Westcountry Studies, issue 6

Westcountry Studies a bibliographical newsletter on Devon and its region Issue 6 January 2019

Into 2019 ...

As our ship of state seems hell bent on setting sail into uncharted waters, casting off from Europe after the great majority of 38% of the registered electorate voted to do so, we start this issue with a different image from Devon's Ship of fools than the book fool which has become a symbol for the Devon bibliography. It also seems an appropriate occasion for a few historical notes on Devon's bookish relations with Europe and the wider world.

Devon bibliography and the wider world

The earliest documented link between Devon and Europe is through Crediton born Saint Boniface. During his missionary travels in Germany in the 740s he wrote several times to England. In about 747 he developed an interest in the works of Bede. He wrote to Abbot Hutebert of Wearmouth asking him to sent him Bede's writings. in a letter to Bishop Daniel in the early 740s where he asked for the book of the Prophets that Winbert of Nursling left on his death. It had large clear letters and no copy was available in Germany suitable for his failing eyesight. It was impossible for him to read the small abbreviated script of the manuscripts circulating there.

Some 135 manuscripts from the medieval library of Exeter Cathedral are known to survive today. Many are now in the Bodleian Library, and examination shows that they were probably produced not in a scriptorium at Exeter, but in Normandy with which Devon had close links, not least through the supply of Caen stone for the fabric of the Cathedral. They were probably the gifts of successive Bishops of Exeter including Bishop Osbern (1072-1103) and his successor Bishop William Warelwast (1107-37). One of them even has a self-portrait of the Norman scribe Hugo Pictor.  

In the first century of printing readers in Devon were reliant on Europe for the supply of Latin publications as most printing in England was in the vernacular. In 1509 an inventory of all the treasures and goods of Exeter Cathedral only seven of the 625 volumes in the Cathedral's possession are listed as being printed. It is unlikely that the compiler of the inventory omitted many printed items, indeed the very fact that he indicates that they were "arte impressorie" implies that they were something of a novelty. Five of the volumes belong to one set, the commentary of Abbas (Nicholas Panormitanus de Tudeschis) on the Decretals, a massive compilation on canon law which had first appeared in print in Venice as early as the 1470s. They formed part of a small group of 38 volumes out of the total of 374 housed in the Cathedral Library which were unchained, perhaps because they were less highly regarded than the manuscript volumes or perhaps because they were recent additions. No English editions of the Decretals are known, so this set of volumes would have had to cross the Channel. 

In the whole of the south west of England there was only a single press during the first century of printing. This was set up in the precinct of Tavistock Abbey. Like other provincial presses it does not appear to have been very active, indeed only two titles are recorded as being printed there. The first in 1525 was The boke of comfort called in laten Boecius de consolatione philosophie. The imprint of this book reads "Enprinted in the exempt monastery of Tauestok in Denshyre. By me Dan Thomas Rychard monke of the sayd Monastery. The 272 page quarto, was printed in two black letter fonts, both of which lacked the letter "w" and thus were probably of French origin, with a wooduct of God seated, holding an orb and cross and surrounded by the emblems of the four evangelists. There is an ill-assorted collection of French-style border pieces, one of which is used upside down. 

Printed books of a more modest nature than those in the Cathedral were arriving in Exeter in the first years of the sixteenth century through the activities of Exeter's first recorded bookseller, Martin Coeffin.

His name first appears in the imprint of two schoolbooks printed for him in Rouen. The earlier in date is the vocabulary known from its first three words as Os, facies, mentum (translated as "a mouthe a face a chyne") which was printed by 'Laurentij Hostingue et Iameti Loys' in about 1505. It is now represented by a unique copy in the Folger Library. Coeffin was a native of Normandy and the second known Exeter bookseller, John Gropall, was also an alien, probably from Lombardy.  

William of Orange almost certainly had the services of a printer when he reached Exeter in 1688. In view of the illegality of any press in Exeter in 1688 we would have to look to London for an appropriate printer. The printer whose initials J. B. appears on items with an Exeter imprint in 1688 and 1689 is is John Bringhurst, a Quaker, who printed extensively for the Friends between 1681 and 1685, at which date he disappears. He is known to be in Holland in June 1688 when on the 4th of that month the death by consumption his son John, aged 5, is recorded in the Quaker burial registers at Friends House. William was advised by Harbord to bring a press with him on his voyage to England. The memorial of Admiral Herbert, Sept-Oct 1688 says "I shall referre in many things to Mr Harbord's project and begin with a printing presse. Additionally as it was uncertain where William would land, it would be highly coincidental if he found a press awaiting him in the nearest large town. A likely course of events is that William's aides found Bringhurst in Holland and arranged for him to accompany the expedition as printer.

