the english private library in the seventeenth century

he English private library in the seventeenth century

is an area where there is scope both to increase our knowledge of thefacts and also thereby our understanding of the significance and

impact of book ownership in the society of the time. This is not by anymeans uncharted territory and might at first glance seem to be a subject thathas been quite well documented, but on closer inspection the gaps becomemore apparent. The research project described here focuses on the seven -teenth century partly for reasons of personal interest and partly for eviden -tial and documentary reasons — in the sixteenth century the evidence isthinner, whereas once we move into the eighteenth century it grows sig -nificantly, with more and more books in circulation and ownership. Also thesixteenth century is relatively better covered by work like ElisabethLeedham-Green’s edition of Cambridge probate inventories and PrivateLibraries in Renaissance England, and down to 1640 we have Sears Jayne’slist of Library catalogues of the English renaissance, incomplete though thatis.1 For the purposes of this project seventeenth-century private libraries aredefined as those that belonged to people who died between 1610 and 1715,with the aim of trying to focus on collections formed at least partly if notwholly during that century.

The starting point is the setting out of a series of questions that we mightreasonably ask if we wish to understand the landscape of book ownership,with reflections on how fully we can answer them from our present state ofknowledge. What was the typical size of a private library in England in the seventeenth centuryand how did that vary over time? What were the typical contents and how did they

The Library, 7th series, vol. 13, no. 4 (December 2012)© The Author 2012; all rights reserved

The English Private Library in the Seventeenth Century

by

DAVID PEARSON

An edited version of the Presidential Address, delivered to theBibliographical Society on 21 February 2012

T

1 E. S. Leedham-Green, Books in Cambridge Inventories (Cambridge, 1986); Private Libraries inRenaissance England, ed. by R. J. Febrenbach and others (Binghamton, 1992–); S. Jayne, LibraryCatalogues of the English Renaissance (Godalming, 1983).

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change, not only over time, but according to profession and social status? How werelibraries and their contents bought and sold and how were they stored? What werethe motives for acquiring books? How did people regard their books: to what extentdid they regard them as trophies or objects rather than texts pure and simple; howdid they annotate them, how did they read them? How many books or entirelibraries were destroyed during, and since, the seventeenth century? And why mightwe want to know any of this, why does it matter?

The aim of this paper is not to provide detailed answers but rather to sum -marize our current perceptions and suggest a methodology for further work.

Size

To begin with the question of size, how big might the seventeenth-centuryprivate library typically be? Here we have some pegs in the ground that havelong been known, and which will be readily cited if we start asking aboutEnglish private libraries of that time. Celebrated collections from the earlypart of the century include those of the Archbishops — Bancroft and Abbotat Lambeth, Toby Matthew at York — and other academic clerics like PhilipBisse and William Crashawe.2 In the middle of the century Selden’s libraryof eight thousand or so books is often cited as one of the biggest collectionsof its day, although Richard Holdsworth’s library (Holdsworth died a fewyears before Selden) was equally big if not bigger.3 At the end of the centurywe know that Francis Bernard’s library was in excess of ten thousand vol -umes and that Christopher Codrington gave about twelve thousand volumesto All Souls, but the best known big collection of the time is that of JohnMoore, Bishop of Ely, which became the Royal Library at Cambridge, esti -mated at thirty thousand volumes.4 Less commonly mentioned is the factthat the library of Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey, who died twenty yearsbefore Moore, was estimated at the same size.5

It is hardly surprising to conclude that big collections get bigger as thecentury progressed. These well-known examples suggest that at the begin -ning, anything in excess of three thousand volumes would be reckoned astrikingly large collection, while by the middle of the century somethingnearer ten thousand volumes would be needed in order to stand out. By theend of the century, it had become possible to own as many as 30,000 books.This sense of steady growth in average sizes is borne out by undertaking amore systematic survey across numerous libraries of known size. The listing

The English Private Library in the Seventeenth Century380

2 C. B. L. Barr and D. G. Selwyn, ‘Major Ecclesiastical Libraries’ in The Cambridge History ofLibraries in Britain and Ireland vol i: to 1640 (Cambridge, 2006), 363–99.

3 S. Naiman, ‘John Selden’ in Pre-Nineteenth-Century British Book Collectors ed. by W. Baker(Detroit, 1999), pp. 297–306; J. Oates, Cambridge University Library: A History (Cambridge, 1986),pp. 314–48.

4 Thornton’s Medical Books, Libraries, and Collectors, ed. by A. Besson, 3rd edn (Aldershot, 1990);E. Craster, The History of All Souls College Library (London, 1971), pp. 66–81; D. McKitterick,Cambridge University Library: A History (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 47–152.

5 M. Perceval-Maxwell, ‘Annesley, Arthur, First Earl of Anglesey’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004).




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of seventeenth-century English book owners, which I have maintained forsome years on the websites of this Society and of the Bibliographical Societyof America, currently includes about 1200 names.6 Taking those whose sizeis known (admittedly a minority), calculating an average size by decades,and turning the results into a bar chart produces the result shown in Fig. 1.

Looking at the available evidence to try to work out library sizes bringsout the difficulty of using evidence from valuations and cost estimates forthis purpose, a point which Elisabeth Leedham-Green has made in thecontext of looking at Cambridge inventories.7 Often we do not have acatalogue but rather a probate valuation — ‘his books, £30’, or £60, or £80,and how accurately might we be able to infer from this how big the collectionwas? Not very accurately at all is usually the answer, because ratios betweenvaluations and numbers of volumes fluctuate significantly. At the beginningof the century, the ninety or so titles in 190 volumes left by Humfrey Tyndallwere given a probate valuation of £47, which is 10s. 6d. per title or about 5s.per physical volume, while the seventy books of Isaac Lowden, who died twoyears earlier, were valued at £5 16s., or 1s. 8d. each.8 Tyndall was Presidentof a Cambridge college, Lowden was a curate in Darlington, and how far thedifferent valuations of the books reflect the different nature of their library

David Pearson 381

Fig. 1 Average numbers of volumes in seventeenth-century English private libraries ofknown size, by twenty-year periods.

