Rare Books at Marlborough - An A to Z by Marlborough College

Rare Books at Marlborough An A to Z

Rare Books at Marlborough

An A to Z

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Alchemy Gould’s Book of Birds Censorship and Controversy Darwin Embroidery Fine Printing Glennie Hebrew Illuminated Book of Hours The Marlborough Journal King or Parliament? Languages, Ancient and Modern Maps Newton’s Principia Ornamental Capitals Perspectives on the Past The Queen’s Favourite Rackets, Rugby, and the Rest Songbooks Tyndale’s New Testament Unpublished Poems Vellum War Poets Ex Libris Yeats Zoophytes

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Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

The Master’s Preface

At the heart of Marlborough College’s coat of arms we find an open book, its pages inscribed ‘Deus dat incrementum’ (‘God gives the increase’). The text is from the First Epistle to the Corinthians, and the book, of course, is the Bible. But we may see the book in the badge as not only the scriptures, but a symbol of both the wider education we offer at Marlborough, and our commitment to placing academic excellence at the centre of the College’s endeavours. Among the many books available to pupils around the College, one very special set stands apart: the Rare Books collection celebrated in the following pages. These books may be accounted remarkable in various ways: for their age and scarcity, for the craft and care that has gone into their making, and for the associations some have with famous or distinguished persons who once owned and cherished them. The books in the collection span seven centuries and cover a vast array of subjects. Most importantly, many

are exquisite examples of the art of the book, made by expert craftsmen adept in calligraphy, limning, typography, engraving, formatting, printing, binding, gilding, tooling, marbling, embroidering, papermaking, and a host of other arcane skills. In addition, many of the books carry more information to modern readers than their makers could ever have suspected, whether about ownership, literacy, the aesthetic standards of their time, or common assumptions of the past that we may confirm or contest today.

Such is the multifariousness of the collection that only a few of its books can be covered in a publication of this scope. It is my hope that the volumes selected for this A to Z may give some sense of the riches to be enjoyed in one part of Marlborough’s remarkable cultural inheritance.

Louise Moelwyn-Hughes Master

Introduction

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

For almost two centuries now, Marlborough College has promoted education as its core business with knowledge as its stock in trade. In its delivery of academic excellence, books have been central to its success, and the tens of thousands of pupils who have enrolled at the College since 1843 have read, relished, or wrangled with hundreds of thousands of textbooks in pursuit of academic improvement. Examples of these countless works of edification, enlightenment, and elucidation may still be found scattered across the world on shelves, in attics, or in second-hand bookshops; but the great majority have vanished forever, having played a passing part in the lives of pupils long gone from the College’s purview. Some of the titles placed before classes over the generations have been enduring – like Homer or Shakespeare – and others ephemeral, made obsolete by changes to technology or shifts in moral values. One body of books preserved at the College stands outside such currents of change in curriculum or cultural emphasis. Marlborough’s Rare Books collection is comprised of many works older than the school itself, the earliest a manuscript from the late 15th century. Consisting of almost 3,000 volumes, the collection may not be as extensive as the rare book holdings at Eton, Winchester, or Shrewsbury, a reflection of Marlborough’s history as an early Victorian foundation. Yet despite not being in business to buy old books when they were first printed, the College has managed to accrue a very fine collection, certainly one of the most significant in our region. The College has never followed a policy of actively buying rare books, but such books have nonetheless come into its safekeeping through donations, bequests, and legacies. Some of the benefactors have given of their treasures on a significant scale, as with the Rev. J. D. Glennie, the

Victorian clergyman, educationalist, and artist who is gratefully remembered in these pages. Other books came as single gifts, whether from former pupils who thought the College a proper home for a cherished volume, or from members of Common Room who enriched their departmental libraries with an historical curio. The piecemeal and incremental way in which the collection has come together is reflected in its eclecticism and diversity. There are numerous books of literature, ancient and modern; volumes of local and global history, or contemporary commentaries upon affairs of three or four hundred years ago that have now become historical records. There are many books on mathematics and the physical and natural sciences, and others on geography and exploration, politics and economics, sport and pastimes, music, art, and theatre, on philology, law, education, philosophy, and theology. There are examples of fine printing ranging from the work of the great practitioners of the Italian Renaissance to that of the Marlborough College Press in the mid-20th century. There are works illustrated by celebrated artists, books signed by royalty or Nobel Prize winners, and texts annotated by earnest scholars of the Tudor period or ‘A’ level students from the 1970s (in biro in an 1859 first edition of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty…). There are books of great sanctity and low scurrility; tracts arguing for Scottish liberty or the abolition of

child chimneysweeps; there are books on alchemy and mycology, on steam engines and cider presses, on leprosy, architecture, druids, and butterflies. On every shelf we find abundant evidence of human intellectual endeavour and enterprise in all its variety: diligent scholarship, literary flights of imagination, philosophical exertions, and infectious excitement about subjects great and small, grave or blithe, and in all and through all, a concern to pass on hard-won understanding to others. In this, the books reflect the educational ethos long upheld by the College. We are justly proud at Marlborough of the remarkable collection of books that sits at our intellectual heart, while remaining conscious of our responsibility, renewed in every generation, for safeguarding the literary and bibliographical treasures entrusted to our care by donors of the remote and more recent past. In our committed stewardship of the Rare Books, the College preserves not just wonderful artefacts and objects of beauty, but our own collective cultural memory. In valuing what we hold, we undertake to pass on to the Marlburians of the future what we have received so liberally from the Marlburians of the past.

Dr Simon McKeown Keeper of Rare Books May 2022

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Alchemy It might seem unusual that in a College renowned for scientific excellence, room should be found for books extolling the practice of alchemy, the arcane belief that base matter can be transmuted into gold.

But just as astronomy grew out of astrological speculation, so modern chemistry stemmed from alchemy. As a hermetic philosophy, alchemy offered its disciples both a material path in pursuit of gold, and a spiritual quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, the key to understanding the secret workings of the universe and the mind of God. The falling away of such mystical aims from laboratory practice towards the end of the 17th century was one indication of the onset of the Age of Enlightenment. The College’s earliest alchemical book, Philipp Ulstad’s Coelum philosophorum seu de secretis naturae, was published in Strasbourg in 1528. It is richly illustrated with extraordinary woodcuts of apparatus such as kilns, crucibles, retorts, flasks and alembics set up to distil the hermetic quintessence. The book’s title page shows a concave mirror concentrating the rays of the sun in order to heat the contents of an alchemical flask. Ulstad, a physician practising in Freiburg, was particularly interested in alchemy’s potential to distil effective medicines.

More abstruse in his interests was Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and an adept in alchemy and magic. The College owns two works by Ashmole, the first his Theatrum chemicum Britannicum from 1652, an anthology of English poetical texts, mostly from the Middle Ages, which Ashmole believed carried occult allusions to alchemical secrets. In one image we see Ashmole kneeling before an alchemist who gives him a book with the words ‘Receive the gift of God under the sacred seals’. Some pages of the College’s copy show considerable damage from burns and chemical corrosion, suggesting that the book was used in earnest in an alchemist’s workshop. Interestingly, despite dating from the mid-17th century, the copperengraved illustrations follow the visual conventions of medieval illuminated manuscripts, a reminder that alchemists often appealed to historical authority for their recipes and formulations. In Ashmole’s second book, Fasciculus chemicus from 1650, the author, in keeping with alchemical secrecy, adopts the anagrammatic disguise ‘James Hassole’ – the letters ‘I’ and ‘J’ being interchangeable in the 17th century. 09

Gould’s Book of Birds

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

John Gould (1804–81) was the greatest of all Victorian ornithologists, and the foremost figure in British 19th-century natural history illustration. He is best known as author of the sumptuous The Birds of Australia (1848) and this book, The Birds of Great Britain (1873). Gould played a decisive role in helping Charles Darwin form his theories of evolutionary biology and natural selection: it was he who identified birds from the Galápagos Islands as an entirely new group of finches, and not a variety of blackbird as Darwin had assumed.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Gould’s five-volume, elephant folio The Birds of Great Britain is the most beautiful book of British ornithological illustration ever published. Gould financed it by subscription, printing a run of only 750 copies. The subscribers included some of the leading names of the age, among them Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, King Leopold II of the Belgians and Charles Dickens – although neither Prince Albert nor Dickens lived to see the work completed. Each five-volume set contains 367 hand-coloured lithographs, making in all an astonishing 275,250 individually painted plates. The images reproduced here confirm that Gould was a highly sensitive observer of his subjects’ anatomy, plumage and behavioural characteristics, taking infinite care to match the colours used by his artists to the precise hues of his specimens. He was also pioneering in his interest in the ecology of birds, making special study of their diet, nesting materials and wider habitat.

