The Founders' Library at the RBLA
In 2009, the historic manuscripts, books and archives of St David's College, in recent years known collectively as The Founders' Library, were relocated to the purpose-built environmentally controlled storage facilties of the Roderic Bowen Library and Archives on the Lampeter campus of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
The Founders' Library at Lampeter, by the middle of the nineteenth century the finest of its type in Wales, was made great by three benefactions, those of Bishop Burgess, the Bowdlers and the East India Company surgeon Thomas Phillips.
The Bishop
Thomas Burgess (1756-1837) was Bishop of St Davids when he laid the foundation stone of the College on August 12, 1822. The contemporary newspaper John Bull reported that he thought of the occassion as 'the happiest day of my public life'. Burgess planned the new college as one which would give ordinands of the Church a basic eductaion in the humanities - it was never simply a theological college.
All available sources indicate that Burgess was a pious and hard-working individual. He is not credited with wit or coloured by misdemeanours. A notable Greek scholar at Oxford, and a friend of Thomas Tyrwhitt, the editor of Chaucer, he amassed a fine personal library which, upon his death at Salisbury, reverted to the college at Lampeter. The entire collection is searchable on the Learning Resources Centre library catalogue.
Six works from the Burgess collection would grace the world's most select rare book libraries. The manuscript Norman Vulgate Bible completed by Geoffrey of Fecamp in 1279 is a supreme example of medieval illumination and scribal labour. (Link) It is mateched bu an equally decorative and pristine Bible of an early Renaissance printing master, the 1476 Venetian printing of Nicholas Jenson. Another of BUrgess's incunables is the revered Golden Legend printed by Caxton's successor Wynkyn de Worde. And Renaissance New Testament printing prompted Burgess to secure three examples of ultimate typographic sophistication - the unmatched Greek letter of Cardinal Ximenes' Alcala edition of 1514, Froben's 1522 printing of Erasmus's edition (with magnificent woodcuts by Holbein and Urs Graf), and the oustanding 1534 Paris printing of Simon de Colines.
What else did the Bishop read? A surprising variety, to be sure, but some caution is always necessary in drawing conclusions. Thus Burgess's ownership of Newton's Opera (1779-1785) is probably explained by noting thta the editor was Samuel Horsley, a predecessor at St Davids; and his possession of the Concordance to Hippocrates' Oeconomia (1588) was probably for its linguistic rather than medical interest.
We are not accustomned to think of Burgess as an antiquary, but should remember that he won the Chancellor's English-Prize Esaay at Oxford for a piece 'On the Study of Antiquities'. The reading of county topographies was a predilection of Burgess. He bought, for instance, William Hutchinson's History and Antiquities of Durham (1823) when holding office there, and likewise coloured his Welsh experience with the acquisition of William Coxe's finely illustrated Historical Tour of Monmouthshire (1801) and Rice Merrick's Book of Glamorganshire Antiquities (1825), the latter work having been printed by Sir Thomas Phillipps at middle Hill, Broadway (Phillipps, eccentric, and the greatest collector of vellum manuscripts the world has ever known, claimed Welsh decent and at one stage sought to deposit his enormous collections of books and manuscripts in the care of the Welsh nation, contemplating sites at Llandvoery and Manordier for this purpose).
Several editions of the classical texts, however, were the dominant feature of Burgess's shelves, with his favourte Aristotle well to the fore, but even in the realm of classical learning he leavened his studies with topographic musing, instanced by the presence of Lechevalier's Description of the Plain of Troy.
Burgess's collections were not, it must be said, overburdened with native literature. His Chaucer was edited by his friend Thomas Tyrwhitt, and his Shakespeare and his Shalespeare the ten volume octavo edition of Johnson and Steevens. But neither his letters nor his books suggest immersion in English literature; yet his biographer, Harford, notes a habit, late in life, of passing the evenings reading poetry, especially Gray. It is pleasant to record that his bequest to Lampeter includes the finest edition of Gray, that of the esteemed printing house of the Glasgow Foulis brothers.
Perhaps the most extraordinary episode in Burgess's life was to suggest and subsequently to be invited by the Monarch to from, a Royal Society of Literature. Today's R.S.L. is an enormously respected academic body and one wonders if it might ever have been formed had it not been for the Bishop's initiative.
Burgess remained President for the first ten years of the Society's existence, addressing it annually, when he frequently embarrassed members with wayward thoughts on the claims of Milton's authorship of a newly found manuscript.
There were other diversions. He was asked to cope with the consolidation and safety of the flow of manuscripts of sacred texts of the East into Britain - letters reached him with news of soldiers bringing back such manuscripts from the Burmese war. Again Burgess faithfully pursued a leading Society function, the publication of 'inedited remains' of ancient literature (prompted, no doubt, by Percy's Reliques), and encouraged an allied pursuit, the exploration of what he called 'terra incogneite' of public libraries. His ideal for this task was 'some second Leland' possessing the 'knowledge and perserverance of Langbaigne, Mabillon or Montfaucon'.
The Bowdlers
Other papers were read to members of the R.S.L. of course, one being by Dr Thomas Bowdler, who, in 1824 addressed the Society on the madness of Hamlet. This, we should remind ourselves, was six years after the publication of his notorious Family Shakespeare (1818). Bowdler died in 1825 and shortly afterwards the substantial collection of tracts or pamphlets amassed by three generations of his forebears became the property of St Davids College. There is a lack of evidence on the mechanics of transfer, but Bowdler's talk to a Society presided over by Burgess, and his long residence in Swansea, a town in the bishop's diocese, lead to the conclusion that Burgess encouraged the gift to the College. In all, the College tract collection comprises 828 volumes which embrace approximately 10.000 bound-in tracts, the majority untrimmed, in their original state of issue, a fact of ultimate significance for the bibliographer and textual scholar. These figures include all later accretions to the original Bowdler gift. But the Bowdler proportion is paramount, and the major period of concentration of tracts is that from 1640 to 1730, the period 1710-1714 probably being more comprehensively represented than in any other known collection. As an historical archive it is of unique importance, and historians of an earlier generation, C.H. Firth and T.F.Tout, were quick to recognise this.
The history of this bibliophilic family is not without interest. There were Thomas Bowdlers for three generations before the 'Doctor' of the expurgated Shakespeare. Thomas Bowdler I (1638-1700) started the tradition of collecting pamphletts. One of his family duties was to bring up his nephew, Thomas Bowdler II (1661-1738), virtually abandoned by his mother, whose father, a Bishop of Meath, initially took charge of the boy. A clerkship at the Navy Office gave the young Bowdler the opportunity to befriend Samuel Pepys, whose collecting habits no doubt bolstered the impetus already supplied by his uncle. There is reason to believe that Thomas Bowdler II's was scarcely impeded by his access to wealth. his uncle had been a merchant of standing, and the young Bowdler married into similar advantageous circumstances, his wife being the daughter of a Turkey merchant. And he supplemented this happy state with personal ineterests in the East India Company.
Although the history of English book collecting has notable examples of major collections being formed by people of little wealth - Bowdler's contemporary Narcissus Luttrell was one, and George Thomason another, both, ironically, collectors of tracts - there is no doubt that inherited wealth was the major spur to the formation of great personal libraries. And the inherited wealth frequently came from involvement with great trading companies. We have noted the young Bowdler's interests in the East India Company. The same company aided the fortunes of Saint Davids College's third library benefactor, Thomas Phillips (the 'Botany Bay Surgeon') and provided the inherited fortune which allowed Richard Gough, the 'father of British antiquity', to collect books on a forbidding scale. Money made on the sugar plantations of the west Indies furnished the exotic William Beckford with the means of building the staggering Fonthill Abbey and forming a quixotic library which, before winnowing, included the whole of Edward Gibbon's library at Lausanne. Sir Thomas Bodely poured much of his persaonl fiortune into the library which carried his name at Oxford, a fortune largely based on the pilchard fishing of the North Sea promoted by his father-in-law.
Thomas Bowdler III (1706-85), for the most part resident in or near Bath, continued the tradition of collecting pamphlets in a rather more modest way. If he needed reminding of his family's bibliophilic traditions, his wife, a descendant of Sire Robert Bruce Cotton the famed Jacobean collector of manuscripts, had the pedigree to do so.The range of political, social, military, naval, economic, religious, and literary themes which activate the great Bowdler tract collection can scarcely be reduced to summary. Suffice to say that a few minutes spent browsing the catalogue (Link) will astonish. One volume will reveal two contemporary and highly critical attacks on the publication of the Spectator; another will chronicle the attempted Scottish settlement of darien, or English fortunes in Virginia. A volume compositely labelles 'Quaeries' will include a pamphlet entitles Quaeries from the Coffee Club, being pertinent and scandalous on the affairs of the day; another will relate the range of London libraries open or accessible to the scholar in the London of 1704.