6 http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/electronic-publications.htm#Bookowners7 Leedham-Green, Cambridge Inventories, i, xiii.8 Leedham-Green, Cambridge Inventories, i, 569–72; Darlington Wills and Inventories, ed. by

J. Atkinson and others (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1993), pp. 31–33, 122–25.

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holdings, or the condition of the books, or the different values applied inCambridge and Darlington, is a matrix not easy to unpick by simple math -ematical formula. Nearly a hundred years later the 405 books left by RobertMoore, a Derbyshire Nonconformist minister who died in 1704, were valuedat £30, which is 1s. 6d. per book.9 One year later the 130 books left byThomas Devey, curate of Coleshill in Warwickshire, received a probate valua -tion of £19 12s. 5d., which is 3s. per book.10 However the 600 books of SirJohn Barneby, a Herefordshire landed gentleman who died in 1701, were val -ued at only £12, or 5d. each.11 Again, this is not an easy logic to unscramble.

These figures do not suggest that book values went up significantly overthe century, which seems counter-intuitive in the context of general mon -etary inflation; one of the standard relative values of money calculatorsavailable on the Internet suggests that £1 in 1700 would have been worthonly 14s. in 1600.12 Of course books were more plentifully produced and incirculation in 1700 than they were 100 years earlier. This is an area thatJames Raven has considered in The Business of Books where he did findsome evidence of book price inflation for new books during this period, butwas also forced to conclude that ‘determining any “average” price for a bookis necessarily elusive’.13 One thing that regularly comes out of evidence ofthis kind is that the probate or resale value of books is typically less than theowner paid; William Crashawe is said to have spent £2000 on his library of4000 volumes, which is 10 shillings apiece, and rather more than thevaluation figures mentioned above.14

Contents

‘What were the typical contents, and how did they change not only over timebut according to profession and social status?’ was the next question. I havepreviously put some thoughts on this in print not only in the article onpatterns of book ownership in The Library in 2010, but also in the piece onearly seventeenth-century bishops’ libraries published there in 1992.15 It is ofcourse a large and complex topic where countless other studies of particularcollections have added pieces of the jigsaw. We have a broad understandingof the shape taken by many seventeenth-century libraries of any size, of thekinds of things that we are not surprised to find in the collection of a cleric,


9 A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), pp. 353–54.10 J. L. Salter, ‘The Books of an Early Eighteenth-Century Curate’, The Library, iv, 33 (1978),

pp. 33–46.11 Inventories of Worcestershire Landed Gentry 1537–1786, ed. by M. Wanklyn (Worcester, 1998),

pp. 288–90.12 http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/ 13 J. Raven, The Business of Books (New Haven and London, 2007), p. 50.14 A. Hunt, ‘Clerical and Parish Libraries’, in Leedham-Green and Webber, Cambridge History,

pp. 400–19 (p. 408).15 D. Pearson, ‘Patterns of Book Ownership in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, The Library, vii,

11 (2010), 139–67; D. Pearson, ‘The Libraries of English Bishops, 1600–40’, The Library, vi, 14 (1992),221–57.




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or an academic, or a gentleman. At least half its contents would probablycomprise what we would call theology of some shape or form, but it wouldotherwise be wide ranging as regards recorded knowledge and wouldembrace some coverage of history, literature, geography and travel, classics,science, natural history, medicine, and law. Proportions would vary and aphysician’s library would contain more medicine than a cleric’s, but hislibrary would still contain a lot of divinity. Over time the proportion of mat -erial in the vernacular, and printed in England rather than abroad, wouldincrease and a late seventeenth-century collection is typically much lessdominated by continental books in learned languages than one from thestart of the century. These trends apply to institutional libraries as well asprivate ones. At the other end of the spectrum many households would havea much smaller number of books, typically including a Bible, some devo -tional literature, and maybe some popular history or self-help material. JohnParker, a Lichfield apothecary who died in 1655, had ‘sixteen books little andbig’ recorded in his probate inventory; Robert Tudman, a Cheshire yeomanwho died in 1632, had six books valued at £1.16

In between there is a wide spread of possibilities about which we have aless chronicled picture. There are some more unusual or apparently maverickcollections like Brian Twyne’s or Antony Wood’s, which preserve a lot ofmore ephemeral or less commonly encountered items, but we know muchless about the broader pattern of ownership of this kind.17 We know moreabout the spread of ownership of the works of the church fathers in theseventeenth century than we do about, for example, copies of Delectabledemaundes, and pleasant questions in . . . matters of love, or A profitablebook, declaring divers approved remedies, to take out spots and stains, twoSTC books that survive in Brian Twyne’s library at Corpus Christi College,Oxford. There must once have been whole editions of these things that wentto good homes but the pattern of the preservation of books for posterity viainstitutional libraries means that today there are hardly any surviving copies— not something you can say for the works of St Basil — so that distributioncan only be conjectured. A point that was made in the 2010 article on pat -terns of ownership was around the presence of recreational and less seriousworks in the libraries of clergymen; Stephen Charnock, a Nonconformistminister eulogized by Calamy for his learning and judgment, did indeed ownlots of theology but he also had a Collection of Oxford Jests and a poem onthe delights of tobacco.18 The publication of the first volume in the newOxford History of Popular Print Culture has reminded us, should it be

David Pearson 383

16 Probate Inventories of Lichfield and District, 1568–1680, ed. by D. Vaisey (Oxford, 1969), p. 99;Wrenbury Wills and Inventories, 1542–1661, ed. by P. Pixton (2009), p. 284.17 R. Ovenell, Brian Twyne’s Library (Oxford, 1950); N. Kiessling, The Library of Anthony Wood

(Oxford, 2002).18 Pearson, ‘Patterns’, p. 156.




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necessary, of the huge market share of printed material that we would callephemeral — newsbooks, pamphlets, chapbooks, ballads, sermons,playbooks, and simi lar. It has been reckoned that a printed almanac couldbe found in every third household in England by 1660.19 Anna Bayman’sessay in that volume talks about the pervasiveness of this kind of materialacross all kinds of book owners, the Seldens as well as the yeoman farmers— ‘there was no sharp division between popular and elite culture during thisperiod [. . .] but rather, there was substantial overlap between the reading ofthe elites and that of ordinary people’.20

Another important point made in the 2010 article is that we should notexpect the contents of people’s libraries to be merely mirrors of their ownmindset; we should not think that a Presbyterian clergyman will only ownthe writings of his fellow Nonconformists, or that a lawyer will only haveprofessional legal texts on his shelves. Then, as now, anyone engaging withcurrent affairs, whatever their discipline, needed to absorb a wide sweep ofcontemporary thinking, as well as received wisdom. This point was wellmade by Philip Benedict and Pierre Léchot, writing about Marsh’s Library,when they said that ‘rather than offering us a sharply defined picture of itslast owner’s personal intellectual orientation, it reveals instead his largerintellectual inheritance and the range of texts he might have used to thinkwith, or against’.21

Buying and Selling

‘How were libraries and their contents bought and sold?’ was the next ques -tion, and it is well known that trade in books was a well-established part ofthe economic infrastructure throughout the seventeenth century. Again onecan refer to James Raven for a recent and systematic overview of this area,but there is a voluminous literature on the book trade. Major towns andcities had numerous outlets where new books could be bought, and moreprovincial or rural locations would be within striking distance one way oranother. Booksellers might turn their hand to a number of other more or lessrelated activities, like stationery, bookbinding, patent medicines, or wineselling, and there were considerably more of them at the end of the seven -teenth century than there were at the beginning. Raven’s estimate is that thenumber of London booksellers who dealt in ‘old libraries’ increased three -fold during the course of the seventeenth century.22 Just what was available


19 L. Kassell, ‘Almanacs and Prognostications’, in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. i: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. by J. Raymond (Oxford, 2011), pp. 431–42

(p. 431).20 A. Bayman, ‘Printing, Learning, and the Unlearned’, in Oxford History, ed. Raymond, pp. 76–87

(p.76).21 P. Benedict and P-O. Léchot, ‘The Library of Élie Bouhéreau’, in Marsh’s Library: A Mirror on the

World, ed. by M. McCarthy and A. Simmons (Dublin, 2009), pp. 165–84 (p.183).22 Raven, Business of Books, p. 106.




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in bookshops by way of unbound or ready-bound stock, and what peoplespecified when they indicated their wish to buy is less clear, but receivedwisdom on this point has been rightly questioned by Stuart Bennett amongothers.23

What is less well mapped is the extent and role of the second-hand booktrade, which we all know was there, but struggle to find much serious docu -mentation about before auction and fixed price catalogues began to appearin the last quarter of the century. The importance of the second-hand trade,and the relative paucity of documentation on it, are issues brought out byMatthew Yeo in his recent book on Chetham’s Library in the seventeenthcentury; as he points out, our conceptual models of book history, likeDarnton’s communications circuit, tend to be focused primarily on the tradein new books.24 If we were to ask ‘what proportion, on average, of the con -tents of a representative seventeenth-century private library from the begin -ning, middle, or end of the century was acquired second-hand as opposed tonew’, there would be no obvious place to go to find an evidence-basedanswer, or to know how the proportion changes over time.

Design and Storage

‘What did private libraries look like, how were books stored’? Most peoplewho have written on this topic, or on the history of library design, havelamented the fact that very few historic private library spaces have survivedremodelling in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and that there are notmany original pictorial representations or plans to help reconstruct what hasbeen lost. At the level of the private individual in not too grand a settingthere are many references in probate documents and elsewhere to studies orclosets, and it is clear that a small room or part of a room, with a desk andadjacent or surrounding bookshelves, was a model that could commonly befound among those with medium-sized collections. Henry Peacham’sCompleat Gentleman of 1622 advises ‘Let your studie be placed, and yourwindows open if it may be, towards the east [. . .] have a care of keeping yourbookes handsome and well bound’.25 There is a surviving plan by RobertSmythson dating from about 1600 for such a room as part of an unknownhouse, and the picture of Dean John Boys in his study in 1622, included inthe engraved title-page to his Works, suggests a space like this.26 A portraitof very similar date, of the 6th Earl of Rothes in a small book-lined room,is reproduced by Murray Simpson in his overview of pre-nineteenth century

David Pearson 385

23 S. Bennett, Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660–1800 (New Castle and London, 2004).24 M. Yeo, The Acquisition of Books by Chetham’s Library, 1655–1700 (Leiden and Boston, 2011),

pp. 81–83.25 P. and D. Selwyn, ‘The Profession of a Gentleman’, in Leedham-Green and Webber, Cambridge

History, pp. 489–519 (p. 504).26 M. Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven and London, 1978), p. 166; the Boys

vignette is reproduced in J. W. Clark, The Care of Books (Cambridge, 1901), p. 317.