Shown in these pages are images that capture the visual glory of Gould’s book, from the Dartford Warbler to the Glossy Ibis, by way of the Golden Oriole, Roseate Tern, Greenland Falcon, Roller, Pine-Grosbeak and Jack Snipe. Regrettably, many of the original 750 sets of Gould’s book have been mutilated by print dealers eager to sell the plates at premium prices. By contrast, Marlborough’s set is complete and in remarkably fine condition. It was donated to the College by Herbert Leaf (1854– 1936), long-serving Assistant Master, sometime Mayor of Marlborough and generous benefactor to the school. The book had belonged to his father, Charles Leaf, a successful silk merchant and one of Gould’s original subscribers.

Censorship and Controversy Not everything committed to print meets with universal approval, and sometimes readers register their dislike of an author’s opinion directly on the pages of a book. Such interventions add richness to a book’s story, and show how ideas have been received, negotiated and contested.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

An example is found in a magnificent de-luxe folio of the works of the Roman writer Seneca, edited by the renowned humanist scholar Justus Lipsius, and published in Antwerp in 1615. Despite being an exemplary work of scholarship, an early reader has taken issue with the portrait of Lipsius ahead of the text. This portrait, based upon a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, has been mutilated, the eyes scratched out by a sharp point. It is impossible to say exactly why the admired Lipsius should be thus attacked in effigy, except to note that he switched between Catholicism and Protestantism several times over the course of his career. Perhaps in an age of confessional upheaval (the Thirty Years’ War broke out in 1618), such fluidity in religious conviction was likely to attract contempt. Another example comes from the English Civil War. Joshua Sprigg, chaplain to the parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax, published an admiring account of his master’s campaigns up to the year

1647. Partial in tone, Anglia Rediviva was aimed at readers on one side of the political divide, but inevitably fell into the hands of those on the other. In the copy owned by the College, a Royalist sympathiser offers acerbic comments upon Sprigg’s text. Where the title page describes Fairfax as ‘Captain General of all the Parliaments Forces in England’, the disgruntled Royalist adds ‘Being a Pack of Presbyterian Knaves’. When it informs the reader that it has been ‘Compiled for the Publique good by Joshua Sprigge, M. A.’, the same hand snipes ‘who Murder’d the Best of Kings’. But the Royalist does not have the last say, because his comments have been scribbled out by a later reader. The same pattern of comment and censorship continues in the dedicatory letter which Sprigg directs ‘To the Honourable William Lenthal, Speaker of the Honourable House of Commons’ – to which the Royalist responds ‘Who Dethron’d the Best of Kings’. Again, this has been scored out, and glossed ‘as ye Lying Jacobits and Torys say’. The handwriting and vocabulary of this

rebuff date from the 1690s or early 1700s, half a century after the Civil War – an illustration of how long political recriminations can linger. The controversy was still bitter in 1802, the date of William Butler’s Arithmetical Questions for ‘The Use of Young Ladies’. Butler was a progressive teacher, delivering lessons on history, commerce, geography and science, then posing mathematical questions based upon dates or statistics. But as a Quaker, Butler described kings such as Charles I or James II as tyrants, a view alarming to the monarchist owner of the College’s copy of Butler’s book who expunged whole passages of the author’s nonconformist commentary in thick, black ink. (Ironically, one of the censored passages concerns the freedom of the press). The book bears the signature of a certain Ann Elizabeth Cunningham. Did one of Ann’s parents take umbrage at Butler’s opinions, and seek to protect her from radical views? Or was it rather Ann herself who wanted to blot out Butler’s troubling ideas?

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Darwin Established as a school for the sons of clergy, Marlborough stood as a bastion of 19th-century Anglicanism. But this affiliation did not debar the College from acknowledging emerging ideas in the sciences, including Charles Darwin’s theories on natural selection and evolutionary biology.

Published in November 1859, On the Origin of Species provoked wide controversy as it entailed a challenge to the authority of Holy Scripture, and thereby to those within the Established Church who argued for the integrity of biblical accounts of Creation. While many 19th-century Anglicans vilified Darwin and his teaching, his theories found a sympathetic audience among some at Marlborough. In fact, the College bought all of Darwin’s books on their first publication, including On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and the exploratory work on psychology The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The books formed part of the library of Marlborough’s famous Natural History Society, the first school science club to be established anywhere in the country. Founded in 1864, the Society encouraged pupils to undertake fieldwork in the Wiltshire countryside and publish their findings in annual Proceedings.

The College owns two early copies of On the Origin of Species, the one shown here being a rare first edition. Now regarded as the most famous book of biological science of all time, only 1,250 copies were printed; but such was the immediate public interest in Darwin’s explosive theories that the publisher, John Murray, issued a larger, second edition in January 1860. The ideas propounded in the book were famously the subject of a debate staged at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in the Natural History Museum, Oxford, in June 1860, an event subsequently remembered as the ‘Oxford Evolution Debate’. Fought out between the celebrated biologist Thomas Huxley and the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, the debate drew wide attention to the increasing discord between science and religion in the mid-Victorian era. Marlborough’s Master between 1871 and 1876, Frederic William Farrar, became a personal friend of Darwin’s, and

persuaded the authorities to permit his burial in Westminster Abbey after his death in 1882, despite objections from resentful clerics. A generation after his death, the scientist’s grandson, Charles Galton Darwin (1887–1962), later to be Director of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, began his scientific studies at Marlborough as a boarder in Cotton between 1901 and 1906.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Embroidery Some objects in the College Rare Books collection are truly unique, such as a Dutch translation of the Bible from 1628.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

What makes this iteration of Holy Writ so exceptional is its embroidered cover, a beautiful and fragile example of petit point stitching on a canvas ground. Decorative needlework of this kind was typical of English and Scottish styles in the 17th century, so the presence of such a binding on a Dutch book is unusual. What is not in doubt is the artistry and skill of the work, and the colours of the threads retain their vibrancy after almost four centuries. It was considered a virtue for women in the 17th century to ply their needle in ways useful to the household, and as a defence against idleness and the vices attendant upon it. Higher-ranking women eschewed the menial tasks of mending and darning, preferring instead to work on decorative objects such as chair seats and cushions, bed hangings, frames for mirrors and, as here, covers for special books. Often the images they worked upon were laid out on canvas in black outline by

professional pattern drawers who copied woodblock motifs from printed books. Women could therefore order designs to certain specifications, and then use their judgement and taste to determine which colours and materials to deploy. The subject matter of embroidered bindings often featured women from biblical lore, such as Judith, Ruth, Susannah or Bathsheba. In this case, however, the cover shows a family group, with the husband and a son hand in hand on the upper board, and the wife and another son hand in hand on the lower board. The clothing they wear, notably the woman’s dress, dates the cover securely to the 1630s, and would have been familiar to Anthony van Dyck, then newly arrived in England. He was to be instrumental in popularising family group portraits. What is remarkable about the College’s embroidered Bible is that the image of the wife on the reverse

almost certainly depicts the needlewoman herself. Social convention obliged her to give her husband prominence on the book’s front, while she followed discreetly on the back. But in other ways she takes pride in her appearance, not just in the lovely shimmering folds of her gown, but in the way she picks out the features of her face in fragile silk, and how she adds a strand or two of gold-spun thread to catch the highlights of her hair. She walks with her husband and children in a flowery, verdant meadow, surrounded by animals – a moth, butterfly, caterpillar, stag, frog and snail – joyously stitched with scant regard for scale. On the spine, set into compartments, are a talbot dog, a squirrel, a kind of finch, a primrose and an English rose. The Dutch Bible’s embroidered cover stands as a personal and poignant family artefact from the years before the Civil War.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Fine Printing The College is fortunate to be the custodian of books produced by some of the greatest publishing houses in history.

