Inside the Fellows' Library: Exploring the Rare Books of Winchester College

Hello, I'm Richard Foster and I'm the Fellows Librarian at Winchester College. And I'm Sarah Griffin, Assistant Curator. In this film we'll be showing you some of the highlights of the school's rare book collection known as the Fellows Library, which contains around 10,000 volumes collected over the past 600 years. On our tour, we'll be visiting parts of the school where the library has been kept over the centuries. Waiting there are a selection of books in a variety of subjects, from theology, music and art, to geography, history and science. We'll consider how these books illuminate key moments in history, from the invention of the printing press, the translation of the Bible, to a scientific revolution of the 17th century. We'll hear Renaissance music and encounter the texts of Shakespeare, Austen and Keats. And we'll see the works of artists and illustrators from the 12th century to the present day. Winchester College was founded in 1382 and opened to its first pupils in 1394. It has been in continuous operation on its original site for longer than any school in England. The original plan of the college did not include a library, but the warden and fellows, a group of men responsible for the administration of the college, soon began to accumulate a collection of books. The library they established was not for the use of pupils, but quite early in its history, schoolmasters seemed to have had access to it. We'll start our tour in Audit Room, which is situated in a tower in the heart of the medieval school. To get there, we'll pass the college's Gothic chapel and chamber court, where scholars have slept and studied since the 14th century. This room was the original library in the early 15th century. It held around a hundred books, some of them chained to desks and some of them kept in this chest. The oldest books in the library were made many centuries before the college itself was founded. And this book is one of the earliest in the collection. It's a biblical commentary on the Book of Lamentations by an author called Paschasius Radbertus, who lived in the 9th century. And this manuscript was made in around the year 1100 at Winchester Cathedral Priory. At that time, Winchester was one of the leading cities in England. William the Conqueror had just built a palace here, and it was a major centre of book production. The manuscript is written on very fine quality parchment in a very beautiful hand. In fact, two scribes worked on this manuscript. In the margins of the book are a number of rather mysterious and very beautiful drawings. So on this page, there is a drawing of the head of Christ, and above that, the text speaks about the judgment of Christ. And on this page, there are a series of heads in the margin. These drawings were added to the manuscript in the middle of the 12th century, so about half a century after the text itself was written. This manuscript dates from the time that the college was established and belonged to William of Wycombe, the college's founder. He rose from humble origins to become Bishop of Winchester and the most powerful minister to two kings, Edward III and Richard II. He founded two educational institutions, New College Oxford and Winchester College. It prepared its pupils to go on to Oxford and to have careers in the church. William of Wycombe had a personal library of hundreds of books. He gave nine to the college, and three we still have to this day. This is Ranalf Hibken's Polychronicum, a history of the world from the creation of Adam and Eve up until the 14th century. It's full of these illuminated initials embellished with gold leaf, which you can see catch the light as the pages turn. Near the beginning, we also have this rare medieval world map. And if we look a little bit closer, you can see some familiar place names such as Roma, Italia, Corsica. And if we come to the centre of the map here, we see Jerusalem. Then as we go up, we find something a little bit different. Paradesius, Paradise. This is not a map for navigation. It is a spiritual map, which shows the place where humankind was created amongst the earth, the realm. If we look a little bit above Paradise into this greenish sea around it, we can just about make out the word Oriens, meaning east. So really, the map should look a little bit more like this from our perspective. The Fellows Library soon grew too large for audit room. And so in the 1440s, a new library room was created above the Chantry Chapel in the college's medieval cloister. And that's where we're going to go next. This room is one of the earliest purpose-built libraries in Britain. There would originally have been desks between each of the windows with books chained to them. This room was built to hold the college's manuscripts. But soon afterwards, in the second half of the 15th century, an important change took place in libraries across Europe as the first printed books began to appear. One of the earliest printed books in Winchester's collection is this set of maps published in 1482, around 30 years after the invention of the printing press. The book is often referred to as the Ulm Ptolemy as it was published in the German city of Ulm and the text was written by the Greek author Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD. It is one of a collection of books given to the library in 1543 by William Morin, a cleric who studied at Winchester in the 1490s. Unusually for a library of this period, most of Morin's books were scientific in nature. They range from astronomical tables to track the movements of the planets, to medical and alchemical texts, to tools for memory training. These two volumes give us a view into the study of geography and science during the early Renaissance. Using the list of place names and coordinates in Ptolemy's texts, these maps were created in the 15th century. They're hugely significant to the history of cartography because they are the first printed maps made in Northern Europe and the first to show much of the known world as it existed at the time. After the invention of the printing press, some books continue to be copied by hand. This collection of scientific and alchemical texts was copied in the late 15th century, around the time that the Ulm Ptolemy was published. It has these nifty numbered tabs which make the text far more easy to navigate. Another interesting feature of this manuscript are the diagrams that we can see in the margins. A particularly clear one is on this page. This one shows light coming from