IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND one man travelled the length and breadth of the country, from monastery to monastery, on a mission commissioned by King Henry VIII. Travelling alone and on horseback, John Leland cut a striking solitary shape against the backdrop of the turbulent Tudor period, and his journey was to give us the last possible glimpse of the contents of the monastic libraries before they were destroyed in the name of the Reformation.
Leland had been born into a changing world. Education and knowledge had been controlled by the Catholic (a term that also means ‘universal’) Church for over a millennium. A network of monasteries and religious orders maintained the libraries and the schools. England was still recovering from a long and bloody civil war, a new royal family – the Tudors – were on the throne and there was growing restlessness across Europe over the Church’s wealth and power. A new intellectual movement, humanism, which encouraged the learning of languages and the study of classical authors, had created an intellectual ferment that offered new ways of looking at the world. A questioning of assumptions by interrogating the sources of ideas was taking hold in the elites of Europe. The key English humanists (Thomas More, adviser to the king and author of Utopia, and John Colet, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral) wanted to teach a new generation of scholars who would spread this message. Although Leland had been orphaned as a child, his adoptive father enrolled him as one of the first pupils at John Colet’s refounded school, where he was taught Latin and Greek. These schools were very different to those that had come before, as they encouraged their pupils to read the classics as well as the scriptures and Catholic writers.
After studying at Cambridge, Leland became tutor to the son of Thomas Howard, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, and then went on to Oxford where he was perhaps associated with All Souls College. Although not rich or of noble blood, Leland was as clever and ambitious as his patron Cardinal Wolsey, and with his encouragement he then skipped across the Channel to Paris, to move in the circles of some of the greatest intellectuals of the time, including the learned Guillaume Budé, the royal librarian, and the brilliant François du Bois, professor of rhetoric. Encouraged by these men, he worked on his poetry and immersed himself in the humanist method of scholarship, seeking out and studying sources in manuscript.1
When Leland came back from France in 1529 Wolsey was no longer in favour, and like his new patron Thomas Cromwell he had to find a way to survive in the dangerous climate of Henry VIII’s court, a place of intrigue, back-stabbing, condemnation and execution.
At this time Henry VIII was building up arguments against the Catholic Church. At first these were focussed on finding a way to divorce his queen, Catherine of Aragon, and marry the beautiful young courtier Anne Boleyn. His best advisers used theological arguments to back up his case, but what began with a divorce appeal then escalated into a more fundamental battle over the authority of the Pope in England. The debates were increasingly overshadowed by an audacious sense of opportunism. If he could pull it off, Henry could seize control not only of religious authority in his realm but also the massive wealth that the Catholic Church had built up over the preceding centuries. This was England’s version of the phenomenon we now call the Reformation, which had begun in Germany in 1517, with a powerful reforming movement led by Martin Luther, and which spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century. Leland and Cromwell were both determined to be a central part of this.
Henry was only the second ruler of the Tudor dynasty, and without a male heir his grip on the throne was fragile. Manipulating the past became a vital weapon in these battles. Manuscript histories and chronicles found in the libraries of the monastic houses became highly prized evidence of ancient English independence from papal authority, especially before the Norman Conquest. Even the stories of mythical British figures like King Arthur were dragged into the debates. The contents of these libraries could therefore hold the key to unlocking Henry’s future. Leland jumped at the chance to use his scholarly talents to support his position in the court. He became a particular expert on King Arthur and wrote two works proving his historical veracity. He became known as ‘antiquarius’, which was not an official position but was a suitable term for someone who was deeply interested in the past.
The king’s plans gradually came to fruition. Anne Boleyn was given a triumphal entry into London on 31 May 1533, and was crowned queen in Westminster Abbey the following day. For this glittering occasion, brilliantly stage-managed by Thomas Cromwell, Leland even penned official Latin celebratory verses that referred eight times to the king’s hopes for Anne’s fertility. It wasn’t, however, for his poetry that Henry wanted Leland to work for him. Following the coronation he was given, so Leland later recalled, ‘a most gracious commission … to peruse and diligently search all the libraries of monasteries and colleges’ in the country.2 Through this commission, Leland took an active role in the king’s ‘great matter’, the arguments in support of the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the legitimacy of his new wife, Anne Boleyn. From these debates would come the formal separation of England from papal authority and the assertion of the king and not the Pope as the supreme authority of the Church in England.
