The Hurd Library

Alexander Pope and Marginalia

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:35 +0100

We don’t encourage students to write in books unless they are going to be famous - and of course you can’t always tell if fame will come eventually. But Alexander Pope must have been pretty certain, as he made numerous notes in the books of his we have in the Hurd Library. Here is one he made in his 1611 copy of Spenser’s poems.

The expression that has caught his eye is “The builder Oake” on the last line but one. His note refers to the same expression in Chaucer’s “Assembly of Foules” (called the “Parliament of Fowls” now) and he gives the page number - 245. We have his 1598 copy of Chaucer’s works and here is the page he looked at:

“The bilder Oke” is on the last line but one. If we look at Pope’s note more closely we can observe an interesting point:

He has not written the page number as 245 but as 24.5. Let’s look at the page number in the Chaucer:

Pope was copying exactly what he saw, the inking after the 4 suggesting a point. Not even Maynard Mack, in his bibliography of Pope’s library, spotted that.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

The fruit of the vine

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:00:46 +0100

Wine is a perfect accompaniment to home-made bread (see our last blog), of which Bishop Hurd’s nephew, young Richard, was well aware. After his uncle’s death in 1808 he went to live in the Old Palace in Worcester, where he planted some grape vines in 1809.

Here is a letter from the supplier, Mr Wynne:

Richard has noted the varieties and recorded their planting:

He even kept the labels - I found them, wrapped in 200-year-old paper, in a drawer recently:

One of the vines was obviously brought from Hartlebury. The wine (if he made any) may have been a bit thin but the fruit must have gone down well with his bread and cheese. This wonderful antiquary seems to have thrown nothing away.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

The staff of life

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:30 +0100

Bread is a universally acknowledged staple diet. Bishop Hurd’s nephew, young Richard, spent a lot of time in his uncle’s library, making notes about (and sometimes in) the books. In early 1800 he turned his attention to the making of this vital food. (His interest in rice pudding came later - see our last blog but one).

In February he transcribed a recipe for bread made with bran water, sent to the Bishop of Durham by the Rector of Nuneham near Oxford.

It appeared that bran water (which must have tasted pretty strong) made a heavier loaf than one with common water. So they conducted a similar experiment at Hartlebury.

The local village baker, John Wiles, tried it first and found plain water the clear winner; then they had a go at the castle a few days later -

with the same result.

What puzzles me is there is no sign of any sugar to make the yeast rise. But Stephanie might be tempted to try the recipe in the castle cafe, though I suspect it will be nowhere near as good as her wondrous cakes and quiches. As for me, I shall stick to my panasonic.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Another Lottery winner - Thomas Gray

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:30:00 +0100

Last week it was announced that the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has been so generous to Hartlebury Castle, is supporting the restoration of of Thomas Gray’s monument and family tomb in St Giles’s churchyard at Stoke Poges. It is the first step in the run-up to the 300th anniversary of Gray’s birth in 2016. He was four years older than Richard Hurd but they were close friends from their days at Cambridge, together with William Mason, who was a poet too, but not an awfully good one - his real forte was gardening.

Although Hurd kept up a prolific correspondence with Gray he didn’t keep any of his letters - apart from one single, unsigned sheet:

This is a copy, in Gray’s hand, of an epitaph composed by Mason for his wife, who died prematurely, after only two years of marriage, in 1767. She is buried in Bristol Cathedral. Mason used to send his verses to Gray and usually got a healthy dollop of criticism in return. The final quatrain on this occasion must have been dire in the extreme, as Gray said “That will never do for an ending - I have altered them thus”. He sent the amended version to Hurd for his comments, as Hurd was pretty good at composing monumental inscriptions. “I have shew’d the Epitaph to no-one but Hurd, who entirely approves it” he wrote to Mason on 23 May 1767.”He made no objection but to one line (and that was mine)… so if you please to make another, you may: for my part I rather like it still” Hurd’s objection was to the penultimate line, but wisely Mason left well alone and the monument can be seen in the north choir aisle of Bristol Cathedral.

Gray’s input is not acknowledged, but no-one who struggles through the entire epitaph can fail to be moved by the sudden leap from the pedestrian to the sublime.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Lovely rice pudding for dinner again!

