Sir Henry Spelman (fig 1) was a founding member of the Society of Antiquaries in its earliest form; from his record and contribution he could be considered the doyen of English antiquaries. Born at Congham, near King’s Lynn, Norfolk,Footnote ¹ he came from a good family, one that had a strong association with the law. He was educated at Walsingham grammar school and graduated BA from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1583. While studying law at Furnival’s Inn, and then Lincoln’s Inn, which he entered in 1586, he became interested in the history and antiquities of England. Along with men such as William Camden, Richard Carew, Sir Robert Cotton, William Lambarde, John Stow and Francis Thynne, Spelman helped to found the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, which met regularly between 1584–86 and 1606–08.Footnote ²

Fig 1. Portrait of Sir Henry Spelman, after Cornelius Johnson (Cornelius Janssen van Ceulen), 17–19th century based on a work of 1628. Oil on canvas. 756 × 552mm. © NPG, image no. 962; reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Returning to Norfolk, on 18 April 1590 he married Eleanor (d. 1620), daughter and co-heir of John L’Estrange of Sedgeford, Norfolk. They had four sons, John, Henry, Francis and Clement, and four daughters, Dorothy (m. Ralph Whitfield), Anne (m. Thomas More of Shropshire), Katherine and Alice (m. John Smith of London),Footnote ³ most notable among whom were Sir John Spelman (1594–1643), the eldest son, and Clement Spelman (1598–1679), who became cursitor baron of the exchequer. Through his wife’s inheritance, Spelman secured the wardship of Hamon L’Estrange, son of Sir Nicholas L’Estrange (d. 1591/2), his wife’s cousin.Footnote ⁴ This allowed him to reside at the L’Estrange property of Hunstanton, Norfolk, where, living as a country gentleman, he wrote several works on subjects such as armorials and the pros and cons of political union. Knighted in 1604 he served as sheriff of Norfolk from November 1604 until February 1606Footnote ⁵ and as justice of the peace until 1616. His acknowledged expertise on the historical records of Norfolk (and Suffolk) was such that he wrote the description of Norfolk printed in John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain.Footnote ⁶ In 1612, when Hamon L’Estrange’s minority had ended, Spelman moved his permanent residence to Tothill Street in London.

Having been named in 1617 as a commissioner to determine unsettled titles to lands and manors in Ireland, he made three visits there. In July 1620 he suffered the death of his wife, a son and a grandson. The same year he became a member of the New England (Guiana) Company (treasurer, 1627), thereby becoming involved in legal battles with the rival Virginia Company. Beginning as an assistant to the privy councillors appointed as members of a commission set up by James I in 1622 to investigate the fees taken in civil and ecclesiastical courts, he became a full commissioner in 1623, attending meetings and writing several reports. In 1625 he was elected mp for Worcester, but relinquished the position the following year in favour of his son John.

During his residency in London, Spelman worked on a project to document all the church councils held in England. Assisted in this by the Revd Jeremy Stephens and others, he published the first part dealing with councils up to 1066 under the title Concilia in 1639.Footnote ⁷ Many of the documents Spelman wished to consult were in the possession of the University of Cambridge and some of them in Anglo-Saxon, so Spelman began discussions with the university about the establishment there of a lectureship in Anglo-Saxon, to which Abraham Wheelock was appointed in 1638. The lectureship was held in conjunction with the vicarage at Middleton,Footnote ⁸ which Spelman himself restored, having persuaded his uncle to give up the rectory at Congham on the grounds that lay rectories tended to the defrauding of the Church.Footnote ⁹

Spelman died on 1 October 1641 at the house in the barbican of his daughter, Dorothy, and her husband, Sir Ralph Whitfield.Footnote ¹⁰ He was buried in Westminster Abbey by the door of St Nicholas’s Chapel, opposite Camden.

Spelman was a remarkable scholar.Footnote ¹¹ He correctly explained modern ‘rune’ as coming from OE ryne ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’.Footnote ¹² In his Archaeologus in modum Glossarii (1626), or Glossarium, Spelman refutes the false etymology of the word ‘gospel’, wrongly supposed to be from ‘Ghost-spel’, and cites OE godspel ‘good story’ (never *gastspel) as conclusive evidence.Footnote ¹³ In the field of legal history his achievement was to recognize that the Norman Conquest imported continental feudal tenures into English society, and this recognition led to the imposition of periodisation, pre-feudal, feudal and post-feudal, onto English history.Footnote ¹⁴ His methodology was painstaking. To deal with the problems he had in reading medieval documents, he compiled a list of abbreviations and contractions, the Archaismus Graphicus, anticipating Capelli by nearly 300 years.Footnote ¹⁵ His Archaeologus in modum Glossarii, covering the letters A–G, which, although arranged alphabetically in the form of a glossary, was more a series of commentaries on the meaning of words for ‘usages, offices, ranks, ceremonies and rules in the medieval church and law. … Studying language for the sake of law, he approached the English past as part of the history of Europe’.Footnote ¹⁶ As is reported by his son while visiting Angers, Spelman was known in France as ‘Varro Anglicanus’, ie the English equivalent of Marcus Terrentius Varro, considered the most learned of Romans.Footnote ¹⁷ In his acknowledgements, French, German and Dutch scholars outnumber the English and Scots by twelve to seven.Footnote ¹⁸ His correspondence shows him consulting these European scholars about his work, which showed enterprise and innovation. He was genuinely a man of vision, who saw what needed to be done, and who made a real contribution towards doing it.

Back in 1930, in an impressive paper, Powicke considered Spelman ‘one of the main founders of English philological study’, someone who stood out ‘among the scholars of his time by his wise furtherance of the subject and the encouragement he gave to others’. Powicke considered that a ‘critical edition of those [letters that refer to manuscripts] would be of considerable interest’.Footnote ¹⁹ One of the reasons that so little has been done to address the needs identified by Powicke is that Spelman’s papers and library have been dispersed widely since his death, many manuscripts being divided up and sold on separately, so that finding where items are now, how they got there and how they fit together is a challenge.

After his death most of his papers were evidently kept at Hunstanton.Footnote ²⁰ Access to them must have been granted occasionally, for example to Sir William Dugdale (1605–86; ODNB) when he revised Spelman’s Archaeologus in modum Glossarii (1626). As mentioned above, the first edition covered only the letters A–G, but Spelman left his own draft for most of the rest of the alphabet (certainly to R), so Dugdale’s work in completing it was editorial and only partly that of second author.Footnote ²¹ Dugdale, still a young man, met Spelman in 1637 and Spelman encouraged Dugdale by recommending him to Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel (Junius’s patron), for service of the king in the College of Arms.Footnote ²² Spelman also introduced Dugdale to his collaborator-to-be, Roger Dodsworth.Footnote ²³ Dugdale’s revision of Spelman’s Glossarium was by arrangement with Charles Spelman (Sir Henry’s nephew),Footnote ²⁴ as seen in Letter cxxxiii (19 June 1662) and the agreement signed 29 November 1662.Footnote ²⁵ In Letter cxxxv (12 April 1664) Charles Spelman approves the dedication,Footnote ²⁶ which was to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (1609–74; ODNB). It may have been through Dugdale that a letter from Johannes de Laet to Spelman, dated 1 August 1640, together with collations of two early Anglo-Saxon laws in Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568) with the version in the Textus RoffensisFootnote ²⁷ came to be available to print in George Hickes’s Thesaurus (1703/5);Footnote ²⁸ the original letter has since disappeared.Footnote ²⁹

Another scholar who must have had access to Spelman’s study was Edmund Gibson (1669–1748; ODNB), later bishop of Lincoln (1715–23) and then London (1723–48), whose Reliquiæ Spelmannianæ: The Posthumous Works of Sir Henry Spelman Kt relating to the Laws and Antiquities of England, Publish’d from the Original Manuscripts evidently used manuscripts that have since become dispersed.Footnote ³⁰ He could also have been the medium through whom the letter from de Laet passed to Hickes. Gibson, well known by Anglo-Saxonists for his edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,Footnote ³¹ was very much part of Hickes’s Oxford circle.

In 1702 Spelman’s papers were still in Hunstanton when Thomas Tanner (1674–1735; ODNB) wrote to Peter Le Neve (1661–1729; ODNB) asking for his good offices in gaining access to Spelman’s study.Footnote ³² Presumably Tanner was successful as his papers, now in the Bodleian Library, contain at least four copies of letters to or from Spelman. Tanner also possessed a letter from Ussher dated 6 November 1638 together with his notes on a draft of Spelman’s Concilia (1639).Footnote ³³ Tanner was in the nick of time. Spelman’s books and papers were soon to be dispersed and are now ‘to be found in various libraries’.Footnote ³⁴ By 1709 nearly 300 volumes featured in a sale by the bookseller John Harding (fl 1678–1719), of which there is a catalogue.Footnote ³⁵ Unfortunately this catalogue is an amalgamated list of books not only from Spelman’s library but also, and apparently principally, from the library of the physician Sir Edmund King (1630–1709; ODNB), who had just died. Some items stand out as coming from Spelman, such as no. 89 on p 57, the ‘Liber Psalmorum. Ling. Lat. & Sax. [Pergam.]’, which he used for the Psalterium Davidis Latino-Saxonicum vetus ‘put forth by’ his son Sir John Spelman in 1640;Footnote ³⁶ the item occurs again in the Walter Clavell sale of 1742 as lot 18.Footnote ³⁷ Happily, a much more helpful ‘Catalogue of the mss in the Library of Sir Henry Spelman sold by Auction by John Harding who [had] bought them. December 20, 21, & 22. A.D. 1709’ was produced by Humfrey Wanley,Footnote ³⁸ where 203 items are listed in Wanley’s hand.Footnote ³⁹ They are all manuscripts (plus a few printed books) rather than collections of papers or letters. A number of these manuscripts were acquired by large collectors such as Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755; ODNB) and Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753; ODNB), who gave them to the Bodleian Library and the British Museum, respectively.Footnote ⁴⁰ Others were acquired by private collectors for their own use or pleasure; for example, Thomas Thynne, the first Viscount Weymouth (1640–1714), acquired up to thirty manuscripts.Footnote ⁴¹ There were probably some letters among the collection as a whole, as Tanner’s collection includes some thirty-two letters in addition to the four copies mentioned above; these letters are found scattered in no particular order among Tanner’s collection.

The Revd Cox Macro (1683–1767; ODNB), antiquary and Church of England clergyman of Little Haugh Hall, Norton (Sf),Footnote ⁴² owned several Spelman manuscripts, and they were inherited by his daughter Mary, who allowed some dispersal before the final sale in 1820. Eighteen folio volumes from Spelman’s library are listed in the Macro sale catalogue, including three volumes of ‘Epistolæ Miscellaneæ’, the first containing 142 letters including Spelman’s correspondence with Peiresc, Wormius, Rigault, Meursius, Ussher, Camden and others, and the second 193 articles including Spelman’s correspondence with Jeremy Stephens, Ussher, Wheelock, De Laet and many others. The third volume contained 180 letters, but they were not necessarily correspondence with Spelman.Footnote ⁴³

Later in the nineteenth century many of Spelman’s books and papers were in the collection of Hudson Gurney, antiquary, banker and verse-writer of Keswick Hall, Norfolk (1775–1864; ODNB), and so appear in the sale catalogue made for the dispersal of books by his son, John Henry Gurney, where 125 manuscripts are cited.Footnote ⁴⁴ Others, particularly the letters, were bought by Dawson Turner (1815–58; ODNB), antiquary, banker and botanist, who shared Gurney’s interest in antiquarian books and corresponded with him. After the death of his first wife in 1850 he auctioned off many of his volumes in a sale of 1853, with a final sale in April, May and June of 1859.Footnote ⁴⁵ For example, lot 8 in this sale, containing some of Spelman’s material on Anglo-Saxon grammar, subsequently became item 21538 in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872). It was sold as lot 1090 in one of the Phillipps sales in 1899 to the British Museum. Four volumes of Spelman’s papers and letters that were item 442 in the sale of June 1859 (pp 188–9) came to the British Museum in 1863 and 1894.Footnote ⁴⁶ According to the sale catalogue entry, these volumes included correspondence with Méric Casaubon, but only one letter survives from Méric Casaubon to Spelman (6 May 1636) and it is now in Edinburgh. It is possible that this letter became detached from the volumes now in the British Library. The collection of David Laing (1793–1878; ODNB), now at University of Edinburgh Library, contains five other letters besides the one from Casaubon.Footnote ⁴⁷ As for the collections of letters between Spelman and Wheelock in Cambridge University Library, it is not known whence they came into the library.Footnote ⁴⁸

The letters to and from Sir Henry Spelman that survive can be only a fraction of those written. From what follows it will be evident that many are replies to other letters that do not survive; and the letters listed only start in 1600, when Spelman was already about thirty-six years of age. This conspectus records all those that I have found (over 300);Footnote ⁴⁹ no doubt more may turn up. The letters are given in chronological order; a few where the date is uncertain are assigned a probable date in the sequence. First the sender and recipient are noted, then the date, then the address of the sender and recipient if recorded on the letter, and finally the manuscript and the folio/page therein where it is found; in the few cases where the letter has been printed, reference is given to the relevant edition.Footnote ⁵⁰ The beginning of each letter is transcribed usually omitting the form of address (as this is often somewhat long) so that the letter is clearly distinguishable from any other, a necessary precaution because some letters exist in more than one version, and with varying dates;Footnote ⁵¹ in these transcriptions a vertical stroke signifies a line | division. A brief indication of the contents is given where feasible or useful,Footnote ⁵² although usually not for letters that have been printed.

Even from the incipits, the character of the writers emerges. Spelman is always courteous but could be quite firm, as when he writes to Sir Simonds D’Ewes saying that his own proposed Anglo-Saxon dictionary is more advanced and superior to the one D’Ewes is proposing (17 April 1640). He could be legally precise, as on the subject of tithes (10 April 1624). His editorial assistant, Jeremy Stephens, is absolutely devoted to supporting Spelman and even encouraging him, and much concerned with matters of health, usually Spelman’s, but on one occasion he reports that he himself is having to take ‘physick’. Abraham Wheelock, his lecturer in Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, is equally devoted but in a more obsequious way, hardly ever demurring except when Spelman suggests he should travel (27 May 1640), an activity that did not stir his enthusiasm.Footnote ⁵³ Most of the family letters are to and from his eldest and evidently favourite son, John, and show paternal care and concern blended with practical advice and humour. Themes running through the letters, apart from family and business matters, include Spelman’s publications and the preparations for them, the Glossarium (1626), the Concilia (1639) and the Anglo-Saxon Psalterium (1640), the reading and transcription of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the preparation of an Anglo-Saxon grammar and dictionary and various scholarly enquiries.