AS THE LIBRARIES of monasteries either closed or lacked the supporting framework of funds to run them, gaps appeared in the preservation of knowledge. Individuals played an important part in bridging them. One of the most important people to try to fill these gaps was Sir Thomas Bodley. The greatest English intellectual of the period, Francis Bacon, described Bodley’s contribution – the creation of the library that still bears his name – as ‘an ark to save learning from the deluge’.1 The deluge that Bacon was referring to was, of course, the Reformation. By the time the religious upheavals had swept through Oxford its university library had grown in size and quality to be a major institutional collection, one of the largest outside the monasteries.
The first sense of a university library in Oxford had emerged four centuries earlier with the concept of loan chests: where money could be borrowed in return for books – valuable objects – being deposited. The religious orders were important in developing the culture of libraries in the city and the emergent university. The city’s earliest organised libraries were founded in the twelfth century by the Augustinian Order, which established the Abbey of Osney and the Priory of St Frideswide, and in the thirteenth by the Cistercians, who established the Abbey of Rewley. These houses all had libraries, although they were not part of the university. The mendicant orders (religious men and women who travelled and lived in cities, focussing on studying and preaching) were much more integrated with the university, especially the Dominican and Franciscan friars, and both of their houses in Oxford had libraries.2 The Dominicans also had a librarius – a member of the community responsible for the care and use of their books. The wealthier colleges soon began to develop their collections in imitation of the practices of the friars, who from the late thirteenth century had developed a system of organising their collections so that some of the books became a ‘circulating’ collection, from which the students (novice friars) could have books assigned to them, and were allowed to keep them in their rooms for personal use. Alongside this remained the common library, which became the reference collection, which was kept in a specially identified room where books could be consulted silently, and where they were often chained to library furniture. The first indication of this practice in Oxford was in the thirteenth century at the Franciscan convent, where the library of the convent (libraria conventus) was kept separately from that of the students (libraria studencium).3 This ‘two collection’ approach was soon adopted by the colleges of the university. We see this expressed formally in new statutes at University College in 1292, but it can also be seen at Oriel, Merton, Exeter, Queen’s, Balliol, Magdalen and Lincoln colleges. Although it is tempting to identify the physical room as ‘the library’, it was actually the sum of both collections that made the library.4
The university (as opposed to the individual colleges, halls and convents) book collections in the loan chests began to grow so much that by the early fourteenth century a new, purpose-built library room was needed to house the books. A structure was proposed adjacent to the University Church (where the loan chests were kept) but between 1439 and 1444 the library was doubled in size by five spectacular gifts of books from Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, the younger brother of Henry V, bringing works of humanistic learning for the first time to join the scholastic texts already in the medieval library. Here were ancient writers like Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, but also the works of the French humanist Nicolas de Clamanges and translations of Plutarch by the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni.5 The university authorities immediately decided to adapt a new building project already underway (the magnificent medieval room known today as the Divinity School), and added another storey above it to house the university library. The new library room was designed both to house the collections and to make them available to the scholars of the university. The stone structure of the space is miraculously unchanged today, and still operates as a library room, despite the astonishing changes in the city and the university since the middle of the fifteenth century.6
The books in this room, known today as Duke Humfrey’s Library, were chained to ensure that such valuable volumes would remain in place for others to use, and the library became a central place for learning. Those students and researchers who use the library today can still see the stone window and roof corbels, featuring heads of humans and animals, in a working environment that opened up for use four years before Christopher Columbus landed on the American continent.
The scholars of the medieval university library had their access to its collections brutally disrupted. In 1549–50, the commissioners of King Edward VI visited the university and, although we do not know the exact circumstances, by 1556 no books remained, and the university elected a group of senior officers to arrange the sale of the furniture. It has been estimated that 96.4 per cent of the original books in the university library were lost.7 Just a handful of books and the shadows made by the original fifteenth-century shelves on the stone piers remain today.