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:01:01 +0100

Lovers of A.A.Milne will remember little Mary Jane, the fussy eater who threw a tantrum whenever rice pudding made its appearance for her supper. She might have been pleased to see it had she had the misfortune to live among the poor of Worcester in 1800. Some scraps kept by Bishop Hurd’s nephew, young Richard, show his uncle’s concern for those unable to afford bread. Rice, it was suggested, was just as nutritious and an acquaintance (T. James) sent him a broadsheet on its merits printed in Worcester on 4 August 1800. It was intended to be pasted on to the back of a door in the house.

The recipes don’t sound at all bad to modern eyes. I think I may put a copy up in my kitchen. The broadsheet was accompanied by a letter from Mr James, dated 7 August. It clearly had the endorsement of his wife.

One must hope that the twopence ha’penny required for the ingredients was not beyond the reach of too many; but perhaps this explains why rice pudding used to have so bad a press.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Our new graduate trainee

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:30:37 +0100

Today we welcomed Sarah Stretton’s successor to the Hurd Library. Alison Winston is one of the five new Skills for the Future trainees, who all began work last week on our new project, Nurturing Worcestershire’s Treasures. Alison will divide her time between the University of Worcester Research Collections and the Hurd Library. Her main tasks will be to continue putting records into the English Short Title Catalogue and to compile a provenance index. This will involve looking at every book and unlocking the details of former ownership, notes and marginalia which so many of them contain; we can expect lots of informative blogs. Here she is looking at a volume of Plutarch with parallel texts in Greek and Latin and observing the idiosyncracies of the early Greek font. (She read Classics at St Andrews.)

Bishop Hurd is looking over her shoulder as she examines the works of his old friend Thomas Gray.

It was a beautiful day today and the shock to my system of seeing that strange yellow thing in the sky and feeling too hot in my customary four layers resulted in my misreading the bus timetable and causing Alison to miss her bus home to Worcester. However this meant I could introduce her to Hartlebury Railway Station and, even more importantly, the pub on the platform, where we had tea.

She caught her train, but as the level crossing gates remained down too long after I had seen her off I had the pleasure of watching my train to Birmingham passing by on the opposite side without me on it. So I caught the next bus. Which will teach me to read timetables more carefully in future.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

The power of a village community

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:00:51 +0100

Followers of Twitter will know that the Hartlebury Castle Preservation Trust (www.hartleburycastletrust.org)has been successful in its first round application to the Heritage Lottery Fund. It has been awarded £413,700 of development funds in support of its efforts to secure the castle’s future as a heritage site, benefiting the local community, the UK and beyond. But it all started rather quietly seven years ago, when a small group of local people in the village of Hartlebury got together to discuss the possible danger to the Hurd Library if the castle were to be sold privately. “Three or four families in a country village” wrote Jane Austen in 1814 “is the very thing to work on”. In this case it was the families doing the work. Meeting in a conservatory they wrote letters, lobbied, recruited people with knowledge or influence, founded the Friends of Hartlebury Castle and the Hurd Library and, in 2009, the Trust, which has done us so proud. Here are some images of the idyllic village where Bishop Hurd spent the best years of his long life:

It won’t be all roses; there is hard work ahead as the Trust starts work on the second round application to secure the amount required to purchase the castle and grounds and prepare the building for a sustainable future. As Churchill said in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. And we are a step further to keeping the Hurd Library where it has belonged for just over 230 years.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

THE LOST WINDOW

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:01:03 +0000

The glazing of the east window in the chapel at Hartlebury Castle was installed in 1898 by the family of Bishop James Perowne, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his becoming a priest.

The Bishop can be seen in the bottom left hand corner and his most famous predecessor, Hugh Latimer, in the right. The original glass, now long lost, had been installed about 1750 as part of Henry Keene’s remodelling of the chapel for Bishop Maddox. The painting, depicting the Agony in the Garden, was, according to Treadway Nash, done by William Price of Oxford, who had provided the glass for the west window at Westminster Abbey in 1735, and the glazing was by Rowell of Reading. A cousin of Bishop Johnson, Francis Hopkinson of Philadelphia, visited the castle in 1766 and described the window in a letter to his mother: “The window over the Table is elegantly painted, representing, in the Middle, the Passion or Agony of our Saviour in the Garden, and on one side the Disciples sleeping and on the other Judas with his Band”. Bishop Perowne, however, did not like it at all. An article describing a visit to him, published in the Kidderminster Shuttle on 10 December 1892, reports: “The less said about the stained glass windows in the chapel the better. The Bishop himself described what was meant for a representation of the scene in Gethsemane as ‘something appalling’. The attitude and expression of the sleeping disciples in the adjoining window are simply too comical for description.”

Fortunately a photograph was taken before the glass was removed.

