Insight 2012

The Queen’s College Library 

Insight 

Issue 2, Trinity Term 2012 

Inside this issue 

MS 194 and Bishop Barlow's grudge 

against the episcopal bench 

Dan Paltzer 

Nicholas Hawksmoor, William 

Lancaster and the Queen’s College 

designs 

Eleonora Pistis 

Heraldic manuscripts in the 

Library of The Queen’s College 

Nigel Ramsay 

Pulsilogium to pulse watch 

Denis Gibbs 

Modern swimming instruction 

begins in style: the contribution of 

the influential Everard Digby (ca. 

1551-1605) 

Paul Ivanovic 

Refurbishment of medieval 

manuscripts for Henry VII: Part 

two, Queen’s College MS 303 

Jane Eagan

2 

W 

elcome to the second issue of 

Insight, the annual publication 

which seeks to highlight some of 

the treasures of the Queen’s 

Library, both to members of the College and to a 

wider audience at home and further afield. 

THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY NEWSLETTER 

In this issue we again have a variety of articles on 

printed book and manuscript collections in the 

Library, both from regular readers of the collections 

and from members of the Library team. 

These include an article on the Library’s large 

collection of heraldic manuscripts by Nigel 

Ramsay of University College London, and an 

account of Thomas Barlow’s grudge against the 

Episcopal bench by Dan Paltzer, who spent several 

weeks in the Library last summer researching 

Barlow for his PhD thesis. Denis Gibbs, who has 

been visiting the Library to consult our early 

medical collection since the 1960s, has written 

about Sir John Floyer, whose collection in the 

Library formed the basis of a successful cataloguing 

and conservation project funded by the 

Wellcome Trust some years ago. Paul Ivanovic, 

our rare books cataloguer, has contributed an 

article about his favourite printed book in the 

Library, Everard Digby’s De arte natandi, while 

Jane Eagan, our head conservator, has written the 

second in her series on the refurbishment of our 

Henrician medieval 

manuscripts. 

Fig. 1: Frontispiece 

depicting Charles II, from 

the first volume of Wood’s 

Historia et antiquitates 

Universitatis Oxoniensis , 

recently bequeathed to the 

Library by old member Mr 

J. A. Colmer. The Sheldonian 

Theatre can be seen in 

the background. (Sel.b.281a) 

Over the last year we 

have received several 

visits from groups 

interested in our 

fascinating collection of 

original Hawksmoor 

propositions for the rebuilding 

of the College 

in the early eighteenth 

century, and I am 

particularly pleased to 

be able to include in 

this issue an article 

about Hawksmoor’s 

designs for Queen’s by 

Eleonora Pistis of 

Worcester College, 

Oxford. 

It is not often that we 

add to our historic 

collections but this year, 

as a result of the sad 

death of old member Mr 

Fig. 2: p. 125 and facing plate showing an illustration of 

Queen’s Chapel, from Ackermann’s A history of the 

University of Oxford, recently bequeathed to the Library by 

old member Mr J. A. Colmer. (Sel.c.200a) 

J. A. Colmer in late 2011, we received a bequest of 

23 early printed books. Many of the volumes are 

extremely rare including a copy of Anthony 

Wood’s 1674 Historia et antiquitates universitatis 

Oxoniensis bound in two volumes interleaved with 

Loggan’s 1675 Oxonia illustrate (fig. 1). Another 

wonderful addition to our collection of antiquarian 

material relating to Oxford is Ackermann’s 1814 

two volume History of the University of Oxford 

(fig. 2) containing exquisite prints of College and 

University buildings which, rather surprisingly, we 

did not have in the collection previously. One of 

the most interesting parts of the collection are the 

five volumes of East India tracts including a 

number of items not held by the British Library 

until Mr Colmer provided copies of some of them. 

The collection as a whole is an extremely welcome 

addition to the College Library and I am most 

grateful to Mr Colmer for remembering us in this 

particularly generous way. 

As last year I am most grateful to all the contributors 

to this issue of Insight and in particular to 

Lynette Dobson who has produced the Newsletter 

for us. 

If you have ideas for future articles or indeed 

would like to contribute, please contact me at 

amanda.saville@queens.ox.ac.uk 

Amanda Saville 

Librarian 

June 2012 

Cover image: Section of illustration of High 

Street, Oxford from Ackermann’s A history of the 

University of Oxford.

MS 194 and Bishop Barlow's grudge against the episcopal bench 3 

MS 194 and Bishop Barlow's grudge 

against the episcopal bench 

Dan Paltzer 

University of Minnesota 

W 

hen I came to the Library at 

Queen’s College last summer, I 

was searching for the answer to a 

deceptively simple question. Why 

would a seventeenth-century Anglican bishop 

write a pamphlet arguing that none of the bishops 

should be allowed to participate in the Earl of 

Danby’s impeachment before the House of Lords? 

Such a pamphlet contradicts everything which one 

would expect of a bishop from that day. Yet this 

was exactly the position that Thomas Barlow, the 

Bishop of Lincoln, took in his pamphlet A discourse 

of the peerage & jurisdiction of the lords 

spiritual in Parliament (1679). This pamphlet was 

Barlow’s intervention in an ongoing debate about 

whether the bishops could participate in the 

impeachment trial or attainder of Charles II’s chief 

minister. From the evidence he found in legal 

records, Barlow concluded that the bishops were 

legally banned from such proceedings. 

This was a very strange position for Barlow to 

take, and one which seemingly violated his usual 

political convictions as a staunch royalist. Danby 

was under attack by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who 

therefore wanted to prevent the bishops from 

voting to acquit Danby in this capital trial. 

Shaftesbury therefore unburied an old custom that 

had roots in canon law which prevented clergymen 

from judging “cases of blood”. 

Oddly enough, Barlow agreed with Shaftesbury 

and argued that the bishops should withdraw from 

all cases of blood. I find this position odd, because 

it contradicts the theological and political positions 

which Barlow defended in all of his other 

publications as well as most of the manuscript 

treatises he left in the Queen’s College Library. 

For the sake of comparison, consider De Jure 

Regio Monarchiae Anglicanae (MS 194), where 

Barlow proved himself to be a firm supporter of 

the divine right of kings. This short treatise was 

actually written to contradict Shaftesbury, even 

though a few years later he would take the Earl’s 

side on the issue of bishops during capital trials. 

This piece proclaimed an ideology which one 

would expect from an Anglican bishop. Shaftesbury 

had delivered a speech to the House of Lords 

on 20 Oct 1675 in which he claimed the doctrine of 

the divine right of kings was the most dangerous 

and destructive doctrine there had ever been to 

English government and law. Furthermore, it was 

a relatively new error introduced by the Laudian 

clergy. Barlow dismissed this idea on three 

counts. Divine right was neither new, nor dangerous, 

nor destructive. The doctrine had a strong 

basis in Scripture, and had even been revealed to 

pagans through the use of natural reason. Therefore, 

the King of England (and, by implication, all 

other legitimate monarchs) held his crown by the 

will of God, and not from the Pope, the people, or 

laws of England. 

The dilemma which brought me to Queen’s was 

how to explain the position in the pamphlet 

concerning bishops and cases of blood, because 

this publication supported the political machinations 

of a man whose ideology Barlow generally 

opposed. In the manuscript described above, as 

well as his other publications from the 1670s and 

early 1680s, Barlow consistently supported the 

political positions associated with the Tory side of 

the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. He remained 

a steadfast proponent of the established, 

episcopal Church of England and a firm supporter 

of the Stuart dynasty until just before the Glorious 

Revolution. So what would cause a bishop to 

argue a position which would effectively weaken 

the political position of bishops by removing them 

from important matters which came before the 

House of Lords? 

As it turns out, Barlow’s position was conditioned 

by ongoing disagreements between himself and 

the rest of the episcopal bench. In The state of the 

controversy between the Rt. Revd John Ld Bishop 

of Oxon and ye Bishop of Lincolne about ordination 

in Q. Coll. Chappell. 1676 (MS 194 - fig. 1 

overleaf), Barlow described his side of an argument 

between himself and John Fell, the aforementioned 

Bishop of Oxford. The conflict Barlow 

described was simultaneously based on his 

personal preference to remain in the congenial 

habitations at Queen’s College and his ideological 

commitment to maintaining Oxford University 

and its constituent colleges’ rights to autonomy. 