What happened to the books? Anthony Wood, writing more than a century after these events in his History and Antiquities of the Universitie of Oxford (1674), suggested that ‘some of those books so taken out by the Reformers were burnt, some sold away from Robin Hoods pennyworths, either to Booksellers, or to Glovers to press their gloves, or Taylors to make measures, to Bookbinders to cover books bound by them, and some also kept by Reformers for their own use.’8
Just eleven volumes have survived. In the Bodleian’s stacks just three remain today: a copy of John Capgrave’s Commentary on the Book of Exodus, the Letters of the classical author Pliny the Younger (copied in Milan around the year 1440) and a copy of the Works of Nicolas de Clamanges, given to the university in 1444.9
But out of this destruction grew one of the most distinguished libraries in the world. In the newest part of the Bodleian, the Weston Library, there hangs a sixteenth-century painting of the man responsible, Sir Thomas Bodley. Stare at Bodley’s portrait today and you can see the raffish charm of the man. He is dressed in fine clothes, his beard is well trimmed, and there is a definite gleam in his eye. Born into a wealthy family in 1547, his childhood was still marred by the violence and uncertainty of the Reformation. His parents had so fully embraced Protestantism that all the Bodleys were forced into exile when Mary Tudor took the throne and reintroduced Catholicism to England in 1553. On her death the family returned and Thomas came up to Magdalen College Oxford, graduating in 1566, and for the next thirty years he combined a successful career as a merchant in Exeter (helped considerably by his marriage to a rich widow whose fortune was based on trading pilchards) and as a diplomat in the service of Elizabeth I, becoming part of her courtly circle. Returning to Oxford in the 1590s he and an old friend, Sir Henry Savile, set about the renewal of the university library.10
In his autobiography, Sir Thomas Bodley set out his own personal mission: ‘I concluded at the last to set up my staff at the Library door in Oxford,’ he wrote, ‘being thoroughly persuaded, that … I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (to which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students.’11 He had already elaborated this idea in 1598 to the Vice Chancellor of Oxford, pointing out that ‘Where there had been heretofore a public library in Oxford: which you know is apparent by the room itself remaining, and by your statute records I will take the charge and cost upon myself to reduce it again to its former use: and to make it fit, and handsome with seats, and shelves, and desks and … to help to furnish it with books’: Bodley was himself willing to make a huge financial commitment to the project.12
That the books came thick and fast to the new institution, from 1598 onwards, was a sign of how desperately the new library was needed. Sir Thomas donated over a hundred and fifty manuscripts from his personal collection, among them arguably the most sumptuous illuminated manuscript the Bodleian owns: a copy of Alexander of Paris’s version of the Romance of Alexander, written and illuminated in Flanders, 1338–44, with which is also bound a manuscript version of the same tale in Middle English, and a Middle English translation of Marco Polo’s Li livres du Graunt Caam. In this part of the volume is one of the most famous paintings of Venice, executed in England around 1400, which has for many years been reproduced in almost every history of that city. The Romance of Alexander was undoubtedly commissioned by a very wealthy patron – very possibly a powerful noble or even royal family – as the finest scribes and artists combined forces to make this book truly magnificent. It is large for a medieval manuscript of this period, and every page has been richly decorated with floral designs and wonderfully evocative and imaginative marginal illustrations depicting scenes from everyday life. Even after seventeen years at the Bodleian, this volume still sends a shiver of delight down my spine – the sensory pleasures of the glimmering gold leaf, and the rich pigments brightening the page in combination with the beauty of the script, and the heavy sound that the large sheets of parchment make as you turn the pages. It is one of the world’s great cultural treasures.
On 27 April 1857 a young undergraduate at Exeter College obtained special permission to see the Romance of Alexander. The undergraduate was William Morris, who was to become one of the most influential artists, designers, writers and political thinkers of the nineteenth century. Shortly after seeing the manuscript, Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and their fellow Pre-Raphaelites decorated the walls of the Oxford Union Library with Arthurian themes, influenced by the miniatures in the manuscript showing knights fighting battles, chivalric deeds and courtly rituals. For both Morris and Burne-Jones consulting such richly illuminated books was a profoundly influential experience, helping to forge the medieval aesthetic firmly in their minds.13 Morris continued to draw inspiration from medieval aesthetics and ways of making things for the rest of his life. Central to this was the creation of his own books in the same style, for which he even set up his own printing press, the Kelmscott Press in London.
