A CONSPECTUS OF LETTERS TO AND FROM SIR HENRY SPELMAN (1563/4–1641)

Sir Henry Spelman, a founding member of the Society of Antiquaries of London who may be considered the doyen of English antiquaries, made a substantial contribution through his many publications, particularly his Glossarium of 1626, his Concilia of 1639 and, together with his son John, the Psalterium Latino-Saxonicum of 1640. He pioneered the methodical study of historical documents, compiling a guide to the abbreviations and contractions found in medieval manuscripts, and, because some of the documents are in Old English, he made a plan to prepare an Anglo-Saxon grammar and established a lectureship in Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge. After his death his books and papers were dispersed in stages, many of them being bought by subsequent antiquaries. The printed part of this paper surveys the history of his books and papers, with particular attention to his letters, which have never been listed or presented in an organized form despite calls for this to be done since 1930. The supplementary part (online) offers a conspectus of the letters in chronological order with indications of where they are found and of their more important contents. They throw considerable light on how he worked and on his relationship with those who helped him. Themes running through the letters include Spelman’s publications and the preparations for them, the Glossarium, the Concilia and the Anglo-Saxon Psalterium, the reading and transcription of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the preparation of an Anglo-Saxon grammar and dictionary and various scholarly enquiries.

Returning to Norfolk, on  April  he married Eleanor (d. ), daughter and coheir 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),  most notable among whom were Sir John Spelman (-), the eldest son, and Clement Spelman (-), 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. /), his wife's cousin.  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  he served as sheriff of Norfolk from November  until February   and as justice of the peace until . 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.  In , when Hamon L'Estrange's minority had ended, Spelman moved his permanent residence to Tothill Street in London.
Having been named in  as a commissioner to determine unsettled titles to lands and manors in Ireland, he made three visits there. In July  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, ), 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  to investigate the fees taken in civil and ecclesiastical courts, he became a full commissioner in , attending meetings and writing several reports. In  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  under the title Concilia in .  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 . The lectureship was held in conjunction with the vicarage at Middleton,  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.  Spelman died on  October  at the house in the barbican of his daughter, Dorothy, and her husband, Sir Ralph Whitfield.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey by the door of St Nicholas's Chapel, opposite Camden.
Spelman was a remarkable scholar.  He correctly explained modern 'rune' as coming from OE ryne 'mystery' or 'secret'.  In his Archaeologus in modum Glossarii (), 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.  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.  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  years.  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'.  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.  In his acknowledgements, French, German and Dutch scholars outnumber the English and Scots by twelve to seven.  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 , 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'.  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.  Access to them must have been granted occasionally, for example to Sir William Dugdale (-; ODNB) when he revised Spelman's Archaeologus in modum Glossarii (). 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.  Dugdale, still a young man, met Spelman in  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.  Spelman also introduced Dugdale to his collaborator-to-be, Roger Dodsworth.  Dugdale's revision of Spelman's Glossarium was by arrangement with Charles Spelman (Sir Henry's nephew),  as seen in Letter CXXXIII ( June ) and the agreement signed  November .   Spelman approves the dedication,  which was to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (-; ODNB). It may have been through Dugdale that a letter from Johannes de Laet to Spelman, dated  August , together with collations of two early Anglo-Saxon laws in Lambarde's Archaionomia () with the version in the Textus Roffensis  came to be available to print in George Hickes's Thesaurus (/);  the original letter has since disappeared.  Another scholar who must have had access to Spelman's study was Edmund Gibson (-; ODNB), later bishop of Lincoln (-) and then London (-), whose Reliquiae Spelmannianae: 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.  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,  was very much part of Hickes's Oxford circle.
In  Spelman's papers were still in Hunstanton when Thomas Tanner (-; ODNB) wrote to Peter Le Neve (-; ODNB) asking for his good offices in gaining access to Spelman's study.  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  November  together with his notes on a draft of Spelman's Concilia ().  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'.  By  nearly  volumes featured in a sale by the bookseller John Harding (fl -), of which there is a catalogue.  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 (-; ODNB), who had just died. Some items stand out as coming from Spelman, such  , who gave them to the Bodleian Library and the British Museum, respectively.  Others were acquired by private collectors for their own use or pleasure; for example, Thomas Thynne, the first Viscount Weymouth (-), acquired up to thirty manuscripts.  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 (-; ODNB), antiquary and Church of England clergyman of Little Haugh Hall, Norton (Sf),  owned several Spelman manuscripts, and they were inherited by his daughter Mary, who allowed some dispersal before the final sale in . Eighteen folio volumes from Spelman's library are listed in the Macro sale catalogue, including three volumes of 'Epistolae Miscellaneae', the first containing  letters including Spelman's correspondence with Peiresc, Wormius, Rigault, Meursius, Ussher, Camden and others, and the second  articles including Spelman's correspondence with Jeremy Stephens, Ussher, Wheelock, De Laet and many others. The third volume contained  letters, but they were not necessarily correspondence with Spelman.  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 (-; ODNB), and so appear in the sale catalogue made for the dispersal of books by his son, John Henry Gurney, where  manuscripts are cited.  Others, particularly the letters, were bought by Dawson Turner (-; 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  he auctioned off many of his volumes in a sale of , with a final sale in April, May and June of .  For example, lot  in this sale, containing some of Spelman's material on Anglo-Saxon grammar, subsequently became item  in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (-). It was sold as lot  in one of the Phillipps sales in  to the British Museum. Four volumes of Spelman's papers and letters that were item  in the sale of June  (pp -) came to the British Museum in  and .  According to the sale catalogue entry, these volumes included correspondence with Méric Casaubon, but only one letter survives from Méric Casaubon to Spelman ( May ) 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 (-; ODNB), now at University of Edinburgh Library, contains five other letters besides the one from Casaubon.  As for the collections of letters between Spelman and Wheelock in Cambridge University Library, it is not known whence they came into the library.  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 , when Spelman was already about thirty-six years of age. This conspectus records all those that I have found (over );  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.  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;  in these transcriptions a vertical stroke signifies a line | division. A brief indication of the contents is given where feasible or useful,  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 ( April ). He could be legally precise, as on the subject of tithes ( April ). 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 ( May ), an activity that did not stir his enthusiasm.  Most of the family letters . Now BL, Add MS  () and BL, Add MSS - (). . EUL also possesses a copy of Spelman's 'Archaicus Graphicus An ', previously lot  in the sale of the Lauderdale library: Lauderdale Sale . David Laing was one of the editors of The Bannatyne Miscellany. . I am grateful to Dr James Freeman, medieval manuscripts specialist at CUL, for this information. . For  of his letters or those to him preserved in the Bodleian, see the EMLO website: http:// www.emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. The EMLO entry also includes two letters not to or from Spelman but containing reference to him (accessed  Dec ). . A few letters occur in printed form, but I have not found them in any of the manuscripts. They may be preserved in manuscripts that survive abroad in Copenhagen (Olé Worm), Dublin (Ussher) or France (Peiresc). . I follow the convention in Lem and Rademaker , although they limit the incipit to just five words. . For these I have been able to draw where possible on those provided by the Catalogue of the Manuscripts in CUL (Anon -) and by EMLO (which availed of card entries made earlier by Colin B Hunt, as I am kindly informed by Miranda Lewis, digital editor of EMLO). . Cf. Lucas /, -.  THE ANTIQUARIES JOURNAL 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 (), the Concilia () and the Anglo-Saxon Psalterium (), the reading and transcription of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the preparation of an Anglo-Saxon grammar and dictionary and various scholarly enquiries.