Westcountry Studies. Issue 29, February 2023

 

Westcountry Studies a bibliographical newsletter on Devon and its region Issue 29 February 2023

Norden revealed!

17th century communities in Devon, people and their landscape in the Norden Survey of 1613.

I was pleased to be able to attend the event at the Devon Heritage Centre on 27 January 2023, along with about forty other people, to have a preview of the transcript of the original manuscript, CLA/044/03/004/041, now part of the London Metropolitan Archives. 

Des Atkinson, the project director, outlined the nature of the project, which covers eight manors in Devon which are crown lands (Ashburton, Dunkeswell, Bradninch, Ottery St. Mary, Bovey Tracey, Exeter Castle, Heathfield  and Buckfastleigh) each with a detailed survey but, apart from the Castle in Exeter, the smallest of the estates, without the detailed maps which accompany other of Norden's surveys, for example in Hertfordshire.

 

It forms part of the Corporation of the City London archives which also holds several other Westcountry surveys by Norden in its Royal Contract Estates collection:

CLA/044/03/004/003 J. Norden's survey of certain manors lands and tenements ... in ... Dorset (Langton Hering, Long Breedie, Sturminster, Ryme extrinsica or Out Ryme; and Hermitage Woods and St Johns Lands parcell of Fordington) ... Feb/Mar 1615/6. 17 folios. Former reference: R.C.E. Rentals Box 4.3

CLA/044/05/042 John Norden's survey of the manors of Portland and Wyke, Co. Dorset, Limpsham Co. Somerset; and Newbury Co. Berks. 1622. ca 75 folios

CLA/044/05/054 John Norden's perambulation of the manors of Steeple Ashton and Cheriel Co. Wilts. 1615. 83 folios.

The text of the survey was transcribed by an enthusiastic team of volunteers in each parish and, before I had to resign as treasurer for FODA and the Norden Project because of personal commitments, I was able to attend several meetings to observe the training, which covered such matters as deciphering the handwriting, interpreting the terminology, identifying place-names, and grappling with geographical information systems. We were able to have a preview of the transcript as it would appear in the printed volume, together with an introduction, and Irene Andrew was able to demonstrate how the surveys could be accessed online through the South West Heritage Trust's website. Unfortunately I could not stay for the second half where Richard Knights spoke on applying geographical information systems to Norden's surveys, but I am sure fuller details will be given on the SWHT's and FODA's websites.

John Norden was much appreciated in Devon, even in the remote northern parts of the county in the parish of Alwington, near Bideford where in the 1680 Richard Coffin was building his extensive library at Portledge. 

On or around 21 November 1687 Richard Lapthorne bid on behalf of Richard Coffin at the auction of William Cecil, Lord Burleigh's books (Munby and Coral 1687/22) for at least three lots:

• Page 88 MSS Eng fo 9. Wicklif's Book of Postils or Sermons in old English upon vellum. £7 - 02- 6.
• Page 89: MSS Eng fo 24. Norden (Jo.) His Speculum Britanniae, with a Topographical and Historical Description of Cornwall. 
• Page 92: MSS Her fo 29. A book of Visitation of the Arms and Genealogies of the Gentry of Devonshire]. £1 - 10 - 00.

In an undated letter, but probably about Saturday 17 December 1687 Lapthorn wrote to Coffin: The manuscripts being sold this weeke there [is got for] you only The Vissitation for Devonshire don by they say a man of fame. It cost 30s. A Dorsetshire gent bid 28s. The manuscripts [went at ?] an excessive rate there being a throng [?] of quallity to buy. I bid 51s. for Norden [ ? ], a thin booke wch as I take it went [at ?] 5li. 

So Coffin was unsuccessful there, but in 1801 the Portledge library contained at least three works by Norden:

1113. The surueiors dialogue, very profitable for all men to pervse, but especially for gentlemen, farmers, and husbandmen, that shall either haue occasion, or be willing to buy, hire, or sell lands: as in the ready and perfect surueying of them, with the manner and method of keeping a court of suruey with many necessary rules, and familiar tables to that purpose. As also, the vse of the manuring of some grounds, fit as well for lords, as for tennants. Diuided into sixe bookes by I.N. Now the third time imprinted. And by the same author inlarged, and a sixt booke newly added, of a familiar conference, betweene a purchaser, and a surueyor of lands; of the true vse of both, being very needfull for all such as are to purchase lands, whether it be in fee simple, or by lease. London : Printed by Thomas Snodham, 1618. - [14], 174, 179-226, 217-256 pages ;  4⁰. ESTC S113326. 

1141. Speculum Britanniae. The first parte an historicall, & chorographicall discription of Middlesex. Wherein are also alphabeticallie sett downe, the names of the cyties, townes, parishes hamletes, howses of name &c. With direction spedelie to finde anie place desired in the mappe & the distance betwene place and place without compasses. Cum priuilegio. By the trauaile and vew of Iohn Norden. Anno 1593. [London] : [Printed at Eliot’s Court Press], [1593]. - [8], 48, [4] pages, [3] folded plates :  maps, coats of arms (woodcuts) ;  4⁰. ESTC S113229.