Thomas Bodley’s network of friends and associates came forward with gifts of manuscripts, archives, printed books, coins, maps and other materials, and money to purchase new books. The materials included many manuscripts from the dissolved monasteries, but also state papers relating to national affairs of the previous century. They recognised that this new institution offered a range of attributes quite unlike any other library at the time. Some of these early donors were antiquaries like William Camden (the great historian), Sir Robert Cotton, Thomas Allen (the owner of St Dunstan’s Classbook) and Sir Walter Cope. Others were members of Bodley’s own family, like his brother Lawrence, a canon of Exeter Cathedral, who persuaded the Dean and Chapter there to donate eighty-one manuscripts from the library in 1602. But Bodley was keen to do more than preserve the past. He wanted the library to remain relevant into the future too. In 1610 he entered into an agreement with the Stationers’ Company of London which meant that a copy of every book published by its members, and registered at Stationers’ Hall, would be deposited in the new library.14
One of the dreams of Western civilisation has been the accumulation of all knowledge documented in one library. It begins with the myth of the Library of Alexandria and returned strongly after the Renaissance with the growing sense that libraries could help their communities master all the questions of mankind, or at the very least offer them the opportunity to look up all the references in an important scholarly work. The Reformation devastated many of the libraries of Europe, and especially the libraries in the British Isles. The losses are unquantifiable in precise terms but we know from various different pieces of evidence that between 70 and 80 per cent of the contents of the pre-Reformation libraries of the British Isles were lost, and a slightly smaller proportion of the books on the shelves of the European monastic libraries.
The Reformation was damaging to books in other ways – especially the backlash against Hebrew books that was triggered by the Counter-Reformation. Looking at the few books to survive these various onslaughts, it is undeniable that we have lost a huge amount of knowledge from the Catholic Middle Ages – not just texts of authors that have not survived, but evidence of well-known authors being read in different religious communities or by different individuals. We have lost documentary evidence of everyday behaviour through the damage done to the medieval monastic archives, which as we know through the example of Magna Carta sometimes held unexpected but hugely important documents for safekeeping.
In the founding statutes of the library Sir Thomas Bodley laid down many detailed stipulations regarding the security, preservation and careful management of the institution, in part a direct response to the destruction of knowledge that had taken place earlier. By ensuring preservation, Sir Thomas could also ensure access to those materials not just by members of the university but by what Sir Thomas called ‘the whole republic of the learned’. His ideas were novel in the provision of knowledge. No other library in Europe was so dedicated to the preservation of its collection, to the aggressive expansion of its holdings, and at the same time to broadening access to the community beyond its immediate constituency. The Bodleian’s own archive documents the use made of the collection in the years following its formal opening in 1602, which included scholars from Danzig, Montpellier and Hamburg, as well as from other parts of the country.15
Another innovation that Sir Thomas made was to publish the library’s catalogue of its holdings. The first substantial library catalogue to be published was that of Leiden University Library, in 1595, which also marked the opening of their new library building. A famous engraving of the library made in 1610 shows that the collections were arranged under seven categories: theology, law, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, literature, history.16
‘There is nothing more to the credit of a library than that every man finds in it what he seeks,’ wrote the influential writer on libraries, Gabriel Naudé, in 1627, criticising the Ambrosian Library in Milan (one of the few in Europe that was open to the public) for its lack of subject classification and its books ‘stowed pell-mell by volume’.17 In contrast the Bodleian was highly organised. It had been the first library in England to have its catalogue printed and circulated in 1605 (three years after the library opened to readers). The catalogue divided knowledge into just four groups: arts, theology, law and medicine, but also provided a general index of authors, and special indexes on the commentators on Aristotle and the Bible. The catalogue was the work of Thomas James, the first librarian. Much of the correspondence between him and Bodley survives, and a surprising amount of it is concerned with catalogues.
The first catalogues were lists (referred to as ‘Tables’) that were put up in wooden frames at the end of each bay of shelves in the newly restored space that today we call Duke Humfrey’s Library: ‘You must by no meanes omit, to take good notice of their orders, in placing and disposing their library-books: whether they do it, by the Alphabet, or according to the faculties.’18 In the end, with the first catalogues placed on the shelves, it was the listing by faculty that formed the first catalogue. The catalogue is physically a small book, the size used to be called ‘quarto’, which refers to the format of the book; although it is only about 22 cm high, with over four hundred pages of text, over two hundred pages of appendix and sixty-four pages of index, it amounts to a substantial publication. The catalogue was widely circulated, sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair (still today the key annual gathering of publishers, and where new books are promoted) and began to be used by other collectors and libraries. Copies of the 1605 catalogue were owned by the great French collector, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, in Paris, for example, and by the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden in Edinburgh. In 1620 the Bodleian would innovate by producing a new edition of its catalogue arranged alphabetically by author – a practice that was to become standard in centuries to follow, but then a landmark in intellectual history.19
How the Bodleian differed from the other libraries of early modern Europe was in its approach to making this preserved knowledge accessible. Today the Bodleian catalogue is searchable from anywhere in the world, with over 14 million searches being made in the academic year 2018–19; more than three hundred thousand readers come to use the Bodleian’s reading rooms from outside the university, millions more download our digital collections from every country in the world (with the exception of North Korea). This combination of preservation and access would mean that the Bodleian in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries would become the de facto national library.
