Category Archives: 18th century

Academic dress in the Oxford University Archives

Of the many Oxford University traditions that have survived to the present day, one of the most visually distinctive and recognisable is the ‘academic costume’: the gowns, caps and subfusc worn today by students and officials during examinations and ceremonies. Yet despite the long presence of academic dress in the University’s history, the University Archives hold surprisingly little material relating to it. This is perhaps because until the mid 20th century, its exact nature appears to have been fairly fluid, constantly evolving, and on occasion subject to change that was not authorised by the University. It was not until 1957 that academic dress was fixed in its current form, with the publication of Academic Dress of the University of Oxford by R.E. Clifford and D.E. Venables. This illustrated guide includes precise descriptions of each element of the academic dress, and although this book has been republished and revised, very few alterations have been made to the rules it lays out.

The oldest item relating to this topic in the University Archives is this small book, which dates from 1716 and contains numbered engravings of different forms of academic dress. An example of every official and student is shown, from the Vice Chancellor and the Bedels to the Bachelor of Arts, the Master of Arts and many others.

Title page, with the Phillipps shelfmark. Reference: OUA NW 1/10*

Bachelor of Arts

Vice Chancellor

Doctor of Theology, wearing a ‘toga coccinea’ (red cape)

These images are in fact cuts from David Loggan’s 1675 engraving Habitus Academici, part of his Oxonia Illustrata series of engravings illustrating Oxford University and its environment. The original engraving is a black and white single sheet, but here they are coloured, bound in a small volume with a new title page: ‘Habitus Academici in Universitate Oxoniensi Anno 1716’, and they are likely to be the earliest coloured representations of Oxford University academic dress. The shelfmark written at the bottom of the title page, ‘Phillipps MS 24809’, shows that it appears to have made its way into the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, one of the most important book collectors of the 19th century. It was ultimately donated to the University Archives by the Keeper of the Archives 1927-45, Strickland Gibson.

Not only are these illustrations some of the earliest of academic dress in the University Archives, but they are some of the only visual representations we hold. Most other records on this topic concern attempts to regulate academic dress, and how these rules were broken.

Although the exact nature of academic dress pre-20th century is hard to pin down, attempts were nevertheless made to regulate it as early as the 17th century. In the Laudian Code of 1636, which was the first coherent set of Oxford University regulations, Statute Tit. XIV De vestitu et habitu scholastico laid down rules for how academic dress should look and be worn, and required models of the various outfits be made. The original 1636 ‘Codex Authenticus’ of the the Laudian Code is held in the University Archives, as seen below with the seals of the University, Archbishop Laud and Charles I.

The ‘Codex Authenticus’ of the Laudian Code. Reference: OUA WPγ/25c/1

At this point in time, academic dress was not worn for just ceremonies and examinations, but in University members’ everyday lives, including when they were out and about in the city. As a result, rules on academic dress were also rules about the everyday physical appearance of university members. §1 of Stat. Tit. XIV in particular describes how no member’s hair should be ‘[in] curls or excessively long’, and lays out the monetary penalties and corporal punishment that could be expected for disobeying this rule.

Stat. Tit. XIV, §1 in the Codex Authenticus

As the centuries passed, University members were required to wear their gowns less and less, and so the surveillance of their everyday appearance began to relax. Nevertheless, there were still plenty of instances of students bending or breaking the rules, and during the 20th century the University Archives begin to show more evidence of how exactly rules were disobeyed. This Proctor’s memorandum from 1945, shown below, gently reminds students of the correct situations in which academic dress should be worn, in particular noting that ‘it is an offence to smoke in academic dress’.

Proctors memorandum. Reference: OUA PR 1/8/1/1

Similarly, this notice from around the 1920s-30s, sent from the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors to the college authorities, emphasises the importance of candidates for degrees being suitably dressed. According to this note, those taking degrees recently had been doing so ‘in torn gowns, in brown shoes, in light grey suits, in flannel trousers, and even in a form of jumper or ‘pull-over’.

Vice Chancellor and Proctors notice. Reference: OUA PR 1/5/6/1

The University Archives’ most recent holding relating to academic dress dates from 1956, just before the publication of Academic Dress of the University of Oxford in 1957. The ‘Register of Colours’ created by Shepherd and Woodward, an outfitter to the University based in Oxford, contains samples of the correctly dyed fabric to be used on each item of dress, with descriptions of the precise material and hood shape to be used.