 

1142. Speculi Britan[n]iæ pars the description of Hartfordshire by Iohn Norden. [London] : [printed by Thomas Dawson], [1598]. - [8], 31, [1] pages, [1] folded leaf of plates : coat of arms, map ;  4⁰. ESTC S113233. 

Of the devotional texts that Norden also wrote, I have so far found no trace among the 5,000 or so works listed in the 1801 sale catalogue. 

Coffinloads of books

The library at Portledge, built up over two centuries by generations of the Coffin family is an important example of the transmission of knowledge and ideas across Europe in the era of the wooden handpress. 

The historian John Prince in his Danmonii orientales illustres, or, The worthies of Devon (1701) wrote of Richard Coffin: 'He hath a noble library and knows well to make use of it'. 

I have already placed transcripts with indexes of the sections relating to books in the letters from Richard Lapthorne to Richard Coffin from 1683 to 1699 on the Exeter Working Papers website, but I am now directing my attention to the manuscript shelf list of the library (DRO: Z19/8/5) drawn up around 1684, probably shortly after Lapthorne began to act as Coffin's London agent. It is very much a library in course of rearrangement, with comments such as "The bookes on this 7th shelfe shew right some order as they are placed here but they should have been otherwise with from Mr Howes Discourse Cr and then otherwise placed but now they stand in the order they are writt". There are also many entries struck through, presumably because they have been moved to another shelf. 

Richard Coffin lists his library in 1684

Columns 45-46 which includes the note mentioned above

I have legible images of the catalogue and am making good progress on transcribing it. Inspired by the Norden project, I hope to be able to mount the page images and transcription on the Exeter Working Papers website, and then to match entries against the 1801 sale catalogue of the library, mentioned above, and expand the description by reference to ESTC, USTC and other online union listings, a long term project that can be accomplished without stirring from home. 

The Bovey Tracey giant

Bovey Tracey is one of the manors covered by Norden and coincidentally I have been contacted by Mike Steer, a former resident of Bovey Tracey, now living in Australia, who had been pointed in my direction by Brian Randall of Genuki - word gets around. 

Just before the Devon Record Office moved from Concord House, South Street to Exeter Central Library in 1977 Mike Steer ‘surfed the stacks’, searching for literature on Bovey Tracey history. He writes:

 

During the search I found a note or short report in a journal that mentioned a discovery in the parish church, back in the late 1850’s, of the remains of a ‘giant’. The discovery occurred while a new north aisle was being added to the medieval fabric [in 1858]. The Church was being extensively renovated at the time and the journal might have had something to do with diocesan architecture reports.

 

Apparently, the enormous skeleton was clutching a silver coin, and when the hand was opened, the coin was found to be a Swedish thaler from the early 1600s. Whoever submitted the article suggested that the ‘giant’ skeletal remains were those of a Scandinavian mercenary hired by Charles to fight for him in the Westcountry during the Civil War."

 

I have searched Transactions of the Exeter Diocesan Architectural Society from 1858 to 1862 and the report of the visitation in 1892 (series 2 , vol. 5, pages 242-3), but not their church notes or the EDAS papers in the Devon and Exeter Institution. It is not mentioned in church guides, but I have not been able to check Beatrix Cresswell's typescript church notes (Moreton Deanery). Mike Steer writes: 

"The story doesn’t appear in any of the several Bovey histories, although as a boy growing up in Bovey in the 1940-50s there were rumours of a ‘giant’s’ body having been ‘dug up’ at the Church. One of my long deceased local historian friends (Lance Tregoning) searched for it among DRO records, but without success. I’ve since searched the online copies of TDA, also Notes and Queries, but without success." 

To this I can add unsuccessful searches in the British Newspaper Archive, the Exeter Flying Post card index and the massive Burnet Morris index at the Devon Heritage Centre, but it is now difficult for me to embark on extended searches. Is there anybody out there who can shed any light on this local legend?

After Norden what next?

The next project that FODA is involved in is the cataloguing of the Carey papers and that will take some time, but there is an important area that should be urgently addressed - recording the present. The last decade is a black hole as far as recording and acquiring a wide range of local Devon publications is concerned. 

For example, the latest Exeter plan, published at the end of 2022, is listed neither in the SWHT Local Studies catalogue, nor in the Devon Record Office on-line catalogue, nor in the Devon Libraries, nor the University of Exeter catalogue (which includes the Devon and Exeter Institution), although a hard copy is available for public consultation in most public libraries in the city. The same holds true for the more than sixty neighbourhood plans that have been published by communities in Devon over the past decade. The SWHT and DRO list none. Devon Libraries lists only:

Buckfastleigh and Buckfast draft neighbourhood plan 2015 -2025 :

Author: Buckfastleigh Town Council.

Year: May 2015.

Media class: Paperback

Publisher: Buckfastleigh Town Council, 

held in the reference section of Buckfastleigh Library.

The University of Exeter Library catalogue lists only

Exmouth neighbourhood plan : referendum documents, 2018-2031

Exmouth Town Council.