Changes were also made to the keeping of documents in archives. At Oxford during the medieval period, the complex nature of the university, with its many colleges, halls and inns, meant that there was a plethora of documentary and administrative information that needed to be maintained. As soon as the university obtained powers of administration, and the right of conferring degrees and other rights over its members, the need for maintaining records also began. The earliest records are the books of statutes and ordinances relating to the studies and discipline of students. The oldest surviving letter written to the university – perhaps the earliest sign that the university was a notable institution – came from the papal legate (the Pope’s representative), Cardinal Guala, in 1217 or 1218.20 As the university gradually became larger and more ordered, the early officials of the university (some of these roles still exist today – such as the proctors) began to keep Registers of Matriculations (matriculation is the formal admission of a student onto a course of study) and Registers of Congregation (the lists of the masters and other academic staff of the university). The modern equivalent of these lists are still consulted today as the ‘master files’ of who is (or was) entitled to degrees and other forms and privileges of membership of the university.
The same approach extended beyond the sphere of universities. The process of gathering knowledge for the purposes of government was established in the medieval period, but took a dramatic step forward in England during the sixteenth century, prompted by the change in religion brought about by Henry VIII and his ministers, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. Wolsey’s surveys of the 1520s, the Valor Ecclesiasticus (a great catalogue of returns from a survey of the revenues of the Church undertaken by Henry VIII’s Royal Commissioners in 1535), and the Chantry Commissions of the 1540s, were all concerned with knowing the state of church finances with accuracy, so that the king could take control. Cromwell’s introduction in 1538 of the requirement by law that all parishes should maintain registers of christenings, marriages and burials, and the introduction of registration of land conveyances, amounted to an unprecedented period of information gathering by the state, which would herald the start of governmental monitoring of data, held eventually in the state archives.21
Until this point the process of keeping knowledge had used a term now rarely used, but which sums up the value of preservation: muniment. Muniments are records kept to preserve evidence of rights and privileges. The practice of keeping these documents progressed to the level of a highly organised activity. The first centralised state archive was formed in 1542 in Simancas by Emperor Charles V for the records of Spain. In England in 1610 James I appointed Levinus Monk and Thomas Wilson to be ‘keepers and registrars of papers and records’.22 Individuals like Scipio le Squyer, Deputy Chamberlain in the Court of Exchequer, were employed not only to maintain the records in their care but also to make complex lists of them.23 In 1610 the Vatican Archives in their modern form also came into being.
The process of ordering information was integral to the development of regulation and the growth of state finances, but it also began to be seen as having a beneficial public purpose. Part of the role of government was, after all, to ensure that citizens were well governed. In the seventeenth century, in circles around the Royal Society and Gresham College in London, prominent intellectuals promoted the gathering of social statistics as a means to make government ‘more certain and regular’ and to ensure ‘the happiness and greatness’ of the people.24
The idea that information must be diffused and made available to the public if government was to be open to correction also began to be understood. A key proponent was John Graunt who, in his Natural and Political Observations … Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (1662), was in two minds about whether the data collated in the bills of mortality (documents listing the numbers of deaths and analysing their causes in London) should be considered useful just for the government of the country, or for wider society: was it ‘necessary to many’?25 The bills were published to provide ‘clear knowledge’ aimed at encouraging a more complete understanding of the state of society in London, and to encourage individual citizens to behave better or, as Graunt phrased it, to secure ‘the Bars, which keep some men within bounds’ and away from ‘extravagancies’.26 The original data which the bills were produced from could be consulted in the archive of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, who had the responsibility for collecting it, and as the diaries of Samuel Pepys later show, ordinary citizens did rely on the reports to manage their own behaviour. On 29 June 1665 Pepys recorded that: ‘This end of the town every day grows very bad of the plague. The Mortality bill is come to 267 which is about 90 more than the last: and of these but 4 in the city – which is a great blessing to us.’27
