The British Museum Library

A Short History and Survey

Arundell Esdaile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000505269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book, first published in 1946, provides a summary account, historical and descriptive, which is full enough to be useful for reference and information, and at the same time to bring out the true significance of the collections of the British Museum Library and of the tale of their gathering.

Part I Historical

I The Foundation

1. The Act of 1753 and the Opening

The story of the foundation of the British Museum has been too often told and is too well known to be related again at length, but it must be told here in outline before its significance is discussed. The outline can be followed in the Act of Parliament (36 Geo. II, c. 22) of 1753¹ which founded the Trust. The preamble of that Act tells how “Sir Hans Sloane of Chelsea, in the County of Middlesex Baronet, having, through the Course of many Years, with great Labour and Expence, gathered together whatever could be procured either in our own or foreign Countries, that was rare and curious,” by a codicil dated 1749 to his Will desired that his collection in all its branches, as described in forty-six volumes of catalogue, should be kept together, and that his trustees should offer them to the Crown for the sum of £20,000.

It proceeds to recite previous Acts, of 1700 (12 & 13 William III, c. 7) “for settling and preserving the Library kept in the House at Westminster, called Cotton House, in the name and family of the Cottons, for the benefit of the Publick,” and of 1706 (6 Anne, c. 30) “for the better securing Her Majesty’s purchase of Cotton House” and the building of a room to be called the Cottonian Library, to contain the manuscripts and other collections of Sir Robert Cotton, very little having been done in pursuance of the former Act. It is then recorded that the Act of Queen Anne had had no better result, but that in 1731 the Cotton Library had suffered by a fire. That Arthur Edwards, Esq., by his Will of 1738, had bequeathed his books and (subject to the life interest of Mistress Elizabeth Milles) £7,000 to erect a house in which to preserve the Cottonian Library, or should such a house have meantime been provided, to purchase manuscripts, books of antiquities, ancient coins, medals and other curiosities to be added to the Library. And, further, that the Countess of Oxford, the widow, and the Duchess of Portland, the only daughter, of Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, were prepared to sell the valuable manuscripts collected by the late Earl and his father Robert Harley, the first Earl, for the sum of £10,000, to be kept as an addition to the Cottonian Library, and to be called the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts.

The Act then established a body of Trustees, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor or Lord Keeper, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, as Principals, and consisting beside them of the other great Officers of State, and of two trustee representatives each of the families of Sloane, Cotton and the Harleys, and also, elected by all these, fifteen others.² These Trustees are to find a “repository” within the Cities of London or Westminster or the suburbs thereof; the collections named and any additions to them, “received into the said General Repository, shall remain and be preserved therein for publick use, to all Posterity,” and free access to them is to be given to “all studious and curious Persons.” The three Principal Trustees are to recommend two candidates to the Sovereign, who will appoint one of them (and by inference, be it observed, nobody else) to be Principal Librarian, the only statutory officer, who with the other officers and servants (again, be it observed) is specifically forbidden the common and corrupt practice of the period, of employing a deputy to do the work of his office.³

Then follow twenty-four sections providing in minute detail for the conduct by the Archbishop and other Trustees of a lottery for raising the necessary money to pay the £20,000 for the Sloane collection and the £10,000 for the Harleian manuscripts, to purchase or erect and furnish the “repository,” and to set up an endowment of £30,000 for current income, the balance if any on the profits of the lottery to be reserved for the future disposition of Parliament.

The conduct of the lottery, despite its dignified auspices, was not free from scandal;⁴ but the Trustees were able to pay the £20,000 required for the collections, invest the £30,000, buy for another £10,250 Montagu House, in Great Russell Street, in the Parish of Saint George, Bloomsbury (28 Geo. II, Sess. 2, Private Acts, c. iii), and at a cost of £12,873 to repair and fit it and put the garden in order. This high cost is due to the fact that the house had stood empty for some years.⁵ The Trustees had rejected in favour of it Buckingham House, which was offered them by Sir Charles Sheffield for £30,000 ; it had previously been decided by Sloane’s trustees to remove his collection from Chelsea. While the new Trust was engaged in settling into its home, the House of Lords deposited Thomas Rymer’s collection of documents not printed in his Foedera and also sixty-four volumes of Rolls of Parliament; and, more important, in 1757 George II transferred to it the Library of the Kings and Queens of England, now called the Old Royal Library. In 1758 the first Statutes were drawn up, and on 15th January, 1759, the British Museum was opened.