Barlow’s account of the spat focused primarily on 

the legality of his actions under English law, with 

occasional claims that he did not act against 

Christian doctrine and insults for his opponent 

thrown in for good measure. The difficulties

4 


outside of them but still within English society, 

such as Presbyterians or leaders of the political 

opposition to the Crown (such as Shaftesbury in 

the example above). The task of writing this 

defence against Fell combined both institutional 

allegiances and personal preference, and it 

therefore contrasted with the way he wrote in 

other pamphlets or treatises. 

Fig. 1: Title page for Barlow’s letter The state of the controversy 

between the Rt. Revd John Ld Bishop of Oxon and ye Bishop of 

Lincolne about ordination in Q. Coll. Chappell. 1676. (MS 194) 

began when Fell sent Barlow a letter mere hours 

before Barlow was scheduled to begin ordaining 

new clergymen for his diocese in the chapel of 

Queen’s College. The letter asked Barlow not to 

proceed with the ordination, but Barlow saw no 

reason why he could not go ahead with the 

ceremony. After the ordination, Barlow sent Fell a 

letter explaining why these affairs were none of the 

Bishop of Oxford’s business. The University of 

Oxford, and all of its constituent colleges, had 

never really been under the episcopal authority of 

the local diocese. Ironically enough, until Henry 

VIII created a new bishopric in Oxford, the town 

was part of the diocese of Lincoln, which was 

Barlow’s see. However, Barlow claimed the 

Bishops of Lincoln had never been allowed to 

exercise authority over the University of Oxford. 

The Provosts of the University and visitors of 

particular colleges administered colleges’ spiritual 

and administrative affairs without interference 

from the Bishops of Lincoln. The 1541 charter 

which created the new bishopric in Oxford 

expressly preserved these rights and privileges. 

Fell had no jurisdiction over Queen’s College. 

Barlow had received permission from the proper 

authorities at Queen’s, therefore he felt he had 

acted within the bounds of clerical and legal 

propriety. 

The wonderful thing about MS 194 is that it 

humanizes an otherwise abstract vision of ideological 

allegiances in seventeenth-century England. 

In broad terms, Barlow’s ideological positions 

on matters such as divine right monarchy or 

bishops’ spiritual powers reflected the official 

policies of the Anglican Church. He defended 

these institutions from opponents who were 

MS 194 reveals a different kind of conflict, because 

it was between different factions of institutional 

insiders. Barlow’s conflict with the other bishops 

stemmed from his refusal to leave Queen’s College 

and take up residence at Lincoln. This was a man 

who loved life at Queen’s College (and if the people 

at Queen’s in his day were half as friendly and 

helpful as the current library staff of Amanda, 

Lynette, Rory, and Tessa, I can’t really blame him 

for not wanting to go). Due to this affection, 

Barlow wanted to preserve the administrative 

autonomy of the Oxford University colleges (and 

Queen’s in particular), because this autonomy 

allowed his college to continue to function in its 

traditional modes. Legal documents such as 

Parliamentary statutes and royal charters were the 

instruments establishing and protecting that 

autonomy, so Barlow fiercely defends the entire 

system which perpetuated these protections. 

In practical terms, this defence required him to 

protect the integrity of the common law from any 

outsiders (including the other bishops) who might 

try to interfere in college business. In order to 

make sure he could keep out anyone who wanted 

to intrude where he thought they did not belong, 

Barlow needed to ensure the integrity of the 

institutional elements responsible for protecting 

and enforcing English law. The House of Lords 

was one of these elements, insofar as certain types 

of cases were heard before that body. In all of his 

publications, Barlow wished to maintain a particular 

ideological understanding of how elements 

within English society relied upon each other and 

ought not to overstep their bounds to transgress 

upon other institutions’ traditional functions. 

However, MS 194 showed that he had personal 

reasons for this as well. The conflict between 

himself and the other bishops made him suspicious 

that the other prelates were willing to 

overstep such boundaries, which in turn explains 

why he could oppose Shaftesbury’s policies 

generally while also writing a pamphlet intended 

to show that bishops should not judge Danby’s 

trial.

Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Lancaster and the Queen’s College designs 5 

Dan Paltzer is a PhD candidate of the Department 

of History at the University of Minnesota-Twin 

Cities. Prior to arriving at Minnesota, he was a 

Government major at Lawrence University in 

Appleton, WI (BA) and a graduate student in the 

Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt 

University (MA) where he studied Political 

Theory. His political theory background led him 

into an interest in early modern political thought 

and its place within broader intellectual trends of 

the time period running roughly from 1500- 

1800. His dissertation research involves the 

ways in which English pamphleteers interpreted 

history through ideological lenses during the 

1680's. 

Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Lancaster 

and the Queen’s College designs 

Eleonora Pistis 

Worcester College, Oxford 

O 

n 6th February 1710, coincident with 

Queen Anne’s birthday, the Vice- 

Chancellor of Oxford University 

William Lancaster (1650–1717) laid the 

foundation stone for a new Queen’s College, of 

which he had been Provost since 1704 (fig. 1). 1 In 

1714, John Ayliffe wrote that, when finished, the 

new building would be ‘one of the most Majestick 

Pieces of Architecture in the whole Kingdom.’ 2 

During Lancaster’s Vice-Chancellorship (1706– 

1710) – and most likely between 1708 and 1709 4 – 

another figure drew up different preliminary 

designs: the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661– 

1736). Hawkmoor’s contribution amounts to 

twenty drawings, still kept in Queen’s Library, 

representing seven different projects which the 

architect entitled Propositions. 5 

Fig. 1: William Lancaster 

(1650-1717) 

As has already been pointed out, the final design 

of Queen’s College’s cannot be regarded as the 

work of a single mind. 3 It is usually ascribed to the 

amateur architect Dr. George Clarke, with the 

assistance of the master mason William Townesend. 

The majority of these 

designs have already 

been published and 

discussed in the 

scholarly literature. 6 

Within what Colvin 

c a l l e d ‘ U n b u i l t 

Oxford,’ Hawksmoor’s 

propositions are 

usually regarded as 

the ‘fiasco’ 7 of an 

‘expensive architect 

with a penchant for 

adding extravagant 

and functionally 

unnecessary gestures.’ 

8 But was there a 

r e a s o n b e h i n d 

Hawksmoor’s ‘extravagant’ solutions? Should his 

designs be considered a failure? The aim of this 

brief contribution is to analyse Hawksmoor’s 

designs in the context of his relationship with his 

patron, in order to identify his main aims and 

reevaluate his achievements. 

The designs for Queen’s mark the beginning of the 

history which bound Hawksmoor to the city of 

Oxford for nearly three decades (ca. 1708–1736). 

They are addressed to William Lancaster, at that 

time the most powerful figure within the University 

and a man with an interest in architecture – 

potentially a perfect patron. Lancaster’s interest in 

architecture is confirmed by the presence of his 

name in a plate from the Vitruvius Britannicus 

(1715) which illustrates a design by Colen Campbell 

for a church on Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, dated 

1712 9 ; while his involvement in Oxford’s architectural 

activities is confirmed by Thomas Hearne, 

who, in reference to William Townesend, wrote: 

‘a great many justly wonder that he should have 

been so much made use of by the University. But 

this, I believe, is owing in good measure to Dr. 

George Clarke of All Souls, as it was also to Dr. 

Lancaster of Queen’s.’ 10 

Certain aspects of Hawksmoor’s drawings for 

Queen’s College confirm that the architect must 

have been aware of Lancaster’s potential as 

architectural patron. Various annotations demonstrate 

that this set of drawings was conceived as an 

introductory portfolio addressed not simply to the 

Provost of the College, but to the Vice-Chancellor. 

With a great deal of insistence, in fact, in more 

than one drawing Hawskmoor craftily indicates 

the ‘Vice Chancellor’s lodgings’. 11

6 


The Queen’s designs can be distinguished within 

the whole corpus of Hawksmoor’s designs for 

Oxford 12 based on three main characteristics. The 

first is the exceptionally large size of the sheets, 

which measure up to 0.52 by 1.385 metres. The 

second is the accuracy of the drawings. Although it 

is true that some are unfinished and several are by 

an assistant, 13 the propositions which Hawksmoor 

labeled ‘A’ and ‘IV’ are particularly well-defined. 

The third, as we will see, is the propositions’ 

provocative character relative to the Oxford 

architectural tradition, in terms of both typology 

and language. 

If the first two characteristics are compatible with 

the intention of receiving the Queen’s’ commission, 

the third reveals a broader and slightly 

different purpose. In the absence of any precise 

indications dictated by the prospective client, 14 

Hawksmoor demonstrated his ability to elaborate 

infinite typological solutions in plan and volume, 

using a language composed of an extraordinary 

wide range of sources. Hawksmoor’s main aim 

seems to have been to present himself to Lancaster 

as the right architect not only for Queen’s, but 

potentially for any building, with skills that would 

have distinguished himself from amateurs or 

master masons. 

Hawksmoor’s propositions reveal the architect’s 

strategy in front of his new client. Queen’s presented 

Hawksmoor with his first opportunity to 

consider how to shape a college from scratch, a 

subject to which he would return many times in 

the next twenty-five years. He began by organizing 

the college around two regular quadrangles, as in 

Clarke’s contemporary masterplan for All Souls, 

with a symmetry and regularity that was completely 

new to Oxford. There was, however, one 

crucial difference: at Queen’s College, the Old 

Library and the newly built north range were 

already existing elements which Hawksmoor was 

obliged to incorporate into his project. 15 This is the 

reason why, in all of the propositions, the second 

quadrangle is always less prominent, while in 

Clarke’s masterplan for All Souls it is the most 

important element. 16 With a radically different 

approach, Hawksmoor focused on the definition of 

the first quadrangle, which in PROPOSITION V, 

QUEEN’S 14 and 15 (fig. 2, top left), he expanded to 

occupy all of the available area. In designing the 

entrance of the latter, he employed an erudite 

quotation: the vestibule of the Palazzo Farnese in 

Rome. 

Fig. 2: Plan drawings of Hawksmoor’s propositions. Left to 

right, top to bottom: Queen’s 15 ; Proposition III ; Queen’s 

17 ; Proposition II ; Proposition A ; Proposition IV. 

With the balance between the two quadrangles 

abolished, Hawksmoor next concentrated on the 

two vital nuclei of any college, the hall and chapel. 

These became the crux of the project. In PROPOSI- 

TION I, the hall and chapel are along the High 

Street, whereas in almost all of the other proposals 

the hall and chapel, or the chapel alone, are 

instead positioned in the range that separates the 

two quadrangles. 

The central position of the hall and chapel, 

provided an opportunity for Hawksmoor to design 

various innovative solutions that transformed the 

transversal range into a complex organism, one 

that is moulded and expands to the point that in 

PROPOSITION III (fig. 2, top centre) it occupies 

much of the second quadrangle. Here the hall and 

chapel are connected by a semicircular colonnade, 

with a couple of twin columns positioned in a 

radial perspective, interrupted by a telescopic 

passageway that frames a peripteral temple 

against the north range. It is a solution reminiscent 

of the screen of columns present in a preliminary 

design for Greenwich. The most direct 

source, however, is Bernini’s St Peter’s Square, 

depictions of which abounded in the libraries of 

Oxford of the time. 

In other proposals the chapel is detached or semidetached 

at the centre of a large court. In PROPOSI- 

TION VI and its variation QUEEN’S 17 (fig. 2, top 

right) it has an oval structure, which perhaps 

alludes to Bernini’s third design for the Louvre, 

which would have been familiar to Hawksmoor


Fig. 3: Proposition IV, High Street elevation. 

from the engravings in the Grand Marot and 

probably from the enthusiastic descriptions by 

Christopher Wren, who appreciated models of the 

scheme when he visited Paris in 1665. In PROPOSI- 

TION II (fig. 2, bottom left), as in QUEEN’S 14, the 

chapel becomes a peripteral temple. 

Fig. 4: Proposition IV, front quadrangle, east-west section 

showing the north side elevation. 

By using a court layout with a church at the centre 

of the rear range, as in PROPOSITION A (fig. 2, 

bottom centre) Hawksmoor seems to refer in part 

to Solomon’s Temple, as designed by Villalpando 

and reinterpreted in the Escorial and later also in 

the Hôtel des Invalides. 17 But this later reference is 

only a part of a wider focus on French sources, 

well known thanks to George Clarke’s print 

collections. 18 Hawksmoor not only seems to refer 

to Louis Le Vau’s designs for the Louvre 

(PROPOSITION A), but in QUEEN’S 17 he also 

designed the first quadrangle with a concave side 

after the model of countless Parisian Hôtels. He 

also adopted the structure of the rusticated 

gateway from the Palais du Luxembourg – see 

PROPOSITION VI. 

As Downes pointed out, PROPOSITIONS A and IV 

are the only ones to have been developed entirely 

and coherently. As we have seen, they are the most 

accurate and contain references to the Vice- 

Chancellor Lancaster. 

PROPOSITION IV (fig. 2, bottom right) is illustrated 

in five drawings. The gateway at the centre of the 

monumental High Street front is framed in a 

stunning and out-of-scale manner by two huge 

composed Doric columns, sixty feet tall (fig. 3). 

This astonishing entrance evokes the Gothic access 

towers of medieval cloisters, but interprets its 

vertical development in terms of archaic monumentality, 

as that of the Pillars of Hercules. Going 

through the High Street entrance, one would 

Fig. 5: Proposition A, High Street elevation. 

arrive in the first quadrangle. The hall and the 

chapel are en pendant in the north range and 

divided by a vestibule (fig. 2-4). 19 The lateral sides 

of the façade clearly evoke the lateral facades of 

the court of the Curia Innocenziana in Rome, 

whereas the fenestration, with large headed 

windows set within deep concave recesses, recalls 

the niches of the drum of St Paul’s. The façade of 

the central vestibule is a tetrastyle pronaos that, as 

in the Basilica Aemilia, ends in a terminal column 

flanked by a pilaster, a device that had been 

employed already in one of the preliminary 

projects for Greenwich Hospital and later at 

Blenheim. Onto the quadrangular vestibule is 

grafted a low octagonal drum flanked by cinerary 

urns superimposed on sacrificial altars. On this 

low drum is a second one, higher and articulated 

by paired columns and by hefty buttresses that 

frame wide openings: the model is Michelangelo’s 

drum at St Peter’s in the Vatican, mediated by the 

combination of pronaos and attic of the Sant’Agnese 

in Rome, whereas the buttresses are modelled 

on Borromini’s Sant’Ivo. This powerful 

structural system surprisingly supports a lowtiered 

dome with steps based on the model of the 

Pantheon. 

PROPOSITION A (fig. 2, bottom centre), illustrated 

in four large designs, is based on the other projects: 

from PROPOSITION I it takes the position of

8 


Fig. 7: Proposition A, front quadrangle, north-south section 

showing the west side elevation. 

Fig. 6: Proposition A, front quadrangle, east-west section 

showing the north side elevation. 

the hall along the High Street; from PROPOSITION 

IV, at least in part, it takes the layout of the east 

and west ranges; from PROPOSITIONS VI it takes 

the idea of a central chapel with an interior dome, 

from PROPOSITION V the arrangement of the 

Chapel. The façade of the college along High Street 

is characterized by a rusticated arcade surmounted 

by a main floor with giant Corinthian pilasters and 

by an attic floor (fig. 5). The central section of the 

façade is marked by a three bay recess, which 

forms a sort of triumphal arch, as in Le Vau’s 

design for the east façade of the Louvre (1664) . 

But here the central arch overruns the main floor 

and becomes a podium with French ornamentation 

that bears a female figure, perhaps Queen 

Anne. Going through the entrance vestibule, one 

would enter the first quadrangle. The north range 

(fig. 6) is dominated by the chapel orientated west 

-east, the south façade of which is a hexastyle 

pronaos of the Corinthian order two bays deep, a 

solution that Hawksmoor would use again in St. 

George’s in Bloomsbury (1713–1715). The pronaos 

is flanked on both sides by a single-storey rusticated 

arcade that leads to two symmetrical 

staircases, which give access to two lofty towers. 

These elements, with screens of columns and 

broken-based pediments, are characterised by 

ancient-style features reminiscent of Roman 

baths, probably mediated through Palladio. 20 The 

two side facades are composed of rusticated 

arcades, a main floor and attic (fig. 7). The ground 

-floor arcade is taken from the courtyard of 

Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza as illustrated in Palladio’s 

Four Books. 21 The monumental first floor is 

organised by raised bands, that evoke a trabeated 

system and frame double-level fenestration. The 

centre of the façade is marked with a curvilinear 

pediment free of any decoration. 

In sum, Hawksmoor drew up at least seven 

different innovative proposals for a new Queen’s 

College. By disrupting the traditional quadrangle 

structure, he concentrated on the hierarchic 

coordination between the various parts, orchestrating 

high and low elements and creating visual 

axes and sudden vistas. He employed a vast 

repertoire of architectonic sources taken from 

English tradition, but most of all from France and 

from ancient and modern Rome. Evocations of the 

Pantheon, St Peter’s, Hellenistic and Imperial 

architecture are combined together with references 

to Michelangelo, Palladio, Salomon de 

Brosse, Jones, Webb, Bernini, Borromini, Le Vau, 

Carlo Fontana, Hardouin-Mansart, Wren, and 

Vanburgh. 

Hawksmoor put on show his power of elaborating 

almost infinite architectonic solutions, suggesting, 

at the same time, the impossibility of an a priori 

selection without further indications from the 

prospective client. Every final decision, in fact, 

would have involved deep reflection on the 

ultimate purposes of the building, and this was 

evidently the task of Lancaster and his Fellows. 

The design that was finally approved demonstrates 

the reception of Hawksmoor’s suggestions. 22 The 

position of chapel and hall are connected by a 

Fig. 8: Queen’s today, front quadrangle, east side elevation.


pronaos, as suggested in PROPOSITION IV; 23 and 

the layout of the lateral facades reflects PROPOSI- 

TION A, published here for the first time 24 . Within 

the old Oxford tradition, can this result be considered 

a complete ‘fiasco’? 

Soon after creating the Queen’s ‘Propositions,’ 

Hawksmoor was employed for the Clarendon 

Building project by the same William Lancaster 

and his colleagues, the Delegates of the Press. 25 

From that moment on, he played a central role in 

planning an urban and architectural renewal of 

Oxford that would have changed the face of the 

city forever. 26 With the Queen’s designs, 

Hawksmoor had wanted to make himself known to 

the man who had more power than anyone else in 

Oxford to involve him in new projects. In the end, 

the architect accomplished this goal. 

Acknowledgements 

I would like to thank Amanda Saville for her kind 

suggestion to write this brief contribution on 

Hawksmoor’s Queen’s Designs. She and her staff 

have given much valuable help for my research on 

Oxford University architecture and its patronage 

between 1702 and 1736. 

1 

This initiative continued the late-seventeenth-century 

enlargement of the medieval college, which had included the 

creation of the Williamson Building on the northeast side 

(1671–1672) and the Library on the northwest side (1692– 

1696); followed in 1707 by a north range of which ‘one half of 

it’ was ‘at the sole charge of Dr Lancaster […] and the other 

half at the common expense of the Society’. Thus, the new 

building campaign of 1710 concerned the reconstruction of 

the remaing southern parts of College, which would have 

faced on High Street. See J. Magrath, The Queen’s College, 2 

vols. (Oxford, 1921), II, pp. 63-87; Victoria History of the 

County of Oxford, 16 vols., III, The University of Oxford 

(London, 1954), pp. 138-142. 

2 

J. Ayliffe, The ancient and present state of the University of 

Oxford (London, 1714), p. 301. 

3 

See H. Colvin, Unbuilt Oxford (New Haven and London, 

1983), p. 47; Nicholas Hawksmoor and the replanning of 

Oxford, ed. by R. White (Oxford and London, 1997). 

4 

K. Downes, Hawksmoor (London [1959] 1979), p. 102. 

5 

Six are numbered with roman numerals I-VI, and one 

labelled with the letter ‘A’. There are also three plans for 

alternative designs [Queen’s 14, 15, 17] and two High Street 

front elevations [Queen’s 18-20]. In Queen’s Library there is 

a manuscript catalogue by Roger White. 

6 

K. Downes, Hawksmoor, cit., pp. 102-107; H. Colvin, 

Unbuilt…, cit., pp. 47-53; G. Worsley, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor: 

A Pioneer Neo-Palladian?’, Architectural History, vol. 33 

(1990), pp. 60-74; R. White, Nicholas Hawksmoor…, cit., 

pp. 15-24. 

7 

K. Downes, Hawksmoor, cit., p. 107. 

8 

R. White, Nicholas Hawksmoor…, cit., p. 16; see also H. 

Colvin, Unbuilt…, cit., p. 47. 

9 

C. Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus… (London, 1715), pl. 3. 

The plate is inscribed to William Lancaster ‘Vicar of St 

Martin in the Field [...] Provost of Queens College Oxon’. 

10 

Remarks and collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. by C. E. 

Doble, 11 vols. (Oxford 1885-1921), VII, p. 247. 

11 

See: Queen’s 3, 4, 12. 

12 

This corpus includes designs for All Souls College, 

Clarendon Building, Radcliffe Library, Brasenose, Worcester, 

Magdalen College. 

13 

K. Downes, Hawksmoor, cit., p. 102. 

14 

As already pointed out by Kerry Downes, Hawskmoor 

appears not to have had either an exact survey of the site or a 

master plan to follow as he had, for example, in the case of 

the later design for the Clarendon building. 

15 

See footnote 1. 

16 

For Clarke’s All Souls master plan see H. Colvin, Unbuilt…, 

cit., p. 36. 

17 

V. Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor: rebuilding ancient 

wonders (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 202-213, in 

particular p. 204. 

18 

T. Clayton, ‘The Print Collection of George Clarke at 

Worcester College Oxford’, Print Quarterly, 9 (1992), pp. 

123-141. During the Opler Conference at Worcester College 

(29th-31st March 2012) I gave a paper on Clarke’s library 

entitled: Architecture and Oxford University in the early 

Eighteenth Century: George Clarke’s ‘Accademia’ and his 

library-laboratory. 

19 

For the arrangement of hall and chapel en pendant see K. 

Downes, Hawksmoor, cit., p. 104. 

20 

For Hawksmoor’s Palladian sources, see G. Worsley, 

‘Nicholas Hawksmoor…, cit. . 

21 


22 

See G. Worsley, ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor…’, cit., p. 61; R. 

White, Nicholas Hawksmoor…, cit., p. 15. 

23 


24 

The only part of the College that can be regarded as 

Hawksmoor’s work is the main gateway on High Street, built 

by W. Townesend in 1733-36. 

25 

K. Downes, Hawksmoor, cit., pp. 107-109; H. Colvin, 

Unbuilt…, cit., pp. 60-64; R. White, Nicholas Hawksmoor…, 

cit., pp. 45-48; G. Tyack, ‘The Clarendon Building: Printing 

House and Propylaeum’, Bodleian Library Record, 23 

(2010), pp. 41-63. 

26 

Hawksmoor and the Oxford renovatio urbis is the central 

subject of my PhD thesis ‘The Seat of the Muses’. Nicholas 

Hawksmoor and Oxford (University IUAV of Venice, 2011) 

and of my current book-project. 

Dr. Eleonora Pistis is Scott Opler Research Fellow 

in Architectural History at Worcester College, 

Oxford. She has conducted various studies on 

eighteenth-century European architecture, with 

particular attention to Italy, France and England. 

Her current book-project concerns Nicholas 

Hawksmoor, George Clarke and the renovatio 

urbis of Oxford.

10 


Heraldic manuscripts in the Library of 

The Queen’s College 

Nigel Ramsay 

University College London 

M 

any hundreds of heraldic manuscripts 

of the Tudor and Stuart 

periods are extant today. Most are 

without much scholarly value as 

texts, being copies that were produced for sale to 

the numerous Englishmen who wished simply to 

be better informed about the heraldry and family 

relationships of their fellow countrymen. They 

were valued as reference books, rather like a 

Who’s Who today; and they were not the sort of 

book that anyone would have expected to find in 

an Oxford or Cambridge college library. Heraldic 

manuscripts began to enter the colleges’ collections 

only in the late seventeenth century, when 

the study of English history was itself starting to 

be seen as a suitable subject for study by the 

colleges’ Fellows. 

Original heraldic compilations are much rarer, 

and in principle those that were produced in the 

course of their official duties by the officers of 

arms (the three Kings of Arms, six Heralds of 

Arms and four Pursuivants of Arms who together 

comprise the College of Arms) became the property 

of their College. Almost all the original 

records of the visitations of the different counties 

of England and Wales that were carried out 

between the early sixteenth and late seventeenth 

centuries are today at the College of Arms; the 

most authoritative list of visitations and their 

records is accordingly that of Sir Anthony Wagner, 

in his Records and collections of the College of 

Arms (London, 1952). When heralds produced 

other books, for use in the course of their professional 

duties, there was a tendency for these 

compilations to be passed on, by gift or sale, to 

other officers of arms: open sales in the secondhand 

market must have been much less common 

than private-treaty sales by, say, heralds’ widows 

to practising heralds. There was a professional 

wish to keep the heralds’ books out of the hands of 

the herald-painters and other interlopers who 

posed a commercial threat to the heralds’ own 

private practices. 

Fig. 1: Drawing by Robert Glover of sealed attached to grant 

of the manor of Pesenhall to Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, by 

Alexander, King of Scotland. (MS 166, folio 2 recto) 

The most capable heralds have always tended to 

be both writers and compilers themselves as well 

as collectors of the works of their predecessors. 