Here is the east end of the chapel as it would have looked to Bishop Hurd; and a close-up is as near as we can get to the original painting - a suitable image for this year’s Holy Week:

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

The empty plinth

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:00:48 +0000

A job Mike and Ken were asked to do after sorting out the Hurd Library windows last year was to clear junk out of a glory hole under the roof, just outside the north door of the library. They removed everything except some large pieces of marble, which they thought might be important. They were indeed.

They were the plinth, with an inscription by Bishop Hurd, which once supported a plaster bust of William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield. The bust is now on a column in the Great Hall, head-height and so lifelike that I have occasionally mistaken him for one of the visitors at a function and offered him coffee.

Lord Mansfield (1705-1793) was Lord Chief Justice, a friend of Alexander Pope, Ralph Allen and William Warburton. Warburton introduced him to Hurd, to whom he became both patron and friend. He had also known Bishop Johnson and was one of the trustees of the Warburton Lecture, whose first series was delivered by Hurd. In his old age he lived at Kenwood, where he worked hard to create the gardens, and a letter to Hurd in 1784 shows how much he valued his friendship and wise advice about the challenges of retirement:

Isaac Gosset of Bath made a wax portrait miniature of Mansfield in full wig which we have in the library:

The bust, on its plinth, was also placed in the library and was there when Francis Kilvert (uncle of the diarist) published his biography of Hurd in 1860. But later on, in the 20th century, it was given a less imposing position, on a stone base carved with the arms of the See, in the fireplace:

When or why it was moved to the Great Hall we don’t know; but one day I hope it will be restored to the place Hurd chose for it, if the floor will stand the weight.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Trouble at Vicarage?

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000

We never know what we are about to discover in the Hurd Library. One week it’s a piece of obscure ancient Greek, the next it’s a long-forgotten record of a very cross local clergyman.

The Reverend Charles Shipley, Vicar of Grimley and Hallow, was a good friend of the Hurd Library, giving several very fine books to it both before and after Bishop Hurd’s death. These include an Aldine Suidas of 1514, Blaeu’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1645 and the works of Saint Augustine, printed by Froben of Basle in 1569. Leafing idly through the latter last week this is what I found, tucked between the leaves:

Clearly the Reverend Shipley had had a violent falling-out with a lady called Bessy, who had apparently been bossing him while on a visit. The second page records his remark “I will be master in my own house”. So much for Bessy.

The ink and paper suggest an early 19th century date and the folded note has probably sat undisturbed in the book for over 200 years. Shipley did not present it to the Hurd Library until 1820, by which time Hurd was dead. Perhaps this was just as well. Had he seen it it is difficult to say what would have shocked him more - the evidence of an unseemly dispute in the home of one of his clergy or the forthright behaviour of a female visitor. Given his vigorously expressed antipathy to matrimony it would probably have been the latter.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Eureka

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:59:10 +0000

The visits of researchers to the Hurd Library continue to help us unlock some of its secrets. When Dr Stephen Gregg was with us last month, investigating the use Bishop Hurd made of the works of Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, one of the books he looked at was this one:

It was given to Hurd the year it was published, Stephen thinks, by William Warburton, who mentions it in a letter dated 17 July 1759: “I hope you remember that I have Clarendon’s History for you, which I shall bring with me”. The flyleaf bears a quotation In Greek, we think in Hurd’s hand:

Although I have a smattering of ancient Greek I did not get very far with this; Hurd’s upsilons and rhos are rather curious but it looked as if the author might be Plutarch. But what on earth was the work? Something about flight? So I enlisted the help of two good friends, who have far more than a smattering. Margaret Dews got all the words but was initially baffled; Ray Fisher, over toasted teacakes last Sunday, produced a peculiar sentence about the muses completing something beautiful by taking flight as an accomplice - could flight be exile, he wondered? I took it back to Margaret, over toast and coffee the next morning, and that was the breakthrough. She never admits defeat and had the answer by the afternoon: Plutarch’s On exile, chapter 14: “For it seems to me that the muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exiles as fellow workers”. I asked Stephen if Clarendon had been in exile and indeed he had. He fell out with Charles II in 1667 and was exiled to France,where he wrote this book in Montpellier. He died in Rouen in 1674.

