Willam Byrd's Sexual Lexicography

William Byrd II (1674–1744) is a familiar figure to students of the history of colonial Virginia. He inherited extensive property from his father and expanded those holdings, he founded new settlements, and he played an active rôle in Virginia politics. Today Byrd is best known for his secret diaries and his narrative of the expedition to establish the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina, both of which offer unmatched insights into the private life of a colonial gentleman. In what follows I will offer yet another view of Byrd’s private life, one gleaned from a new manuscript found written in the blank pages of a relatively staid folio from his library.

First a few words are in order about Byrd as a book-owner. During his time in England, where he spent all but eight of his first thirty-one years, Byrd accumulated a sizeable collection of books. Though not remarkable among educated English gentlemen (in whose company Byrd was convinced he belonged), Byrd’s collection almost certainly became the largest private library in North America. The Stretch catalogue of this collection (compiled in the 1750s) lists at least 2,345 volumes; and Kevin Hayes’ recent reconstruction of Byrd’s library has discovered still more. Byrd’s secret diaries record his regular habits of daily reading (most often the classics and the Bible), a habit that evidently preserved his sense of identity as an educated gentleman, the product of Felsted Grammar School in Essex and London’s Middle Temple. Indeed, the firm link maintained by many colonial gentlemen to English and Continental culture has sometimes been ignored by historians under the influence of the powerful anachronistic impulse to trace our own lineaments in the noble features of our forebears’ portraits. But Byrd does not really exhibit proto-American tendencies by constructing new models of liberty in Virginia; rather, he built himself a garrison of learning that supported his lifelong attempt to erase the distinction between colonial and British gentility.

Only a few of Byrd’s books whose current location is known bear physical evidence of his ownership. He did sign his name on the flyleaf of one or two of his books and pasted armorial bookplates into many others. The margins of some of his law texts are sometimes annotated in shorthand, and he wrote out some short queries about rents in his copy of Edward Coke’s Complete Copyholder. ¹ On the pastedown flyleaf of his copy of Jeremy Taylor’s The Worthy Communicant he wrote out nineteen lines of a penitential prayer based on psalms from the Lenten readings. ² Engaged readers sometimes leave behind copious marginalia, but while Byrd often occupied himself with sessions of intense reading (mentioned in his diaries and recorded in his commonplace book), he hardly ever wrote anything on the pages of his books.

There is one other known instance in which Byrd wrote substantially in the blank pages of one of his books. On the inside pastedown and flyleaf of his copy of the French Academy’s Le Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences, Byrd wrote a “Supplement” consisting of eighty-nine French sexual terms with macaronic definitions in French and Latin. ³ This abbreviated glossary—it breaks off suddenly in the middle of the “F” section—is remarkable for both the forthright nature of the definitions and the range of sexual practices discussed.

Byrd’s Supplement thus offers a rich body of new evidence about the private life of an individual whose habit of documenting his erotic adventures has already provided a window into eighteenth-century sexuality. Ever since a team of intrepid researchers in the 1940s transcribed and edited Byrd’s secret shorthand diaries, however, the response to what intimate details he saw fit to record has been mixed. On the one hand, the diaries furnished one or two highly memorable and entertaining moments, some of which are still anthologized in collections of early American writing, notably the entry for 30 July 1710:

I read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson and then took a little [nap]. I ate fish for dinner. In the afternoon...