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Scot tish book storage techniques.27 But books were also being stored inchests, as Henry Percy’s inventory of 1632 mentions fifty-two chests ofbooks and there are other references to books in chests, piles, or cup -boards.28 The generally expressed view is that by the end of the century theidea of a library as a separate room in larger houses was well established,and we have a rare intact survival at Ham House, which dates from the1670s, but there are records of library rooms in grand houses much earlierthan this, such as at Northumberland House, and Salisbury House, both inthe 1610s.29 As Elisabeth Leedham-Green and David McKitterick put it inthe Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, the evolution of the libraryas a distinct room in a gentleman’s house awaits a full investigation, andwhat we have at the moment is rather like our landscape of private librariesmore generally, a number of well-known examples that are regularly cited inthe literature, and a feeling that there is more that could be uncovered withsystematic research.30

Motives for Book Ownership

The next set of themes was around motives for acquiring books, how theywere regarded and how they were treated, which is a complex set of ques -tions with no more one-line answers than would be the case if asked today.Books were obviously recognized for their intellectual content and asquarries of knowledge, motives that were clearly at work when peoplebequeathed their books to institutional libraries or to sons who were enter -ing the ministry, or when George Ashwell, who died in Oxford in 1694, askedthat his books be auctioned there so as to benefit the ongoing promotion ofstudy in the University.31 When Richard Hooker was told that his house wason fire it was his books that he asked about, and on being told that they weresafe, he is said to have replied that ‘it matters not, for no other loss cantrouble me’.32 He too was probably thinking primarily about their textualcontent, but when William Boothby later in the century talked about hisbooks as ‘the great joy of my life’ we detect more layers to the bibliophiliconion, more flavour of delighting in books as objects, as possessions, gettingcloser to what motivated Samuel Pepys to have his books uniformly boundand to put little blocks under the smaller books in his bookcases so as to


27 M. C. T. Simpson, ‘Housing Books in Scotland before 1800’, Journal of the EdinburghBibliographical Society, 4 (2009), 11–31.28 G. Batho, ‘The Library of the Wizard Earl’, The Library, v, 15 (1960), 246–61.29 Girouard, English Country House, p. 170; M. Guerci, ‘The Construction of Northumberland

House’, Antiquaries Journal, 90 (2010), 341–400.30 E. S. Leedham-Green and D. McKitterick, ‘Ownership: Private and Public Libraries’ in The

Cambridge History of the Book in Britain vol. iv: 1557–1695, ed. by John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie,(Cambridge, 2002), pp. 323–38 (p. 325).31 Noted by the auctioneer in the introduction to Catalogus Librorum . . . in Omni Facultate

Insignium (London, 1696; ESTC R29124).32 R. Irwin, The Origins of the English Library (London, 1958), p. 167.




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achieve an aesthetically satisfying result.33 We all know about Naudé’sadvice about library formation, about not wasting money on bindings andhow it becomes only the ignorant to esteem a book for its cover, but JohnEvelyn, the English translator of Naudé, whose shelves were full of elegantbindings in monogrammed goatskin, never seems to have taken much noticeof that.34

John Carter opened his Taste and Technique in Book Collecting by quot -ing A. W. Pollard’s definition of ‘the bringing together of books which intheir contents, their form or the history of the individual copy possess someelement of permanent interest, and either actually or prospectively are rare’,going on to note Pollard’s view that ‘by the end of the seventeenth centurybook-collecting was in full swing all over Europe’.35 It is questionable howfar the idea of creating collections of the kind that we have been familiarwith since the rise of bibliophilic fashions, around the turn of the nineteenthcentury, had really taken hold in the seventeenth. That movement hasrecently been expertly charted by Kristian Jensen who observed that ‘in theseventeenth century a rare book had most often meant a “useful” book’.36

Certainly there were people then who liked their books to be handsome, orwho wanted large libraries, but practical usefulness was more likely to be aprimary driver than the wish to gather together books with some kind ofPollardesque intellectual rationale as collections. The website listing refersdeliberately to book owners rather than book collectors, as any attempt todraw some kind of imaginary line between seventeenth-century connois -seurs who were collectors, from others who were merely owners, would beartificial and misguided.

The extent to which books were acquired as status symbols, as expres -sions of social standing, as decoration, or as things to give away and createa memorial for posterity, rather than as things to read are all areas deservingmore exploration, and of course these various motives are not mutuallyexclusive. Book marking habits were as varied in the seventeenth century asthey are today; then, as now, there were people who marked their ownershipand their thoughts in their books, and people who didn’t. Bill Sherman haswritten more about this in Used Books, pointing out that there were con -temporary guides to how to mark as you read, but observation shows a greatvariety of practices and attitudes.37

David Pearson 387

33 P. Beal, ‘My Books Are the Great Joy of My Life’, The Book Collector, 46 (1997), 350–78; G. Mandelbrote, ‘Personal Owners of Books’ in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Great Britainand Ireland, vol. ii: 1640–1850, ed. by G. Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 173–89

(p. 185).34 G. Naudé, trans. by J. Evelyn, Instructions Concerning Erecting a Library (London, 1661), p. 61;

Evelyn’s bibliophilia is well documented and in this context see the illustrations of his bindings in theChristie’s sale catalogues of The Evelyn Library (22–23 June 1997). 35 J. Carter, Taste and Technique in Book Collecting (London, 1970), p. 1.36 K. Jensen, Revolution and the Antiquarian Book (Cambridge, 2011), p. 106.37 W. Sherman, Used Books (Philadelphia, 2008), ch. 8.




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Destruction and Loss

How many books or entire libraries were destroyed during the seventeenthcentury? It is easy to overlook the scale of book destruction in the past.There have been numerous studies of the survival rates of books going backto Oliver Willard’s article in The Library in 1943, and more recently PaulNeedham has published a useful piece focused on survival rates for incuna -bula.38 Needham reckoned that the average survival rate for fifteenth centurybooks was about one in 500. He stresses the point that the most significantfactor influencing book survival is the likelihood, or not, of their enteringinstitutional library collections, and that ‘books that do not enter institu -tional libraries often become rare so quickly that age or antiquity alone isnot a very important factor — an eighteenth-century edition, being two orthree hundred years younger than an incunable, does not for that reasonalone have any greater chance of survival’.39 This point is brought home byJohn Barnard’s observation that the Stationers’ records show that 84,000

school primers were printed in 1676–77, of which one copy can now betraced.40 Books were endlessly and continuously destroyed throughout theseventeenth century, through wear and tear, through accident and calamity,because people had other uses for spare paper, or simply because they werenot wanted. On top of regular activity in domestic violence to books, thecentury saw some particular high spots for destruction, such as the GreatFire of 1666 that consumed numerous libraries, and the Civil War. There arelots of tales from the 1640s of libraries being sequestered and never seenagain, and of soldiers ransacking and destroying cherished collections. Thelibrary of Thomas Jones, a Devon clergyman ejected in 1645, was plunderedaround that time by parliamentary forces who were said to have defiled andtorn the books into pieces and scattered the leaves across the roads andfields.41 The books of Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, were reputedly rentin pieces with torn leaves scattered over the church, even to the covering ofthe pavement, when the Cathedral was sacked.42 Robert Mapletoft, whobequeathed his books to help recreate the Cathedral Library at Ely, dispersedduring the Interregnum, described what he was able to leave as ‘the smallreserves from the late plundering times’, while John Riland, fellow of Mag -dalen College, Oxford, described how his study was broken up during the


38 O. Willard, ‘The Survival of English Books Printed before 1640’, The Library, iv, 23 (1943), 171–90;P. Needham, ‘The Late Use of Incunables and the Paths of Book Survival’, Wolfenbütteler Notizen derBuchgeschichte, 29 (2004), 35–59.39 ibid., p. 40.40 J. Barnard, ‘The Survival and Loss Rate of Psalms, ABCs, Psalters and Primers from the Stationers’

Stock’, The Library, vi, 21 (1999), 148–50.41 J. Walker, An Attempt towards Recovering an Account of the . . . Sufferings of the Clergy (London,

1714), pt. 2, p. 280.42 G. Keynes, A Bibliography of Henry King (London, 1977), p. xvi.




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Civil War, with the loss of all his books and papers.43 The upshot of all thisof course is that we should not base our understanding of the landscape ofseventeenth- century private libraries only on what has survived, but makeuse of every kind of archival and printed source that may refer to what onceexisted.

Next Steps: The Need for a Better Reference Infrastructure

This paper has sketched out a series of questions of the kind to which weshould have answers if we are to have developed an all-round kind ofunderstanding of the nature and impact of private libraries in seventeenth-century England. It is clear that we have better handles on the answers forsome questions than for others, although the waters are clouded both byreceived but insufficiently challenged wisdom, or by well-known exemplarsthat tend to be regularly trotted out and assumed to cover all that needs tobe said. It should also be recognized that our knowledge base of buildingblock material on which to create such understanding is thin, and that thereis a lot of information that could be uncovered and brought together so asto build a fuller picture and facilitate the kind of interpretative work thatcould go with that. As Giles Mandelbrote put in in the Cambridge Historyof Libraries, where he refers to ‘the density and complexity of book owner -ship in this period’, ‘most of this history remains to be written at local level;it is almost entirely absent from the older surveys of private book ownershipand collecting’.44

The website listing was created as the first stage of a bigger project tocreate a reference source to help build that picture, envisaged as a directoryof seventeenth-century English book owners. Its aim is to set out readily andconcisely what is known about an individual’s library, how to recognize theirownership evidence, and where to find more information, includingexamples of surviving books where possible. It does not currently aim to beall-embracing for the British Isles, and focuses specifically on Englishowners; some Scottish and Irish owners are included if their careers, andtheir libraries, were primarily based in England. The list contains a little over1,200 names drawn from various sources, and its outward references includelinks to websites with useful images, as well as printed works. The criteriafor inclusion need to be flexible, as we often do not know how large particu -lar collections were, and even then size alone is not the only measure ofsignificance. A hundred books in 1610 stands out more than the same num -ber in 1710, and a provincial apothecary or schoolteacher with such a libraryis probably more noteworthy than the same number found on the shelves of

David Pearson 389

43 E. Venables, ‘Mapletoft, Robert (1609–1677)’, ODNB; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford,1948), p. 365.44 Mandelbrote, Personal Owners, p. 177.




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an Oxford academic or an archdeacon. As noted earlier there were countlessseventeenth-century families with a Bible and a small number of devotionalor popular books in their possession and it would be unrealistic to try toinclude them all — to put it another way, this is not about trying to captureevery seventeenth-century name found in the books in all of our libraries. Aunified provenance index to many libraries is another desideratum thatwould complement this work, but that would be a separate project.

Drafts currently exist for the fuller directory for nearly 350 of the nameson the list; the Appendix shows a few specimen entries so as to invite com -ments on the format. In each case a brief biographical section is fol lowed bywhatever can be said about the library including, as appropriate, its size,contents, value, and any descriptive material available from contem po rarysources. Wills are always important, where they exist, for evi dence ofowners’ perceptions of their libraries and their status within their overallestate. People sometimes specified how their libraries were to be dividedbetween male and female relatives, or directed that they should be sold forcharitable purposes; they indicated their wish that collections should be keptintact, or become family heirlooms — not always respected — or theybequeathed them in considered ways around multiple recipients. Or theydidn’t mention them at all, even when they are known to have had sizeablelibraries. Sometimes they were particular about conditions of dis persal —George Hickes, for example, wished his books to be sold after his death ‘bythemselves pure and unmixed with any other books whatsoever’.45 Therefollows a discrete section on characteristic markings, which may be inscrip -tions, bookplates, armorials, or anything else, and which needs to includeimages; in many cases, of course, it is impossible to supply anything here asthere are lots of collections that have been dispersed without trace, andmany owners throughout history who have not marked their books at all.The entries conclude with a bibliography of relevant further references inprint or online.

Book ownership is one of the remaining uncharted bibliographicalfrontiers. In Thomas Jefferson’s house at Monticello in Virginia, there is alarge map hanging in the hallway showing America as it was known aroundthe turn of the eighteenth century. The north-east is reasonably well drawnout, then it becomes blanker and patchier as you move south and west withhardly any recorded knowledge of the west coast at all, or how much thereis in between. About a century ago our bibliographical forbears might haveobserved that knowledge of the national printed output of the hand-pressperiod was much the same — they had a number of building blocks inprinted catalogues of major libraries, but an awful lot of uncatalogued or


45 The National Archives, PROB 11/549, sig.238.




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scarcely discoverable material in libraries all over the world. It was of courseSTC, which was first mooted at a Bibliographical Society meeting in 1918

and first brought to publication in 1926, that changed all that, together withthe subsequent short-title catalogue projects it inspired. Our knowledge ofthe people who produced and distributed the books, the printers and thebooksellers, was similarly once a twilight world with occasional candles hereand there, but then the British Book Trade Index and London Book TradeIndex came along to build on the work of Plomer and his colleagues. We nowtherefore have a much more comprehensive reference source in that field, notas authoritative as STC, but providing that kind of overall map of thelandscape that enables contextual assessment.

If STC has brought the Ordnance Survey to the national printed output,in the world of provenance and book ownership we are still closer toJefferson’s America. There are large swathes of territory yet to be properlycharted by the kind of reference infrastructure that would both create a goodchance of identifying evidence in a particular book and of putting individualowners more fully into their contemporary contexts. I have argued elsewherefor the importance of paying full attention to the copy-specific aspects ofbooks, and my belief that in an increasingly digital age it is only thosedistinctive and unique aspects of books that will give them lasting culturaland research value, once textual content is fully and satisfactorily availableonline. I am not seeing anything in the ongoing march of the Kindle and e-text to change that opinion. There has indeed been a steadily growinginterest in provenance studies in recent decades, both in cataloguing and inbook historical literature, but the field needs better reference anchors.

In that context a directory of the kind I have described could be useful. Itwas originally conceived as something published in print, but by the time itreaches that stage it will probably make more sense as an online resource. Itcould also be built upon to extend beyond the seventeenth century — indeed,such a database confined to its present date range would probably soongenerate frustration among researchers who would curse the absence of thegeneration of Narcissus Luttrell, who died in 1732, or Anthony Askew(d. 1774), or even that of Richard Heber (d. 1834). It is easy to see variousmodels whereby the idea could be developed as an online directory with theopportunity for community input and editing, provided that a stable hostand central point for editorial direction could be maintained. As I said whendelivering this paper orally, I would welcome contact from any fellowresearchers in this field who share the vision for a resource of this kind andits desirability, and who might help create the critical mass to bring it about.

The last question on my opening list, not yet addressed, was: ‘Why doesit matter?’. And it is important not to overlook being able to answer that.The defining concept of book history is around understanding the socialimpact of books; we have moved on from the emphases of twentieth-century

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historical bibliography, which had a strong focus on enumerative and textualbibliography and the need to establish the record of what was produced, towanting to understand what influence these things actually had on theircontemporaries and on subsequent generations. This is why it is importantto focus on which books were owned, what patterns of ownership and usewere, how books were read and regarded, and how people responded tothem: these are all things that are unlocked by looking both at privatelibraries in the round and by looking at the evidence in surviving books.Inscriptions, bookplates, and armorials tell us something about attitudes tobooks, as well as providing direct evidence of individual collections, whileannotations provide an interface between text and reader. Bindings can tellus how much someone wanted to spend on what kind of long or short terminvestment, whether a book has been read or left on the shelf, where it waswhen it was bound, and whether anyone has ever wanted to rebind or repairit. Paying close attention to these things while also developing the referenceinfrastructure to allow us to interpret evidence and place it in context is whatwill deliver that understanding and help us to appreciate why books haveongoing historic and cultural value.

London

APPENDIXA DRAFT FORMAT, AND SPECIMEN ENTRIES,

FOR A DIRECTORY OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH BOOK OWNERS

Humphrey BABINGTON 1615–92

Born at Cossington, Leicestershire, son of Adrian Babington, Rector there. BATrinity College, Cambridge 1639, fellow 1640, MA 1642, tutor 1642–47, DD 1669;ejected from his fellowship, 1650. Rector of Keyworth, Notting hamshire 1654, ofStanton on the Wolds 1655; Vicar of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire, and ofGrantham, Lincolnshire, 1657. Restored to his Trinity College fellowship in 1660;Rector of Boothby Pagnell, Lincolnshire 1661. Senior Dean of Trinity 1671–72,Senior Bursar 1674–78, Vice-Master 1690.

Babington was a significant donor to the building developments at Trinity Collegeafter the Restoration, including support for Nevile’s Court in the 1680s. He was alsoclosely involved in the building of the Wren Library, partly in overseeing some of thework but also in subscribing £100 in 1676, and providing more money for thesouthern extension in 1681, on condition that he could occupy rooms there and thatrental income from the space would subsequently be applied to the purchase oflibrary books. Babington’s arms were subsequently included as one of the armorialscarved by Grinling Gibbons to decorate the presses, for which he paid a further £25.





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Books Babington’s will (PCC PROB 11/408) included a bequest to Trinity College of his‘Collection of mapps that I have putt together according to that method that DoctorHeylin hath used in his Geography’; it also refers to ‘setts of musicall books’ alreadygiven to the College. He bequeathed books to the value of £10 to the Town Libraryof Leicester and in establishing a charitable foundation in the parish of Barrow,Leicestershire in memory of his uncle Theophilus Cave, included a stipulation thatmoney be spent annually on Bibles, to be given to poor children, bound with ‘Thegift of Theophilus Cave’ on the covers in gilt letters.

The bulk of Babington’s books was sold by auction in Cambridge, 12 July 1692.The sale catalogue includes 865 lots, plus 52 volumes of tracts, divided into Latinbooks (465) and English (400), not further subdivided other than by format (i.e. notby subject). The collection included a typical mix of theology, history, and classicswith a sprinkling of science, literature, and other material. C. 15 percent of thebooks were 16th-century imprints, with the remainder spread across the 17thcentury. Examples: BL, 3104.c.9; Emmanuel, Cambridge S1.2.21.

Characteristic MarkingsThe Babington books that have been traced have his name, and the price and date ofacquisition, in a small neat hand in the top right hand corner of the title-page. Thereare no annotations.

BibliographyDNB; P. Gaskell, Trinity College Library: The First 150 Years. The Sandars Lectures1978–79 (Cambridge,1980); D. McKitterick, The Making of the Wren Library(Cambridge, 1995); D. Pearson, ‘Patterns of Book Ownership in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, The Library, vii, 11 (2010), 139–67; Catalogus variorum librorumReverendi Dris Babington, 1692 (Wing, B246B).

BANKES Family

Sir John Bankes (1589–1644); Mary Bankes, his wife (1598–1661); their sons John(1626–56) and Ralph (1631?–77); Ralph’s son John (1665–1714)

Sir John, born in Keswick, Cumberland, matriculated at Queen’s, Oxford 1605

and subsequently pursued a successful legal career, being knighted 1631 and becom -ing Attorney General in 1634. He acquired the royal castle of Corfe, Dorset, and theadjacent Kingston Lacy estate in 1635. He was impeached and dispossessed byParliament during the Civil War and died at Oxford in 1644. Corfe Castle was

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destroyed by military action in 1646 but the family property was regained by SirJohn’s wife and sons in 1647, by payment. John matriculated at Oriel College,Oxford in 1643 and both he and his brother travelled on the continent in 1646–48.Ralph was MP for Corfe Castle 1659–77; after the Restoration he was knighted andbuilt a new family seat, Kingston Hall. This was subsequently expanded in the 19thcentury to become the house now known as Kingston Lacy.

Books Only a few books now at Kingston Lacy can be traced back to Sir John’s time,although he is likely to have had a collection. Some high quality late 16th centurybindings are thought to have come from his original library at Corfe Castle. John(the son), Ralph, and Mary were all active book purchasers throughout the middledecades of the 17th century and their books form the foundation of the presentlibrary at Kingston Lacy. Their books cover a range of subjects and languages andare predominantly contemporary 17th century publications (i.e. they appear not tohave acquired many 16th century books), in fairly plain bindings of the period, witha few exceptions of more upmarket work. The collection seems to have gone througha period of little growth between the late 17th and late 18th centuries (i.e. afterRalph’s death), and books were certainly dispersed after 1677. Examples: primarilyat Kingston Lacy.

Characteristic MarkingsJohn and Ralph regularly inscribed their names on title-pages, sometimes with pricesand other acquisition details; endleaves were commonly used for notes, which maybe in the language of the text (e.g. Italian notes, and Italian forms of name, in Italianbooks). Some books are marked as belonging to Mary.





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BibliographyDNB; A. Mitchell, Kingston Lacy, Dorset rev. edn (Stroud, 1994); N. Barker,Treasures From the Libraries of National Trust Country Houses, (New York,1999);Y. Lewis, ‘Sir Ralph Bankes (?1631–77) and the Origins of the Library at KingstonLacy’, Library History, 18 (2002), 215–23.

Barnabas BARLOW 1598/9–1657

Of Easton, Hampshire. BA King’s College, Cambridge 1619, MA 1622, BD 1629,fellow 1618–37. Rector of Barton in Fabis, Nottinghamshire, 1637; ejected 1646,after which he returned to Hampshire where he died. Prebendary of York, 1640.

BooksBarlow bequeathed a number of specific books to family members in his will, includ -ing Baronius’s Annals and Martyrology to his cousin Thomas, his folio Estienne

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Greek New Testament to his cousin Nicholas Hobart, his Parkinson’s Herbal to SaraHobart, and Cicero’s works to his cousin Katherine Bust. The remainder of hisbooks in Barton were to be sold by his friend Henry Sacheverell, with the proceedsdistributed to the poor there. He also directed his nephew to burn all his sermons,sermon notes, and commonplace books.

Characteristic MarkingsNone of Barlow’s books have been identified.

BibliographyVenn; Walker revised.

Francis BERNARD 1628–98

Born in Croyden, Surrey, son of Samuel Bernard, Vicar there. Bound apprenctice to John Lorrimer, apothecary of London, in 1645; admitted a freeman of the Society of Apothecaries 1653, liveryman 1662. Apothecary to St Bartholomew’sHospital 1661, where he was noted for his service during the great plague of 1665.Awarded a Lambeth MD 1678; shortly afterwards appointed assistant physician at St Bartholomew’s, promoted to physician in 1683. Honorary Fellow of the RoyalSociety of Physicians 1680, full Fellow 1687. Physician in ordinary to James II, 1685.Bernard was involved in several controversies associated with the College ofPhysicians during the 1680s and 90s, generally supporting new ideas and a willing -ness to experiment (in opposition to the conservative tradition of the discipline); heresisted the College’s attempts to restrict the activities of apothecaries.