So now we know why Hurd wrote that quotation on the flyleaf. He would, I hope, be gratified by the challenges he sets us. Like all scholars he generally knew the answers, but librarians have to know where to find them.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Hurd and Winchester

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 10:22:59 +0000

One of Bishop Hurd’s closest friends was Dr Thomas Balguy (1716-1795). They had met at Cambridge. Balguy was also in orders and moved to Winchester as a prebendary in 1757, becoming Archdeacon in 1759. Many of Hurd’s letters are to him, the bulk being in the Beinecke Library at Yale, where I saw them in 2011. We have a fine portrait of Balguy by William Hoare in the Hurd Library.

He was looked after at Winchester by his cousin Sarah Drake, who is the subject of one of Hurd’s rare affectionate references to women: “Pray give my respectful compliments to Miss Drake” he wrote after a visit in May 1769. “I Interest myself much in her new Gown, & yet you have not said one word of it”.

In 1781, when Hurd became Bishop of Worcester, Balguy was offered the see of Gloucester. This would have brought the two friends much closer together, but Balguy was in such poor health by then that he had to decline. This fact was recorded on his monument in Winchester Cathedral:

Balguy and his cousin lie next to each other in the nave. Not far away is Jane Austen, who died in a house in nearby College Street in 1817.

A few weeks ago I stayed in the house next door when attending a symposium on private libraries. We have at least one book in the Hurd Library which Jane Austen knew. In 1805 King George III gave Hurd a collection of finely bound books, embossed with the royal arms, and one of them was this:

In Mansfield Park Fanny Price is visited by her cousin Edmund in the East Room, where she has several books lying about. “You … will be taking a trip into China, I suppose”, he says. “How does Lord Macartney go on?” He goes on to refer to it as “your great book” and is almost certainly commenting on its handsome size.

It is tempting to speculate what Hurd might have thought of Jane Austen, had any of her novels been published before his death. Not a lot probably - far too much about the desire for matrimony ( he once said he shuddered at the thought of it) and possibly he would have found them too light-hearted, despite his interest in Sarah Drake’s gown. But Jane Austen might have taken a dim view of him too, largely on account of his christian name. For some reason she objected to the name Richard. On 15 September 1796 she wrote to her sister Cassandra: “Mr Richard Harvey’s match is put off, till he has got a better Christian name, of which he has great hopes”. And Catherine Morland’s clergyman father in Northanger Abbey was “a very respectable man, though his name was Richard”. But perhaps she would have made allowances for Richard Hurd too if she had seen his library.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

A better summer residence than Eccleshall

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 10:00:00 +0000

On 2 December 1774 Richard Hurd was told that he was to be appointed Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, succeeding Brownlow North, who was off to Worcester. The episcopal residence then was Eccleshall Castle, a house not unlike Hartlebury in appearance with its two projecting wings.

But it seems to have had some drawbacks, which were noted in 1806 by Thomas Harwood in his History and antiquities of the church and city of Lichfield: “Since the civil war, the castle of Eccleshall was not better than a farm house.” Before he had seen it himself Hurd wrote to Gertrude Warburton, reporting an inspection his elder brother John, who lived not far away in Shifnal, had made: “My elder brother (who has that useful knowledge which I want) has been at Eccleshall, & gives a woeful account of my Lord Bishop’s Palace. Not that it is dilapidated: but, to use his own words, it is an uncouth place, both within and without. I tell him there is no hurt in this, for a mean house will keep me humble, & humility is a great virtue in a Bishop. So you see I resolve to make the best of everything.”.

Hurd’s current house, the Rectory at Thurcaston in Leicestershire, was anything but mean.

On first seeing it, in 1756, he commented it was “good enough for a Bishop”. What precisely was the matter with Eccleshall, apart from its resemblance to a farm house, I have not so far managed to discover (the letters to Gertude Warburton are in the British Library and I have not yet had time to see them - my thanks to Mike Ashby for sending me this titbit) but in the Hurd Library we have an entertaining extract, copied by Richard Hurd jr., from a letter written by his uncle soon after hearing his brother’s account.

Where the original is we don’t know. Possibly it was to his brother, who was a farmer himself. Whatever the drawbacks Hurd lived at Eccleshall until 1781, when King George III moved him to Worcester. A phrase in the letter appointing him suggests that His Majesty was well aware of the deficiencies of the Lichfield see house. He hoped, he wrote “you will allow Hartlebury to be a better summer residence than Eccleshall”. Hurd was to agree. In 1792 he wrote to his old friend Thomas Balguy, commenting that, with increasing age, they were both now confined to their “respective habitations”. “Indeed”, he went on, “where could either of us find a better?” Where indeed!