Over the course of his extraordinary journey, Leland pored over the books he found on the shelves of more than a hundred and forty libraries. He was a fervent researcher, documenting the books he examined and writing up notes of what he had encountered at the end of every trip. After his death, his friends tried to put these notes in order. This was not easy. In 1577, the historian John Harrison reported that they were ‘motheaten, mouldy, and rotten’, and that his books were ‘utterly mangled, defaced with wet, and weather, and finally imperfect through want of sundry volumes’. His frustration at trying to make sense of such a jumble rings off the page: ‘his annotations are such and so confounded, as no man can (in a manner) pick out any sense from them.’3
The notes were neatly bound up when they came (very conveniently for me) into the Bodleian in the eighteenth century, but were originally just a mass of papers covered in Leland’s handwriting, with layers of crossing out and corrections, some showing signs of having been folded up, some stained and water damaged, others torn and worn. Although Leland only listed the books that he found particularly interesting, they reveal a mass of detail of what was destroyed, which helps us to identify the original home of many books that have survived, sometimes as a direct result of Leland’s activities. His notes also give a good deal more personal insight into the libraries he travelled to, often on long journeys, planned out in advance with orderly lists and sometimes even with rough maps to help find his route.
We take it for granted that we would use a map to navigate around the countryside, but Leland’s journey took place thirty years before Christopher Saxton produced the first printed maps of England. The notes show signs of his detailed preparations, lists of libraries to consult, and even small sketches of localities, to help organise his time efficiently. There is a map of the Humber estuary, showing a cluster of monasteries in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire that he visited in 1534.4
What Leland was attempting to chart was the rich store of knowledge spread across almost 600 libraries of medieval Britain, from which there are more than 8,600 surviving volumes. The medieval collections ranged from the handful of service books owned by the smaller parish libraries, to the large, highly organised collections of books in the libraries of the religious orders. One of the most renowned libraries of medieval England was that of the Benedictine Abbey of St Augustine at Canterbury, which held almost 1,900 volumes when the last of the medieval catalogues of its contents was compiled (between 1375 and 1420, with additions between 1474 and 1497). Only 295 of these books are known to survive today.5 The library at St Augustine’s was large by medieval standards and its catalogue included books that had been written at, or given to, the abbey from as far back as the late tenth century. Most of the books were works on religion, either biblical texts, or commentaries on the Bible by later theologians (for example, the Venerable Bede) or the works of the Church Fathers. The library allowed its monastic community to read across the range of human knowledge: from history (both ancient and modern historians) to science (including astronomy, mathematics, geometry) and medicine, and there was a major section on the works of that great polymath of the ancient world, Aristotle. The catalogue had smaller sections on poetry, books on France, grammar, on canon law, logic, the lives of saints, and on letters.
Glastonbury, in the west of England, as one of the greatest monastic houses in the country, was for Leland an eagerly anticipated destination. Not only was the abbey the site of the tomb of King Arthur (and therefore of great interest to Henry’s political argument), but it also had one of the country’s most famous libraries. Leland vividly described his first visit: ‘I had hardly crossed the threshold, when the mere sight of the most ancient books left me awestruck, stupefied in fact, and because of this I stopped in my tracks a little while. Then, having saluted the genius loci, I examined all the bookcases for some days with the greatest curiosity.’6 Leland’s notes refer to just forty-four books, which were mostly consistent with the key targets of his antiquarian searches. The great chroniclers of English history were consulted: William of Malmesbury, Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Dominican Nicholas Trevet. But he also looked closely at many ancient manuscripts: copies of the works of Alcuin, the Venerable Bede and Aelfric, as well as works by the Church Fathers such as St Augustine or Gregory of Nazianzus. They had been preserved at Glastonbury for centuries. Some of these books were of central concern to Henry’s political campaign, but others were purely of interest to Leland’s own antiquarian projects, especially his great work De uiris illustribus (On Famous Men), a compilation of accounts of all the main writers of Britain. His entry for Geoffrey of Monmouth confirms that he consulted the confirmatory charters from Henry II, as well as inscriptions in stone, but it was manuscripts like Geoffrey’s Life of Merlin which he read most ‘avidly’ in the library at Glastonbury.7
