484
NOTES AND QUERIES. tns.ix. JUNE 20,1914.
expense, for his Cathedral Church. This benefac-
tion was afterwards rendered more valuable by
the liberality of his successor, Bishop Gheast,
who supplied the same library with a collection
of books. The name of each founder was, subse-
quently, perpetuated by an inscription, in which
their bounty is gratefully recorded : ' Hsec biblio-
theca extructa est sumptibus R.P. ac D.D.
Johannis Jewelli, quondam Sarum Episcopi ;
instructa vero libris a B. in Christo P. D. Edmundo
Gheast, olim ejusdern Ecclesin? Episcopo : quorum
memoria in benedictione erit. A.D. 1578.' "
Two questions of not unimportant anti- quarian interest are prompted by this passage : ( 1 ) Did Jewel build a library for his Cathedral ? and (2) Is the " inscription " existent ? and if so, where ? Canon Words- worth has kindly answered the queries (in 4i letter under date 22 January) thus :
A. The Library :
" Our library [Salisbury] is (and was) thirty- three steps up a staircase, and now runs half the length formerly ran the whole length of one side of the cloister the eastern side. Half was pulled down in 1756. I think if you saw it you would agree that it was built at least a century before Jewel's time, and it still con- tains 170 MSS. which belonged to this Cathedral in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and ome of them from Old Sarum times. We have descriptions (one in 1733) and pictures of the cloister and library before Wyatt (or the men of 1756 before him) touched it, and we can find nothing in such representations to favour the assertion that any early Elizabethan builder touched the building.* A considerable sum was spent in stone, &c., for repairing the library in 1480 ; and again, when Bishop Gheast died in Feb., 1577, by his will he ' did bequeath to the library of the Cathedral Church of Sar', now decayed, all my books, there to be kept for perpetual remembrance .... desiring .... the Dean and Chapter. .. .will so ordain and dispose all these my same books to places and stalls as may be fit for the preservation and good keeping of the same.' We have many of Gheast's books possibly all of them and they are placed in plain old shelves. But it is strange that, on the supposi- tion that Jewel built a library as early even as 1560 (and he had some trouble to get the spire restored after it was struck by lightning just before his entry as Bishop in 1560), it should be described
- " Since I wrote the foregoing I have found
some of Mr. Maiden's extracts from fifteenth- century Chapter Act-books at Salisbury, whence it is clear that the Dean and Chapter decided to .join with the Bishop (W. Aiscough) in January, 1444/5, to build schools and a library over one side of the cloisters, and handed over 100?. to those entrusted with the work. They decided to go on with the undertaking in December following ; and in June, 1446, made a present of a cope of red velvet motley with the letter y to the Abbess and Convent of Shaftesbury, who had allowed them to open a quarry for the requisite stone at Tis- hury. About 18 of the MSS. still in our library were given or bequeathed c. 1445-60. Those given by J. Stopynton, Archdeacon of Dorset and blaster of the Bolls, were received 31 Oct., 14.47."
as ' decayed ' in 1577. He may, conceivably,
have built some small room, but if so, all trace or
tradition of it has been swept away. Or he may
have done some repairs to the hall of the old
library now removed which, in his friends'
opinion, amount to a new structure. My brother's
(our late Bishop) opinion, however, to which I
refer in a brief article on Jewel which I contributed
to Ollard and Crosse's * Diet, of Engl. Ch. Hist.,'
is recorded by his own hand in a copy of Ayre's
edition (Parker Society) of the Works of Bishop
Jewel, where, in the margin, over against the
words ' the erection of a library attached to the
Cathedral,' Dr. John Wordsworth has written :
' Probably bibliotheca only means bookcase here.'
I venture to add the remark that Jewel be-
queathed 201. to the Cathedral for repairs, and the
Dean and Chapter may have employed the
money, or some of it, on library fittings."
B. The Inscription :
" That inscription was, I presume, put up about the second year of Bishop J. Piers, i.e., after Bishop Gheast's books presumably had just been put into their places. No such inscription is now extant (except in books), nor can I hear of any one who has seen it. In his zeal against superstition Jewel himself did a great deal of destruction of Latin Service-books and painted glass. The mutilation then begun was followed up a century later, with less discrimination, in the robbing of all gravestones, &c., of their brasses (two important ones have partially escaped) ; Jewel's own did not escape, his slab being already ' reft of its brass ' when (in 1684) the choir was repaved with marble. That monu- mental inscription (attributed to Lawrence Hum- phrey) is, of course, on record ["Le Bas gives it], though the brass itself was lost. It says nothing about the library Our present memorials of Jewel in the Cathedral are of modern erection. You will recollect Fuller's reference to Jewel, that he had enriched the Church of Salisbury with a fair library and the Church of England with another. He must have known pretty well what the inscription put up in 1578 meant. I find it hard to think that there was not some sort of ' Jewel Memorial Library ' put up when Gheast's books were given or in Gheast's lifetime by way of spending Jewel's legacy. But perhaps, as sometimes happens, his friends and admirers gave scant justice to the nameless builders who were before him, and whose stonework has outlasted that of 1560-80 if such ever existed. It appears that some care was taken with Gheast's books, as in 1578 seven keys were procured for the library. And thus we may believe that the efforts which Jewel among others made to revive theological studies on Reformation lines, both when he was a Royal Commissioner and after he became Bishop, may have been beginning to bear fruit under Bishop Piers."
The sum of all this seems to be that the " extructa est sumptibus " can only be satisfactorily explained as meaning either that the " bibliotheca " was a bookcase only, or that some kind of memorial library was erected in Bishop Gheast's episcopate out of Jewel's own legacy to the Cathedral. j. B. McGovEBN.
St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester.
