Firsts London Library Partner: Lambeth Palace Library

By Giles Mandelbrote, former Librarian of Lambeth Palace Library

This year Firsts celebrated the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, so it was particularly appropriate that the charity partners were the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library, one of the few surviving libraries from Shakespeare’s London. The Library was founded in 1610, through the bequest of Richard Bancroft (1544-1610), Archbishop of Canterbury, who left some 6,000 books and manuscripts for the use of his successors in office, the senior bishops in the English church. It has remained ever since on the medieval Lambeth Palace site, on the south bank of the Thames facing the Palace of Westminster, thereby escaping the Great Fire of London.

Over the centuries, the Library has grown, as libraries tend to do, and its work has evolved. One of the most important acquisitions of modern times were the pre-1850 collections of Sion College library, founded in 1629 as a resource for the clergy of the city of London and transferred to Lambeth in 1996. At a single stroke this added some 60,000 manuscripts and early printed books, together with detailed records of benefactors, documenting the close relationship of Sion College library to the early modern citizens of London whom it served. Lambeth Palace Library has developed into a specialist research library, primarily for the history of the Church of the England, as well as a very large archive, documenting the Church’s national and international role. In 2021, the entire library moved into a purpose-built eight-storey building in the Palace garden, providing much better accommodation for the collections – fully to modern conservation standards and with over 20km of shelving - as well as improved facilities for events and exhibitions, now freely open to the public.

Long before Lambeth Palace Library was formally established, there were books, manuscripts and archives on this site. The long series of archbishops’ registers (or act-books) begins in 1279; from the mid-nineteenth century, these are supplemented by the increasingly voluminous official correspondence and papers of the archbishops. Possibly the most remarkable individual library ever to have been housed at Lambeth was the magnificent collection of manuscripts assembled by Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-1575). After his death, his books followed what was then the traditional pattern for archbishops’ personal libraries and were bequeathed to his old college - in this case, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where they remain today. A few of Parker’s manuscripts took a different path and one of these, the MacDurnan Gospels, a beautiful pocket gospel-book decorated in the intricate ‘insular’ style of the ninth century and probably made in Ireland, is among the earliest of the medieval manuscripts now at Lambeth.

Archbishop Bancroft, like Parker, was able to take advantage of the unprecedented book-collecting opportunities offered by the dissolution of monastic libraries a few decades earlier. The Lambeth Bible, one of the finest giant Romanesque bibles to survive from twelfth-century England, may have been a royal commission, part of the patronage lavished on the abbey of Faversham which was intended by King Stephen as his mausoleum. It was originally one of two volumes: the other volume, which eluded the archbishops, arrived much later at Maidstone Museum, and makes a very sad contrast, stripped of the huge full-page illuminations of Biblical scenes which make the Lambeth volume so compelling.

Some of Lambeth Palace Library’s greatest treasures arrived very early on, but their precise origins continue to defy investigation. The Lambeth Apocalypse, illuminated in the French style in colours which remain strikingly brilliant to this day, was made in the 1260s for a noble female patron, Eleanor de Quincy, Countess of Winchester. It has been at Lambeth for some 400 years, but exactly how and when it arrived is still unclear. The same is true, tantalisingly, of the Lambeth copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first European book to be printed with moveable type (in Mainz, c.1455). Self-evidently an extremely expensive deluxe copy, one of a small number printed on vellum rather than paper, its fifteenth-century English decoration provides clear evidence that it reached this country within a few years of its production. This copy could well be the first (surviving) printed book ever to reach England, but nothing more is known of its early ownership.

A volume containing six printed pamphlets, all dating from 1600, probably bears witness to Bancroft’s participation in the control of the English book trade, while he was Bishop of London (1597-1604). In this period, the bishops of London and their chaplains were responsible for reading any texts thought likely to prove controversial and deciding whether these could be printed. Their role came particularly under the spotlight at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, when uncertainties over the succession created a political crisis. The pamphlets seem to have been Bancroft’s file copies, kept as evidence of the licensing process; no fewer than three of them are signed by the respective booksellers who undertook their publication. Most notably, The Second part of Henrie the fourth (‘printed by V.S., for Andrew Wise, and William Aspley’) has been signed by the bookseller Andrew Wise: this is the only copy of a Shakespeare quarto to be so directly associated with its publisher.

Other important early printed books arrived later and by more circuitous routes. A book linking two of the architects of the English reformation, Thomas Cranmer’s copy of Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (1521), which won for Henry VIII the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ from a grateful Pope, went first to the royal library and then to the British Museum, where it was unceremoniously sold off as a duplicate. After several auction sales, it came into the hands of the American millionaire collector J.P. Morgan, who thought it a suitable Christmas present for Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang in 1938.

More recently, the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library have been invaluable supporters of the Library, both by directly funding purchases of rare books and manuscripts and by enabling the Library to attract matching grants from elsewhere. One such purchase, from the catalogue of an ABA member in 2018, was a work on rhetoric by the Roman author Quintilian, elegantly printed by Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1471, which had belonged to Cardinal John Morton (d.1500), the first Archbishop of Canterbury who is known to have owned printed books.

Firsts provided the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library with an ideal opportunity to recruit some more members (including at least one of the exhibitors) and to make Lambeth Palace Library, its collections, events and exhibitions, better known to the general public. It also proved to be an eye-opening and stimulating experience for the members of Library staff who took their turn on the stand.

For more information, see:

lambethpalacelibrary.info/about-lambeth-palace-library/friends-of-lambeth-palace-library