The Salopian Summer 2023

SCHOOL NEWS
35
The Shewsy
I have been working on a Chapter outlining the history of
Shrewsbury House in Liverpool as part of a book on Public
School Missions to inner cities, provisionally titled My Soul’s
Shelter: Public Schools and their Missions to be published in
October. Of the very many schools that established ‘missions’
to inner cities in the late 19th century, all have long since
closed down, with the exception of Shrewsbury House and
the Harrow Mission. The full details are:
My Soul’s Shelter: Public Schools and their Missions
(Provisional Title)
Sunnyrest Books, Truro, October 2023
Foreword by HRH the Princess Royal, Prologue, 22 School
Essays, Epilogue. c500pp; c170 illustrations.
Hardback c. £40, Paperback c. £25.
Schools included: Bradfield, Charterhouse, Cheltenham
Ladies’, Clifton, Dulwich, Durham, Eton, Haileybury, Harrow,
Highgate, King’s Canterbury, Marlborough, Monkton Combe,
Radley, Repton, Rugby, Shrewsbury, The Leys, Tonbridge,
Uppingham, Wellington, Winchester.
Scholarly Visits
We have hosted the usual array of scholars and academics
to work on various items and received a varied mail bag of
archival and scholarly enquiries, including visits from:
Evelyn Nicholson, doctoral student from Cambridge, to work
on the Haughmond Graduale (MS 30), and MS 12 from
Buildwas Abbey, both dating from the early 12th century.
John Colley, doctoral student from Oxford (recently elected
Fellow of St John’s Cambridge), came to work on various
16th century books related to the English Renaissance. He
was particularly interested in marginalia and annotations. One
of the books is reputed to have been the personal possession
of Roger Ascham, tutor to our founder king, Edward VI.
MS XXIII: Floretum et Rosarium. England late 15th Century
Prof Van Dussen of McGill University plans to visit for two
days in June to work on MSS X and XXIII; “particularly
interesting admixtures of Floretum and Rosarium material,”
he observes. He specialises in research on the Wycliffites in
England and their counterparts in Hussite Bohemia.
MS X: Rosarium Theologiae (De Virtutibus et Vitiis) – 194
leaves. 165mm by 110mm, vellum, red initials, England,
15th Century. A donation label stuck to f. iv states, ‘given by
Mr Lewes Taylor parson of Moreton Corbett in the County
of Salop, 1619’. Extracts in Latin from the Fathers, etc., on
Virtues and Vices.
MS XXIII: Floretum et Rosarium – A theological
commonplace book, in alphabetical order according to
subjects. Paper and vellum. 174 leaves, 230mm by 215mm,
England, late 15th Century.
Peter Brown – ‘Journeys of the Mind’
Over the last couple of years, I have been in occasional
correspondence with Peter Brown (O 1948-52), Professor
of History at Princeton. I was able to provide some help
and digital copies of a hefty chunk of The Salopian for
the last 80 years or so to help him with his magnificent
memoirs, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, Princeton
University Press, 2023. It is an enthralling account not only
of his life from childhood in Dublin to academic historian,
but also his seminal work in the study of late antiquity, the
rise of Christian Europe, and pioneering work in Byzantine
and Middle Eastern antiquity.. It contains a fascinating and
detailed account of his time at Shrewsbury School in the
early 1950s, in which he captures with great faithfulness and
affection the character and atmosphere of the School at that
time and his remarkable teachers,
notably Murray Senior and Laurence
Le Quesne. He is undoubtedly the
most distinguished historian to have
come from Shrewsbury and is rightly
described on the book’s cover as
“one of the world’s most influential
and distinguished historians”.
Among his many books, his
biography St Augustine of Hippo is
a much-read classic.
Rowland Heylin (OS)
A fascinating request came to us from Lloyd Bowen, an
academic in the History Department at Cardiff University,
regarding an Old Salopian, Rowland Heylin, who, along
with his wife, bequeathed 83 books to the School Library.
We were able to supply some details of the books, some of
which are listed in the Library’s Benefactors’ Book, while the
remainder will emerge as we complete the cataloguing work.
Heylin was born in 1562 and entered the School in 1570.
He became Alderman of Cripplegate in 1624 and Sheriff of
London in 1625. He was a native of Shrewsbury, although
of Welsh extraction, his family having long been settled at
Pentreheylin in Montgomeryshire. He published a Welsh
version of the Bible at his own expense, and among his
bequests to the Ironmongers’ Company was £100 to provide
for an annual sermon to commemorate the failure of the
Gunpowder Plot, and for a dinner after it. Lloyd was able
to add that Heylin was deeply involved in the religious
controversies of the early 17th century – particularly in
Shrewsbury itself, where his sponsorship of a disruptive
puritanism is striking.