Robert Glover, Somerset Herald, who died aged 44 

in 1588, was regarded in his own day as the most 

scholarly and capable of all the officers of arms; 

and he certainly was also the most prolific writer 

and transcriber of his age, as well as being a major 

collector of medieval and Tudor historical and 

heraldic manuscripts. 

The College of Arms was in a state of some 

disarray in the 1580s, and Glover’s enormous 

collection was divided and dispersed within a few 

months of his death. A good many of his manuscripts 

ultimately passed into the collections of 

other heralds—including his nephew John Philipot 

(these manuscripts later being acquired by the 

College of Arms) and Elias Ashmole (by whom 

they were bequeathed to the University of Oxford). 

A few were acquired by his near-contemporary 

Ralph Brooke (c. 1553-1625), Rouge Croix Pursuivant 

from 1580 and York Herald from 1592. 

Brooke was an acrimonious and litigious man, 

who frequently quarrelled with his fellow-officers 

of arms, but he was undoubtedly very capable; and 

his abilities extended to his collecting. He acquired 

a considerable group of manuscripts that had been 

written by Glover, and several of these are today at 

Queen’s. 

For the medieval historian, the most remarkable 

of these manuscripts of Glover’s is MS 166 (fig. 1). 

It is one of his books of miscellaneous notes, and 

was compiled in the mid to late 1570s. It is replete 

with excerpts and transcripts of medieval charters,

Heraldic manuscripts in the Library of The Queen’s College 11 

perhaps no more than a decade or two previously; 

it was also an opportunity for him to engage in 

original research, examining charters that might 

provide new material for some of his wider aims, 

such as his projected record of all the baronial 

families that there had ever been in England. 

Fig. 2: Williamson family tree and pasted in coat of arms of 

Joseph Williamson from Glover’s Visitation of Northamptonshire. 

(MS 112, folio 50 recto) 

interspersed with notes of heraldry seen in parish 

churches (in Essex, especially), draft funeral 

certificates (such as were written by heralds when 

they conducted public funerals that incorporated a 

display of the deceased’s coat of arms) and 

excerpts from medieval texts, such as the names of 

benefactors listed in the Almoner’s book of St 

Alban’s Abbey. As always with such collections of 

notes and transcripts, the direct historical value 

lies partly in the presence of copies of documents 

that in their original form have since been lost— 

although discovering whether the originals may 

survive is rarely easy. 

For both the Tudor historian and the armorist, 

there is obviously enormous value in MS 106, the 

record of Glover’s visitation of Staffordshire, 1583. 

This is the original manuscript, and lies behind all 

other known copies; it is thus our primary authority 

for the many genealogies that it provides. 

Moreover, it is not just a collection of genealogical 

tables (authenticated by the signature of the head 

of each armigerous Staffordshire family); like 

Glover’s other books of visitation pedigrees, it is 

also replete with notes of the ‘proofs’ that he was 

shown: medieval charters and their seals, and 

other records that he felt to be of value. For 

Glover, a heraldic visitation was not just the 

occasion for making the official record of changes 

to a county’s families since the last visitation, of 

The route by which part of Ralph Brooke’s collection 

came to Queen’s College is significant. The 

College’s heraldic manuscripts seem almost all to 

have formed part of the legacy of Sir Joseph 

Williamson in 1701 (fig. 2). Williamson was keeper 

of the State Paper Office (among many other 

public offices), and another part of his heraldic 

collection seems to have entered that Office (and 

so is today dispersed within the Public Record 

Office’s class SP 9, in the National Archives at 

Kew). Williamson was fortunate enough to acquire 

much or all of the collection of manuscripts of Sir 

Thomas Shirley (c. 1590-1654), a country gentleman 

who is best known today as having been one 

of a group of four antiquaries—Sir Edward Dering, 

Sir Christopher Hatton, William Dugdale and 

Shirley himself—who in 1638 agreed to pool their 

documentary resources, putting all their antiquarian 

collections at each other’s disposal. For these 

purposes, Shirley’s books were to be marked with 

his coat of arms, and this may in part explain why 

his manuscripts that are at Queen’s are still 

identifiable in this way today. Comparatively little 

is known of Shirley’s life. His letters and accounts 

appear not to survive, and his intended magnum 

opus, entitled The Catholic armorial, remains in 

unpublished obscurity within PRO, SP 9; but his 

acquisition of a substantial portion of Ralph 

Brooke’s library has indirectly ensured its survival 

and may one day enable a re-assessment of some 

of Shirley’s own activities. No less importantly, 

through Ralph Brooke, Sir Thomas Shirley and Sir 

Joseph Williamson, a significant group of Robert 

Glover’s manuscripts has been kept together and 

preserved for scholarly use at Queen’s. 

1 

Not all, however; for instance, one of Brooke’s Glover 

manuscripts is now MS Harley 807 in the British Library. 

2 

A.R. Wagner, A catalogue of English mediaeval rolls of 

arms, Aspilogia I (Oxford, 1950), p. xxii. See also, more 

generally, R. Cust, ‘Catholicism, antiquarianism and gentry 

honour: the writings of Sir Thomas Shirley’, Midland 

History, 23 (1998). 

Dr Nigel Ramsay is a Senior Research Associate 

engaged on the English Monastic Archives 

Project at University College London. He is 

shortly to publish an edition of the letters and 

papers of Robert Glover.

12 


Pulsilogium to pulse watch 

Denis Gibbs 

I 

n 1724, when he was aged 75, Sir John 

Floyer (1649-1734) gave a collection of 

books and unpublished manuscripts to The 

Queen’s College, Oxford, where he had 

matriculated some sixty years previously. Among 

these were a few books he used when he was a 

student in Oxford, but the great majority he 

acquired during his long and distinguished career 

as a physician in the cathedral city of Lichfield. On 

blank pages in many of the books and sometimes 

on printed pages, Floyer wrote comments, notes 

and prescriptions, as well as adding marginal 

annotations; his books were for use rather than for 

show. Whereas some of the books were used by 

him in support of his practice as a physician, 

others were acquired to assist him in his research 

and writings on medical subjects. 

A special feature of the Floyer collection is that it 

not only reflects the working library of a busy 

provincial physician of the period, but it also 

contains much of the source material upon which 

Floyer relied when writing his important medical 

works. In this respect, the collection provides a 

unique resource for the interpretation and understanding 

of Sir John Floyer's contributions, 

offering continuing opportunities for the further 

assessment of his place in the history of medicine, 

as well as for more general studies on the nature of 

the practice of an important provincial physician 

of the time. 

Sir John Floyer is acknowledged as an important 

pioneer of pulse-timing. He was the first person to 

make numerous observations on pulse rates by 

means of a specially constructed watch with a 

seconds hand 1 . Though Floyer used his pulse 

watch within a system of clinical practice that was 

still based substantially on Galenic beliefs, the 

watch was perhaps the first reasonably efficient 

clinical instrument to merit application in practice. 

My purpose in this paper is twofold: firstly, to 

consider the pulse-watch used by Sir John Floyer 

in the context of developments in watch and clock 

making of the period; secondly, to draw attention 

to the way in which concepts and inventions 

relevant to pulse timing were transmitted from 

Padua to the small provincial city of Lichfield, in 

the late 17 th century. 

The pulse watch used by Sir John Floyer was 

constructed in 1695 by Samuel Watson. 2 Samuel 

Watson (c. 1635-1711) was born in Coventry, a city 

noted at the time for the expertise and skill of its 

watch and clock makers. Samuel Watson became 

prominent among these as a result of which, at 

least before 1689 when Watson moved to Long 

Acre to continue his craft in London, Floyer had 

easy access to one of the leading watch and clock 

making masters of the age. Samuel Watson was 

one of those who, with his more famous contemporaries 

such as Thomas Tompion (1639-1713) 

and Daniel Quare (1649-1724), contributed to 

improvements which, for some decades, raised 

English horological craftsmanship and invention 

to a position of pre-eminence. When he moved to 

London, Samuel Watson was appointed Mathematician-in-Ordinary 

to King Charles II. He was 

commissioned (but never paid) by the King to 

make a remarkable astronomical clock, now in 

Windsor Castle; he was subsequently referred to 

as “the curious contriver of the celestial orbitary”. 