a source on the left, and we know this because it's labelled with the word sol, the Latin word for sun. The rays of light are then refracted by a spherical glass container full of water. This text is a text on optics, written by the medieval philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon in the 13th century. The books that we've looked at so far are only really interesting when you open them up and look inside, but it's obvious from the bindings of these volumes that they're something really quite important. These are four musical manuscripts made in the middle of the 16th century, written between 1564 and 1566. There is one for each voice part, so a book for the bass, the tenor, the alto, and the soprano. They contain over 100 pieces by some of the leading European composers of the mid-16th century, many of which survive only in these part books, making them a very important source for Renaissance music. They're very beautifully written on vellum, these beautiful illuminated initials, and we can identify the scribe as one who worked in Antwerp. The bindings also were made in Antwerp, and they're made of leather that has been dyed red and then stamped with gold leaf. The patterns on the bindings, these interlaced patterns, are what's known as arabesques because they derive ultimately from Islamic art. They're a very popular aspect of the decoration of Renaissance objects, and very similar decoration can be seen on a mid-16th century piece of silver in the College's collection, made just a few years earlier than the part books. Painted on the binding is Elizabeth I's coat of arms, and there's documentary evidence to suggest these part books were a gift to her from Eric XIV, the King of Sweden. Certainly they were at the English court during her reign. What we're not certain about is how they then eventually came to end up at Winchester College. At the time these books were made and brought to England early in the reign of Elizabeth, Winchester was experiencing a period of transformation. After the Reformation, it became a Protestant institution. The Chantry Chapel beneath this room could no longer be used for its original purpose of saying masses for the dead, and for the next 300 years it became the College's main library. After the Reformation, members of the College community could marry. New accommodation was created for the warden and his family in the late 16th century. That building, the warden's lodgings, is now home to most of the books in the Fellows Library, and that's where we're going next. This room was built by John Harmer, who was headmaster and then warden of Winchester from 1596 to 1613. During his time as warden, Harmer was involved in one of the great scholarly projects of the age, a new translation of the Bible, commissioned by King James I, and normally known as the King James Bible, or sometimes as the Authorised Version. This is a copy of the first edition of the King James Bible in the College's collection. It was published in 1611, and there's this very fine engraved title page to the beginning of the New Testament. About 50 translators worked on the King James Bible, and at least five of those had been educated at Winchester. We think that several of the translators made use of the Fellows Library, which had a very rich collection of books on biblical scholarship and Bibles going all the way back to the medieval period, and some of the work of translating the Bible must have been done by John Harmer in this room. There are many hundreds of Bibles in the collection at Winchester, but this, I think, is one of the most extraordinary. It was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1685, and it's in the Native American language of Algonquin, a language that's now extinct. Algonquin isn't a written language, and so the translator, John Eliot, rendered the whole Bible phonetically, except when he found that there was no equivalent in the Algonquin language for a word in the Bible. So here on the title page, the word God, for example, and the word Testament remains in English. The book was intended for the use of missionaries, but this copy belonged to a Bostonian called Samuel Sewell, who was a friend of the translators. Sewell's family came from Hampshire, and in 1690, he visited England and kept a journal of his visit. In that journal, he writes about coming to visit Winchester College on the 2nd of January, 1690, and he records in his journal that he left this Bible as a gift to the library. A few years later, when he'd returned to America, Sewell became one of the judges at the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Alongside works of biblical scholarship, a particular strength of the Fellows Library is its collection of books from the scientific revolution of the 17th century by authors such as Johannes Kepler, Henry Power, and Isaac Newton. This book was published in London in 1665 and was written by Robert Hooke, who was among the first scientists to publish observations of bodies under a microscope, such as the flea we see here. These stunning engravings showed tiny specimens, such as seeds and insects, in an unprecedented amount of detail that would have been perhaps frightening to their 17th century viewers. In the accompanying text, which conveniently for us is in English, Hooke tells us how he goes about making these observations. At the beginning of the book, he shows us how he uses his own model of a compound microscope, an engraving of which we have here. In one passage, he tells us about his struggle to keep an ant still beneath the lens. After a few experiments, he found an effective technique. He fed the ant a small bit of brandy and in Hooke's words, knocked it out dead drunk so that he became moveless. The ant woke up about an hour later, bubbled a little bit from the mouth and ran away. But as we can see on this engraving on the page before, this gave Hooke a good amount of time to capture its appearance. In the late 18th century, the fellows seemed to have become interested not just in scientific books, but in the practical pursuit of science. And around 1780, they bought for the library this microscope, which has a drawer which contains still some of the original slides. As well as this microscope, the fellows also bought for the library a telescope and two globes, celestial globe and a terrestrial globe. Those two globes can be seen in this engraving of the library interior in 1816. At that time, the library was still in the medieval Chantry Chapel. But about 50 years later, in the 1870s, most of the library was gone.