The Reverend Thomas Bray (1656-1730) is remembered as the founder of what may be called the earliest public libraries in British North America: the thirty-nine libraries attached to various Anglican parishes and colonial centers from Massachusetts to Georgia to the West Indies. These were established by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) because Bray recognized a need for books in parishes that were largely surrounded by dissenters, and because most of the young clergymen who could be induced to cross the Atlantic were unable to provide themselves with books (The best general account is Henry P. Thompson's Thomas Bray [London: SPCK, 1954].)

            It is not well known that Bray and his friends also provided a series of libraries in Great Britain for almost the same reasons. In 1697 Bray published a plan for lending libraries in all of the deaneries of England. Two years later he founded the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which, like the SPG, was a missionary society of the Church of England. Both were inspired by the Roman Congregatio pro Propaganda Fide. A committee of the SPCK pushed forward the parochial libraries idea and in 1709 obtained the passage of an act of parliament for the protection of all existing and all future parochial libraries. In the same year Bray issued on behalf of the committee a Proposal for Erecting Parochial Libraries in the Meanly Endow'd Cures throughout England.

            In March 1710 the first of a group of fifty-two libraries was sent to Evesham and to Henley-in-Arden. The committee completed the dispatch of sixty-six libraries before the death of Dr. Bray and its last meeting in 1730. A new group was formed called the Associates of the late Reverend Dr. Bray, and it distributed a further seventy-three libraries before the program was abandoned in 1768.

            The early SPCK parochial libraries were not lending libraries, as originally planned, but the later ones were. All were supposed to be permanent and inalienable, handed on to each succeeding incumbent. The original fifty-two libraries consisted of either seventy-two volumes or sixty-seven volumes and, save for the variation of a few titles, they were all identical. The books were purchased or given by publishers and in many cases were published or promoted by the SPCK. Records of the binders who provided the serviceable brown calf are recorded, as are the accounts of the joiners who provided the traveling cases, some of which survive as bookcases in the parish churches. The total cost of books, binding, cases, and transportation was about £22, of which £5 was required of the incumbent. Shelf lists of each library were kept by the SPCK and survive, while white vellum bound register books containing a catalog as well as copies of the printed Proposals of 1709 and the act of the same year went with the libraries. Two catalogs of the library were also sent to the incumbent, who signed them before witnesses and then forwarded one to his bishop and the other to the SPCK.

            Each book had a bookplate pasted to the title verso. The larger books contained the plate illustrated (173 x 71 mm). St. John on the Island of Patmos is receiving a book from an angel, who also holds a banderole with the words from the Apocalypse: Accipe librum, et devora illum. To the left is a book cupboard that is an accurate representation of those sent with the libraries. Below St. John's eagle are the initials of the engraver, Simon Gribelin. Gribelin (1661-1733) engraved numerous bookplates and also provided illustrations, headpieces, and tailpieces to the booksellers, notably for the lovely edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (1711).

A similar plate is found in the smaller books, with a kneeling figure and a different text. Both plates have an inscription at the foot to which is added in manuscript the name of the parish and of the county. Records of the SPCK show that 8,000 impressions of the two plates were provided in 1709.

The example shown is from the parochial library at Monmouth in southern Wales and was found in a copy of the third edition of Thomas Bray's Catechetical Lectures, London, 1703, which is now in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Bray's book was published in 1696 and first brought him to the attention of the archbishop of Canterbury and other influential churchmen. It is not surprising to find it among the books selected for the parochial libraries. All of the books are theological or ecclesiastical and most of them are contemporary works. The Bray volume, bound up as this one is with a copy of Allen's Discourse on the Two Covenants, was the sixth book on the first or bottom shelf of the book cupboards sent out in 1710. Like many of the libraries, that at Monmouth was dispersed at an unknown date and nothing of it now remains. (The above notes owe much to the only thorough account: The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England, Report of a Committee Appointed by the Central Council for the Care of Churches [London: Faith Press, (1959)].) 

John P. Chalmers

Humanities Research Center

University of Texas at Austin