Glastonbury was, in Leland’s words, ‘the most ancient and at the same time the most famous Abbey in our whole island’. Leland recounted later how, ‘wearied by the long labours of research I was refreshing my spirits thanks to the kindness of Richard Whiting [the abbot] … a most upright man and my particular friend’.8 Leland was given astonishing access to the libraries and monasteries he visited, and one can picture some of his hosts enjoying conversations about Britain’s past with their learned visitor. We get a glimpse of this at Glastonbury through one later entry in De uiris illustribus, where he describes seeing a manuscript of a work by John of Cornwall, as Whiting was guiding him through the shelves: ‘the book was actually in my hands and my first taste of it had pleased me greatly’, when the abbot ‘called my attention elsewhere’, and Leland ‘forgot to seek it out again’.9
Some of the books that Leland saw there have survived and the Bodleian holds some of the greatest. The most famous of the Glastonbury books is known as St Dunstan’s Classbook, a composite volume, with parts dating from the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, which were brought into England from the Celtic cultures of Wales and Brittany.10 The manuscript is made up of four distinct elements. Each part looks and feels very different, from the style of the script to the parchment it is written upon: some parts feel like suede – soft, thick and almost velvety to the touch – whilst others are much thinner and crackly, revealing different traditions of making parchment in the early Middle Ages.
This book provides a rare glimpse into a period of British history for which comparatively few signs of intellectual life survive. The first and oldest part is a book of grammatical writings of an ancient writer called Eutyches (a text known as De verbo), with commentaries in Latin and Breton of the ninth and tenth centuries, showing its connection to European ideas. The second part, written in the second half of the eleventh century, is an Old English homily on the finding of the true cross, and the third and fourth parts written in Wales in the ninth century include an anthology of useful knowledge and a famous Roman poem on the art of seduction, the Ars amatoria of Ovid, with Welsh glosses (annotations that help explain the text). We cannot be certain when these individual sections were gathered together, but there is a drawing that shows St Dunstan, successively Bishop of Worcester and London and finally Archbishop of Canterbury from 959 to 988, on the opening leaf – he kneels at the feet of Christ in the drawing, begging for his protection, which, according to a later inscription, was the work of the saint himself.11 St Dunstan was one of the most influential figures in the early English Church, leading it during a period known for the influence of European monastic ideas in England, especially the reform of the Benedictine movement.
Thanks to the survival of the medieval catalogues from Glastonbury we know that this volume was present in the abbey’s library in 1248, and we also know that it was in the custody of one of the monks, Brother Langley, in the fifteenth century. It was also one of the forty books that Leland swooned over when he visited in the 1530s, and he recorded it in his notebook as ‘The Grammar of Eutyches, formerly of Saint Dunstan’.
But the days of the Classbook’s residence and that of its neighbours on the shelves of the library were numbered. In 1534 the Act of Supremacy made Henry VIII the head of the Church in England, and marked the formal separation of the authority of the Pope from the religious life of England and Wales. From this point onwards the monasteries began to be dissolved formally, most significantly after 1536 with the passing of the Act for the Court of Augmentations (which created the machinery for handling former monastic properties) and the Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries. After a short respite, when some of the larger houses assumed they would escape, Thomas Cromwell’s scheme moved into overdrive, and in 1539 the Act for the Dissolution of the Greater Monasteries was passed, allowing the final great institutions to be targeted for visitation, and either voluntarily surrendered or suppressed. One of these ‘Greater Monasteries’ was Glastonbury, which was to become the site of one of the last and most violent acts of the English Reformation.
Over the summer of 1539 the surviving financial records of the abbey record the natural rhythm of this great community continuing in the way it had for centuries: food was bought for the refectory, the grounds were maintained and watercourses cleared, and the seventy-year-old abbot continued to preside over the institution.12 Perhaps Whiting thought his abbey might be spared, due to his friendship with Leland and as he had not stood in the way of the Reformation in Parliament (where he sat in the House of Lords), and had subscribed, like many of his fellow abbots, to the oath accepting the Royal Supremacy. But Glastonbury was a famously rich abbey and the king’s appetite for increasing his wealth was prodigious. Cromwell sent commissioners to the abbey in September 1539 circulating accusations that Whiting knew not ‘God, neither his prince, neither any part of a Christian man his religion’. He was examined at his house at Sharpham Park on 19 September where the commissioners declared that evidence was found of his ‘cankered and traitorous heart’. But when Whiting would not surrender the abbey voluntarily, the visitors of the commission searched the abbey and ‘found’ incriminating documents condemning the royal divorce as well as money that had been hidden. This was all the commissioners needed. Whiting was tried at the neighbouring town of Wells on 14 November 1539, the main charge levied against him being that of the ‘robbing of Glastonbury church’. The following day he was dragged through the streets before being taken up to the Tor, where ‘he asked Gods mercy and the king for his great offenses’, and hanged. His body was butchered, one quarter of it taken and displayed for all to see at Wells, another to Bath, the rest at Ilchester and Bridgwater. His head was placed on the abbey gate at Glastonbury itself.
This bloody process brought about the destruction of the abbey. Within a few days it had been plundered, and every nook and cranny had been searched.13 All the property of the abbey was put up for sale: silverware such as candlesticks and chalices, vestments and church equipment like organs, but also more mundane items: the cooking equipment, crockery and cutlery, even glasses, beds, tables and paving slabs. Lead from the roof and metal from the bells were especially valuable.
The books went quickly. Leland’s notes are our only account of the library on the eve of the Reformation, but based on the early catalogues and a broader representation of losses at other houses we can estimate that perhaps a thousand manuscripts were destroyed. Only about sixty remain that are identifiably from Glastonbury, in thirty contemporary library collections around the world, but it is highly likely that there are more, as many manuscripts lack the marks that can pin them to a specific medieval library.
What played out on Glastonbury Tor was just a fraction of the violence and destruction that the Reformation would bring to the British Isles and Europe. In Britain alone, tens of thousands of books were burned or broken up and sold as scrap; in the words of the seventeenth-century writer and historian Anthony Wood: ‘books were dog cheap and whole libraries could be had for an inconsiderable nothing.’14
In Europe, too, the Reformation afflicted the libraries of the monastic and other religious communities. In Lower Saxony monastic buildings were torn down, and all moveable properties including books were carried away by fleeing Catholic monks and priests. The Peasants’ War of 1525 saw many libraries and archives targeted by peasant bands because they contained feudal charters and tax rolls that kept the peasants in bondage. Here the Reformation was the trigger for broader social movements to be unleashed, the documented past being one of the targets. The sixteenth-century German historian Johann Letzner researched in the town of Walkenried and lamented the loss of the library when it was burned down in the 1520s. Precious volumes from the monastery library had been used to provide stepping stones for muddy paths. Cyriakus Spangenberg described manuscripts being stuffed down a monastery well in 1525. In Calenburg, Letzner noted that citizens burned books owing to their association with the old religion.15
John Bale, Leland’s successor, in his published account of Leland’s The laboryouse journey, went into more detail:
To destroy all without consideration, is and will be unto England for ever, a most horrible infamy. A great number of them which purchased those superstitious mansions, reserved of those library books, some to rub their boots. Some they sold to the grocers and soap sellers, and some they sent to overseas to the bookbinders, not in small number, but at times whole ships full, to the wondering of the foreign nations … What may bring our realm to more shame and rebuke, than to have it known abroad, that we are despisers of learning?16
Evidence of the losses through deliberate destruction can be found from fragments of the books that have survived in bookbindings from the period. Before the mechanisation of book production in the middle of the nineteenth century, books were bound by hand and those hand-made bindings were often strengthened by waste paper or parchment in the part of the book known as the ‘pastedown’. This was often reused material from discarded books.
The practice of reusing old books in unusual ways had gone on in the Middle Ages, with some (typically service books – books needed by priests to perform religious services) broken up and either sold or reused when they became outdated or too worn for daily use. Parchment leaves were reused to strengthen more than books. An Icelandic ‘manuscript’ now in the University of Copenhagen was found being used as a stiffener for a bishop’s mitre.