Chief among them is that of Aldus Manutius of Venice, pre-eminent printer of the Renaissance, the inventor of the ‘New Roman’ typeface, italic type and the semicolon. The College has three works from the Aldine Press dating from the early 1500s, each bearing the famous device of the dolphin and anchor, symbol of Aldus’s speed and accuracy. One of Aldus’s ablest rivals was Johann Froben of Basel, represented in the collection by folio editions of the works of Josephus (1544) and the letters of Erasmus (1558). Europe’s greatest publishing house of the late 1500s and early 1600s was that of Christophe Plantin and Balthasar Moretus at The Golden Compasses in Antwerp, its quality exemplified by the sumptuous edition of Seneca’s works published in 1615. Many of the values espoused by these early masters were upheld by Marlborough’s own William Morris, and we are fortunate to have several works from the Kelmscott Press. The Arts and Crafts aesthetic championed by Morris inspired a host of small, private presses, and

the College acquired fine examples from 20th-century artisan printers like the Nonesuch Press, Cuala Press, Golden Head Press, Whittington Press and Westminster Press, often gifted by the publishers. For half a century between 1934 and 1984, Marlborough published its own books under the aegis of The Marlborough College Press. It was the initiative of Brian Hone (1907– 78), Marlborough’s first teacher of English, who, though himself a Cambridge cricketing Blue, recognised that pupils averse to sport needed something to occupy them. With funds from the Master of the time, George Turner, Hone set up the press, having first taken a crash course in hand printing with The Shakespeare Head Press in the winter of 1933–34. Oxford University Press gifted the College an Albion printing press from 1839, along with stocks of Caslon type; Hone later acquired further presses, including one that had belonged to William Morris. Indeed, Hone travelled to Kelmscott Manor in 1935 to meet with May

Morris, William and Janey’s daughter, then aged 73. With a team of dedicated pupils, Hone oversaw a series of handsomely printed books, and his Press in time published limited editions of the works of Ronsard, Sassoon (150 copies signed by the poet), William Golding, A. E. Housman, Robert Graves and many others. When Hone left in 1939 to become a headmaster in his native Australia, the Press fell under the direction of Edward Walters (1899–1977), today remembered as a highly skilled wood engraver in the great English tradition. Among the works issued during his tenure was Unity in Strength and Other Fables of Aesop, published in 1942 with woodcuts by Walters. After the Second World War, the Press continued to publish literary titles, but also took on the job of printing Orders of Service, invitations, cricket scorecards, prize lists, annual Christmas cards and play programmes. Its finest post-War work was The Marlborough Litany printed in 1949 in three colours and with exceptionally dignified typography.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Glennie The Rev. John David Glennie (1796–1874) is an important figure in the history of Marlborough College.

He was among the group of gentlemen who first argued for the foundation of a school for the sons of clergy, and was present at the meeting in July 1842 when proposals were drawn up to locate it at Marlborough. He was elected to the founding Council of the College, and over the next 30 years helped Marlborough grow from a fledgling school to a powerhouse of Victorian education, bringing expertise as a national Inspector of Schools and author of pamphlets on pedagogy. In many ways he was born to it, having been raised with his 11 brothers in a boarding school run by his father in South London, Dr Glennie’s Academy in Dulwich. This school is remembered as an alma mater of Lord Byron, who attended it from the ages of 11 to 14. It had on its staff the celebrated artist Samuel Prout, later ‘Painter in Water Colours in Ordinary’ to George IV, William IV and Queen Victoria, and a man much admired by Ruskin and Turner. Prout saw artistic ability in young Glennie, and tutored him in landscape art. It was a skill Glennie developed to a high degree,

exhibiting at no fewer than four Summer Exhibitions of the Royal Academy; he was also in demand as a book illustrator, including work for a volume on Byron published in 1832. Glennie’s best-known artistic productions are 50 beautiful lithographic prints of mainly German and North Italian scenes, published as Views on the Continent in two folios in 1841 and 1849. But Glennie also had scientific interests, particularly in the field of entomology. He was an enthusiastic beekeeper, researching the mechanics of stings (using his left hand as a test site), and publishing the findings under the pseudonym ‘J. D. Ottinge’. He became the go-to expert on bees for Charles Darwin, with whom he exchanged scientific letters.

Glennie’s pertinence to the Rare Books collection is that he remains the single most generous donor of old and remarkable books in the institution’s history. By the terms of his will of 1874, Glennie bequeathed to the College an astonishing collection of books already scarce in his day. Some had been bought in the late 1700s by his grandfather, John Glennie (1720–1801), minister of Marycultur in Aberdeenshire; others came from the library of his father, Dr William Glennie (1761–1827). Many of the books are Bibles of exceptional interest. One such is the very first Bible to be printed in Spanish. Published in Basel in 1569, it was strictly banned by the Catholic Church, and any copies found were burned, a circumstance that makes

surviving examples very rare. Another remarkable book is a Spanish-language text of the Torah printed in Amsterdam for the Hispanic Jewish community expelled from Iberia. Glennie also left the College Paraphrases upon the New Testament by Erasmus of Rotterdam published in 1548–49 under the direction of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife. From around the same date is his copy of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament which is treated here at greater length under ‘T’. Some century and a half after his bequest, the College salutes the Rev. Glennie and honours him still.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Hebrew Following both Erasmus’ translation of the New Testament from Greek (1516) and Luther’s of the whole Bible from Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic (1534), there was a strong urge among Protestant theologians to read and understand scriptural texts in their original tongues, and many were particularly interested in Hebrew as the authentic language of the Old Testament. The academic recognition of the importance of Hebrew as a true insight into biblical thought raised the language’s status and created a demand for high-quality Hebrew texts scholars could consult for themselves. Ideally placed to meet this demand was the French-born publisher Christophe Plantin (1520–89), whose printing office at The Golden Compasses became the world’s largest publishing house in the second half of the 16th century, operating no fewer than 22 presses. He was based in Antwerp which was at that time a major centre of humanism and scholarship; but it was also a city where pro-Catholic civic fathers governed a citizenry that was largely Protestant. This created a climate of religious tension and intolerance, and Plantin found himself in trouble in 1562 when a Calvinist pamphlet was discovered during a raid on his print shop. In an attempt to appeal to the Spanish king, Philip II, Plantin devised a project whereby he would create an edition of the Bible in five languages in eight monumental volumes, the

largest polyglot Bible of the 16th century. His plan met royal approval, and Philip provided financial support that enabled Plantin to embark on his colossal Biblia Polyglotta. The College’s Hebrew Bible dates from 1566, just one year before the project commenced. It is a survivor from the original run of 7,800 copies Plantin printed, the largest single issue for any of his books. Published with the elegant Hebrew typeface Plantin inherited from the great Venetian printer Daniel Bomberg, his book was aimed principally at reformed divines who wanted to savour the urlanguage of the patriarchs and prophets. The College copy has beautiful manuscript annotations by an early, probably clerical owner. His notes testify to the excited interest in Judaic texts during the 16th century. In some parts of Europe, however, they were less valued: the Inquisition organised mass burnings of Bibles printed in Hebrew during the 1550s.

humanism, as well as on science, mathematics, botany and astronomy. His books were bought by scholars, teachers and private readers, and helped fuel healthy academic discussions across Europe and beyond. Conditions during the Dutch Revolt forced Plantin to move his base temporarily from Antwerp to the more northerly Leiden, but his printing operations resumed in Antwerp in 1585. His palatial premises on the Vrijdagmarkt survive in a remarkable state of preservation, so much so that the very type that made its impression on the pages of the College’s Bible over 450 years ago can still be found in serviceable condition in Bomberg’s original typecases.

Aside from the success of his religious and biblical publications, Plantin published books on all areas of

Illuminated Book of Hours The oldest book owned by the College is a late 15th-century Book of Hours written on 128 leaves of vellum.

Like most Books of Hours, it contains certain set prayers and devotional readings, including the Penitential Psalms and excerpts from the Gospels, plus the Hours of the Virgin, the Calendar of Church Festivals and the Office for the Dead. The manuscript was calligraphed and limned by monks working in the scriptorium of a northern French abbey, probably in the 1480s. Some of their work includes the use of gold leaf that brings sheen and dazzle to the page; the introduction of such light to manuscripts is known as ‘illumination’. The photographs overleaf show the manuscript’s most ornate opening, facing illuminated leaves with reverential figures on the left, or verso side, and the Annunciation with the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin on the right, the recto side. We are invited to read the image from left to right, following the orientation of the petitioning figures towards the scene of Christ’s Incarnation. Two of the verso figures are instantly recognisable: St Christopher with the Christ-Child, and St Denis, patron saint of France, with his severed head under his arm. The man before them, kneeling in golden robes and with his

hat, or bourrelet, laid respectfully on the ground, is the commissioning patron of the book. His identity has long lain hidden, but the coat of arms displayed in the ornamental border suggests that he was a member of the House of Nesle, a noble family from Picardy and hereditary Counts of Soissons. According to the late 17th-century historian, Claude Dormay, a châtelain of the Nesle family made generous donations to the Church in the 1480s to restore local ecclesiastical buildings damaged during the Hundred Years’ War. We may perhaps identify the bishop on the verso leaf as St Medardus, possibly the name-saint of the book’s owner. A cult venerating St Medardus centred on the Abbey of St Médard in Soissons, an establishment under Nesle patronage. Reference to the College’s Book of Hours has recently come to light in an auction catalogue printed in Paris in 1866. There we read that the manuscript had been for many years in a private collection in Lyons. It was subsequently bought by a Manchester bibliophile, Thomas Hayes, and upon his death in 1878 sold by the London booksellers Henry Sotheran Ltd. It was later

presented to the College in 1883 by the Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Falconer Madan (1851–1935), a one-time pupil in C1. Madan was an expert on illuminated manuscripts, holding a lectureship in medieval palaeography at Brasenose College; later, in 1912, he was appointed principal Librarian of the Bodleian. Other illustrations in his spectacular gift to the College show the Ascension of Christ, and images of Saints Nicolas, Mary Magdalene, Catherine and Geneviève.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

The Marlborough Journal The Marlborough Journal was a weekly newspaper printed in the town for 190 issues between March 1771 and July 1774. It was one of only two local newspapers to be published in Wiltshire in the 18th century, the other being The Salisbury Journal which is still a going concern.