The Surgeon
Thomas Phillips (1760-1851) is the thrid great benefactor of the original library at St David's College. His frequent consignment of books to the College from 1834 to shortly after his death account for more than 22,500 volume. Thanks to Phillips, Lampeter has a great and significant cross-section of the printed literature of Western Europe.
Born in London, but partly brought up in Wales, he studied medicine under the famed John Hunter and beacme a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. He spent his career with the East India Company, including a period as an inspector of the medical facilities at the convict colony of Boatany Bay, and retired to London in 1817.
Most on the incuables (books printed before 1501) at Lampeter are Phillips' gifts and exceed in number the holdings of all but three of the Oxford colleges. They are entirely from German and Italian presses, some 35 being from the great Renaissance printing houses of Venice which first made classical literature avaliable to the post-medieval world. Two are highlighted here.
The first is the large folio Genealogia deorum of Boccaccio printed at Venice (1472) by one of the Spira brothers, the earliest printers to work in that city. It is our first compendium of that mythological knowledge which so fired the Renaissance mind. Many of the large pages are emblazoned with hand-painted genealogical trees outlining the descent of the gods of the classical past.
The second is a monumental piece of German printing is the large folio Bratislava Missal printed at Mainz in 1499 by Gutenberg's successor Peter Schoeffer, and illuminated in gilt and colour in the mode of the manuscript age.
Sixteenth and seventeeth century editions of classical and vernacular texts abound, from the Aldines to books from the presses of Froben, Plantin, Estienne and Elzevier. Eighteenth century English imprints are not infrequently in the choice typographical garb of such presses as Foulis, Baskerville and Strawberry Hill; and there are notable first editions of The Wealth of Nations and Gulliver's Travels.
Phillips' career and interests are reflected in volumes of natural history and antiquities, atlases and cosmographies. He bought the elephant folio of Pennant's British Zoology (1766) and Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, both brilliantly hand-coloured, and he supplemented these with an array of herbals from the fifteenth century Macer Floridus to a strong representation of medical herbals of later centuries. Munster's Cosmographie (Paris, 1575) is the quintessential world survey of the Renaissance, a veritable encyclopaedia of city views, and it is supplemented by regional surveys such as Olaus Magnus's Historia (Venice, 1565) with its myriad woodcuts. Antiquities are exmeplified in several ways from the pioneering 15 volumes of Montfaucon's L'antiquite to the Graevius Thesaurus and the majestic engravings of Rome by Piranesi and Overbeke.
Ortelius and Mercator take pride of place in the Phillips' array of atlases, which also includes such notable items as the Atlas universal of Robert de Vaugondy (1757) and Chauchard's General Map of the Empire of Germany, Holland etc, (london 1800). The Ortelius atlas contains the frist printed map of Wales by Humphrey Lhuyd of Denbigh with an engraved Latin note above the River Teifi which reads 'Hic fluvius solus in Britannia castroes habet' (this is the only British river with beavers).
Phillips also gave the college a collection of large city plans: London's rich topography in the guise of Horwood's fine plan atlas (1799), and Paris in the sumptuous bird's-eye view of Louis Bretez and Claude Lucas (1739).
A particular delight of the collection are the many narratives from the 'Silver Age' of exploration and travel: Cook, Vancouver, La Perouse, Cartaret, Pallas, Humboldt, Dalrymple, Clapperton, Ross, Parry, Franklin, Bruce, Burton and Denon, Napoleon's herald of Egyptology.
The great dictionaries, biographical and language, descended on Lampeter. Perrault's folio compendium of emminent 17th century Frenchmen is perhaps the most gracious of biographical dictionaries, with its full page engravings of figures supplementing the text. The language dictionaries are in greater evidence - the Stephanus Latin dictioany, the epoc-making Vocabularia of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, Jonson's Dictionary, and the exotic Chinese dictionary commissioned by Napoleon with definitions in French and Latin. The Celtic world is favoured by the presence of Lhuyd's Archaeologia, Dr John Davies of Mallwyd's Dictionarium Duplex and Armstrong's Gaelic gloss.