During the 17th and 18th centuries readers in Devon were reliant on books printed in Europe for works in Latin as few works were printed in the classical languages outside Oxford and Cambridge. In Exeter virtually no works were printed in Latin before 1800, the main exceptions being medical and antiquarian books by William Musgrave. The table below shows the progressive decline of the representationof works in Latin and of foreign imprints up to the mid-18th century. 

Libary	Barnstaple		Tiverton		Totnes
Period	% in English	Foreign imprints	% in English	Foreign imprints	% in English	Foreign imprints
16th century	6%	91%	0%	94%	28%	67%
1600-49	47%	45%	22%	62%	57%	56%
1650-99	50%	30%	57%	11%	---	---
1700-49	77%	0%	78%	4%	---	---

Proportions of books in English and printed abroad in Devon parish libraries

The dominance of the London book trade limited the overseas links of the Devon trade in the 17th and 18th centuries although London agents employed by book collectors such as Richard Coffin at Portledge in north Devon had access to extensive supplies of European books through auction sales or attending the Frankfurt book fairs. Otherwise the main evidence of overseas links is the publication of travel works by Exeter presses, such as the adventures of Joseph Pitts of Exeter in the Near East A true and faithful account of the religion and manners of the Mohammetans, printed by S. Farley, for the Exeter booksellers Philip Bishop, and Edward Score in 1704 or Andrew Brice's massive work, first issued in mumbers over several years The grand gazetteer, or topographic dictionary, both general and special, and antient as well as modern, &c. Being A succinct but comprehensive Geographical Description of the various Countries of the habitable known World, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America printed by and for the Author, at his Printing-House, in North-Gate-Street, Exon,  in 1759, a totsal of 1446 folio pages with maps.

The spread of printing in Africa in the 19th century was greatly promoted by the involvement of missionaries and Devon played its role in this. Henry Townsend was born in 1815 in Exeter, England, into the printing family of James Townsend and his early experiences served him well. After a number of adventurous years he ended at the mission in Abeokuta. After the ministerial vocation, printing became the first skill the Church Missionary Society mission introduced to the Yoruba people through Townsend. When he began to publish in 1859 the Iwe Irohin, a newspaper he produced in English and Yoruba, he published the first newspaper in what is now Nigeria. In 2009, during the celebration of the 150th anniversary of print media in Nigeria, his name was honorably mentioned. Townsend’s hands-on learning in the printing business led to the publication of many materials for worship, devotional, and educational purposes in the mission, including several hymns which he compiled and printed as the first Hymn Book in Yoruba. He also put together a Primer in Yoruba. In retirement, he compiled a new and enlarged edition of the Yoruba Hymn Book and saw through the press two Yoruba School-books, an edition of Yoruba version of the Book of Common Prayer corrected, and the Peep of day in Yoruba. 

The firm of Townsend continued its interest in Africa into the 20th century, printing an English-Ibo Phrase Book in 1920 and the same year N~wed iquo¨ ke Efik  in Efik, a language spoken in Calabar, Nigeria, a volume containing 245 hymns.

In the 20th century the Exeter printers Wheatons, prolific publishers of school books, was also working for overseas markets. In 1960 appeared Pepereksaan masok ka-sekolah menengah Persekutuan Tanah Melayu : petua dan chontoh soal-soalan bahasa kebangsaan, Malayan secondary schools entrance examination : simple grammar and specimen papers in national language  by Chegu Kamil. In the 1960s Wheatons was also publishing geography textbooks and atlases for African schools. 

In 1986 Wheatons became part of Maxwell's British Printing and Communications Corporation, then the largest printing group in Britain, owning more than 40 companies. The firm employed more than 300 staff in Exeter and were capable of producing 300,000 books a week. Educational publishing remained important and they also printed for the British and Foreign Bible Society. Maxwell's links with the eastern block brought a number of unusual contracts. In 1984 they printed Deng Xiaoping's speeches for Maxwell's Pergamon Press. It formed part of the Leaders of the world series. There was a visit by a Chinese delegation which was thoughtfully presented with Express and Echo 80th anniversary tankards and in 1989 Wheatons printed an official reference book The German Democratic Republic.

It was probably the presence in Exeter of Wheatons and Pergamon which encouraged the Dutch publishers of academic journals and textbooks to set up a branch office, Elsevier Science  in Bampfylde Street, Exeter in 1994. Their office still remains in Exeter, but will it continue to do so after bidet? 

These few links were scrambled together in haste - any additional information will be gratefully received.

Friends Reunited

Reference 5203M in the Devon Record Office is a motley collection of material relating to the Baring-Gould family. Apart from correspondence and other archival material relating to Baring-Gould, it also contains boxes of books rescued from the cellars of Killerton. These were items not presentable enough to fill the shelves of the library at Killerton, so they did not move to the University of Exeter Special Collections when they were transferred from Killerton a few years ago. The whole lot had been moved from Lewtrenchard Manor in the 1970s when former Plymouth librarian Bill Best-Harris made a selection from the family library there to fill the empty shelves at Killerton when the property passed to the National Trust. As a result sets of volumes had been split between the three locations. It was a happy event to see the books collected from Lewtrenchard and the Record Office unwrapped and placed next to their colleagues in the special collections room of the University, reunited after almost half a century. Three other items also found their place in the Devon Record Office: a typescript account of Edward Sabine's diary of his scientific expedition to Greenland in 1818 and a a massive folio volume with the spine title "Misc arms", a manuscript with the bookplate of Carolus Pole and an inscription "Ex libris Edward Pole de Templeton". It contains pencil notes by Sabine Baring-Gould. Some 17th century material appears to be traced and pasted in, other material was added later probably in the 18th or early 19th century - but the archivists will know better than I. It contains many delicately drawn vignette symbols, the significance of which escaped me on a cursory examination. These two volumes came from the University of Exeter.  The third item came from the Shacklock Collection in Lewtrenchard - correspondence linked to the publication of Cliff castles and cave dwellings of Europe in 1910/11 as well as a series of SBG's original pen and ink drawings and watercolours.

Know Your Place and Etched on Devon's Memory

Following the concern expressed about the loss of the Etched on Devon's Memory website following the transfer from Devon County Council to South West Heritage Trust there is an exciting new prospect for accessing the images of several thousand early engravings of Deon held in the Westcountry Studies Library. Know Your Place, an interactive map based website developed by the City of Bristol, has recently been extended to Devon. It is possible to move a slider across between two base layers of mapping and see how any area in the county has changed over time. For Devon the base layers so far represented are the Ordnance Survey County Series 1:2500 (about 25 inches to a mile) and 1:10560 (six inch to a mile) maps for Dartmoor, the first edition (typically 1885/90) and second edition (typically 1905/06) as well as the extremely detailed 1:500 town plans (1879/88) which can be overlaid against the 2017 Ordnance Survey mapping. Other base layers available are the manuscript tithe surveys for the years around 1840, the earliest detailed mapping using modern techniques of surveying which covers the majority of the county, vertical aerial photographs of the entire county dating from 1946 and, for Exeter and Plymouth the Goad insurance maps covering the period 1888/1931 - probably the most detailed of any early maps with considerable information on the structure of buildings. These were updated by visits from Goad and I remember from days working in Guildhall Library in the 1960s an individual turning up at the enquiry desk armed with a set of sheets, paste-pot and scissors. The maps would be produce and updated by the careful pasting-on of the ground plans of buildings that had changed. To these basemaps can be added information layers of points, lines or polygons for area information, such as conservation areas.  The main information added so far is for the Devon Historic Environment Record  (formerly the Sites and Monuments Register - Exeter, Plymouth, Torbay, Dartmoor and Exmoor maintain their own HER records, so full coverage is not yet available there. There is also a community layer, to which anyone can contribute, entries being moderated by staff at SWHT. There is also a facility for other collections. Devon suffrage activists and Crediton Local History are the only collections featured at present, but this is where Etched on Devon's Memory could fit in. It would be possible to click on a point or polygon and see a catalogue entry for the engraving together with any associated text from contemporary topographical writings and an image of the engraving, much as was done in the original Etched project. Of course this is not the complete answer as it is difficult to provide geo-referencing for landscapes and general town views, so some form of bibliographical access to engravings will still be required. The original engravings and lithographs, being published items still need to be included in the Devon Bibliography and it is to be hoped that the metadata held in the SWHT database can be made available to the Devon bibliography as it is revised for inclusion in Know Your Place. 

The Devon Bibliography and the Devon and Exeter Institution

After discussions with the Devon and Exeter Institution it is hoped to start loading the Devon bibliography onto its website during February. This will give it a more solid institutional base than the blogsite that presently hosts it and hopefully make it more findable and indeed fundable. In a recent email Brian Randall, the compiler of the website Genuki revealed that he had only just located the website. He writes:

I have just stumbled across, and been absolutely delighted by, your Devon Bibliography pages. I have of course added an appropriate link to them. When the DRO merged with the Southwest Heritage Trust they caused chaos to lots of my links, and led to my spending much time trying to find where various web pages had gone to, with apparently lost ones in the Internet Archive, etc. However this was nothing compared to what I see you have achieved in this regard - and I’m delighted to see you are continuing to develop this valuable resource. I see you are getting some support - but do you have many people actually helping you?