The foundation of the newspaper testifies to the importance of Marlborough as a stopping point along the Great Bath Road. Although Marlborough’s population did not exceed 3,000 souls in the 1770s, no fewer than 42 stagecoaches stopped in the town each day. The inns and hostelries saw a constant flow of guests and patrons, including those elite visitors who stayed at the Castle Inn, now C1. It was to serve both this transitory population and the town’s residents that The Marlborough Journal was conceived. It was established by John Smith and Edward Harold, the town’s printers and booksellers, to ‘indulge that principle of curiosity inherent in the mind of man’. Most of the copy was supplied from London and was surprisingly global in its coverage. It was possible for citizens of Marlborough to keep abreast of faraway events like the partition of Poland, the disbanding of the Jesuits by the Pope or the coronation of Gustavus III of Sweden. What is perhaps more surprising is how quickly news reached the editor’s desk: a report on the American pre-revolutionary Boston Tea Party of 16th December 1773 was

already before the town’s readers by 29th January 1774. There is still much to delight the modern reader of The Marlborough Journal. Book notices tell us of prevailing literary fashions, theatre reviews document the critical fortunes of leading actors of the time, while news from Plymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth detail the comings and goings of commercial and naval shipping. Serving a rural community, the newspaper reported on corn prices and animal auctions. Then, like now, there was demand for private schooling, one met in part by Mrs Hilliker who advertised the merits of her ‘Ladies Boarding School’. Perhaps some of her charges and their siblings took note of The Journal’s regular advertisements for medical elixirs that promised to address ailments such as ‘Scurvy, Leprosy, Pimpled Faces, and other malignant Eruptions’. And like newspapers of a certain stamp of more recent times, The Journal found space for amusing anecdotes, such as the account given here of the nuptials of Thomas Thirlewell, an octogenarian groom.

The last issue of The Marlborough Journal was published in July 1774. Edward Harold confessed that the ‘Expence attending its Printing and Circulation [was] more than the Advantage received’. He switched to supplying local readers with The Bath Chronicle which he sold alongside his books, stationery and medicines ‘to such of his Customers as shall please to take it.’ The College’s collection of 189 issues of The Marlborough Journal is the most complete in existence and provides unique documentation of life in the town during the 1770s.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

King or Parliament? The town of Marlborough had its share of upheaval during the conflict variously known as the English Civil War, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, or the English Revolution.

Perhaps the last designation is the preferred one in Marlborough, as the town was predominantly sympathetic to Parliament, an allegiance still emblazoned in the Commonwealth coats of arms engraved on the town’s silver ceremonial maces. The burning of 53 houses and looting of town property by Royalist troopers in December 1642 only hardened allegiance to the parliamentarian cause. The College holds an extensive and important collection of original printed material from the decades before, during and after these turbulent events, ranging in scale from folio records of speeches made in Parliament before its dissolution by Charles I in 1642, to dozens of cheap, ephemeral pamphlets issued by unregulated printers arguing pro and contra king or Parliament. There are also retrospective histories of the era, written by those who had fought on the side of the king; dating from after the Restoration in 1660, these offer revisionist accounts of the wars, repudiating Cromwell and his experiment in republican rule. Two small publications carry local significance. Both are texts of

sermons preached during the war, the first by John Sedgwick, vicar of St Alphage’s, Cripplegate, but a native of Marlborough. In 1642 he returned home to deliver a sermon from the pulpit of St Mary’s in which he likened the country’s travails to the afflictions visited upon the Old Testament patriarch, Jacob. Sedgwick had long been a critic of the king, and indeed had his thumb chopped off in 1633 for preaching a disloyal sermon. Travelling in the opposite direction was Nicolas Proffet, the vicar of St Peter’s, Marlborough, who went up to London to deliver the fiery homily England’s Impenitence under Smiting. Proffet was a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, a group characterised by Lord Clarendon, the Royalist apologist, as ‘infamous in their lives and conversation, and most of them of very mean parts, if not of scandalous ignorance’. Richard Baxter, a puritan theologian, took a different view, describing them as ‘men of eminent learning and godliness, ministerial ability and fidelity; and the Christian world, since the days of the apostles, has never had a synod of more excellent divines’.

Among the most spectacular of the Civil War books is a 1687 copy of Eikon Basilike, an anthology of the writings of Charles I. ‘The King’s Book’ became enormously successful in the years after the Restoration, but its appearance in monumental folio during the reign of James II betrays the political tensions of those years. The magnificent fold-out plate shows the image of Charles the Martyr. Engraved by Anders Hertochs in Antwerp, it presents Charles kneeling before an altar, his attitude deliberately echoing Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The king spurns with his foot the world and his earthly crown, and looks to the celestial diadem that awaits him. The king’s hapless political performance is explained away by emblems in the background: Charles has valiantly tried to keep the ship of state on course through turbulent seas; like a rock lashed by waves, Charles has remained ‘Unmoved, Triumphant’. This grace under pressure is also reflected by the palm tree straining under heavy weights: the palm, a tree of victory, was said to grow stronger under duress.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Languages, Ancient and Modern The teaching of languages has always been taken very seriously at Marlborough, a tradition maintained against national trends to this day.

The holdings of the Rare Books collection offer ample evidence of this respect for European languages, ancient and modern, with outstanding treasures of classical literature in both Greek and Latin, but also in the ancient Hebrew tongue. Of current languages, there are notable books by French, Italian, German and Spanish authors. The finest Greek book is the first complete edition of Aristophanes’ plays, published in Basel in 1532 with a printer’s device by Hans Holbein the Younger. The text of the 11 extant plays was prepared by the German humanist and reformer, Simon Grynaeus, an associate of Erasmus, Thomas More and John Calvin. Also notable is the edition of the Anthologia Graeca published in 1566 by the great French Renaissance printer, Henri Estienne. The College owns the personal copy of a book belonging to Estienne’s father, Robert, a Greek edition of Josephus from 1544. There are many works of Latin literature, among them editions of Ovid by the Dutch scholar, Nicolaas Heinsius (1662), of Diogenes Laertius by the Danish Royal Librarian, Marcus Meibomius (1692), and of Horace’s poems and Terence’s comedies by the famous Oxford philologist, Richard Bentley (1723 and 1726).

Among the Italian books is a 1573 edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron purged on the orders of the Inquisition of its more salacious tales about abbots and abbesses. The College’s six-volume set of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso was published in London in 1815 for British readers eager to access romance literature and belles-lettres in the original languages, a trend also exemplified by 29 volumes of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau published à Londres between 1782 and 1802. The 70 handsome volumes of Voltaire’s Oeuvres Complètes, published in Paris in 1784, bear two interesting ownership marks, the first for Prince Frederick, son of George III, and the second for Sheridan, the Irish playwright. French literature from an earlier era is represented by multi-volume collections by the triumvirate of Racine, Molière and Corneille, the latter in an edition of 1762 graced with an outstanding suite of plates by Hubert-François Gravelot, one-time drawing master of Thomas Gainsborough.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Maps As a mercantile people, the Dutch were unsurpassed masters of cartography, taking inspiration from the Flemish Renaissance mapmakers, Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius. The latter, as well as key figures of 17th-century Dutch cartography, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Frederik de Wit, Johannes de Ram and Nicolaus Visscher, are all represented in the College Rare Books collection. One hundred maps by several hands are gathered in a magnificent composite Atlas published by De Ram. Compiled in 1685, the Atlas consists of large fold-out copperengraved maps, all teeming with details of towns, terrain and even fauna, and coloured by hand with extraordinary precision and beauty. Merchants and private citizens alike bought such atlases to order, priced according to the quantity of maps required and their level of finishing. The College’s comprehensive Atlas with maps of the Americas, Africa, Asia and all parts of Europe, and with lavish colour on every opening, stands at the de-luxe end of the scale. Shown here is a planispheric presentation of the Earth’s two

hemispheres which serves as the Atlas’s inner title page. We show a general map of the British Isles that precedes more detailed individual presentations of Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales. Notable is the relative insignificance of later industrial cities such as Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds; in the 17th century such places were still only sizeable market towns. Emphasis was placed instead upon cathedral cities, an indication of the continuing importance of the Church. De Ram’s Atlas also offers views of regions far beyond Europe, such as China and Japan. For this, De Ram needed to call in the expertise of another mapmaker, Joan Blaeu, who had drawn up maps of these territories from information supplied to him by the missionary Martino Martini, the Jesuit Superior in the Far East. Blaeu’s map of Japan in particular is a rare document of a kingdom long debarred to