2. Origins of the Foundation Collections

Let us now look backwards.

Behind these events, thus for the most part recorded in the dry language of Parliamentary draftsmen, lay a long and far from dry history of two at least of the great intellectual movements of Western Europe of the previous two centuries. For the new Museum was of twofold inspiration, historical and scientific. It brought together; for preservation in the first place, and as it proved later for vast development, the accumulated results, so far as they had gone, on the one hand of the studies in national records of the Elizabethan and Jacobean antiquaries, and on the other of the researches into nature and natural law of the enquiring minds of the preceding hundred years, originating before the foundation of the Royal Society at the Restoration, and marked by an increasing foundation abroad of academies with a wide scientific outlook.⁶

The essence of the whole was the gathering together of the libraries. In the list of the classes of Sloane’s collections set out in the Act of 1753 his library of books stands first, and curiously enough, except for crystals and mathematical instruments, nothing that we should now call science is mentioned, though the chief value of his collections was and is in natural history. It was not too late to be encyclopaedic, and, broadly considered, the books and the “curiosities” illustrated each other. But it is with the books, manuscripts and written documents alone that we are here concerned.

The latter half of the fifteenth and the sixteenth century saw the foundation and the refoundation or development of libraries throughout the more advanced parts of Western Europe, in answer, as it were, to the ferment of new knowledge and new criticisms of the old which took triple form as the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. After the return from Avignon Popes Nicholas V (enriched by the alms of the Jubilee year, 1450), Sixtus IV, Leo X and Sixtus V, gathered a new and splendid Papal Library in the Vatican; Francis I of France, a great patron of the new scholarship, issued in 1527 the first decree (the Ordonnance de Montpellier) ordering a copy of every book published in France to be sent to his Library at Blois, and appointed Guillaume Budé, the greatest classic of the time, as his Librarian; the Medici family, and notably Lorenzo the Magnificent and Pope Leo X, regarded the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana as one of the most precious possessions of their house, and finally opened it to the public in 1571 ; Albert V of Bavaria, with the help of the wealth and culture of the merchant prince of Augsburg, Johann Jakob Fugger, founded the Court, now the State, Library of Bavaria at Munich in 1561; the Emperor Maximilian I and still more Ferdinand I (1503–64) created that of Vienna; Philip II of Spain that of the Escorial in 1576; Julius Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg the Wolfenbüttel Library (1572); while the libraries of universities were either, like that of the Jagiellonska at Cracow, vastly developed by the acquisition of manuscripts, or were refounded, as was Oxford’s by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1603.

In Italy and the neighbouring countries the chief quarry of the Renaissance collectors was the classical literature of Greece and Rome, of which manuscripts were being discovered in monasteries and elsewhere, and which more and more men were able and eager to read. Some of these, mostly Latin, came from Northern monasteries such as Fulda and Corvey, where they were found by a tribe of hunters, headed by Poggio Bracciolini; but few remained, and few went, north of the Alps, except to Paris and Munich; most of the classical Greek texts (being in fact the most ancient known) possessed today by the more northerly libraries, such as the Paris Aleman, and the British Museum’s Bacchylides and Aristotle, ‘Αθηναων πολιτεα, have come from the comparatively recent discoveries of papyri in the rubbish-heaps of ancient Egyptian towns. It is significant that “the best MSS. of Homer are now in Venice; of Hesiod and Herodotus, in Florence; of Pindar, in Rome, Florence, Milan and Paris; of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius, in Florence; of Euripides, in Venice, Florence and Rome; of Aristophanes, in Venice and Ravenna; of Thucydides, in Florence, Rome, Munich and London; of Demosthenes and Plato, in Paris; and of Aristotle, in Venice, Rome and Paris.”⁷ Much the same is true of classical Latin literature. And Oriental literatures were collected for the Vatican, the Escorial, Munich and the Royal Library of Paris long before (with the exception of Laud’s gift to the Bodleian) they reached English Libraries, at least in any quantity.

In the North, and in England especially, the dominating study was controversial theology. Thomas James, Bodley’s first librarian (and perhaps also, in less degree, Bodley himself), conceived the function of the University Library to be to certify the text of the Christian Fathers against the supposed falsifications of Romanist divines.⁸ Wolfenbüttel also was intended to be an armoury of Reformist theology with which to meet the Roman Counter-Reformation. And the Counter-Reformation in its turn was soon (in 1609) to be crystallized in a library foundation, Frederic Borromeo’s Ambrosiana at Milan.

3. The Suppression of the Monasteries: Archbishop Parker and the Antiquaries

A third interest may be observed coming into play at just this time: that in the national history and antiquities. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century the ancient shadow of the Holy Roman Empire was fading from men’s veneration, and in France and England at least the Crown consolidated its power, and reduced the independence of provinces and nobles; Louis XI and Henry VII by this common policy of theirs did much to create national patriotism, an inevitable fruit of which is an interest in national history. That the period saw a crop of chronicles in this country is therefore no independent phenomenon.⁹

The first and chief step which led to the foundation of the British Museum Library has now to be mentioned. That step was the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII. It is true that cause and effect were divided by over two centuries; the connection between them is not the less certain and vital. The monastic libraries were the chief repositories of the chronicles and other vernacular literature of the country, and still more of the church-books, dating from the days of Theodore and Bede, and almost of Augustine himself, which were the chief documents proving the pedigree of the Christian Church in this Island. Neither Henry (though he had had a theological training) nor Cromwell cared for these things. It has been well pointed out by Edward Edwards¹⁰ that in all the eighty-six detailed Visitation Articles of the Royal Commissioners of 1536 there is no mention whatever of books or of the ability to read, let alone of libraries or learning. Except for such altar-books as had bindings of precious metals or jewels, the monastic libraries, which were often rich, were scattered unregarded. To save what books survived from them, and provide for their preservation, was the problem of the next two generations of English scholars.

The sins of omission of the Commissioners of Henry VIII in 1536 were followed in 1550 and 1551 by the sins of commission of those of Edward VI, or rather of the Protector and Council, who purged the Oxford libraries of popery by indiscriminate destruction of quantities, though fortunately not all, of their books;¹¹ amongst the rest went Duke Humfrey’s books and “d’Aungerville’s Library,” i.e. Richard de Bury’s, given by him to his foundation of Durham College. Similar purges were made at Cambridge¹² and elsewhere by the fanatics of the new ideas and the new order, in the hope of exterminating the old. It is a proceeding natural to such men at such times; we have seen in recent years some, and those probably by no means the last, examples.

There were a few who saw the loss and did what they could to stop it. The suppression was visibly coming before it came; indeed it had begun long before in a small and irreproachable way under orthodox Church authority, and the foundations of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge by Bishops Fox and Fisher between 1505 and 1515 had foreshadowed the coming change clearly enough. John Leland, who had been Keeper of the King’s Library from some time before 1520 and in 1533 was appointed King’s Antiquary, made his celebrated “laboryous journey and serche for Englands antiquities” between the latter date and 1543, noting important books in the libraries he visited, as well as ancient buildings, coins, and the like. On 16th July, 1536, the year of the final and great suppression, he wrote to Cromwell, entreating him to extend the duties of the Commissioners of Enquiry to cover the monasteries’ books, so that the best of them could be taken for the King’s Library; but the Articles of Enquiry, as noted above, bear no trace of this, and though Leland did secure some volumes, they were few. Of the Royal Library we shall have more to say in a later section.

Leland’s mind gave way soon after this; his collection and notes were published in 1549 by John Bale, an ardent convert to the Reformation, who, though endowed with a taste and talent for vituperation which is unhappily too common among the advocates of change, was nevertheless a real lover of learning. In his well-known preface to this work Bale lamented that the opportunity of the Suppression had been lost and that among the Commissioners “men of learnyng and perfyght love to their nacyon were not then appoynted to the serche of theyr lybraryes, for the conservacion of those most noble Antiquitees” (i.e. the English Chronicles and other ancient MSS.), and “in every shyre of Englande but one solempne library” founded to preserve “our noble monumentes.”¹³ The works of orthodox theologians, schoolmen and canonists on the other hand were in Bale’s eyes best burned. “If the byshop of Rome’s lawes, decrees, decretals, extravagates, Clementines, and other such dregges of the devyll, yea if Heytesburyes sophisms, Porphyryes universals, Aristotles olde logyckes and Dunses dyvinite, wyth such other lowsy legerdemaynes and frutes of the bottomlesse pytte, had leaped out of our libraries ... we might wele have ben therwith contented.” Bale’s enduring work is based on Leland’s; it is the first bibliography of English writers.¹⁴ He also collected books himself and helped to find them for Archbishop Parker.

Matthew Parker, born in 1504, elected Master of...