The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers ed. by Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (review)

Michael Riordan has recently characterized the selection of “interesting” documents for publication from Oxford archives in the late nineteenth century and the (dire) impact of this process on cataloguing practice (Journal of the Society of Archivists [April 2011]). He writes that “an editor examined the content of documents in order to make a judgement on which to select for publication and then arranged them in an accessible way,” pointing out the manner in which accessibility carried the field, prioritizing content over everything (including, as it happens and disastrously, context, provenance, and archival order). Though the pictures are very lovely, the results of the fashionably themed and Heritage Lottery- funded digitization of those few (ten) former Wollaton Hall manuscripts acquired (also with HLF support) by the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at Nottingham University Library (viewable at http://www.nottingham.ac./manuscriptsandspecialcollections/learning) have all too much in common with this Victorian model. The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded volume under discussion here is an offshoot of the Lottery-funded Wollaton Library Collection project “to raise awareness of the manuscripts and to improve understanding of them.”

With its capacious format and lavish margins, The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts looks as though it belongs to a different world, looks authoritative, looks as though it aspires to be definitive. Perhaps partly because of the hurry (very apparent both in the editing and the proofreading) involved in being part of the larger project but also because of a certain lack of perspective, the book at times falls short of this aspiration.

As the preface does seem to begin pretty much in medias res (“So far as we can ascertain, the Wollaton manuscript collection has probably survived pretty much intact from the time of Francis Willoughby the Builder [1546–96]”), a little background may assist. The Willoughby family acquired the Wollaton estate in the fourteenth century (ca. 1314–1319) and is now represented by the 13th Baron Middleton whose seat is at Birdsall near Malton in Yorkshire. Succeeding a medieval manor house, the present Wollaton Hall, a startlingly innovative and vertiginous mannerist structure, was built for Sir Francis Willoughby in a single program between 1580 and 1588. Long overwhelmed by the smoke of the manufacturing town, the Hall was sold to Nottingham Corporation in 1925.

A century-long time line from 1911 suggests a roller-coaster ride in the fortunes of the collection of medieval manuscripts. The Wollaton Hall library and archives, the latter preserved “in a fireproof muniment room in the basement of the south-western pavilion of Wollaton Hall,” were surveyed by W. H. Stevenson of the Historical Manuscript Commission; all those working on the collection still rely on his accomplished Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, Preserved at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1911). Between 15 and 18 January 1925, 765 lots from the library (including two medieval manuscripts) were sold by Christie’s (the copy of the Polychronicon also left in 1928). The medieval manuscripts surviving in the collection and the bulk of the Middleton archive were deposited at the then University College Nottingham in 1947 and have been managed as the “Middleton Collection.” In 1974 the famous Wollaton Antiphonal (originally commissioned by Sir Thomas Chaworth of Wiverton, 1380–1459), returned by the Willoughby family to St. Leonard’s Wollaton in 1924, also came into the University’s care. Four medieval manuscripts were sold, again at Christie’s, on 16 November 2005 (lots 15, 18, 19 and 20). The confusingly named “Wollaton Library Collection” within the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections comprises only the ten manuscripts and forty-three early printed books acquired with Heritage Lottery Fund help in 2007.

The accident of survival of a country-house library or, as here, near survival does not itself confer a significant role in cultural history but, in this case, there is no doubt that...