The Reformation created a massive amount of new material for bookbinders who were for the most part concentrated in the major centres of book production. In England this meant London, Oxford and Cambridge, and the practice of using manuscript fragments in bindings has been studied in greatest detail at Oxford.17 Between 1530 and 1600 binders used printed waste material from outdated or overused books, especially those used by university students. As the Reformation moved with unstoppable force we find evidence of the effect of this on book collections in the bindings of later books, many of which remain on the shelves of libraries in Oxford today. Service books were rarely used as pastedowns in Oxford before 1540, but from the 1550s they become frequent. Studies made on surviving bindings from this period show service books, biblical commentaries, lives of the saints, works of canon law, scholastic theology, the Church Fathers and medieval philosophy all turned into binders’ waste.
Thanks to the careful keeping of college accounts in Oxford we even have some detailed examples. At All Souls College, a famous printed edition of the Bible, made in Antwerp 1569–73, was given to the college library in 1581. The Plantin Bible is a large, eight-volume work and the Oxford bookbinder Dominic Pinart, who was paid by the college to repair it, required a lot of parchment to support the structures of its leather-bound covers. Between thirty-six and forty leaves were removed from a large-format thirteenth-century commentary on the book of Leviticus that had been given to the college in the fifteenth century. More of these leaves are also to be found in the binding of a book Pinart constructed for Winchester College. Bizarrely, no other leaves were used, and the disfigured manuscript still remains in the college library today.18
It was not just the libraries of the former monasteries that were destroyed and dispersed, other kinds of books were also singled out for destruction. These were the now illegal service books of the Catholic Church: missals, antiphonaries, breviaries, manuals and other books that had long been used by priests and others for the proper observance of the complex services of divine worship in the unreformed medieval church. These books began to be destroyed in monasteries and churches during the early phases of the Reformation, but following the passing of the 1549 ‘Acte for the abolishinge and putting awaye of diverse bookes and images’, state sponsorship of this destruction intensified.
This is not to say that there was no resistance to this destruction and censorship. An antiphonary (a large service book with musical notation used by choirs) made for the parish church of St Helen’s Ranworth still survives today. It had been carefully adapted to comply with the new religious laws of censorship that would have dominated the lives of the parish priest, the churchwardens and other officials of St Helen’s. According to the 1534 Act, references to the English saint Thomas Becket (whose martyrdom had been the result of his disobedience to the English king) needed to be removed from the calendar: a section of all service books which detailed the dates throughout the years when each saint and other important religious festivals should be commemorated (these were often adapted to include local saints). The Ranworth Antiphonary had ‘erased’ the entry for St Thomas with the very faintest of diagonal lines, leaving it easy to continue to read the words. Once Mary Tudor took power and reimposed Catholicism, the text for St Thomas was rewritten back into the antiphonary.19
While the losses during the Reformation were great, the cases of survival – only five thousand or more books are known to survive today from the libraries of the medieval monasteries of the British Isles – are vivid testaments to how individuals can resist the destruction of knowledge. In some cases, these were the monks, nuns, friars and canons forced to leave their monasteries and who occasionally took the most precious books with them. In York, Richard Barwicke, a former monk at the Benedictine abbey, took books from the abbey library with him, bequeathing them to a secular friend. William Browne, the last prior of Monk Bretton in Yorkshire, took 148 books with him when the Benedictine house was dissolved. At the time of his death in 1557 Philip Hawford, the last abbot of the Benedictine house at Evesham in Worcestershire, owned 75 books, mostly acquired when he was a monk.20 Even the most famous medieval manuscript of them all, the Book of Kells, now the greatest treasure of Trinity College Dublin, was in all likelihood removed from St Mary’s Abbey at Kells by Richard Plunket, the last abbot. They were dangerous souvenirs, particularly in the most intensely Protestant period of the Reformation, when decoration and colour, statuary and religious iconography were stripped out of churches across northern Europe.