3,4 

Sir John Floyer’s extensive published writings on 

pulse timing with the many tables of data he 

compiled early in the 18 th century, are well 

known. 5 He began by making simple observations 

with his pulse watch and soon extended these to 

explore possible relationships between pulse rates 

and other measurements, such as barometric 

pressure and ambient temperature, not to mention 

phases of the moon. Though he was sometimes 

over ambitious and naïve, particularly when he 

extrapolated fancifully from the data he collected, 

he did also make important and original discoveries, 

such for instance as observing for the first time 

an approximate ratio between pulse and respiration 

rates. 

At a time when Floyer was starting in practice as a 

physician in 1675, after he had spent at least 11 

years at the University of Oxford, there was a 

crucial development in horological technology. 

The introduction of a spring balance was conceived 

by Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who did 

experimental work on the subject as early as 1658. 

But, it took another 17 years before Thomas 

Tompion, at Hooke’s behest, made a watch for 

Charles II in 1675, which was under the control of 

a spring balance. Though the watch was neither 

very accurate nor reliable, for the first time in 

England, the construction of time-pieces to show

Pulsilogium to pulse watch 13 

accuracy and reliability were not attainable and, 

for some two centuries, watches were used for 

show as expensive articles of fashion and jewellery, 

rather than as useful time-keepers. It was 

only in the late 17 th century that the first reasonably 

accurate watches could be made, following the 

invention and application of balance springs. 

Fig. 1: Title page from Floyer’s The physician’s pulse-watch, 

1707. The copy is from Floyer’s library and contains his 

handwritten notes. (Sel.f.19) 

Fig. 2: Diagram from the second 

volume to The physician’s pulsewatch. 

(Sel.f.20) 

the passing of 

seconds as well as 

of hours and 

minutes, had 

become technically 

feasible. 6 

The importance 

of the invention 

of the balance 

spring needs to be 

put briefly into 

perspective. The 

force of gravity 

using a suspended 

weight 

was the driving 

force in long case 

clocks. Once 

Galileo (1564- 

1642) had worked 

out that a pendulum 

linked to an 

escapement 

mechanism 

would be an ideal 

timer at the heart of such a clock, and following 

the work of Christiaan Huygens (1639-1696) in 

Holland who transformed theory into practice, 

long case clocks with hour and minute hands 

became fairly precise timekeepers. But they were 

large and not readily portable. In the mid-fifteenth 

century the force of a mainspring was introduced 

as an alternative means of driving clockwork and 

this, in turn, led to the birth of watches. Though 

ingenious devices like the fusee were added, 

In his preface to the first volume of The physician’s 

pulse-watch, published in 1707 (fig. 1), 

Floyer referred to the instruments he had used for 

timing the pulse. “I have for many years tried 

pulses by the minute in common watches, and 

pendulum clocks, when I was among my patients; 

after some time I met with the common seaminute 

glass, which I used for my cold bathing, 

and by that I made most of my experiments; but 

because this was not portable, I caused a pulsewatch 

to be made …” Floyer extended his observations 

on the pulse and wrote a second volume of 

The physician’s pulse-watch which was published 

in 1710 (fig. 2). The physician’s pulse-watch was 

the only one of the many books he wrote, to be 

translated into Italian and published in Venice in 

1715. 7 The publication of an Italian edition was an 

entirely fitting acknowledgement of the fact that 

Italy was the home of the first scientific applications 

of pulse-timing, whether by Galileo (1564- 

1642), who discovered the isochronism of the 

simple pendulum by using his own pulse, or a little 

later, by Sanctorius (1561-1636), Professor of 

Experimental Medicine in Padua, who extended 

Galileo’s observations with the pulsilogium, as 

well as proposing the use of other instruments for 

measurement in medicine. 

Evidence has recently come to light that, in about 

1684, Floyer acquired about twenty Renaissance 

texts for his own use, which included two books by 

Sanctorius. Forty years later, when Floyer was 

aged 76, he donated them as part of his collection 

of medical books, to the Library of The Queen’s 

College, Oxford. Recently, the significance of a 

small monogram, AH, written on title pages of 

many of the Renaissance books has been discovered. 

The ownership device indicated that they 

had first belonged to Dr Anthony Hewett (c1603- 

1684), who was Floyer’s predecessor as physician 

in Lichfield. Very little was then known of Dr 

Hewett, but evidence is now available that he 

studied medicine at Cambridge and that he 

subsequently travelled to Padua, where he was 

awarded MD in April 1638. 8 When he returned 

from Padua, Hewett brought back books he had 

bought while on his Continental travels, and at

14 


Fig. 3: Title page from 

Sanctorius’ Commentary 

on Avicenna, 1626, 

showing Anthony Hewitt’s 

initials at the top of 

the page. (HS.b.545) 

least some of these were 

later acquired by his 

successor, Sir John Floyer. 

Floyer’s fascination with 

measurement in medicine, 

especially with timing the 

pulse, was inspired by 

Sanctorius, particularly 

from reading the relevant 

parts of Sanctorius’s 

Commentary on Avicenna 

(1626) (fig. 3), one of the 

books he acquired from 

Hewett. 9 Here the many 

different instruments and 

apparatus devised by 

Sanctorius, including 

several examples of 

pulsilogiums, were illustrated 

and discussed. 

Floyer may well have been as baffled as some 

readers of the present day in trying to understand 

how several of Sanctorius’s instruments worked; 

some were probably prototypes rather than of 

proven value, and most were probably designed 

with research rather than clinical practice in mind. 

Floyer took an important initiative by requesting 

Samuel Watson to construct a pulse-watch with a 

seconds hand, soon after the requisite technological 

advance had been achieved. Sanctorius of 

Padua was the pioneer. Floyer followed, seventy 

years later, as a disciple of Sanctorius, at a time at 

the end of the 17 th century, when easy and reasonably 

accurate timing of the pulse using a pocket 

watch first became feasible. 

1 

Morton, Leslie (Garrison and Morton). A Medical bibliography. 

3rd ed. London: Deutsch, 1970. 318, item 2670 

2 

Gibbs, D.D. ‘The physician’s pulse watch.’ Medical History, 

1971 15 p. 187-190 

3 

Lloyd, H. Alan. A collector’s dictionary of clocks. London: 

Country Life, 1964. 

4 

Jagger, C. ‘Royal Clocks.’ Clocks, April 1983 5 p. 35-39 

5 

Floyer, Sir John The physician’s pulse watch London: 

Volume I 1707; Volume II 1710 

6 

Hayward J.F. English watches. Victoria and Albert 

Museum. London: HMSO, 1969. 

7 

Floyer, Sir John L’oriuolo da polso de medici, ovvero un 

saggio per ispiegare l’arte antica di tastare il polso, e per 

meglioraria coll’ajuto d’un oriuolo da polso. In tre parti … 

Venice: 1715 

8 

Gibbs, D.D. ‘Dr Anthony Hewett (c. 1603-1684) MD Padua 

and Cambridge, Physician of Lichfield and Student of 

Renaissance Medicine.’ Staffordshire Studies, in press. 

9 

Santorio, Santorio (Sanctorius) Commentaria in primam 

fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae … Venetiis: Jacobus 

Sarcina 1626 

Denis Gibbs is a medical historian and one of the 

foremost authorities on John Floyer. In his early 

career he practiced medicine in Lichfield, Floyer’s 

hometown, and later at The Royal London 

Hospital. He was educated at Keble College, 

Oxford. 

Modern swimming instruction begins in 

style : the contribution of the influential 

Everard Digby (ca. 1551-1605) 

Paul Ivanovic 

The Queen’s College 

E 

verard Digby’s De arte natandi 

(Sel.b.98) was published in 1587. It is 

justifiably credited with being the first 

scientific treatise on swimming, at least 

in the European sphere. One imagines Digby saw 

his work as a useful guide to help prevent and 

reduce the deaths of young men in swimming 

accidents in Cambridge, where he worked, and 

beyond. Although there are a few European 

antecedents, these are more in the form of literary 

essays celebrating swimming rather than instructive 

texts. Outside of Europe, there remains the 

possibility of earlier texts in, for example, the 

Chinese, Indian or Japanese languages. Indeed, in 

Japan interscholastic swimming competitions 

have existed since 1603, suggesting that an early 

Japanese instructional text may exist, although it 

is possible that knowledge was passed down orally 

in this and the other traditions. 

Digby, an extrovert and perhaps slightly “oddball” 

Cambridge scholar, provides a short (115 p.), 

coherent and informative narrative, which is 

divided into two books. Loosely, the treatise is 

structured into a shorter first book with theory 

and practical advice, and a longer second book 

with illustrative woodcuts outlining swimming 

techniques. One presumes Digby provided the 

printer with sketches, as it would be impossible to 

produce the illustrations from simply consulting 

the text. Those of the 43 woodcut illustrations 

which show swimming techniques and activities in 

the water have been cleverly designed in two parts.

Modern swimming instruction begins in style 15 

such as how to carry objects (fig. 2) and keep them 

dry and also more eccentrically how to safely pare 

your nails in water. The swimming styles are 

described rather than named: “to swim like a dog”, 

foreshadowing the dog-paddle, and “to swim like a 

dolphin”. He essentially covers what we might 

recognize as nascent forms of the breaststroke (fig. 

3), sidestroke, and backstroke, as well as the 

aforementioned dog-paddle. 

Fig. 1: Illustration from De 

arte natandi showing how 

to float in the water. 

Fig. 2: Illustration from De 

arte natandi showing how to 

carry items across water 

without getting them wet. 

There is an outer background frame – there are 5 

used in total – and a smaller changeable internal 

woodcut with a naked male swimmer demonstrating 

the chosen activity in the water. It is possible 

that this rarely used illustrative technique was the 

result of necessity, with the cost of so many 

completely separate full-page illustrations proving 

prohibitively expensive. The idea of a smaller 

changeable internal woodcut would therefore 

make good sense. 

The first book details ideas about swimming; the 

health benefits and its nature as a pleasurable 

activity. Digby advises on the right time of year to 

swim, as May to August, and about the best places 

to swim. He also wisely assumes that the value of 

swimming to his readers will not be uncontested. 

For example, the only four clear references in the 

Bible and the many references in Shakespeare to 

swimming are invariably negative in nature. 

Swimming was also principally engaged in by 

people associated with water such as seamen and 

bargees, and was not an activity of the elite. One 

could count hunting, tournaments and tennis as 

elite activities in the 16th century. Nevertheless, 

with the Renaissance, and the rediscovery of the 

classics, the status of swimming was improving 

and it was no longer associated with only lower 

class men. 

The second book, which illuminates the actual 

techniques, may appear unintentionally humorous 

to the modern reader. Digby covers getting into 

the water (jumping and getting stuck in the mud 

could be life threatening), he provides instruction 

on how one can swim in different styles, how to 

turn in the water and how to float (fig. 1). There 

are also a number of ecletic activities included 

As the title suggests De arte natandi is in Latin, 

and in fact in an elaborate Renaissance Latin, 

which would have been accessible only to aristocrats, 

clergy and scholars who could read Latin, 

thereby significantly limiting the possible audience. 

Digby deliberately chose to write in Latin 

because he wanted to give swimming a status and 

importance, which he felt it lacked. He might have 

felt, perhaps slightly humorously, that he was 

writing a seminal account of swimming as an “art” 

similar to that of Virgil on agriculture or of 

Hippocrates and Galen on medicine. However, an 

abridged English translation, A short introduction 

for to learne to swim by Thomas Middleton, 

appeared in 1595. This reused the original plates, 

although the background and central plates have 

become mixed in certain cases, presumably as a 

result of mistakes by the printer, and he hardly 

altered the description of the swimming styles. 

This testifies to the accuracy of Digby’s account of 

swimming during the period. Digby made no claim 

to originality as a writer on swimming techniques. 

Neither De arte natandi or Middleton’s translation 

were reprinted. Middleton’s work seems to 

have fallen into obscurity and today there are only 

three extant examples, and only one of these 

copies, held at the British Library, is complete, 

whereas there are more than 10 copies of De arte 

natandi. It is unknown how many copies of either 

work were originally printed. 

Digby’s contribution to the teaching of swimming 

continued to be influential 

until the 18th century, as a 

result of two unacknowledged 

English translations. These 

are The compleat swimmer 

(1658) by William Percey, 

and The art of swimming 

(1699) by Melchisedech 

Thevenot. In the case of 

Thevenot, this was the 

translation of his own French 

work L’art de nager (1696) 

plagiarized from Digby. 

Fig. 3: Illustration of 

the breaststroke from 

De arte natandi.

16 


Percey’s study is most notable for one of the first 

recorded uses of the word “stroke” to describe a 

swimming style, otherwise there is little new. 

The swimming styles of today essentially evolved 

in the late 19th century onwards and would 

probably be unrecognizable to 17th century 

swimmers. As we are saturated by images of 

swimming from cinema and television, it is 

difficult to imagine how different swimming styles 

might have been in earlier periods. Nevertheless, it 

is amusing to note the anachronistic swimming 

one finds in historical films, especially in 

swashbucklers, though it is true that there is often 

surprisingly little swimming in these films. In Sea 

devils, set in 1800, Rock Hudson stylishly swims 

both a modern looking breaststroke and front 

crawl while fully dressed. In fact, most people 

would probably have swum in the nude at this 

time, costumes being gradually introduced in the 

19th century. Another swashbuckler, The crimson 

pirate, set in the late 18th century, is a comic 

action film which might be considered an antecedent 

of Pirates of the Caribbean. There is a scene 

in which an entire ship’s crew very competently 

swims underwater from one vessel to another, 

which they intend to seize. It seems unlikely that 

all members of a ship’s crew could swim and 

indeed swim very skilfully, and a possible opportunity 

for comedy is sadly missed. Indeed, for a very 

long time sailors thought it unlucky to learn to 

swim. It was not until 1879 that the Queen’s 

Regulations for the Royal Navy were amended, 

and all seamen were required to take a swim test 

or to learn how to swim. In a historical quirk, the 

Queen’s Regulations for the British army were 

amended earlier in 1868, and swimming instruction 

was made a “military duty” for all troops. 

Swimming instruction outside of the military 

services was for a long time solely provided by 

swimming clubs, and was often limited by the lack 

of swimming pools. In the 19th century, the 

increasing number of swimming pools and the 

construction of the railway network provided 

opportunities for competition between different 

areas and greater access to the sea to swim. 

Nevertheless, it was not until 1890 that swimming 

instruction in London schools became more 

prevalent, with the allocation of education funds 

for this purpose. In the provinces, it was over a 

decade later before swimming instruction in 

schools was to become established. 

lose his position at St John’s College, Cambridge 

over a minor financial dispute, although there 

were also unhelpful underlying religious differences 

with his colleagues which also played a part. 

He was to support himself as a country clergyman 

for the rest of his life. He died in 1605, which was 

strangely the same year as a kinsman, Sir Everard 

Digby of Stoke Dry, was executed as one of the 

main conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. As a 

final note, Nicholas Orme, a key writer on early 

English swimming, tried to have a commemorative 

postage stamp issued in 1987 on the 400th 

anniversary of the publication of De arte natandi, 

but sadly he was unsuccessful. One imagines 

Everard Digby’s image reflected in the surface, the 

mirror suddenly deforming and ripples travelling 

outwards before a stillness returns. He remains 

another generally uncelebrated British first. 

All the English works cited above can be accessed 

as full text electronic facsimiles in Early English 

Books Online at http://eebo.chadwyck.com. 

Bibliography 

Capwell Fox, Martha. Swimming. Thomson/Gale, 2003. 

Keil, Ian & Don Wix. ‘In the swim: the Amateur Swimming 

Association from 1869 to 1994’. Swimming Times, 1996. 

Love, Christopher. A social history of swimming in 

England, 1800-1918: splashing in the Serpentine. London : 

Routledge, 2008. 

Orme, Nicholas. Early English swimming 55 BC-AD 1719. 

Exeter : University of Exeter , 1983. 

Filmography 

The crimson pirate. Directed by Robert Siodmark and 

starring Burt Lancaster, Nick Cravat and Eva Bartok. 1952. 

Pirates of the Caribbean: The curse of the black pearl. 

Directed by Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp, Geoffrey 

Rush and Keira Knightley. 2003. 

Sea devils. Directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Rock 

Hudson and Yvonne De Carlo. 1953. 

Paul Ivanovic is the Rare Books Cataloguer at 

The Queen’s College Library. 

Returning to Everard Digby, his life was to change 

soon after he finished De arte natandi. He was to

Refurbishment of medieval manuscripts for Henry VIII 17 

Refurbishment of medieval manuscripts 

for Henry VIII 

Part two, Queen’s College MS 303 

Jane Eagan 

Oxford Conservation Consortium 

T 

he Library contains seven medieval 

manuscripts known to have been 

altered/recovered in red and black velvet 

on entry into the royal collection at the 

Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of 

Henry VIII. In Issue 1 of Insight, I described two 

projects funded by the National Manuscripts 

Conservation Trust to conserve and document this 

important collection, and outlined the conservation 

treatment of one of the manuscripts, Queen’s 

College MS 323 (pp. 15-19). In this issue, I will 

briefly describe the conservation of another 

manuscript of this group, Queen’s College MS 303, 

and also show how this manuscript was altered to 

make it suitable for the royal library. 

The corpus of surviving medieval monastic 

manuscripts altered or rebound and recovered in 

velvet for Henry VIII is small; twenty-four manuscripts 

which have not undergone complete 

rebinding have been identified in seven library 

collections. This survival rate seems even smaller 

when compared to documentary evidence of the 

large number of books in the royal collection in 

1547 described in variations of the following: ‘Item 

xxiiij bokes couered with purple veluet and 

garnysshed with siluer wherof xxj guylte’, or ‘Item 

foure bokes couered with crimson veluet and 

garnysshed with golde’, etc. An important source 

of information about the library of Henry VIII is 

the inventory made shortly after his death in 1547, 

which lists books and other possessions found in 

the royal palaces, with brief descriptions. The 

inventory gives some detail about the materials 

used in bindings and shows that, in some rooms, 

books were arranged by colour, implying that 

books may have been viewed as aesthetic objects, 

as well as sources for study and reference. 

Fig. 1: MS 303 before treatment. 

Fig. 2: The upper oak board 

clamped after adhering the 

vertical split. 

on the Psalms, written in England in the thirteenth 

century. The manuscript was in poor 

condition, with a vertical split through the wooden 

upper board, a heavily pleated first leaf, and 

instability of the upper board in the joint area, due 

to removal of endleaf material (fig.1). To stabilise 

this volume, the first step was to repair the split 

board, by inserting with a fine brush, warm 

gelatine adhesive, then clamping the board until 

this was dry and reinforcing the split with parchment 

patches (fig. 2). To protect the first leaf, 

which was becoming pleated and abraded due to 

contact with the upper board, a new endleaf of calf 

parchment was sewn in place, which incorporated 

a linen/paper guard that could be used to reinforce 

the board attachment and pull the upper 

board back into position and secure it (fig. 3). 

Having done this, the next task was to humidify 

the pleated area only of the first leaf with a thin 

strip of damp blotter and Gore-Tex® membrane, a 

Conservation of Queen’s College MS 303 

MS 303 is a copy of Peter Lombard’s Commentary 

Fig. 3: New parchment endleaf (upper).

18 


Fig. 4: Pleating of fol. 1r, before treatment 

Fig. 5: Pleating of fol. 1r, after treatment 

technique which 

lets only minimal 

moisture 

through to the 

parchment in a 

very controllable 

way (fig. 4,5). 

The humidified 

area was then 

dried between 

blotting paper 

u n d e r l i g h t 

weight. The 

presence of a 

new parchment 

endleaf will keep 

the first leaf flat 

against the textblock 

and stop it 

from floating up 

when the board 

is opened and 

b e c o m i n g 

pleated (this is 

called ‘suction 

pleating’). There 

was a large loss 

of textile material 

from the 

spine, and the 

edges of the red 

velvet textile in 

this area were fraying and fragile. Textile conservator 

Maria Hayward infilled this area with two 

weights of cotton cloth dyed to match and stitched 

this infill in place with long and short stitches 

using a very fine silk thread (Fig. 6). 

Alterations for the royal library of Henry 

VIII 

In addition to conservation treatment, the work on 

the Henrician bindings has focussed on documenting 

what can be observed and understood about 

the working practices of binders refurbishing this 

small group of manuscripts, and by extension 

other volumes taken into the royal library. The 

extent to and means by which this material was 

structurally altered to produce luxurious-looking 

books for the royal collection is a subject that has 

not been explored. 

Alterations were carried out to endleaves, textblock, 

and endbands, and metal furniture and 

covering materials were removed. The binders 

Fig. 6: Stitching in place the infill for large loss on the spine. 

appear to have lifted/removed/excised existing 

pastedowns and the original covering material, 

before recovering with velvet and pasting down 

flyleaves or other matter to cover the inner board 

faces and traces of original material. Removal of 

endleaf material would explain why there is little 

evidence of earlier covering, turn ins, or lacing to 

be read from the altered endleaves. Another 

option open to the binders would have been to 

recover the books without removing the original 

covering and pastedowns, but this has not been 

found in the Queen’s group. 

Alterations to Queen’s College MS 303 

MS 303 retains its medieval sewing structure and 

board attachment, with four double thongs as 

sewing supports, laced into oak boards. On entry 

into the royal library, this sturdy underlying 

structure was left largely unchanged, but some 

elements were altered in order to recover the book 

in velvet, to make a more luxurious binding 

suitable for the king’s collection. 

The original external covering material would have 

been an alum tawed skin (not a tanning process 

but a different one based on aluminium salts), and 

this was removed. The upper endleaves were also 

removed, and a piece of parchment pasted to the 

upper board. On the underside of this parchment 

leaf (removed during treatment of the split board) 

was a sixteenth-century inscription, evidence that 

this leaf did not belong to the original binding, and 

was pasted down in the sixteenth century (or 

later). Removal of endleaves would have been 

necessary after the cover was taken off, as they 

would have been damaged by this process.

Ghosts in the Library 19 

Ghosts in the Library: 

Apparitions of the dead in the collection of 

the Queen’s College, Oxford 

A new exhibition in the Upper Library 

Spring - Winter 2012 

Fig. 7: Queen’s MS 303 after treatment. 

Metal furniture such as clasps and bosses was also 

removed. Under the velvet covering of MS 303, at 

head and tail on the outer face of the upper board, 

there are recesses for non extant clasp straps with 

the nails still in position. The lower pastedown 

shows rust marks where pins/catchplates for these 

straps were positioned, closing from the upper 

onto the lower board. In addition, there is a set of 

rust marks which may have been caused by a 

parchment titling piece with protective horn cover 

traditionally nailed onto the lower cover. It is 

likely that this manuscript was originally in a 

Romanesque binding. 

Having removed the original covering of MS 303 

and made alterations, Henry VIII’s binders began 

to refashion the stripped-down medieval binding. 

In place of the original structural endbands laced 

in to reinforce the board attachment, they worked 

a new decorative endband in a front crossover 

pattern over rolled tanned-skin cores with pink 

and blue thread (dyed with woad or indigo), used 

doubled on the needle and tied down into a few 

quires, often only in three to four places and 

frequently missing the centres of the quires. These 

hasty non-structural endbands are typical and are 

found on five other Henrician textile bindings at 

Queen’s. 

The binders worked quickly and used the luxurious-looking 

velvet covering material economically, 

making use of selvedges where possible and 

cutting only where they had to. Neatness was a byproduct, 

warp direction and alignment of the 

textile were disregarded, corners were fashioned 

quickly, and refashioned endleaves were liberally 

glued out with animal glue. The rich appearance of 

these refurbished bindings is what mattered. 

Craftsmanship, integrity of structure, working 

properties, etc. were secondary (Fig. 7). 

Jane Eagan is the Head Conservator at the 

Oxford Conservation Consortium. 

T 

his small exhibition illustrates the 

variety of opinions held about ghosts in 

English and European thought, with 

works on display dating from the 15th to 

19th centuries. 

The topic of apparitions of the dead was a popular 

and controversial one in the late 16th and early 

17th centuries, and reflecting our collection the 

exhibition focuses particularly on ghosts as they 

appear in Reformation literature. 

Items on display include the 15th century manuscript 

The Gast of Gy, a 1703 quarto edition of 

Shakespeare’s The tragedy of Hamlet Prince of 

Denmark and a 19th century scientific treatise 

called Sketches of the philosophy of apparitions 

by Samuel Hibbert. 

For the brave-hearted, alongside the exhibition 

you can also peruse the modern book Haunted 

Oxford, which includes a tale of the Upper Library’s 

very own ghost. 

The exhibition is curated by our Technical Services 

Librarian, Lynette Dobson, and will be on display 

until Autumn 2012. 

Non-members of the College (including members 

of other Oxford colleges) need to make an appointment 

before visiting – please email 

library@queens.ox.ac.uk. 

The Queen’s College Library Insight 

Published by The Library, The Queen’s College, 

Oxford, OX1 4AW 

Copyright The Queen’s College, Oxford, 2012 

All rights reserved 

ISSN 2049-8349

Ghosts in the Library 

Apparitions of the dead in the collection of 

the Queen’s College, Oxford 

April — 

September 

2012 

This small exhibition is 

located in the display cases 

in the Queen’s College 

Upper Library. 

Non-members of the 

College, please contact us 

advance to arrange an 

appointment 

An exhibition of books in the Upper Library 

The Queen’s College Library 

01865 279130 

library@queens.ox.ac.uk

Insight 2012

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?