The Register of Colours. Reference: OUA WPγ/28/15

The register is still occasionally updated by Shepherd and Woodward today, as it is relied upon by the Vice Chancellor’s Regulation 1 of 2002, which states that robes, gowns and hoods should conform to the standards ‘prescribed in the Register of Colours and Materials of Gowns and Hoods for Degrees of the University of Oxford… deposited in the University Archives.’

The topic of academic dress is one which illustrates well the relationship between the University Archives and the University itself. Our material relating to academic dress is limited to that which was considered practical to record at the time. This is why regulations for academic dress and punishments for not obeying these are represented more so in the Archives than any precise picture of exactly what was worn and how it changed over the years. Thus the Archives preserve the history of the University, but only as far as the University recorded this history at the time.

To find out more about Oxford University Archives and our holdings, please contact us.

Further Reading

Brockliss, L. W. B., ‘Students and Teachers’, The University of Oxford: A History, OUP 2016

Clifford, R. E.  & Venables, D. E., Academic Dress of the University of Oxford, Oxford 1957

Franklyn, C., Academical Dress from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, Hassocks, Sussex 1970

Escaping the Reign of Terror: MS. French c. 19

“And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children, even until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen.”[1]

1793, France.

Revolution swept the country five years ago. Since the well-known Storming of the Bastille on 14th July 1789, many changes have taken place across France, mostly in Paris. For five years, the French aristocracy and nobility have been in a state of panic. They have witnessed the rise of increasingly radical republican ideas take root in local politics, resulting in widespread violence.  As the country moves further away from its monarchical past with each passing month, King Louis XVI is executed on 21st January 1793 on grounds of high treason against the State—one among many casualties of the new regime.

How did it all come to this?

Like many revolutions, it started with a desire for more freedom and for an enlargement of political rights. The French population had increased to 26 million inhabitants when the revolution broke out, making it the most populated country in Europe at the time. This came with challenges, especially as far as food was concerned, and crop failures (such as the one that occurred in 1788) were bound to accentuate the already existing tensions between the people and the elite. This French population was also increasingly more educated. The common people started to press for more freedom from an outdated feudal system while the bourgeoisie demanded an increase in political power and representation. Overall, there was a consensus among many French subjects that the current system of government was obsolete and needed reform. Additionally, the 18th century was marked by the birth of Enlightenment ideas and many of the philosophers who shaped the movement (Rousseau and Voltaire to cite a couple) were French and widely read in France. The philosophers criticised absolute monarchy and the influence of the Church and they believed in the importance of human rights.

By May 1789, France had reached a state of financial crisis that was serious enough for the King to gather a sort of assembly that was called the Estates General. The goal of this assembly was to bring together the nobility (300 representatives), the Church (300 representatives) and the commoners (600 representatives) so that they could discuss the grievances of people of all classes across the country and advise the King. However, when it came to voting in the 1789 Estates General, it was decided that each of the three estates would count for one vote—an unfair system for the commoners as their voice went from representing half of the assembly to  only a third. The conflict escalated in June, as the commoners broke from the Estates General to form a National Assembly whose goal was to write a new French constitution. While Louis XVI initially agreed to this, he nonetheless drafted troops to dissolve this new National Constituent Assembly. Now July 1789, less than a week before the Storming of the Bastille, revolution was about to break out.

1793, France.

Revolution swept the country five years ago. Did it manage to achieve the ideals for which the revolutionaries fought? The King is dead and a Republic has been proclaimed. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, directly inspired by the ideas of Enlightenment, has been introduced. Yet, the violence and bloodshed continues as revolutionaries strive to purge the country of its old system. Enemies of the Republic and aristocrats are executed daily on the Place de la Grève. Since July 1789, to escape the guillotine or just the ambient violence, many French people have decided to emigrate.

So what did emigration mean during the French revolution?

Emigration linked to the French revolution was very far from being the largest mass migration in history. In total, according to Raphael Franck and Stelios Michalopoulos, more than 100,000 French people decided to leave their country behind in the wake of the revolution (so, a very small portion of the 26 million French). Quite logically, emigration concerned mainly the wealthy, especially the nobility and the clergy.[2]  Some left with the goal of plotting a return of the monarchy from abroad, others simply to escape the violence. Their destinations varied as while some crossed the Atlantic, many remained in Europe. Ernest Daudet’s account of the phenomenon highlights that many nobles fled to relatives’ homes in nearby territories, especially in Turin, where Louis XVI’s brother was scheming ways to counter the revolution.[3] Many French people also decided to head for the British Isles.