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

A busy week

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:48:00 +0000

This week has been a busy one in the Hurd Library. Firstly we have had a researcher - Dr Stephen Gregg (Bath Spa University), who has been studying the use Bishop Hurd made of some of his books, notably Clarendon’s History of the rebellion, which he had in several editions. We worked in the office to keep warm.

Another Stephen was engaged on something completely different:

He was investigating the cellar for traces of asbestos, for which he had to wear this very fetching costume.

Meanwhile my laptop became disobliging so I had to do something else. I found a tatty paper parcel, labelled by Bishop Hurd

And inside were some notes he had written on Horace for his pupil at Cambridge, Sir Edward Littleton:

- as fresh as if they were written yesterday, each page creased down one side to make a neat margin for annotations.

The snow made me think of Bewick’s snowman in 1797:

And here is one made at the castle on 2nd February 1919, when it was still a convalescent hospital for soldiers wounded in the First World War:

This is Sergeant A.E. Morris standing on the lawn - one of the few who did not have to go. back to the front.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Starting as he meant to go on

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:49:41 +0000

Richard Hurd began his lifelong passion for book collecting when he was an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In the Hurd Library we have two books, purchased in 1737 when he was only 17. Each bears an elegant ownership inscription:

One of them is a Cicero, dated 1730; the other is by the Master of Trinity, the great scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742), dated 1735:

The purchase of this book provides an extraordinary premonition of where this humble student would be 44 years later. In 1691 Bentley had become chaplain to Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester from 1689-1699. In 1695 he became Rector of Hartlebury, holding the living until Stillingfleet’s son James was eligible to take it in 1698. As well as being a great scholar (Hurd referred to him as “the great Bentley” two years after his death) he was also a great librarian. In 1693 he was appointed Keeper of the King’s Libraries at St James’s. When Stillingfleet died he did his best to persuade the King to purchase his magnificent library for the royal collection, but without success;it was then snapped up by the Archbishop of Armagh, Narcissus Marsh, and is safely and splendidly housed in the Marsh Library in Dublin.

Bentley did not always get a good press; Pope caricatured him as the overweening pedant Aristarchus in The New Dunciad. But William Warburton, despite being a great friend of Pope, appreciated his worth, describing him in a letter to Hurd in August 1749 as “a great and much injured man” who was falsely “esteemed a dunce among wits”. And A.E Housman called him “the greatest scholar that England or perhaps Europe ever bred”. On this bitter, snowy afternoon it is good to think of our own scholar bishop founding another magnificent library in a building Bentley would have known so well.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

My Week (1788)

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 11:08:00 +0000

One of the pleasures of reading The Times on Saturdays is Hugo Rifkind’s column My Week - an imaginary diary by a well-known person who has had some unfortunate publicity recently. In 1788 a witty Welshman, David Williams, turned his hand to something similar in his anonymous publication Royal Recollections, a send-up of George III’s visit to Cheltenham, Gloucester and Worcester in the summer of that year, written in the form of a diary by His Majesty.

Williams was a controversial political and religious theorist who founded the Literary Fund “to support men of genius and learning in distress”; it still functions, as the Royal Literary Fund. He disliked formal Christianity, was rather fond of ladies and admired the philosophy of Voltaire - altogether not the kind of chap Bishop Hurd would have had much time for. This book was his greatest commercial success and demonstrates how well-known Hurd already was as the King’s favourite bishop. He appears on the first page:

Williams also has something to say about Hartlebury, which King George visited on 2nd August.

Hurd had been the tutor of the Prince of Wales, with whom the King was not on good terms. The following page has him saying that “a cell in Newgate should have been substituted for the charming residence at Hartlebury”. The reference to Hurd’s “cautious plausibility” echoes Horace Walpole’s description of him as “a gentle, plausible man”. Clearly Hurd was not admired by Mr Williams, who continues his aspersions in an entry on 8th August.

My searches for Hurd’s unpublished letters have not yet discovered any references to this subversive work. One must hope that if he ever did see it he might have decided that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

Given Bishop Hurd’s love of literature it is surprising to find only one English novel in the...

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:49:00 +0000

Given Bishop Hurd’s love of literature it is surprising to find only one English novel in the Hurd Library; this is Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, 1765.