St Dunstan’s Classbook survived by coming into the ownership of the Renaissance collector Thomas Allen. Allen gathered books from dissolved monastic libraries throughout the country. One Oxford bookseller seems to have acquired many old manuscripts, as ‘in the reign of King Edward VI there was a cart load of MSS [manuscripts] carried out of Merton College library when religion was reformed … Mr Allen told him that old Garbrand the bookseller … bought them of the College … Mr Allen bought some of them of him.’ Presumably Garbrand Harkes (he is known to have been active from the 1530s to at least the 1570s) may have been able to source manuscripts from further afield for his regular customers.21
Other Glastonbury manuscripts were available at the end of the sixteenth century for collectors to snap up, even in remote parts of the country. By 1639, James Ussher, the scholarly Archbishop of Armagh, had seen the enormous Magna Tabula of Glastonbury Abbey, a vast wooden folding panel, which has parchment sheets of text pasted onto its boards, at Naworth Castle, in a remote corner of Cumbria, very close to Hadrian’s Wall. The Magna Tabula contains legends of the founding of Glastonbury Abbey by Joseph of Arimathea (Jesus’s supposed uncle) and accounts of the saints buried there, and seems to have been made to stand in the abbey church for the monks and other worshippers to see and read. Even closed it measures over two feet by three feet and is one of the Bodleian’s heaviest manuscripts (the library’s book-fetchers groan whenever a scholar asks to see it). It cannot have been easy to transport it from Glastonbury to Naworth, telling evidence that the trade in old books in early modern England was not only determined but remarkably effective.22
One significant figure responsible for preserving some of these books from destruction was the same man who had been upholding the king’s demands, John Leland. In his The laboryouse journey he recounted how he had ‘conserved’ monastic books, and in his poem ‘Antiphilarchia’ he reported fitting out the royal libraries at Greenwich, Hampton Court and Westminster with new shelves to accommodate the collections from the dissolved monasteries, some of which he had found. A number of books, many now regarded as cultural treasures, were identified by Leland for the Royal Library. A ninth-century Gospel now in the British Library, with close associations to the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan, for example, was one of a group of books he acquired from St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury for the king.23 This book’s Anglo-Saxon royal associations are clear, but it is harder to see why the twelfth-century copy of an obscure commentary on Matthew’s Gospels by Claudius of Turin, which had been seen by Leland in Llanthony Priory in 1533–4, had also been identified for acquisition for the king’s library at Westminster.24
Leland may have chosen books during his visits and had them transferred almost immediately, but it is more likely that they remained in situ until the commissioners visited the monasteries. Most of the books that survive in the Royal Collection (which are for the most part now in the British Library in London) leave no specific indication that they passed through Leland’s hands, but he certainly had a major role in preserving them.25 There is a glimpse of how it might have worked in a letter concerning the great library of the Benedictine abbey at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Just five days after the formal Dissolution on 4 November, Leland came back to Bury to ‘see what books be left in the library there, or translated thence into any other corner of the late monastery’.26 We also know that at least 176 volumes were in Leland’s personal library when it was seen by his friend and successor John Bale, and Bale probably only listed part of the collection.
Although Leland was responsible for some of the dispersals he was horrified at the destruction. He wrote to Thomas Cromwell, his sponsor, that ‘now Germans perceiving our … negligence, do send daily young scholars hither, that spoil [the books], and cut them out of libraries, returning home and putting them abroad as monuments of their own country’.27 But the full impact of the Dissolution on the libraries and the realisation of how far he had strayed from his humanist beginnings may only have sunk in in the decade or so following the intense phase of his journeys and after he had fallen from favour at court in his mid-forties. A letter survives ‘dolorously lamenting his sudden fall’.28
In 1547 John Leland went mad. He collapsed into a frenzied state, his small dwelling in the grounds of the former Carthusian priory in London, known as the Charterhouse, turned into a disordered mess, his papers strewn around it. Friends came to help, but it was too late. Leland had fallen deeply ‘into madness or insanity from a sudden striking down of his mind, from an imperfection of the brain, from frenzy from affliction, melancholy or from any other moderate disposition of the spirit’. On 21 February 1547, just a few weeks after the death of Henry VIII, he was officially declared insane, ‘upon that day he became demented and remained so ever since’. An official document in 1551 recorded that he had been ‘mad, insane, lunatic, furious, frantic’.29 He may have been susceptible to mental illness. We have no way of reconstructing the decline of his mental state, but for such a bookish person the understanding that his own work had played a part in so much destruction may have been too much to bear. By April 1552 Leland was dead but the Reformation ploughed on.30
The devastation was not just limited to the destruction of texts of the old religion and the institutions that housed them. The medieval archives of the monastic and other religious houses also suffered. They had been retained mainly for the legal and administrative ease they provided to the new owners of the properties who were keen to collect rents from tenants. The possession of title deeds was vital in organising rent collection or in the subsequent sale of property. In the 1520s, one precursor to the Reformation was the suppression of two Oxford religious houses, the monastery of St Frideswide and the Augustinian abbey at Osney. Both were closed and some of their properties transferred to form Cardinal College, which began altering old buildings and putting up new ones in 1525. The new college had been a ‘present’ from Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey. After Wolsey’s fall from favour in 1529, Cardinal College went through a period of further change and became a Protestant establishment, Christ Church, in 1546, and the old priory church of St Frideswide became the new Cathedral Church of Oxford. The new administrators of Christ Church were determined to maintain an organisational grip on the extensive land holdings that they now possessed. The contents of the muniment rooms of the two abbeys must have been transferred to a central record store at some point in the 1520s, where the title deeds and other documents began to be sorted. This process had resulted in an accumulation of documents in a room off the cloisters at Christ Church where they were consulted by the antiquarian Anthony Wood in the middle of the seventeenth century.