6 February 1793, London.

“Sir, I send you with this a list of the French Emigrants of known and respectable Characters, now in England, and in Jersey, which you said it would be desirable to obtain, in a Conversation I had the Honour of having with you on the subject some time since in the House of Commons. I cannot be sure it is compleat, notwithstanding great Pains have been taken to render it so . . . John Thomas Stanley, Esq., M.P.”[4]

2019, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

“This” is a volume of 126 leaves, with a vellum binding. Names are recorded alphabetically along with, every now and then, mentions of family members and occupations. Overall, the register documents the arrival of 1,063 French people in England and Jersey, of which many were domestic servants and members of the military. Comprehensive lists of emigrants was commissioned several times during the revolution years by French authorities to identify people whose remaining belongings could be confiscated. Were they to come back to France, people on these lists would have been stripped of their civil rights. It is unclear however whether this particular register was used for this purpose as the ultimate recipient, both of the volume and of Staney’s letter, is now unknown.

John Thomas Stanley’s letter, along with the register that contains the list of French emigrants to England and Jersey, are now known as MS. French c. 19. It was acquired by the Libraries in 1937 and the 226 years of its life have not been the kindest to the register. Former mould, eradicated through fumigation, has left marks over the pages of the volume. This has not however eaten away the names of those people who, two centenaries ago, crossed the channel in the hopes of a better life far from the massacre of what came to be known as the Reign of Terror. The register does not record what happened to the emigrants after their arrival, but you can still today discover who they were by visiting the Libraries and calling up MS. French c. 19. The Bodleian’s Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts also contains documents that shed light on what was happening in the meantime in France, with MS. French c. 27 containing official documents of the French revolutionary government (1793-1795).


References:

[1] Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960 (1913), p. 9

[2] Franck, Raphael, and Stelios Michalopoulos. “Emigration during the French revolution: Consequences in the Short and Longue Durée.” IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc (2018): IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc, 2018. Web.

[3] Daudet, Ernest. Histoire de l’émigration pendant la Révolution Française. Tome I : De la Prise de la Bastille au dix-huit fructidor, Paris: Librairie Poussielgue, 1904.

[4] Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. French c. 19, fol. 4

Read more about this:

“French Revolution”, Britannica Online

Reboul, Juliette. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution, Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Gingerbread from the Radolphus Ayres “Cook Oxford” Recipe Book, 29th August 1721 – Reference MS. Don. e. 89

As someone who has always enjoyed baking and has a love of all things historical, finding old recipe books is one of the most exciting things about working in archives. I love when cooking shows explore what people of the past would have eaten, and the different ingredients they would have used to create what we now consider modern classics. Working on the retro-conversion of the Bodleian Libraries New Summary Catalogue since September (you can read about our project here) has allowed me to discover a fair few recipe books, with some of the treats far more enticing than others… After some deliberation, I chose this 18th century recipe for gingerbread – a tried and tested festive favourite. I wanted my colleagues to actually taste it and thought it might be slightly more appetising than the vast range of pickles, a 14th century recipe for the plague, or mince pies that were made with veal hearts and tongues (that one I vetoed pretty quickly myself). Gingerbread seemed like a safe option, and I also thought dried ginger might perhaps be easier to source than “dragon warter” – weirdly Tesco didn’t have any in stock when I asked.

So here’s what I had to work with:

Before attempting this slightly vague bake (and figuring out how/if I was going to dip the cake in a mixture of “boyling watter and ale”), I decided to do a bit of research into the history of gingerbread. When did this delicious treat make its way into our lives? The important stuff.

So, ginger root was first cultivated in China, where they used it for “medicinal and magical” purposes. Ginger is still used today in medicine to help things like travel sickness – something anticipated by John Baret in his Alvearie or triple dictionaire of 1573-80, and Henry VIII even thought it might help build up resistance to the plague in the 16th century. In Roman times, the spice was known as “zingiber” from the Sanskrit “sringavera” and was used for cooking and medicinal purposes as it travelled in from the Silk Road from the 2nd century AD. Caravans came from China full of silk, ginger and cinnamon to a meeting point in central Asia where the Romans would be able to barter for these luxury items. They loved ginger so much that a pound of the spice was worth the same as a sheep!

