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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector |
Christ Church College In 1525 the second most powerful man in England founded a new college at Oxford on the site of the dissolved Augustinian priory of St. Frideswide. Five years and more than £20,000 later, Cardinal Wolsey fell from favor and one year later he was dead. King Henry VIII was the inheritor of Wolsey's plan and of his great property, and after the progress of the English Reformation he refounded the earlier foundation as Christ Church College. It has remained in many respects as Henry left it for more than 400 years, half college and half cathedral with the monarch as patron, with one man serving as dean of each, 8 (now 6) canons, and 100 (now 101) students. The Tudor foundation was served by a library situated at the south side of the cathedral cloisters in the building that was previously the refectory of the priory of St. Frideswide. This conversion of dining room to library was completed in Wolsey's time, but it was restored and considerably altered in the early seventeenth century by the benefaction of Otho Nicholson and fitted up in the style of Duke Humphrey's Library in the Bodleian Library. During the next hundred years books naturally arrived on its shelves in numbers, so that by the early eighteenth century the need for a new building was generally recognized. Richard Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and a student and librarian of Christ Church, left his library to the College in 1640. Likewise, Richard Allistree, the anonymous author of The Whole Duty of Man, left his library to the College. Henry Aldrich, dean until his death in 1710, left his large collection of books and pamphlets, extensive music of all countries, and thousands of engravings. Aldrich had almost completed three sides of a new quadrangle to the north of Wolsey's (Peckwater) before his death, and his friends combined their efforts to complete the fourth side with a new library. The building, one of the noblest in the college, was designed by Dr. George Clarke, a man not unlike Aldrich, whose large benefactions bless Worcester College. The work began in 1717 and was not completed until 1772. During that time Aldrich's friends raised funds for the library and left their collections to it as they died, so that the new building was barely adequate by the time it was completed. The original plan was for the library to be on the first floor above the ground level (which was not enclosed). This was altered before the building was complete to accommodate a large collection of early Italian master paintings, the arches being filled in and the ground paved. The bookplate on the cover is perhaps the earliest of ten or more plates used in the libraries of Christ Church. Its style in bookplate parlance is "early armorial," fashionable in the late seventeenth century. The arms of the college are actually Cardinal Wolsey's (Sable, on a cross engrailed argent a lion passant gules between four leopards' faces azure; on a chief or a rose of the third seeded and barbed proper between two Cornish choughs). It is thought that Wolsey himself designed his arms: an aggregation of details from the arms of families associated with his, with the lion in honor of Pope Leo X, who made him a cardinal (1515), and two choughs from the arms of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the cardinal's name-saint, and finally the rose for England. The shield is surmounted by a cardinal's hat with an excessive number of tassles (21). (Wolsey's hat was acquired by the college in 1898 and is now in the library.) Below is the Latin title of the College. The plate is engraved, and measures 74 x 61 mm.
The copy reproduced on the cover is taken from the mounted example
in the Drake collection of the Humanities Research Center at the
University of Texas. Another example in the HRC is in a copy of a little Military
Dictionary printed in London in 1702 (HRC: U25.M75 1702). This has no
manuscript shelf mark or other inscriptions associated with Christ Church.
An eighteenth-century rendition of the same bookplate (in the Chippendale
style) is in a copy of Joducus Crull's Ancient and Present State of
Moscovy (London, 1698), with manuscript shelf mark and duplicate
release stamp (HRC Wing C7424). A modern version of the same plate, dated
1904, is in the HRC's copy of Ulugh Beg's Epochae Celebriores printed
in London in 1650 (CE51.U48 copy 1), which has its manuscript shelf marks,
is annotated "Duplicate," and is in a lovely polished brown calf
binding with clear evidence of once having been chained (at the lower
cover). This was very probably in the original refectory-library. Further
information about the collections and the building at Christ Church can be
found in Paul Morgan's Oxford Libraries (Oxford: Oxford
Bibliographical Society and The Bodleian Library, 1973), and in W. G.
Hiscock's A Christ Church Miscellany (Oxford: for the author,
1946). John P. Chalmers Humanities
Research Center University
of Texas at Austin [Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 18, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 190-192.] |
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