheduled clean in 2017, the librarians and I have focused our attention on the other two components of tackling dust in historic libraries, and have looked more closely at mitigating and monitoring strategies for the Upper Library. As a heavily used student study area and a working

library, dust will be constantly introduced and also generated within the space. This is compounded by the building work in the adjacent quads since 2014 which has exposed the library to a great deal of extra particulate dirt.

Regular and careful cleaning is the main weapon in the fight against this dust and dirt, and there is already a very high standard of cleanliness through the work of the Housekeeping team at Queen’s. Regular vacuuming of floors and floor coverings will remove a significant proportion of the dust, minimise its accumulation and reduce recirculation to the collection. The filters on the library’s air circulation system are well maintained and regularly checked, again minimising the amount of particulates that can enter into the library through normal air exchange. However, it is impossible to remove or eliminate all dust and this is where monitoring can be an effective tool in identifying how and where dust is an issue. The results from monitoring can then be used to target resources to where the need is greatest. It was hoped that the results from any monitoring would inform future cleaning and dust management programmes for the library, and, as handling is the greatest risk to the collection, reduce the frequency with which the whole collection is cleaned.

There were four priorities for the design of a dust monitoring system for the Upper Library at Queen’s. It had to be simple, cost-effective, safe for the collection and unobtrusive. Research around the subject and consultation with the Preservation section of the Bodleian’s Conservation Collection Care department showed a wide variety of approaches and equipment available, most of which relied on electronically recording the measurement of progressive loss of gloss, or reflection, on a sample surface such as a glass slide caused by the accumulation of dust. As the purchase of such equipment was not an option, two simpler, comparative methods of dust

Fig. 6: The dust trap in position. Fig. 5: A sticky dust trap ready for use.


monitoring were chosen as the most suitable for the Upper Library.

The first was a card tray with a sticky inner base to catch and hold any dust accumulations. These were constructed in-house using conservation boxboard and double sided tape. The sides of the tray minimised the risk of the traps becoming accidentally adhered to any library object, and warning signs on the traps discouraged casual interest. They were placed either on the shelf or on the head edges of the books at regular intervals throughout the library. Entry points to the library were chosen for sampling, as well as both high and low level shelves. As dust requires access to fall on any given surface, shelves where there was both a significant and minimal gap above the head edge of the books were chosen. This placing scheme was

intended to allow the greatest possible comparison of the anticipated results. As it is predominantly circulated by traffic through a given space, most dust should accumulate at waist height and below, and in terms of deposition on the head edges of books, it stands to reason that the larger the space above the book the greater the capacity for dust to settle. Entry points have the maximum traffic volume, and so should have the maximum dust accumulation. The traps were checked at 6 monthly intervals, with the previous 6 months results being covered by a strip of Melinex™, a thin clear plastic sheet. It was hoped that after a significant time it would be easy to compare the results between the test areas and determine which locations were most affected.

After 18 months the results of the initial monitoring programme using the sticky traps proved fairly inconclusive. As expected for shelves near the main entry point to the Upper Library, there was a slight increase in dust in the traps facing the stairs from the Lower Library. Overall, however, there was minimal dust in any of the traps. This would have been a positive sign, and proof that the mitigating strategies in place were working sufficiently well, if it had not been for contrary evidence in the form of visible dust accumulations on the shelf edges.

A rethink of the monitoring method was required, and following further research in the literature on dust a potential solution was found.

As each shelf in the Upper library is roughly the same width, a simple way of comparative sampling was to collect the dust from each shelf edge and visually cross-reference the quantities collected. Some unusual equipment was required, and from an unusual source: Superdrug is not a supplier you normally associate with conservation. A flat circular cotton wool pad was drawn along the front edge of the shelves and the sample swab was placed in a clear plastic bag labelled with the shelf reference. This would allow easy comparison both between shelves according to proximity to the entry points and main aisle but also as according to height within any given bay. The simplicity of the method meant that a greater number of shelves could be sampled, and as well as the main entry points, the sampling focused on the bays next to the carpeted areas and the heavily used student work spaces. Although as a method it could not monitor the different deposition rates of dust according to the space above the head edges of the books, it did provide a measurement of the maximum level of dust on exposed surfaces. This information could then be applied to all such areas where dust could have easy access, including the book edges.

Fig. 7: Two years after the last cleaning programme, the ac-cumulation of dust is noticeable.


As a method of dust monitoring it was more successful and safer than the sticky traps in that it provided an easily comparable set of data and immediate results. There was a small increase in the level of dust on the lower shelves in the bays adjacent to the main entrance point at the head of the stairs from the Lower Library, which was to be expected: virtually everyone who enters the library does so by this route. Likewise, there was a noticeable reduction in dust levels at the Senior Common Room end of the library, which is less regularly used by readers.

However, some of the data did not entirely follow the normal expectations of a heavily used library space. The results from the main body of the library were more surprising, with near identical deposits being recorded at various heights throughout the open shelves. Although there was a slight increase in some of the higher open shelves, the level at which the sample was taken within the bay did not seem to make a significant difference, which proves the thoroughness and success of the housekeeping measures in place in removing the daily accumulation of dust from the floors. If the floor and the carpets were providing a dust reservoir the level of dust on the shelves would be significantly higher up to waist height. What was

intriguing was that the most noticeable accumula-tions of dust were found behind the cupboard doors on shelf A of each sampled bay, as it would be expected that the doors would provide excellent protection from airborne particulates. A possible hypothesis is that the air circulation system is distributing the available dust at a higher level than would normally be anticipated, borne out by the slightly higher shelf B dust levels. In order to check this theory, and check that there are no other factors involved in this anomaly such as the impact of the building works in the adjacent quads, a sample cupboard will be cleaned and monitored separately to see the level of dust build up over the next year.

Although some of the data gathered in the Upper Library over the past 18 months has proved, in part, contrary to what was expected, the monitoring programme has provided a sound starting point for the future cleaning and collections care of this important collection and historic interior. It is gratifying for all those involved in the care of the library to know that the measures in place, such as the thorough housekeeping and maintenance regime, are clearly effective in reducing dust accumulation as the rate of deposition is fairly low. By using this data,

Fig. 8: Cotton wool pad swabs, showing the comparative levels of dust collected at various points throughout the library.

The Queen’s College Grand Orrery, 2016 24

priorities can be set for future library cleaning programmes to focus on where the need is greatest. Priority areas include the bays near access points and around the most heavily used student study desks, as well as where the dust has greatest access through a significant gap above the book head edges. In other areas where the effect of dust is minimal, only the shelf edges may need to be periodically vacuumed to remove visible dust accumulations. In doing so, the risk associated with handling the collection could be minimised whist the overall aesthetic of the collection and the space would not be compromised.

By tackling the gritty issue of dust in the Upper Library, a sound model for dust management has been created which will have wider benefits to the college community as a whole. As an example of an effective method, the measures in place at Queen’s can applied to other college libraries and collections cared for by the Oxford Conservation Consortium. Queen’s continue to pioneer work in this area, by hosting a dust management and monitoring session for Consortium members in August 2016. It is great to have the opportunity to share the knowledge we have developed over the last two years and showcase how Queen’s Library is leading the way in this important aspect of collections care.

Further information on library cleaning, book handling and care of collections can be found in a series of booklets produced by the Preservation Advisory Centre at the British Library, and via the following links:

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/

collectioncare/publications/booklets/

caring_for_bookbindings.pdf



cleaning_books_and_documents.pdf



damaged_books.pdf

1For example, see www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/learn/

conservation/.../Musmicdustpaper.pdf;

www.ifla.org/files/assets/pac/ipn/IPN%2053.indd.web.pdf;

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?

doi=10.1.1.468.5969&rep=rep1&type=pdf

2See

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/

S1296207409000557

Having started her career in a trade bindery and

following her graduation from the London

College of Printing, Victoria has worked as a

library and archive conservator at the Oxford

Conservation Consortium since 2002, undertak-

ing conservation and collections care for 16

colleges of the University of Oxford. She also

works in private practice from her own

workshop. She is an accredited member of the

Institute of Conservation (Icon). As well as

serving on Icon’s Book and Paper Group and

Care of Collections Group committees Victoria

also co-ordinate activities for the Oxford

Conservators’ Group.