European visitors. Also interesting is just how well understood the north coast of Australia was to Dutch cartographers. A century before Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, the Dutch had already mapped the northern part of ‘Hollandia Nova’. Another type of map is a chart of the winds first published in 1650 by Joannes Janssonius. Entitled Tabula anemographia seu pyxis nautica ventorum nomina sex linguis repraesentans, the map shows the directions of the winds in all quarters of the globe, listing their names in six languages – Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Latin. Historians of cartography call maps of the winds ‘wind roses’ because of their concentric form, and the puffing heads ‘wind blowers’ or ‘wind heads’. Janssonius shows 32 such wind heads ventilating every region of the Earth.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Newton’s Principia Marlborough College is fortunate to own a copy of the rare and important second edition of Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1713), one of only 750 copies printed.

It contains substantial modifications to the text of the extremely scarce first edition of 1687, of which only 250 copies were made. Published 26 years after the first, the second edition was printed at Cambridge University Press in wide quarto format and illustrated with numerous woodengraved and letterpress diagrams, including beautiful images of cometary orbits. Newton’s work had a major influence on the history of science, and was described by Albert Einstein as ‘perhaps the greatest intellectual stride that it has ever been granted to any man to make’. There were, in all, three authorised printings of the Principia in Newton’s lifetime (1643–1727). Richard Bentley, the Cambridge classical scholar and member of the Royal Society, noticed that copies of the first edition were becoming increasingly hard to find and accordingly very expensive. In 1708 he convinced his friend Newton to allow him to organise a second edition, and to engage the help of Roger Cotes, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, in compiling it. Together, they expanded the scope of the work and developed further postulations. The result was an improved and expanded text of the

Principia; indeed, the book was almost entirely rewritten. The second edition of the Principia was subsequently viewed as an exemplary work of empirical science, and the definitive expression of Newton’s ideas. Because of the extent to which Einsteinian theory is grounded on Newtonian science, the Principia has retained its unique and seminal position in the history of physics, even if some of its tenets have been further refined and finessed. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica translates from Latin as ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, the term ‘natural philosophy’ being an earlier description of what we would call physics. The book expounds Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation, making it the foundational work of classical mechanics. The sequence of definitions used in setting up dynamics in the Principia is familiar from many textbooks current today. Indeed, Newton first set out the definition of mass used to define what we now call momentum. Newton’s single-minded attention to his work on the Principia was recalled many years later by his one-time secretary and copyist, Humphrey Newton (no

relation). His account describes his master’s complete absorption in his studies, and how he would forget to eat or sleep, and that he would often rush back to his room with a new thought, not even waiting to sit down before writing. The College’s copy of the Principia is imperfect, lacking its title page. It is bound in early 19th-century calf with neoclassical ornament and bears an old ex libris of the library of the Mathematics Department. How one of the first thousand copies of science’s most momentous book since antiquity came into College ownership is unknown.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Ornamental Capitals In earlier times, when materials such as vellum or paper were expensive, scribes or typesetters beginning a new section of text, such as a chapter division, did not start on a fresh page, but marked the change with a large, decorated letter distinct from the others in its scale, colour, flourishes and elaboration. Manuscript and book historians have identified two main types of ornamental letter: the decorated initial that introduces a new section of text and carries visual embellishments; and the historiated initial that includes figures or narrative episodes illustrative of the passage that follows. There are numerous examples of both types in books owned by the College.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

The decorated initial has enjoyed the longer life. It can be found already in the College’s Book of Hours (see the entry under ‘I’), where in addition to fully illuminated leaves, there are numerous beautiful capital letters limned in rich, vibrant colours. One series of capitals are rendered in lapis lazuli blue worked with white body colour; others deploy the technique called rubrication, the use of red. In one of the rubricated capitals, the limner has included the head of a dragon with fangs and forked tongue, while in a lapis capital, we see an elegant bird; such animals are known as cadels – meaning a ‘gift’, or a ‘little extra’. The examples from printed books shown here range in date from the Renaissance to the 19th century, including work printed in a medieval style by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press. Historiated initials were intended to serve more than a textual function, providing visual illustrations of key figures or narrative episodes in the passages they announced. For limners in the Middle Ages, the story dictated which figures to include within the frame of the letter. In the age of print, similar character or narrative scenes were cut into woodblocks and integrated into the so-called forme, the block of assembled metal type and blank ‘furniture’ from which impressions were made. However, because printing stock was expensive, printers

did not trouble to cut new capitals for every job, but re-used old letters: indeed, some printing houses kept the same letters for generations. This meant that figures and stories within initial capitals appear indiscriminately in new contexts, regardless of their relevance to the text. We see this in a magnificent historiated initial ‘I’ used by Holinshed in the preface to his Chronicles, where the text begins ‘It is dangerous, (gentle Reader), to range in so large a fielde…’. But accompanying this is a scene of God the Father presiding over Eden taken from a Latin Bible where Genesis opens with ‘In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram…’. Other examples reproduced here are two ‘A’ letters, one showing God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, the other Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac; a ‘B’ with the angel confronting Balaam and his talking donkey from the Book of Numbers; a large ‘T’ with the ancient Greek navigator Timosthenes; a letter ‘N’ with the Old Testament Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem with trowel in one hand and weapon in the other; and ‘I’ (really a ‘J’) showing Jacob’s dream with angels ascending and descending a heavenly ladder. Harder to decipher is the letter ‘O’, which shows the Apocryphal heroine Judith slipping a decapitated head into a sack. The name of her victim, the wicked Holofernes, was sometimes also given as ‘Oloferne’.

Perspectives on the Past The Rare Books collection is an important depository of material on all aspects of Wiltshire’s long history, including antiquarian surveys of the county’s Neolithic monuments, learned tomes on architectural heritage, and scientific and archaeological analyses of barrows, ditches, mounds and stones.

There are also 18th-century tourist guides to Avebury and Stonehenge, and even poetical responses to the Romantic craze for the ‘British druids’. The pen-and-wash paintings of Stonehenge shown here were executed by one of Wiltshire’s greatest antiquarians, Sir Richard Colt Hoare of Stourhead (1758– 1838). Heir to the banking fortune of Charles Hoare & Co., Hoare was able to devote himself to historical and archaeological projects, undertaking extensive surveys and digs across Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire Downs. His excavations

at Stonehenge (1798 and 1810), Silbury Hill (1812) and Avebury (1815) followed work upon almost 400 barrows throughout the county. His monochrome paintings served as the originals for the engraved plates made for the first volume of his monumental The History of Ancient North and South Wiltshire (1812–21). In addition to suggesting the tonal values the printmaker should follow, the paintings carry instructions on the reverse noting where the plates should appear. These valuable paintings came into the College’s keeping in 1883 when Stourhead estate short-sightedly auctioned off part of its library.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Hoare’s work was influenced by an earlier scholar to take interest in the county, William Stukeley (1687– 1765). One of Britain’s earliest and greatest antiquaries, Stukeley was a clergyman and a physician, a friend of Sir Isaac Newton, and, in 1707, one of the founders of the Society of Antiquaries. During the 1720s and 1730s he collaborated with Edmond Halley on a study of the geo-astronomical secrets of Stonehenge. In 1725 he published his Itinerarium Curiosum, or

An Account of the Antiquitys, and Remarkable Curiositys in Nature or Art, Observ’ d in Travels through Great Britain, a richly illustrated account of ancient tumuli, monuments and ruins throughout England and Wales. Naturally, Wiltshire was of particular interest to Stukeley, and he offers engravings of many prospects of the county’s antiquities. Most valuable to the College is his bird’s-eye view over the Earl of Hertford’s mansion, drawn and

engraved in 1723. From it we can easily make out buildings and features little changed today: St Peter’s Church, Granham Hill, the Old Bath Road, Court, New Court, the Duelling Lawn, the Yew-Hedges, the Mound, the Master’s Garden and the grassy plots down to the Kennet. Lord and Lady Hertford’s great house, now C1, is shown without its present porch, but is in other respects comfortably familiar.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

The Queen’s Favourite History remembers Sarah Churchill, 1st Duchess of Marlborough, as the favourite of Queen Anne, a relationship brought to renewed attention in the 2018 Oscar-winning film starring Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz. The College possesses a notary’s copy of the Duchess’s last will and testament in a manuscript that probably dates from 1744, the year of her death at the age of 84. Born in 1660, Sarah Jennings had in 1677 married the up-and-coming soldier John Churchill, later the victor of Blenheim, Outenaarde and Malplaquet. But it was with the accession to the throne of Queen Anne in 1702 that her fortunes reached their zenith. Sarah had known the queen since 1675, when

she was 15 and Anne just ten. Now holder of roles such as Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stool, Sarah enjoyed unparalleled access to the queen, and proved to be as formidable a tactician in court politics as her husband showed himself on Europe’s battlefields. In fact, as jealous courtiers noted, she became a ‘She Minister’, advising Anne on matters of national, international, financial, political and military significance. Sarah’s apparent indifference to rank made her an invaluable confidante of a queen wary of flattering advisors, but Sarah’s once-valued informality turned to an unguarded and offensive outspokenness. After a series of quarrels, Anne dismissed Sarah from court in 1711, and the two women were not to be reconciled before Anne’s death in 1714. Sarah’s will reveals the extent of her wealth. In it, she disposes of no fewer than 27 estates spread across several counties. These included Blenheim Palace, Marlborough

House on the Mall, Wimbledon House (then a country residence), Holywell in St Albans, Cranbourne Lodge in Windsor Great Park and Bedford House in Bloomsbury. Touchingly, Sarah stipulates that she is to be interred at Blenheim on the condition that her husband’s body be committed with her. The Duke had died in 1722, and lay in repose in the crypt of the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey. As a consequence of the Duchess’s wishes, his remains were exhumed and removed to Blenheim in time for his wife’s funeral in November 1744. Public curiosity over the Duchess’s earthly chattels was such that a printed version of her will was published in several editions in both London and Dublin. Our notary’s copy runs to 59 pages of elegant copperplate handwriting bound in buckram. Remarkably, the sheet of heavily bespeckled blotting paper used by the notary to dry his ink has remained undisturbed inside the manuscript for almost 300 years.

Rackets, Rugby and the Rest

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Interest in sport has been constant from the College’s earliest days, a preoccupation reflected in volumes preserved among the Rare Books. The College has been collecting Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack almost from the time of its inception: John Wisden established his annual series in 1864, and the earliest of the College’s 143 volumes dates from 1866. The 19th century was the era when many sports adopted regulated codes; before that, sport was more loosely defined, as we can see from Joseph Strutt’s 1853 book The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England. There, in addition to recognisable games in their earlier forms, such as cricket and football, we find descriptions of ‘Wrestling and other Gymnastic Sports’, ‘Hood-man Blind’, ‘Badger-baiting’, and ‘Sporting with Insects’. But with the systematisation of sport, not least in Britain’s schools, a new era dawned, one documented by the celebrated Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, a 32 volume set of books published between 1885 and 1920, mostly under the editorial direction of Henry Charles FitzRoy Somerset, 8th Duke of Beaufort, a politician and former soldier who had served as a young man with the very old Duke of Wellington.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Beaufort’s vision of what constitutes sport differs from our modern understanding in several points. There are books dedicated to Big-Game Hunting, a topic that reveals the colonialist spirit of the time, as well as volumes on Coursing and Falconry, Boating and Racing and Steeple-Chasing. But Beaufort was also open to new developments, such as the invention of the bicycle, and the volume on Cycling, written by William Coutts Keppel, Earl of Albemarle in 1887, includes images of men and women exploring the scope of the new vehicle. Other games enjoyed by both sexes included Skating and Figure-Skating, Tennis and Billiards, and Major William Broadfoot’s volume on the latter includes lithographic plates that evoke the atmosphere of country house weekends from a lost age. Equally memorable are the plates in John Moyer Heathcote’s book on skating, where the advised item of safety equipment appears to be the top hat. Another new sport is described in 1902’s Motors and

Motor-Driving, in which the author, Alfred Harmsworth, recommends introducing new cars to your horses. But if this all seems genteel, see the daredevil courage of the tobogganist inventing the discipline of the skeleton on the Buol Run at Davos. The Badminton volume on Cricket from 1888 was written by Allan Gibson Steele, an England international, and provides a history of the sport with chapters devoted to umpiring, wicketkeeping, fielding and the mysteries of bowling and batting. For the game of rugby, alas, we must search in the volume dedicated to Football by Montague Shearman who includes the oval-ball game in a section squeezed between chapters on Association Football and Australian Rules. Published in 1899, Shearman’s book relies mainly on photographic illustrations, but due to the long exposures of Victorian cameras, moving ball scenes have been achieved by trickery in the dark room. Foul play!

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Songbooks Old volumes of songs and music often show more wear and tear than other genres of book because, as tools for musicians, they are opened to their fullest extremity, flattened and perched on music stands – all at great peril to their spines and stitching. Fortunately, some copies come through these ordeals, as in the case of two books of great interest in the College’s keeping.

The first is a very rare Elizabethan Psalm book dating from 1579 and entitled The Psalmes of David in English meter. Its musical settings were composed by ‘Guilielmo Daman’ (c.1540-1591). William Daman’s origins are obscure, with some authorities linking him with Liège in Wallonia, and others with Lucca in Italy. What is certain is that he was a member of Queen Elizabeth I’s Recorder Consort, an ensemble background that equipped him to provide parts for the Psalms in ‘Tenor’, ‘Bassus’, ‘Treble’, and ‘Contratonor’. The title page shows King David in his two roles as shepherd-poet and king, presiding over a female orchestra of viol, trumpet, flute, tambourine, clavier, lute, recorder and triangle. The positioning of the Tudor coat of arms between the two images of David allows readers to draw flattering comparisons between the exemplary Old Testament king and Queen

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Elizabeth. Daman’s Psalm texts derive from the metrical translations of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, two reformers from the time of Henry VIII. Designed to be memorable, the translations were criticised by later commentators for their heavy metre: the Royalist Thomas Fuller described Sternhold and Hopkins as ‘men whose piety was better than their poetry; and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon’. Fuller was correct in detecting a Genevan tone to their Psalms: Daman’s book was published by the Calvinist John Day and sponsored by John Bull, a puritan goldsmith. We turn from sacred music to secular song with a three-volume set of popular arias and airs from the

mid-18th century, Clio and Euterpe, or British Harmony: An Admired and Rare Collection of the Most Celebrated English and Scotch Songs. Originally published in 1739 as Calliope, or English Harmony, the book reached its fullest form in 1762, the date of the College’s set, when it offered no fewer than 600 songs. Compiled by the publisher Henry Roberts, who engraved the book’s charming headpieces, Clio and Euterpe was a compendium of songs from the shows, whether pieces from light opera, patriotic crowd-pleasers, songs from Shakespeare or comic ditties by popular singers of the day. The resulting anthology ranges from Purcell and Handel to songs from pantomimes and risqué farces, something reflected in the song titles: ‘Rule Britannia!’, ‘Come,

Britannia, Shake thy Lance’, ‘Kindness Preferred to Beauty’, ‘Colin and Dolly’, ‘A Favourite Air in The Tempest’, ‘The Lass of the Mill’, ‘Beer-Drinking Briton’, ‘By a Prattling Stream’, ‘Ye Tell Me I’m Handsome’, etc. The book was a joint publishing venture by Roberts, who owned a bookshop across the road from the Opera House on Haymarket (now Her Majesty’s Theatre), and John Welcker, proprietor of a musical instrument shop in Soho. Welcker’s trade card, preserved in The British Museum, tells us that he stocked ‘a catalogue of vocal and instrumental music printed and sold wholesale’. Many of the engraved headpieces in Marlborough’s set of Clio and Euterpe have been tinted with watercolour.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Tyndale’s New Testament Marlborough’s status as a Church of England school accounts in part for the remarkable range of early Bibles preserved in the Rare Books collection. One of the most interesting and historically significant is a duodecimo edition of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English, the publication of which has been described as ‘arguably the most important single event in the history of the English Reformation’. The longer legacy of Tyndale’s translation extends beyond its part in that great cultural and intellectual upheaval, because it is now generally recognised as a landmark text in the development of English as a literary language. It is often said that the King James’s translation of the Bible from 1611, also known as the Authorised Version, and the works of Shakespeare stand as the cornerstones of modern literary English. But analysis has shown that James I’s committee of divines who worked upon the 1611 Authorised Version followed 85% of Tyndale’s words, subsuming whole passages from the older translation unacknowledged. Such unofficial recognition of his labours would have struck Tyndale

as ironic; for fear of persecution, he had been forced to print his Bibles in great secrecy in Cologne and Worms, and to smuggle the unbound sheets into English ports inside bales of wool – sacred contraband deemed heretical by Henry VIII.

