Law, learning and religion: gifts to Gray's Inn library in the 1630s

Law, learning and religion: gifts to Gray's Inn library in the 1630s Despite his earlier discussions of what the index to The Elizabethan Puritan Movement refers to as 'Lawyers, puritan alliance with the', and more recent judicious reconsideration of puritan 'men of business', the common law and its practitioners hardly occupy centre stage in Patrick Collinson's portrayal of English religion under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts. Yet Collinson's treatment of the inns of court and their professional inhabitants is, unsurprisingly, a good deal more even-handed and perceptive than much contemporary opinion and some m o d e m historians.1 George Ruggle's Latin university comedy, Ignoramus, would hardly have reached seven printed editions over the course of the seventeenth century had his caricature of an unlearned, puritanical common lawyer not appealed to many besides King James I on his two famous visits to Cambridge in 1615. Yet Ruggle's successful invocation of academic, clerical, lay and regal prejudice obviously says more about prevailing cultural stereotypes than the actual state of learning and religion among early Stuart common lawyers. Ruggle did succeed in getting under the common lawyers' skin. Besides numerous public answers and rebuttals on behalf of the legal profession, the controversy found its way into private correspondence; thus, on 24 June 1615, the Welsh Inner Temple barrister Richard Prythergh wrily reported that 'this day M r donn preached at our Temple; he had to[o] much learninge in his sermon for ignoramus' .2 Their purported philistinism, and puritanism, or religious indifference, evidendy remained a sensitive issue with the denizens of the inns of court. Three years later William Crashawe, quondam preacher at the Temple Church and now newly returned from Yorkshire to London, published a volume of sermons which he dedicated to six named individual readers, together with the 'whole Bench of that Ancient and Honorable Society of Greyes Inne' (whose number then included Francis 1 P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, London, 1967, p. 518; idem, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism, London, 1983, pp. 138, 149, 243, 270, 348, 458; idem, 'Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments', Parliamentary History 7 (1988), 187-211. 2 Cf. W . R. Prest, The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590-1640, Oxford, 1986, p. 187n; Public Record Office, Powis M S 30/53/7/11, Richard Prythergh to Sir Edward Herbert, 24 June 1615. P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 206 W. R. Prest Brackin, the recorder of Cambridge pilloried in Ignoramus). Crawshawe asserted that the dedicatees already enjoyed proprietary rights over his work, both because they had first heard some of the sermons preached, and also on account of 'your love to Religion, and all that teach it, to Learning and all that love it', to justice, charity, virtue and the preacher himself: Were all they that seeke otherwayes to be above you but equall to you in those respects, the Jesuits should have had no cause to traduce the Innes of Court... Hold up Learning in your selves, help it forward in others, and shame them that say, Law and Learning cannot stand together.3 Nearly twenty years later, Sampson Eure and Sir Edward Moseley, two of the named patrons of Crawshawe's Parable ofPoyson, were among twentyfive identifiable members of Gray's Inn whose gifts of books to the library of their house provides the theme of this paper.4 I Small library collections for the use of barristers and students were established at each of the four inns of court by, and in at least one case certainly before, the sixteenth century.5 The earliest known reference to a library at Gray's Inn appears in the will of Robert Chaloner, a former reader, who bequeathed his personal library and the sum of two pounds to his cousin in 1555, 'that he maie by cheines ... fasten so many of them in the Librarye at Grauisin as he shall thinke convenyente'. During the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this library was accommodated on thefirstfloor of a building erected by the Elizabethan Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon...