Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T00:53:44.648Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - Clerical and parish libraries

from Part Three - Tools of the trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Arnold Hunt
Edited by
Elisabeth Leedham-Green  and
Teresa Webber
Elisabeth Leedham-Green
Affiliation:
Darwin College, Cambridge
Teresa Webber
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
Get access

Summary

To begin with, a tale of two clergy: John Favour, seventeenth-century vicar of Halifax, and John Wilkinson, one of his fifteenth-century predecessors. Writing in 1619, Favour poured scorn on the pre-Reformation clergy for relying so heavily on ‘their golden Legends, Saints lives, Festivals, Martyrologies, Sermones discipuli, and such like wholesome books’, when ‘the Scriptures lay perhaps motheaten in a few libraries, and were scarse to be found in one Priests studie of an hundred’. To illustrate his point, he cited

the will of a predecessor of mine, in the Vicaridge of Hallifax, dated anno Dom. 1477; who giveth no booke in his will, but one …Item lego Ioanni Wilkinson filio Roberti Wilkinson, unum librum nominatum Legenda Sanctorum, si sit Presbyter: I bequeath to John Wilkinson my brother Robert his sonne, one booke called the Legend of Saints, if he be a Priest. By which we may see, what store of bookes such a man in those dayes had; perhaps in all likelihood, he had not a better.

At first glance, this appears to present us with the starkest possible contrast between pre- and post-Reformation libraries. Favour was a man of wide learning whose personal library was evidently a large one. In his will, he bequeathed ‘my best English Bible’ to his son William, his duplicates (‘one of every sort of my bookes which I have dubble’) to his son-in-law Henry Power, and the remainder of his library to his son John. When he reflected on the solitary volume owned by his medieval predecessor, then glanced round at his own well-stocked bookshelves, it must have seemed to him as though darkness had been succeeded by light. The benighted ignorance of the popish clergy had given way to a new age of learning in which, thanks to the protestant Reformation, the Bible and other religious books were more widely available than ever before.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland , pp. 400 - 419
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, J. A. et al. (eds.), Darlington wills and inventories, 1600–1625, Surtees Soc. 201 (Durham, 1993).Google Scholar
Bowker, M.The secular clergy of the diocese of Lincoln, 1495–1520 (Cambridge, 1968).Google Scholar
Brigden, S.London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar
Burgess, C. (ed.), The pre-Reformation records of All Saints’ [sic], Bristol, 3 vols. (Bristol, 1995–2004).Google Scholar
Clark, J. W. ‘On some English verses written in a fifteenth-century service-book’, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Proceedings and Communications II (1904).Google Scholar
Craig, J.Reformation, politics and polemics: the growth of Protestantism in East Anglian market towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001).Google Scholar
Cross, C., ‘A medieval Yorkshire library’, Northern History 25 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cross, C. (ed.), York clergy wills, 1520–1600: city clergy (York, 1989).Google Scholar
Dickens, A. G. ‘Robert Parkyn’s Narrative of the Reformation’, in Dickens, Reformation studies (1982).Google Scholar
Duffy, E., The stripping of the altars (New Haven and London, 1992).Google Scholar
Emmison, F. G. (ed.), Essex wills, 1571–1577 (Boston, 1986).Google Scholar
Emmison, F. G. (ed.), Essex wills, 1565–1571 (Boston, 1983).Google Scholar
Favour, JohnAntiquitie triumphing over noveltie (London, 1619).Google Scholar
Fines, J. ‘The post-mortem condemnation for heresy of Richard Hunne’, The English Historical Review 78 (1963).Google Scholar
Fisher, R. M. ‘William Crashawe’s library at the Temple 1605–1615’, Library, 5th ser., 30 (1975).
Flood, S. (ed.), St Albans wills, 1471–1500 ([Hitchin], 1993).Google Scholar
Frere, W. H. (ed.), Visitations and injunctions, 3 vols. (London, 1910).Google Scholar
Gray, S., and Baggs, C., ‘The English parish library: a celebration of diversity’, Libraries and Culture 35 (2000).Google Scholar
Harris, J. ‘A rare and precious room: the Kederminster Library at Langley’, Country Life (1977).Google Scholar
Harris, RobertHezekiah’s recovery (London, 1626).Google Scholar
Herbert, A. L., ‘Oakham parish library’, Library History 6 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hicks, M. A. ‘John Nettleton, Henry Savile of Banke, and the post-medieval vicissitudes of Byland Abbey library’, Northern History 26 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, W. P. M.Elizabethan episcopal administration, 3 vols. (1924).Google Scholar
Kisby, F., ‘Books in London parish churches before 1603: some preliminary observations’, in Barron, C. and Stratford, J. (eds.), The church and learning in late medieval society: studies in honour of Professor R. B. Dobson (Donington, 2002).Google Scholar
Lang, S., and McGregor, M. (eds.), Tudor wills proved in Bristol, 1546–1603 (Bristol, 1993).Google Scholar
Manley, K. A. ‘An unrecorded medieval parish library?’ Library History 8/2 (1988).Google Scholar
Marsh, C.Popular religion in sixteenth-century England (London, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meek, E. L. ‘Printing and the English parish clergy in the late middle ages’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society II (1997).Google Scholar
Moran, J. A. H. ‘A “common profit” library in fifteenth-century England and other books for chaplains’, Manuscripta 28 (1984).Google Scholar
O’Day, R. and Heal, F. (eds.), Princes and paupers in the English church, 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1981).Google Scholar
Pabel, H.M. (ed.), Holy Scripture speaks: the productionandreception ofErasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkin, M. (ed.), A directory of the parochial libraries of the Church of England and the Church in Wales, 2nd edn (London, 2004).Google Scholar
Raine, J. (ed.), Testamenta Eboracensia: a selection of wills from the registry at York, 6 vols., Surtees Soc. 4, 30, 45, 53, 79, 106 (Durham, 1836–69).Google Scholar
Richardson, R.C.Puritanism in north-west England (Manchester, 1972).Google Scholar
Rosenthal, J. T., ‘Clerical book bequests: a vade mecum, but whence and whither?’, in Barron, C. and Stratford, J. (eds.), The church and learning in late medieval society: studies in honour of Professor R. B. Dobson (Donington, 2002).Google Scholar
Shinners, J., ‘Parish libraries in medieval England’, in Brown, J. and Stoneman, W. P. (eds.), A distinct voice: medieval studies in honor of Leonard E. Boyle, OP (Notre Dame, IN, 1997).Google Scholar
Stieg, M.Laud’s laboratory: the diocese of Bath & Wells in the early seventeenth century (1982).Google Scholar
Walker, W. J.Chapters on the early registers of Halifax parish church (Halifax, 1885).Google Scholar
Wallis, P. J., ‘The library of William Crashaw’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 2 (1956).Google Scholar
Watkin, A. (ed.), Archdeaconry of Norwich: inventory of church goods temp. Edward III, Norfolk Record Soc. 19 (1947–8).Google Scholar
Weaver, J. R. H. and Beardwood, A. (eds.), Some Oxfordshire wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1393–1510 (Oxford, 1958).Google Scholar
Wells-Cole, A.Art and decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the influence of continental prints, 1558–1625 (New Haven and London, 1997).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×