Protestant, who licensed the royal printer Richard Jugge to publish several further editions of a book his father had sought to suppress.

As will be remembered, Tyndale lost his life in 1536 near Brussels, a victim of the sectarian fires that flickered through Reformation Europe. It was not only his body that was consumed by flames: almost every copy of his 1526 first edition of the New Testament met a fiery end in pyres built along Paternoster Row outside St Paul’s Cathedral. So thorough was the book-burning that only three copies of the first edition survived – one now in the library of the new St Paul’s Cathedral, one in the British Library and one in the Prince’s Library in Stuttgart. The College copy comes from the third edition of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed in 1550. The orders to reprint it came from Henry’s son, Edward VI, a devout

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Unpublished Poems University students in former centuries were encouraged to keep commonplace books, manuscript volumes in which to record worthy sayings, memorable points from sermons or striking ideas from their private reading. But it was not unusual for students to compile compendia of a less edifying character, for example, books of humorous poems.

The College possesses a collection of miscellaneous manuscript poems dating from the mid-1710s. Some poems allude to the reign of Queen Anne, and others express contempt for Jacobitism, probably in response to the Rising of 1715. The manuscript is composed by several hands, some scrupulously neat, others exuberantly wild. Although the manuscript bears no ownership inscription, it clearly belonged to a student at Oxford. Some of the contents reflect serious studies, such as estimable translations from classical authors. But other entries are less high-minded, such as copies of poetical squibs by the scurrilous satirist Tom Brown (1662–1704), an Oxford wit and later Grub Street hack. A few of the poems appear to be original, if conventional, literary exercises in the taste of the day, dealing with the hopes and disappointments of courtship, or offering gallantries to women, real or imagined. Students of those times seemed to share with their modern counterparts fondness for the tavern, and one poem, written in English, drops into discreet Latin when describing disreputable episodes during an 18th-century pub crawl. Other poems are old favourites that survived far into the 19th century.

One such is the facetious ‘On the Pye-House Memory of Nell Batchelor a woman yt kept a pastry Shop in Oxford’: Beneath in the Dust The old mouldy Crust Of Nell Batchelor lately was shoven Who was skill’d in ye Arts Of Pyes, Custards & Tarts And knew every use of ye Oven. When She had liv’d long enough She made her last puff, A Puff by her husband much prais’d Now here she doth lye And makes a Dirt Pye In hopes yt her Crust will be rais’d. This poem, along with some others in the manuscript, later appeared in 1764 in an anthology with the unlikely name of The Oxford Sausage, or Select Poetical Pieces written by the Most Celebrated Wits of the University of Oxford.

Vellum Undoubtedly one of the most visually rich and poignant books at Marlborough is a hand-calligraphed poem dating from 1907 executed in Indian ink and vermilion paint on 24 leaves of vellum, or parchment.

It is a rendering of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of a famous Persian poem which had first appeared in 1859, and which appealed strongly to Victorian Orientalist taste. What makes the book special to Marlburians is its provenance: it was presented to the College as a memorial to Allen Wedgwood, a boy enrolled in Cotton between 1906 and 1911 and who subsequently enlisted in the Northumberland Fusiliers in 1914. He went missing in action at Gallipoli on 19th August 1915 when he was 22 years old, and his body was never recovered. The gift was made to the College by his mother, Mary Louisa Wedgwood, in May 1930. In a letter to the Master, George Turner, she explains how she had shown the volume to some London booksellers, who advised her that she ‘over-valued it’. ‘No doubt I do,’ she adds. The manuscript was Mrs Wedgwood’s Christmas present to Allen in 1907. To carry out the work, she engaged the services of Edward Johnston (1872–1944),

‘the father of modern calligraphy’ and a man still revered as inspiring ‘the greatest revolution in letterdesign since the Renaissance’. Perhaps he is best remembered for developing the red circle and blue band motif for London Transport, as well as the iconic Sans Serif Johnston font used in all TfL branding. He received the CBE in 1939 for his contribution to British design, and among his many students were Graily Hewitt and Eric Gill. It is likely that Mrs Wedgwood approached Johnston in the light of the publication of his Writing and Illuminating and Lettering, the classic text on 20th-century calligraphy and font design, which had appeared in 1906. He carried out his work for her in 11 days (‘about 3 too many’, as he tells us in a self-deprecating postscript), using a turkey quill. Mary Wedgwood (née Bell, 1854– 1953) instilled in Allen a passion for botany, an interest perhaps strengthened by his father’s familial ties to the Darwins. In the years before the War, mother and son spent happy times gathering botanical

specimens and pressing them in so-called drying volumes. After Allen’s loss, Mrs Wedgwood embarked upon a remarkable personal mission: to collect a sample of every species, variety and hybrid listed in the London Catalogue of British Plants (1853) as a memorial to her son. This vast undertaking led her all over the British Isles in her chauffeur-driven limousine on seasonal expeditions. She completed the task in 1934, and two years later presented to the College the entire Wedgwood Herbarium housed in a wooden cabinet and accompanied with a catalogue. In 1932 a species of rose, the Rubus Wedgwoodiae, was named after her in recognition of her services to botany. Mrs Wedgwood moved to Marlborough to escape the Blitz, and died here aged 99. She is remembered not just as a great benefactress to the College, but as a woman of science, a council member of the Botanical Society of the British Isles and an imperious figure on the London intellectual scene.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

War Poets Several former pupils of the College who enlisted as soldiers during the First World War became nationally acclaimed for their poetical responses to the conflict and the moral questions it raised.

The best known of them remains Siegfried Sassoon (1887–1967), the son of a Jewish-Iraqi father and Anglo-Catholic mother, and a pupil in Cotton House between 1902 and 1905. He joined the Welch Fusiliers in 1915 and earned from his comrades the sobriquet ‘Mad Jack’ on account of his reckless courage. He later became an outspoken critic of the war and its jingoism, and poetry provided an outlet for his disillusion. He submitted poems singly to periodicals and magazines before publishing the little-noticed collections Does it Matter? and The Old Huntsman (both 1917), and Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918). His work only reached a wider audience in the late 1920s, but by then Sassoon had turned to other subjects, particularly country pursuits. In the early 1930s, he settled at Heytesbury House in south Wiltshire. We have at the College several signed works by Sassoon, including a first edition of his 1928 novel, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Better known during the War was the poetry

of Charles Hamilton Sorley, who was killed aged only 20 in 1915. The son of a professor at the University of Aberdeen, Sorley came to Marlborough in 1908 as a boarder in C1. A convinced Germanophile, he enrolled for a year’s study at the University of Jena prior to taking up a scholarship at Oxford, but the outbreak of war put an end to his academic dreams. Due to the weight of casualties, Sorley was rapidly promoted to Captain in the Suffolk Regiment, and was shot leading his men at the Battle of Loos in October 1915. His poems were published by Cambridge University Press early in 1916 under the title Marlborough and Other Poems, and became an immediate bestseller, reprinted seven times between 1916 and 1919. The least well-known of Marlborough’s war poets is Alec de Candole, a pupil in C3 between 1911 and 1916. A prize-winning student at Marlborough, De Candole intended to study Theology at Cambridge before taking Holy Orders, but with war raging in Europe, he enlisted with the Fourth Wiltshire Regiment in 1916. De Candole was only 21 when he met his death in France during a bombing raid in September

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

1918, a few weeks short of the Armistice. His poems were first brought to public attention through small publications sponsored by his grieving father; later, in 1919, Cambridge University Press published his Poems, a collection of work written at Marlborough and during his time in uniform. The College possesses the personal copy that once belonged to Helen Edith de Candole, Alec’s mother. In 2020, a Shell student working on a research task in the Memorial Library unearthed an unpublished manuscript poem by Alec de Candole tucked between its leaves. Written on tissue-thin paper, the poem, seemingly transcribed in his mother’s hand and dated 1916, now resides in the Rare Books collection alongside Alec’s books.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Ex Libris Books are often cherished possessions, and down through time owners have marked them with their signature or by a specially commissioned label called an ex libris. Ex libris (the same term applies in the plural) are small, printed labels pasted into the inside front boards of books; they are also known as bookplates. Although occasionally found in the 15th century, such plates only came into wider usage in the late 1600s. The College has two such early ex libris. The first bears the name of Robert Hodges, a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, between 1696 and 1704. His ex libris is in the ‘Old Armorial’ style, a family coat of arms rendered with Baroque exuberance. The other is more inventive, showing a florid monogram inscribed on a scroll hanging from a tabernacle made of books. Dated 1699, it belonged to William Hewer, Samuel Pepys’s close friend and amanuensis on the Navy Board.

During the 18th century, designs for bookplates proliferated. A mid-century ex libris belonging to John Peyto Verney, 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke, shows French influence; but the 17th Baron, Robert John, preferred the style known as ‘Plain Armorial’. Dating from the 1770s is an example of a ‘spade shield with festoon and beaded teatray’, the ex libris of Richard Bendy, a sea captain. From the 1780s comes the bookplate of Sir Alexander Cumming-Gordon of Altyr, whose great house would later provide the premises for Gordonstoun School. The style of the ex libris belonging to Frances Mary Richardson Currer dates from the 1820s and takes the unusual form of a counter-curved lozenge. Frances was renowned as the

greatest female bibliophile of her time with a library of 20,000 books. She was, moreover, a noted philanthropist who funded many charitable concerns, including the school for daughters of clergy in Lancashire attended by the Brontës. She also gifted much-needed money to the girls’ father Patrick after the death of his wife. It was for these reasons that Charlotte published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the nom de plume ‘Currer Bell’. Another plate with literary connections belonged to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, celebrated author of The School for Scandal and The Rivals. The College has no fewer than 70 examples, one pasted into each volume of his splendid Oeuvres Complètes of Voltaire. Another Irishman, William Horatio Crawford, presented his arms in a bevelled shield. Crawford, a brewer from Cork, collected art and books, and endowed an art college bearing his name. His finer books were auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 1891, and one lot was the College’s copy of the Aldine edition of Pliny’s letters from 1508, the oldest printed book in the collection.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

With the onset of the Gothic Revival, ex libris took on a medieval appearance, such as the ‘Seal Armorial’ of Frederick Warburton Dunston. There followed the ‘Golden Age’ of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, represented by the bookplates of Robert Heriot Glen and Reginald Huth. Other bookplates went down the pictorial route, with images like the melancholy fool shown in the ex libris of Frederick Locker. Locker, who married the daughter of Lord Elgin, acquirer of the Parthenon Marbles, was a poet, wit and raconteur, and an intimate of Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Kate Greenaway and other literary figures; he was, moreover, renowned for his book collection. Also happiest amongst books was ‘A. K.’, recently discovered to be the cipher of Arthur Kay, a Glaswegian businessman and friend of James McNeill Whistler. His Arts and Crafts-influenced bookplate was engraved by his wife, Katherine Cameron, one of the ‘Glasgow Girls’ group, and a contributor of illustrations to the famous fin de siècle periodical, The Yellow Book. It shows three bees glossed with a maxim from the epicurean philosopher Lucretius: ‘As bees sip at every flower in the meadow, so too will I feed on every one of your golden sayings’. A. K.’s ex libris is laid carefully over that of an earlier owner, James Smith of Jordanhill, a wealthy 18th-century Glasgow merchant and geologist. His bookplate is the only example in the collection of a so-called ‘Chippendale’ ex libris, an asymmetrical Rococo design inspired by the work of Thomas Chippendale, the cabinetmaker.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Yeats

One of four Irish writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an acclaimed author of poetry, prose and drama in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.

His work was deeply admired by Marlborough’s greatest Irish poet, Louis MacNeice, who freely acknowledged his influence. Indeed, MacNeice, who met Yeats in Dublin in 1934, wrote the most important early survey of his compatriot’s work, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, which was published in 1939. MacNeice was not the only Marlburian poet personally acquainted with Yeats: the photograph reproduced here shows Yeats in the company of Siegfried Sassoon in the Red Room of Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, in September 1920. A curio among the College Rare Books is a copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems published by Macmillan in a handsome two-volume set bound in green buckram and signed by the poet in a small, neat hand. What is odd is that the book was published in 1949, ten years after Yeats’s death. The explanation for this apparent posthumous signing is that

Macmillan had asked Yeats to sign 375 so-called limitation sheets in 1938 in preparation for a variorum edition of his poems, but the project stalled, first on account of Yeats’s death in January 1939, and then because of the outbreak of the Second World War. It was only at the end of the following decade, when economic conditions were more conducive for the sale of limited edition books, that the sheets were brought out of storage and work on the project resumed. The College also holds some attractive examples of the graphic productions of Yeats’s younger brother, Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), also a playwright and poet, but chiefly remembered as one of Ireland’s most distinguished artists. Reproduced here are images from his Broadside Ballads (1909) and Life in the West of Ireland (1912), both typical of Jack B. Yeats’s economical execution and characterful style.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

Zoophytes The term zoophyte has passed out of scientific usage but was once a catch-all label applied to sea creatures of unrelated taxa, such as corals, sea anemones, sea squirts and sponges.

Rare Books at Marlborough: An A to Z

These creatures had been described by the 6th-century scholar Isidore of Seville as animals that behaved like plants, the term ‘zoophyte’ (φυτόζωω) signifying ‘animal-plants’ in Greek. Zoophytes had been accepted as a separate taxonomic class by the great Carl Linnaeus, but the term was dismissed in the early 19th century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an expert on invertebrates, who highlighted dissimilarities between many supposed members of the class. Despite this, the word zoophyte continued to be used for much of the 19th century as a convenient term to describe corals and other colourful sea creatures. The images presented here are from Zoophytes, a book by James Dwight Dana published in Philadelphia in 1849, and considered to be a pioneering work of American scientific description. It was issued as Volume 7 of a proposed 28 volumes of findings published by the United States Exploring Expedition, although only 19 were completed.

The expeditionary work was carried out between 1838 and 1842 and was the first major scientific research project to be undertaken by the still young United States. It was led by the naval officer Charles Wilkes at the head of a flotilla of six ships equipped to conduct scientific surveys of the Pacific Ocean. A team of on-board scientists stood ready to make observations of geology, vulcanology, oceanography, zoology and even ethnography of the island communities they encountered. One of the expeditionary scientists

was Dana (1813–95), later to be Professor of Natural History and Geology at Yale. Although his chief work lay with geology, his documentation of sea animals in his zoophyte volume was a model of analytical description. His scientific precision was matched by the expedition’s official artist, Joseph Drayton (1795–1856), who was responsible for the delicately observed studies of sea creatures in the volume’s 61 hand-coloured, full-page engravings.

Acknowledgements Texts: Dr Simon McKeown, Keeper of Rare Books, and Head of History of Art Text for ‘Hebrew’: Isobel Benster (U6 DA) Text for ‘Newton’: Willow Smiley (U6 MO) Photography: Ian Leonard Additional photography: Simon McKeown Design: MAXX, Newbury Project Manager: Jackie Jordan With thanks to: The Master, Louise Moelwyn-Hughes; the Head Librarian, James Burton; the Archivist, Gráinne Lenehan; and former Librarian, Trisha Rae. Marlborough College is pleased to acknowledge the kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery to reproduce images of Sarah Churchill, Charles Darwin, the Rev. J. D. Glennie, Sir Isaac Newton, William Tyndale, Siegfried Sassoon, and W. B. Yeats. This publication remembers with gratitude those many individuals who have entrusted their remarkable books to the care of Marlborough, and through such gifts supported and enriched the College’s academic ambition and provision.

Marlborough College Bath Road, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1PA www.marlboroughcollege.org

Rare Books at Marlborough - An A to Z

Articles inside

Z Zoophytes

Y Yeats

X Ex Libris

W War Poets

T Tyndale’s New Testament

S Songbooks

U Unpublished Poems

V Vellum

R Rackets, Rugby, and the Rest

Q The Queen’s Favourite

P Perspectives on the Past

L Languages, Ancient and Modern

O Ornamental Capitals

K King or Parliament?

M Maps

J The Marlborough Journal

N Newton’s Principia

I Illuminated Book of Hours

G Glennie

D Darwin

H Hebrew

A Alchemy

C Censorship and Controversy

E Embroidery

B Gould’s Book of Birds

F Fine Printing