BooksBernard assembled a library of over 10,000 books, sold by auction in London (at hishouse), beginning 4 October 1698. His will does not mention his library, whichpassed to his widow as part of his overall estate; it refers critically to his son and oneof his daughters, echoing the comment in the preface to the sale catalogue that heregretted not having heirs who might make use of his books. The preface alsohighlights the size and scope of the collection, and the rarity of some of the items.It refers to a manuscript catalogue of the library, and the fact that some items listedthere had been lost through Bernard’s generosity in lending books to people and nothaving them returned. The collection was evidently assembled throughout Bernard’slife; he received an unknown number of books on the death of his father in 1657,whose will stipulated the division of his library between Francis and two of hisbrothers (Samuel and John).

The sale catalogue lists 9,997 lots, plus 39 bundles of pamphlets, divided intoLatin theology (1069), Law (Latin and English; 277), Mathematics (including astron -omy and astrology, Latin and English; 938), Medical (mostly Latin, but includingsome English; 4484), Miscellaneous Latin (4950), Italian, Spanish, and French(1163), English divinity, history, and miscellaneous (2066). The medical section wasunderstandably singled out for its size, but the library was wide ranging in its subjectcoverage. It included a number of MSS (Bernard’s name is found as a buyer of MSSin several marked-up sale catalogues of the 1680s and 90s), and has been noted for





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its holdings of Caxtons, and other incunabula. Examples: BL, Ames 7/693; Cam -bridge, UL, U.8.9; Marsh’s Library, Dublin, K.1.4.35, N.1.8.12; Wellcome Library,EPB/A7424/A.

Characteristic MarkingsBernard commonly inscribed his title-pages ‘Sum Francisci Bernard’, sometimesadding the date of acquisition. The preface to the sale catalogue mentions the plain -ness that was typical of his bindings: ‘being a person who collected his books for use[. . .] he seem’d no more solicitous about their dress than his own; [. . .] a gilt back ora large margin was very seldom any inducement for him to buy’. It also regrets theabsence of annotations in his books, saying that this was mentioned to him shortlybefore his death, and that he agreed: ‘if he had but taken the trouble [. . .] of settingdown in the vacant leaf of many of his books the reasons which he had to buy them[. . .] it had become [. . .] a singular piece of service to the future posses sors’.

BibliographyDNB; Thornton; R. Beadle, ‘Medieval English Manuscripts at Auction,1676–c. 1700’, BC, 53 (2004), 46–63; A. Freeman, ‘Some Notes on Francis Bernard’,BC, 61 (2012), 65–69; A Catalogue of the Library of . . . Francis Bernard, 1698 (Wing,B1992).

Henry BOURCHIER, 5th Earl of Bath c. 1587–1654

Born in Ireland, son of Sir George Bourchier, a younger son of John Bourchier, 2ndEarl of Bath. BA Trinity College, Dublin 1605, Fellow 1606, MA 1610. He inheritedIrish estates from his father but moved to England c. 1620; he was appointed to acommission of inquiry on the affairs of the Virginia Company in 1623. He becameEarl of Bath on the death of his cousin Edward, 4th Earl, in 1637. During the 1640she became increasingly, but reluctantly, involved in the royalist cause; he was sent toDevon (where the family estates lay) to raise forces for the King, but was given a veryhostile reception, and his subsequent military activity was ineffective. He wasappointed Keeper of the Privy Seal in 1644. He was sequestrated by Parliament andcompounded for release in 1649, after which he retired to the Devon estate atTawstock, where he died.

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BooksBourchier was described by Fuller as ‘a learned lord, and a lover of learning’, andhis widow Rachel (1613–80) gave books to the value of £200 to both EmmanuelCollege, Cambridge (in 1659) and Trinity College, Dublin (1671); these gifts wereuniformly bound incorporating a stamp with her arms as Countess of Bath andappear to have been specially purchased as donations. Bourchier’s library was soldshortly after his death following Rachel’s brief remarriage to Lionel Cranfield, 3rdEarl of Middlesex (according to an account of 1658, he sold ‘all her plate, most ofthe household stuff, and all Lord Bath’s library: all goes in rioting and play’). Thesize of his collection is not known, but books with his inscription are now found invarious libraries. Examples: Cambridge, UL, Q*.11.16; All Souls, Oxford, SR.41.a.5;Plume Library, F.7.5; Marsh’s Library, Dublin, A.6.32, L.1.1.23.

Characteristic MarkingsBourchier typically inscribed his books with his name in the form He: Bathon, withthe motto ‘Non est mortale quod opto’, sometimes adding details of the price andplace of purchase.

BibliographyDNB; F. Stubbings, A Brief History of Emmanuel College Library (Cambridge,1981); http://armorial.library.utoronto.ca/stamp-owners/BOU002

Richard BRACE – 1642

‘Gentleman and practitioner in the art of physic’ in the parish of St Augustine theLess, Bristol.





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BooksBrace’s probate inventory lists 120 ’several books of several volumes’ in the study, invarious formats between folio and duodecimo, collectively valued at £6, from a totalestate valued at £283. A copy of Gerard’s Herbal in folio ‘editio ult[ima]’ [i.e. theLondon, 1636 edition], and of ‘Romulinus his anotomie’ were separately listed andvalued at 30s. and 8s. The study also contained a variety of boxes holding instru -ments, glasses, and oils, and various other pieces of medical equipment.

Characteristic MarkingsNone of Brace’s books have been identified.

BibliographyE. and S. George, Bristol Probate Inventories: Part 1 1542–1650, Bristol RecordSociety, (Bristol, 2002), p. 125.

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the english private library in the seventeenth century

Documents