Ginger supplies dried up after the fall of the Roman Empire when trade routes crumbled but the spice was then reintroduced freely across Western Europe. This was supposedly with returning crusaders, or through the Venetian explorer Marco Polo in the 13th century – there is quite a bit of ambiguity here. The Germans, Austrians and Hungarians were the first to develop honey and spice flour based doughs, adding candied fruits and nuts, and in France they used a simple spice recipe called “Pain d’espice”. In Medieval England, gingerbread simply meant “preserved ginger”, with the spice being used to cover up the taste of preserved meats in the winter. By Elizabeth I’s reign, between 1533 and 1603, gingerbread was eaten by wealthy aristocrats. The queen is even credited with inventing gingerbread men by asking for the biscuits to be decorated as important members of her court for a celebration.  By the 17th century, gingerbread was being sold at fairs and for special occasions in England but it was nothing like the gingerbread we love now. Valerie Barrett explains how it was “made from stale bread, honey, pepper, aniseed, with saffron or liquorice for colouring, and ginger… mashed together, moulded or shaped and dried until hard and brittle”. Doesn’t exactly sound appetising! Treacle was introduced later in the 17th century and the recipes began to change into the biscuits and cake we know today.

Gingerbread recipes travelled to America with the first English settlers, where they swapped the sugar for golden syrup. There are many variations of gingerbread, from the decorated gingerbread men and houses (popularised after Hansel and Gretal was published in 1812), to Yorkshire Parkin or American Hot gingerbread. If you want to explore the multitude of recipes I would definitely recommend The Complete Book of Gingerbread by Valerie Barrett, The Gingerbread Book by Steven Stellingwerf and The Book of Gingerbread by Carla Capalbo (all available to read at the Bodleian Libraries, references below). Although gingerbread is now made mostly at home or bought in supermarkets, it remains a part of the European Christmas tradition.

Now that I have explored gingerbread and its roots (however ambiguous), I can unveil my 18th century creation:

Although most of the ingredients were easy to acquire, I had to settle for candied mixed peel instead of simply orange peel after checking 4 different supermarkets. I also didn’t complete the last step. Unfortunately dipping the cake in ale and water made the bake soggy and un-transportable… not ideal when I needed opinions from my colleagues! The recipe itself was questionable, with the mixture not actually coming together at all until I added some warm water, though I put this down to the ingredients probably being slightly different and also the recipe being quite vague.* Either way, it got into the oven and made the house smell like caraway and coriander seeds for quite a few days!

My colleagues all agreed this was “interesting”, something I definitely agreed with. Many thought it was almost savoury in flavour and was quite dry and dense, though most enjoyed it enough to eat a whole piece and some even went back for seconds! My favourite reviews have to be “first time I’ve been unable to finish a baked good, 1/10” and “pleasingly festive, surprisingly spicy, 6/10”.

Overall rating: 6.3/10

If you want to explore the original Radolphus Ayres cookbook, you can find and request it here on the new Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts website. Look out for some more interesting things found in the Summary Catalogue conversion project in the New Year, and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

References

The Complete Book of Gingerbread by Valerie Barrett (The Apple Press, London, 1992)

The Gingerbread Book by Steven Stellingwerf (Charles Letts and Co ltd, London, 1991)

The Book of Gingerbread by Carla Capalbo (Ebury Press, London, 1984)

John Mariani’s American Classics: Gingerbread” in Restaurant hospitality, October 1998, 82:10, pg. 86

PBS Food “The History of Gingerbread” by Tori Avery, 20 Dec 2013, URL: https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-gingerbread/

The Guardian “A Brief History of the Gingerbread House” by Antonia Wilson, 22 Dec 2018, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/dec/22/a-brief-history-of-the-gingerbread-house

* I found out at a later date that the recipe book was published in 2006, Ralph Ayres Cookery Book edited by Jane Jakeman (Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2006), and this would’ve made the recipe conversion a lot easier!

A new project in Archives and Modern Manuscripts: the conversion of the Bodleian’s Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts

The summer of 2019 saw the beginning of an exciting and much anticipated new project in Archives and Modern Manuscripts: the conversion of the Bodleian’s Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts into machine-readable format, ready for greater online accessibility through the newly launched Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts website.

What is the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts?


The Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts edited by Richard W. Hunt, Falconer Madan and P. D. Record (1915)

The Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts is key to accessing our collections. The ten volumes were compiled to list all of the Western manuscripts held by the Library, as a summary of the collection (they are aptly named), and a finding aid for researchers and readers. The first seven volumes, edited by Richard W. Hunt, Falconer Madan and P. D. Record, provide an overview of manuscripts acquired before 1915. The last three volumes, edited by Mary Clapinson and T. D. Rogers, were published in 1991 and describe acquisitions made between 1916 and 1975.

Together, the volumes of the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts describes approximately 56,000 shelfmarks (physical places within our archival storage), and thus a substantial part of our vast and eclectic collection. The material ranges from manuscripts acquired singly such as an Album of genealogical tables of ruling families of Europe and the Middle East from classical times to the 20th century, to large archives such as the archive of John Locke (full catalogue coming soon).

If you want to learn more about the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts and the acquisition of material at the Bodleian Libraries, alongside our interesting history, we highly recommend William Dunn Macray’s Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, A.D. 1598-A.D. 1867, which you can read online here. William Dunn Macray worked here at the Bodleian during the nineteenth century.

How can you discover what’s in the Summary Catalogue now?

The volumes of the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts are accessible in paper format in the Weston library and have also been digitised to be accessible remotely. Digitised scans, in PDF form, are available via SOLO: the first seven volumes are accessible here, and the last three volumes there.  The first few Summary Catalogue descriptions that we’ve converted since the project began in September have been published in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts. You can find details of what’s been published so far on our New Additions page.

Meet the team:

We are two archivists working exclusively on the project: Alice Whichelow and Pauline Soum-Paris. Our colleague Kelly Burchmore also devotes some of her time to the project.

Alice Whichelow – Hi! I qualified as an archivist in September 2019, gaining my qualification in Archives and Records Management from University College London. As a history enthusiast, getting to explore some of the lesser known treasures of the Bodleian Libraries’ collection is great, and getting to share them is even better!

Pauline Soum-Paris – After completing my Master of Archives and Records Management at the University of Liverpool, I became a qualified archivist in September 2019. With interests in languages, history and religions, I can only see the collection held by the Bodleian Libraries as a goldmine and I am looking forward to sharing a few of the gems I come across every day!

Kelly Burchmore – As a project archivist who qualified in Digital Curation in March 2019, I work mostly on modern collections. Therefore, through the conversion process I enjoy learning about the physical characteristics of more traditional archive material; it’s interesting to read about the binding of the manuscripts, and see the meticulous methods by which they were catalogued. It’s great to work with Alice and Pauline to share the value of this project, and indeed, the collections and items themselves.

What you can expect from us:

The conversion of these Summary Catalogue descriptions into machine-readable form for online discovery is now well-underway, and new descriptions will be added regularly to Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts over the course of 2020 and 2021. We will be using this blog to keep you updated on what we find, sharing blog posts about items and collections from the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts which have sparked our interests. Likewise, if you have used the Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts and have suggestions regarding items that fascinated you, do let us know in the comments. So, keep an eye out and enjoy!

Oxford College Archives

A new website for Oxford College Archives has been launched at https://oac.web.ox.ac.uk/.

Painting of Oxford students entitled 'Conversation Piece, Worcester College' by Edward HallidayThe site includes a general introduction to the archives held by the Oxford colleges, individual pages on most of the colleges (with further links to catalogues etc.) and links to associated archives in the City and University.  There is also an FAQ page, a glossary of all those odd Oxford terms, and a bibliography.  The site will be enhanced and updated regularly.

A Brief Encounter with Jane Austen’s Aunt and Cousin, Paris 1786

Eliza de Feuillide, nee Hancock (1761-1813), by an unknown artist

Visitors to the Jane Austen exhibition (Which Jane Austen?) will have seen a small diary whose anonymous author attended a party in Paris where both Jane Austen’s aunt and cousin were present.

Although the diary has been in the Bodleian since 1945, the Jane Austen connection had not been noticed until I stumbled across it in 2015. In June of that year a number of History and English students came to a workshop in the Weston Library to help us discover the authors of some anonymous manuscript travel diaries in Bodleian collections. We called the workshop ‘Travelling Incognito?’ Archivists in Special Collections surveyed the diaries briefly before the workshop to assess them for readability, condition and potential research interest. During this process, a page in one of the diaries, MS. Eng. misc. e. 250, caught my attention. The catalogue entry for the diary is brief: ‘Journal of a tour in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, late 18th cent. 60 leaves; marbled wrappers.’ The author mostly describes towns, houses and gardens he visits, and perhaps apart from his visit to the Royal Court at Versailles where he saw Marie Antoinette, there is nothing especially remarkable about the diary. No year is mentioned, but we can date it to 1786 from the correlation of days and months and some references to recent events. One or two pages for no apparent reason are written in French, and it was on one of these pages (fol. 19v ) that I noticed some interesting names in reference to a dinner in Paris on 17 June. The description of the dinner reads as follows:

Saturday 17th

… Nous avons aujourdhui dine chez Monsr. Pattle ou il se trouvait le Doct. Geary, deux Anglais, Made Hancock anglaise & sa fille[,] un Curé[,] Mde Villette & Monsr. Pattle qui se trouvait bien indispose, mais il nous a reçu avec beaucoup d’honnetété & nous a conté beaucoup d’Histoires –  Mde Hancock en des Indes & connait tres bien Mons Sumner, Mde Yorke, la famille Birch &ca. Le Doctr ma dit que sa fille etait de Monsr Hastings. …

[We dined today at Mr Pattle’s, where were Doctor Geary, two Englishwomen, Madame Hancock and her daughter, a Curé, Madame Villette and Mr Pattle, whom we found was very unwell,  but he received us with great sincerity, and recounted to us numerous stories. Madame Hancock was in the Indies, and knew well Mr Sumner, Madame Yorke, the Birch family etc. The Doctor told me that her daughter was Mr Hastings’s …]

What are we to make of this? At first I was struck by the author’s apparent interest in India. The fact that Madame Hancock had been ‘en des Indes’, and had known various people out there, was clearly of interest to the author who may well have had connections with India and the East India Company, and appears to have had mutual acquaintances there with Mrs Hancock. The name of the host, Pattle, was sufficiently unusual to be worth an internet search, so I tried my luck and put the names Pattle, Hancock, Sumner, Yorke and Birch into a search engine together with India. The results were encouraging. One ‘hit’ was on a document created by the British Library, People and Places.  A guide to materials relating to India at the British Library Western Manuscripts Collections.  This guide revealed that one Thomas Pattle had been a director of the East India Company; that Richard Sumner was also an East India Company official, and that Warren Hastings, as Governor-General of India, had corresponded with him. The names Yorke and Birch are also listed in an Indian context, but the name that really stood out was that of ‘Tisoe Saul Hancock’, Surgeon at Fort William (Bengal), especially as his name came up in the context of letters he had written to Warren Hastings. Also mentioned in the British Library Guide was ‘Mrs Hancock’. Copies of Mr Hancock’s letters to his wife and daughter, and his will, are among the papers of Sir Warren Hastings. The significance of all this is that Tysoe Hancock’s wife was Philadelphia Hancock, nee Austen. She was Jane Austen’s aunt.

Portrait of Warren Hastings by Tilly Kettle, c.1772 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

So now let us return to the dinner at Mr Pattle’s house in Paris in June 1786. Those knowledgeable about the history of Jane Austen’s family will have noted straightaway that the ‘fille’ of Mrs Hancock, also present at the dinner, must be Eliza. And of course, Eliza and her mother were in France in 1786 because Eliza had married a French Army Captain, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide. Jean-François made the mistake of making (possibly bogus) claims to aristocracy and ended up a victim of the guillotine, by which time the Hancocks had returned to England. Eliza was thus Jane Austen’s cousin, and Jane knew her well. She was 14 years older than Jane, and according to the article on Jane in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Eliza was ‘a frequent visitor to Steventon and a powerful influence on her cousins.’ Her vivacious and witty nature is thought to be reflected in the character of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, published shortly after Eliza’s death in 1813. By then, Eliza had married Jane’s brother Henry, so that she was Jane’s sister-in-law as well as her first cousin. The most interesting thing about the passage mentioning the dinner in Paris is the apparent reference to a story circulating at the time, that Eliza was the natural daughter of Warren Hastings (stated in the rather bald French, ‘sa fille etait de Mons r Hastings’). Whatever the truth or otherwise of the rumours surrounding her birth, and this subject remains controversial among Austen scholars, it is very interesting to see that the story was apparently circulating in Paris in 1786, even among those very close to Mrs Hancock and her daughter.

None of this has helped us to identify the author of MS. Eng. misc. e. 250, but it does suggest a network that might be pursued. And during the course of the Travelling Incognito workshop, the student assigned to work on this diary discovered that the author had visited Mr Pattle on 13 June. His house was in Place Royale, and the author delivered to him ‘our letters and parcels’, one of which was from Mr Hastings, thanking Mr Pattle for his offer of his services ‘on the trial’. So it certainly would appear that there is some connection between the author and Warren Hastings, and that perhaps some official business took him to Mr Pattle’s house.  Warren Hastings’s impeachment for alleged corruption in India began in 1787 and he was acquitted after a trial that lasted until 1795.