The process of sorting the title deeds and other records of land ownership had resulted in some documents being deliberately neglected: ‘And because the nembers thereof have not the Lands, which those Evidences concern, they take no care of the Evidences, but lay them in a By-place expos’d to weather, and thereby are much perished and become not legible.’31 Wood had a free rein to help himself to materials he found there, and among the documents he preserved were at least two, possibly three, of the original thirteenth-century official copies of Magna Carta, the most important political document of medieval England.
The original agreement that was sealed on the field of Runnymede following the final meeting of King John and the English barons in June 1215 does not survive. What does survive is a series of copies made by official state scribes in the Royal Chancery (the legal administration of the English monarchs), which had the king’s seal attached to them, and carried the same legal power as if they were the original itself. These documents were issued periodically throughout the thirteenth century, sent to the counties, to be read aloud by the king’s representatives, the sheriffs. The sheriffs then looked for safe places to store and preserve the documents. In Oxfordshire, the nearest place of safekeeping was at Osney Abbey. It was from Osney Abbey that engrossments of the 1217 and 1225 Magna Carta were transferred with the rest of the monastic archive to Cardinal College in the 1520s.32
As Magna Carta had nothing to do with land ownership, the engrossments had been transferred to a pile of unwanted documents. Anthony Wood instantly saw the significance of the documents and preserved them; they eventually found their way to the Bodleian Library. Thanks to the preservation of the engrossments of Magna Carta by individuals like Wood, and by institutions like the Bodleian, the significance of its text became a key part of the constitutional arguments in favour of democracy and the rule of law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, still a strong influence on our ideas of good government today.
The European Reformation of the sixteenth century was in many ways one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge. Hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed, and countless others dislocated from the libraries they were housed in, many for centuries. The archives of the monasteries that were in the front line of the Reformation have not been studied to the same extent, but as the account of Magna Carta shows huge numbers of archival documents were destroyed. The monks and nuns who had performed the roles of librarian and archivist were powerless to hold back the force of the Reformation, and so the task of preservation fell to a group of individuals who, in the words of the seventeenth-century writer John Earle, were ‘strangely thrifty of times past’ and who would typically be ‘an admirer of the rust of old monuments’ who was ‘enamoured of wrinkles and loves all things (as the Dutch do cheese) for being mouldy and worm-eaten’. These individuals were antiquaries, and according to Earle a typical antiquary was of the kind who likes to pore over a manuscript ‘everlastingly, especially if the cover be all moth-eaten’.33 They were deeply interested in the past and anxious to collect the remnants of the libraries. Their motivations were often partly driven by their Catholicism (as in the case of Lord William Howard) but sometimes by their Protestantism (Leland after all was motivated to support Henry’s arguments for the divorce and for the split from Rome). What united them was a passion for the past, and for the recovery of ideas and knowledge. They formed networks, which meant they could copy each other’s books, and even formed a society in 1607; initially short-lived it was refounded a century later, and still exists today as the Society of Antiquaries. These individuals helped preserve a substantial portion of the knowledge of the medieval period. Their work was to trigger the creation of many of the most important modern libraries, and furthered the professions of librarian and archivist.