 PRINT | 2019.

Available at Devon and Exeter Institution (AD/EXM 711 EXM X)

The Wayback Machine, American based, only lists:

http://paigntonneighbourhoodplan.org.uk/

paignton neighbourhood plan 158 capture(s) from 2012 to 2016

 

As for the UK Web Archive there are 22,898  results for "devon and neighbourhood and plan" but just try to drill down to the PDF document itself. Also there seem to be no captures later than 2017 and many items are for consultation in the BL reading room only (do they have a virtual reading room?).  However they are all listed in the Devon bibliography, but only with links to the PDF files, which were valid at the time I accessed them but may now have changed or refer to later versions.  We also keenly await the arrival of the on-line catalogue of the Devon Rural Archive to see whether they have put other local studies collections to shame.

There may be some excuse for such local authority publications. Public libraries have handed over the management of Devon local studies publications to the Record Office, assuming that they will pick them up eventually as part of the archives of the local authorities. The Record Office may not receive them as modern records until long after they have lost their current interest, and the public library does not pass outdated community plans to the Record Office. The local authorities may consider the printed plans as publications rather than archives and so not feel that they form part of the archives. Certainly it is difficult to locate copies of earlier published planning documents in the on-line Devon archives catalogue.

However the same is also true for a range of other local publications, for example tourist guides. The library service used to contact local tourist information centres for these, to provide community information resources in branches, and copies were passed to the local studies libraries for permanent retention. Increasingly copies are available on-line, but web archives do not always include the relevant links, and current website links are frequently only to the latest issue. There is a severe risk that many resources are born digital and die digital, even though we are assured that the ever-growing cloud will house them for ever in some remote corner of the dark web. Also digital resources are capable of regular revision, which is not always evident when accessing a site, and there is also the ever-present problem of changing software, or apps as we now have to call them. 

There should be a drive to gather together as much of this grey literature as possible, before it disappears without trace and, where this is not possible, to download a PDF or similar copy. It is ironic that, when we are drowning in a sea of digital data, we have entered an information dark age where there are no lifeboats to rescue us from the whirlpools of misinformation and general ignorance. That's what local studies librarians used to do for the region's local communities. 

To adapt an old adage, look after the present and the past will look after itself. 

Baring-Gould yet again

Since my mention that I had published The Baring-Gould library : the books at Lewtrenchard in newsletter 26 (July 2022) a number of things have happened. At the Special Collections at the University Library several boxes of books have been released from quarantine after they had been transferred from Killerton, and these will be added to the on-line catalogue in due course. There are also a few books that have been put aside for transfer from there to the Devon Heritage Centre, mainly books on folk songs, which will join the manuscript and popular literature collections there. 

Some of the books at Lewtrenchard.

Those on the top shelf are part of the Bibliothèque universelle des dames

see my earlier report in issue 18, November 2020.

More significantly, I was able on Valentine's day to use a bursary to allow me to stay at Lewtrenchard overnight, to make significant progress in sorting the sequences into better order and identify the shelves  on which individual items are relocated, both in the Baring-Gould family library and the recently received collection of David Shacklock. A number of additional items were also catalogued and I was able to photograph all the shelves, in order to produce back at home an annotated version of the shelf list to be kept at Lewtrenchard Manor Hotel. While I was there I was able to introduce local author and teacher Kathryn Aalto to the collections and to Baring-Gould and his writing desk, on deposit there from Exeter City Library (not on the SWHT local studies catalogue). She is considering Lewtrenchard as the location for one of her writers' retreats - highly appropriate.

The Library: a fragile history

Reading this book by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen (Profile Books, 2021, paperback edition 2022) I was fascinated to see how the fate of the various libraries I have been involved with, including the Baring-Gould family library, the library at Portledge, the Rochehouart Collection in Bayeux Cathedral Library, the medieval Exeter Cathedral Library and the Westcountry Studies Library echoes that of innumerable libraries across the millennia and across the world. The authors are both linked to the Universal Short Title Catalogue at St Andrews University, inheritors of the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose team has ransacked libraries across Europe and beyond to track the spread of printing to 1650, discovering evidence of the creation and dispersal of libraries along the way.  Like the USTC itself, their coverage is international and, while libraries in Devon receive no mention, their broad canvas does place the rise and fall of the various types of library in different periods into context. All the libraries I have studied have moved their location, merged with other collections, had their highs and lows of acquisition and disposal of stock, suffered periods of neglect, in one case has been entirely sold off and another lost 100,000 volumes during a war. 

This magnificent survey has given me a sense of perspective and, against the mighty rolling tides of history, these local collections become insignificant ciphers and my long involvement with them the twinkling of an eye. This old bibliofool will potter on as far as his changing circumstances will permit, but has become stoical about the impact his endeavours is likely to have. 

While the University Library, Devon and Exeter Institution and Devon Heritage Centre do not seem to have acquired this book, there are copies in the public libraries in Barnstaple, Exeter and Tavistock - or of course you could always buy a copy - I recommend you do so.