It was during this first visit that Mr Pattle invited the author to dine on the 17th. He describes Mr Pattle as a 76-year-old man with one eye. This identifies Mr Pattle as Thomas Pattle of Paris, whose will of 1788 is among the Prerogative Court of Canterbury records held at the National Archives. Mrs Maria Villette, presumably the Madame Villette noted in the diary, was a major beneficiary, in recognition of the care she had taken of Pattle and his affairs.  Julia Margaret Cameron, nee Pattle, the noted photographer and great aunt of Virginia Woolf, was Thomas Pattle’s great granddaughter.

This takes us some way from the brief entry in the anonymous diary however. Of more interest in this context is a reference to the same Thomas Pattle and his Paris residence in the correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (see  The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Electronic Edition, ed. Sprigge et. al., InteLex Corp., Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A., 2000). Just a year before the anonymous diarist met Thomas Pattle and the Hancocks in Paris, on 17 August 1785, Jeremy Bentham wrote a letter to his father, Jeremiah, on 17 August 1785:

“I scribble in haste from Mr. Pattle’s Country house at Argenteuil, formerly the House of the Marquis du Chatelet, and Residence of Voltaire, present Mrs. Villette, Mr. Pattle, Captn and Mrs. Brook and Mr. Roger Metcalfe… .”

Later in the letter he adds:

“I met your Friend Dr. Keary here on Sunday who made the most affectionate Enquiries after you.”

It may not be significant, but it was a ‘Dr Geary’ who confided to the anonymous diarist the story of Eliza Hancock’s alleged origins. The editors of the Bentham correspondence were not able to identify Dr Keary. Could our diarist have mispelt his name? The editors did have something to say about Thomas Pattle however, noting that Samuel Bentham, Jeremy’s brother,  had stayed with a Mr Pattle at Paris in 1775.

In September 1785 Jeremy Bentham wrote to Jeremiah from Florence, ending a long letter with the following:

“I don’t know that I saw Lady Craven. I had a pretence to call on her from having seen her beautiful little boy, Keppel at Mr. Pattle’s (Mrs. Villette and she are great friends) … .”

This brings us once more into the Jane Austen orbit, for she had connections with the Cravens through her great friend Martha Lloyd, and through Thomas Fowle who was betrothed to Jane’s sister Cassandra before his untimely death in the West Indies, both of whom were descended from a junior branch of the Craven family. The Countess Craven in Jane’s day, daughter in-law- of the Lady Craven  mentioned by Bentham, read and offered her opinions of some of Jane Austen’s novels, as indeed did Warren Hastings (see footnotes in the The Letters of Jane Austen  published by OUP, 1995; online database version published by InteLex Corp., Charlottesville, 2004).

The diary remains on display in the Which Jane Austen? exhibition in the Weston Library until 29 October.

The Simon Digby Oriental Collection – curation and care

 In April of 2015, the Trustees of the Simon Digby Memorial Trust deposited a large collection of Oriental Manuscripts belonging to the Late Simon Digby (1932-2010) with the Special Collections Department of the Bodleian Libraries. Almost a year later, the collection was officially donated to the Library.

Mr. Simon Digby, a descendent of Sir Kenelm Digby (d. 1665), whose Western and Oriental manuscript collection the Bodleian Library also holds, was a Fellow of Wolfson College, and a scholar, linguist, translator, and collector. He was Assistant Keeper of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum from 1972. Above all a lover of India, Mr. Digby spent a great deal of time in that country (indeed, he was born and died there). However, the bulk of his collection was amassed in Britain at the auctions of manuscripts from the collections of Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hall (d. 1872); Sir Richard Burn, KCIE, ICS (d. 1947); A. H. Harley (d. 1951); and others.

MS. S. Digby Or. 210 – A 15th-century illuminated manuscript of poetry from Herat in Afghanistan.

The Simon Digby Oriental Collection consists of over 260 manuscripts the majority of which are in Persian, with a handful in languages such as Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, and some in Indian languages including Sanskrit and Gujarati. The collection contains important and rare works in the fields of Indian history, biographies of Sufi Saints, and biographies and poetry of the Persian Poets of the Sabk-i Hindī or Indian Style.

Upon arrival in the Library in April 2015, the entire collection was sent to a specialist conservation laboratory for thorough drying and cleaning. When the books returned, some months later, staff in the Oriental Department began work assigning new shelfmarks, making observations on the general condition of each book and measuring each volume for a custom made archival box. Certain items were also flagged up for extra care from the conservation department of the Library.