Excerpt from A report following the servicing and inspection of The Queen’s

College Grand Orrery, 2016

Jonathan Betts

Brief Description

L arge Grand Orrery by Benjamin Cole & Son, London, 1763, commissioned specifically for Queen’s College.

The instrument stands on a fine mahogany table with six finely carved cabriole legs, the whole covered with a multi-panelled protective glass shade which can be locked securely onto the table, preventing access to the orrery. The mechanical orrery within is fitted in a mahogany twelve-sided case, with lacquered brass mounts and surmounted, on a brass pillared gallery, with a large lacquered brass hemi-spherical armillary structure. The mechanical orrery itself incorporates within its compass the solar system out to Mars, including the Earth and Moon, with additional mountings fixed on the outside of the case for attaching static models of Jupiter and Saturn.

http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/collectioncare/publications/booklets/caring_for_bookbindings.pdf



http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/collectioncare/publications/booklets/cleaning_books_and_documents.pdf



http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/collectioncare/publications/booklets/damaged_books.pdf



http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/learn/conservation/.../Musmicdustpaper.pdf

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/learn/conservation/.../Musmicdustpaper.pdf

http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/pac/ipn/IPN%2053.indd.web.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.468.5969&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.468.5969&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1296207409000557

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1296207409000557

The seventeenth century scientific revolution in England 26

biological sciences on the right, although many of the distinctions are blurred. A number of the books on display have strong Oxford connections. Many of our holdings have interesting provenances, which, when they are known, are described at the bottom of each caption.

The Queen’s College Library Insight Published by The Library, The Queen’s College, Oxford, OX1 4AW Copyright The Queen’s College, Oxford, 2016 All rights reserved ISSN 2049-8349

The seventeenth century scientific revolution in England: an exhibition

Curated by Amanda Saville Librarian, The Queen’s College

The following is the introductory text from the current exhibition on display in the Upper Library. Books on display include Hooke’s Micrographia, Newton’s Principia, and Robert Boyle’s Sceptical chymist. The exhibition will be in place until Spring 2017. Old and Current members are welcome to visit the exhibition and the Upper Library during staffed hours; non-members should contact the Library in advance to make an appointment.

*

A fter the seismic conflict and turmoil of the English Civil War and the Cromwel-lian Protectorate, the last forty years of the seventeenth century were revolu-

tionary in another way, witnessing significant advances in all fields of science from physics and chemistry to medical and life sciences. The relative political calm and optimism of post- restoration England allowed scientific endeavour to flourish. The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and scientific publishing grew. As in the rest of Europe, long held scientific precepts were challenged by natural philosophers working experimentally in London and the university cities. Many English publications from the second half of the seventeenth century are still to this day regarded as some of the most seminal scientific texts of all time. The Queen’s College Library is extremely fortunate to own some of the most important of these publications. The current exhibition showcases selected highlights from our collection and also includes earlier texts which indicate research endeavour at the beginning of the century. Importantly, these provide evidence that students in Oxford were continuing their scientific studies despite the Civil War raging around them. The cases are roughly divided into mathematics and physical sciences on the left and medicine and

An exhibition of books in the Upper Library

01865 279130 [email protected]

The 17th Century Scientific

Revolution

September to

Spring

2016/17

The Queen’s College Library

This small exhibition is

located in the display cases

in the Queen’s College

Upper Library.

Non-members of the

College, please contact us

in advance to arrange an

appointment.

insight - the queen's college, oxford · 2017. 1. 4. · the lost medieval library of...

Documents