His last question could also be answered by the move to the DEI as it has a wealth of library expertise and commitment among its trustees, staff and volunteers. It has also renewed its links with the University of Exeter with exciting possibilities of involvement of students and researchers. Already there is the prospect of collaboration in indexing periodicals for the bibliography and there is work in hand on improving the indexing of Ordnance Survey maps. These developments have prompted much thought on how to maintain local studies in Devon. An article has been submitted for peer review for a special issue on the theme "Community and small archives: evaluating, preserving, accessing, and engaging with community-based archival heritage" in the international journal Global knowledge, memory and communication (formerly Library review). It was presented as a discussion paper and case study and it is stated in conclusion:

Devon's example may not be relevant for other parts of the world faced with funding problems, indeed it may not prove possible within Devon to realise all the proposals made in this paper. Nevertheless it may encourage others to think across existing structures when looking for a way of safeguarding the community's local studies documentation and also to see that the solutions of an earlier age might offer a way forward in the digital era.

An edited extract is given below and the full draft paper can be supplied on request but should not be distributed more widely before publication. 

Re-imagining local studies in Devon.

In Devon there is now no designated local studies staff [to serve the fifty public libraries] outside Plymouth. Reference collections of published material are being inadequately maintained. Current publications are not being actively sought and documented and the level of intake of books, pamphlets, periodicals, maps and ephemera is much diminished, if one is to judge from figures for Devon titles recorded by the on-line public access catalogues.

Given the level of funding available to the library service from local authorities, wonders have been achieved. Relieved of the albatross inheritance of local studies and also of traditional reference services, Libraries Unlimited, a charitable trust which now runs public libraries on behalf of Devon County Council and Torbay Council, has not had to close any of its 50 libraries. The use of volunteers has forged close links with the community. Freed from local authority constraints they have managed to obtain new funding. The service has reinvented itself, being nominated a New Radical by Nesta (the innovation foundation) in 2018. The South West Heritage Trust has also achieved much, despite diminished resources, winning the Record Keeping Service of the Year award in 2015, but this is largely in the field of museums in Somerset and archives in Somerset and Devon. No blame can therefore be attached to the service providers but the public local studies library service has certainly suffered disproportionately from the effects of austerity in Devon.

Local record offices are a relatively recent arrival on the heritage scene in England and Wales and there are only three located in the historic county of Devon, based in Exeter, Barnstaple and Plymouth. [...]

The organisation Devon Museums records more than thirty museums and heritage centres across the county; in fact there are more than sixty service points in this sector if fifteen houses with extensive document collections which are open to the public are included. Many of these have local history or friends societies attached, most are accredited through the Arts Council and some have their document collections recognised in Archon by The National Archives. Apart from this there are also many other local history societies in the county. The county organisation, the Devon History Society, has 62 affiliated organisations, but knows of at least a further 43 groups active in the county who are unaffiliated – a total exceeding 100. While not all of these have archives of their own, many members have great expertise and often considerable collections are scattered across the community. Members provide a rich source of volunteers and their research interests do not take them solely to the major centres in Exeter, Plymouth, Barnstaple or Torquay but to more local resource centres. It is perhaps significant that of the twenty service points that have been set up by the Devon Record Office, to provide local access to archival material such as parish registers and tithe apportionments, sixteen are in museums or heritage centres and only four in libraries.

Also in the local studies landscape are a group of perhaps 25 community archives. These do not deal in archives as strictly defined, some being devoted principally to collecting images, for example the Totnes Image Bank has a database of some 60,000 images. The Devon Rural Archive has been undertaking an extensive survey and documentation of manor houses in the county. The Beaford Archive is one of the largest, a photographic record of people in rural North Devon, containing more than 80,000 images by James Ravilious and Roger Deakins. According to the Royal Photographic Society, it is “a unique body of work, unparalleled, at least in this country, for its scale and quality”. Largest of all is the South West Image Bank, made up of some 200 individual collections and close to one million negatives, including those of the Western Morning News newspaper. They often derive from Manpower Services Commission or National Lottery funded projects, sometimes initiated by local studies organisations and linked to local museums. Many are registered with Archon and have received accreditation. A listing of Devon collections of all kinds is under compilation as part of the Devon bibliography.

