During the Hour we received advice on how to use an early modern public library to research local history and how local history can in turn be used to research a library. While these libraries are interesting in their own right by studying them we can learn a great deal about the people and politics within a community.

Anna started by providing a detailed overview on public libraries in England from the sixteenth century onwards. Learning that ‘public’ had a different meaning we heard how libraries across England were set up to provide educational, mostly religious, books to serve local communities by disseminating knowledge through elites. From the end of the sixteenth century there was a movement to provide collections large enough that we can begin to call them libraries with a wave of public library establishment up to the outbreak of the civil wars in the 1640s. Libraries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to be concentrated in commercial towns, often with a strong religious culture. They were sometimes housed in purpose-built buildings but also in churches, schools and town halls. We have notable provincial examples such as Chethams in Manchester but see them in towns across the county such as Leicester, Dorchester and Ipswich.

After the civil wars library building began again and existing libraries received renewed attention. Toward the later seventeenth century there was a move from local collections being purposefully collated to collections formed from bequests by people who had amassed a large number of books. There was increased effort to provide libraries within smaller parishes and even discussions of a national plan for libraries across the country. The plan which eventually took off was the result of the work of Thomas Bray who with support provided ‘Bray libraries’ for parishes, campaigned for an increase in independently founded libraries, including lending libraries, and was able to pass the Parochial Libraries Act in 1709. From the early eighteenth century there was growing enthusiasm for libraries, older libraries reviewed their collections and book clubs, library societies and subscription libraries were established.

Anna closed with how we might research libraries ourselves. We can do this by looking at the people who were involved in providing the books such as through records of their bequests or subscription schemes. We can look at inscriptions in books, catalogues and inventories. While early public libraries weren’t established to lend books by the eighteenth century we begin getting borrower’s registers. The library established by Andrew Cranston in Reigate has an existing eighteenth century borrowers register. Within library collections which survive we can also get local books collected which would be of interest to the historian. Many collections have since been broken up but can sometimes be found together, often in larger collections. It is worth distinguishing between libraries which survive or partially survive (which we generally know about, but often haven't had a lot of research) and libraries which have been dispersed and might not be known about, but which we can sometimes discover existed through things like town accounts, bequests in wills, the odd book turning up in another collection. Anna ended on a very positive note that there are still public libraries to be rediscovered and that historians with localised knowledge are in an ideal position to discover them.

We moved from Anna’s overview to Helen’s study of Thomas Plume’s library in Maldon, Essex. Born in the town in 1630 Plume had a long and successful career in the Church during which he accumulated a large collection of books and manuscripts. Among many other treasurers we saw on screen his notes on Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the great seventeenth century work of English political philosophy. To house his books after his death Plume acquired the derelict church of St Peter, Maldon, keeping the tower and adding a two-story building. This collection of over 8,000 books included, manuscripts, clergyman’s notebooks and around 1,600 unbound pamphlets which are rare survivals. When Plume died the books were shipped from the libraries he had used during his life in casks and a list was made called the ‘cask list’. They were then unloaded onto the shelves wherever they fitted. Because the books were arranged like this rather than by genre and were bound very plainly without names on the spine the library has a special system of counting across the shelves to find the book they want. Plume’s collection had much of the religious focus of other libraries of this period but he had broad interests such as geography and natural history. The books were kept on the top floor and the grammar school was moved into the ground floor, a common arrangement in libraries of the time. Our audience received encouragement from Helen to visit. An offer which many will surely take up.

Following the talks we had some excellent questions come through for Helen and Anna to answer. One was on how far the advent of print changed the nature of libraries. The upheaval, dispersal, and destruction of institutional libraries at monasteries and the universities (because of politics and Reformation) coincided with the growth of print. Although books were still expensive, the influx of printed books brought them within the price range of more people. So, at a time that many existing collections were being depleted or destroyed, there was less incentive to keep on top of new or renewed shared, communal collections because people could buy their own books. Libraries certainly existed in university colleges and cathedrals in the mid sixteenth century, but it was private libraries which really grew in this period. However, public, shared and institutional libraries caught up again from the late sixteenth century. The sheer quantity of books meant they could acquire much larger collections, and that many more collections could be built. Anxieties over managing all this new knowledge in printed form fed into ideas of the role of the librarian in a) systematising it, and b) producing new knowledge.

This feeds into another question we had. During her talk Helen mentioned the ‘Library Keeper’ at Plume’s Library who was appointed to look after the books. We had a question over when librarian became established as an occupation. This is hard to answer. Thomas Bodley of Bodleian library fame was one in the early seventeenth century, but Plume’s Library Keeper could have other jobs as a vicar or schoolmaster so he wasn’t in the library as a full time job. the idea of the professional, full time specialist librarian developed in mainland Europe in sixteenth century (but elsewhere in the rest of world) and was imported to England at the end of the century. Thomas James at the Bodleian is notable for being employed solely in that capacity, rather than say being a fellow or chaplain with added library duties, and there was lots of discussion in the seventeenth century on the role of librarians and their contribution to scholarship. More and more librarians were employed over this period. Having said that, few libraries or private collectors had the resources to employ full time librarians this kind of library management was often out of the reaches of the smaller provincial collections. In terms of provincial public libraries, it would be common for a local schoolmaster or clergyman to take on that job part time (with varied attentiveness), either paid or, more commonly, unpaid.

BALH thanks Helen and Anna for sharing their knowledge with us in an informative and enjoyable summary and for their help putting together this summary. They have provided a reading list below for you to begin your own research on early modern public libraries.

BALH’s next Local History Hour will be on Thursday 29th July with Professor David Killingray and Dr Anna Cusack presenting on ‘Marginalised lives in localities’ with a particular focus on eighteenth century London. We hope to see many of you there.

Further reading:

www.thomasplumeslibrary.co.uk

R.A. Doe and C.C. Thornton, ed., Dr Thomas Plume, 1630-1704: His life and legacies in Essex, Kent and Cambridge (2020)

Michael Perkins revised ed. Neil Ker, A Dictionary of the Parochial Libraries of the Church of England and the Church in Wales. (2004)

Thomas Kelly, Early Public Libraries (1966)

Paul Kaufman, ‘’The Community Library: A Chapter in English Social History’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 57, no. 7 (1967)

Individual studies, often in local studies journals and as MA/PhD theses.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the British Association for Local History (BALH). Any content provided by our contributors is of their own opinion and is not intended to malign any individual, group, organisation, or entity.