Each manuscript is housed in its own custom-made archival box.

At the same time, work began on cataloguing the collection for which Mr. Digby’s extensive notes and handlist proved very useful. These notes together with information obtained through examination of the volumes were converted into online catalogue records in the Fihrist database – a UK based union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamic world. Browse the S. Digby Oriental Collection on the Fihrist Database [work-in-progress]. To date, 168 entries appear on Fihrist, and work is currently underway to catalogue from scratch the remaining works for which no notes exist.

Detail from MS. S. Digby Or. 129 – A history of the coinage of India.

Speaking about the Library’s acquisition of the S. Digby Collection, Bahari Curator of Persian Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, Alasdair Watson, said, “Mr. Digby was, perhaps, one of the last of the true ‘gentleman collectors’, and his collection is substantial both in terms of numbers of items as well as richness of content. Acquiring a collection such as this is a really once-in-a-lifetime experience for any library curator and it is a great privilege to be involved in its long-term preservation and care as well as in helping to make it available for scholarly study.”

 

 

 

 

Index of Chandra Shum Shere manuscript collection now digitized

Chandra Shum Shere1On 20th December, the Bodleian’s Clay Sanskrit Librarian, Dr. Camillo Formigatti, was pleased to be able to announce the launch of a complete digital version of the Index Catalogue of MSS. Chandra Shum Shere by T. Gambier Parry, revised and completed by E. Johnston. This small project was made possible by a generous grant from the Max Müller Memorial Fund.

The PDF files are available on the Finding Aids – Oriental Manuscripts & Rare Books: South and Inner Asia webpage of the Oxford LibGuides website. They are listed under the section Sanskrit. Dr. Formigatti has prepared a set of three different files:

• Index Catalogue of MSS. Chandra Shum Shere vol. 1 (A-Tarpaṇa)
• Index Catalogue of MSS. Chandra Shum Shere vol. 2 (Tarpaṇa-Muktāvalī)
• Index Catalogue of MSS. Chandra Shum Shere vol. 3 (Muktāvalī-Haumikaprāyaścitta-Modern Indian Languages)

Each file is available in two different resolutions: the first for fast internet connections and fit for printing, the second for slower internet connections and to be displayed on-screen. All files are provided with bookmarks for easy navigation.

We hope this basic navigation tool will help all manuscript lovers to find their way through the thousands of manuscripts in this valuable collection.

Thai Manuscript Conservation Association Workshop at the Bodleian

On 14th and 15th December staff from Bodleian Special Collections and Digital Library Systems and Services welcomed representatives from the Manuscript Conservation Association of Thailand. Delegates included Mr. Boonlert Sananon, President of the MCA, Mr. Boonlue Burarnsan, Vice President of the MCA, and Mrs. Phatchanun Bunnag, Registrar of the MCA.

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During the first day of the workshop delegates discussed the latest developments in TEI /XML cataloguing standards for Thai manuscripts at the Centre for Digital Scholarship. On the morning of second day of the workshop the delegates visited the Conservation workshop. This was followed by a lecture by given Mr Saneh Mahapol, from the Fine Arts Department of the Ministry of Culture on the conservation of palm leaf books in Thailand.

The workshop ended with delegates helping the library to identify and make basic TEI descriptions of uncatalogued Thai manuscripts in the Bodleian’s collection.

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A Mughal Hunt Manuscript shown as the Artist Intended

One of the joys of working for the Bodleian is the capacity of manuscripts to surprise. During the final preparations for The hunt in Mughal India exhibition , I was asked to look at the mount of one of the manuscripts for display (MS. Ouseley Add. 171, f. 6r). The 1947 mount tightly framed the miniature, which is painted in subdued greens and browns. When folded back from the miniature, the artist’s border of warm pink and gold was revealed, bringing the whole composition to life. It was a pleasure to give permission for the old mount cover to be removed so the picture could be displayed as the artist had originally intended it to be seen.

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A further hidden masterpiece that cannot be shown in the exhibition is the reverse of the painting of the nobleman hunting with a decoy blackbuck (MS. Douce Or. b. 3, f. 29r), which is covered with exquisite calligraphy. The relationship between the calligraphic panel and the painting has yet to be fully researched.

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The hunt in Mughal India exhibition runs until the 8th of January and is open to the public. Readers at the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library can also see an associated exhibit of modern printed books relating to the theme of the Mughal hunt.

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