The author’s name is added in Hurd’s own hand. One might have expected to find a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, as Hurd’s friend Ralph Allen was the model for Squire Allworthy. Hurd certainly read novels in his youth and greatly enjoyed Samuel Richardson’s Pamela when he was only 22 (though he did realise it might not be a very suitable book for a young man who had just taken holy orders); but by 1795 he had forgotten this, telling his friend William Mason that he had been “accustomed from my infancy almost to read only the best books” and had “acquired an indifference to general reading”. He had a low opinion of Sterne and was so shocked to see a copy of Tristram Shandy on a friend’s shelves that he urged its instant removal. The only other works of fiction in the library are Don Quixote translated by Thomas Shelton and Rousseau’s La nouvelle Heloise, which Hurd did very much admire. “There are many exquisite beauties in this odd romance” he wrote in 1761.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Not all the books in the Hurd Library were collected by Bishop Hurd himself. After his death in 1808...

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 13:31:00 +0000

Not all the books in the Hurd Library were collected by Bishop Hurd himself. After his death in 1808 several gifts or purchases were added by succeeding bishops. This fine volume, illustrating momentous events in England from 1816-1823, was added probably by his successor, Bishop Cornewall.

It deals in particular with the accession of King George IV (whom Hurd had tutored many years previously) and has some superb coloured plates. This one shows George’s unfortunate estranged wife, Caroline, out for a drive:

And a magnificent plate records the King’s coronation on 19 July 1821. He had decreed that the men’s robes, including his own, should be Jacobean in style:

But if we enlarge the print we can see His Majesty was not in the best of spirits:

Perhaps he was having second thoughts about his costume and thinking about his matrimonial difficulties and his unpopularity. He had forbidden Caroline to attend the coronation, had arrived half an hour late and the ceremony was to last five hours. Enough to make anyone feel glum.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Today, 13 January, is Bishop Hurd’s 293rd birthday. He recorded it in the manuscript notes of...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:38:42 +0000

Today, 13 January, is Bishop Hurd’s 293rd birthday. He recorded it in the manuscript notes of his life, which is among the collections of the Hurd Library.

His nephew, young Richard, added a note about his parents, John and Hannah Hurd:

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

Volunteers: what do they do?

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:30:00 +0000

The Hurd Library has no paid staff. Without its loyal and enthusiastic volunteers we would achieve very little. Many of them help us to run tours of the library, acting as stewards and giving talks. Three of them turn up almost every Tuesday morning to carry out the vital tasks of shelf-checking and book-cleaning.

Walter Tinley and Robert Wagstaff, seen above, have been checking the shelves for over a year, making sure the books are in the right places. So far they have found none to be missing, other than those known to have disappeared long before we became involved. It is far more fun than it sounds as, unlike what happens in paid employment (library selection panels are not usually impressed by interview candidates who say they like reading, as there is never time to do that), they are encouraged to look inside the books, noting those which need conservation, and other less obvious features.

Many small details, of provenance or other material, were noted by Graham Cartwright when he catalogued the library in 1980. Walter and Robert are rediscovering them and now, thanks to the internet, we can make them more widely known.

Here is a menu for a sumptuous dinner, apparently used as a bookmark in a volume of Thomas Sherlock’s sermons, published in 1772. It is not in Bishop Hurd’s handwriting, but it looks 18th century and the bill of fare certainly sounds like that enjoyed by our gourmet ancestors. It is tempting to think it may have been found in the waste paper left behind in 1781 by Hurd’s predecessor, Brownlow North, who, judging by his corpulent portrait (shown a few blogs ago), had meals of this extent every day. We know his wife kept pheasants at Hartlebury and we also know that he left the castle in a bit of a pickle when he went off to be Bishop of Winchester.

Another rediscovery was this book, given by Queen Charlotte to Hurd on his becoming Bishop of Worcester.

It is obviously not new (plucked off the King’s shelves perhaps) and not an especially good read either - but the inscription shows the high opinion the Queen held of her favourite bishop. She kept Gainsborough’s portrait of him in, of all places, her bedroom. It still hangs in Kew Palace; the one in the Hurd Library is a copy, painted in 1788 by Gainsborough himself.

Penny Greenwood also comes on Tuesdays, wielding her conservation vacuum cleaner to remove some years of dust. She also finds time to take a closer look at books which need attention or have something interesting to tell us.

She is looking here at a book about Castleton in Derbyshire, written long after Hurd’s death, by William Shawcross in 1903. He was a local clergyman and may have given the book to the then Bishop, Charles Gore.

Penny was particularly struck by the extraordinary incident described below, especially the episode in the pub.

You never know what you are going to find next in this astonishingly varied library - and we are very fortunate to have the time to explore it, perhaps more thoroughly than at any time in the last 2 centuries.

This post was drafted by Sarah Stretton before she left us last August.

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian