Thomas Bodley and the Bodleian

Thomas Bodley helped finance and create the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, building upon the remnants of the Duke Humfrey's library. In the last few days I have been trying to condense the research I have been doing into around 500 words. There is so much to learn about Thomas Bodley himself, his motivations and actions in relation to the Bodleian. The early years of the Bodleian are, again, in themselves, extremely interesting. 

Chronology and Notes:

·         1563- Bodley graduated Bachelor of Arts at Magdalen

·         1566- Bodley became a Master of Arts

·         1569- Bodley became Junior Proctor

·         1576- ended his residence

·         1584 – elected to Parliament (Sir Thomas Bodley. Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, 11/1/2011, Academic Search Premier)

·         1585-1596 several diplomatic missions for Queen Elizabeth I

·         In his retirement, Bodley decided to ‘set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students’.

·         1588- Bodley married a wealthy widow, a Mrs. Ball, the daughter of a Bristol man named Carew

On February 23, 1597/8, Thomas Bodley sat himself down in his London house and addressed to the Vice Chancellor of his University a certain famous letter:

'SIR,
'Altho' you know me not as I suppose, yet for the farthering of an offer of evident utilitie to your whole University I will not be too scrupulous in craving your assistance. I have been alwaies of a mind that if God of his goodness should make me able to do anything for the benefit of posteritie, I would shew some token of affiction that I have ever more borne to the studies of good learning. I know my portion is too slender to perform for the present any answerable act to my willing disposition, but yet to notify some part of my desire in that behalf I have resolved thus to deal. Where there hath been heretofore a public library in Oxford which you know is apparent by the room itself remaining and by your statute records, I will take the charge and cost upon me to reduce it again to its former use and to make it fit and handsome with seats and shelves and desks and all that may be needful to stir up other mens benevolence to help to furnish it with books. And this I purpose to begin as soon as timber can be gotten to the intent that you may be of some speedy profit of my project. And where before as I conceive it was to be reputed but a store of books of divers benefactors because it never had any lasting allowance for augmentation of the number or supply of books decayed, whereby it came to pass that when those that were in being were either wasted or embezzled, the whole foundation came to ruin. To meet with that inconvenience, I will so provide hereafter (if God do not hinder my present design) as you shall be still assured of a standing annual rent to be disbursed every year in buying of books, or officers stipends and other pertinent occasions, with which provision and some order for the preservation of the place and the furniture of it from accustomed abuses, it may perhaps in time to come prove a notable treasure for the multitude of volumes, an excellent benefit for the use and ease of students, and a singular ornament of the University.'

·         1598 – Bodley’s money accepted by Oxford, the old library was refurnished to house a new collection of some 2,500 books, some of them given by Bodley himself, some by other donors

Bodley wrote to the Vice-Chancellor on February 23rd, 1598, 'I will take the charge and cost upon me, to reduce it [the library] again to his former use: and to make it fitte, and handsome with seates, and shelfes, and Deskes, and all that may be needfull, to stirre up other mens benevolence'. The offer had clearly been carefully prepared; he was already planning endowment; and within less than a month announced that he had obtained timber for the furnishings, and that he and his close friend and advisor, Henry Savile, the polymath Warden of Merton, were about to come forward with a new design, on the model of the shelving introduced, for the first time in England, by Savile in the Merton library just ten years earlier.( Clennell, Thomas Bodley, by Nicholas Hilliard, 1598)

·         8 November 1602 Thomas James, a librarian, was appointed to the Bodleian and the library opened

·         June 1603- Bodley was attempting to source manuscripts from Turkey

·         1603- the first Chinese book was acquired for the Bodleian Library

·         1605- First printed catalogue

·         1610 - Bodley entered into an agreement with the Stationers’ Company of London under which a copy of every book published in England and registered at Stationers’ Hall would be deposited in the new library. Although at first the agreement was honoured more in the breach than in the observance, it nevertheless pointed to the future of the library as a comprehensive and ever-expanding collection, different in both size and purpose from the libraries of the colleges. More immediately it imposed an extra strain on space within the building, which was already housing many more books than originally foreseen; new gifts of books made the lack of space ever more acute.

·      1610–12 Bodley planned and financed the first extension to the medieval building, known as Arts End because the collection had grown so large and so fast

At the beginning of 1612, the Stationers’ Company of London reaffirmed an agreement with Thomas Bodley of 1610, binding all printers to deliver to the Warden of the Company, for onward transmission to Oxford, one copy of every new book they printed, in quires (folded, but unbound sheets). To add further weight to its enforcement, eighteen members of the Court of High Commission added their signatures to the document, promising their support. Although the Bodleian throughout the seventeenth century only received a small proportion of the books registered at Stationers’ Hall, Bodley’s agreement ensured that his library’s claim to every book published was confirmed in the first Copyright Act of 1710 and all subsequent acts.

·         January 20 1613- Bodley died

·         March 29, 1613- The founder of the Bodleian was buried with proper pomp and circumstance in the chapel of Merton College

·         1613 – the day after Bodley’s funeral work started on the building of a spacious quadrangle of buildings (the Schools Quadrangle) to the east of the library. Bodley was the prime mover in this ambitious project, but most of the money was raised by loans and public subscription. The buildings were designed to house lecture and examination rooms (‘schools’ in Oxford parlance) to replace what Bodley called ‘those ruinous little rooms’ on the site in which generations of undergraduates had been taught. In his will Bodley left money to add a third floor designed to serve as ‘a very large supplement for stowage of books’, which also became a public museum and picture gallery, the first in England.

·         1619- quadrangle was structurally complete

·         1620- New edition of printed catalogue ran to 675 pages

·        1624- work on fitting out quadrangle was nearing its end (http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/history-bodleian-library)

Even during the Civil War Bodley's books remained uninjured, at all events by the Parliament men.

'When Oxford was surrendered [June 24, 1646], the first thing General Fairfax did was to set a good guard of soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. 'Tis said there was more hurt done by the Cavaliers [during their garrison] by way of embezzling and cutting of chains of books than there was since. He was a lover of learning, and had he not taken this special care that noble library had been utterly destroyed, for there were ignorant senators enough who would have been contented to have it so' (Macray, p. 101 in Birrell, In the Name of the Bodleian and other essays)