Thomas Hunt’s Monograms

Thomas Hunt was an active book merchant in fifteenth-century Oxford.¹ In addition to buying and selling manuscripts, Hunt served as a university stationer, a position to which he was elected in the 1470s.² As a university stationer, Hunt was responsible for appraising items (usually manuscripts) that scholars brought as collateral for funds borrowed from the university’s many loan chests. Once a stationer appraised an item, the keepers of the chest could issue the loan. If a borrower repaid his loan, the responsibilities of a university stationer ended. But if a borrower abandoned the items that he pledged, a university stationer was responsible for selling them. After the sale, the stationer had to repay the original loan amount to the loan chest; any surplus would go to the borrower.³

The position of university stationer could be lucrative. Although a stationer could not keep money that he received from the sale of forfeited objects, he might benefit from that sale by gaining new clients or by encouraging prospective buyers to purchase other items he had available.⁴ Nor was the selling of books the only benefit afforded to university stationers; they received robes from graduating scholars and, after 1473, had a monopoly (within the jurisdiction of the university) on the sale of all books valued at over half a mark.⁵

In an essay published posthumously in this journal, Malcolm Parkes argues that Thomas Hunt leveraged these various perquisites and invested his profits in other parts of his business.⁶ As Parkes observes, Hunt did not immediately return the money he collected from the sale of a manuscript forfeited to the Chichele Chest, a delay that suggests Hunt might have used the money for other purposes. Specifically, Parkes intimates that Hunt might have used the money owed to the Chichele Chest to help fund his foray into printing, a venture that soon collapsed under the weight of competition with foreign markets.⁷

In this note, I supplement Parkes’s argument by adding to his evidence. Parkes identifies five appraisals that Hunt made as a university stationer, appraisals confirmed by Hunt’s monogram. (Indeed, it was common practice for a university stationer to make his unique mark next to his valuation, and Hunt was no exception.) These five appraisals confirm Hunt’s active role as a stationer and book merchant in Oxford. Here, I add seven more of Hunt’s appraisals to Parkes’s tally. In doing so, I suggest that Hunt was even more active in the university’s loan chest business than Parkes was able to prove.⁸ These seven additional appraisals not only demonstrate that Hunt had his hands on a greater number of manuscripts (and thus funds) than Parkes knew, but also highlight the diversity in the types of manuscripts Hunt evaluated and in the chests that claimed his attention.⁹

Although Oxford University appointed stationers from the start of the chest system, it was not until the fifteenth century that stationers themselves started to record their appraisals regularly in a manuscript’s opening or closing folios.¹⁰ A stationer included his own identifying initials next to his appraisal in the form of a stylized monogram. In Hunt’s case this meant a distinctive ‘TH’. Parkes offers thorough descriptions of five manuscripts that bear Hunt’s monogram.¹¹ Three early appraisals are: Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 113, an early fourteenth-century copy of sermons pledged four times between 1481 and 1499, which Hunt valued at 40s; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 563, a theological treatise pledged in 1481 and then again 1484, which Hunt valued at 8s; and Bodleian Library, MS Auct. D. inf. 2.4, a thirteenth-century bible, used for a loan in 1482 and appraised at 40s. Parkes also identifies two later appraisals made by Hunt in 1491. These are Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 87, an ‘illuminated copy of sermons, sententiae, and letters’ that Hunt valued for a loan of 54s 8d; and MS Bodley 442, a copy of Hillary of Poitiers’ De trinitate followed by a glossed Song of Songs, which was pledged with...