The scientific theorist Samuel Hartlib proposed an ‘Office of Address’, which aimed at providing a great exchange of economic, geographical, demographic and scientific information open to the public: ‘all that which is good and desirable in a whole Kingdome may be by this means communicated unto any one that stands in need thereof.’ Hartlib’s plan had strong support from a number of influential and prominent reformers, especially at Oxford, and when John Rous (the second librarian) fell ill, Hartlib was seriously proposed to succeed him, as it was felt at the time that his plan to develop a major communications agency would be best located in a great library, as he wanted a ‘Center and Meeting-place of Advices, of Proposalls, of Treaties and of all Manner of Intellectual Rarities’. There were opponents to this scheme, however, and eventually Thomas Barlow, a Royalist sympathiser – who was, in historian Charles Webster’s words ‘academically orthodox’ – was appointed.28
Many important documents were preserved by the Bodleian. The Magna Carta is the one that has had the most profound impact over time: we still adhere to its vital 39th clause which states that no free man should be imprisoned or dispossessed ‘save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’, and its 40th clause which makes illegal the selling, denying or delaying of justice. These clauses remain enshrined in English law to this day and can be found across the world, including in the American constitution, and were a key source for the UN Charter on Human Rights.29
One of the greatest legal thinkers of the Enlightenment, William Blackstone, brought a broader awareness of Magna Carta’s legal and political significance to bear on the broader debates of the eighteenth century. His book The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest (1759) drew on his close study of the engrossments of Magna Carta, which had been bequeathed to the Bodleian in 1754.30 This book, and his magnum opus the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9), were hugely influential on the fathers of the American Revolution (copies could be found in the personal library of Thomas Jefferson, for example), and on the intellectuals in revolutionary France. If the power of the actual documentary remains of the thirteenth-century Magna Carta is doubted, one of the seventeen surviving copies was sent to America in 1941 by Winston Churchill as a totem for ensuring American engagement in the Allied cause in the Second World War.
The destruction of libraries and archives during the Reformation prompted a generation of antiquaries to rescue records of the past and to collect as much of this material as they could. Things had changed since Leland had proudly assumed the role of ‘antiquarius’ for Henry VIII a century before. Antiquaries now seemed so strange to their contemporaries that they were often lampooned in plays and poems and cartoons. The New Dictionary of the Terms, Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew in 1698 even defined an antiquary as ‘a curious critic in old Coins, Stones and Inscriptions, in Worm-eaten Records and ancient Manuscripts, also one that affects and blindly dotes, on Relics, Ruins, old Customs, Phrases and Fashions’. But the ‘Worm-eaten Records and ancient Manuscripts’ these individuals saved were to become the foundational holdings of great institutional libraries in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.31 The antiquaries’ obsession with the past preserved it for the future.
Bodley was part of a movement of individuals determined that the destruction of knowledge should not be repeated. Another was Duke Augustus the Younger of Brunswick-Lüneberg, an obsessive collector. By the time the duke died in 1666, he had 130,000 printed books and 3,000 manuscripts in his library – much larger than the Bodleian at the time.32 After a youth spent in Germany surrounded by the religious upheaval and violence that eventually turned into the Thirty Years’ War, the duke’s motivation was to preserve knowledge. Like Bodley, he used agents to help build his collections (from as far afield as Vienna and Paris), and he even visited the Bodleian in 1603, just a few months after its official opening. Bodley’s library inspired the duke to new heights of collecting and his books became the foundation of what is now a great independent research library (funded by the federal and state governments) at Wolfenbüttel, known as the Herzog August Bibliothek.
Bodley was meticulous in his preparations for the future. Statutes were drafted, funds were donated, old buildings were rebuilt and new ones planned and begun. The new role of librarian Bodley wanted to be carried out by ‘some one that is noted and known for a diligent student, and in all his conversation to be trusty, active, and discreet, a graduate also and a linguist, not encumbered with marriage, nor with a benefice of Cure’ (i.e. not a parish priest). When Thomas James, an eminent scholar who had worked on the King James Bible, was appointed, the founder and benefactor looked over his shoulder constantly. Their surviving correspondence paints a fascinating picture of the sheer minutiae involved in setting up a great library. The role is still called Bodley’s Librarian to this day. (I am the twenty-fifth.)
The ark had to be watertight. In 1609 Sir Thomas compiled the deed establishing an endowment, as ‘by good observation’ he had ‘found it apparent, that the principal occasion of the utter subversion and ruin of some of the famous libraries in Christendom has been the want of due provision of some certainty in revenue for their continual preservation’.33 And then Bodley put his money where his mouth was and disinherited his own family.