Finally mention must be made of networks that both produce and distribute local publications. There are some 35 tourist information centres across the county, local authorities at regional, county, district, town and parish level, public utilities, health, police, fire and rescue services, research bodies in universities and other education centres, historical and archaeological bodies, often attached to museums and publishers both within and outside Devon. All these need to be involved in continuing to record the present in order to preserve the past for the future. How can this be achieved?

Local studies in Devon should cease to be under the umbrella of the archives service and transfer to museums. Its centre of administration and operations should be located in Exeter, Devon's county town.

An objection to this move is that there is no county service for museums in Devon, but in some ways that is its strength. Local studies are by definition locally focused and that makes engagement with the local community essential. Even at a time when there were more resources available to public libraries there was a thinning of the network of communication and coverage as distances from Exeter increased. This isolation has been only partly overcome by the arrival of the internet.  The Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter has acted as a hub museum under the Renaissance programme for regional museums from 2002 to 2011 and is now a Major Partner Museum under the Arts Council England programme of strategic investment to ensure that a network of advice and support is available for all accredited museums as well as those working for accreditation. It has recently appointed a finds liaison officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme covering the whole of Devon. It is already providing a co-ordinating role in Devon to which local studies documentation could be added. Ironically this would set the clock back more than a century to Victorian times. Exeter voted to adopt the Public Libraries Act in 1869 and when it was opened the following year the public library was located in the Royal Albert Memorial which also housed the Museum and a School of Art. It was not until 1930 that the public library service moved to separate premises.

Another advantage of the move would be that museums have a wider remit than archives. It is not just that they collect artefacts, works of art and specimens; their subject coverage is wider, frequently including the region's environment, geology, natural history, art and literature. They include contemporary and secondary source material in their collections while archives, by the strict definition that guides the work of major record offices, limit their collecting to documents of an historical nature. This definition of archives is based on that of the Society of American Archivists: Primary source documents created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and collective control.  

The move of a co-ordinating role for local studies from libraries or archives to museums in Devon does not envisage the moving of existing collections but the establishment of a small co-ordinating group to advise on current publications and maintain a retrospective union listing of non-archival documentation, particularly published material, both in printed and digital form. This would require the setting up and editing of an on-line database to which password access would be given for publishers and cataloguers in collections across Devon to add to and amend records – not so much a bibliography as a wikiography. The structure would have to be compatible with standard bibliographical practices such as MARC, AACR as updated by RDA and the Dublin Core while avoiding the complex coding and proprietary formats involved with many software applications. As most of the contributors will be volunteers, any system must be kept as simple as possible. The pooling of effort in this way is essential to ensure the maintenance of the knowledge base relating to Devon's heritage across more than 400 communities at a time when resources are so stretched.  

Such a database would reveal gaps in collecting and it is here that museums could become repositories of such published material. Much of the material is available cheaply or free of charge or can be downloaded once identified, has visual appeal, and items will become historical artefacts in their own right.

The maintenance of such a wikiography in Exeter could be undertaken through the Devon and Exeter Institution [...] the only institution in Exeter with the appropriate local studies expertise, the University of Exeter having delegated to the Institution the maintenance of research collections relating to the region, but it would require additional external funding. The setting up of such a collaboration between Exeter's major museum and the Institution would set the clock back two centuries to 1813 as the Royal Albert Memorial received the bulk of the Institution's museum collections when it was set up in 1869.  

The setting up of such a union listing would require a project funded by the National Lottery, Arts Council or other sources [...] The project officer would preferably be a qualified librarian with experience or interest in local studies. An assistant might also be required to assist in the surveys, edit records and maintain communication with participants across the county. It is envisaged that such a project could last 12-18 months.

To maintain the work after the project's completion on-going funding would be required to employ a local studies liaison officer to edit and develop the bibliographical database. As networks would have already been set up and no public service point would be maintained, a single member of staff assisted by volunteers from across Devon should be sufficient. Funding could be through shared contributions from local authorities (county, district and town councils), museums, libraries and other interested bodies. Publishers might also see the benefit of their output being more actively promoted, perhaps through on-line or published newsletters and listings.

There is a wealth of local expertise and enthusiasm in local organisations across the county. There is also a need for researchers to be able to access and locate local documentation in a structured and reliable form and for that documentation to be located and collected for posterity. In an age of digital dysfunction, fake news, social media, commercial interests, subscription services and other closed groups Devon cannot rely on the wider world to collect, document and promote its heritage assets. [...]

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This page last updated 31 January 2019